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Sounds a little more lonely when you read "it's likely there are a minimum of 1,500 planets within just 50 light-years of Earth." 1,500 isn't that many, and 50
by JeffL 15y ago
Sounds a little more lonely when you read "it's likely there are a minimum of 1,500 planets within just 50 light-years of Earth." 1,500 isn't that many, and 50 light-years is a really long distance.
- michaelcampbell 15y ago> 50 light-years is a really long distance. Compared to what we can wrap our brains around generally, sure, but in the scheme of the universe, not so much.
- meepmorp 15y agoWhat about in comparison to a distance we'd be likely to reach before we annihilate ourselves?
- alexkcd 15y agoI keep hearing this argument. But physically traveling there is pretty stupid if you think about it. It's much simpler to set up a communication channel. Sure it'll have a 50 year latency, but we could easily stream all of youtube (or the entire internet really) to them, and so could they. Assuming they're more advanced and their cameras capture the environment in spherical 3D, we could recreate what it's like to stand on their soil pretty accurately from home. Besides just browsing their extranet would be amazing in itself.
- sien 15y agoSo we discover another civilization and send them 4chan? Mind you, seeing another species' civilization's sense of humor would be pretty amazing.
- dolbz 15y ago> Sure it'll have a 50 year latency, but we could easily stream all of youtube (or the entire internet really) to them Well Eric Schmidt who's probably in a better position to estimate than most, said that Google estimates the internet is made up of 5 million terabytes. 5 million terabytes / 10gbps = 126.8 years and I very much doubt 10gbps is even remotely achievable over interstellar distances. I don't what kind of data rates are achievable but I would expect it to be extremely slow relative to Gigabit speeds.
- michaelcampbell 15y agoI imagine by the time we find extra terrestrial intelligence, 10gbps will be childs play. I HOPE we find some way to use entanglement as a communications mechanism by then, although I don't know if that's even possible.
- MPSimmons 15y agoOr we could, you know, use more than one channel.
- JeffL 15y agoI wonder if the singularity happens like they say, and we can upload our minds into the computer, if we can send a slow probe to another star with a receiving dish and by the time it gets there, we can just beam our consciousnesses there, with maybe enough know-how to roll up an entirely new world with minimal resources.
- michaelcampbell 15y agoIrrelevant to the fact being stated.
- celoyd 15y agoWe don’t really know how many 1,500 is, because we’re missing a lot of the variables we need to have even an order-of-magnitude estimate of how common intelligent life is. It could be practically inevitable on planets with liquid water; it could be one in a million even given “animal” life. Qualified experts disagree. And 50 light years is a long distance to travel even at a tremendous speed like 0.01c, but it isn’t that long to send postcards. If we’d sent out a bunch of reasonably good questions in 1912, we would still be interested in the answers today. (More interesting, I think, is what they would ask us.) In retrospect, I’m assuming we’re taking a finding-intelligent-life perspective here. But if you’re thinking in terms of human expansion – terraforming and so on – then I agree.
- prawn 15y agoMore interesting again is what they could tell us. I think with the time scales involved, chances are that anyone communicating with us would be significantly more advanced.
- ars 15y agoNot really. Otherwise it works exactly the same the other way: The chance is that we would be significantly more advanced than them. In actually chances are we have zero data on the matter and can not calculate chances at all.
- felipemnoa 15y agoWe are pretty isolated. Had we belonged to a cluster of stars our chances of finding life would have been greater. From Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_cluster http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_cluster Globular clusters, or GC, are roughly spherical groupings of from 10,000 to several million stars packed into regions of from 10 to 30 light years across.
- martey 15y agoFrom http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Globular_cluster http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Globular_cluster : "However, they are not thought to be favorable locations for the survival of planetary systems. Planetary orbits are dynamically unstable within the cores of dense clusters because of the perturbations of passing stars."
- malbs 15y agoSome have theorized that the reason we are even talking about this is because we are _not_ in a cluster. We are pretty isolated, life ending events are pretty rare, every 60 million years?
- michaelfeathers 15y agoI'm just troubled by the fact that alien TV signals appear to look like static.
- CamperBob 15y agoThis is unfortunately no joke. Only a fairly primitive technological culture will waste energy and S/N ratio by using coherent signals for communications. Modern radio and TV signals look more or less exactly like static to a receiver that doesn't know what it's listening to, for the same reason that a .jpg or .zip file looks like random data to a program that doesn't know how to decompress it. So it seems clear that SETI-like efforts will be unlikely to detect any transmissions from civilizations who aren't deliberately trying to talk to us. Only civilizations that occupy the narrow time slice caught between the invention of radio and the widespread adoption of digital computers would be detectable, otherwise.