3 ms·
Due to the finite speed of light, for many of those galaxies the images are a snapshot of several billion years ago. So we have no idea of what is thriving ther
by Qem 4y ago
Due to the finite speed of light, for many of those galaxies the images are a snapshot of several billion years ago. So we have no idea of what is thriving there today.
- sbierwagen 4y agoOkay, but that makes it worse. You can spend a million years beaming your waste heat at an apparently-dead galaxy, only to have one of its indigenous species bootstrap up a technological civilization in a blink of an eye (a mere thousand years) and launch an invasion fleet. If it's the Dark Forest scenario then it's simply not safe to show any technosignatures at all, ruling out megastructures entirely.