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If you're talking about sending live people, absolutely If you're talking about sending alien drones, the light mass and lack of having to keep them alive make

If you're talking about sending live people, absolutely If you're talking about sending alien drones, the light mass and lack of having to keep them alive makes energy requirements a lot lower, but they'd probably just be scouting us (if not trying to kill us) so we wouldn't be able to detect them

dougmwne 3y ago
And this is why I suspect AGI superintelligence is impossible. A bio civilization will never reach us. An AGI will reach us rapidly.
- revscat 3y ago
  https://www.reddit.com/r/aliens/comments/14rnjoa/from_the_late_2000s_to_the_mid2010s_i_worked_as_a/ https://www.reddit.com/r/aliens/comments/14rnjoa/from_the_la...
lazide 3y ago
Considering no human object has yet to leave the solar system (meaningfully), and we’ve nearly wiped ourselves out several times just in recent memory - that’s still in the realm of pure fantasy. There is no evidence yet that anything we can construct (or a near peer) could make it to another system intact enough to know it had arrived, let alone DO anything regardless of the form any intelligence takes or how it is packaged. Hell, as a species we still struggle to land probes on mars and Venus. And they don’t have to do anything but send data back. Getting a toehold on a random solar system, or even arriving and taking pictures and sending them back is so many orders of magnitudes harder to do based on what we know now it’s essentially impossible. Even if we had a ‘fast forward’ button. Hopefully we’ll find something out that we’re currently missing, but as of yet we have no reason to believe it exists.
- TheCleric 3y ago
  Not sure what "meaningfully" is supposed to mean here, but both Voyager probes have gone passed the heliopause and are outside our solar system from that perspective.
  - lazide 3y ago
    "However, if we define our solar system as the Sun and everything that primarily orbits the Sun, Voyager 1 will remain within the confines of the solar system until it emerges from the Oort cloud in another 14,000 to 28,000 years." [https://solarsystem.nasa.gov/missions/voyager-1/in-depth/ https://solarsystem.nasa.gov/missions/voyager-1/in-depth/] "The twin Voyagers are the only man-made objects to have entered interstellar space. However, while they have left the heliosphere, they have not yet left the boundary of the Solar System which is considered to be the outer edge of the Oort Cloud." [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heliosphere#Heliopause https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heliosphere#Heliopause] [https://www.nasa.gov/press-release/nasa-s-voyager-2-probe-enters-interstellar-space https://www.nasa.gov/press-release/nasa-s-voyager-2-probe-en...] It's still in the area of things that primarily orbit the sun, even if it is no longer in the 'atmosphere' or 'shade' of the Sun (aka the heliopause, which is what was being used for PR purposes). And it's nowhere near anything which isn't orbiting the sun, and nowhere near 'not being in' the area of things orbiting the sun. So meaningfully, it's still in the solar system, and will be for a very long time. It's just out of the nice part. Distance wise, Voyager 1 (the furthest) is ~ 22 light hours away, or .02% of a light year - after travelling for 45 years. Proxima Centauri, the closest known star to us is 4.25 light years away. It would take ~ 73,000 years at Voyagers blistering pace (38,000 mph) to reach it, and there is essentially zero chance we could keep contact with it or it would be functional even 1/10th of that time - it's RTG is already nearly dead, and with a ~ 87 year half life, it would be a miracle if it even lasted another 50-100 years.
- dontupvoteme 3y ago
  Voyager was meant to take pictures of objects in our celestial sphere, if instead we were in a race to, for instance, yeet our stuff faster than the soviets towards Proxima Centauri, everything would have been different.
  - lazide 3y ago
    Care to do the napkin math on what it would take energy wise for anything to make it from here to Proxima Centauri in 50 years or less? (Approx. rounded up time of the entire Cold War) Hint: even with instant construction, even nutty ideas like Project Orion would be incapable of doing it, let alone anything else. We’re talking > 10% the speed of light for the entire trip.
    - dontupvoteme 3y ago
      I'm not even close to claiming you'd get there in under a few hundred years I'm just saying our space faring objects would be fundamentally a lot different
      - lazide 3y ago
        The 'space race' isn't going to happen if no one can 'win' within the politicians lifetimes, IMO.

dougmwne 3y ago

And this is why I suspect AGI superintelligence is impossible. A bio civilization will never reach us. An AGI will reach us rapidly.

revscat 3y ago
https://www.reddit.com/r/aliens/comments/14rnjoa/from_the_late_2000s_to_the_mid2010s_i_worked_as_a/ https://www.reddit.com/r/aliens/comments/14rnjoa/from_the_la...

lazide 3y ago

Considering no human object has yet to leave the solar system (meaningfully), and we’ve nearly wiped ourselves out several times just in recent memory - that’s still in the realm of pure fantasy. There is no evidence yet that anything we can construct (or a near peer) could make it to another system intact enough to know it had arrived, let alone DO anything regardless of the form any intelligence takes or how it is packaged. Hell, as a species we still struggle to land probes on mars and Venus. And they don’t have to do anything but send data back. Getting a toehold on a random solar system, or even arriving and taking pictures and sending them back is so many orders of magnitudes harder to do based on what we know now it’s essentially impossible. Even if we had a ‘fast forward’ button. Hopefully we’ll find something out that we’re currently missing, but as of yet we have no reason to believe it exists.

TheCleric 3y ago
Not sure what "meaningfully" is supposed to mean here, but both Voyager probes have gone passed the heliopause and are outside our solar system from that perspective.
- lazide 3y ago
  "However, if we define our solar system as the Sun and everything that primarily orbits the Sun, Voyager 1 will remain within the confines of the solar system until it emerges from the Oort cloud in another 14,000 to 28,000 years." [https://solarsystem.nasa.gov/missions/voyager-1/in-depth/ https://solarsystem.nasa.gov/missions/voyager-1/in-depth/] "The twin Voyagers are the only man-made objects to have entered interstellar space. However, while they have left the heliosphere, they have not yet left the boundary of the Solar System which is considered to be the outer edge of the Oort Cloud." [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heliosphere#Heliopause https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heliosphere#Heliopause] [https://www.nasa.gov/press-release/nasa-s-voyager-2-probe-enters-interstellar-space https://www.nasa.gov/press-release/nasa-s-voyager-2-probe-en...] It's still in the area of things that primarily orbit the sun, even if it is no longer in the 'atmosphere' or 'shade' of the Sun (aka the heliopause, which is what was being used for PR purposes). And it's nowhere near anything which isn't orbiting the sun, and nowhere near 'not being in' the area of things orbiting the sun. So meaningfully, it's still in the solar system, and will be for a very long time. It's just out of the nice part. Distance wise, Voyager 1 (the furthest) is ~ 22 light hours away, or .02% of a light year - after travelling for 45 years. Proxima Centauri, the closest known star to us is 4.25 light years away. It would take ~ 73,000 years at Voyagers blistering pace (38,000 mph) to reach it, and there is essentially zero chance we could keep contact with it or it would be functional even 1/10th of that time - it's RTG is already nearly dead, and with a ~ 87 year half life, it would be a miracle if it even lasted another 50-100 years.
dontupvoteme 3y ago
Voyager was meant to take pictures of objects in our celestial sphere, if instead we were in a race to, for instance, yeet our stuff faster than the soviets towards Proxima Centauri, everything would have been different.
- lazide 3y ago
  Care to do the napkin math on what it would take energy wise for anything to make it from here to Proxima Centauri in 50 years or less? (Approx. rounded up time of the entire Cold War) Hint: even with instant construction, even nutty ideas like Project Orion would be incapable of doing it, let alone anything else. We’re talking > 10% the speed of light for the entire trip.
  - dontupvoteme 3y ago
    I'm not even close to claiming you'd get there in under a few hundred years I'm just saying our space faring objects would be fundamentally a lot different
    - lazide 3y ago
      The 'space race' isn't going to happen if no one can 'win' within the politicians lifetimes, IMO.