5 ms·
The odd thing about the universe seems to be that the distances are so vast that it almost doesn't matter if there's other sentient life here or not because it'
by cletus 14y ago
The odd thing about the universe seems to be that the distances are so vast that it almost doesn't matter if there's other sentient life here or not because it's far too distant to be of any relevance.
Travelling between stars is incredibly expensive (in terms of pure Joules) and time-consuming. I can see the logic in the theory that the most likely outcome for any species reaching sentience is to destroy themselves. either through direct means (eg nuclear or biological war) or indirectly (simply running out of resources)
- Fizzer 14y agoCalling it irrelevant just because you can't travel there is short-sighted. We could still learn a lot just by watching the broadcasts of another civilization, even if they're already long gone.
- rewind 14y agoAnd just knowing they exist would be incredibly exciting, even if there was zero chance that we could directly contact them in the span of our entire existence.
- snowwrestler 14y agoThe distances are so great that the broadcasts of another civilization would attenuate to undetectable levels before they could reach us.
- vibrunazo 14y agoOut of all infinite amount of different methods to communicate and broadcast themselves they could possibly be using. Including the ones we didn't even discover yet. Assuming they're using the same ones humans just found out in recent history. The ones SETI is measuring. Even then, assuming it's formatted in a way we would decipher and be able to understand its structure (as in Carl Sagan's movie). That just sounds so improbable. Even if they are broadcasting it, we're probably listening to it with the wrong technology. Even if we happen to be lucky of listening with the "right" technology. We probably wouldn't be able to tell it from random noise. I find it extremely unlikely humans will ever be able to watch alien broadcasts during our existence in the universe.
- dexter313 14y ago"Even if they are broadcasting it, we're probably listening to it with the wrong technology. Even if we happen to be lucky of listening with the "right" technology. We probably wouldn't be able to tell it from random noise." That's why you start by blasting prime numbers on all em frequencies for 5 years.
- lusr 14y agoI don't think there are many different ways to encode meaningful information. We all live in the same universe and I see no reason to believe that intelligent alien life won't be intellectually quite similar to us. While tricky without context, decoding extraterrestrial signals will inevitably produce something of interest (images, audio) even if understanding e.g. the audio itself will be tricky. That being said, while I suspect that meaningful, structured information will be, by definition, structured and therefore obvious to spot in a broadcast, the real problem is that these transmissions are likely to be (a) compressed and/or (b) encrypted. While compression formats may reveal a few hints that there is some structured information present, encrypted data will be all but impossible to distinguish from random transmissions. We may be picking up transmissions from alien life but be unaware simply because the data is encrypted. I have no idea what proportion of our broadcast signals are encrypted today, but I suspect it's a fairly significant and growing proportion (privacy and intellectual property concerns being the primary reasons).
- mistermann 14y ago> While tricky without context, decoding extraterrestrial signals will inevitably produce something of interest (images, audio) even if understanding e.g. the audio itself will be tricky. Serious question: How is it presumably simple to decode images and audio, but difficult to understand the audio? Is it because one can assume image representation would tend towards mathematical efficiency, but spoken languages do not? >While compression formats may reveal a few hints that there is some structured information present, encrypted data will be all but impossible to distinguish from random transmissions. We may be picking up transmissions from alien life but be unaware simply because the data is encrypted. I would think that encrypted transmissions would be easily distinguishable from background white noise, no? My thinking is, you have the general random noise of space, and then you would have something obviously different, is that totally not the case?
- ygmelnikova 14y agoWhat lessons are to be learned from the alien version of "I Love Lucy"?
- tlogan 14y agoThe super intelligent life will live forever so distance/time might not be relavant to them as it is to us. Also, it seems like at this stage of our intelligence we can communicate and find only intelligent life which is at similar stage (which is maybe span of 100K +/- 10K years). That is nothing.
- bane 14y agoIt's kind of like an old joke from Penny Arcade, once something gets too expensive to be practical it may as well cost infinity. http://www.penny-arcade.com/2008/12/1/ http://www.penny-arcade.com/2008/12/1/ Mathematically inaccurate but can be a short and simple way of summarizing costs and complexity.
- anonymous 14y agoCould we travel by moving the entire solar system with us? Build a dyson sphere around the sun and harness part of the energy to ever so slowly move our planet and sun towards a nearby suitable star system. Then settle our planet in orbit around the other star. This way we should have at least some way of sustaining human life past the end of our sun.
- caf 14y agoThe distances are indeed vast, but the time periods involved are yet more vast. A Von Neumann probe travelling at quite modest speeds should be able to spread over our entire galaxy in mere millions of years; the universe is billions of years old. So while direct visitation by aliens seems highly improbable, such a probe making contact seems at least a theoretically plausible possibility.