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exactly. > Extra terrestrial life that is more advanced than us has no reason to go on a suicide mission to come see us (a bunch of war-mongering primitive hai

exactly. > Extra terrestrial life that is more advanced than us has no reason to go on a suicide mission to come see us (a bunch of war-mongering primitive hairless baboons) Just as advanced western scientists have no interest in going on biology field trips to remote parts of the world to study lesser species.

ChrisNorstrom 14y ago
Traveling on your own planet (which is easy and cheap) and traveling to an unknown planet in space which costs trillions of dollars and takes a minimum of 20,000 years are two very different things. Lets keep things in perspective now. Traveling a few hundred miles to see a creature you can stand a few feet away from, touch, and study /AND/ traveling for millions of years, never seeing the fruit of your labor so that your great X 1,000 grandchildren might be able to reach a planet they can walk around on in an air tight suit for the rest of their lives, then send a signal back to earth which will take 20 years to reach. That's a whole new "field trip".
- galadriel 14y ago
  Where are you getting this stupid 20,000 year figure from? Even with current tech, we can travel at 0.1c easily, that is without any extra effort made in actually travelling outside our solar system. Near-by candidates are within 20ly, so at min it would take just 200 year, or 3 human generations. And if it might give you some peace, there are thing called machines that can be built to contact other civilization without sacrificing your hypothetical children.
  - rimantas 14y ago
    > we can travel at 0.1c easily Can we? I mean as humans, not just some spacecraft. We can also sustain closed ecosystem for three generations? Last I heard an attempt to do that on Earth failed.
    - mkramlich 14y ago
      > We can also sustain closed ecosystem for three generations? Last I heard an attempt to do that on Earth failed. Most things fail before they succeed.
  - arethuza 14y ago
    I'd love to know how we can "easily" get a spaceship up to 0.1c using "existing" technology. [NB I wouldn't consider the Project Orion approach "existing" technology, it hardly got off the drawing board and was never tested with anything other than chemical explosives on a very small scale].

ChrisNorstrom 14y ago

Traveling on your own planet (which is easy and cheap) and traveling to an unknown planet in space which costs trillions of dollars and takes a minimum of 20,000 years are two very different things. Lets keep things in perspective now. Traveling a few hundred miles to see a creature you can stand a few feet away from, touch, and study /AND/ traveling for millions of years, never seeing the fruit of your labor so that your great X 1,000 grandchildren might be able to reach a planet they can walk around on in an air tight suit for the rest of their lives, then send a signal back to earth which will take 20 years to reach. That's a whole new "field trip".

galadriel 14y ago
Where are you getting this stupid 20,000 year figure from? Even with current tech, we can travel at 0.1c easily, that is without any extra effort made in actually travelling outside our solar system. Near-by candidates are within 20ly, so at min it would take just 200 year, or 3 human generations. And if it might give you some peace, there are thing called machines that can be built to contact other civilization without sacrificing your hypothetical children.
- rimantas 14y ago
  > we can travel at 0.1c easily Can we? I mean as humans, not just some spacecraft. We can also sustain closed ecosystem for three generations? Last I heard an attempt to do that on Earth failed.
  - mkramlich 14y ago
    > We can also sustain closed ecosystem for three generations? Last I heard an attempt to do that on Earth failed. Most things fail before they succeed.
- arethuza 14y ago
  I'd love to know how we can "easily" get a spaceship up to 0.1c using "existing" technology. [NB I wouldn't consider the Project Orion approach "existing" technology, it hardly got off the drawing board and was never tested with anything other than chemical explosives on a very small scale].