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this is a question i have explored as part of my own scifi world building: what is a realistic timeline for first contact, and how will it actually happen? so
by em-bee 1y ago
this is a question i have explored as part of my own scifi world building:
what is a realistic timeline for first contact, and how will it actually happen?
so we decode a message that we are pretty sure is of alien origin.
we send a message back and then wait a few decades or centuries.
we don't know how far away the origin of the message is. let's assume that it is less than 50 light years. that's still a round trip of 100 years. in other words it's a generational project, and we don't know if our first response is understood. we'll have to keep iterating until we can confirm that we are actually communicating. and then, the next step will be to try to understand each other.
with a round trip that long, even under the most optimal conditions just establishing a dialog based on say math is going to take a few centuries.
of course once we have a dialog, communication is going to speed up because then we can send longer messages.
but then it could still take anywhere from 500 to 1000 years before a common language is developed and we are able to share actual scientific and engineering knowledge.
once we reached that level of communication however, we can collaborate on developing FTL.
contrary to star trek, it was always my idea that FTL travel is not developed by the inhabitants of each planet/star system on their own, but only in collaboration across multiple such systems. maybe even more than two. driven by the desire to meet each other.
so from the point of the first received message it will be one millennium before we get to learn anything about and from these aliens, and another millennium before we can meet them in person.
and that's the optimistic projection. it could just as well take 10 times as long.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- analog31 1y agoI predict that if FTL travel is possible, it will happen in our lifetimes, perhaps even as soon as 20 years ago.
- the_gipsy 1y agoThat's what they said 30 years ago
- AppleBananaPie 1y agoHaha. Time travel :D
- IAmBroom 1y agoWell, someone on the internet predicted it. That's noteworthy.
- gtech1 1y agouhm, develop FTL ? Break causality and the universe ?
- jay_kyburz 1y agoI don't know about faster than light, but as soon as we have real AI, it will simply be information and should be able to travel at about speed of light.
- johncolanduoni 1y agoIt may be simply information, but if you put it into a radio signal and send it into the universe it won’t do anything on its own. Not unless someone receives it and understands it well enough to execute it. Assuming they’d want to - I guess it’s the interstellar equivalent of downloading and running a program from a spam email.
- wewewedxfgdf 1y agoYou the Neptunes Pride guy? Looks great - curious to know what broweser tech is it built with?
- jay_kyburz 1y agoYes! NP was originally written in 2010 so it's vanilla js on the client. Had a python server for many years, but when I had to move from python 2, I switched to js for the server as well. When the server was python I was using googles app engine database (can't remember what its called right now). These days, just a vanilla postgres and boring old SQL statements.
- wewewedxfgdf 1y agoWhat are you working on these days? Built 15 years ago and still running! Is Neptune's Pride still paying your bills?
- 1y ago
- jay_kyburz 1y agoWe fleshy humans will never visit other stars, but our AI children will be able to explore the galaxy with all the time in the world.
- datavirtue 1y agoI'm in an AI cult. Send help. No don't.
- saulpw 1y agoBecause hardware never breaks, especially not on galactic timescales, and without resources to perpetually replace failing components.
- jay_kyburz 1y agoThey will have whole galaxies of resources! Massive amounts of redundancy. Mines, Refineries, and Factories on planetary scales. Not going to happen tomorrow, but perhaps in the next few thousand years something will be ready to begin its journey.
- stickfigure 1y agohttps://www.decisionproblem.com/paperclips/ https://www.decisionproblem.com/paperclips/
- em-bee 1y agoif you like science fiction, you may enjoy reading the bobiverse by dennis e. taylor. it describes exactly that scenario, except that the AI is an uploaded human. but that's pretty much the same thing.
- anon291 1y agoConsider that, if the time separation is long enough via light then physical limits make it such that we do not ever have a chance of contact in which case this exchange is essentially indistinguishable from communication with supernatural beings. Not that I believe they are the same, but many people will come to this conclusion and they would not be probably wrong. Causality is strange.
- jtsiskin 1y agoWe wouldn’t have a long back and forth to establish a common language, we would likely send something like https://cosmicos.github.io https://cosmicos.github.io. “CosmicOS is a way to create messages suitable for communication across large gulfs of time and space. It is inspired by Hans Freudenthal's language, Lincos, and Carl Sagan's book, Contact. CosmicOS, at its core, is a programming language, capable of expressing simulations. Simulations are a way to talk, by anology, about the real thing they model. CosmicOS is structured to communicate the usual math and logic basics, then use that to show how to run programs, then send interesting programs that demonstrate behaviors and interactions, and start communicating ideas through ”theater” and simulations. This is inspired by Freudenthal's idea of staging conversations between his imaginary characters Ha and Hb.”