151–156 of 156 posts
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I can't see a molecule on my desk, even with a jeweller's microscope, nevermind seeing one 120 million light years away! Science is amazing.
You're actually seeing tons of molecules on your desk. You just can't resolve them individually. Neither can the JWST.
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..... How do you propose getting a probe to something 120 light years away and getting an answer within a human lifetime, unless you're going for a ride on the probe? Do you have some new physics?
The Centauri system is 4 light years away, my link shows a proposal of how to do that with a flyby, it's most certainly not the only starshot proposal just the one with a prominent billionaire like Mark Zuckerberg behind it so I thought perhaps the best to put out there for people to see as an intro to the concept. These are very real ideas with very real engineering designs by incredibly smart people. It's not sci-f…
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We won't get the capability to build probes that approach the speed of light if we keep observing instead of beginning to build the probe.
Nobody said something about stopping building probes. That will continue and eventually lead to probes which might approach the speed of light. But the achievable targets for the next decades are planetary, not interstellar.
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> > Why would they want to though? > Without wanting to turn this into a political debate you could ask this question about Russia attacking Ukraine Reading you narrowly, I agree that of course you can always ask why an actor chooses a particular action. But I don't really understand your larger point, do you mean that all offensive wars are irrational? Because pointing out that wars in the history of planet earth ha…
I'm not explaining why they'd want to or wouldn't want to: I'm suggesting that it doesn't make sense to simply default assume they won't be hostile because we can't imagine reasons why they'd want to attack.
I'm picking the example of Russia/Ukraine because it's the most recent conflict example that I can think of where the aggressor's published reasons for attacking - at least to many observers - don't seem to stand up to rational scrutiny. You can have a debate about whether that's correct or not, and different people will have differing perspectives. The point is that aggressors can be aggressive for reasons that don't make sense or seem rational to others. Within the context of this conversation I am not looking to take a position on Russia/Ukraine: it's simply an example that most people will be aware of. Perhaps too current though to avoid an off-topic argument.
I explicitly didn't say anything about "all offensive wars" in general.
Your narrow reading is, from what you've said here, correct and I wasn't trying to make a larger point beyond suggesting that we don't have much of a basis to assume beings from another world will or won't be hostile.
If I were trying to make a larger point I would have stated it explicitly. One of my pet peeves with online discussion is a culture of implication (i.e., people choosing not to speak plainly) that leads, in many cases, to other comments being overread/overinterpreted when they were never intended to be. Hence, I would have chosen to make the wider point explicit rather than leave it to chance, but it seems like I wasn't clear enough in any case, for which I apologise.
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" Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents. " https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
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" Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents. " https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Respectfully, I object. Evidently I wasn't clear enough, for which I apologise, but I've explained the intent of my comment in more detail in response to @SiempreViernes' sibling comment. Hopefully that clarifies.
More explanation on these points in case anyone finds it helpful:
effects, not intent: see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28932445 and https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
the burden is on the commenter to disambiguate: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...