111–120 of 307 posts
There are 259 stars within about 30 light years. Communication could be conceivable with such distances...
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You don't have to figure out a 1400-ly trip to be here. You just ("just") need to be able to move from one star system to the next. If they took 100 years to get to the next star system 5-ly away and then 500 years to populate that system enough to start a new colonization, that's just ("just") 168,000 years to be here. Given a 2 billion year head start, that's easy.
Even if it only took them 100 years to get to a star system 5 ly away, I would be amazed and impressed by a society that would be okay with investing in and working on at minimum a 105 year mission. Perhaps they live much much longer than we do :)
Cathedral building in the middle-ages was a multi-generational 80+ year affair and some of the Pyramids took even longer IIRC. So societies were/are definitely capable of working on ~100 year missions :)
At 2 billion years older than Earth, I can't begin to imagine what kinds of things could possibly be living on this planet. Given, of course, that it's got the right ingredients for life to arise. What if it's suffered huge extinctions recently? What if there's a domineering species out to conquer the planet just like humans? What if there's a society there more sophisticated than us? It's a very exciting discovery.
[The Fermi paradox: We're pretty much screwed...](http://imgur.com/gallery/Wtog9)
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I hope they were recording the whole time and upload the videos to YouTube. I can't wait to watch Hannibal on the Pyrenees From Space.mp4
You'll have to wait 6000 years to see it on YouTube: 1500 for them to hear about YouTube and 4500 for them to upload (assuming TCP)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I hope they were recording the whole time and upload the videos to YouTube. I can't wait to watch Hannibal on the Pyrenees From Space.mp4
You'll have to wait 6000 years to see it on YouTube: 1500 for them to hear about YouTube and 4500 for them to upload (assuming TCP)
The significance is this: it's very likely that there are a lot more such planets a lot nearer to us. This is because Kepler can only detect planets which lie in the same plane as earth and the star so the planet occults the star. Assuming random distribution, there's probably thousand fold amount of off plane planets. There are 259 stars within about 30 light years. Communication could be conceivable with such dista…
At 2 billion years older than Earth, I can't begin to imagine what kinds of things could possibly be living on this planet. Given, of course, that it's got the right ingredients for life to arise. What if it's suffered huge extinctions recently? What if there's a domineering species out to conquer the planet just like humans? What if there's a society there more sophisticated than us? It's a very exciting discovery.
If there was an intelligent life form, like humans, it would have expanded into the cosmos and colonized the entire galaxy within only a million years of developing technology. Since we don't see traces of them everywhere, we must presume they don't exist.
It's like, nobody has considered that advanced life might not even feel a need to live on planets at all. It's expensive to get resources from, and there's a near limitless supply of easy to get smaller debris.
Additionally, the difference a 2 billion year head start could make is hard to imagine. One thing that's not hard to imagine is that they don't live in meat bodies for most of that time. They could easily be machines or virtual, and then would look and act nothing like anything we're looking for.
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Interstellar travel is perfectly possible if you're not in a hurry. Assuming there's no way to sidestep GR, the real problem is the human lifespan (and attention span.) If our culture moved at 0.1% of the current rate and we lived a thousand times as long, a 1400 year round trip wouldn't be problematic. It's possible to imagine low-energy lifeforms that move that slowly. But they wouldn't be looking for Earth-like pl…
The problem isn't just sending something (or someone) to another star (though it would take far longer than 1400 years with any currently plausible technology and energy expenditure). It's sending something accurately to another star (can't use too much energy adjusting course, since fractional additions to weight require tremendously more power) with a payload that's still operational by the time it gets there. Thin…
As far as onboard power sources go, fission seems perfectly cromulent. You just have to protect those radiators.
The significance is this: it's very likely that there are a lot more such planets a lot nearer to us. This is because Kepler can only detect planets which lie in the same plane as earth and the star so the planet occults the star. Assuming random distribution, there's probably thousand fold amount of off plane planets. There are 259 stars within about 30 light years. Communication could be conceivable with such dista…
I believe you meant occludes rather than occults