Where did all the starships go?

>When they turned LIGO on i wanted to see warp drives whipping around. But all we saw was distant black hole mergers; interesting but not exactly a star trek moment.

• The LIGO methodology is to look for hyper-specified patterns in voluminous reams of apparent 'noise'. It wouldn't be unfair to call it an extensively aggravated search for what one is looking for. That's okay, so long as they provide the stats to back up the non-noisiness of what they turn up. (I'm not a stats person and can't debate that, and. I trust their caliber enough that I don't feel the need to). But to your point, if there are other signatures lurking in LIGO data _that they don't know already how to look for_, then there is no reason why a paper would have gotten produced describing it since the first GW detection in 2015.

• Now, take this for what it's worth in terms of fragmentary information relaying - But at the first Sol Symposium in 2023 at Stanford, I can tell you that in podium-level banter between talks (perhaps it was Q&A and the like IIRC) it was asserted that the LIGO consortium was not allowing studies (read: not allowing access to its data) where the investigator's intension was related to UFO / UAP phenomena (like, extrapolating here, looking for signatures correlated with external reports of UAP sightings). If that claim was borne out, than perhaps the LIGO consortium is just doing preemptive reputation protection in not allowing such studies to kick off with its name associated with it. (One could attempt to follow up with astronomer Beatriz Villaroel for a lead on who said that or if there's substance to that research policy claim)

But my point is, between these two bullet points, you are afforded a complete 'empty set' - and decidedly not a 'negative result' - on whether or not LIGO has detected signatures of a 'warp drive' or other some such non-prosaic phenomenon.

"Dragon" as a classification is odd, because when you look at every kind of mythological creature that gets classified as such nowadays, sometimes from cultures that wouldn't have recognized the concept, you find that they have little in common beyond some vaguely reptilian vibe and being scary.

And I'm sorry but that thing is too goofy looking to be considered a dragon.

So what? Dilithium + antimatter + magic space warping was enough for the Star Trek universe. The sky is the limit for science fiction.

Just in that first paragraph:

- How do you stop at the other end? There won't be a large laser array at the receiving end and a laser probe will not have enough stored energy to decelerate itself.

- How exactly do you download a mind to be transmitted? We can't do it right now to be sure, and it's not clear we could ever accurately do that depending on how finely detailed a human brain is.

- How do you transmit it reliably over several hundred light years? Background radiation alone is enough to drown out any signal after a few dozen light years no matter how good your transmission is. Also, when do you start sending? You cannot possibly know which probes survived. (you DID send out at least a few hundred probes right? Don't forget to multiply laser energy requirements by the amount of probes)

- How does the receiving end download a mind into a robot body? We can't even begin to do that on Earth, not even with worms or flies. Humans are right out.

- How do we power the lasers? Conservative estimates have put required laser power at several gigawatts at least. Current laser systems can do that in pulsed mode but only with extremely low duty cycles. Getting enough power together to supply millions of homes would be tricky to say the least. (and see the note above about needing multiple probes just to be on the good side of probability)

- How does the probe survive decades of ultrahard radiation? What about dust it will encounter at high-subluminal speeds, also for decades? The shielding for that won't be lightweight, but the heavier the probe gets the more difficult it will be to accellerate.

- The satellite which is light enough to be powered by lasers also contains the most magical 3d printer anyone has ever seen. You can't just pull the molecules for advanced processors and energy generation equipment out of the air, such a probe would need to set up significant mining industries all on its own without any human interaction.

- A basic robot body. Keep in mind that "picking up a keychain and choosing the right key out of it without dropping the whole keychain" is already a challenge for modern robots.

In short, it'll be several centuries before humanity even gets close to such a project. I'd like to be wrong, but it seems extremely unlikely anyone of us will see such a thing in our lifetime.

They didn't go anywhere. Lots of excellent starship/space opera novels out there with more coming out each year. There's just lots there stuff too. :)

These two examples are not equally unlikely. They are of different orders of unlikelihood, the one is extremely unlikely, the other simply impossible.