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Aliens on 1k nearby stars could see us, new study suggests

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Re: Aliens on 1k nearby stars could see us, new study suggests

#181

Post by vl »

skissane wrote: post #123
vl wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Basically there is not need and motivation for humans to colonize anything outside the Earth. It's just too far, too expensive and too uncomfortable. Humans evolved specifically to live on Earth, to live somewhere else, they need to be severely altered. Now you just seeded civilization of another species, that might turn out to be confrontational or outright hostile. Why would you do that? Too see how well this works…

> Basically there is not need and motivation for humans to colonize anything outside the Earth. It's just too far, too expensive and too uncomfortable. There is definitely motivation. Some people want to colonise Mars. Not everybody, but likely enough people to make it happen. Elon Musk wants to make it happen, and while there is no guarantee he'll get his wish, I think he has a decent chance of succeeding. And estab…

I personally love space and aviation stuff. But, as economies become more efficient and global, it’s increasingly unlikely that it will be possible to finance such projects. See: people haven’t been on the Moon for 50 years, Concord haven’t flown for 20. Both projects have been financed through relatively undemocratic, non-market means.

Re: Aliens on 1k nearby stars could see us, new study suggests

#182

Post by elihu »

coldcode wrote: post #38

I always wondered if they could see us, would they recognize us as something to care about? I see ants on my porch, but they don't really matter much to me.

Most ants are benign. Some ants will eat your house. We have the technological capacity to make our own planet uninhabitable to humans and perhaps to any kind of life if we tried hard enough. We could probably do pretty nasty things to planets in other star systems if we were sufficiently motivated to do so and weren't in any great hurry.

An advanced alien civilization might see us not as threatening per se but rather as a potential problem they have to manage somehow and not just ignore.

Re: Aliens on 1k nearby stars could see us, new study suggests

#183

Post by 35fbe7d3d5b9 »

marta_morena_28 wrote: post #135
jcims wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm fairly confident we'll eventually find that our form of life is the result of intentional or unintentional colonization of Earth. If you look at how quickly life began after the oceans settled out, then look at precisely how complex even the most primitive forms of life are (in terms of likelihood of stochastic construction to the point of sophistication to support evolutionary mechanisms) it seems incredibly unl…

Possible, but far reaching. There are other explanations: * We are a computer simulation (hence there is no colonization, we are in an experiment) * There are like 1,000,000,000,000,000,000 habitable planets in the universe. Just because something is "extremely unlikely" doesn't mean that it didn't happen to us. I.e. whomever this happened to, would ask himself that question. We may just be the ones it happened to. A…

> * We are a genesis project and they will simply come back later and settle in what we left behind (i.e. they let the ecosystem build for a few million years before trying out this settlement)

Depressing fiction idea: our progenitors return, look at what we've done with the world, shake their heads and leave us to suffer.

Re: Aliens on 1k nearby stars could see us, new study suggests

#184

Post by Retric »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #171
Retric wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Milky Way lacked rocky planets early on, making that 12.5 Billion year age largely meaningless. Which is just one of many bad assumptions in how people do these calculations. At a minimum you don’t get a straight path from A to B. Assuming any kind of limitation in distance traveled and your at the mercy of the distribution of whatever resource you need. Aka need rocky planets with liquid water, that’s likely goi…

> For example, what happens if they first send a probe to verify habitability? Suddenly travel times more than double. This doesn't seem like a good idea if their method of traveling is generation ships. What would be the point?

One obvious consideration is to see if anyone is living there. Even just the basic economic consideration of spending a low fraction of the cost of a habitable ship to collect more data. Generation ships also implies different people will be arriving, however having a X thousands of year lifespan is another possibility. Which is kind of the thing, sharing physics is a given but biology and especially culture could be very different.

Re: Aliens on 1k nearby stars could see us, new study suggests

#185

Post by Retric »

mylons wrote: post #169
Retric wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Milky Way lacked rocky planets early on, making that 12.5 Billion year age largely meaningless. Which is just one of many bad assumptions in how people do these calculations. At a minimum you don’t get a straight path from A to B. Assuming any kind of limitation in distance traveled and your at the mercy of the distribution of whatever resource you need. Aka need rocky planets with liquid water, that’s likely goi…

If you used the Von Neumann machine approach wouldn’t it not really matter if the planet was habitable or not?

Let’s assume your sending a Von Neumann probe to prep the way for your ship. Now it shows up and does whatever it needs to and then sends an everything is ready signal before you send your generation ship.

I mean sure you could in theory send out an endlessly replicating probe that keeps going to other star systems, but that’s even more risky.

Re: Aliens on 1k nearby stars could see us, new study suggests

#186

Post by elihu »

sudhirj wrote: post #32
ThalesX wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What if wars were waged for ideological reasons also? Beliefs, cultures etc.

Or just defensively. The US invaded Iraq because they might have had WMDs. Other planets might have WMDs too. And they might think we have WMDs. Doesn’t matter if any of the sides actually do.

This seems likely; both sides might see it as a prisoner's dilemma situation, where there isn't any basis for trust and it's safer to destroy the other civilization before they're destroyed themselves.

(I don't think Iraq was actually such a situation, but at least on the American side some influential decision makers may have believed that it was.)

On the other hand, you might have something more like a cold war situation, where both sides have the capacity to destroy the other completely or almost completely but not without an equivalent counterattack, and so both sides have much more to lose than to gain by striking first.

Re: Aliens on 1k nearby stars could see us, new study suggests

#187

Post by skissane »

vl wrote: post #181
skissane wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Basically there is not need and motivation for humans to colonize anything outside the Earth. It's just too far, too expensive and too uncomfortable. There is definitely motivation. Some people want to colonise Mars. Not everybody, but likely enough people to make it happen. Elon Musk wants to make it happen, and while there is no guarantee he'll get his wish, I think he has a decent chance of succeeding. And estab…

I personally love space and aviation stuff. But, as economies become more efficient and global, it’s increasingly unlikely that it will be possible to finance such projects. See: people haven’t been on the Moon for 50 years, Concord haven’t flown for 20. Both projects have been financed through relatively undemocratic, non-market means.

> people haven’t been on the Moon for 50 years

They are supposed to be going back in 4 years time. That's probably going to be delayed, but still people will probably be back on the Moon before the end of this decade. And this time they are saying they plan to stay.

> Both projects have been financed through relatively undemocratic, non-market means.

So are LHC, ITER, the International Space Station, Project Artemis. The US is unwilling to spend the massive amounts it spent during the Apollo project on space right now, but it still spends a lot of money (NASA's budget is about 22 billion USD a year, and the military space budget is about 14 billion USD – over 36 billion spent on space every year) and has been pretty continuously since Apollo was closed down. It would have achieved more by now if it had been spending that money more efficiently. The advent of SpaceX and other commercial providers is changing that.

Re: Aliens on 1k nearby stars could see us, new study suggests

#188

Post by ChuckMcM »

This is a fun story for a Friday evening. If we peg the beginnings of intentional electromagnetic emission from our planet at 1900, then by 2226 all of these stars will be able to "receive" or potentially detect, non-random emissions from the planet which will scale exponentially both in power and in frequency.

Those stars that are currently between 50 and 70 light years away will be experiencing our "golden age of television" about now.

Perhaps it would be useful to have a SETI project that focused on EM emissions to see if any of them have started transmitting. It would be hilarious if the first reception from an alien civilization was "Who shot JR?"

Re: Aliens on 1k nearby stars could see us, new study suggests

#189

Post by sliken »

Retric wrote: post #154
deeeeplearning wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure why it was downvoted. Many people have looked into this. https://gtocx.jpl.nasa.gov/gtocx/competition/ Even entire competitions to find optimal colonization methods. Could take 90M years with measly future human tech. Age of Milky Way is 13.5 Billion so even conservatively you could indeed colonize the galaxy many many times over in that time.

The Milky Way lacked rocky planets early on, making that 12.5 Billion year age largely meaningless. Which is just one of many bad assumptions in how people do these calculations. At a minimum you don’t get a straight path from A to B. Assuming any kind of limitation in distance traveled and your at the mercy of the distribution of whatever resource you need. Aka need rocky planets with liquid water, that’s likely goi…

One effect not considered in early considerations was the differential radial speed. So even the ability to seed planets 10 light years closer or further from the galactic core over a few 100M years results in expansion much more quickly than earlier models.

Re: Aliens on 1k nearby stars could see us, new study suggests

#190

Post by duncan_bayne »

natechols wrote: post #177
tzs wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The issue of crew as consumable resource is interesting. It's particularly interesting I think because now that you've brought it up, it seems to me there is a similar issue with much Earthly colonization or frontier expansion, and I've never seen it mentioned. For example, anyone who left England to start or join a New World colony early on, when settlements were far apart and it was a struggle for each to survive,…

17th century American settlers were fleeing an environment where the child mortality rate was at least 1/3rd even for the upper classes, nearly all land and wealth was controlled by inbred gangsters, and the penalties for petty theft or incorrect religious worship included public hanging. From that perspective, the risks associated with colonization may have seemed much more attractive than the best-case scenario of…

And the early colonies had their problems too. IIRC at least one colony enacted capital punishment for anyone caught abandoning the colony to join the native American tribes.
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