191–200 of 226 posts
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.
People spend lifetimes studying ant behavior
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There are problems of resiliency and energy storage that could be more or less fundamental problems. It could take millions if years of technological civilization to produce a machine capable of sustaining life for the hundreds of thousands of years necessary for interstellar travel, and civilizations may tend to collapse for various reasons before reaching such technological peaks. It's also entirely possible that w…
> It could take millions if years of technological civilization to produce a machine capable of sustaining life for the hundreds of thousands of years necessary for interstellar travel. For a generation ship, are you referring to all the machinery that can maintain a balanced ecosystem of plants and animals and humans in order to provide food for the people during the trip to the new planet, and to make all the thing…
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> It could take millions if years of technological civilization to produce a machine capable of sustaining life for the hundreds of thousands of years necessary for interstellar travel. For a generation ship, are you referring to all the machinery that can maintain a balanced ecosystem of plants and animals and humans in order to provide food for the people during the trip to the new planet, and to make all the thing…
I'm always fascinated in the assumptions underlying some of these proposals, and how little thought they've given to the problem. For example, the complete disregard for the lives or autonomy of the "replacement crew", who are effectively treated as a consumable resource starting from childhood. Science fiction set on generation ships tends to be extremely gloomy for good reason.
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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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I don't know why this got down-voted. The milky way is 100K light years across. It's 13.5 billion years old. It's entirely possible to blanket the whole galaxy with probes, without even getting into self replicating probes.
You have to make an assumption about speed - it certainly won't be more than a tiny fraction light speed. Eg voyager appear to travel now at less than 0.00006 c (16 km/s). Than turns 100k light years into ballpark 150 M year journey (no it doesn't its 1.8 bn years as mentioned in reply) . Still possible to cross 10.000 times - but that would be a straight line. I suspect the distances will grow somewhat fractally if…
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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…
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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…
This is an interesting idea. Look at how religion explains the origin of life: A lifeform not from this planet, far more advanced than us, gave "the breath of life", and calls us their "children". The vastness of this universe leads me to believe that it's impossible to dismiss the idea that there is an intelligence/lifeform sufficiently advanced as to appear to be a God to us.
> the zone where Earth's transit is visible gets smaller as you get closer to our solar system I’m trying to imagine why that is but cannot.
The article is just poorly written. Even the first line is messed up... > Those 1,004 star systems are in a direct line of sight to our planet... It's SPACE. Every star within 1000 light years is in a direct line of sight to every other star.
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and those ants don't know they are being studied/farmed
I'm not sure I like this line of reasoning because it implies that the ants aren't aware of us. Certainly they are in some cases. Ants are able to physically perceive us. So if aliens aren't using some means of passive remote sensing to study us then I don't see why we wouldn't also notice them (though they may have good reason to not use active means). Sure, the ants aren't aware of what why we're hanging out around…
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If you didn't know what ants were already they probably would be interesting
Sure, but if you were a billion years old and had seen ants before, it's unlikely that you'd take interest in any specific ant hill you walk by.
And having seen many, many, many ant hills, specific ones with slight odd variations unnoticed by people who are merely a million years old would stand out like a flashing neon sign and you would be all "Hello! What, pray tell, is this?!" while everyone looked at you funny because they lack context.
Just sayin'...