191–200 of 365 posts
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We'll put a giant sunshade in the Earth-Sun L1 Lagrange point.
Sadly it is still only a stop-gap measure. The sun is for all intents and purposes, dying a slow death.
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Isn't that the point of the dark forest theory? It's not the fact that there is a dangerous tribe behind a bush it's more that you don't know if they're dangerous or not so you have to err on the side of caution - because you don't know if they're doing the same. It's the whole chain of suspicion theory that it's safer to shoot first and then ask questions later because the speed you can communicate is the same speed…
Yes, but the next bush is dozens of light years away. The analogy breaks down because the distances are different in quality. The only reason why this becomes such a problem in the Three-Body-Problem is the existence of magic in that universe. Thinking protons, instant communication, folded dimensions, easy interstellar travel, it's all interesting speculation inspired by physics, but incompatible with our actual uni…
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If life is very common in the universe, then that is probably bad news for us. It means that civilizations should exist that are millions of years more technologically advanced than us; and should be leaving telltale signatures across the sky that we'd likely have detected by now. And the absence of those signs would be relatively strong evidence that life, while common, isn't long-lived. Suggesting that our demise t…
It is quite plausible that life is abundant, but sentience is not. If we take Earth, it formed 4.5 billions years ago, conditions became suitable to support life like 4B years ago and first known signs of life are dated 3.7B years ago. Now, in just .5B years Earth would likely become uninhabitable due to Sun becoming a red giant. In other words, on Earth life spent 90% of its total available time before sentience eme…
[1] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4494450/
If you're referring to technology/civilization-building capabilities, that is a different matter.
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Calling it simply an engineering issue is not properly conveying the ridiculousness of such a journey. For a small space ship of 1000 tons, this would take ten thousand times the current yearly energy consumption of mankind. So we'd need to figure out how to generate the energy and then store it on a space ship before even thinking about the engineering. And that's ignoring the mass of the fuel. The classical rocket…
Our energy production grows exponentially. For a type I civilisation, producing that kind of energy would be possible. For a type II it would be trivial. In any case the timescales involved are measured in centuries.
Energy production is not something self-amplifying like a population of rabbits, so there is no fundamental reason why energy production per capita should grow indefinitely.
But sure, how you would turn sunshine into antimatter at astronomical rates might be an interesting problem to think about. But my original point that basically dismissing this as an engineering issue is a bit dishonest still stands.
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lol 0.5B to 1.5B is a pretty big difference. Sounds like we really don’t know what we are talking about.
Every field of study, subject, or problem, or even business cases, -- all have different ranges. Why does this one in-particular sound like they don't know what they are talking about? It would be just as accurate for me to say in the range of responses, yours kind of sounds like an anti-science bot. Typical of that type of thinking.
Your anti-science bot comment however, is very anti-science.
Is there a source for this that isn't plastered with banner ads? I can't read more than a sentence at a time without having to scroll past adverts. I do wonder why I was stupid enough to pay for a phone with a bigger screen as it just seems to mean more and bigger ads on screen at once and the same amount of content.
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Say another human-like civilisation existed and was more technologically advanced, what sort of tell-tale signs do you expect to see?
Scientists use the term "technosignatures", which you can google for more info. But broadly: radio signals, infrared from megastructures, optical signals like laser pulses. We haven't put a huge amount of effort in searching for such signatures, but there has been some.
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While it has more time to become a red giant, it'll become more luminous over time and life on Earth will be impossible much earlier. I've seen estimates of 0.5B to 1.5B years.
In 500 million years, hopefully humans (or whatever humans have become at that point) will be able to modify the Earth's atmosphere to deal with the increased luminosity of the Sun.
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why isnt a crocodile sentient?
Technically, it is: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/sentient (the first two definitions). You mean the science fiction definition though (the third), and it's because it's not self-aware and not very intelligent, because it doesn't need to be to survive and procreate successfully. A slightly smarter crocodile must not have enough of an advantage over its peers to matter for evolutionary purposes.