271–280 of 365 posts
Every once in a while for a good chuckle I visit r/UFOs or r/aliens where people go gaga over blurry videos of balloons in the sky. I've never understood how that stuff seems to capture the imagination more than actual science like this.
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We don't even need to look at other species. Humans have been just as smart as you and me, maybe even smarter according to cranial measurements, without inventing anything that significantly changed their way of life. There could be loads of planets with prehistoric humans, having a fine time hunting with bows and picking fruit.
I don't think so, though. I think that unless there are limiting factors (no ores or some other necessary component) life would tend toward technology. Curiosity as an evolutionary trait is quite an advantage, and I would think is necessary for intelligent omnivores. It's what helped us figure out what we could and couldn't eat, and taught us better techniques for living. Curiosity naturally leads to technological de…
Based on what evidence? We only know if it happening once, after a very long delay.
This is happening 124 light years away from earth. That means if we develop a way to make a space ship accelerate at 1g for a long period of time, you could go there in just 10 relativistic years. Unfortunately, whilst science allows such a rocket, our engineering skills are far from being able to build one.
If you can somehow make a ship capable of constant acceleration at 1G, and had enough shielding on it to protect it against the radiation, you can travel to any point in the observable universe, in a human lifetime. If you just keep accelerating and left as a 20 year old, you'd be in your 50s when you saw the final stars born and die in 100 trillion (earth) years time. That's how crazy relativity and torchships are
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> and IIRC doesn't occur in the series the dark forest name comes from The Trisolarians developed FTL travel while they were on the way to Earth, IIRC.
I tried to look it up. I think they didn't ever get FTL, based on https://www.reddit.com/r/threebodyproblem/comments/1blvikg/c... and https://forums.spacebattles.com/threads/trisolaris-in-wh40k.... .
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We don't even need to look at other species. Humans have been just as smart as you and me, maybe even smarter according to cranial measurements, without inventing anything that significantly changed their way of life. There could be loads of planets with prehistoric humans, having a fine time hunting with bows and picking fruit.
I don't think so, though. I think that unless there are limiting factors (no ores or some other necessary component) life would tend toward technology. Curiosity as an evolutionary trait is quite an advantage, and I would think is necessary for intelligent omnivores. It's what helped us figure out what we could and couldn't eat, and taught us better techniques for living. Curiosity naturally leads to technological de…
Firstly that is completely badass science. The idea that you can use observations to detect the chemical composition of an exoplanet millions of kilometres away is an absolute triumph of the work of thousands of people over hundreds of years. Really amazing and deeply humbling to me. Secondly, my prior was always that life existed outside of earth. It just seems so unlikely that we are somehow that special. If life d…
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…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
no matter how advanced the civilization is, proxima centauri will always be 42 trillion kms away. Our civilization in current stage is not even close to 0.1% the speed of light but lets say your advanced civilization goes at 99% the speed of light, still doesnt change the fact they need 4.25 years approx to reach earth. Still doesnt change the fact that unless they have a 1 billion km wide telscope, they cannot relia…
When you think of it, light speed is really slow. Even on Earth we are capped by it.
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Being intelligent doesn't necessarily lead to runaway technological development. Dolphins are smart but they're never going to invent radios to broadcast their existence to other star systems. They're stuck in the water and don't have thumbs. And even orangutans, who have thumbs and live on land, don't seem tracked for technology even if humans weren't around; their ecological niche is small even if we assumed humans…
We don't even need to look at other species. Humans have been just as smart as you and me, maybe even smarter according to cranial measurements, without inventing anything that significantly changed their way of life. There could be loads of planets with prehistoric humans, having a fine time hunting with bows and picking fruit.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Regarding populating earth and invading space. I was just watching the original (first) matrix movie yesterday because I was just too bored. And there was this dialogue by Agent Smith:- ```I’d like to share a revelation during my time here. It came to me when I tried to classify your species. I realized that you’re not actually mammals. Every mammal on this planet instinctively develops a natural equilibrium with the…
It's a cool speech, but it's also wrong. Mammals don't "instinctively develop a natural equilibrium", reality forces that equilibrium on them. A species gets too good at breeding and/or resource consumption - that's either happy times for their predators who eat them back into balance, or they starve themselves back into balance.