51–60 of 237 posts
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Do you not think that actually knowing, really knowing, is a worthy cause in and of itself? To have proof that we are not alone? Even if we can't get there I think that certainty would be a very nice thing to have.
Is it worth millions of dollars to know that? Nope. It's rich people playing with their toys.
A very noble endeavour indeed, but I still don't get it. So let's say that by examining the petabytes of data that's received from the telescopes, at some point a signal is detected. Let's say that somehow all the competing scientests and skeptics, religious and opinion leaders magically and peacefully agree: the signal is from an inteligent life form. Somewhere close, just a couple of hundred light years away ... Th…
Do you not think that actually knowing, really knowing, is a worthy cause in and of itself? To have proof that we are not alone? Even if we can't get there I think that certainty would be a very nice thing to have.
On the other hand, if they spent their energy sending ships, they would eventually find us, and they would learn phenomenally about technology, science and their place in the world, even before they reach us.
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I agree that knowing is a worthy cause, but never mind getting there we will not even be able to have anything even resembling a conversation if you have to wait hundreds of years for a response. Edit: Does anyone know the current thinking of the odds that information could be able to travel faster than light, ie a wormhole? As far as I know they are very slim.
Well, if we do detect a signal, we're not going to just transmit "wassup?" and wait for an answer. I think it will be an interesting problem to have a conversation with other beings where the lag time is measured in decades!
There is a galactic consent that nobody will ever be able to actually visit each other.
And of course, this is pure science fiction :)
Please excuse my complete ignorance - this is something that continues to perplex me no matter how many times I hear it explained and I may sound like a complete idiot here. Can someone explain how this would work in layman's terms? Let's say that life on another planet 150 million billion miles away wanted to send us a message. So that's 25,000 light years away. They send us one single 1 minute duration message at t…
Sounds about right. Frank Drake created his famous equation [1] to try to quantify the probability of detecting ETI, but you do need to make guesses at some of the inputs. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drake_equation
I wish someone would instead come up with a project to really capture the public's attention about space exploration. More interest means more funding. The U.S. Budget is measured in billions. The New Horizons project, for example, only cost $700 million. The Lunar X Prize might have been that project but it doesn't seem to be making progress: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Lunar_X_Prize http://lunar.xprize.o…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I agree that knowing is a worthy cause, but never mind getting there we will not even be able to have anything even resembling a conversation if you have to wait hundreds of years for a response. Edit: Does anyone know the current thinking of the odds that information could be able to travel faster than light, ie a wormhole? As far as I know they are very slim.
Anything contradicting relativity is currently out of the scope of science and not backed by any observation whatsoever, so any travel-faster-than-light theory has exactly the odds granted to it by it's own believers, and zero for everybody else.
The scientific name for a wormhole is an Einstein-Rosen Bridge - named after Nathan Rosen and, obviously, Albert Einstein who conceived the idea.
There are other suggestions for "faster than light" travel, but FTL is a bit of a misnomer because the concepts of FTL aren't about having a velocity that's greater than c (the speed of light in a vacuum), it's about warping or cutting through the fabric of space in a way that makes the distances shorter. A wormhole is just one theoretical method of jumping those distances via a shortcut.
I wish someone would instead come up with a project to really capture the public's attention about space exploration. More interest means more funding. The U.S. Budget is measured in billions. The New Horizons project, for example, only cost $700 million. The Lunar X Prize might have been that project but it doesn't seem to be making progress: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Lunar_X_Prize http://lunar.xprize.o…
I know America is supposed to lead the way but Europe is larger and richer and has a space budget one third of NASA.
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It strikes me that the two are very different things. ET != AI.
Funny you say that: The Dominant Life Form in the Cosmos Is Probably Superintelligent Robots “If they were interested in us, we probably wouldn’t be here,” said Schneider. “My gut feeling is their goals and incentives are so different from ours, they’re not going to want to contact us.” That’s a welcome divergence from Steven Hawking’s claim that advanced aliens might be nomads, looking to strip resources from whatev…
How is that not interesting?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Do you not think that actually knowing, really knowing, is a worthy cause in and of itself? To have proof that we are not alone? Even if we can't get there I think that certainty would be a very nice thing to have.
Is it worth millions of dollars to know that? Nope. It's rich people playing with their toys.