81–90 of 102 posts
As a result we're sending a lot less stray analog RF out into the universe. And the stuff we are sending looks a lot more like noise.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is assuming that the creators of the Dyson sphere haven't also figured out how to absorb the heat energy with extremely high efficiency.
You are assuming they'd have figured out how to break the laws of thermodynamics as we know it.
Not a giant leap to imagine for a species that's been able to construct a Dyson Sphere in the first place ;)
Obligatory talking points associated with the Fermi Paradox: - It takes a very short time in comparison to the age of the galaxy for a single self-replicating probe to result in a descendant probe visit to every star. A few million years. This means that you cannot really argue plausibly that all civilizations fail to do this - it would take trivial effort for just one faction within just one advanced civilization to…
>Where are the macrostructures? We don't see Dyson spheres or other evident macroscale engineering. Everything we can see so far looks natural. This is more troubling than an absence of detectable communications. Assuming a Dyson sphere was nearby, how would we detect it? What would it look like? If it's able to make use of most of a star's radiation output, wouldn't that make it very difficult to see? It wasn't unti…
The sphere would be dynamically unstable in the gravity field of the star and station-keeping would be expensive and hard to coordinate over the lightspeed delay.
And stars are terrible energy sources--they're huge, diffuse, inefficient, and not portable. It would be much more useful to build fusion generators to order.
Nevermind life outside our planet, why isn't there other non-related life on our planet (independant biogenesis)? From what I gather, evidence at the molecular level (things like molecular chirality in various cellular structures) point to all life being related.
Of course, it has taken us about 1/4 the lifetime of the entire universe to get this far, so YMMV. :D
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>Where are the macrostructures? We don't see Dyson spheres or other evident macroscale engineering. Everything we can see so far looks natural. This is more troubling than an absence of detectable communications. Assuming a Dyson sphere was nearby, how would we detect it? What would it look like? If it's able to make use of most of a star's radiation output, wouldn't that make it very difficult to see? It wasn't unti…
I don't understand why any civilization would ever build a Dyson sphere. The sphere would be dynamically unstable in the gravity field of the star and station-keeping would be expensive and hard to coordinate over the lightspeed delay. And stars are terrible energy sources--they're huge, diffuse, inefficient, and not portable. It would be much more useful to build fusion generators to order.
My favorite is: We're first. Assuming we make it out of the solar system and so on, then just imagine the practical jokes we get to play on future civilizations: Whoopee cushions crafted out of gas giants, mysterious "ruins" that have no bloody purpose at all, ancient stone tablets that end with "Assuming a spherical cow in a vacuum..." Some archeologist, 20 millions years hence: "Oh god, not /these/ forerunners agai…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think you don't give us enough credit :-) We have developed enough technology to leave the planet and walk around on our Moon. We are, perhaps within a decade, going to have that capability again but with a much higher level of base technology. While it would be unlikely for Dinosaurian satellites to have remained in orbit for millions of years, anything they left on the moon would still be there. "There might be b…
> So what hypothesis could support billions of iterations of 'life' evolving into the multicellular form we see today and in our past, and so few evolving technology? Probably just a function of environmental input and enough generations optimizing along directions that matter more for species propagation than a large, energy burning cognitive organ. Keep in mind, it appears that Human level intelligence seems to hav…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
And if you did see that, you were damn lucky to be born at just the right time to see it before you get annihilated by the oncoming intelligent matter transformation.
Yeah, because the probability that a random alien would recognize "humans would rather not be reassembled into somebody else's compute substrate" as ethically relevant is slim.
If this is true, we were likely destroyed a long time ago, and we now live in one of those simulations. Any cosmic activity outside of our solar system is a mere fuzzy approximation, and even if we develop interstellar travel technology, we'll hit some sort of "Truman Show" wall if we try to leave our imaginary sandbox.
Makes you curious to keep watching the Voyager probes, does it not? :)
The truth is, technology is incompatible with species. As soon as a race becomes able to competently engineer genes (or whatever serves to encode their form) suddenly there is no more 100% cohesive 'species', but also a number of self-engineering unique entities. Who's interests typically conflict violently with the remaining original species. When one or more of these entities survive they eventually become space faring individuals, wholly transcended from their original species-derived intellectual nature and physical form. Of course there are many pitfalls, and in some cases the outcome is 'everyone dies'. But in NO case, can a technology wielding species ever do so for more than a very brief period.
Space is full of intelligent life. All of whom are immortal, universe-roaming individuals, none of whom have any kind of species-survival related instinctive thought habits. There are no interstellar empires, no expand and conquer instinct-driven behavioral rubbish. Only Travelers.
And most certainly, from moral principles deriving from the fundamental nature of information, intelligence and fun, NO passing of significant information to any instances of embryonic planet-borne life forms. No more than you'd consider poking a fetus with a pointy stick. Horrible idea, nothing useful could come of such actions.
Btw, the 'Grays' are open-source gene-ware, manufactured intelligent semi-independent remote manipulator/observer peripheral units of visiting Travelers. They are not 'species', rather a range of production models. When they do interact with humans they lie about their nature and origin, since humans are not supposed to be handed the truth. It would interfere with humans' natural progression towards transcendence (or self annihilation.) The only thing that matters is that the human 'story' remains uninfluenced by exposure to external truth. But there's nothing wrong with you working it out for yourselves.
Here's a little story: http://everist.org/texts/Fermis_Urbex_Paradox.htm
Obligatory talking points associated with the Fermi Paradox: - It takes a very short time in comparison to the age of the galaxy for a single self-replicating probe to result in a descendant probe visit to every star. A few million years. This means that you cannot really argue plausibly that all civilizations fail to do this - it would take trivial effort for just one faction within just one advanced civilization to…
This is a good summary. One of the missing pieces is we don't know what the minimum set of combinational factors are to create "advanced" civilization. The scare quotes for advanced here are that two incompatible definitions for civilization quality compete for the nominative "advanced." In the current context advanced means we've developed machines that carry us into space, we can create habitats to survive in even…