The Astronomy Thread
- Thread starter Araxen
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This is what I see as well.
My first question for the aliens would be, "Seriously guys, how thehelldid you get here?" I am totally on board with the near fact that they almost certainly exist. I personally find the Drake equation to be at least a good ballpark figure. I am just not understanding how we can even see them let alone talk to them let alone visit with them.
I agree. The universe is actually much much bigger than most people think.
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The Edge
Lord Nagafen Raider
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This type of thinking shows of severe lack of imagination and foresight. Never is a pretty bold statement. It doesn't even take much strain to predict ways that this would be possible. We build stargates to instantly step onto any planet in the universe. We formulate a way to detect intelligent anywhere in the universe. Blip on the scanner, let's go say hi. You don't need to limit yourself to light speed or warp speed when you're given no time limit. We'll surpass all that.
chthonic-anemos
bitchute.com/video/EvyOjOORbg5l/
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Tuco
I got Tuco'd!
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What you say is true but there's a few important points here:
1. 400 years is not a great deal of time on a cosmic scale it's just a blink. Imagine if in a million years no tech was improved on, how populated the milky way could get? How about 1 billion years? At what point does a 400 year trip to Andromeda become desirable?
2. The tech in Star Trek, and in the real world, will likely improve in its ability to traverse space over time. Star Trek takes place a few hundred years away from where we are now, and it's feasible to have these warp systems and all kinds of VX in the fictional work. Why wouldn't it be feasible for even more powerful systems to exist thousands of years from now in the same fictional work?
gogusrl
Molten Core Raider
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We can never guess what the future will bring. We can make educated guesses and extrapolate from known shit, but in the end, it's all crap. I was reading The Mote in God's Eye by Larry Niven which was written in 1974. The story happens around 3075 AD we've got FTL travel and all kinds of stuff, but when there's computers involved he mentions things like the low frequency hum when there's a lot of processing power, or the room heating up slowing because there's 20 guys using their PDA's in it, etc. He could not imagine the world of we live in now in 2015 not to mention 3000.
Same could be said about Arthur C. Clarke with 2001: A Space Odyssey.
FTL travel in 100 years could be as natural as is airplane travel right now. Took us a few decades from no flight to combat flights to commercial to space travel.
edit : actually I have to admit that Banks with Culture Series had some really novel ideas.
Same could be said about Arthur C. Clarke with 2001: A Space Odyssey.
FTL travel in 100 years could be as natural as is airplane travel right now. Took us a few decades from no flight to combat flights to commercial to space travel.
edit : actually I have to admit that Banks with Culture Series had some really novel ideas.
Gavinmad
Mr. Poopybutthole
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It also may be that FTL travel isn't actually possible. Which means colonizing the galaxy would take a few million years, and assuming you could sustain a speed of 99% of the speed of light the entire trip, it would still take over 2.5 million years to get to the Andromeda galaxy. So you would have to build a ship or armada that was capable of sustaining itself and a population sufficient to colonize a prospective planet without outside resources for what is effectively an infinite amount of time.
If our past success on guessing the future is indicative of anything its that we don't have a clue of what is going to happen in the future. Perhaps warp drives will have us traveling at 30 - 7000 times the speed of light in the future perhaps not. Shows like Star Trek certainly have impacted our view of what the future might be like though.
It's interesting if you take time dilation into account when exploring the galaxy at near the speed of light. Although it's 2.5 million light years away, it might only be 2 years travel to "you". So you may actually be able to explore much of the galaxy in a lifetime. But when you arrive in Andromeda, the earth as you knew it has moved on for 2.5 million years...
khorum
Murder Apologist
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we actually kinda solve that on the "lifetime" end.
Travelling to alpha centauri at a speed of .99c will take ~10 years counting boost and deceleration. At a life expectancy of 80 years that's 12.5% of a lifetime.
But even economists are now contemplating theexponential growth of life expectancy now,with Western life expectancy growing by 1 year every 6 years. A .99c trip to Alpha Centauri for people with an average life expectancy of 500 years is 2% of their lifetime. For a future generation with a life expectancy of 1,000 years that's just 1%.
1% of a modern lifetime is around 8 months, which is about how long it took to sail from Britain to Australia for the first fleet of settlers there.
Travelling to alpha centauri at a speed of .99c will take ~10 years counting boost and deceleration. At a life expectancy of 80 years that's 12.5% of a lifetime.
But even economists are now contemplating theexponential growth of life expectancy now,with Western life expectancy growing by 1 year every 6 years. A .99c trip to Alpha Centauri for people with an average life expectancy of 500 years is 2% of their lifetime. For a future generation with a life expectancy of 1,000 years that's just 1%.
1% of a modern lifetime is around 8 months, which is about how long it took to sail from Britain to Australia for the first fleet of settlers there.
Palum
what Suineg set it to
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Of course irony being the people who built the top ones used the bottom ones to drop them places so...Maybe it's just me, but I think we achieve thisbefore this
khorum
Murder Apologist
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Thing is we can barely get our shit together to get off low earth orbit.
Beyond the LEO "boundary" there's the more pressing problem of a sociocultural barrier that's probably dooming our species right this moment lol.
I mean look, everyone wants to leave the planet right? Nope, actually the majority of the cultural class wants us to focus resources on helping the poors or curtailing unfettered capitalism.You get cunts like this guywho got to visit SpaceX's factory where they're building reusable rockets that land upright after delivering cargo into orbit and his best observation was:
There's no point aspiring to buildingNASA's alcubierre FTL ideasor even crowdfunding the VASIMR engine when it'll just get laughed out of congress. We've seen it happen before when the SSC was scrapped in favor of the ISS because an international space station was more "socially inclusive" whilst the SSC was an esoteric Texan adventure from the Reagan era.
I actually think that's as real a potential answer to the Fermi Paradox as the anthropic principle or the simulation argument---how many civilizations just getoutvotedinto a malthusian death-spiral until they no longer have the planetary resources or even the WILL to survive extinction risks? If you think about it, a global nuclear war with the soviet union would've just been the logical conclusion of such a "social barrier" to interstellar expansion.
If intelligence is as widespread as the Drake Equation surmises it is, then power-hungry populism must be too.
Beyond the LEO "boundary" there's the more pressing problem of a sociocultural barrier that's probably dooming our species right this moment lol.
I mean look, everyone wants to leave the planet right? Nope, actually the majority of the cultural class wants us to focus resources on helping the poors or curtailing unfettered capitalism.You get cunts like this guywho got to visit SpaceX's factory where they're building reusable rockets that land upright after delivering cargo into orbit and his best observation was:
So as fun as discussing the economic value of interstellar travel versus building matrioshka brains or dyson swarms, it's probably worthwhile discussing whether or not intelligent civilizations ever escape their impulses to recede and fade because populism ultimately crushes their ambition.The Guardian_sl said:
There's no point aspiring to buildingNASA's alcubierre FTL ideasor even crowdfunding the VASIMR engine when it'll just get laughed out of congress. We've seen it happen before when the SSC was scrapped in favor of the ISS because an international space station was more "socially inclusive" whilst the SSC was an esoteric Texan adventure from the Reagan era.
I actually think that's as real a potential answer to the Fermi Paradox as the anthropic principle or the simulation argument---how many civilizations just getoutvotedinto a malthusian death-spiral until they no longer have the planetary resources or even the WILL to survive extinction risks? If you think about it, a global nuclear war with the soviet union would've just been the logical conclusion of such a "social barrier" to interstellar expansion.
If intelligence is as widespread as the Drake Equation surmises it is, then power-hungry populism must be too.
Agraza
Registered Hutt
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Gavinmad
Mr. Poopybutthole
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In my opinion, we'll never make any serious inroads into exploration of our solar system, much less interstellar travel, until we transition into some sort of post-scarcity global government. Obviously that can't happen unless someone conquers everyone else, or until we experience a partial/major collapse of civilization and a global government (or its predecessor) rises from the ashes.