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mcbexx posted:We are at a point where the space debris orbiting earth could soon prevent future space exploration for good. Kessler syndrome is enormously overblown as a threat and it would absolutely not prevent future space exploration for good. It’s a problem that if we were serious about fixing, we could fix it. Solutions are current-day technically possible. ConfusedUs posted:With tech, we can see much, much further. EDIT: Hubble has seen something 9 billion light years away. Hubble has observed objects that are over 30 billion light years away; the boundary of the observable universe is about 45 billion ly away. The distance scales involved in expanding throughout the universe is enormous but they're compensated for by the time scales involved being enormous. If you can build self-replicating probes that can achieve even 10% of c, you can spread them across the entire galaxy in about a million years. Given an aggressively-expanding civilization, spreading across the universe could be done in several billion years. And all it takes is one, but there are apparently none. The answer can't just be "space is too big." I like the answer Charlie Stross comes up with in Accelerando: matter is cheap but bandwidth is expensive, so post-Singularity entities just turn the mass of their solar systems into computronium and sit around simulating everything, there's no *point* in going anywhere. Phanatic fucked around with this message at 00:42 on Feb 25, 2021 |
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Feb 25, 2021 00:09
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ConfusedUs posted:Simulation theory seriously looks more and more plausible to me with every passing year, honestly. But that's neat. Book's available under a free license as well, it's worth a read: http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/fiction/accelerando/accelerando-intro.html
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Feb 25, 2021 21:00
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ate poo poo on live tv posted:Agreed. I don't mean we'd necessarily see alien Hitler and be able to interpret the broadcast's meaning. But if the origin signal were strong enough, or close enough, what we picked up would be obviously "different" from background radiation and other naturally generated phenomenon. If it's too far away or was too weak we wouldn't pick it up at all, or rather it would be indistinguishable from the usual noise. This whole post is extremely relevant: https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/39571/how-far-away-would-an-alien-civilization-need-to-be-for-us-to-not-notice-them
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Feb 27, 2021 16:54
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Run, Kodos, he’s got a board with a nail in it!
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Mar 1, 2021 04:38
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Salt Fish posted:I don't know about this number you have, but surely it must be the far side only? It's pretty hard to wiggle a meteor in between the earth and the near side. Where are the meteors coming from that they won't impact the near side? The Earth's only blocking about 2 degrees of the FOV from the lunar surface at most.
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Mar 1, 2021 22:57
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That said there are organisms that display negligible senescence: they age and develop up until a point but then seem like they can just hang out forever until something eats them instead of eventually growing decrepit and dying from their internal systems breaking down.
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Mar 6, 2021 20:57
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Salt Fish posted:If 1 in 100,000,000,000 habitable planets have some species as smart as humans then there are like 5-10 billion intelligent species in the part of the universe we can observe. How do you know there are that many habitable planets in the observable universe?
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Mar 14, 2021 18:13
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Pentecoastal Elites posted:The reason people are assuming abundant life is because of our sufficiently-observed area is infinitesimally small (and so can be discounted) and when looking at the history of Earth and life on it it doesn't seem like there's anything magical* that lead to us. It really doesn't. And again, reasoning by analogy that "life is abundant on earth so it's abundant elsewhere" is one thing, but the Fermi paradox is specifically about intelligent, tool-using, complex etc. life, so the analogy needs to work the other way: despite the abundance of life on Earth, only one such species has arisen, which suggests that it is fantastically rare elsewhere. Phanatic fucked around with this message at 23:28 on Mar 16, 2021 |
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Mar 16, 2021 23:26
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I’ll believe monkeys can use tools when I hear one swearing like a sailor because he just dropped the twig-extender down the header pipe.
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Mar 24, 2021 04:34
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