Comment on The window for a convincing UFO video has closed
Bytemeister@lemmy.world 18 hours ago
I always giggle at the idea that aliens would come here in some super advanced spaceship.
Look at the spacecraft we’ve managed to land on other celestial bodies. They’re basically the lightest, sketchiest, life support boxes with a rocket motor that we can manage to get to the destination. It would be reasonable to assume that any alien out there reaching earth for the first time would either send a rover, or it would be the jankiest craft that could just barely get here.
A persistent assumption about advanced interstellar travel is that engine efficiency is monumentally better to the point that the “tyrrany of the rocket equation” is no longer a factor, and extra mass can be carried without absolutely exploding your fuel requirements into absurdity.
If adding 10kg of payload didn’t mean also potentially many times more mass of propellant we’d be sending up more robust spacecraft, no question.
Rocket equation notwithstanding, there is the tyranny of development. Electric motors, rocket engines, ion thrusters… All of these locomotive technologies went through iterations. Even if alien scientist invented a warp drive capable of carrying an infinite amount of mass an infinite distance with no energy, there would still be a development process to implement and integrate that drive into a spaceship.
Technological progress, or the accumulation of knowledge does not happen overnight, it’s built layer by layer.
rumba@lemmy.zip 17 hours ago
That’s assuming they came here first :)
Also, assuming one of the 60 horrible things happening right now doesn’t prove the Fermi paradox.
Bytemeister@lemmy.world 17 hours ago
We’ve been looking all over for signs of life. Earth screams “there is life here!”
rumba@lemmy.zip 14 hours ago
We’ve only been broadcasting for 120 years, which is ~120 light-years away. Someone within that bubble needs to be technologically advanced enough to have been listening for the past 120 years.
Also, our average transmissions are pretty weak. If we really want to get noticed, We should have been firing intense lasers at them.