Comment on The great silence or why haven’t we found any aliens yet?

• IchNichtenLichten@lemmy.wtf ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

  Earth has been giving off obvious chemical evidence of life signs for eons.

  True, like I said microbial life is likely found all over the galaxy but we’ve only been transmitting radio waves for a little over a century.

  Even if they haven’t arrived to check it out, which I doubt, they will be watching carefully in various ways.

  How would they travel, realistically? Also what are these various ways that they will be watching?

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  • SreudianFlip@sh.itjust.works ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

    It’s impossible to be “realistic” about travel, as it is one of the things where we don’t know how little we know. We theorize about alcubierre warp fields and wormholes or generation ships or machine intelligences but isn’t that like saying you can’t canoe to the moon? Do our paleo ancestors have anything to say about ion drives or plutonium energy sources?

    I appreciate all the skeptics on space travel, but so many fall down on turning the same skepticism on our own limits to knowledge, and assume we know enough to make conclusive assumptions about something we have never tried.

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    • IchNichtenLichten@lemmy.wtf ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

      True, but we still have to try and understand the universe within the scientific framework we’ve built otherwise we’re just indulging in science fiction. We know things like the distances involved, the time it would take to travel those distances even at a high percentage of the speed of light, the amount of energy needed to move a specific mass, and so on.

      Maybe there are ways around this for sufficiently advanced beings but maybe there is intelligent life within 100 light years of us that is listening to the first radio broadcasts with no way of getting here.

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      • SreudianFlip@sh.itjust.works ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

        Yes. My point is that the theoretical approach is

        • already sf inspired: cf. warp drives etc.
        • applying our limitations as universal is also a sf ‘plot twist’, as it’s highly unlikely that we understand enough to be conclusive
        • slow travel is just the ‘better canoe paddle’ approach… probably near impossible
        • relativistic speeds are unlikely effective not so much because of on-board problems but because human society is so volatile, as more than a common sf trope
        • and most importantly: separate scientific framework descriptions from dogma, as science is provisional and assumes a better proof is simply waiting for better research; speculation is inspiration and goal-setting

        Sent from my tricorder/communicator combo unit

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