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

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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