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A question of whether a space travelling civilization would want to travel outside their star system has been raised, but I've never seen it addressed to my satisfaction. What's the reason we assume aliens would try to propagate on other planets? Beside some catastrophic scenario of course
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Aug 12, 2020 23:19
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Monglo posted:A question of whether a space travelling civilization would want to travel outside their star system has been raised, but I've never seen it addressed to my satisfaction. Because we want to, and have since before we knew that we'd killed this planet.
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Aug 13, 2020 00:15
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its just assumed (by scifi) at a certain level of technology distance and relativity no longer matters, so at that point why not explore
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Aug 13, 2020 00:17
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Yeah, whenever sci-fi doesn't assume the trip will be painless they instead assume people will willingly throw themselves into extremely costly, extremely dangerous, centuries-long voyages with virtually no guarantee of success for the sake of exploration and spreading civilization.
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Aug 13, 2020 00:29
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Classon Ave. Robot posted:Because we want to, and have since before we knew that we'd killed this planet. lol at you coming into this thread and thinking you're taking on Elon Musk's fanclub. Moaning about how space science is reactionary sure is some anticapitalist praxis!! Look at the garbage you got ripped for in USPOL: Classon Ave. Robot posted:Wow, say something bad about some lame nerd hero and a lot of people get really mad. Classon Ave. Robot posted:It's a little strange how much hostility you can get just for not being impressed about some dude who failed horribly at doing the thing he set out to do and ended up getting replaced with Neil deGrass Tyson of all people. After having to listen to years of embarrassing nerds talk about how important space is while the planet they rely on for survival is dying beneath their feet I'm really just unimpressed at his accomplishments. Classon Ave. Robot posted:Uhhhh the scientific community is hugely complicit in underselling how serious climate change is and has been for decades. The inherent conservatism and cowardice of climate science communication is blindingly obvious to anyone who's ever read an IPCC report. Classon Ave. Robot posted:I don't know who's getting the idea that I think I'm smarter than Carl Sagan lol, I'm just sick of hearing about some guy who failed utterly in what he was trying to do as a hero of some sort that we should be celebrating all the way into our own grave. Nobody listens to the full pale blue dot speech, they just take the first image from it and then jerk off about how big the universe is and how cool it is that there's so much stuff out there that we could go visit if we give Elon Musk billions of dollars to invent a rocket ship that doesn't work. Classon Ave. Robot posted:I feel like you might not be paying a lot of attention to climate science in general if you don't understand how wildly conservative and politically naive the scientific establishment has been and continues to be. I guess I wouldn't recommend doing any research on it though, it's kinda depressing. In this, the space science thread. Nothing you post here can be taken as posting in good faith because of these opinions. DrSunshine fucked around with this message at 01:06 on Aug 13, 2020 |
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Aug 13, 2020 01:03
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ashpanash posted:Yeah - no. You're reading this wrong, sorry. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_energy_teleportation what do u think of this?
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Aug 13, 2020 01:08
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Conspiratiorist posted:Yeah, whenever sci-fi doesn't assume the trip will be painless they instead assume people will willingly throw themselves into extremely costly, extremely dangerous, centuries-long voyages with virtually no guarantee of success for the sake of exploration and spreading civilization. People have certainly never, ever, ever in the history of mankind thrown themselves into the unknown to make a new life and explore new horizons. You've got humanity's number there, yesiree.
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Aug 13, 2020 01:10
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Conspiratiorist posted:Yeah, whenever sci-fi doesn't assume the trip will be painless they instead assume people will willingly throw themselves into extremely costly, extremely dangerous, centuries-long voyages with virtually no guarantee of success for the sake of exploration and spreading civilization. Polynesia- famously unsettled until the 20th century.
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Aug 13, 2020 01:14
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PawParole posted:https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_energy_teleportation Injecting energy into a system and retrieving some of the injected energy - that's the basis for how all systems behave. Novel approach, but nothing that breaks the laws of thermodynamics. What you *can't* do is generate work from a system at equilibrium.
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Aug 13, 2020 01:37
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Monglo posted:A question of whether a space travelling civilization would want to travel outside their star system has been raised, but I've never seen it addressed to my satisfaction. Would it be even possible for a species with no interest in expansion or exploration to get to the global level of civilization enough to support the diversity of thought and specialization of labor enough to generate a space program? Are they going to go through all the steps to get a species advanced enough they control resources enough they can travel around their solar system but then go 'nah, I'm good now"?
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Aug 13, 2020 01:51
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DrSunshine posted:lol at you coming into this thread and thinking you're taking on Elon Musk's fanclub. Moaning about how space science is reactionary sure is some anticapitalist praxis!! Look at the garbage you got ripped for in USPOL: eh who cares about someones spicy opinions about a puny human in the space thread
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Aug 13, 2020 01:51
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:Would it be even possible for a species with no interest in expansion or exploration to get to the global level of civilization enough to support the diversity of thought and specialization of labor enough to generate a space program? Are they going to go through all the steps to get a species advanced enough they control resources enough they can travel around their solar system but then go 'nah, I'm good now"? send probes to other solar systems to study and explore maybe the difference between intrasolar(?) and interstellar travel is enormous (as far as i understand it at least) and you don't need to do it, surely. there must be enough material to last a good long time in the solar system and building a space habitat is easier than migrating solar systems
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Aug 13, 2020 01:59
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Captain Monkey posted:People have certainly never, ever, ever in the history of mankind thrown themselves into the unknown to make a new life and explore new horizons. You've got humanity's number there, yesiree. DrSunshine posted:Polynesia- famously unsettled until the 20th century. These people assumed they'd live to reach the places they were heading towards. Also they were generally driven by population pressures.
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Aug 13, 2020 02:44
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Conspiratiorist posted:These people assumed they'd live to reach the places they were heading towards. Nobody's ever gone to great lengths to secure their childrens' future either! You really have a deep and thorough understanding of mankind.
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Aug 13, 2020 02:46
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Far more believable for our modern context is actually an Elon Musk esque wealthy futurist conning hundreds into embarking into a doomed journey of interstellar colonization, which is also historically accurate when it comes to a large number of settling endeavors. But rarely do stories go "and then they all died needlessly" because that doesn't make for very compelling literature, at least not when it's from the perspective of the prospective settlers. Captain Monkey posted:Nobody's ever gone to great lengths to secure their childrens' future either! You really have a deep and thorough understanding of mankind. You're unintentionally agreeing with me.
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Aug 13, 2020 02:49
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Uhh I don't know where this sudden bizarre nonsensical hostility came from but the idea that life on other planets would want to do the thing that so many humans on our planet want to do is not particularly controversial or anything? The idea that life formed by the same evolutionary forces that created us would want to do the same stuff we want to do is perfectly reasonable.
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Aug 13, 2020 02:56
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Dunno, it seems like comparing historical precedents of human migration on our planet to space exploration isn't fair. Humans travelled and explored in hopes of finding richer habitats, to make their lives better and easier, which will never happen in space. There is no chance in finding a better place than your own world to live in. So, the only incentive for us and hypothetical aliens is to do it for science. Which has few if any precedents in our own history. It's like living in an underwater city. We could actually do it with our technology. For basically same reasons as we would do it for space exploration. But the fact that we don't have those makes me think, humans (and similar aliens) wouldn't trade comfort of their home for extremely costly life on other planets.
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Aug 13, 2020 03:09
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Captain Monkey posted:Nobody's ever gone to great lengths to secure their childrens' future either! You really have a deep and thorough understanding of mankind. Saying we won't live in underwater cities is not the same as saying no one wants to live in underwater cities. If you build an underwater city I guarentee you some people will go live there but that doesn't mean they are likely to be built. It's not about individuals. Of course people would go. The question is if or when or if it's likely they'll be enabled. Lots of people want to go right now but currently there's no government or supra-national organization seriously working on it. Is this likely to change? Who knows but I'd guess it would have to get a lot easier and cheaper to do it before anyone will really consider it and it's possible that will be never.
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Aug 13, 2020 03:16
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Monglo posted:
Lots of people have moved from nicer to worse “habitats”, we aren’t squirrels. People live in tundra, in deserts, 5000 people even live in Antarctica.
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Aug 13, 2020 03:28
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We’d never find a plant half as inhabitable as Antarctica, and it’s not really possible to live there without importing resources from elsewhere.
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Aug 13, 2020 03:34
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Antifa Turkeesian posted:We’d never find a plant half as inhabitable as Antarctica, and it’s not really possible to live there without importing resources from elsewhere. Who said we had to live on planets? Monglo posted:A question of whether a space travelling civilization would want to travel outside their star system has been raised, but I've never seen it addressed to my satisfaction. It doesn't really matter if you're raising a fermi paradox type of question. The vastness of the numbers involved when thinking about possibly existing civilizations is that you just need one civilization to go out and spread into other star systems for ~whatever reason that we can't even imagine, and the logic of Von Neumann probes would kick in and you'd see a civilization that had colonized its galaxy over a period of 30-100 million years.
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Aug 13, 2020 03:53
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Antifa Turkeesian posted:We’d never find a plant half as inhabitable as Antarctica, and it’s not really possible to live there without importing resources from elsewhere. And yet people do live there. The idea humans will only move to better “habitats” just doesn’t match real life.
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Aug 13, 2020 04:03
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Humans moved into the arctic circle and the most isolated of islands because they were pushed to the boundaries of their former ranges by sedentary humans who had developed agriculture and domesticated livestock. They didn't go there by choice.
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Aug 13, 2020 04:20
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DrSunshine posted:Alright, it seems that I was mistaken about the accelerating expansion of the universe eventually making it impossible to observe anything farther than our galaxy. That's a comforting notion. The paper I linked to addresses that, but I mostly agree with the the summary that anthropic arguments centered around our N=1 sample just aren't that interesting. DrSunshine posted:Still, there's something I'm not quite understanding about how this works. For example, say star A and star B are 1 light year apart. The expansion of the universe is 1 ly/y. The acceleration of the expansion is 1 ly/y/y. If a photon is emitted from star A at time 0, and travels for 1 year, by the time the light gets 1 light year out, the universe will have expanded by 1 more light year. By year 2, after the photon travels another year, the universe will have increased in size by two more light years. How could light from Star A ever reach Star B? The signals from distant galaxies were emitted in the past and appear to undergo time dilation when observed here. So galaxies that are currently outside our event horizon are observable in the sense that we can receive signals from their past, but we will never receive the signals that they are emitting today. Likewise, galaxies that are not yet observable but will enter our particle horizon in the future will only offer a glimpse of their history from the early universe. I suspect that the difference between observable meaning detecting signals from the past versus those emitted today is the main source of misunderstanding. Disclaimer: I am not a cosmologist and don't grok relativity.
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Aug 13, 2020 04:49
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At any rate, let's pretend I said "Why don't we observe a redder universe?" or something of that nature.
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The idea that we can't find a planet better than the one we are on now gets more absurd every day as we slowly destroy all the great things about this one. The worse things get the easier it will be to find something better.
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Aug 13, 2020 05:00
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Yeah, it's seems laughable to say people voluntarily chose to live in harsher conditions, instead of being forced there by circumstances.
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Aug 13, 2020 05:04
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Monglo posted:Yeah, it's seems laughable to say people voluntarily chose to live in harsher conditions, instead of being forced there by circumstances. I still am unclear why people are talking about humans like it’s 4000 bc, you can just go live in a desert or wherever you want. People just move to Dubai or Norway. People aren’t living in Vegas because their crops failed or predation pressure or to escape raiders. People aspire to live in Iceland it’s such a nice country despite being cold and dark and a volcanic wasteland.
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Aug 13, 2020 05:25
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Thats why I used the silly comparison of Underwater Cities. Average person, I think, would be against living in dangerous and harsh conditions, if given the choice. And I think its important to consider the average person and not some sort of daredevil survivalist explorer, otherwise its just a research outpost, and not sure if I would consider that colonization, as people describe it when talking about interstellar civilizations. Personally, I fail to imagine why a group of people or aliens with full control of their resources and population would venture outside the most comfortable place to exist and not just explore. Thats the only reason I posted previously, I wanted to find out if there are any plausible scenarios for an advanced life form to leave their home planet, except catastrophic scenarios, where they have no choice.
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Aug 13, 2020 05:39
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Monglo posted:Thats why I used the silly comparison of Underwater Cities. Average person, I think, would be against living in dangerous and harsh conditions, if given the choice. It could be that they might want to simply create more habitats for their own type of life. Perhaps as a sort of insurance against the extinction of their own homeworld, far in the distant future, as we may someday do. Perhaps an alien civilization might be under the spell of an incredibly powerful driving religious myth, like a prophecy telling them to go out and settle other solar systems. Or, perhaps they simply exhaust all of the resources of their solar system in building some kind of monumental structure, and need to go elsewhere. Imagine there is a very very long-lived species, that somehow is able to transmit their personalities or memories from one generation to another. They view things not from the perspective of us with our short lives, but on the scale of thousands or even millions of years. They set forth on some kind of exploration project because of the aspirations of one single individual that managed to genetically transmit their will from the ancient past. What if they are highly xenophobic, and venture from one system to another in a paranoid attempt to circumvent the existence of any other species to compete with them?
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Aug 13, 2020 06:01
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Monglo posted:Thats why I used the silly comparison of Underwater Cities. Average person, I think, would be against living in dangerous and harsh conditions, if given the choice. So your argument is ‘some people may not want to do this therefore it will never happen’? Because that’s hella lazy. People will populate the stars if it’s feasible and we live that long, we’re a species of explorers that do big weird gestures just to do them. We’re not beep bloop computers that weigh the cost benefit analysis before each action, we have a drive to spread and grow and if we can make or find a planet half as habitable as the worst day in Antarctica we’re gonna build a dome and live on it. Have you ever been outside or met people that enjoy the outdoors? Because this is the weirdest take on humanity I’ve ever heard in my life.
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Aug 13, 2020 06:20
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An extremely horny race that just wants to go out and find other aliens in order to have weird sex with them.
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Aug 13, 2020 06:24
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DrSunshine posted:An extremely horny race that just wants to go out and find other aliens in order to have weird sex with them. Humans?
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Aug 13, 2020 06:46
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DrSunshine posted:Alright, it seems that I was mistaken about the accelerating expansion of the universe eventually making it impossible to observe anything farther than our galaxy. That's a comforting notion. Sorry to wreck this, but after the light on it's way arrives ( as explained by the earlier poster ) then stuff will start dropping out of visibility. Eventually we will only be able to see matter that is gravitationally bound together. I think for us, that's the local supercluster which will probably eventually fuse into one big galaxy.
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Aug 13, 2020 07:19
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DrSunshine posted:An extremely horny race that just wants to go out and find other aliens in order to have weird sex with them. I see you've watched Doctor Who.
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Aug 13, 2020 08:32
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Everyone seems to be just ignoring the question of distance and assuming that interstellar travel is the same as sailing to an island so all you need is a will to do it When there isn't really any pressure to do it at all and the distances involved make it unfeasible for anything alive
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Aug 13, 2020 09:27
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Communist Thoughts posted:Everyone seems to be just ignoring the question of distance and assuming that interstellar travel is the same as sailing to an island so all you need is a will to do it I tend to think of it as being something that would be equivalent in scope to an Apollo project, but for a Type 2 civilization. Even then, I don't think it would be a wholly rational undertaking. It would only ever be done by a species that for whatever reasons had a psychological need to have a presence in another system.
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Aug 13, 2020 11:08
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DrSunshine posted:Perhaps an alien civilization might be under the spell of an incredibly powerful driving religious myth, like a prophecy telling them to go out and settle other solar systems. Or, perhaps they simply exhaust all of the resources of their solar system in building some kind of monumental structure, and need to go elsewhere. In one of the Hitchhiker books, the alien race Krikkit evolved in a star system enveloped in a dust cloud so dense that they never saw the rest of the universe. Then they found a wreckage of a space craft that'd crashed there, and made one of their own, and ventured beyond the cloud. They saw the vastness of the cosmos, and the incredible multitude of stars. They decided 'this has to go', and started destroying everything around them. 
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Aug 13, 2020 13:34
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Communist Thoughts posted:Everyone seems to be just ignoring the question of distance and assuming that interstellar travel is the same as sailing to an island so all you need is a will to do it Breakthrough Starshot is an initiative that has the leadership and backing of dozens of leading physicists, engineers, and astronomers, and it has already tested proofs of concept for its mission in space. Their aim is to send a swarm of spacecraft to explore Proxima Centauri using light-sails pushed by a laser, designed to accelerate to 1/5th the speed of light, and to reach Proxima Centauri in about 20 years. How is that not interstellar travel and exploration? If such a project is conceivable using present-day technology, then a more scaled-up mission could be feasible, with spacecraft that can carry human beings. At any rate, you're not thinking broadly enough, your viewpoint is still too limited to human perspectives and vantage points. Interstellar travel looks very different from the point of view of a Bristlecone pine, or Galapagos turtle. There could be a sapient alien race whose individuals live for tens of thousands of years. They could even be immortal. Even at piddling Voyager spacecraft speeds, travel to the nearest solar system from Earth would take only about 30,000 years. For such a long-lived race, would the distances and travel times really matter? Even for humans, if you're willing to accept genetic modification to enhance our lifespan, or modify our bodies to withstand long periods of space travel, or with advances in cryogenics and hibernation, it might be possible to send humans to colonize other solar systems. Some have even proposed sending fertilized human embryos, tended by AIs, or uploaded consciousnesses, though these are still very speculative. Bug Squash posted:Sorry to wreck this, but after the light on it's way arrives ( as explained by the earlier poster ) then stuff will start dropping out of visibility. Eventually we will only be able to see matter that is gravitationally bound together. I think for us, that's the local supercluster which will probably eventually fuse into one big galaxy. So that does align with my initial intuition, then. Also your avatar is super disturbing!!! Nightmare fuel!
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Aug 13, 2020 14:52
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DrSunshine posted:Breakthrough Starshot is an initiative that has the leadership and backing of dozens of leading physicists, engineers, and astronomers, and it has already tested proofs of concept for its mission in space. Their aim is to send a swarm of spacecraft to explore Proxima Centauri using light-sails pushed by a laser, designed to accelerate to 1/5th the speed of light, and to reach Proxima Centauri in about 20 years. Where are they going to go? They're just going to stay on the ship and study the planets they find? You're not going to be able to colonize other planets without long periods of geoengineering on each one, and they'll seldom be very nice even after that.
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Aug 13, 2020 14:58
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I said this before, but who said that you needed to live on planets? Planets are terrible choices for colonization for any organic being, because the most ideal place for them (assuming they haven't genetically modified themselves) is their home planet. It's obvious. Like you take Mars for example. Mars is an obviously terrible spot to put down a colony, because in order to live on Mars, you'd need to build the same kind of shielding, hydroponics, self-contained air systems, etc, that you'd need to survive in a space colony. At which point you may as well build a space colony!
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Aug 13, 2020 15:24
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