It's somewhat comforting to think the alien planet could also be in a perpetual bureaucratic budget crisis and they've dismantled their space program to make more room for tax cuts.
Politics could save us from an alien invasion!
Many talk about travel at 10 times the speed of light (warp-10) as if that is fast, but if you actually notice that lack of aging during travel they have to be traveling much faster than that. (at 10 times the speed of light the nearest star to earth is just under a 1 year round trip - your kids would not remember you very well when you return)
Which is to say that any aliens with space travel that discovers us now will not be making the journey because the length of time it would take.
Not at all, you need to look at other sub-genres. The social, economic and military structures that form around slower than light travel are a mainstay of hard science fiction. "A Deepness in the Sky" is a great example. So is the first half of "Neptune's Brood" or the second half of "Accelerando". Any story that uses a generation ship as the setting, like "Hull Zero Three", also assumes sub-light travel. Or what would happen if present-day society discovered an alien race next door, like in "The Sparrow". Or maybe we need to make ourselves slightly less human to survive sub-light space travel. "Blindsight" and "Echopraxia" explore the philospohical ramifications of that. Even "Ender's Game" doesn't have FTL travel.
Now space opera almost universally assumes that FTL is possible. Though there are exceptions, Ian Banks "The Algebraist" is my favorite sub-light space opera.
edit: Some hard sci-fi will still use wormholes, either as a normal thing or a macguffin. FTL communication is also common. Though FTL comms are getting less common in modern hard sci fi. Us readers like this and it makes for convenient plot devices as comm lag leads to misunderstandings.
TV and movies are almost always space opera, with "The Expanse" being the only sub-light TV production that comes to mind, and "2001" for film. But I don't know as much about film as books.
The book series is excellent, and it has two seasons released from SyFy, which does a pretty good job capturing the feeling the books.
The author's handling of energy is really annoying. I can overlook the structural impossibility of spinning up an asteroid for example, but I can't overlook the fact that they can command that sort of energy. It is made even more frustrating because they understand the offensive capabilities of kinetic weapons and rocket exhaust.
For example, the mirror array on Ganymede was stupid. The greenhouses use electric lighting for half of the time anyway, when behind Jupiter. Why build this giant orbital mirror array when you could install a second fusion reactor instead and leave the lights on all the time? And then it could all be underground too.
Magnetospheres make some locations very desirable. Why not lay down some super conducting cables, hook up a fusion reactor to it and make your own magnetosphere? This would have been a great plot device too, since any rich civilized place would do it, but it also makes detection of the habitat trivial. Poorer places would keep their's off and take the risk of cancer, turning it on only for protection from solar flare bursts. Seedy places would never install one at all.
Not a troll - I'm genuinely wondering what I missed from the episodes.
P.S. I love the Expanse :) I'm glad it was renewed for Season 3. Best sci-fi I've seen on TV since Battlestar Galactica.
Travel times are mentioned occasionally and they are consistent with ships that can do a brachistochrone orbit at a constant 0.3 or 1f acceleration. This would be a few days between most locations mentioned iirc.
I like to believe there was only one Matrix movie ever made and only one Dune novel. I will probably prefer to believe that there were actually 9-N books in The Expanse series, where N has yet to be determined.
Like the post-Ender's books (before Card sold out), I find mulling over the consequences of upsetting an applecart far more interesting than the upsetting.
The first books in both series feel a bit too "Mission Accomplished!", pat-on-the-back in hindsight.
Children of Dune had the most egregious problem with this. Trying here to not spoil the plot for you, but at towards the end (page 329 of 408 in my edition) Leto discovers something profound. The backstory to introduce this was first mentioned on the previous page. It didn't use some bit of trivial from the first two books, and he couldn't be bothered to write it 300 pages earlier either. (Feel free to email me when you think you've reached that part.) The later novels are slightly better, then he's writing these new discoveries into the previous chapter.
Re-reading Dune has always been pleasurable for me. You can feel it is just the tip of an iceberg and tease out the history by reading between the lines. The other books lurch from one deus ex machina to another.
Ender's Game is also largely about consequences too. Humanity wins the fight and destroys the big bad, but this doesn't happen at the end of the book. There is still a third of the story left to mull over the consequences.
edit: Slight spoilers, but nearly all of the later Dune books essentially allow anyone to come back from the dead. He never once explores the ramifications of this. What happens if you try to bring back multiple copies of someone at once? Does every cell in our body really carry the full weight of our entire past experience? What about identical twins? What if you blended the nucleus of one person with the mitochondria of a second and the cellular plasma of a third? Or does the procedure somehow tap into the soul? Is god annoyed that the natural cycle is broken? Does the process damage the soul? Never once delves into any of this, instead it is used only as a cop-out to avoid creating new characters.
For me, the biggest things are currently "must be at least this hard sci-fi" and "must have believably human characters." It sounds like one of yours is "must have book-spanning world-building." Which I get, but don't think bothers me as much.
I expect the unexplored deus ex machina will probably irk me when it shows up though! Though maybe not, I think a large part of my enjoyment of Dune is the somewhat orthagonal-to-Western world-building. Although the Islamic religious echoes are ham-fisted and shallow sometimes, it's still refreshing to even read something attempting it.
By my memory, Ender's didn't mull over consequences nearly as much as Speaker for the Dead, Xenocide, & Children of the Mind. It was more "Oh my god, this was horrible" and less "We did a horrible thing, so what do we do now? And how does that inform our reactions the next time we're presented with the same choice?"
Side note: if you ever want to read something laughably bad, especially for how modern it is, read one of the Honor Harrington books from David Weber. I tapped out after 20 pages.
Just found my copy of Ender's, one of the few OSC books I still have. I got the proportions very wrong. The story was "over" on page 295 of 324. So like 9%, the entire last chapter, was about the aftermath. Mostly Ender dealing with what happened. Still way more than the usual "happily ever after" and sequel hook you normally see, to give it credit.
The Honorverse is the purest of space opera. I have too many good memories to agree with you, but I won't push my luck with a re-reading. I seem to recall that it actually was pretty good at having their magic super weapons, drives and shields progress reasonably over the series. Weber was very good about having military tactics shift in step with the technology.
But I guess I forced myself to read enough Golden Age sci-fi that I developed a neurotic category for lazy... "deep worlds"? I'm looking at you and Foundation, Asimov.
So much of that stuff is a splash of human-esque characters and plot on an otherwise naked thought puzzle that I feel like it deserves its own category. I suppose it irks me less when I feel like the author did that not because they couldn't do otherwise, but because they intentionally didn't care to. Which is to say, the thought puzzle interested them more than the characters.
I feel the same about Lost. JJ Abrams doesn't give a damn about solving mysteries. He just likes creating them. Not liking him for not solving them is like not liking a dog because it wags its tail. That's a valid preference against tail wagging... but maybe not dogs for such a person?
And I really wouldn't chance a reread. I started reading it because I'd heard good things about the tech. Let good memories lie.
The lines that did me in were something to the effect of: "{Someone does a thing that makes Honor happy}. Honor felt happy because someone did a thing." (!!!)
Foundation was actually what got me started on the "future histories" kick. The civilization is a more fleshed-out character than any human in the story. But I was eleven and didn't read any further than the original trilogy.
My favorite golden-age sci-fi would probably be Heinlein's "The Past Through Tomorrow" collection. The parallels between Elon Musk and D. D. Harriman are amusing.
I haven't read any Burroughs though. Always meaning to.
No, no, no. That was only in the Voyager episode Threshold. It is widely regarded as one of the worst Voyager episodes, and the entire plot of that episode doesn't make any sense. There are questions of if this episode is even canon.
In any event, there are other Star Trek episodes where warp 10 is not a hard limit. All Good Things has ships traveling at Warp 13. The Kelvans modified the TOS Enterprise to travel at Warp 11. Even within Voyager, transwarp conduits allow for travel faster than whatever warp 10 would be if you disregard Threshold.
Warp 10 is not infinite velocity. It's just a line in a terribly written episode.
That was the standard scale used ST:TNG, ST:DS9, and ST:VOY with the notable exception of All Good Things. Obviously the point was to convey to the audience "Hey look, in the future things go much faster." Unfortunately they had originally chosen a scale that doesn't make that obvious to most viewers (it is not intuitively obvious that Warp 9.999 is substantially faster than Warp 9.99[2]). At a practical level it also very inconvenient to have a speed scale where all of the speeds share the same prefix (IOW, it is much easier for the captain to call out "Warp 9" and "Warp 12" then it is is to call out "Warp 9.99" and "Warp 9.999."
I choose to believe that the in the All Good Things timeline that once Federation started building ships that consistently exceeded 9.9 they came up with a modified scale that had better resolution and was easier to use, but that doesn't change the fact that Threshold (despite being terrible) is actually consistent with the existing source content and All Good Tings is not.
1: http://memory-alpha.wikia.com/wiki/Star_Trek:_The_Next_Gener... 2: http://memory-alpha.wikia.com/wiki/Warp_factor
Presumably in the alternate future in AGT they had recalibrated the scale again (probably as warp 9.975 is a mouthful, 9.9954 would be a right pain)
There are lots of problems with this theory, but to me it's mind blowing that it cannot be fully excluded yet. I guess we will need AI superintelligence to find out.
http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2007/06/the_high...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faster-than-light_neutrino_ano...
How often do countries go to war with people who are similar to them? Now how often with people who are the other? (Whatever definition fits)
Unfortunately we're now at or rapidly approaching the culmination of such a process: http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.... It's interesting to consider figure 3 as an example of meiosis in a social meta-organism.
I'd say the historical rule for warfare is that the belligerents are so similar that tiny differences seem irreconcilable. Proximity and competition for resources also seem more important that otherness.
American Civil War: many were actual relatives! ("brother vs. brother") WWI: English are descended from Germanic tribes, French are closely related to Germans too. WWII: Same as WWI mainly; Italians aren't very different from French/English/Americans. Americans/Japanese were a pretty big difference though. But Japanese/Chinese isn't that big a difference, relative to non-easterners.
The people who promote wars frequently try to cast the enemy as alien, in order to rile up support for the war and to get soldiers to participate.
I'd argue that the cultural perception of the belligerent humans towards their targets is far more important than objective differences.
And you and parent are certainly being overly-reductive compared to the context of the times.
What would a 1930s German have said about being compared to a Polish or Dutch person? Would they have seen themselves as "pretty similar"?
And I'm not sure how many Indians and Pakistanis you've talked to, but they're pretty close to space aliens to each other.
Same with Shia Iraqis and Sunni Iraqis, and both with Kurds. Etc etc.
I don't see how you can say "these peoples are the same" across any modern ethnic or national boundaries without a lot more support without it coming across as "those people all look alike."
Hell, I can localize most folks in the US within five sentences or so.
And yes, there were states that straddled the Mason-Dixon line (and states like Virginia that were shattered because of it), but outside of those limited cases I'm sure the majority of the people involved could have identified "the other" pretty easily.
Point being that if we're finely tuned enough to physical and cultural differences amongst our own species, yet still war on those we can perceive as different... imagine how much stronger that impulse would be against something that didn't even look like us.
That would predict that the Germans would prefer to ally with other Europeans against people like the Japanese, who they are maximally different from. Historically this did not happen. Yes, there are clear conflicts between each of the groups named, but they are more similar to each other than they are to most other populations of humans.
Let's say an alien combat spacecraft crash-lands in the middle of ISIS-controlled territory. Would you expect ISIS to immediately declare a cease-fire and surrender the craft and its weaponry to the UN so that humanity can work together to face this new threat, or do you think they would immediately go about using it as a tool to better murder their fellow humans?
If you're proceeding purely from history, it's not supportive to say that armies on opposite sides of the world fight each other more rarely than armies next to each other.
A more apt test of my assertion would be the frequency with which civil wars (excluding cross-ethnic wars in poly-ethnic societies) are initiated vs non-civil wars (allowing for the variance caused by internal policing, international politics, etc).
Just because Poles and Germans are similar to you doesn't mean they're similar to each other.
On the latter, I'd prefer a more fair: ISIS and a non-ISIS armed force are engaged in a firefight. An alien ship crash lands and disembarks five non-humanoid aliens. These aliens immediately begin shooting at both parties. What happens?
In any case, I've been trying to argue a point on my own rather than being a Scott Alexander repost-bot, but I have clearly failed. Most of what I'm getting at is based on what I remember from http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/30/i-can-tolerate-anything... . He presents this far better than I have.
not to germans, unless you ignore that whole biologically superior Aryan fad
Ironically, I initially didn't mean war, but some project that requires concerted effort of all the population. Like colonizing nearby uninhabited planets or improving life conditions on their home one.
Turns out I wasn't thinking anthropomorphically enough.
The thing about Fermi's paradox is that the Universe is old and the local galaxy is big, so any explanation for the apparent absence of ETI has to cover all ETIs. It just takes one species in galactic history to reach the point of launching a self-replicating interstellar probe to produce a galaxy permanently aswarm with them. Heck, we're not that far away from being able to do so ourselves. And any explanation of the form "the ETIs wouldn't do that because reasons" just fails, because it just takes one event, over a very long time and large number of systems.
So I guess Ben just knew that aliens would never be a problem because Death and Taxes. Apparently the IRS is more powerful than Statistics and Physics.
I'd rather hope in the opposite.
By that metric alone, and given that the probability of each of realistically pretty small... contact doesn't seem too likely.
For example, we are spending $45 billion in our healthcare bill to fight the opioid epidemic. Imagine if we were able to avoid such problems in the first place.
The problem is that by placing the origin of evil on the far side of some liminal threshold (species, space, stargates, hell) we generally fail to engage with it and so perpetuate the existence of an epistemological gap.
It's interesting to consider genre tropes as analogues of Kubler-Ross' stages of grief. Viewed in this light, Europa Report gains considerably.
Spoiler: Not much happens in this book. But maybe in the next!
Therefore, there is some filter that prevents the vast majority of life from achieving interstellar colonization. Either the filter is behind us and we're the lucky first ones, or the filter is ahead of us and we are almost certainly doomed to stay trapped in our solar system until it is no longer habitable.
And second, my previous comment was a joke.
Let's assume that aliens had a 1% head start on us. They were 1% faster at evolving. That's not a crazy idea - Earth spent 2 billion years going from photosynthesis to multi-cellular life. The cretaceous extinction could've been a 50 million year setback, how close were Dinosaurs to getting sentience?
We're at 13 billion years on the global clock right now, so 1% of that is 130 million years. An alien with a 130 million year head start on us. Imagine that.
Now let's assume there are 40 billion habitable planets in the galaxy. That seems like a lot. And let's assume it takes a really long time for a planet to go from "just colonized" to "ready to produce more interstellar colonies". Say 100,000 years - longer than recorded human civilization. We'll make a vague approximation - every inhabited planet can colonize another planet once per 100,000 years. That seems conservative.
It takes about 35 generations for a doubling population to reach 40,000,000,000.
35 generations. So with a generation taking 100,000 years, that means 3.5 million years.
In 3.5 million years we see a species go from "sentient" to "every habitable planet in the galaxy".
You can play with the numbers, but the result speaks volumes: geometric growth is fast, and the universe is old.
It is highly unlikely that we're the first. And if we're not the first, and interstellar colonization is possible, then every planet in the galaxy should already be colonized, because it would take a blink of an eye in galactic timescales.
Specifically that the metallicity of stars would need to exceed a minimum in order for civilizations to have the necessary building blocks for technology.
It's hard to build a fusion reactor without the right elements. And it would be impractical to synthesize them in any practical amount. Especially since that would balloon your energy needs drastically.