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Comment by mygo | Hacker News Reader

> It would be anticlimactic in the extreme to arrive to a destination to find a thriving civilization thousands of years ahead of you in terms of technical know how.

That would be extremely exciting! IMO even more exciting than finding a desolate planet. Discovering an entire unknown civilization is anti climatic? No way, it would be like discovering Atlantis! So what if they’re more advanced? We were capable and curious/brave enough to even make the trip! Keeping score would be pointless but the fact would remain that we made first contact with them, on their turf, even though they were more advanced.

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Unless it was started by colonists who left years after you did but with technology orders of magnitude faster. Say the year after you leave in a colony ship with contemporary propulsion systems, wormhole travel is discovered and a second colonization effort is started thousands of years before you arrive.

(I chose wormholes specifically because it makes it more believable that you were not contacted or picked up and pulled along by the faster technology.)

aah, gotcha. Gee, you’d think in the eons they spent after settling on that new planet and sorting out their turf wars that they would have thought to maybe launch a ship with their advanced wormhole-hopping tech to collect earlier travelers who may still be traveling along that intergalactic path. If for any purpose other than studying how spending such a long time in space has affected them. But that would be too thoughtful or something.

I suspect we would learn to USE a technology like wormholes before we could reliably CREATE wormholes.

A mission like you suggest would require us to create precisely calibrated wormholes. Which is quite a step beyond DISCOVERING a wormhole.

Not sure who mentioned immediately launching a ship the day after landing, but I said sending out ships after colonizing, settling turf wars, advancing, etc. There’s no telling how advanced their ships or other tech would be at that point. How much would even 500 years do for space travel after they were already able to achieve such short-timespan intergalactic travel? I can’t fathom.

Anyways, lots of ways to skin a cat. Making wormholes may be one way, but faster space ships, or controlling gravity, or teleportation, or some other fantastical exploit we haven’t even begun to imagine may be another.

Wormholes are nice, but putting yourself through a subatomic mixer will not persuade anybody to try that. You can try it with a conventional meat grinder at home, if you like that idea, as in "Fargo".

GP is talking about humans who left later but arrived earlier.

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