Are we alone? Tiny spacecraft will head to Alpha Centauri to find out
cnet.com
cnet.com
Depicted in these magazine articles and artist renditions: in the future (certainly by the 2020s!), we will have bases on the Moon, maybe even Mars, and rotating space stations... all the while wearing stylish futuristic fashions (yet still looking very much 70's), the women sipping from glasses of champagne and laughing to each other while in the background the men play some yet-to-be-invented handball game.
It always seems as if we're just 50 - 100 years from "the future".
Lost in Space takes place in 1997 when we were about to colonize space. Or as we know it, 21 years ago.
The original Blade Runner takes place next year. When we'll have space colonies and humanoid androids to work them.
And according to Star Trek, we've weathered the Eugenics War and have 31 years before World War III and the post-atomic horror. But in just 45 years, Zefram Cochrane will invent the warp drive.
Not to mention the countless flying cars we'll have as we go eat all of our meals in pill form.
"It was the distant future, 2005..." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yAioZzuhOQg
GP:"the women sipping from glasses of champagne and laughing"
OP:"[instead] women seem to laugh at salad rather than champagne."
i.e. in actual modern life the ultimate debonaire lifestyle, as depicted by the likes of instagram, doesn't focus on smiling over exclusive alcohol as much as it does on smiling over exotic salads.
So when he mentioned women sipping champagne and laughing, it brought the image to my mind.
[0] https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/women-laughing-alone-with-sal...
- What are we doing to ensure our survival?
- What are we doing to ensure we propagate beyond our home?
- What are we doing to ensure that, in the event of an unavoidable extinction or apocalypse, the history of our existence and knowledge endures on?
So far we aren't doing any of that (although #3 may be accidentally taken care of through our ruins.)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11851871
( archive.org link, because this article isn't online anymore. )
https://web.archive.org/web/20180106124933/http://www.wipp.e...
Man, I love the old "artist's concepts", hate the new CG.
It's also amusing how much humans are effected by century and millennial boundaries.
There was a show in the 80s, on I think Discovery, called Beyond the Year 2000.
As a kid it seemed like the simple fact that we were entering the next millennium MUST be meaningful. And popular media portrayed it that way.
But 15 years is 15 years. Doesn't matter what boundary is crossed. Hahaha.
I think that's part of what even got people worked up about Y2K. It's a new millennia! Did we plan for it?!?
Anyway, my point is, I think the millennial boundary may have influenced excitement about space progress as much as other forms of irrational optimism.
Plus, gravity is hard.
I have a large collection of old science fiction books (60’s and 70’s) from spending a lot of time in second hand book stores.
Growing up before the internet and the explosion of the genre in the 90’s that use to be the only way to find new books or authors.
The art of sci-fi book cover has certainly lost something...if only for being more pc.
And everyone else can go home. ;-)
I assume your friend would reject that, but unless the bet specified a procedure to use in the case that the participants could not agree on the outcome, it might have been enough to void the bet at least.
Also, was the bet in writing and signed? If not, and if you are in a jurisdiction that has something like the Statue of Frauds [2], you might try to argue the bet is invalid because the Statue requires contracts that cannot be performed within one year (other than indefinite contracts) be in writing and signed.
The 2010 end date on the contract arguably makes it not of indefinite duration. The "cannot be performed within one year" is harder. It doesn't mean that it has to be performed within a year--just that it is possible.
For example, if I make a contract with you that says I'll pay you $1000 if in the next three years your bicycle is stolen and not recovered within two weeks. Because it is possible that your bike could be stolen in the next year, this contract can be performed in one year. It doesn't matter that it might not be.
Would it be possible in 1990 for a permanent Moon base to be deployed within one year? It may have been physically possible, but it was certainly politically and economically impossible. For Statute of Fraud purposes, is it good enough that it could happen even if it would require worldwide cooperation on an unprecedented scale? Or does it have to have a non-negligible chance of actually happening?
[1] https://www.dailystar.co.uk/news/latest-news/601628/Dark-Sid...
At that point, you might just try more direct means of not having any friends and save yourself the hassle.
If you change "have" to "could", then maybe it's true again, according to this video at least: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3iMlOH6hdOw
It's quite sad to see politicians make space exploration this hard.
Even more sad after you find out politicians also the source of so many wars on the Earth.
The craft would be completely unable to brake so it will pass past the target planets in a matter of minutes. It's unclear what kind of sensors could be employed to detect anything and we certainly lack the technology to beam and receive back signals sent by a postage stamp craft 5 light years away. Let me rephrase that: we haven't got even a theoretical model of a system that would allow communication at such vast distances with milliwatt power sources.
Needless to say, nobody is seriously working on this, nor will they for many decades at least.
On the other hand, if someone were to sent similar craft to us, would we even have a reasonable chance of detecting something that small without knowing exactly where, when and what to look for?
ʻOumuamua may have been a probe, yet even with our suspicions about it being something out of the ordinary, we more-or-less collectively yawned and went about our daily strife without making any effort to collect it.
There is a range of the radio spectrum we can't really practically measure: the very, very low frequencies. Consider a nanohertz signal. Period of each sine wave: 31 years. You might also need an antenna the size of the solar system to grab anything.
As far as collecting, I remember reading a back-of-the-envelope analysis that suggested that we might be able to catch it if we made a really concerted effort. We might then be able to hit it with an impactor (or just smack the probe into it) and do some spectroscopy on the resulting dust cloud, but it's going way too fast in an inconvenient direction for us to be able to collect anything, slow down and return it.
Say each one weighs a gram, and is 1m across - that's just impossibly small. The Hubble ST's resolving power means that it can resolve a 1m object (ie, make one pixel = 1m²) at something like 4000km away. In space terms, that is practically touching. In interstellar terms, that might as well be inside the planet!
Any transmitting that it might be doing would necessarily be very low power, which means it would need to be highly directional and pointed back the way it had come, behind what must be a reflector more reflective by far than anything we know how to build. Unless you managed to get its transmission pointed directly at you by being behind it, there'd be no way to see it.
After decades or more in the interstellar void, it would be about as equal to the ambient temperature as it's possible to be, and in any case, it's not made of very much 'stuff', so it would have no heat signature to detect.
Lastly, at 20% light speed, they would cover the average distance from Pluto to Earth in something like 36 hours. That's not a lot of time to search!
The only possible method I can think of would be to detect the results of these things crashing into dust within the solar system. How much of a 'puff' a gram of diffuse something travelling at 0.2c hitting a speck of rock makes I don't know. Still way too small to spot, I'm sure.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bbi1hHPpTjY
They talk about using a 1km^2 earth based laser array to accelerate the craft. They also discuss using a 1W laser on the craft, and using that to transmit data back to earth (with a similar 1km^2 array to receive the signals).
They really seem to have thought through all the issues and come up with difficult, but plausible solutions.
The "will" in the title is just flat wrong. "Might possibly" is a stretch, even. People are sketching out the idea, enough that there are known but currently insurmountable problems in doing it. It's an interesting and promising approach in general though.
Some additional highlights:
> accelerate the nanocraft with a 60,000-G force
We're going to make a package of sensors, transmitters, power source and sail that weighs one gram and can also survive 60,000g's of acceleration for multiple minutes? For comparison, the US Navy's ship mounted railguns accelerate projectiles at something like 15,000-20,000g, and those are 10kg of high-precision tungsten, and need to do nothing except not disintegrate.
> The combined laser power needs to be something close to 100 gigawatts
If my maths are right, that's nearly the generation capacity of Japan (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_electrici...). Granted, it wouldn't be required for long, but recruiting (or alternatively, storing) a whole-extra-Japan's worth of energy for even a few seconds is just completely ridiculous. We would need large-scale orbiting solar or commodity fusion power before we could even dream of anything like that.
So it does have some use other than just launching probes..
Might be interesting to couple laser powered “solar” panels with an ion drive, though :-)
However, the distances between stars and the very short windows of time in which life may thrive (remember that we may have never known about the dinosaurs on our very own planet if we didn't discover their bones, and we will never see them again) means that we may never meet any other life.
We certainly do not have any proof that it's impossible for life to be different from us, and we're already in the process of creating intelligence that's different from ours.
Our understanding of where life can thrive still gets challenged by discoveries on our own planet, or the experiments in our own labs, like the one on metal-based "cells" [0] that I read about recently.
[0] https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn20906-life-like-cells...
The "space is big argument" is not good but hopefully it leads you down the rabbit hole of more interesting arguments.
The "otherwise we should have met someone by now" is an absurdly weak criteria, given the distances and timelines involved.
––––
We know that life and intelligence are possible and that there are plenty of places for them to occur on:
We know the universe must be practically infinite. [0]
We know there must be practically infinite planets (here "infinite" being a substitute for trillions upon trillions.) [1] multiplied by [0]
We know that even lifeforms on the same planet may never come into contact with each other. [2]
We know that intelligent lifeforms can decide to leave other intelligent lifeforms alone. [3]
We know life can take forms that do not occur naturally on Earth. [4][5][6]
We know intelligence can take forms that do not resemble human intelligence. [7]
We know that lifeforms do not require humanoid bodies to be able to use tools. [8]
We know we don't have the technology necessary to conclusively detect life at distances beyond 2-3 planets adjacent to our own.
We know we don't have the technology necessary to disprove life – present or past – on other planets.
There is more evidence to support extraterrestrial intelligence than there is to infer that this is the only planet to harbor intelligent life.
––––
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galaxy
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milky_Way
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dinosaur
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncontacted_peoples
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypothetical_types_of_biochemi...
[5] https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn20906-life-like-cells...
[6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetically_modified_organism
To be honest the easiest explanation for the Fermi Paradox is that we are indeed alone as an inteligent civilization. If we were just an average civilization there should be plenty of evidence of more advanced civilizations across the galaxy, because probabilistically they would be millions of years more advanced than us.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_paradox [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rare_Earth_hypothesis
This is what I mean by "knowing exactly what to look for."
Can we place something at Pluto and have it listen to radio waves from the direction of Earth, and compare it to the background "noise" at that location? How different is it? How much of that perceived difference would be our own bias?
How much evidence about life on Earth is available to our own instruments from this range? -> https://www.bing.com/images/search?q=Pale+Blue+Dot
Yes, but data created and encoded by other humans. We would likely not even know where to begin when encountering data (assuming we even recognized it as such) from beings who may perceive reality completely differently.
Lots of interesting reading, for those so inclined, at https://descanso.jpl.nasa.gov/DPSummary/Descanso4--Voyager_n...
https://www.spaceacademy.net.au/spacelab/projects/jovrad/jov...
[1] https://uanews.arizona.edu/story/oxygen-and-carbon-discovere...
What if it's not? What if it's an intractable problem?
What if technological advancement isn't exponential? What if it's more of an inverse tangent? A slow start, an explosive middle, then a long finish with an upper bound.
We have absolutely no other examples to base any assumptions of technological societies on, so why do we get "space colonization" and "independently thinking machines" for free?
I don't think either of those is advanced enough to have a concept of anything "looking complex" to them. A cat or a dog would be a much better for comparison.
Gaia says: Whatever, buddy. You're like a neuron comparing yourself to liver cells.
As well, metaphors for intelligence really falls apart when you are talking about very different scales, in the same way that some explanations for physical phenomena fall apart depending on the scale with which you are describing it.
For us, finding intelligent life would be a massive change in our reality and understanding of life because right now, the current state of affair is that we're alone.
But what if these other beings are used to a universe with billions of civilizations competing for resources of various kind (including biological, innovation, etc). Why draw attention to yourself?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sLYorVnA44U
Paraphrased: "Everything that we have achieved which the chimpanzees can't, is in the 1% of the difference between our DNA and theirs. Imagine another species that is 1% different from us, in the same direction that we are different from the chimps."
It seems to me that even with our limited intellects, we have already figured out an awful lot of what there actually is to figure out. We know all of the stable elements that make up atomic matter. We have identified and measured a huge range of the fundamental universal constants and it seems unlikely there are many more left undiscovered. So we can make reasonably good guesses about what the upper bounds of possible technology in our physical universe are. No FTL for example.
Of course you can refute that by appealing to ignorance - maybe there are technologies we can't conceive of and modes of existence beyond our comprehension. Well ok, but maybe there are fairies at the end of the garden path. That's not an argument that's tractable to rational analysis, no matter how rational you are. It can make no predictions and can never be tested so it's not much actual use.
that's very presumptuous. As we learn more, every time, more phenomenon shows up that's even more intriguing. We can't explain many quantum effects (tho there's a good theory on how to do some predictions), we can barely manipulate 2 of the 4 fundamental forces, etc.
example: we understand all of the relevant theories to explain how an ant can carry something that is many times heavier than itself.
but would we have thought to use those theories in the way that the ant's body does if we had never seen it nor had a concrete need to produce a similar result for ourselves using technology? clearly not. even after the fact, knowledge of the way the ant performs its feats does not let us replicate it easily. engineering is not something to dismiss with a hand wave, it's the meat.
put differently: our imagination for the upper bounds of technology is with certainty nowhere near the actual upper boundary because we are always thinking too narrowly when we consider the application of the laws of the universe, even when we know the laws deeply.
that doesn't mean FTL is possible. it means we might might create a way to make the problem of a speed limit irrelevant using what we already know.
Really? It seems just as likely that our brains are fooling us into believing that they are universal knowing machines.
We understand that there are real things that we cannot see. Microscopes and telescopes and other sorts of detectors outside the visual spectrum allow us to "see" them. That is we have technology which present reality as a simulacrum our eyes can see. Similarly with sound, we know that there are sounds which we cannot hear, but through technology we can represent them in a form which we can consume. But to be clear, we are still not seeing or hearing these things, we are seeing and hearing artifacts of our technology which we accept as corresponding with reality.
Is it that hard to imagine that there are true thoughts that we literally cannot think? And any sort of technology which would help us, would really just be showing us a pale representation of the reality?
Maybe they are so advanced that they can hide their trail so belligerent civilizations like ours do not encounter them.
I don't think the easiest explanation is to assume that there is any sort of naturally occurring event in the universe that is one of a kind, save maybe for the big bang.
And we collectively decided to leave them alone, ostensibly for their own good.
It also assumes that it’s safe to broadcast your presence to the whole galaxy that way. It assumes a lot of unproven ideas and then hand waves at a “sufficiently advanced” species that has only apparently enjoyed technological advancement rather than personal or social advancement. Maybe humans as we know them would spread unmanned probes across the galaxy for the sake of doing it, but I have doubts that humans capable of th feat would do it. I suspect we’d be wiser, or we’d be dead.
• That it is possible for a region as large as even a single galaxy to ever be "full" of one species or their creations.
• That anything can keep spreading indefinitely, and remain intact, not only across the gargantuan distances involved but also over potentially millions of years for other species to encounter them.
• That intelligent life wants to keep spreading or exploring indefinitely. As opposed to, say, creating VR universes of its own and attaining contentment within them.
• That there are only a few "directions" into which species or machines can spread across the universe, for them to run into each other.
• That there are no "stabilizing" forces – natural or adversarial – which counter rampant expansion.
The entire universe is limited to the periodic table. You would need to have a device made entirely out of material that has a half life greater than millions of years, and a battery that can last that long without sunlight. I'm not saying it's impossible because technology is often surprising, but that's a fundamental limitation that so far we know cannot be overcome.
Edit: Even if the robot behaved in a self-sustaining manner, this further assumes a perfect, unobstructed trajectory and asteroids full of essential materials are on the route to earth.
I see this sort of statement all the time, and we have no empirical evidence it is true.
As this article says, even this simple "Starshot" concept is "a monumental engineering challenge that will require huge leaps in technology for spacecraft design, propulsion and communication."
And all the challenges are fundamentally physical, involving issues of weight, strength, density, power density, thermodynamics, etc. Unless they make some near-magical breakthrough in physics, a civilization one million years older than our own would find it just as difficult as we will!
And what if some galactic civilization has already done this? Are we likely to detect a spacecraft "just 3 to 12 feet across and weigh as little as a thimbleful of water" passing somewhere through our solar system at 20% C?
I don't think physics is a roadblock for space exploration at this point. We just need to figure out asteroid mining and building in space, after that we can send robots driven by AI to other systems, at low speeds. Once they reach other systems they would refuel, build more robots and carry on.
It's a massive engineering challange, but it's quite predictable within a few thousand years (if we don't destroy ourselves by then).
For example, we could have begun building a base on the Moon by now if we wanted to, but we have decided not to.
It could actually serve well as a strategic and logistic launchpad for subsequent missions.
But still, you highlighted a key point yourself: That it's not always going to be possible (or desirable) to continue expanding through the galaxy because we may run into a "dead end" with no stepping stones (i.e. habitable planets) within our range of travel.
The other thing is that the paradox isn't just that they aren't physically here with us. It's that there's no evidence of intelligent life whatsoever. We're at the point where we can take direct optical images of exoplanets. At some point we have to conclude that if they are out there, we would have seen some indication of it.
Why? How? How soon would they be able to start? Why haven't we begun doing so ourselves? Why haven't we even established a presence on our neighboring moons and planets, even though we are technically capable of already doing so?
At the risk of sounding like a broken record, the "we should have met someone by now" argument relies upon a bunch of thin assumptions that have been brought up elsewhere in response to other instances of it:
Now imagine, how huge the unobservable universe is. Probabilistically, it is quite possible for a civilization (or multiple) more or less advanced than us to exist far, far away, or may have existed some point in time. But none can detect each other. Its even possible for a civilization to exist in the spheres of observation of other civilizations but so far away that its almost impossible to make contact. 13.8 Billion years is not a long time on the scale of the universe, but it is also a long time on evolutionary scale for a civilization to have existed and have been extinct.
Maybe there is a lot of space out there, but not enough time? Maybe the universe is still pretty young and it takes a lot of time to go from zero to intelligent life that knows how to contact each other over great distances.
Or too much time, between different epochs even on the same planet.
We are intelligent. We know dinosaurs existed. They stood where we stand. We cannot contact them, we will never touch them, and we will never fully learn about them, nor they us.
Which considering the appalling job we are doing of caring for our home planet is a good thing. Because if humanity ever finds another species, our track record is pretty abysmal. God only help them if their planet contains a resource we covet
What if we are a random sample of conscious life in the space of all possible universes in a multiverse? Many of them will have intelligent life in many places, but the majority have the parameters just tweaked enough to touch the edge and only produce one. Couldn't we live in one of those?
(And there is near certainty a given tuning of the parameters produces none but obviously we can't be in one of those.)
That would give us about one civilisation in every 10,000 galaxies. There are actually a lot more possible stages than that too, I've seen estimates that reasonably put our existence in the observable universe at all as a low probability event and maybe they're right. I've swung either way over the decades. There is a reasonable case that long term technological civilizations might be extremely rare. It's not a foregone conclusion that we are one of many.
Personally, I have no idea. It could go either way, but the Fermi Paradox does tend to indicate in the pessimistic direction at least with regard to our own galaxy. The problem is once you say technological life is rare at the one galaxy level, it only takes a few extra stages and a few extra low probability multipliers to make any life anywhere pretty unlikely.
That's another remarkably small window in time for us to discover anything - what if a civilization died out a million years ago?
This is what I keep bringing up when referring to dinosaurs, and I'm surprised that this point doesn't get presented more often when considering the chances of encountering life on other planets:
We have proof right here that life on the same planet can be separated by time and never contact each other, without even bringing cosmic distances into the equation.
That's very frightening on its own. Assuming the universe is practically infinite, there is another identically similar earth in this universe where another guy that has the same microscopic details as me writing this comment.
We don't have infinite planets. We have 10^21 stars, roughly, and some constant P average planets per star.
If the odds of life are 10^-14 per planet, and the odds of intelligent life are 10^-7 per life hosting planet, and we presume every star has one planet that might support life, then in the 10^21 stars in the universe, we'd expect only one intelligent life. That is one possibility!
But we simply don't know what the odds of life and the odds of intelligent life are in the slightest. We don't even know what range of possible values are reasonable. And humans are so bad at contemplating numbers like 10^21 and 10^-14. They're too extreme for one to think of them rationally.
And saying "well, it happened here, be it must be common" is selection bias- we can only contemplate the problem because it happened here.
The right answer is to get more information to improve our estimates of the probabilities. If we can find life at Alpha Centauri, that would either be a hell of a coincidence, or a very good indicator that the probability of life given a planet is high.
Why would finding life on just one more planet – out of the 195 or so "worlds" that we know about, including moons – suddenly make "the probability of life given a planet" high?
By your own reasoning, whether we find life at Alpha Centauri, or do not find any life there, will not really change the probability of discovering future life or intelligence among the rest of all the 10^21 * P planets.
We could always just keep saying that "There are only 2 planets in the universe with life. No more." "There are only 5 planets in the universe with life." and so on and on.
Because sampling. It's like election polling. If you ask one person who they're going to vote for and they say "Candidate A", you really have no idea how likely it is that candidate A has massive support. Perhaps you just happened to find the only person voting for that candidate! But if you ask the next random person and they say the same thing, well, the odds that you found the only two people voting for candidate A in your first two random asks is very low. On the other hand, if the second person is not supporting candidate A, that also helps you get a better guess at support levels.
You can never know the true level without asking every single person, but with every additional piece of data you can better estimate just what the truth is.
Just the same, as soon as we find another star with life, the number of stars we had to search to find that second one gives us a fantastic start to coming up with an estimate on how common life is. We presume that our corner of the universe is a good sampling of the rest, and extrapolate based on what we know here.
The key point is that extrapolation from a single data point is wildly innacurate.
We currently know of at least 8 or 9 planets in our system + at least 185 moons (new ones were discovered around Jupiter last month.)
So, finding life on 2 out of 194~ places will take us from "There is only 1 planet in the entire universe with life!" to "how common life is"?
> The key point is that extrapolation from a single data point is wildly innacurate.
But extrapolating from 2 points out of (100 billion x 200 billion) is not?
–
Why wouldn't people continue to use the same arguments they do now to say Earth is the only planet with life, to say there are only 2 planets in the universe with life?
Sampling requires a random selection from the universe of interest.
I really loved the series. I can see why some others weren’t into it, but I think it’s been my favorite books I’ve read in years and years.
With all the resources Trisolarians put into colonization of Earth, and all their superior technology - they could've made space habitats that had perfectly safe orbits around whichever star they prefer, and put all of their citizens on them.
What's the point of risking mutual destruction by hunter in the dark forest (and we know they were afraid of it since the start), if you can create habitats in your own star system, or choose any nearby uninhabited star system if the 3-body-problem is really making it impossible to put these in your own system (and realistically - it wouldn't be so bad, just make a dyson swarm around the whole system.
The final book in the series does a good job showing why Earth was a good option for them. Tri-Solarians knew far more about Earth than they could reliably determine about most nearby star systems.
They were betting their existence on a species they knew already uses MAD as a basis for its' survival not figuring out that it could use MAD to defend themselves.
Their system was interesting, but ultimately not much worse than ours, once you leave the planet. And they have to leave the planet anyway.
Once you have nanomaterials allowing cheap access to space - putting your population in space habitats is cheap and easy. We could do it now, if we had space elevator. The cost of materials and energy is negligible compared to invasion of another star system. Especially with such conveniently storeable population :)
> Tri-Solarians knew far more about Earth than they could reliably determine about most nearby star systems.
There's nothing stopping them from figuring it out. You don't have to invade a system, you can send a stealthy probe. I would assume in their circumstances it would be a wise thing to do if they really don't want to live in space further away from the center of gravity of their star system.
Besides, if the dark forest is so important - why invade Earth at all and play with fire? You can kill everybody on Earth without bothering to show up or sending any warnings. Send a big meteor their way or make a deadly disease that looks like flu, infect everybody, and on set date kill all hosts. Much cheaper, and no risk of ceasing to exist.
What they did in the books was very risky and wasteful for no good reason.
> betting their existence on a species they knew already uses MAD
If ant colonies depend on MAD for continued existence, it means nothing to us. This example was used multiple times throughout the series. They didn't even make a singular bet on Earth. The invasion was just one avenue they chose for survival.
> You don't have to invade a system, you can send a stealthy probe.
In the dark forest of the three body universe you could send a probe, but you learn nothing if it finds no life in a system. The only reliable, actionable information a probe can provide you is if life is found. Finding an absence of life just as easily means that the life in the system is so far advanced beyond you that you cannot detect it. It would be far riskier to bet your future on a system in which you found no life. Not to mention that you are making a huge gamble on the stealthiness of said probe. The probe could be the very thing that makes you the target of a dark forest strike. Earth already appeared safe, so why take further action that carries real risk of notifying some other civilization that you exist? You can't be reliably stealthy because some other race can be technically beyond you.
> Send a big meteor
Earth was an un-imaginable eden to Tri-Solaris, it's made clear that they wanted the planet intact.
> or make a deadly disease that looks like flu
This requires a much longer timeline as multiple trips are required to carry out the plan. The Tri-Solarans were facing a very real threat of extinction that made a shorter plan worth the risk. It's made very clear that they did not wish to exterminate humanity.
Earth was valuable because in all probability the rest of the universe did not know it existed. Given that you are saying they were stupid for not building space habitats, you must not be aware of what actually happened to the Tri-Solarans :). Besides, those space habitats present their own form of danger to their inhabitants. Actually, the danger they pose is worse than existing on a planet.
But we're not an ant colony to them, we're already using technology that can be used for MAD (sending signals through the sun), and they know it from the start.
> Earth was an un-imaginable eden to Tri-Solaris, it's made clear that they wanted the planet intact.
As far as I understand every planet in the system was heaven for them, the orbit was important. Which is stupid, because you can make anything follow a circular orbit around some star.
> This [flu] requires a much longer timeline as multiple trips are required to carry out the plan.
Why? They have their stealth probe (don't remember how it was called), they can take a look at a spanish influenza or something and pimp it up a little. At worst they then need to send like 1 gram at almost light speed the conventional way - still much easier and faster than sending the armada.
> Given that you are saying they were stupid for not building space habitats, you must not be aware of what actually happened to the Tri-Solarans :).
They were destroyed because their coordinates were broadcasted. As they should expect from the start messing with civilization that broadcasted "hello".
> those space habitats present their own form of danger to their inhabitants. Actually, the danger they pose is worse than existing on a planet.
How? They aren't any less stealthy than sattelites, tv, or radio.
> But we're not an ant colony to them
Tri-Solaris technologically stomps humanity throughout the series. Humanity was ignorant of the dark forest, and Tri-Solaris knew that. Further, they're able to suppress the Sun's broadcast capability. From their vantage point there was no feasible way for humanity to become aware of the dark forest. Their misunderstanding of humans is a central plot point. By every single measure Tri-Solaris had the advantage in a massive way.
> Why? They have their stealth probe
It was not stealthy. Humanity literally saw the probe pull ahead of the fleet and knew the probe was coming 50+ years before it arrived. Sometimes hiding behind an asteroid or planet is not stealth.
> They were destroyed because their coordinates were broadcasted.
No, the Tri-Solaris civilization still existed near the end of the universe. Their planet was destroyed, but they lived on as a space faring species.
> How? They aren't any less stealthy than sattelites, tv, or radio.
Do you recall what light-speed capable ships do to the fabric of the universe?
Tri-Solaris knew only what their sect was aware of, not what everyone on Earth thought. Also - they were somehow aware of the dark forest, would be very naive to think others can't discover it on their own. They were clearly considering it a real threat, because they tried to stop him and reacted so quickly when the guy staring at the wall did the experimental star demolition.
> Humanity literally saw the probe pull ahead of the fleet and knew the probe was coming 50+ years before it arrived.
Wasn't it only seen because they were already looking there? I might misremember something.
> Further, they're able to suppress the Sun's broadcast capability.
Only after the girl is chosen as the person to hold MAD button, IIRC. At that point the decisions on invasion were made centuries ago. Counting on that happening would be crazy.
> Do you recall what light-speed capable ships do to the fabric of the universe?
Not really, I ignored most of that 3rd book technobabble because it was unphysical. They were destroying universe and making it 2d or something?
Anyway, why should it matter? Habitats are supposed to orbit somewhere pleasant, like any dumb rock would do, not move at light speed.
> No, the Tri-Solaris civilization still existed near the end of the universe. Their planet was destroyed, but they lived on as a space faring species.
My bad, don't remember everything from the book. Still - this only proves my point - it's possible, so they should have done that from the start. They were never in "existential danger", just lazy (but still somehow happy to spend lots of resources, effort, and risk to live on Earth).
I think this is the basis of our debate. I can totally understand why many people did not like the series. The author at times drags the reader through multiple chapters of details that feel as though they have nothing to do with the story. They don't even feel like world building. Honestly, I had a really hard time with some of those myself. Especially the first few chapters of books 2 and 3. However, in the end all those asides really matter to wrapping up the story. Is that good storytelling? I don't know. I rather enjoyed it though :)
But yeah, the last 25% of the final book is full of technobabble, but that babble is pretty important to wrapping up the story and understanding the motivation of each civilization.
Which Sci-Fi book or series of books would you say are the best?
Anathem by Neal Stephenson was nice, too, I loved the worldbuilding with construction of whole independent history of science and philosophy on a fantasy world, and how people used it in their lives.
Algebraist by Ian Banks is interesting (not in the Culture series, Culture books are ok too, but there's no tension in these books whatsoever).
I love Lem, especially the robot stories, but also Futorological Congress, Solaris, His Masters' Voice. IMHO Lem has the best aliens in all sci-fi. Maybe Blindsight by Peter Watts comes close.
I also like Jacek Dukaj who I belive wasn't translated to English. But now that I think he tends to do the same thing as in 3rd book of 3 body problem - a book starts with regular people and easily relatable stuff, and by the end it's all so abstract and weird you don't know what's going on. It kinda puts me off, I prefer constant level of abstraction all the way through.
Thanks, always looking for new stuff to read. (edit: not really new, but new to me :)
Concerning The Three-Body Problem, I found it a bit disappointing. Great build up with a rather traditional solution making some things of the build up looking a little bit silly.
Three Body Problem is very thrilling to read; fast paced with a lot of cliff hangers, and excellent world building. The sci-fi/speculative bits are extrodinary, and although the characters can sometimes feel like their only role is to give a 'first person perspective' of the science, Liu can surprise you with the emotional depth that his characters exude.
The Dark Forest is in my opinion harder to get through than Three Body Problem, but the payoff is extraordinary. The pacing is slower with more world-building, and the perspective bounces around between a lot of characters without much forward movement. I had to put it down for a while and read some other books before I built up the motivation to finish it (it helped that I already bought the next book, so I felt guilty not finishing).
Deaths End, the third book, is unbelievably amazing. The pacing is more similar to Three Body Problem, and the science is astounding. All of the patience necessary for Dark Forest pays off because Liu is able to bring his world-elements into a mesmerizing display of action and conflict. I'm only half-way through and I've lost count of the number of times I've had to take pause and simply exclaim "Wow!".
Have you forgotten about the K-T event? :-)
The dinosaurs learned the hard way the danger of not having a significant space program. It seems we're not doing that much better.
If they are crazy genocidal monsters wiping out all intelligent life besides their own, then they're probably systematically looking for targets, sending out their own probes to check out any planet that could sustain life. If they have any kind of presence in Alpha Centauri that could detect these probes, then they'd be here soon enough even if we didn't send out a probe.
The first 3rd of the book that dealt with cultural revolution fallout was awesome, though. But yeah---back half was bad enough to ruin the whole thing for me.
ETA: Actually, we know of another one around B.
So it’s not just things in orbit that are targets, it’s stuff on the ground, as well.
Be the first on your block to have one, I guess.
Same issue though, except now you have a 100GW laser that is able to point to many different places on the ground from where its orbital position.
Even if it is short duration, 1mS @ 100GW imparts as much energy as 100MW over 1 second, or 1 MW for a bit longer than a minute and a half.
I am not a policy expert by any means, I just remember all the consternation over systems which shorten the time between being ready and killing some strategic asset.
How do you travel that fast & not disintegrate or crash into something?
Was Mr Manchester's experiment done using a laser to launch?
Has this been done before at any scale? Even pushing an item a few hundred feet up?
Is there a timeline for this to even get attempted?
I think it sounds really awesome but that makes me wonder if any of this is feasible soon. Sending tiny Raspberry Pi like devices into space at fast speeds that could do cheap experiments more quickly, that would be nice.
We might be getting them once a week and we would have no idea. We can't even find or track most of our own asteroids, and they're already in solar orbit.
The relevant propulsion research was the Ikaros http://global.jaxa.jp/press/2010/07/20100709_ikaros_e.html It accelerated at 1/10 G using only solar radiation.
>Think of it as a large pingpong ball with computers and cameras pointing in different directions. The big advantage? The spherical shape, coupled with a "hollow" laser beam that's stronger toward its outside edge, could be naturally centered on the beam throughout the acceleration.
>"Imagine blowing a piece of paper straight up. It's going to fly off the beam unless it's perfectly aligned," says Zac Manchester, a Stanford professor and Starshot engineer who's researched the subject and already launched a 1.4-inch square spacecraft into Earth's orbit.
Or accidentally start an interstellar war.
Edit: Well, I forgot the relativistic speed that ball would be traveling at. So if the planet's inhabitants actually lived in the upper atmosphere some might actually get burned.
This is my favorite: "If the dinosaurs had a giant laser, maybe they'd still be here"
Finding and tracking very small/fast debris is a different matter, but if you can find the debris and keep a laser aimed at it you can alter its orbit.
aaaand it's going right in the quotes file.
I'm mostly kidding. These are hard, hard problems, much better suited to research organizations. Exciting stuff!
"Is Humanity About To Accidentally Declare Interstellar War On Alien Civilizations?"
https://www.forbes.com/sites/startswithabang/2018/08/07/is-h...
"aiming to the level-of-precision needed to pass close to (but not collide with) a target planet is virtually impossible. The “cone of uncertainty” for any trajectory will include the planet we’re aiming for."
"A planet getting hit by a ~1 gram spacecraft moving at 60,000 km/s is going to experience the same level of catastrophic effects as a planet getting hit by a ~1 tonne asteroid moving at ~60 km/s, the equivalent of which happens on Earth just once per decade. Each strike would hit their world with the same energy that the Chelyabinsk meteorite struck Earth: the most energetic collision of the decade."