Imagine that by some chance Mars was another Earth with a breathable atmosphere. NASA would have been given a trillion dollar budget and we would have been there in the 80s. Instead it’s a dead red rock so NASA gets a small budget and the US spends its money on blowing people up instead.
We have the technology to be a spacefaring civilisation but we won’t care until Earth becomes a worse place to be than the rest of the solar system, which is probably never given how bad the other bodies in the solar system are. Most likely we develop Von Neumann probes before we ever get bored of Earth.
Watching a planet which could retain water go from "nothing to oceans" would be amazing.
I'm not sure how that would get solved without some active technological solution by humans let's say.
It appears that at some point, somebody involved with this knew what they were doing. But we are removed so many steps from that person, that anything said there could as well be Star Trek techno-jumble. Including the conclusions.
Which is short in geological terms, but an eternity in technological ones. We would have plenty of time to solve that problem.
A significant difference of the solar gravitational lens from a conventional telescope is that the gravitational lens telescope is not in any practical sense pointable.
For the telescope at a distance F from the sun to be re-aimed to image a new target 1° away, it would have to move a distance of (π/180°)F, which is 10 astronomical units at the minimum focal distance-- a lateral distance equivalent to the distance from Earth to Saturn.
This means that, in practice, such a telescope is not able to be repointed.
Thus, a telescope at the gravitational focus is necessarily going to be a singlepurpose telescope, with the target of observation selected before the mission is launched.
A gravitational focus mission can’t be used as a telescope to search for a target: such a mission must be with the objective to observe a target whose position is already known.
Geoffrey A. Landis, NASA John Glenn Research Center
https://www.nasa.gov/general/thin-film-isotope-nuclear-engin...
> The basic concept is to manufacture thin sheets of a radioactive isotope and directly use the momentum of its decay products to generate thrust.
Actually it's mentioned at the end of the article:
> Novel ability to reach deep space (> 150 AU) very quickly and then continue aggressive maneuvers (> 100 km/sec) for dim object search/rendezvous and/or retargeting telescopes at the solar gravitational focus over a period of years.
It doesn't scale well. The probe would be able to observe a carefully chosen extrasolar planetary system in the opposite direction in relation to the sun. If you want to observe a second system, it's necessary to launch a second probe 550 AU in another direction. You can't change targets just by rotating the probe, given its lens is the sun.
The Fermi paradox is only a paradox due to the assumption that in a few million years a civilization will colonize the entire Milky Way just because it's theoretically possible, so we should be up to our eyeballs with aliens' von Neumann probes. But many things are theoretically possible. We could build the world's largest house -- the size of Nebraska. Every nation could reorient and sink their economy into that megaproject and do it. But it's irrational to; there's better things we want to do with our resources (which will always be finite, all the way up the Kardashev scale). That's why I think it's silly to expect any intelligent life to be that ambitious (or competent).
Or that perhaps we're a simulation.
We exist in a very interesting time in history when the pieces are coming together.
Our hypothetical future robot descendents may be very interested in learning about their past.
>Wake up
>No idea where I am
>Hey we have no idea where everyone is
>According to history nothing much has happened in the universe
>Oh look at that, just now that you are alive you are hitting the singularity
Feels a little like a rehashed sitcom episode...like a director is just brute forcing shit to figure out a solution, with our lives. And its all probably just on how to make a good cup of coffee for his interdimensional space ship.
This is kind of why I mostly find the discussion of whether we're in simulation to pretty quickly reach a point where it stops being interesting even from a philosophical perspective. I don't really see how you can differentiate between fundamental properties that we observe that reflect the "real" universe where we're just a simulation and fundamental properties that explicitly designed for the purpose of the simulation itself and may not actually reflect the "real" universe. We might as well ask if the OS our simulation is running on has a toggle for dark mode or not.
Belief is simulated knowledge and we exist within our believed world...so we are in a simulation of some kind, but we don't know if we are also in "the" kind.
With software that encourages emergent behaviour we are unaware of the abilities the entities take on. So in theory I think we could.
The better question is if it even matter.
Being among the first civilizations in the galaxy is less special than being the first civilization, but more special than being just another in an ongoing ecosystem.
I want humans to be casually interstellar and expand across the galaxy. I want this to occur in less than N years, N << 10^10.
If humans are casually interstellar and expansionist, then we would colonize the galaxy in M years, M << 10^10.
Humans are not special, therefore if another alien species existed in the past at current human tech levels, then they would do the same as humans would and colonize the galaxy within N + M << 10^10 years after achieving current human tech level.
We believe we can detect such a civilization. Therefore, if we are more than N + M years after a another civilization with current human tech level, then we would see them.
We do not detect any such civilizations.
Therefore one of the assumptions must be wrong.
1. We can not detect a galactic civilization.
2. No alien civilization has reached current human tech level within N + M years of now.
3. Humans are special. Only humans would colonize the galaxy if they had casual interstellar travel.
4. Humans are not special, but we will never invent casual interstellar travel/spread to the stars.
So, if you think humans are not special (3 is false) and you hope humans will spread to the stars in the future (hope 4 is false), then you hope the answer is 1 (humans are bad at detection) or 2 (humans are early).
If you rule out 1 and 2, then 4 can only be true if 3 is true. If you rule out 3 as well, then you must conclude humanity will never spread to the stars for unknown reasons.
Isn't 4 equivalent to, 'no civilization will invent casual interstellar travel/spread to the stars'?
And isn't that hypothesis extremely likely, given what we now know about the costs of _interplanetary_ travel and its relative ease compared to interstellar travel?
That's another assumption, that it's _possible_ to colonize a galaxy from a planetary base. We don't even know that it's possible to colonize a nearby planet. If we were confident that we could, we'd be filling up Siberia, Ellesmere Island, and Greenland first.
There's also another assumption missing from your list- that technological civilizations can last long enough to colonize the galaxy. I'm also surprised that there isn't any discussion on the site or here of Great Filters. If the average technological civilization wipes itself out within a few hundred years of developing technologies that enable space travel or even radio, then all discussion of "filling the galaxy" is castles in the air.
Costs are a function of manufacturing productivity. What is the upper bound on manufacturing productivity? With automation and AI, I don't see any hard upper bound.
The raw resources are certainly available to build starships. I mean, your share of per capita energy consumption over your life would be enough to accelerate your body to maybe 700 km/s, and that's with us just using a small fraction of the energy available on a planet; energy in space would be many orders of magnitude more abundant.
As an example of the latter, look at birth rates in different societies on Earth: Almost universally, they decline to replacement level once they hit a certain level of per-capita wealth.
It’s very likely that a society that achieves interstellar travel will do so after it achieves the ability to provide the highest standard of living for all of its members indefinitely using just the resources of its local system. This already describes Earth; the reasons we don’t do this are ideological, not based on any inherent constraints, while interstellar travel isn’t in our grasp yet and is likely to be extraordinarily costly.
Such a society wouldn’t face any pressure to grow, so any colonization would itself likely be ideological—“We don’t want to do things Surak’s way, let’s pull up stakes and find a world where we can live the way we want!”—or as a contingency/hedge against large-scale existential risk. Neither demand colonizing even a small fraction of a galaxy, assuming habitable worlds are even remotely plentiful near and reachable from the origin world.
Maybe (4 is false) is inevitable now that humanity has reached its current point. Maybe literally every human-like species will become Star Trek and enclose every star in a Dyson Sphere; that would be awesome since it means our goal is now a foregone conclusion. But how would we know? Well, we can do a thought experiment assuming it and extrapolate toward characteristics that we might be able to detect to falsify our hypothesis.
Well if literally every human-like species will enclose every star in the future, then we should not be able to see any stars at some point after one comes into existence. We can still see stars, therefore either it has not happened yet (1), there are no other human-like species (2), or the supposition is false (3). If the supposition is false, then there are risks ahead of us. If the supposition is true, then the risks are behind us, but then (1) or (2) must be true. For (1) to be true, we must either be early or it takes a long time. For (2) to be true, we must either be early or rare. If we can rule out (1) and (2), then we must conclude (3) which means we can be confident that there must be a risk ahead of us preventing us from reaching our goal that we as a species need to be wary of even if we do not know what it is specifically. We just know it has to exist otherwise we would see no stars.
If (1) or (2) is true, then (3) no longer needs to be true. It might still be the case that the goal is impossible, but at least we have a chance. The point of this analysis is trying to theorize where we need to look that gives humanity the most information about if and how to become Star Trek. It is not about coming up with the "correct" answer; we do not have enough information for that. We are trying to create theories that take facts that we can find (or can in theory find) as inputs and generate predictions that can be tested and falsified.
It is one idea anyway. It would be bizarre for us to end up some precursor species...at least in our galaxy.
I suggest googling David Grusch to read about the whistleblower from inside US intelligence services. Also search for “Navy Rear Admiral Tim Gallaudet ufo” and you’ll find additional comments.
This is the greatest coverup in human history.
Do you also think North Korea, Cuba, and Iran either don't exist or want to be part of this coverup? Do you live in a world where there's really only one government and any indication to the contrary is mere kayfabe?
In the lore, multiple governments are involved in the conspiracy. They keep it secret because it is a race to see who can crack the alien tech the fastest.
There have been cases in the lore of other countries (Brazil and Zimbabwe i believe) having encounters or alleged down aircraft and the US has came in to investigate/recover the down object.
I don’t think there is a world government, but i do think we cooperate with each other.
Also President Clinton says he tried to get information on UFOs but they refused and gave him the runaround.
Must say, from practice of living on fast changing territory, it is very typical for people to hate all new, because sometimes new things appear too fast, that just their appear are pain.
This is not something supernatural. Even more - for people is natural when things are NOT change fast, even when all these new things are good. I'm sure, you will admit, from steam railroad there was many things very scary. And Iranians have right to say, that English and Americans opened this Pandora box.
In 1st world, changes are just literally changes, may be you retire later or your deposit will become smaller for few bucks.
But in "3rd world", life is extremely fragile. Most people does not have savings, and typically to not have any safety measures, just because constant under-financed. For example, in India, great disaster, when temperature falls below zero - every time this happen, people die.
So, people in 3rd world typically consider literal daemon everyone who do risky things or ask others to do risky things. People even could literally kick somebody for talking about risky things.
Also, the theocratic leadership of Iran is not so fragile.
You're confusing leadership and economy. This is very significant difference - when economy suffer in first-world, whole world hear this from independent press, but when similar thing happen in countries like Iran, people are killed if try to open truth, because leadership pressures to open just info it think should be open and nothing more.
For example, when in North Korea happen great hunger, nobody outside country knows except CIA.
In countries like Iran, NORMAL higher education just does not exist. For example, I lived in USSR, where instead of Philosophy learned history of communists party. Imagine, what happen with other knowledge, which communists considered harmful - laws and rights, journalism, history, diplomacy - they just substituted whole parts of science with their surrogates.
Read. Use your rights to obtain real information, not surrogates. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juche