At least that's what I tell myself. Hard to appreciate the majesty of the universe if we're forever locked into a single star system.
That goes as well for how aliens light-years away can detect nuclear explosions and show up within days to check it out.
as far as I know, the very few publicly identified records of speeds we have suggest a really big power source and the probable manipulation of fields we cannot yet (mass/gravity), but nothing breaking the speed of light.
so many people make leaps beyond the evidence we have and then declare them not plausible.
> there are machines that have been here possibly a very long time. think at least 500 years. theres no indication the "they" behind those machines have ever made contact, or are on this planet, or are even still in existence. but there is something mechanical here that was not made by us.
> so many people make leaps beyond the evidence we have and then declare them not plausible.
Why isn't the first one exactly what you're complaining about in the second statement? Have I missed something?
And all that galaxy construction level effort for what? To learn hundreds or thousands of years late, that at rock number 123ABCD a fission has happened? And do what exactly with that useful information? Send extermination fleet? Or a robot with flowers, to pay respects?
People for some reason refuse to comprehend just how hard is it to send a speck of dust over light years of distance, let alone anything meaningful which won't break down in the process.
And since the amount of time we're talking about is so large -- larger than the amount of time the beings that create these robotic probes can possibly continue to be alive -- that the only way it could work is if those beings accept robots as acceptable replacements for themselves, or if the probes carry embryos and can terraform planets and raise those embryos to adults and bootstrap a civilization.
Plenty of sci-fi has been written along these likes, like Ursula K Leguin's books, where human-ish beings on any given planet (e.g., Winter) turn out to be sent there from other planets to bootstrap a civilization and they have no memory of it. Or Pushing Ice, by Alastair Reynolds, where there is a robotic probe thing going on, but rather than continue the originating species [redacted to avoid spoilers].
I love LeGuin, Reynolds, and other, sci-fi is practically 90% of what I'm reading. But come on, the whole interstellar stuff is always predicated on very very optimistic assumptions and eventually magic.
If any civilization were to build such a thing they would make it perpetuate themselves.
Not to mention they could send probes closer and further from the galactic center to take advantage of the slower and faster rotation rate to see new stars.
As for the nuclear fission blast I have my doubts. Ham radio folks brag about 1000 miles a watt, in a lossy atmosphere and multiple bounces that reflect less than 1% for each bounce. Using advanced things like tubes of transistors and a copper cable thrown over a tree branch.
Using the 1 watt per 1000 miles the largest nuclear explosion would be 22 light years, and clear line of sight through space is going to transmit quite a bit better than bouncing off the atmosphere then off the ground several times.
An advanced civilization could make say a square km array (which us lowly humans have managed) and would understand nuclear bombs enough to know their likely signature, decay rate, shape of the curve, etc. Much like how astronomers use supernovas as standard candles for distance, despite crazy different red shifts.
Seems quite reasonable for a civilization to keep track of anything going on in their fraction of the galaxy.
"People for some reason refuse to comprehend just how hard is it to send a speck of dust over light years of distance" It's only hard if you are in a hurry, in fact we have 3 rocks come through our solar system from well more than a light year away.
I don't think you can even tell given only one of the particles in a pair if it is still entangled so you couldn't even destructively send small amounts of information either. It's a neat work around for semihard scifi but the universe is stubbornly resistant to any pathways for anything including information travelling faster than the speed of light.
When you measure an entangled particle that tells you, the observer, the corresponding characteristic of the other particle in the pair, but it will tell no one who has access to the other particle anything at all about what you wanted to say.
This is like transmitting information from you to you about a faraway thing (instantaneously! "FTL", but read on), but it's not useful because what you want to transmit information from you to someone else far away rather than from you to you.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tally_stick#Split_tally
So what if you put each half of split tally stick in a box hidden from view then move them a light year apart and then open your box? You immediately know what's on other stick but you can't change it anyway.
and also the act of viewing the stick destroys it.
And any bad guy that can even reach you basically means you’re already dead if they so choose.