Ghost Rockets – A crowd sourced UFO investigation
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As I grew up, I started to appreciate just how vast space really is, and how much energy it takes to hop over to even the nearest solar system for a ship of even small mass, like 1kg.
And after I started studying molecular nanotechnology, it occurred to me that it is very unlikely that aliens have ever visited us. The is nothing they need from us that they couldn't get more cheaply closer to home.
And if they did visit us, they would be so far beyond our current technology level that they could easily observe us without our knowledge.
We have nothing to worry about unless we encounter a self replicating plague, and by then it will be too late.
If they wanted to observe us at all, it would be most useful to not mess with the initial conditions, and just capture as much detail as possible. Then construct simulations with variations as needed.
If they truly don't care about being observed, they have sent probes interstellar distances to basically troll us. Which seems pretty juvenile.
Either way, they would then need to conduct a giant laser to report results back. And wait decades to millena as well. For what? Were aren't that interesting. And they could just simulate different starting conditions for organic life, and get their laughs that way.
Sending back messages isn't very difficult, especially if they only need to travel a few light years, or at least to the nearest outpost they have. Regardless, they could easily construct whatever equipment they need in our solar system. Even if they did build a giant laser, we probably wouldn't even be aware of it. We've only recently begun to track all the various asteroids in our vicinity, let alone investigate them in detail. There are entire moons and planets we haven't mapped in great resolution, if at all.
Yes, though I believe my assumptions to be well-founded.
Simulations are cool, but it's not the same as observing the real thing.
No, they're not of course. But they can achieve a sufficient level of accuracy for entertainment purposes.
Again, what do we have that would possibly be useful? Science, art? Hah. With the time and resources needed to launch interplanetary probes, they could run a whole bunch of sims with all kinds of interesting starting conditions. That's a lot more convenient.
The other factor in this just how fast / hot sufficiently advanced civilizations will run at. Your meat brain operates at essentially the 10's of Hz range. You can get anything done at all because it is massively parallel.
A fully optimized brain of similar architecture could instead be running in the 10 GHz range. So it would be experience reality about a billion times faster than you.
So now you want to send out probes to nearby star systems to look for something fun. Let's say you get lucky, and something interesting has developed 50 light-years away, so you send a tiny probe at nearly light-speed there. You've got to wait about 100 years for the first results to come back.
But that is our meat-brain time scale.
In your optimized-brain time scale, you're waiting longer than the universe has existed so far for the results to come back. That, my friends is boring! Will you really care about the results 100 billion years from now? Eh, probably not.
Sure, you could put yourself to sleep to await the results, but then you'd miss out on everything that is happening locally. Who wants to do that?
It would be like you giving me an inaccurate description of something based on someone else's report, and me mangling your description into something that just happened to be very much like the original. It's not impossible, but you'd have to be pretty optimisic to call it remotely plausible.
I'm sure their minds are already made up and they searching for something they think is there which isn't impartial or scientific.