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Comment by eastbayjake | Hacker News Reader

It's jarring to think that if intelligent life were on Kepler 452-b and observing Earth, we're so far away that they would be seeing our "civilizations" in 615 AD: shrinking global population as the old Roman and Byzantine empires are overrun by barbarian hordes and Arab conquest, with some pockets of human progress in China. They would have no way of knowing that the descendants of those squabbling warlords just cooperated to fling a space probe at 36000 MPH past a tiny ball of rock at the edge of our solar system.

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I hope they were recording the whole time and upload the videos to YouTube. I can't wait to watch Hannibal on the Pyrenees From Space.mp4

My favorite thought is that they've sent probes millions of years ago and we could send a request to watch some HD surveillance of dinosaurs roaming the Earth. It'll just take ~3k years to receive the requested footage.

Not if you board a spaceship and travel to them at close to light speed! Then you, personally, would just wait a few hours.

Once again, it will be easier to bring people to the data, than data to people.

You're right about the idea, but a few hours is way too short, because of how the Human body tolerance to strong accelerations.

Assuming an acceleration of 10 m/s^2 (similar to Earth's gravity), it will takes roughly one year to accelerate to a speed close to the speed of light were relativistic effects occurs, and you will need one more year to decelerate.

You'll have to wait 6000 years to see it on YouTube: 1500 for them to hear about YouTube and 4500 for them to upload (assuming TCP)

Sheesh. I can't believe after 6000 years TCP is still in use.

At least 25% of it will be over IPv6!

> At least 25% of it will be over IPv6!

We probably will need IPv10 to connect all the dots in the sky!

Actually no! Estimates I found are of around 10^23 stars in the universe. There are over 10^38 IPv6 addresses, so even if there were tens of inhabitable worlds per star and billions or even trillions of addresses per world, we'd have enough! (Although it is possible that stars number is a significant underestimate.)

IPv6 only has space for 10^19 networks, so you would need to heavily chop up /64s if you wanted to number the universe.

But IP is not designed for high-latency networks, so this only really matters if FTL communication is invented.

Internet of Stars™

Maybe even as much as 26%, who knows...

That might be the funniest thing I've ever read on HN.

For a second I thought I was on reddit.

I was beginning to think we collectively lost our sense of humor.

There is hope. Now quick, someone post a cat pic and a relevant gif.

Edit: Not complaining about the downvotes, but guys, this is the internet, not work. Loosen up. Smile for once. It's good for you, and confuses people.

It seems like UDP is probably a better protocol for this use case.

Until a gamma beam disrupts the connection and you miss the best part, that is!

I've got a really good joke about UDP, but you might not get it.

That's fine. I've got a great joke about TCP, and I'll just keep telling it to you until you get it. I'll just speak slower each time...

ROFLMAO I got it, I got it... so I think I'm TCP? :P

no redirect to https?

It would go faster if they loaded a bunch of usb sticks in a station wagon and shot the wagon across space.

Only if they can average 0.25c, which seems unlikely :)

do they have a pirate bay?

Hannibal lived 247 – 183/182/181 BC. That's a few hundred years earlier than 615 AD.

> It's jarring to think that if intelligent life were on Kepler 452-b and observing Earth, we're so far away that they would be seeing our "civilizations" in 615 AD: shrinking global population as the old Roman and Byzantine empires are overrun by barbarian hordes and Arab conquest, with some pockets of human progress in China.

Is there something uncivilized about the Arab conquest of Byzantine lands? Had the Kepler 452-b-ians been observing Earthians but a few hundred years prior, they'd have seen the Romans doing much the same to expand their own empire. And the Arabs did quite a good job to not only preserve the Roman intellectual and scientific state of the art, but to contribute their own advancements of those fields.

Not a dig at anyone, especially not the Arabs who basically preserved philosophy and mathematics while Europe entered the Dark Ages. My point was simply that Kepler 452b-ians observing Earth would be seeing lots of war and destruction even though we're currently peacefully collaborating among mankind to discover and explore planets.

> observing Earth would be seeing lots of war and destruction even though we're currently peacefully collaborating among mankind to discover and explore planets.

If they were observing us today, they'd still see plenty of war and destruction.

It just so happens that a fraction of the worlds population lives under "peaceful" conditions. That's not universally true.

Most of the worlds population lives under peaceful conditions these days.

> My point was simply that Kepler 452b-ians observing Earth would be seeing lots of war and destruction even though we're currently peacefully collaborating among mankind to discover and explore planets.

There's a quite a bit more human energy going into war and destruction right now than into "peacefully collaborating among mankind to discover and explore planets."

It is more proper to refer to them as Muslims, not Arabs. The whole point of Islam was to unite everyone under the same ideology. That's why it's called the Islamic civilization.

Source: I'm both an Arab and a Muslim.

Was anybody but Arabs involved in the conquest of the early 7th century? Ie I'm sure other people took on Islam afterwards but he was talking about a specific point in history.

We don't call the Spanish conquest of the Americas a Christian one even though they were Christians who ultimately converted everybody to Christianity.

Quite a few of the Prophet's companions were not Arabs, but yes the majority were. Nonetheless, it is more correct to identify as a Muslim before an Arab.

What irritates me greatly is when historians refer to the Muslim scientists of the Islamic Golden Age as "Arabs", when most of them were not Arabs at all. It's such a simpleminded and sweeping generalisation that clearly shows the thoroughness of the so-called orientalists.

That seems like a silly thing to get greatly irritated about.

Imagine if all the great Scottish scientists were referred to as 'the English'. That might piss some people off.

I'm sure some people track these sort of tribal affiliations between inhabitants of the British isles over the course of a millenium, too, but again I'd consider it a silly thing to get riled up about.

I think people tend to care about these things when one nation is subjugated by another, more powerful one, which tends to exert its dominance.

Hence the 'weaker' nation feels deprived of its history when its proudest moments are appropriated away.

I think it may be the preferred nomenclature in the Muslim world since all the people who were conquered are now Muslim - so they should have an easier time accepting the fact of being Islamicized as that's their culture now (whereas bringing up the fact that they were conquered by a foreign people might stir up tensions).

I agree with you about the second point. I guess it's due to the fact that they wrote in Arabic and many of the people they actually belonged to no longer exist (for example al-Khwārizm was from a Persian family but born in what is today Uzbekistan - I actually visited his hometown :)

>What irritates me greatly is when historians refer to the Muslim scientists of the Islamic Golden Age as "Arabs"

To me it's strange to ascribe such areas of study to the religion. What does Islam really have to do with optics besides Ibn Al-Haytham being a Muslim? No one ever ascribes enlightenment science as 'Christian science'.

If they have the ability to telescope us before we do. They can probably guess that technology accelerates. In fact I feel more pessimistic of the human's future as we found more and more such older planets -- If their million or billion years older civilization cannot reach us, then we might not reach out that far as well in the next billion year, or ever.

That thought makes me sad.

>we're so far away that they would be seeing our "civilizations" in 615 AD: shrinking global population as the old Roman and Byzantine empires are overrun by barbarian hordes and Arab conquest, with some pockets of human progress in China.

Err, the Byzantine empire was still going strong for 6 centuries after that (and still existed, but not in a good shape, for 8).

It never got overrun by "barbarian hordes", but it did have a run in with thieving "supposedely christian horders" on their way to the Crusades in the 12th century, and was finally overrun by the muslim Ottoman empire in the 14th century.

One can perhaps take comfort in the fact that a civilization advanced enough to be aware of us would likely be aware of the fact that we were more advanced than what they could see at any given moment (or they had found a way to narrow the perception lag).

They would likely have extrapolated the savagery they saw and realized that we may pose some problems for the galactic community. RKKVs are probably on their way towards Earth as we speak.

I would want to wait for the day when NASA announces to watch earth from light years or light months away and show us earth back in time.

You'd have to travel faster then light to outrun the light emmited from years ago.

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