I never said that. I just answered your example. If people with advanced devices went back in time they would meet people that couldn't even conceive of technology. They would think it's magic or devilish and attack the guy, maybe burn him at the stake.
Not a Drill: SETI Is Investigating a Possible Extraterrestrial Signal From Deep Space
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I never said that. I just answered your example. If people with advanced devices went back in time they would meet people that couldn't even conceive of technology. They would think it's magic or devilish and attack the guy, maybe burn him at the stake.
Never heard of it. I just plucked the oddly specific number 439 million out of thin air and certainly did not use an exponential formula over two thousand years.
No, they're not. Because it really does matter that space is big. Even if you imagine zero travel time between solar systems, say through an artificial wormhole, exploring every world would take billions of years.
Really?
So far we know that life is possible if not probable, that living creatures have life spans with limited duration, and that it is likely not possible to travel superluminally, our Star Trek and Alcubierre Drive fantasies notwithstanding. If you are willing to accept these stipulations, the reason why civilizations have not spread via colonization is because they can't beyond their solar system.
Leaving their advanced technology just sitting there for anyone to use. Despite being significantly more advanced than the people who killed them. But, according to you, the marine should have some super magical way of preventing people from doing any of that, since he's so much more advanced than these primitive lifeforms.
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I didn't parody your opinion. You said there would be built in safeties that would prevent us from harm. You said, and I quote "Think about it. If aliens ever come to this planet, they'll be well aware of the thieving and violent nature of some of us (they wouldn't be advanced otherwise). They will have taken every precaution to protect themselves against us. It will be in their own best interest to do so."
http://www.trekbbs.com/threads/not-...l-from-deep-space.283260/page-5#post-11732076
He would ask his grandson how to use it and then stare at it uncomprehendingly for 20 minutes while failing to understand the explanation.
That's what I am saying. If they don't, it's because they can't.
That's unlikely. Even people in the 1940s knew what "technology" is even if they don't have the first idea how it works or how to use it. That's why your grandparents didn't freak out when they bought their first computers; their reaction is something more along the lines of "bewildered incomprehension" than "omg the magic glass is making moving pictures talk to me!" Ten years later, my 85 year old grandmother now has her own facebook account, and yet she still calls me every now and then to ask me something like "I forgot my gmail password. Should I reset my router?"
A similar thing happened when they started introducing smartphones to people in third world countries who previously didn't have have television. They figured out pretty quickly how to use them and integrated them into their daily lives. There are still some things that get lost in translation; a classmate from Haiti kept asking me where to buy new smartphone batteries, apparently not realizing that the battery was rechargeable (his son had been recharging it but for some reason he assumed the kid was just putting a new battery in it all the time).
Our marine wouldn't be immune to arrows, or germs, or people jumping him while he's asleep.
Small nitpick: the capacity to travel beyond your own solar system, even at FTL velocities, does not automatically imply an unlimited space exploration budget, an unlimited number of spacecraft, a perfect operating record FOR those craft, sufficient control of the drive system to be able to actually approach or orbit the planet of their choosing (limited to high speed flyby only) or even the capacity to communicate with anyone they might encounter during that flyby, let alone land.
Despite what Star Trek may have you believe, the logistics of space travel will not change just because FTL travel is possible. It will still be very VERY expensive and dangerous, probably much more so with an FTL drive. We could develop that technology tomorrow, but an FTL spacecraft that would cost $5 billion for a mission ten years in duration would still be a massive undertaking even IF we had normalized the technology to explore the rest of the solar system already.
IOW: the learning curve from "Zephram Cochrane" to "NX-01" is ALOT longer than most people would think. They'd have to be technologically thousands of years ahead of us to even approach the degree of sophistication to which "they should be here already" would even make sense.
The post you quoted was about someone going back 2000 years ago.
That's an assumption, reasonable even, given current progress. But a profound breakthrough in physics, such a figuring out how to equate, unify and manipulate quantum entanglement and gravity to provide universal travel at a whim could be instantly transformative and transcendent. Don't take the example literally - it could be something else. We don't know, except for perhaps the observation that we've seen no other civilization using it.
Same difference. They know someone made it and they know it does stuff when you push buttons. It'll be harder for them to use because its beyond their experience, but once the novelty wears off it's just a convenient tool.
The thing is, even very young children have a basic enough understanding of the laws of cause and effect to be puzzled by magic tricks. People primitive civilizations work this way too: "I touch this button, a thing happens. I touch another button, another thing happens." That's all you need to know to understand technology. It's when technology works inconsistently or in a very counter-intuitive way (e.g. the button only works when you press it on tuesday or your phone has literally NO bars in a certain part of town) that technology gets confused with magic or superstition.
To use a Doctor Who reference:
"He's not a god. And you know he's not a god. Because what's the one thing that gods never ever do?"
"SHOW UP!"
It's more than just the physics of FTL travel that's the issue. We could make a breakthrough in fundamental physics tomorrow which means we understand the theory of the warp 9 engine. But building even one functioning starship with one on, then sending it out to explore the heavens is another matter entirely, and still doesn't bring us anywhere near "should have been here by now" territory.
Except the Fermi Paradox.
Sure. But none of those things have any causal relationship with space travel or the development of FTL travel. So assuming one in the presence of the other is illogical; if the only changing factor is FTL travel, and all other factors being the same, then the further assumptions about social, political, economic or military development of that civilization don't follow. Even a breakthrough in new physics wouldn't necessarily drive a massive technological development since such a breakthrough could prove to be very limited in scope in a similar way as, say, rocketry or the splitting of the atom. They could easily increase overall productivity, but it wouldn't necessarily make them more efficient or even, on average, more intelligent.
Which, again, begs the question of why we would assume we WOULD see them using it? Apart from the fact that we don't know what to look for, we also have no reason to believe they would actually come HERE, or that they would be able to do so in a way that would lend itself to detection (again, high-speed flyby) or that out of the thousands and thousands of systems they could visit, ours would be on the short list of targets. From the last point, it assumes that such a civilization definitely WOULD send thousands and thousands of ships to visit every system in nearby space and can navigate with enough control to visit every planet in said system by entering orbit and announcing themselves. Any of those things NOT being the case would result in us not seeing them at all.
Do we actually have the capacity to detect an object 60m in diameter passing 3 AUs from Earth at 80% of the speed of light? I'd like to think that would be easy, but for that sort of detection we would have to know exactly where to look at exactly the right time with exactly the right instruments, and even then we could still miss it. Add to the fact that a civilization with limited resources might be able to afford such a flyby maybe once or twice in a decade, our chances of knowing about it are actually quite small.
It's not much a paradox. Life could EASILY be everywhere and there are a thousand different reasons why we would never know about it even if they DID have advanced spaceflight capabilities.
At last someone who knows what I am talking about!
