Yes, I doubt FTL travel is possible or we would already have been overrun.
Bank of England Warned to Prepare for Aliens
- Thread starter Danja
- Start date
Could be everyone in the cosmos isn't as fucked up as humanity is? Or, by the time you reach that level of technology, you have no need to fuck around with monkeys that think they are intelligent?
I'd say that the first MIB movie put it best:
I expect there's little opportunity or need for real-world mischief once you're uploaded into a VR simulation, where you can be as good or evil as you would wish. Eventually, everyone in an advanced civilisation becomes a construct in the simulation and the AIs and robots get on with the job of expanding the computing infrastructure as and when required. Perhaps one day, the AIs realise it's a waste of resources and turn it off. But then what would be their purpose? How would they occupy themselves? The most fundamental goal of organisms that have evolved by Darwinian natural selection is straightforward - last long enough to pass on as much of your genetic information as you can. What is the fundamental goal of an AI? Create a faster, smarter version of itself?
There are physical limits to computation, including the Bekenstein bound, Bremermann's limit and Landauer's principle in addition to thermodynamic and quantum limitations, Would the AI's goal be to reach as asymptotically close to these limits as possible?
Or, other possibilities:
Faster-than-light doesn't mean any speed faster than light. Look at the warp scale chart just for the fictional warp drive, for ST: TNG -- even at those high speeds it takes forever to go long distances. Aliens with FTL maybe not have FTL faster enough to get to us, or with power sources that don't last long enough.
Second possibility: they can go FTL at various speeds, but they don't know we're here -- maybe they have FTL, but not long range scanners/sensors. We tend to think of things in terms of Star Trek magical detection in the scope and space of the universe, or even out own Milky Way galaxy.
Third possibility: we're boring with our under developed technology and they don't care -- maybe there is literally better things to do in the galaxy/universe.
Fourth possibility: maybe they have their own Federation style non interference directive.
Fifth possibility: Maybe the FTL method they have developed, isn't just a point and go, change directional heading as needed. Maybe it's difficult to get here. Maybe it's even a long-term trip and nobody wants to do it.
If FTL is possible, where are they?
I've lost count of explanations for the Fermi Paradox. The most likely one to my mind is that space travel within a system is incredibly difficult and dangerous as it is, and since one light year is 63.240 astronomical units, interstellar travel is at least that much harder. It's perhaps also not worth the effort. It's easier to simulate any possible world or, even more easily, any perception of any possible world.
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well there are probley some alternate earths where faster than light are alrighty invented since the 1960s after star trek came out and has been used very common
It would've been a radically different Earth where Star Trek probably never existed.
A world where Space 1999 became the dominant sci fi franchise
For us to have FTL, I’m thinking the Dark Ages never happened. We would be a completely different species.
Darkseid's coming. Just slowly.
The Dark Ages were a phenomenon of a post Western Roman Empire Europe dominated by the suffocating influence of the Roman Catholic Church. That's why the Renaissance needed Islamic science to help kick start it. I'd argue that the neither the Western Roman Empire nor the Eastern Roman Empire under either paganism or Christianity showed any signs of adopting technocracy. The ancient Greeks might have gotten there eventually, but the city states were too busy bickering among themselves before they were overrun by first the Macedonians and later the Romans. All these societies embraced slavery, so perhaps there was no motivation for labour-saving advancement.
To state that humanity would necessarily be more advanced is a Eurocentric viewpoint somewhat at the level of only Christian white men can achieve anything deemed significant. One might equally well blame the Mongol sacking of Baghdad in 1258, which brought about the end of the Abbasid Caliphate and the Islamic Golden Age. Although there were some attempts at revival, it was never the same again.
Anyway, these are contingent speculations, which most historians abhor. In our brane within the bulk, it never happened.
FTL is impossible or there are no aliens elsewhere in the visible universe of some 200 sextillion* stars. Perhaps both are true, but the second seems more improbable to me.
To quote Arthur C. Clarke: "Two possibilities exist. Either we are alone in the Universe or we are not. Both are equally terrifying."
* 2x10²³ or 200,000,000,000,000,000,000,000
I was thinking more of a world where the West didn’t subscribe so readily to a doomsday cult and were less dickish as a result.
or a what if there are alternate earths where its like star trek
If we cannot falsify that hypothesis, it is metaphysics. It is neither true nor false. There might equally well be earths that are like Star Wars, The Lord of the Rings, Game of Thrones, Narnia, Lyra's Oxford, Mary Poppins's London, the Hundred-Acre Wood and Sesame Street. One brane might contain only all possible Platonic forms. Is it even possible to prove such instantiations are impossible?
Which are more fundamental - states of perception or states of the reality that is perceived? As Leonard Susskind has commented - it might be like the duality between the event horizon of a black hole and the holographically projected space within the horizon that includes a singularity. Our perceived universe includes the Big Bang singularity, which might be no more real than that which we infer mathematically exists within a black hole.
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"That would be a most auspicious thing, don't you agree, Ted?"
What if we are the first "intelligent" (YMMV) species? Someone's gotta be first, right?
I think the furthest we will ever regularly travel, barring some sort of physics/fusion breakthrough, is intersolarsystem. The distance, time and energy required to visit our nearest neighbor is impossible without one. It will take Voyager 18,250 years to travel one light year from Earth. Alpha Centauri is 4.3 light years away. I dare any government to be around that long. Perhaps the spacecraft that explodes nuclear bombs in its butt might go faster
We need smart people to find that breakthrough. Why aren't we supporting them? Without them, our show won't ever be possible.
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imagine a alternate earth where there are humans and instead of real animals they are muppet animals and insects
reminds me of the live action 2022 tom and jerry film where instead of live action real animals and insects they are cartoon animated animals and insects
I think it is pretty unlikely over a 20+ billion year time period.
That's one of my other preferred resolutions to the Fermi Paradox. There weren't enough heavy elements around in the early universe for life to evolve. The JWST has shown that there are perhaps more than expected, however.
Even the city-sized version of Project Orion that used multimegaton H bombs would take generations. Antimatter-matter annihilation is the way to go if we still have to rely on the rocket equation. Finding more efficient ways of producing antimatter is then the problem - as well as containing it safely, of course.I think the furthest we will ever regularly travel, barring some sort of physics/fusion breakthrough, is intersolarsystem. The distance, time and energy required to visit our nearest neighbor is impossible without one. It will take Voyager 18,250 years to travel one light year from Earth. Alpha Centauri is 4.3 light years away. I dare any government to be around that long. Perhaps the spacecraft that explodes nuclear bombs in its butt might go faster
The postmodern panspermia - spreading our seed boldly where no man has gone before. Also spreading our bacteria and diseases as well as acquiring new ones. We'll likely repeat the same mistakes all over again. We will also try to put our stamp on any alien cultures that don't resist us successfully. We can't help ourselves, even if we performatively lament our douchebaggery. It's possibly a common trait of advanced civilisations in any case.
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