Readers, let’s have at it. What do *you* think?
I wrote: “without faster-than-light travel and/or communication, meaningful interaction with intelligent aliens seems unlikely.”
Gary Church responds on January 22, 2012 12:39 pm:
I disagree Jared,
Since the power requirements go up in a sharp curve after about a third of the speed of light, consider .3c to be the practical speed limit for, let’s say, most of the next century. Considering acceleration and decelleration, let’s call it 4 years for every light year. “Meaningful” depends upon your own personal interpretation. Both life extension and cryopreservation will most likely redefine what is meaningful for most people– perhaps in the very near future. It might very well become meaninful for both of us.
The most likely form of star travel for the next millenium after a century of technological development is small singularity propulsion– perhaps near the end of the next century. This will boost speeds close to light where time dilation will make trips only a few years long (ship board time).
Though simplistic, my rough prediction is this century spent on colonizing the solar system and building up an infrastructure capable of manufacturing sleeper ships, the next century spent building up an infrastructure capable of manufacturing small singularity starships, and the third century will find us expanding into the galaxy in massive migrations.
We just need to consider longer time scales– and possibly living much longer. At least our children or their grandchildren may find intelligent life out there and interact with them in a meaningful way. But not considering them could mean stagnation– much like the often used example of the Chinese empire.
And of course, the reason for this blog; the possibility we might destroy ourselves or be destroyed.
“Meaningful communication with aliens” is vague. Travel is not really the issue, in my view, whatever the speed. Does communication have to be bi-directional? Should we focus on images rather than linguistic communication (analysis of the semiotic problems probably rules out linguistic communication)? Does the discovery of the existence of intelligent aliens constitute ‘communication’ in any useful sense — and if not then what more is required? At what point do we consider detailed observation — informative but without intent — to be a form of communication?
All this, in turn, prompts the notion that we are, at this moment, being observed by intelligent aliens. The notion that we should aspire to ‘advanced civilisation’ status, with ‘advanced technology’, can sensibly be interpreted as meaning we aspire to being able to detect/observe intelligent aliens elsewhere without their assistance. Answering the ‘are we alone?’ question doesn’t require any linguistic or symbolic interaction — a really powerful (huge) optical telescope will do. That’s ‘advanced’ for you!
Which then lands us back in ‘lifeboat’ territory. I don’t see alien threats as anything we can sensibly worry about. We should probably take for granted the fact that we are being observed (or at least, our Victorian forefathers with pre-electric light, but lots of infrared emissions and CO2 pollution). To save ourselves from self-destruction we probably should pick a few really absorbing and inspiring technologies to advance, and work on some big projects. Overheating our planet is probably inevitable, so we should also be planning for scenarios which arise in such modelling — rather than trying to avoid those outcomes.
This is not to >advocate< a cavalier ‘we’ll work something out when the time comes’ attitude to ‘development’. That has got us into the current environmental mess. However — the time has come, because others did advocate that attitude, so we have to work something out! And the working out must include addressing problems with economic models as well as technical ones.
Einstein disproved Newtonian Mechanics and came up with the theory of relativity 1n 1917. Given the information of the time and the technology that he had to work with this seemed plausible.
Now fast forward almost 100 years and things have changed. The speed limit that Einstein developed will be broken, not by a little but by a lot. Similar to man will “never” break the 4 minute mile or man will “never” fly. CERN has already started to believe through recent experiments that particles can travel faster than the speed of light.
We will also see quantum mechanics come into its own, the possibility of more than one universe is beginning to look very real. The though of particles or objects performing more than one task at a time has already been proven. Physics and math will be turned on its head shortly and a true understanding of our world and the universe will start to emerge. In theory bending space (bending time) seems like it could work, thus making the speed of light theory obsolete.
Man is still in his infancy, thinking that our speed limit is set at 186K is foolish. It was not that long ago that Galileo was put under house arrest for life for thinking that earth was not at the center of the universe. It was only a blink of an eye ago that man thought the world was flat. Can you only imagine the possibilities when we understand that nothing is impossible!!
Thank you Jared,
I take that reprint as a compliment from one futurist to another.
“I don’t see alien threats as anything we can sensibly worry about.“
Stephen Hawking disagrees. I will go with him, thank you.
“Einstein disproved Newtonian Mechanics“
Uhhhh.…No.
Newtonian mechanics works and took us to the moon. Einstienian physics works and gave us a theory that has yet to be “disproved.“
It all works– let’s work with what we have and not throw the baby out with the bathwater.
IMO “imagining the possibilites” is NOT fantasing about making the earth flat to fit your bias. We all want to go FTL and get beamed up or walk through the stargate but that is not necessarily possible.
Imagining you can travel underwater in a submarine was always possible and required no laws of physics to be broken, and heavier than air flight was naysayed but their was no law of physics invoked to support that condemnation.
We can travel to the stars, it just requires we imagine a new time scale beyond what we are conditioned to accept on earth.
The emotional cry of “nothing is impossible” does not make it so.
I don’t think all kinds of intelligent beens need the FTL technology to accomplish the meaningful communicate.
The “inner time-speed” is a key factor to influence the communication.
If a creature’s ITS(inner time-speed) is just one hundredth of ours, which means if we accomplish a simple task need one second then the creature should take one hundred seconds to finish it, if the intelligence and experience are totally same, then the “light speed” for them is one hundredth of us, about 300,000 “km/s”. The time we spend to reach the Proxima Centauri is about 4 years if we could travel in light-speed, then the time for they cost is just about two weeks if the unit of time is same to us.
So, as a result, the “time trap” for us to communicate with “others” is not a problem for the alien whose ITS is one hundredth or even less of ours.
If such a kind of low ITS creature is not rare in the universe, then what we can say about human being is we are not suitable for the universe.
“The “inner time-speed” is a key factor to influence the communication.”
Well, I don’t know if there are slo mo intelligences out there but I do know when you travel very close to the speed of light there is time dilation.
If there are aliens on the way here traveling at 99.99999…C, I do not know what the mechanics of communicating with or even detecting them are.
It seems to me logical that, if the universe is billions of years old, and if there are aliens out there, then they ought to have had plenty of time to send electronic or nanotech entities to all solar systems and that those entities would be so intelligent and so knowledgable that they should be able to communicate with us in our language in real time. The fact that we see none of this begs the question of what is wrong with our assumptions.
Yeah…the great silence. What’s up with that?
“Yeah…the great silence. What’s up with that?“
Considering what we are doing with genetically modified organisms I am thinking technological civilizations self-destruct 99 percent of the time. If being greedy and insecure drives progress then it follows.
We have to get separate populations established or we may join the great silent extinct species list.
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