The Fermi Paradox, or: Where is Everybody in Space?
115 replies, posted
It's depressing, not only is location a massive problem but times also being a dick about it.
There's far more chance of mankind finding dead Extra Terrestrials than alive ones.
[QUOTE=Thechuz1337;28505074]My brain hurts[/QUOTE]
Are u serious??
[QUOTE=ksenior;28502759]FTL (relative to us that is) is currently impossible with our level of science[/QUOTE]
If faster than light isn't possible, I'm sure we'll actually be ok with lightspeed.
I'm sure we'll be living a pretty fucking long time due to medical advances by the time we're ever capable of leaving our system, and with relativity factored in, it doesn't take much subjective time for people on a spaceship to travel between systems. It's probably possible to freeze people or something similar too, it'd certainly be easier than going faster than light.
And if we are unique little snowflakes, lets make the most of it and not blast ourselves off the face of our home planet over silly issues like nations.
Once we finally have a space elevator, a totally different kind o spaceship is possible.
Is it in our nature that we will eventually destroy ourselves? I wonder. I think the reasoning is a bit outdated, isn't it? It sounds like something from the cold war. I look at the future, and I see a bright one!
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FTL isn't impossible from a practical point of view. You could rip or warp spacetime to "teleport" to another place (and/or time) faster than light. Of course this doesn't mean that you're technically moving a speed greater than c, it just means that lightspeed doesn't have to limit our means of transportation.
[QUOTE=ThePuska;28503780]I have no idea how you could reproduce or transfer a consciousness. Your consciousness is bound to your body, not to some soul entity that could jump from your body to a computer.[/QUOTE]
And how do you come to this conclusion? Conciousness is a big mystery. It is perhaps to biggest unsolved problem in science. We don't even what questions to ask and what we should try to prove.
[quote]The key argument is that technology is incompatible with any species, because we are adapted to a nomadic, hunter-gatherer lifestyle, and suddenly, in a geological nanosecond, we're thrown into the fast-paced course of modern civilization, don't know what to do, and suddenly the entire civilization turns into a group of fucking luddites.[/quote]
Even more a reason to get as fast as possible to mars and beyond (becoming space nomads :v: ). Saddly at the time that happens, some damn archaeologist will be diggin up my bones.
One explanation to the fermi paradox that doesn't include self termination is that we as humans are too undeveloped today to be of any real significance. Maybe the universe is brimming with highly intelligent extra terrestrials, but they chose to communicate with eachother. We could be like an ant hill compared to them. Well.. couldn't atleast someone come and check us out? Afterall, we humans sometimes look at ant hills.
Hmm.. maybe they have?
[img]http://www.ufosightingreport.com/images/07-03/ufo-sighting-baghdad_s.jpg[/img]
!!
Someone else had the idea of looking up the Fermi Paradox after that thread in the news section, I see. Very interesting stuff.
[QUOTE=Rad McCool;28505851]One explanation to the fermi paradox that doesn't include self termination is that we as humans are too undeveloped today to be of any real significance. Maybe the universe is brimming with highly intelligent extra terrestrials, but they chose to communicate with eachother. We could be like an ant hill compared to them. Well.. couldn't atleast someone come and check us out? Afterall, we humans sometimes look at ant hills.
Hmm.. maybe they have?
[img_thumb]http://www.ufosightingreport.com/images/07-03/ufo-sighting-baghdad_s.jpg[/img_thumb]
!![/QUOTE]
Let's steal one of their ships and reverse-engineer it and loot it for technological profit!
I never really understood why you can't go faster than light, can someone explain it to me?
[QUOTE=sergeantsmiles;28506016]I never really understood why you can't go faster than light, can someone explain it to me?[/QUOTE]
The faster you go, the more you warp space, the more you warp space, the heavier you get, the heavier you get, the more energy is required to accelerate you.
So the faster you go, the more energy you need, and it increases at such a rate that to reach the speed of light you need infinite energy (which is nonsense basically, no matter how much energy you put in you'd still never come close enough)
[QUOTE=TheDecryptor;28506170]The faster you go, the more you warp space, the more you warp space, the heavier you get, the heavier you get, the more energy is required to accelerate you.
So the faster you go, the more energy you need, and it increases at such a rate that to reach the speed of light you need infinite energy (which is nonsense basically, no matter how much energy you put in you'd still never come close enough)[/QUOTE]
uNLESS YOU COULD HARNESS LIGHT DUN DUN DUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUN
You guys don't understand. With ANY form of propulsion (even anti-matter, plasma rockets, NPP, electromagnetic acceleration) it's still impossible to jump the light-speed barrier. It would require infinite amounts of energy to do so, and, you can't slow down. In addition, due to the gamma factor (Lorentz Transforms), your length would reverse and time would also reverse if you managed to break the barrier.
Wormholes, of course, may be the way around this but we don't know for sure since we have yet to find one.
Claiming that "true" FTL is possible is nonsense. By that I mean actually having a speed faster than light. "Cheating the system", as someone said it, is probably the only way. You don't actually move faster than light, but the effect is the same.
Every time I think of how small we are compared to the universe, I start to feel really weird and inferior.
[QUOTE=LaceratorX;28506503]You guys don't understand. With ANY form of propulsion (even anti-matter, plasma rockets, NPP, electromagnetic acceleration) it's still impossible to jump the light-speed barrier. It would require infinite amounts of energy to do so, and, you can't slow down. In addition, due to the gamma factor (Lorentz Transforms), your length would reverse and time would also reverse if you managed to break the barrier.
Wormholes, of course, may be the way around this but we don't know for sure since we have yet to find one.[/QUOTE]
Wormholes are the only real way, simply because they shorten the distance. Similar to FTL drives in fiction where they move the ship into another dimension and back out at the destination (like Xen in HL, it can bounce you anywhere and anywhen, even to other dimensions)
[QUOTE=slinkman;28503602]I hate knowing how insignificant we are in the universe.[/QUOTE]
Insignificant, but I think we're important. The universe may be unimaginably huge with events like supernova that make exploding all the nukes on the planet look like an ant's fart, but what would be the point of it all if there's wasn't an insignificant intelligent species to look up and appreciate it all. The universe would still be massive and amazing, but there would be no one around to give a shit.
[QUOTE=Rad McCool;28505687]And how do you come to this conclusion? Conciousness is a big mystery. It is perhaps to biggest unsolved problem in science. We don't even what questions to ask and what we should try to prove.[/QUOTE]
Via Occam's razor. The soul hypothesis assumes the existence of what we haven't seen. Technology that could transfer a person's soul to a computer would first require knowledge about souls, and we have none at all. We have a lot more knowledge about how experiences define us, and therefore it seems more plausible that we could invent a way to transfer experiences onto a computer, and have them define a virtual personality that'd match our own.
[QUOTE=TheDecryptor;28506739]Wormholes are the only real way, simply because they shorten the distance. Similar to FTL drives in fiction where they move the ship into another dimension and back out at the destination (like Xen in HL, it can bounce you anywhere and anywhen, even to other dimensions)[/QUOTE]
Only problem is, for wormholes to realistically work we need exotic matter. Matter with negative energy density! Which doesn't, as far as we're aware, exist. You'd probably need a black hole or something in the first place (somewhere where the laws of the universe are already a bit screwy) to generate said matter if it is even possible at all, and then somehow get the matter into the 'throat' of two connecting blackholes.
Is this thread some sort of mind trick?
We need to start researching that shit they have in Star Trek where they move the space around the ship instead of moving the ship.
[QUOTE=Big Ben;28509303]We need to start researching that shit they have in Star Trek where they move the space around the ship instead of moving the ship.[/QUOTE]
You would still be limited by speed. It's just that the universe would push the limit instead of the ship.
I think Quantum Entanglement is a much better method for this. (Not the actual entanglement, but some other sort of quantum thing that can teleport atoms)
It might be possible that the UFOs we commonly see are actually unmanned Bracewall probes.
[url]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bracewell_probe[/url]
This would explain the generally erratic, nonsensical behavior that UFOs typically display.
Heres one. After you get to the point where you can simulate the universe on a computer there is really little use or even motive to explore the rest of the universe. Once they get smart enough where they can see everything from its most atomic form perhaps they wont care about seeing other life because they are just predicted things that would be expected in this universe.
[QUOTE=animephreak135;28509805]It might be possible that the UFOs we commonly see are actually unmanned Bracewall probes.
[url]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bracewell_probe[/url]
This would explain the generally erratic, nonsensical behavior that UFOs typically display.[/QUOTE]
Why would they need to come so close to the surface of Earth though.
[QUOTE=imasillypiggy;28509935]Heres one. After you get to the point where you can simulate the universe on a computer there is really little use or even motive to explore the rest of the universe. Once they get smart enough where they can see everything from its most atomic form perhaps they wont care about seeing other life because they are just predicted things that would be expected in this universe.[/QUOTE]
Doesn't choas theory make 100% simulations impossible? I'm not sure here, never really looked into it.
[QUOTE=Kai-ryuu;28502826]it saddens me to realize that the day FTL even becomes a blip on the reality radar I'll be six feet under :smith:[/QUOTE]
Not really, 50 years from now immortality will be possible so you might live to see it.
[url=http://www.cracked.com/article_18964_5-ways-science-could-make-us-immortal.html]Sauce[/url]
Mind uploading is far more likely to just create an identical copy; you would still be stuck in your body, not suddenly wake up in a computer.
Which is really fucking annoying. Maybe the best thing would be to have nanobots slowly replace parts of your brain, so you wouldn't notice that you're slowly becoming a computer.
It annoys me people don't want to live forever; its the ultimate THING. Fuck living 100 years and then missing all the great shit that happens in the coming ten billion.
[QUOTE=cathal6606;28510165]Not really, 50 years from now immortality will be possible so you might live to see it.
[url=http://www.cracked.com/article_18964_5-ways-science-could-make-us-immortal.html]Sauce[/url][/QUOTE]
50 years from now: HEY THERE WANNA LIVE FOREVER? THEN GET NEW <WHATEVER IT IS THAT MAKES YOU LIVE LONGER> AND START LIVING FOREVER TODAY!*
*=$50,000,000 please
[QUOTE=imasillypiggy;28509935]Heres one. After you get to the point where you can simulate the universe on a computer there is really little use or even motive to explore the rest of the universe. Once they get smart enough where they can see everything from its most atomic form perhaps they wont care about seeing other life because they are just predicted things that would be expected in this universe.[/QUOTE]
You assume that they have computers like we do, or that they have the same mindset. They could work in a way that's completely different from how we do. It's safe to say that they atleast developed in a way that's different from us. Their motives, thought processes, etc. could be unfathomable to human beings, and vice versa. Their technology could be absolutely different from ours, too. Not just more advanced; they might develop technology in a way that's totally divergent to how we go about it.
Another thing that irks me is that people always assume they have advanced weaponry. It's entirely possible that the concept of weapons/aggressive behavior is totally foreign to them, something they wouldn't even be able to comprehend.
[QUOTE=cyanidem;28510014]Why would they need to come so close to the surface of Earth though.[/QUOTE]
Who knows, but it makes more sense than the idea of manned UFOs in some ways.
[QUOTE=Kai-ryuu;28510352]50 years from now: HEY THERE WANNA LIVE FOREVER? THEN GET NEW <WHATEVER IT IS THAT MAKES YOU LIVE LONGER> AND START LIVING FOREVER TODAY!*
*=$50,000,000 please[/QUOTE]
It's gonna cost so much to live forever. :smith:
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