• The Fermi Paradox, or: Where is Everybody in Space?
    115 replies, posted
[QUOTE=animephreak135;28510436]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.[/QUOTE] Sure but a computer seems pretty basic to me. Something almost all species would have.
[QUOTE=sltungle;28507019]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.[/QUOTE] Well I didn't say it'd be easy. :colbert:
[QUOTE=imasillypiggy;28510651]Sure but a computer seems pretty basic to me. Something almost all species would have.[/QUOTE] Humans are only knowledgeable of one intelligent species, and that's us. So, naturally, when we speculate on what other intelligent civilizations might be like, we always use ourselves as comparisons. I'm sure they have something [i]computer like[/i], but it might be entirely inconsistent (and incredibly more advanced) than what we would recognize as a computer. Think of every technological innovation mankind has made so far, and then ask yourself how we could have done the same thing with radically different designs, mindsets, and materials. I mean, look at the differences between different human cultures. A little bit of earth distance can make a massive difference in how members of the same species think and act, so imagine what that kind of distance can mean in terms of how an alien civilization lightyears away develops. The way they go about creating technology could be completely unfathomable to us, and I think that's probably going to be the case.
I personally think a lot of species will just nanobot themselves. when you have trillions and trillions of little bots going at about the speed of light you could never die and would be able to your whole galaxy in a matter of years.
[QUOTE=imasillypiggy;28510869]I personally think a lot of species will just nanobot themselves. when you have trillions and trillions of little bots going at about the speed of light you could never die and would be able to your whole galaxy in a matter of years.[/QUOTE] Nanobots are a human creation and a human concept. They might have something a billion times better/different that we could never, ever think of or understand. This is all speculation, though.
Well you have to agree that they use technology and making the technology small isnt that much of a stretch because it saves you space and resources.
I'm so fascinated by space and astrophysics, yet I'm god awful at mathematics, so it'll never be more than just a hobby for me. I enjoy when people who understand it put it into Layman's terms though. Thanks for the great read!
[QUOTE=blazingfly;28510458]It's gonna cost so much to live forever. :smith:[/QUOTE] Take out mega loan Get procedure Run away to another country for a few years. Forge new identity and change looks. Become new man. Move back to home country. Steal money from yourself Live life forever.
[QUOTE=blazingfly;28510458]It's gonna cost so much to live forever. :smith:[/QUOTE] Put money in savings account. watch as over the years $1000 turns into billions.
Everyone in space is hiding from us, as everyone else are really peaceful types fucking terrified of the funny bipedal animals currently blowing each other up with bombs that could easily slag the entire planet.
inflation increases by about 1% a year while a savings account increases by about 5%.
[img]http://theinfosphere.org/images/f/f1/Planet_Express_Ship.jpg[/img] "The ship is capable of traveling at 99% light speed (which is a lot faster than traditional light speed since the speed of light was increased in 2208), but in fact it does not move at all. Instead, its engines move the universe around it." We just need to build some of these.
Well, the only real way to transfer your experiences and intelligence into your new you without making copies would be to physically cut out the brain and embed it into the new body. Mind uploading = nx you. Now I wouldn't really want to speculate about why aliens haven't payed an official visit yet, but I'm doing it anyway, so I'll base my ides on some of the previous posts. First, let's assume the galaxy is sprawling with life. So why haven't they come here yet? Someone said that in comparison with aliens we'd be technologically too unadvanced so basically they don't give a shit. Well, we'd make fine slaves and there's gotta be some resources here(though this is a completely unimaginative statement, as our aliens would most likely be dependant on completely different materials), so of course this is just one idea. Perhaps the aliens surrounding us would be so benevolent and friendly that they'd have their own form of Prime Directive in place, prohibiting interference with lesser life forms. Could draw a parallel with Earth here, as the Western world has definitely had a negative influence on the native cultures of the Third World. Imagine, if a galactic power were to suddenly come to Earth, we'd most likely be completely galacticalized with all the fancy gadgets and stuff we'd get from other advanced civilizations. So English would not be the C++ of all languages anymore and the Western civilization on the galactic scale of influence would be as powerful as Ghana right now. So maybe they're good guys. But that's all made with the assumption that the difference between humans and aliens results in the additional pair of furry antennae attached to the forehead. Now to stretch the understandably straightforward thinking of humans a bit, lifeforms from outer space might be so completely different, that we wouldn't even know they existed/couldn't communicate with them/etc. They might even be living amongst us, there is no reason to believe that life couldn't exist as pure energy(well, okay, with the mass of a photon), since matter is essentially created from energy. Now, according to some theories concerning strings, there are more than 3 dimensions of space which then would be so small and tight that they'd be practically undetectable by our senses, so the mystery lifeforms could reside there undistrubed. True, the dimensions would be so small, that only elementary particles would fit through, but thinking that gigantic carbon compounds create the only possibility for life is as smart as the aforementioned idea. So with the endlessly small amount of knowledge we actually have, making formulas for calculating the density of intelligent lifeforms in the universe is beyond the standard definition of stupid. Like shitty artists make their creative crap, so do shitty 'scientists'.
I have an idea that addresses Fermi's paradox, but you'll have to bare with me. If there are millions of alien civilizations in the Milky Way galaxy alone, it might be possible that the advanced ones have made a rule concerning the visitation of, and interference with less advanced civilizations. This is only an idea; I'm still on the fence about the likelyhood of an alien species even understanding the concept of government. I'm quite certain that, regardless of the situation, they're not interested in our resources. A civilization with a several million year head start on ours has probably already found new materials/resources to use. Our resources might be junk in comparison. Hell, it's even possible that they're utilizing elements that we haven't discovered yet.
[QUOTE=animephreak135;28513029]Hell, it's even possible that they're utilizing elements that we haven't discovered yet.[/QUOTE] Well, no actually. In case of specific chemical elements, there is nothing else to discover anymore. You keep increasing the amount of particles and eventually they'll be beyond the reach of the nuclear forces holding the atom together and your glorious element will explode. Besides, all the supermassive elements are unstable anyway, mostly all exist as isotopes, so their only application would be their radioactivity. Ununquadium reactors - not really cool.
[QUOTE=Hori;28513340]Well, no actually. In case of specific chemical elements, there is nothing else to discover anymore. You keep increasing the amount of particles and eventually they'll be beyond the reach of the nuclear forces holding the atom together and your glorious element will explode. Besides, all the supermassive elements are unstable anyway, mostly all exist as isotopes, so their only application would be their radioactivity. Ununquadium reactors - not really cool.[/QUOTE] How wrong you really are.
[QUOTE=JCDentonUNATCO;28512458][ "The ship is capable of traveling at 99% light speed (which is a lot faster than traditional light speed since the speed of light was increased in 2208), but in fact it does not move at all. Instead, its engines move the universe around it." We just need to build some of these.[/QUOTE] I was thinking of something smilair, maybe it's possible to travel about twice the speed of light speed by moving the universe towards the ship at light speed and ''normally'' moving towards your desination at light speed.
[QUOTE=cheezey;28515940]I was thinking of something smilair, maybe it's possible to travel about twice the speed of light speed by moving the universe towards the ship at light speed and ''normally'' moving towards your desination at light speed.[/QUOTE] I'm not an expert (I've only ever been taught Newtonian stuff, for the most part), but I'm pretty relativity would stop you from doing so, by stretching time or space to make your journey the same as moving close to lightspeed. Hence why light from a car's headlights doesn't move faster than light from a stationary object.
[QUOTE=cheezey;28515940]I was thinking of something smilair, maybe it's possible to travel about twice the speed of light speed by moving the universe towards the ship at light speed and ''normally'' moving towards your desination at light speed.[/QUOTE] Firstly, you can't travel at light speed to begin with. Secondly, velocities don't add under relativity like they do in classical physics. Under the way velocities add relativistically, you still have a speed limit at the speed of light.
[QUOTE=ksenior;28502759]FTL (relative to us that is) is currently impossible with our level of science[/QUOTE] True, but there is no reason to stop trying. Eventually we need to develop some method of travel that is faster than light. Whether it be bending time and space to create a wormhole with a direct connection from one side to the other, or temporarily converting the vessel and its contents into energy and accelerating it to the destination at FTL speeds before reconstructing it on the other side. The second method here has strange morale implications that were mentioned earlier in the thread. Namely would the product on the other side still be you? Or would it be a version of you that is simply made out of the same parts? Wormhole travel is ultimately the only theoretical form of FTL travel to my knowledge that would get you from point a to point b without killing you and making a copy as a result.
what if humans are the first or one of the first intelligent life forms? someone has to be the first
[QUOTE=meppers;28516995]what if humans are the first or one of the first intelligent life forms? someone has to be the first[/QUOTE] It would be hilarious if we found a new civilization yet they were all in bred savages who aren't even capable of speech. What a letdown that would be.
[QUOTE=JCDentonUNATCO;28517207]It would be hilarious if we found a new civilization yet they were all in bred savages who aren't even capable of speech. What a letdown that would be.[/QUOTE] Then we play god with them and demand they erect enormous, geometric buildings for us. Except instead of being nice to them and making them build something 'easy' like, say, a pyramid, we force them to build a 500 metre tall dome entirely out of limestone!
I have this problem sometimes, where i'll read something and i get absolutely nothing from it. I won't remember a thing that i just read, i will try to think hard about it but i just can't think of anything on it. It just kills me when i read things like these because im completely interested and fascinated with it, but there are a few passages where i just can't read.
[QUOTE=sltungle;28517344]Then we play god with them and demand they erect enormous, geometric buildings for us. Except instead of being nice to them and making them build something 'easy' like, say, a pyramid, we force them to build a 500 metre tall dome entirely out of limestone![/QUOTE] [img]http://images.wikia.com/en.futurama/images/1/1b/Bender'srobot.jpg[/img]
If what we call life exists on other planets, its probably unimaginably different from us It may not think, it may not move, it may not die, it may not be based on cells, it may not cycle energy, it may not use DNA It really depends on your definition of life But assuming that we'd be able to communicate with them is just unreasonable
The best idea would be to completely drop the business ball. Why sit around occupying ourselves with such bullshit? "OOH! i can make MONEY and be better than EVERYONE!!! yayzors!" How dumb, because you are sucking the resources and mapower out of everyone for your $1bln yacht, and uncomfortable lifestyle and that leaves the rest of the world dragging in the mud, while you, your boat, and the 6 billion doomed people are simply preoccupied while you wait for armageddon. We are going to be extinct within the next 50-100 years. Either an asteroid, a comet, our own planet, ourselves, or SOMETHING will completely wipe out the life on earth, it happened many times before, and i'm sure wer'e due for another mass-extinction soon. We seriously need to knuckle down, start a revolution against the economic society, and build a new, [b]cosmic[/b] society. Why work for money? You can work for the benefit of yourself and everyone around you by doing something COOL and building space-stations, mining asteroids etc. (Ok, maybe some form of money is required around the place to keep people enthusiastic, but the whole arena of share-markets, investing, business, and other economic bullshit is just keeping us down.) Hell, if everyone got together with strong minds, we could do great things. We would need to FIND our minds, then get together and build a series of NFP (Not For Profit. That means the only thing we get out of them is the resources they produce, and we keep the resources, not sell them.) foundries, farms and power plants to start us off. Once we have our free resources, we can start inventing the technology required to get us INTO space. THEN we can think of mining the local asteroids, and building shipyards, and eventually spaceships capable of interstellar travel, but the ships would need to be huge, because FTL is not possible (Unless someone invents a primary inversion drive, which accellerates [i]around[/i] light-speed, not through it.), and a civilization would need to exist on these generation ships, who would colonize new worlds, after travelling for many years through open space... sounds dumb? well you are still stuck in your single-mindedness aren't you?
Money is necessary, not as an incentive or a goal, but to compare the values of different kinds of our limited resources. There can never be enough of everything to satisfy everyone, so you have to choose what you produce and what services you offer.
[QUOTE=ThePuska;28520349]Money is necessary, not as an incentive or a goal, but to compare the values of different kinds of our limited resources. There can never be enough of everything to satisfy everyone, so you have to choose what you produce and what services you offer.[/QUOTE] But still, why not unite and have just one, instead of many different whining competitors? Some resources are somewhat better-spent than others. Most of our resources for exmple, are heading into automobiles, and the many companies producing them. However, if you were to halt all car production, destroy the cars, and just have one transit company running only trains, trucks and buses, then there would be much MUCH better results, like extremely low greenhouse emissions for one, no traffic problems, and plenty of resources left over for spacecraft production. Hell, even the people won't be so fat! The only downside is a minor little bit of [i]inconvenience[/i], and the fact that the economy will be in tears.
[QUOTE=deathstarboot;28515602]How wrong you really are.[/QUOTE] What is, "Not in the slightest?", Alex?
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