I've always been frustrated by the prevailing assumption that aliens will eschew interstellar travel in favor of radio transmission due to the presumed cost of space travel. While aliens might suffer from constraints posed by limited access to resources, the notion of "cost" is rooted in our own brief, limited experience as social primates. We humans might bemoan the seemingly prohibitive price of manned spaceflight, but a more far-sighted intelligence might possess vastly different priorities. Spared the hurdle of terrestrial economic imperatives, I would expect aliens to prove surprisingly resourceful.
Wednesday, April 02, 2008
From my new SETI post:
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7 comments:
"...the prevailing assumption that aliens will eschew interstellar travel in favor of radio transmission due to the presumed cost of space travel..."
Yep. Unless we knew the means, how would anyone be able to posit what an advanced non-human intelligence might be able to use to travel at or beyond light speed? Another case of anthropocentric thinking.
We just don't know, and I don't financial considerations are the issue at all. Might cost very little, on material levels. Think like an alien--I don't see how we can even imagine how to do that, or make assumptions about "their" potential and technologies for transport.
Perhaps the EBE's ARE the radio transmissions.
"...ARE the radio transmissions."
Well, if that were the case, Shostak and crew are doing a rather terrible job with their radio antenna farm in NorCal picking up any such radio xmissions.
Hmmmm....say, if a signal _were_ received _and_ confirmed, wouldn't that kind of put the private seti initiatives out of work? No more private funding, as the good old US guvmint would likely take over any such efforts on a grander scale, and classify it, if we could fit it into the federal black budget (after war and sub-prime mortgage costs, of course).
Maybe we _have_ received signals, but the SETI institute, due to funding and financial imperatives, and the value of reselling such critical intelligence to multi-national technology development corporations, is just keeping it quiet, even from the PTB, just to keep sucking off the teat of private funding for such relatively mis-guided "science."
Now _that_ would be a story! Ha!
(That is, of the scifi kind...) 8^}
mr. i -- Re traveling beyond light speed, there was an interesting Scientific American article a few years back that discussed the theoretical possibility of a "warp drive" and concluded that, based on known physical laws, such a drive is actually (theoretically) possible. This kind of "Warp drive" works by warping the space ahead of the starship in such a way that the speed of light within the warped space becomes much greater than in normal space (if I recall it right) and so the starship shoots right through, just like in, er, well, Star Trek.
Warp five, Mr. Sulu!
And no, it wasn't the April Fools issue....
And speaking of Star Trek, if you'll recall, in one of the movies (3 or 4 I think) the Enterprise travels back in time to the period just before the successful test of the first warp drive-power spaceship. The crew help the inventor of the warp drive to get his act together and Kirk (I think it is) participates in the first test flight of the drive.
And...here is the interesting part. Shortly AFTER the first successful test of a warp drive by human being, the Vulcans visit Earth BECAUSE A PASSING VULCAN STARSHIP DETECTED THE SIGNATURE RADIATION EMITTED BY THE WARP DRIVE.
That is, contact was made not because aliens picked up radio/TV signals from earth, but because they detected the characteristic signature of a star-faring civilization.
Oh, no, I'm not a Trekkie, not me....
It was Picard's Enterprise, noy Kirk's, and it was Will Riker and Geordi LaForge that went along for the ride.
Trekker Paul
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