The multi-verse simulation theory also has elements of scientific religion. It’s basically just dressed up sci-fi but somehow gets taken very seriously by people like Neil Degrasse Tyson and Elon Musk.
I get quite frustrated with science fiction that just sort of assumes the possibility of faster-than-light travel - when it's supposed to be serious sci-fi, anyway. There are some questions about quantum entanglement and such, but going from "maybe theoretically you could have instant transmission of some sort of information, maybe, possibly, quantum wantum oogly boogly," which I can go along with, to the movement of macroscopic objects, is just...too much. It would be like someone from the 1920s saying "surely one day we will be able to travel electrically via the telephone wire." Maybe someone was saying that - I suppose I wouldn't know - but it's that goofy.
It's sort of hard to draw a line because in some sci fi - like Foundation - the travel is faster-than-light, but not particularly fast, and there's clearly an intended analogy with the nautical travel timescales that humans worked with preindustrially. This doesn't rankle me to quite the same extent but I feel like one could get the same effect by reducing one's setting to just the Solar System, plus maaaybe a few outlying stars that are considered very cut-off & isolated, like St Helena. I'm sure it's possible to conduct very grand operas even on that limited stage, while staying within the bounds of scientific reasonability - and that's indeed where most of the rest of Asimov's work is set.
As far as longer scales of interstellar travel, which would still be feasible for longer-lived creatures, unmanned/robotic craft, or self-sustaining populated craft (though that one tests plausibility I will admit), they would probably follow the same space travel notions we do, which, among other things, minimize acceleration & deceleration in favor of orbiting at high speed and detaching probes or landers from the main craft to land if needed.
>For instance, if aliens did visit, why would they do it secretly? Why would they appear briefly over some farm in North Dakota, or crash a single spacecraft into Area 51? I would assume that were alien intelligence actually going to send craft to Earth, we would know it. They would announce themselves. And they would send enough aliens and enough spacecraft to protect themselves in case earthlings turned out to be hostile. The premise of all these space alien theories is that the beings are intelligent enough to build spacecraft we cannot build to travel speeds we cannot travel, but are otherwise complete idiots.
The premise of *your* theory is, you think they'd be sending their Phil Habib. I think it would be more likely their Jane Goodall. Moreover, observation is not a free action, & it's doubly not so if the observed know they're observed.
>By the time our radio signals cross the observed universe, the Sun will have incinerated the Earth and gone through its stellar death cycle itself. We will be long gone.
40 days and 40 nights...40 years to Alpha Centauri....people have always found a way. Odd to assume humans are strictly Earth-dependent when you were just considering incremental, proximate interstellar travel not impossible.
>Civilizations destroy themselves in too short a time frame, or get felled by natural disasters.
Ironically, the letters you're using to write this trace a direct lineage to the oldest of civilizations. A is Aleph, the Ox, originally a hieroglyph, which was turned first on it side clockwise, in the Phoenician alphabet, and then another ninety degrees to become our Latin A. "Civilizations" rise and fall, but civilization is quite durable.
As for my thoughts, I agree that listening for radio signals is silly, for the reasons you stated. There are almost certainly no large technological civilizations on other planets anywhere near us.
My Most Plausible Theory - which I don't think anything you've written here counterindicates - is that if there are or haver ever been any living or life-made things from other planets in our vicinity, they are almost certainly alien *robots*, just as our own spacecraft are almost entirely unmanned.
Let's say we find out Earth is going to get kablammoed by an asteroid. We can't do anything about it, and we don't have time to build an escape pod to Alpha Centauri. We haven't gotten much better at space travel. It is a few years in the future, however, and Ai is even better. We ask the AI to design a "technological ark" that can sustain itself indefinitely underground, detect when conditions are sufficient, and produce two or more humans to restart the human race. Sort of like a seed bank for homo sapiens. This being possible is IMO far more plausible in the near term than any real space travel.
So let's say there really were Martians, however many millions or even billions of years ago. They realize that their planet is going to be fuckaroonied. They build a similar "seed bank" to reproduce their own species (and possibly other Martian lifeforms) in the event that Mars becomes habitable again. Maybe they also tuck a few of them away on other local planets that could become habitable at some point in the future. Maybe the one they tucked on Earth is only "waking up" now - or maybe it's spent the last billion years seeding genetic material into the Earth's biosphere to create conditions suitable for Martians to survive. Either it's now done that, or it woke up early because it detected nuclear detonations (which I think could be a plausible sign
You could also replace Martians with some faraway race shooting out "seed banks" in every direction however many millions or billions of years ago... but Martians are more fun. If I were going to write up the whole sci-fi, I would cast the largely metallic asteroid belt as the twisted, eon-battered remains of solar-orbiting superstructures erected by Martian civilization while it flourished, and I would have the civilization-ending event be that they mined out the metallic core of their planet in making these superstructures, or somehow sucked its rotational energy away, causing Mars to lose its atmosphere & become moribund, depriving their budding space civilization of yolk before it could truly fly. Or maybe it was catastrophically wrecked in a civilization-ending conflict.
This supports having a few aliens, but no larger signs of alien civilization; it explains why exactly aliens seemed to appear so quickly on the scene (not that, to be clear, I believe there is any real evidence that they did) ; it explains why they don't announce themselves, and further, it comes with a very good plot: their civilization was rendered moribund by a nuclear exchange (or some other yet more destructive means of conflict) and they've awoken (or been generated) because humanity has now acquired similar power. Again, this is sci fi, but isn't it a fun theory?
Another fun theory is that the aliens are us, from the future. I'm surprised that one isn't bigger with effective altruists and other basilisk fearers. The physics are an issue for me, there, too, but that's already something they're beyond.
There's also another thing to consider about radio: the inverse square law: basically, double the distance, quarter the power. This is mainly the reason why they're not watching I Love Lucy on Mizar.
The best we could hope for is to detect a signal that just barely stands out above cosmic background and that rings true for the aliens (if they have their receivers on and listening).
The other technology we are developing now is the Colossus telescope which operates on the premise that ET clusters energy the way we do and could potentially spot alien NYC from 50 light years away.
The multi-verse simulation theory also has elements of scientific religion. It’s basically just dressed up sci-fi but somehow gets taken very seriously by people like Neil Degrasse Tyson and Elon Musk.
Belief in aliens is not merely scientism, it demonstrably trends towards gnostic anti-materialism.
I get quite frustrated with science fiction that just sort of assumes the possibility of faster-than-light travel - when it's supposed to be serious sci-fi, anyway. There are some questions about quantum entanglement and such, but going from "maybe theoretically you could have instant transmission of some sort of information, maybe, possibly, quantum wantum oogly boogly," which I can go along with, to the movement of macroscopic objects, is just...too much. It would be like someone from the 1920s saying "surely one day we will be able to travel electrically via the telephone wire." Maybe someone was saying that - I suppose I wouldn't know - but it's that goofy.
It's sort of hard to draw a line because in some sci fi - like Foundation - the travel is faster-than-light, but not particularly fast, and there's clearly an intended analogy with the nautical travel timescales that humans worked with preindustrially. This doesn't rankle me to quite the same extent but I feel like one could get the same effect by reducing one's setting to just the Solar System, plus maaaybe a few outlying stars that are considered very cut-off & isolated, like St Helena. I'm sure it's possible to conduct very grand operas even on that limited stage, while staying within the bounds of scientific reasonability - and that's indeed where most of the rest of Asimov's work is set.
As far as longer scales of interstellar travel, which would still be feasible for longer-lived creatures, unmanned/robotic craft, or self-sustaining populated craft (though that one tests plausibility I will admit), they would probably follow the same space travel notions we do, which, among other things, minimize acceleration & deceleration in favor of orbiting at high speed and detaching probes or landers from the main craft to land if needed.
>For instance, if aliens did visit, why would they do it secretly? Why would they appear briefly over some farm in North Dakota, or crash a single spacecraft into Area 51? I would assume that were alien intelligence actually going to send craft to Earth, we would know it. They would announce themselves. And they would send enough aliens and enough spacecraft to protect themselves in case earthlings turned out to be hostile. The premise of all these space alien theories is that the beings are intelligent enough to build spacecraft we cannot build to travel speeds we cannot travel, but are otherwise complete idiots.
The premise of *your* theory is, you think they'd be sending their Phil Habib. I think it would be more likely their Jane Goodall. Moreover, observation is not a free action, & it's doubly not so if the observed know they're observed.
>By the time our radio signals cross the observed universe, the Sun will have incinerated the Earth and gone through its stellar death cycle itself. We will be long gone.
40 days and 40 nights...40 years to Alpha Centauri....people have always found a way. Odd to assume humans are strictly Earth-dependent when you were just considering incremental, proximate interstellar travel not impossible.
>Civilizations destroy themselves in too short a time frame, or get felled by natural disasters.
Ironically, the letters you're using to write this trace a direct lineage to the oldest of civilizations. A is Aleph, the Ox, originally a hieroglyph, which was turned first on it side clockwise, in the Phoenician alphabet, and then another ninety degrees to become our Latin A. "Civilizations" rise and fall, but civilization is quite durable.
As for my thoughts, I agree that listening for radio signals is silly, for the reasons you stated. There are almost certainly no large technological civilizations on other planets anywhere near us.
My Most Plausible Theory - which I don't think anything you've written here counterindicates - is that if there are or haver ever been any living or life-made things from other planets in our vicinity, they are almost certainly alien *robots*, just as our own spacecraft are almost entirely unmanned.
Let's say we find out Earth is going to get kablammoed by an asteroid. We can't do anything about it, and we don't have time to build an escape pod to Alpha Centauri. We haven't gotten much better at space travel. It is a few years in the future, however, and Ai is even better. We ask the AI to design a "technological ark" that can sustain itself indefinitely underground, detect when conditions are sufficient, and produce two or more humans to restart the human race. Sort of like a seed bank for homo sapiens. This being possible is IMO far more plausible in the near term than any real space travel.
So let's say there really were Martians, however many millions or even billions of years ago. They realize that their planet is going to be fuckaroonied. They build a similar "seed bank" to reproduce their own species (and possibly other Martian lifeforms) in the event that Mars becomes habitable again. Maybe they also tuck a few of them away on other local planets that could become habitable at some point in the future. Maybe the one they tucked on Earth is only "waking up" now - or maybe it's spent the last billion years seeding genetic material into the Earth's biosphere to create conditions suitable for Martians to survive. Either it's now done that, or it woke up early because it detected nuclear detonations (which I think could be a plausible sign
You could also replace Martians with some faraway race shooting out "seed banks" in every direction however many millions or billions of years ago... but Martians are more fun. If I were going to write up the whole sci-fi, I would cast the largely metallic asteroid belt as the twisted, eon-battered remains of solar-orbiting superstructures erected by Martian civilization while it flourished, and I would have the civilization-ending event be that they mined out the metallic core of their planet in making these superstructures, or somehow sucked its rotational energy away, causing Mars to lose its atmosphere & become moribund, depriving their budding space civilization of yolk before it could truly fly. Or maybe it was catastrophically wrecked in a civilization-ending conflict.
This supports having a few aliens, but no larger signs of alien civilization; it explains why exactly aliens seemed to appear so quickly on the scene (not that, to be clear, I believe there is any real evidence that they did) ; it explains why they don't announce themselves, and further, it comes with a very good plot: their civilization was rendered moribund by a nuclear exchange (or some other yet more destructive means of conflict) and they've awoken (or been generated) because humanity has now acquired similar power. Again, this is sci fi, but isn't it a fun theory?
Another fun theory is that the aliens are us, from the future. I'm surprised that one isn't bigger with effective altruists and other basilisk fearers. The physics are an issue for me, there, too, but that's already something they're beyond.
There's also another thing to consider about radio: the inverse square law: basically, double the distance, quarter the power. This is mainly the reason why they're not watching I Love Lucy on Mizar.
The best we could hope for is to detect a signal that just barely stands out above cosmic background and that rings true for the aliens (if they have their receivers on and listening).
The other technology we are developing now is the Colossus telescope which operates on the premise that ET clusters energy the way we do and could potentially spot alien NYC from 50 light years away.