When my great grandma was born, we didn't have flight, radar, lasers, radio, etc... Why would we think that a civilization capable of building massive space structures would be communicating in such a slow and imprecise way. The idea that we've discovered all there is to know about communication over vast distances is hubris.
We can't see anything because we have not yet discovered what we're looking for.
That we would receive a signal with the radio telescope discussed here would pretty much demand either that they make tremendous use of a very specific form of propulsion, or that they are putting a substantial fraction of their available energy into contacting civilizations of precisely our technological level. There's no thought that we'd pick up their radio chatter between themselves- we couldn't pick up Earth's radio noise from that distance, and we're only getting quieter as our technology becomes more effective.
Aliens in the business of contacting emerging civilizations must find themselves with an interesting tradeoff between transmitter power usage and contactee technology level- at a guess, it would be exponentially more expensive to contact species earlier on in their development. We may still just not be far along enough that the cost-benefit ratio makes sense to talk to us.
For starters we can easily talk/communicate to your grandmother and any human in history.
So I assume that you think they fear being found and are not trying to communicate (I find it unlikely they just don't care, as humans we are very interested in working out communications in the most simplest animals and plants)
Yet we have found them with our 'primitive' technology.
Well, if it's actually a Dyson swarm in the making, we'll find out, watching the star go gradually dark during the next few hundred (or thousand?) years..
It's an interesting idea. For a civilisation is constructing a Dyson swarm, the time required to build a 20% coverage one to 30% one should be less than a decade. If I remember correctly, NASA is already be able to observe 1% of the difference. So we only need to wait for a year.
Correction:
"No signal that we use Detected from KIC 8462852"
And ? Nobody with good physical understanding uses Hertz EM waves for communication except emergency broadcasts if he is clever. Assumptions over assumptions and not looking outside the box, this is what SETI does and that's why they are not seeing anything of interest.
Mining minerals ? Nobody mines minerals in on a planet, you use asteroids for that. Microgravity will make separation easier.
Occupying another planet ?
Everybody with understanding of history knows that it does not work, endless conflicts, suffering, problem, etc. Makes no sense, just take another one.
But our planet is so special!!
No its not, even our next neighbors have statistically speaking one habitable planet. Just because we only see the huge gas planets with our current observation tech does not mean there are not many smaller ones. Remember 15 years ago, they were unsure if planets in other systems did even exist, now we have 1000s found.
To far away ?
~ 1480 ly is not easily done, you need a type 2 spaceship with double fields which gives you restrictions on the minimum size and still there will be some upper limit on the travel speed for complex biological system like us. We have currently only type 0 spaceships (impulse based). EM-Drive is a type 1 thruster, but a very bad one. How fast you can be there really depends on your tech, it can be from 16h - 100s of years.
Just because you don't know if they are not doing anything, does not make it so. Its not a valid deduction.
Anyway, don't worry, most of the Galaxy is very friendly and we are the Klingon-Ferengi type of idiot the rest is laughing about.
If somebody wanted, they would have overtaken us already. Everything we have are toys compared to whats possible. Conflicts would just be so devastating, nobody would win. War never has winners, someone just looses more then the other, something we as a species still have not understood.
1480 light years away...it's just too far for practical travel on any sort of scale, and I assume scale would be required to "do something" to us beyond taking a glance - and even that seems far-fetched.
One point consistently glossed over is the fact that if you believe nothing can exceed the speed of light then even if we find intelligent life we will never communicate in any meaningful sense of the word. It would be more like mutual observation. Are there any sci-fi works that acknowledge this depressing reality and somehow manage to make a workable story?
Alastair Reynolds is a hard scifi author with a PhD in astrophysics, and most of his works deal with this in some fashion. One is Pushing Ice (SPOILER IN REST OF POST), which tackles your question about civilizations not really having the ability to communicate with each other, not only because the galaxy 100,000 light years across, but also because it's billions of years old. That is, you could have lots of civilizations rise and fall, even in the same neighborhood of the galaxy.
So the big idea revealed at the end of the book (most of it is structured as "what is going on!?") is that one of the early civilizations planted lots of moons around the galaxy that would lure in and trap ships and then accelerate off somewhere. At high accelerations, for various small amounts of subjective time, millions or billions of years could pass. By calibrating all the moon traps then, lots of different civlizations from different corners of the galaxy, each originating in different eras, would be arriving at about the same time/place.
The Forever War, by Joe Haldeman, has both sides in the conflict sending spaceships at .99c to where they think the enemy will be.. with the unfortunate reality that if the enemy has populated & developed from that location first, the arriving fleet will be thousands of years of innovation behind and be wiped out without a chance.
Written by a survivor of the Vietnam War and a frighteningly poignant read.
"'The laws have changed sir, you no longer get a discharge after 1000 years. We're shipping you back out in 2 weeks' and of course the bastards only pay you for your subjective time, otherwise we'd have soldiers getting rich"
Yes, it's a staple of hard science fiction. It's generally assumed that interstellar cultures are isolated, extremely long lived, and/or have solved the problems of practical interstellar travel (maintaining high thrust, dealing with radiation, not going splat on a dust particle at .99999c).
A Deepness in the Sky deals with interstellar traders that do not have FTL.
The universe the book is set in has a gimmick to allow FTL, but that book doesn't use FTL (part of the gimmick is that it isn't possible in much of the galaxy).
Edit: The Revelation Space books also have lots of people moving between stars at below light speed.
There have been a number of such works. Olaf Stapledon's Starmaker takes a somewhat poetic approach to the idea. And restraining oneself to an Einsteinian universe where nothing exceeds C was a hallmark of "hard-sci-fi" although even Arthur C. Clarke fudged and went for hyperspace when the plot was otherwise going to drag for a few millennia.
For a more recent take on the topic check out Karl Schroeder's Permanence [1] which is a damn fine read and doesn't run the hyperspace cheat and is all the more operatic for that.
I don't think it's glossed over. It's a separate issue though.
Just knowing for certain that there is intelligent life - or any life - on other worlds would have huge ramifications for how humanity views itself and the universe.
It would be interesting to see how major religions responded to confirmation that there is other intelligent life that is not made in the same image as us.
I think your reasoning is somewhat an artifact of bias in science fiction in the first place. You see presumption of FTL all over the place, and so it's depressing to consider that it is very likely a hard impossibility, because it rules out a lot of those stories. But, there isn't a lot of science fiction which explores the consequences of eliminating biological aging, or anything else which might make 1500 years actually a rather short span of time for intelligent life.
Maybe the galaxy is full of life which thinks nothing of going on a journey that would take thousands of our years, or longer.
I don't think Seti look for intelligent life because they want to have a conversation. They are searching because finding evidence of intelligent life out there would be a very important discovery. Perhaps one of the most important discoveries we could ever make. Are we alone in the universe? It seems like we should not be, but we have a sample size of 1 so far. It's a big big big question.
Its a neophillia thing. Plenty of interesting cultural exchange topics exist pre-600 AD. Ship them the complete works of the Greco Roman era, the Pāli Tipitaka, the bible... About 110 years ago Oxford Press published a 50 book series of English translations called "The sacred books of the east" off the top of my head I believe all the originals predate 600 AD? We certainly wouldn't lack for discussion topics.
Its interesting that no era thinks they're particularly dumb or ignorant. They didn't know many cool programming algorithms, we (in general, as a population) don't know as much euclidian geometry or stoic philosophy. I'm sure we'd have plenty to say about some topic even if the topic would change over 1400 or so years.
There's also a general insistence on culture shock, which I disbelieve in. I'm not that old, and something like Plutarch isn't that much closer in age to me than to a newly graduated kid. "We" would do just fine.
For one, we know nothing of the remote party's biology and medical achievements. In fact we don't even know whether the remote party would be a biological entity at all. They could be an engineered AI built by a species long gone or marginalized. Bottomline is we have no clue of their lifespan and mortality.
On the other hand, we can also change beyond recognition within a single roundtrip so if human progress is sufficient then by the time the conversation really gets going it may become possible.
Also, the nearest interesting stars are much closer than 1480 ly [1]. Generally under the most primitive assumptions about star distribution (uniform) we have a fast increase (O(n^3) within distance n ly) in the number of systems we could talk to.
It's also important to keep in mind that this depressing perspective is a contemporary, anthropomorphic one.
It might be the case that communications using electromagnetic radiation are an unremarkable blip on the timeline of technological progress. The modern era has only been in full-swing for a paltry few hundred years!
I like to think that the size and scope of the universe suggests that there absolutely are many many ways to travel and communicate faster than light (and presumably well beyond), that we haven't even imagined yet. Zoom out enough, and any speed or distance scale appears tiny.
My favorite sci-fi work on this topic (and I dare say my favorite sci-fi work ever) is a series of posts on kuro5hin by localroger, together titled "Passages in the void." You can find them on http://localroger.com/ . The speed of light issue is solved without inventing new physics, which is extremely satisfying, but there is still enough of a leap of faith to make it satisfying sci-fi. Brilliant work.
> if you believe nothing can exceed the speed of light then even if we find intelligent life we will never communicate in any meaningful sense of the word.
Quantum entanglement could very plausibly allow for superluminal communication. Yes, I know that it isn't proven, or even considered plausible as yet, but call me an optimist.
[+] [-] pheroden|10 years ago|reply
We can't see anything because we have not yet discovered what we're looking for.
[+] [-] maxander|10 years ago|reply
Aliens in the business of contacting emerging civilizations must find themselves with an interesting tradeoff between transmitter power usage and contactee technology level- at a guess, it would be exponentially more expensive to contact species earlier on in their development. We may still just not be far along enough that the cost-benefit ratio makes sense to talk to us.
[+] [-] gchokov|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] aaron695|10 years ago|reply
So I assume that you think they fear being found and are not trying to communicate (I find it unlikely they just don't care, as humans we are very interested in working out communications in the most simplest animals and plants)
Yet we have found them with our 'primitive' technology.
[+] [-] Faint|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wangii|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] PepeGomez|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] poelzi|10 years ago|reply
And ? Nobody with good physical understanding uses Hertz EM waves for communication except emergency broadcasts if he is clever. Assumptions over assumptions and not looking outside the box, this is what SETI does and that's why they are not seeing anything of interest.
[+] [-] wangii|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] poelzi|10 years ago|reply
Mining minerals ? Nobody mines minerals in on a planet, you use asteroids for that. Microgravity will make separation easier.
Occupying another planet ?
Everybody with understanding of history knows that it does not work, endless conflicts, suffering, problem, etc. Makes no sense, just take another one.
But our planet is so special!! No its not, even our next neighbors have statistically speaking one habitable planet. Just because we only see the huge gas planets with our current observation tech does not mean there are not many smaller ones. Remember 15 years ago, they were unsure if planets in other systems did even exist, now we have 1000s found.
To far away ? ~ 1480 ly is not easily done, you need a type 2 spaceship with double fields which gives you restrictions on the minimum size and still there will be some upper limit on the travel speed for complex biological system like us. We have currently only type 0 spaceships (impulse based). EM-Drive is a type 1 thruster, but a very bad one. How fast you can be there really depends on your tech, it can be from 16h - 100s of years.
Just because you don't know if they are not doing anything, does not make it so. Its not a valid deduction.
Anyway, don't worry, most of the Galaxy is very friendly and we are the Klingon-Ferengi type of idiot the rest is laughing about.
If somebody wanted, they would have overtaken us already. Everything we have are toys compared to whats possible. Conflicts would just be so devastating, nobody would win. War never has winners, someone just looses more then the other, something we as a species still have not understood.
[+] [-] flatline|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] deepnet|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] happyscrappy|10 years ago|reply
One point consistently glossed over is the fact that if you believe nothing can exceed the speed of light then even if we find intelligent life we will never communicate in any meaningful sense of the word. It would be more like mutual observation. Are there any sci-fi works that acknowledge this depressing reality and somehow manage to make a workable story?
[+] [-] losvedir|10 years ago|reply
So the big idea revealed at the end of the book (most of it is structured as "what is going on!?") is that one of the early civilizations planted lots of moons around the galaxy that would lure in and trap ships and then accelerate off somewhere. At high accelerations, for various small amounts of subjective time, millions or billions of years could pass. By calibrating all the moon traps then, lots of different civlizations from different corners of the galaxy, each originating in different eras, would be arriving at about the same time/place.
[+] [-] hellbanner|10 years ago|reply
Written by a survivor of the Vietnam War and a frighteningly poignant read.
"'The laws have changed sir, you no longer get a discharge after 1000 years. We're shipping you back out in 2 weeks' and of course the bastards only pay you for your subjective time, otherwise we'd have soldiers getting rich"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Forever_War
[+] [-] mordechai9000|10 years ago|reply
It's interesting to note that a traveler on a spaceship that can maintain 1g of acceleration would experience 14 years subjective time while traversing 1480 light years. (According to http://convertalot.com/relativistic_star_ship_calculator.htm...)
[+] [-] maxerickson|10 years ago|reply
The universe the book is set in has a gimmick to allow FTL, but that book doesn't use FTL (part of the gimmick is that it isn't possible in much of the galaxy).
Edit: The Revelation Space books also have lots of people moving between stars at below light speed.
[+] [-] olefoo|10 years ago|reply
For a more recent take on the topic check out Karl Schroeder's Permanence [1] which is a damn fine read and doesn't run the hyperspace cheat and is all the more operatic for that.
1. http://amzn.to/1LYhwwm
[+] [-] paublyrne|10 years ago|reply
Just knowing for certain that there is intelligent life - or any life - on other worlds would have huge ramifications for how humanity views itself and the universe.
It would be interesting to see how major religions responded to confirmation that there is other intelligent life that is not made in the same image as us.
Do aliens go to Heaven?
[+] [-] deciplex|10 years ago|reply
Maybe the galaxy is full of life which thinks nothing of going on a journey that would take thousands of our years, or longer.
[+] [-] codeulike|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] VLM|10 years ago|reply
Its interesting that no era thinks they're particularly dumb or ignorant. They didn't know many cool programming algorithms, we (in general, as a population) don't know as much euclidian geometry or stoic philosophy. I'm sure we'd have plenty to say about some topic even if the topic would change over 1400 or so years.
There's also a general insistence on culture shock, which I disbelieve in. I'm not that old, and something like Plutarch isn't that much closer in age to me than to a newly graduated kid. "We" would do just fine.
[+] [-] avz|10 years ago|reply
For one, we know nothing of the remote party's biology and medical achievements. In fact we don't even know whether the remote party would be a biological entity at all. They could be an engineered AI built by a species long gone or marginalized. Bottomline is we have no clue of their lifespan and mortality.
On the other hand, we can also change beyond recognition within a single roundtrip so if human progress is sufficient then by the time the conversation really gets going it may become possible.
Also, the nearest interesting stars are much closer than 1480 ly [1]. Generally under the most primitive assumptions about star distribution (uniform) we have a fast increase (O(n^3) within distance n ly) in the number of systems we could talk to.
[1] http://www.space.com/18964-the-nearest-stars-to-earth-infogr...
[+] [-] hacker_9|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jordanpg|10 years ago|reply
It might be the case that communications using electromagnetic radiation are an unremarkable blip on the timeline of technological progress. The modern era has only been in full-swing for a paltry few hundred years!
I like to think that the size and scope of the universe suggests that there absolutely are many many ways to travel and communicate faster than light (and presumably well beyond), that we haven't even imagined yet. Zoom out enough, and any speed or distance scale appears tiny.
[+] [-] foobarian|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bmelton|10 years ago|reply
Quantum entanglement could very plausibly allow for superluminal communication. Yes, I know that it isn't proven, or even considered plausible as yet, but call me an optimist.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superluminal_communication
[+] [-] MichaelApproved|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Keyframe|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rbanffy|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rust4homoslol|10 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] TerryADavis|10 years ago|reply
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