You can make a spaceship out of tin as long as you have a proper shield. This is why focusing on research into “hard light”, photonics, etc. is more important than “this metal hard”.
I am aware of it, it’s clearly nonsense.
If it’s true why aren’t we dead yet?
But more importantly how are these predators travelling between the stars to predate on things? The energy they get from eating a civilisation can’t possible equal the energy they need to travel from one civilisation to another. The laws of thermodynamics preclude this kind of thing.
Seems about as likely as Nyarlathotep and Cuthulu.
I would think the first value needs to exceed the second one to make the trip worthwhile to anybody.
However, both of these values are unknown. You can’t know that the energy they get out of a civilization is necessarily smaller than energy required to get to that civilization. They might not need it for ‘‘food’’ directly. They might enslave the civilization to put them to work for their benefit. It could be done for all kinds of reasons we can’t even think of.
We’re primitive, we still only think in terms of resources and food, when we think about attacking another civilization (there’s also the ideological angle, but I think that’s primitive as well). One could attack another civilization for knowledge and technology. But also probably for a number of other reasons we can’t think of, because we’re not at that advanced stage in evolution yet.
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Why would we be dead yet?
We’ve only been sending out strong signals for the tiniest fraction of Earths life.
Are you suggesting interstellar space travel is fast?
removed ~6 off topic posts.
So i live near the largest radio telescope in the world, and one of its jobs is to “read” what is out side of our planets atmosphere, and guess what, they don’t hear anything back.
Using NASA’s Goldstone Solar System Radar and NSF’s Green Bank Telescope, astronomers from the University of California, Los Angeles, confirmed that the icy surface of [Jupiter’s moon Europa] scatters radio energy in an unusually strong and complex way not seen on rocky worlds
^^this was a few days ago^^
While the GBT is famous for receiving signals, its newest trick involves sending them out via a massive technological upgrade called ngRADAR (Next-Generation Radar)
Read the whole thing. Stop removing the last sentence. The ISS does not go FTL
Why would I say that there is no material on another planet that could do it when I can’t confirm what is on another planet? Are you really that dense? What is wrong with you? Are you okay? Do you need a hug? Go have a beer and relax. Something has you really stressed.
Show me the material capable of handling FTL space flight and I’ll be more than happy to admit that such a material exists. That’s all you have to do. Go off-world and find it. Bring it back. You’d make trillions.
It’s not backtracking because YOU keep omitting part of my post. YOU are the one pulling it out of context. I can’t help you when you do that. Seriously have a beer. You definitely need something to calm your nerves.
I don’t care what kind of life we’re talking about- it starts with microbes. All life does. ALL. I don’t know if you understand the concept of “all life” but it’s true. The first step in proving intelligent life on other planets is proving that life AT ALL exists on other planets.
That first step has been confirmed.
The issue no one talks about is the amount of stress travel puts on the craft. It’s the same problem that they encountered when they first tried to go faster than sound. The forces destroyed standard (at the time) plane construction materials. They discovered wind resistance and shockwaves were real problems and they only solved it by coming up with a new material that was stronger and still lightweight.
If you try to approach the speed of light, you’ll increase the mass of the ship itself. It’ll have to withstand that. The faster you go, the more you’ll crush the ship. That’s just the truth about speed. You can’t negotiate with it. Faster speed means more mass. A ship made out of tin would be crushed… well, like a tin can.
Even if the warp drive concept was real and worked exactly as planned, you’re still not getting around this problem. The entire concept of the warp drive is to use a giant gravity well in front of the ship to compress space/time. That gravity would have to be immense! So immense that the ship made out of tin would be crushed instantly.
A wormhole wouldn’t solve it anyway since that concept involves flying into a black hole and hoping that it ends up being a tunnel instead of a well. Except everything we know about black holes points to it being a giant gravity well that rips apart everything that gets too close.
And of course there’s the whole shield thing- sending energy and light ahead of you to somehow create a field capable of being completely indestructible only works in science fiction. One spec of dust gets through and your tin can is vaporized at those speeds.
I don’t know those values it’s true, but the energy required to travel between and survive between the stars is several orders of magnitude larger.
Thus I conclude it is practically impossible.
If it isn’t fast then why would civilisations worry about this mythical predator.
It’s coming to get you in 15 million years, oh noes…
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We are talking about cosmic timescales of how life starts in other parts of the universe in the span of billions of years, right?
If a threat comes to snuff out or enslave planets that make too much noise in a mere few million years that’s very much relevant to why so few planets make noise.
Also nowhere did I say it took them millions of years to arrive. There are lots of timescales between the ‘why aren’t they here yet’ and ‘15 million years’ that you suggested.
We’ve only been sending lots of signals out into space for a century or two. Even if that ‘mythical predator’ can travel incredibly fast upon receiving our signal delayed by how many lightyears they live away from us upon receiving our noise this doesn’t mean they should be here already. They could also have set sail and arrive somewhere in the coming century, or decennium if we’re unlucky.
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You don’t know that. You can’t say that you don’t know the values, but that the value required for travel is higher. To us, right now, it seems that the energy required for travel is higher, but it might not be the case. We’re not comparing obvious elephants to obvious mosquitoes here. The value of a civilization is pretty high itself, especially when advanced technologically.
To make comparative statements, you must know at least the scale of values. But we don’t know even that.
It would have to be fast. To reach the closest star at our current max speed would require 80,000 years and that’s WAY longer than it takes for anything we build to break down.
We couldn’t bring enough spare parts to make that journey and with absolutely zero planets between us and that destination, there would be absolutely no possible way to set down for repairs. And even if we did somehow make it that far with a conventional drive, what guarantee would we have to be able to find a planet suitable for repairs? Any form of spinning centrifuge module for the habitat ring would have long since stopped working which means that there would be no gravity which would be very bad.
Even if we triple our speed, it would still take about 25,000 years. It’s difficult enough to send naval ships across the seas without it needing repairs along the way (sometimes impossible- parts have to be shipped out and brought to the ships via a supply ship). A Naval ship can make that journey in a week. 25,000 years? There’s no chance of survival. The ship wouldn’t make it.
And that’s even if you somehow find a way to have infinite fuel. Voyager I and II made it out of the solar system due to inertia. It didn’t need a life support system or electrical power for the artificial gravity ring.
I was talking about interstellar alien space travel to Lucy, not our own technology.
And with ‘fast’ I meant ‘able to arrive within a few hundred years at most’, because that’s what Lucy implied by asking the question
“If it’s true why aren’t we dead yet”.
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Got it.
A few hundred years would be immeasurably better you’re right, but it’s still not fast enough. Even if you grow your own food, that’s too long of a time for things not to fall apart.
If we assume 15 light years at 20 million mph (about 3% C) in just 500 years, anything that made it would be barely functioning at best. It’d result in a crash landing. Nothing functions forever even in the best environments.
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Sure, rationalise away.
I stand by my statement and will not fear your mythical predators.
If it’s just us in the whole universe, seems to me like an awful waste of space.
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You forgot the quotation marks. At least I included them.
And our solar system is young by galactic measure. There theoretically could have been or still be an advanced civillation out there that just has not come back for a 2nd pass.
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We can only hope, this is the mind of a miner in New Eden
When I mine, I hope to become invisible.
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They’re not my predators. I didn’t come up with them and I’m not sure I buy it. But I can understand the situation conceptually.
It is possible that you’re right – that the energy required for interstellar travel will always exceed the benefit anyone could reap from an entire civilization. But there is also the possibility that it’s not. Maybe the aliens are not like us – dead set on destroying everything that we don’t agree with or whose ways of life we dislike. Maybe they’re benign. Beings who explore the universe and observe/acquaint themselves with other civilizations in order to learn or to make friends.
In such a scenario also, they would steer clear of us because we’re belligerent and hostile to anything that doesn’t conform to our views and understanding. Until we change to a better attitude about ‘‘others’’ amongst us and those not amongst us, we are not worth the trouble for anyone to traverse the universe to get to know us.
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