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Extraterrestrials Probably Haven't Found Us - Yet
kasparn writes "The Guardian today has a story about the Danish astrophysicist Rasmus Bjoerk, who recently conducted simulations on how long it will take to colonize the Milky Way. The basic idea is to send out probes in different directions (including various heights above the galactic plane). He estimates that it will take some 10 billion years to explore 4 % of the Milky Way. Since the age of the Universe is of the same order, his conclusion is that aliens can't have had time required to find us yet."
Why 1/10th c? Why not 99% of c? Why not faster than c? Granted faster than light travel is nothing more than theory and dreams at this point, but this article makes the assumption that other civilizations have not progressed in the field of physics any faster nor further than we ourselves have, to date.
I am, therefore you think.
Sheesh, talk about "proof by lack of imagination." This is supposed to answer the Fermi Paradox?
You can't explore a galaxy with a handful of probes. 72 probes??? First of all, if you're going to do it that way, you'd create hundreds of thousands of probes, if not millions of probes (mass production would reduce the cost). Second, you still probably wouldn't do it that way. You'd wait until you had the technology to make self-replicating probes, and the galaxy could potentially be explored in thousands of years.
Not impressed by this guy's argument.
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
To paraphrase: But Sir! If we only send 8 probes it'll take billions of years to search a mere 4% of the Milky Way galaxy!
That's why you have to make the probes self replicating.. utilizing in-situ resources to make more probes at each star they visit, the growth becomes exponential and it only takes a few thousand years to search the entire galaxy. And seeing as we're visiting all these stars anyway, how about looking for planets that don't have life on them, but have nice suitable conditions for starting life on them. Cover a virgin planet with a wide variety of Earth lifeforms and fly on.
How we know is more important than what we know.
Whatever his assumptions are that leads him to 4%... it seems that he is considering only the probability that any ONE alien civilization is looking. But in all likelihood there are many, if not millions of alien civilizations out there than may be search, so the probability that any ONE of those million will find us seems quite a bit higher than 4%.
One of these Turing machines reached Earth about 4 billion years ago. It first had to start by building very simple amino acids, then it graduated to proteins, then to RNA and then to DNA, and then these DNA machines built bodies around them and started using natural selection to evolve into more and more capable organisms. The final aim of these DNA structures is to build powerful radio beacons and send the information back to the original aliens who created these molecules and scattered them to the (solar) wind.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
It may be cheaper to send robotic missions, but probably not as much fun. For a race serious about exploring a significant fraction of the galaxy ...
... I doubt if the manned vs unmanned costs are an issue driving the choice of exploration method.
I'll refer to my second sentence: "Then if anything interesting is found send the "manned" missions." Do you realize how much nothing is out there, where is the "fun" in finding another dead rock just like so many others? Forget the romantic fantasy of spaceflight, it will be uncomfortable, boring, and stressful. With robots doing the scouting there will be a greater number of interesting things for the manned missions to investigate, possible more than could be sent out. Now if manned missions did the initial exploration, the people would largely see nothing of particular interest. I think you are vastly overestimating the novelty of finding another dead rock in space, sure it would interest us, but a generation born after such discoveries become commonplace?
Actually it is a major point of debate, scientists favoring a large number of robotic missions, politicians favoring a handful of manned missions. Manned missions are multiple orders of magnitude more expensive.
More puzzlingly, he assumes these probes can repair themselves for and keep running for billions of years, but they can't self-replicate. Really? If the probe can repair every potential internal probem on its own, the capacity to self-replicate should come almost for free.
That's why I laugh when people spot human-sized UFO craft. If there are UFOs here, they're microscopic.
Assumptions are just that, assumptions. You can laugh all you want, but to me, it just shows one more scientific dogma. The attitude of "knowing it all" is sadly very prevalent here on Slashdot, and probably why so many spend time writing here, instead of discovering new stuff.
The problem is lack of creativity. In 0.5 seconds, I thought of nano-UFOs. Send one, or trillions of those, and let them dig into a moon or planet to rebuilt itself into a fully fledged macro-sized "UFO". Or, maybe if you want to "recreate yourself in your own image", why not send out organic "bombs"? Etc. etc. There are so many possibilities when you dont restrict your mind.
Just because you cant think of it, doesnt mean it isnt possible or thinkable. Please free your mind! There is so much more to know than we already know! And instead of giving focus to more effective ways to kill people, why not science of life?
http://www.debunkingskeptics.com/