What we currenly know about how the universe works basically says it is not possible to excede the speed of light.
It is the hubris of mankind to think that we actually know much about the way the universe works.
That mistake has been made over and over throughout history and the one great truth is that we've been wrong so very many times.
I know that using our current technology, FTL travel is not possible. Your mistake is thinking that we are at some pinnacle of development. You see that we have reached the top of a small hill, maybe 100ft tall, and think we have achieved something great. I see Mt. Everest off in the distance and know we have a long way to go.
BTW, firearms are a bad example of "looks like magic" to somebody 500 years ago. Those automatic weapons haven't changed much in 100 years, and single-shot firearms very similar to what we have today have existed for over 400, with gunpowder-fired projectiles around 800 years old.
I never said that the firearms are "looks like magic", I said they would prevent the burning at the stake.
And frankly, while they had primitive guns back then, I quite imagine they would see a M134 Minigun firing as rather magical.
Well of course, but that misses the point. Aliens traveling across space to come here would of course bring their supplies with them. If we traveled back in time a few hundred years, we'd of course bring supplies with us.
The point is, if the US military today decided to invade... lets say the North Sentinel Islanders, how well do you think that would go for the Sentinelese people?
Small rockets are one thing, you shouldn't underestimate the challenge of building a Saturn V, it is an amazingly complex machine getting those huge engines to work, the fuel system and pumps, and making the whole thing fly without blowing up.
Take a modern turbofan engine. The basic concept isn't rocket science (no pun intended), but the actual development and application of it is harder than you might imagine.
Assuming that I took more than just myself, I don't think burning on a large stake would be a risk, we have automatic weapons.:)
That being said, your example proves my point, it would look like magic to those people who have no frame of reference.
We like to think we're smart today, but the reality is, we can't conceive of what 500 years from now will look like. We can guess, but we are likely to not just be wrong, but REALLY BADLY WRONG.
We may not even keep our bodies in 500 years, preferring to replace them with constructs with cybernetic brains. Most people I toss that idea to are horrified, including my mother and my wife, who think it sounds horrible. Which tells me that it might actually happen, but I really have no idea.
The number of planets, number of galaxies, and the size of the universe... if it doesn't exist, then there is something wrong with basic probability theory...
There are simply too many chances for it to exist for it not to. It just isn't likely to exist anywhere near us.
They still have to match orbital velocity on the same ecliptic, even at 0.1c they would show up from a long ways away. There's no "stealth" in space, plain and simple. Spaceships produce too much everything, heat, radiation, gas etc.
Orbital insertion would be pretty obvious as well, even at the L1 behind the moon we would notice them coming in.
We would? You mean like we notice all those asteroids flying by that we get a few days notice of, or sometimes get notice of AFTER they have passed us?
What makes you think there is no stealth in space? Anyone who can come up with a FTL drive likely can come up with stealth in space.
How does it work? I haven't a clue, but I don't know how FTL works either, just like someone from 400 years ago couldn't tell you how a modern turbofan engine works.
But a space-jumping fleet of invading space aliens is? Did you even read the summary?
Actually, it is very probable indeed... just not HERE!
Space is big, really big, unbelievably big... Odds are, somewhere out there, "space-jumping fleet of invading space aliens" DOES exist. Odds of them being ANYWHERE NEAR HERE? Almost zero.
Imagine the US Military of today decided to invade Europe of Napoleon's era.
Would their "old" technology do them a lick of good when a thousand M1 tanks rolled across the field at them? What about when Predator drones are flying overhead launching missiles at their supply depots behind the lines?
Perhaps their bow and arrows will be effective against the modern artillery and mortars of modern warfare?
---
Instead perhaps we are "closer" to the aliens, so lets move forward to World War I, it is 1916, armies in Europe are locked on the Western Front, unable to make any headway either way.
The modern US military shows up with all the above items...
How long would the Germans last?
Reverse the roles, modern 21st century German army is transported back to 1916, how long would the British and French have lasted against the Leopard II tanks and Tornado fighter-bombers?
---
It is silly to think that anything that we have would do anything at all to a civilization able to travel the stars.
Of course, which is why our Sci-Fi shows are fun, but at the end of the day, silly...
Take Star Trek... 400 years from now, I highly doubt we'll be walking around talking to the ship, we'll be interfaced directly with it and with each other...
But that doesn't make sense to your average person today and it doesn't make for great television, so they show "future versions of today", rather than the complete change that would really happen.
Go back 400 years, what were most people doing? Heck, most people couldn't read and write, most simply spent 90% of their time working to obtain food.
Try to explain 21st century life with the Internet, Space Stations, and Nuclear Weapons, to someone from that time. You'd be wasting your time.
I'd be shocked if we didn't find life in the oceans of Jupiter's moons, if we ever bothered to go there.
We have found life on Earth in places once thought impossible to support it.
I suspect the Universe is full of life, we can't can't see it from here and some of it we wouldn't be looking for until we ran over it.
You don't stop a lobster from pinching you by smashing it with a sledgehammer, you put rubber bands around its claws. I'd expect something like focused energy weapons to knock out anything resembling weapons so that the biomatter can be harvested peacefully.
Why use weapons? Why not just put the population to sleep? A modern tazer is a police officer's tool to subdue someone without shooting them, but it is crude in practice. Advance that idea 100 years and I imagine we'll have something closer to the stun rods from Demolition Man, just touch someone and they are put nicely to sleep. Advance it further and you could probably hit a whole city with a "go to sleep ray".
it's highly unlikely that space travel can be accomplished without huge amounts of EM radiation.
Why? Why is it unlikely? We have really no idea how to travel faster than light, like so many things, I suspect it is something we haven't even thought of... like how silly airplanes looked, until they actually flew and pretty fast they didn't look anything like the silly 19th century attempts to fly.
What was missing was power, lots of power, in a lightweight package.
Even once we had airplanes, you have only a lifetime from 1903 to 1969, yet people in 1903 couldn't have dreamed of what the Saturn V would look like or how it would work.
It is not rational to assume that unknown technology means godlike abilities.
Nonsense, sure it does...
I am quite sure that if you went back 500 years and took modern technology with you, it would look quite "godlike" to those people.
If we can detect exoplanets, what makes you think that we wouldn't be able to detect alien ships?
For one thing, the planets are in one place, stay in one place (well, in orbit) for a long time, they aren't trying to avoid detection, and they are really big. They also have an effect on something even bigger that is its own light source, a star.
Starships fit none of those parameters. Even more, we aren't even looking for starships and if we were, we don't know what to look for. We DO know what to look for when it comes to stars and planets.
While that is a nice hopeful story, and while I suppose ANYTHING is possible...
It isn't very probable...
Besides, even if they were at our level of technology, if they have starships, then they have nuclear weapons. They don't have to invade, they can simple drop rocks or nukes on us to accomplish the same thing, and there wouldn't be anything we could do about it...
Unless of course, someone had a Mac laptop and was a cable repair man!:)
Frankly, any aliens able to travel here from another world are so far ahead of us, it wouldn't make any difference if we detected them or not.
However, you asked the question... so...
Our space detection system is largely aimed at Earth. For example, to warn of us of ICBM launches the first system put into space was called MIDAS between 1960 and 1966.
The GPS satellites have nuclear detonation detectors, which doesn't do any good, but it another example of how our systems are aimed at Earth.
All the stuff pointed out into space, like the Hubble Space Telescope, are designed to see VERY far away and aren't looking for ships. Given the small likely size of any ships compared to planets and moons, we aren't likely to be able to see them even if we're looking for them, until they are on top of us.
After all, we still don't have a telescope that can see the moon landing sights. Pictures taken from sats in lunar orbit have gotten some pictures, but they aren't as good as you'd expect.
Yea, you can tell what it is, because you know what you're looking at, but if you didn't even know where to look? You could stare at the moon for a month with such a camera and see nothing.
--
TL;DR - We likely would have no notice whatsoever of aliens until they entered orbit of Earth, and even then, it is just as likely to be a random person with a telescope who spots them as anyone from the government.
Unless of course they can be seen with the naked eye, if their ships are big enough and they are in low orbit, that is possible.
I suspect the market isn't there yet for 4 TB SSD drives... and it wouldn't require a 3.5" drive case, you could fit 4 TB of NAND easily in a 2.5" drive case (or even less).
That said, the number of people who want to pay $2,000 for such a drive are still quite limited. Give it time...
A TB has already been done in SLC, that isn't hard to do... it is however enterprise only and very expensive, thus not of much interest to your average user...
It isn't going to be something that you see for your personal use.
According to the American Society of Civil Engineers, we need to invest $3.6 Trillion in infrastructure by 2020.
Now I'll grant you, they are biased to make that number high, they profit from it. But that being said, our roads are not new, China is going to build more road in the next 5 years than the US has built in the past 30 years. They already have more roads than we have, they'll be double our size in short order because they are investing in this.
We are not because no one wants to pay for it.
So jobs are indeed limited, because a job implies a paycheck, and someone has to be on the other end of that paycheck.
1 farmer today can do the work of a 20 farmers from 200 years ago. Yes, he does it using machines which took a thousand people to design and build, but those machines are made in one factory and used by 10 thousand farmers nationwide.
So 11,000 people today are doing the work of 200,000 from 200 years ago.
While your math is a bit off, your concept is correct (1 farmer today actually does far more than 20 farmers from 200 years ago).
The problem becomes, what happens when 1 farmer does the work of 1,000 farmers? Then 10,000?
As it stands, one farmer can run a whole field of tractors and combines from his farm house, they don't need drivers anymore.
But at some point the knowledge will be lost if we're not careful to keep enough people informed on how it all works. It reminds me of the scene in the Matrix movies when Neo is talking to the head cheese down below in the "works". The head cheese makes the comment while pointing to a machine and says, "you see that machine there? I have no idea how that machine works, I only know that it needs to work"
Will we reach a day when we point to the big fancy machines and say that? "Oh boy, those machines provide all our food, shame no one remembers how they work.
Or, in this case, movie screenwriters who were just trying to get a point across in three sentences without having to make Tommy Lee-Jones give a lecture on ancient philosophy.
Of course you hit the nail on the head... the poster you're replying to might or might not be correct (I really am not enough of an expert to say), but it misses the point completely...
The point that was being made is simple, yet profound...
Slashdot Mirror
What we currenly know about how the universe works basically says it is not possible to excede the speed of light.
It is the hubris of mankind to think that we actually know much about the way the universe works.
That mistake has been made over and over throughout history and the one great truth is that we've been wrong so very many times.
I know that using our current technology, FTL travel is not possible. Your mistake is thinking that we are at some pinnacle of development. You see that we have reached the top of a small hill, maybe 100ft tall, and think we have achieved something great. I see Mt. Everest off in the distance and know we have a long way to go.
BTW, firearms are a bad example of "looks like magic" to somebody 500 years ago. Those automatic weapons haven't changed much in 100 years, and single-shot firearms very similar to what we have today have existed for over 400, with gunpowder-fired projectiles around 800 years old.
I never said that the firearms are "looks like magic", I said they would prevent the burning at the stake.
And frankly, while they had primitive guns back then, I quite imagine they would see a M134 Minigun firing as rather magical.
http://youtu.be/nG3Hi7K9MU4
I'm not quite sure if you understand how Stealth works then...
The idea of Stealth aircraft is to not reflect EM radiation at all. It bounces it away in another direction or absorbs it outright.
If detecting stealth was as simple as using a different frequency, then it would be worthless.
Well of course, but that misses the point. Aliens traveling across space to come here would of course bring their supplies with them. If we traveled back in time a few hundred years, we'd of course bring supplies with us.
The point is, if the US military today decided to invade... lets say the North Sentinel Islanders, how well do you think that would go for the Sentinelese people?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S...
It was the "how it would work" part that was key.
Small rockets are one thing, you shouldn't underestimate the challenge of building a Saturn V, it is an amazingly complex machine getting those huge engines to work, the fuel system and pumps, and making the whole thing fly without blowing up.
Take a modern turbofan engine. The basic concept isn't rocket science (no pun intended), but the actual development and application of it is harder than you might imagine.
Assuming that I took more than just myself, I don't think burning on a large stake would be a risk, we have automatic weapons. :)
That being said, your example proves my point, it would look like magic to those people who have no frame of reference.
We like to think we're smart today, but the reality is, we can't conceive of what 500 years from now will look like. We can guess, but we are likely to not just be wrong, but REALLY BADLY WRONG.
We may not even keep our bodies in 500 years, preferring to replace them with constructs with cybernetic brains. Most people I toss that idea to are horrified, including my mother and my wife, who think it sounds horrible. Which tells me that it might actually happen, but I really have no idea.
Math...
The number of planets, number of galaxies, and the size of the universe... if it doesn't exist, then there is something wrong with basic probability theory...
There are simply too many chances for it to exist for it not to. It just isn't likely to exist anywhere near us.
They still have to match orbital velocity on the same ecliptic, even at 0.1c they would show up from a long ways away. There's no "stealth" in space, plain and simple. Spaceships produce too much everything, heat, radiation, gas etc.
Orbital insertion would be pretty obvious as well, even at the L1 behind the moon we would notice them coming in.
We would? You mean like we notice all those asteroids flying by that we get a few days notice of, or sometimes get notice of AFTER they have passed us?
What makes you think there is no stealth in space? Anyone who can come up with a FTL drive likely can come up with stealth in space.
How does it work? I haven't a clue, but I don't know how FTL works either, just like someone from 400 years ago couldn't tell you how a modern turbofan engine works.
That is a good point, and near-earth objects such as asteroids and comets aren't actually trying to avoid being detected.
Could WWII RADAR detect a modern Stealth Bomber?
Why do we think anything we have could detect a starship that has its "stealth systems" on? (whatever they might be)
But a space-jumping fleet of invading space aliens is? Did you even read the summary?
Actually, it is very probable indeed... just not HERE!
Space is big, really big, unbelievably big... Odds are, somewhere out there, "space-jumping fleet of invading space aliens" DOES exist. Odds of them being ANYWHERE NEAR HERE? Almost zero.
Two separate points. :D
Imagine the US Military of today decided to invade Europe of Napoleon's era.
Would their "old" technology do them a lick of good when a thousand M1 tanks rolled across the field at them? What about when Predator drones are flying overhead launching missiles at their supply depots behind the lines?
Perhaps their bow and arrows will be effective against the modern artillery and mortars of modern warfare?
---
Instead perhaps we are "closer" to the aliens, so lets move forward to World War I, it is 1916, armies in Europe are locked on the Western Front, unable to make any headway either way.
The modern US military shows up with all the above items...
How long would the Germans last?
Reverse the roles, modern 21st century German army is transported back to 1916, how long would the British and French have lasted against the Leopard II tanks and Tornado fighter-bombers?
---
It is silly to think that anything that we have would do anything at all to a civilization able to travel the stars.
Of course, which is why our Sci-Fi shows are fun, but at the end of the day, silly...
Take Star Trek... 400 years from now, I highly doubt we'll be walking around talking to the ship, we'll be interfaced directly with it and with each other...
But that doesn't make sense to your average person today and it doesn't make for great television, so they show "future versions of today", rather than the complete change that would really happen.
Go back 400 years, what were most people doing? Heck, most people couldn't read and write, most simply spent 90% of their time working to obtain food.
Try to explain 21st century life with the Internet, Space Stations, and Nuclear Weapons, to someone from that time. You'd be wasting your time.
Life is pretty rare in the Universe
Source?
I'd be shocked if we didn't find life in the oceans of Jupiter's moons, if we ever bothered to go there.
We have found life on Earth in places once thought impossible to support it.
I suspect the Universe is full of life, we can't can't see it from here and some of it we wouldn't be looking for until we ran over it.
You don't stop a lobster from pinching you by smashing it with a sledgehammer, you put rubber bands around its claws. I'd expect something like focused energy weapons to knock out anything resembling weapons so that the biomatter can be harvested peacefully.
Why use weapons? Why not just put the population to sleep? A modern tazer is a police officer's tool to subdue someone without shooting them, but it is crude in practice. Advance that idea 100 years and I imagine we'll have something closer to the stun rods from Demolition Man, just touch someone and they are put nicely to sleep. Advance it further and you could probably hit a whole city with a "go to sleep ray".
Weapons are crude instruments.
it's highly unlikely that space travel can be accomplished without huge amounts of EM radiation.
Why? Why is it unlikely? We have really no idea how to travel faster than light, like so many things, I suspect it is something we haven't even thought of... like how silly airplanes looked, until they actually flew and pretty fast they didn't look anything like the silly 19th century attempts to fly.
What was missing was power, lots of power, in a lightweight package.
Even once we had airplanes, you have only a lifetime from 1903 to 1969, yet people in 1903 couldn't have dreamed of what the Saturn V would look like or how it would work.
It is not rational to assume that unknown technology means godlike abilities.
Nonsense, sure it does...
I am quite sure that if you went back 500 years and took modern technology with you, it would look quite "godlike" to those people.
If we can detect exoplanets, what makes you think that we wouldn't be able to detect alien ships?
For one thing, the planets are in one place, stay in one place (well, in orbit) for a long time, they aren't trying to avoid detection, and they are really big. They also have an effect on something even bigger that is its own light source, a star.
Starships fit none of those parameters. Even more, we aren't even looking for starships and if we were, we don't know what to look for. We DO know what to look for when it comes to stars and planets.
While that is a nice hopeful story, and while I suppose ANYTHING is possible...
It isn't very probable...
Besides, even if they were at our level of technology, if they have starships, then they have nuclear weapons. They don't have to invade, they can simple drop rocks or nukes on us to accomplish the same thing, and there wouldn't be anything we could do about it...
Unless of course, someone had a Mac laptop and was a cable repair man! :)
The question isn't stupid, just asking it focuses attention on the fact that there are likely aliens out there.
Perhaps we should stop fighting each other on this planet and develop a real space transportation system?
Frankly, any aliens able to travel here from another world are so far ahead of us, it wouldn't make any difference if we detected them or not.
However, you asked the question... so...
Our space detection system is largely aimed at Earth. For example, to warn of us of ICBM launches the first system put into space was called MIDAS between 1960 and 1966.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M...
The GPS satellites have nuclear detonation detectors, which doesn't do any good, but it another example of how our systems are aimed at Earth.
All the stuff pointed out into space, like the Hubble Space Telescope, are designed to see VERY far away and aren't looking for ships. Given the small likely size of any ships compared to planets and moons, we aren't likely to be able to see them even if we're looking for them, until they are on top of us.
After all, we still don't have a telescope that can see the moon landing sights. Pictures taken from sats in lunar orbit have gotten some pictures, but they aren't as good as you'd expect.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T...
This is the best image I could find of Apollo 11's landing site, and this was after the LRO was moved into a lower orbit:
http://featured-sites.lroc.asu...
Yea, you can tell what it is, because you know what you're looking at, but if you didn't even know where to look? You could stare at the moon for a month with such a camera and see nothing.
--
TL;DR - We likely would have no notice whatsoever of aliens until they entered orbit of Earth, and even then, it is just as likely to be a random person with a telescope who spots them as anyone from the government.
Unless of course they can be seen with the naked eye, if their ships are big enough and they are in low orbit, that is possible.
I suspect the market isn't there yet for 4 TB SSD drives... and it wouldn't require a 3.5" drive case, you could fit 4 TB of NAND easily in a 2.5" drive case (or even less).
That said, the number of people who want to pay $2,000 for such a drive are still quite limited. Give it time...
Most modern SSDs have power loss protection. If it was that easy to lose all your data, no one would be using these things.
I've had power failures, and computers lock up, no data lost...
A TB has already been done in SLC, that isn't hard to do... it is however enterprise only and very expensive, thus not of much interest to your average user...
It isn't going to be something that you see for your personal use.
Jobs are not a limited resource. Jobs are dependent on things we need to get done.
That is not correct, jobs are indeed a limited resource. They are limited by the amount of money that is worth spending on them.
There are many jobs that need to be done, that aren't currently getting done, because no one wants to pay for them.
http://www.infrastructurerepor...
According to the American Society of Civil Engineers, we need to invest $3.6 Trillion in infrastructure by 2020.
Now I'll grant you, they are biased to make that number high, they profit from it. But that being said, our roads are not new, China is going to build more road in the next 5 years than the US has built in the past 30 years. They already have more roads than we have, they'll be double our size in short order because they are investing in this.
We are not because no one wants to pay for it.
So jobs are indeed limited, because a job implies a paycheck, and someone has to be on the other end of that paycheck.
1 farmer today can do the work of a 20 farmers from 200 years ago. Yes, he does it using machines which took a thousand people to design and build, but those machines are made in one factory and used by 10 thousand farmers nationwide.
So 11,000 people today are doing the work of 200,000 from 200 years ago.
While your math is a bit off, your concept is correct (1 farmer today actually does far more than 20 farmers from 200 years ago).
The problem becomes, what happens when 1 farmer does the work of 1,000 farmers? Then 10,000?
As it stands, one farmer can run a whole field of tractors and combines from his farm house, they don't need drivers anymore.
But at some point the knowledge will be lost if we're not careful to keep enough people informed on how it all works. It reminds me of the scene in the Matrix movies when Neo is talking to the head cheese down below in the "works". The head cheese makes the comment while pointing to a machine and says, "you see that machine there? I have no idea how that machine works, I only know that it needs to work"
Will we reach a day when we point to the big fancy machines and say that? "Oh boy, those machines provide all our food, shame no one remembers how they work.
That company no longer exists...
AT&T today is actually the old SouthWestern Bell, turned Cingular, that bought AT&T...
It is a messy web. :)
If that is your viewpoint, then fair enough... but then nothing you say is worth listening to, so any point you might have had will be lost...
You're so full of hate and judgement, it is rather sad...
Or, in this case, movie screenwriters who were just trying to get a point across in three sentences without having to make Tommy Lee-Jones give a lecture on ancient philosophy.
Of course you hit the nail on the head... the poster you're replying to might or might not be correct (I really am not enough of an expert to say), but it misses the point completely...
The point that was being made is simple, yet profound...