And how can any of this give us a hope and a prayer to making interstellar travel cheap and affordable?
Yes, there are many unanswered questions. But the fact we have questions of that nature speaks to the great level of understanding WE HAVE ALREADY ACHIEVED.
Considering that there are still many things in physics that haven't been solved yet I think your assertion is flawed. For example why does matter behave like both a wave and a particle? Is anyone close to solving that one yet?
Solve Schroedinger Equations!!!!
Seriously, there is much on the Internet about that issue. Just apply a little Google.
> It is sheer folly to think that an advance race went through all the trouble to cross many, many light-years of intergalactic space just to say "Hi"
No, if such travel gets reimbursed by the alien space program. Seriously, Hawking and some other terribly sharp minds cannot rule out all conceivable possibilities, so their logic achievements are flawed. Speculate all you want but do not assumed you have concluded anything. Hawking assumes aliens will make their arrival globally known, for instance, or their policy is to wage war openly. WE did not do that when selling colored glass to less advanced civilizations, dammit!
I assume nothing. I merely state that it's extremely unlikely, so unlikely we needn't worry ourselves with it. Quite frankly, I'd be much more concerned that our little neck in the woods might be taken out by a "near-by" supernova or star-quake. Or maybe a black hole comes drifting through our solar system. I think all that I've mentioned here is much more likely than an alien encounter.
Not impossible, but so unlikely we may as well treat it as impossible.
I am not trolling. If anything, I hope one of you out there will be so inspired to prove me wrong that you do actually that -- prove me wrong and give us all cheap interstellar travel.
With the effort -- and time -- it would take them to get here, it would be far easier for them to terraform a planet much closer to themselves -- probably within their own stellar system.
You made 2 assumptions there.
1. We don't know that stable terraforming is even possible. Or perhaps only a few planets can be terraformed.
2. Space travel may be comparatively cheap.
The science behind terraforming is not that exotic. It's more than an engineering challenge than anything else. It may take deorbiting quite a few comets onto the surface of some chosen planet or moon, but it's definitely doable. Stability will definitely be a challenge, but that can be solved with the right bio-engineering for that specific purpose.
We all yearn for many things, and we humans have great imagination. The real test is whether or not we can turn imagination into reality. The test for that is Understanding.
We may not know "everything". But we can certainly circumscribe the holes in our understanding, and make a fairly good determination of what may be possible, what is almost definitely impossible, and what we may have a shot at solving, and from that make a determination of where to place our resources for research and discovery.
Yes, I am being hard-nosed about this. And I can wish upon a star with the best of them. But unless we have another super-major upheaval in our current understanding of Physics on the scale of what happened 100 or so years ago (unlikely), we're wasting our time entertaining fantasies of cheap and easy interstellar travel.
Prove me wrong and create the cheap and easy way, and I'll give you a million bucks!
So, I deem it extremely unlikely that Humanity's fantasies about space travel will ever likely be true.
I'd generally agree with you except for this one line. If you hadn't used both "unlikely" and "ever" in the same sentence then it would be a valid claim. However, given the form of the assertion, I'd have to assume there was probably someone in history that made the same claims about flight. Based on the existing knowledge, they didn't see how it could ever be possible to fly. Knowledge changes and evolves. So, while it may not be feasible based on what we know today, what we know tomorrow may change that.
Often-heard theme.
Considering the level of knowledge we have TODAY vs. what was available at the time of the great Kitty Hawk event, it pales in comparasion. Around that time Einstein was just coming out with with Relativity and a bunch of other things that were soon to rock Physics in a BIG WAY. And many discoveries were made since then, and extremely rapid progress has been made in our understandings of cosmology and quantum physics and the like.
Today, unlike then, we know about the 4 fundamental "forces" of nature, another possible one or two that operates on cosmic scales ("dark energy", "dark matter"), know that the fine structure "constant" has itself evolved over time, etc.
Research going on at the LHC and other places may unlock something new and major -- I'm sure of it. But will it be something us mere mortals will be able to leverage for going to the stars? I seriously doubt it. We still struggle with making fusion useful, and only after many decades of research is there finally a fusion power plant on the drawing board, in Germany, I think.
Don't get me wrong -- I'd LOVE for there to be a cheap and practical way discovered that we can do interstellar travel. I'd LOVE to be proven wrong. It's just that it's extremely unlikely, and not something I am looking to pursue anymore. If you can prove me wrong, GO FOR IT! But if you burn your lifetime looking and die without finding it, I promise not to say "I told you so!" at your funeral.;-)
I've been saying what Hawking is saying all along. It is sheer folly to think that an advance race went through all the trouble to cross many, many light-years of intergalactic space just to say "Hi".
That all depends on whether:
The enormity of the effort they would have to mount given the physics of space travel would be rather significant, and at great cost to themselves.
Either or both of these statements might be untrue. Maybe FTL is really cheap, but very difficult to figure out. Maybe there's naturally occurring phenomena (quasispace portals? wormholes?) which make FTL travel cheap, but we haven't discovered them yet. Maybe we haven't been discovered yet because our jump node is within our Sun.
If you look at the physics of the situation, you'll see that it is very unlikely that there is a "cheap" solution. Maybe in some other Universe, but definitely not ours.
I'd love to learn Superstrings someday so I can see what other universes can be like, and see if it is possible to have a universe that both supports life AND allows for cheap interstellar travel.
I'm not big on cryonics. Mainly because there is no guarantee the company keeping your bits frozen will be around long enough to make it useful to you.
There was one horror story about one cryonics company that had equipment failure and their tanks warmed up, as in HOT! The contents were obviously lost, and I think there was a resultant lawsuit or two.
I also don't think you'll be the same person if they were to bring you "back" -- you'd be an identical copy that is fully convinced you're the original. But you won't be. You see, I have this theory of consciousness that it requires a continual activation to keep the true "you" you. And that link is broken if you die. Indeed, even if you were brought back from sudden hypothermia as sometimes happens when individuals fall into very frigid waters, I don't think you're the same if your brain went flat-line.
Of course, this raises all kinds of notions with regards to consciousness and humans, which is totally out of line for this topic.
I agree. I'm not sure where the "scary" angle comes from. The last couple versions of SQL Server have allowed encryption down to the field level. I would be surprised if Oracle and other competitors weren't offering similar functionality. It also makes sense to encrypt the transaction. The law covers two of the three major points of compromise (the database server itself, and main in the middle sniffing on the network).
And what good is field-level encryption if someone cracks the database? Also, can you index encrypted fields? Is the index itself encrypted on the hard drive? And it must represent a nasty performance hit, to boot.
Why the hell would someone use their SSNO to make a purchase on the Internet? Why would someone even ask for it? You should almost NEVER give away your SSNO for anything. It really was not meant for commercial use anyway.
I know some sites online will ask for the SSNO on a job application, but I never supply it. If they want it, they have to HIRE me first!!!!!
"Covered businesses range from neighborhood dry cleaners to Fortune 100 companies, but the law stipulates that the program be appropriate to the size and resources of the business."
It seems like they really do mean just about everyone. Within a year we'll start seeing stories about how part-time small business people doing exactly what you described are the new source of major data breaches, because their Excel files and whatnot are being stolen via trojans and viruses. And the data security industry will push for more laws and expensive software to remedy the situation. Just a cynical hunch...
Would having a password on a spreadsheet file constitute enough 'security'?
The deep and intricate details of security and encryption will typically NOT be understood by your neighbourhood dry cleaners, and I would even state that many in a so-called "Fortune 500" company would be equally as clueless, if not more so.
Oh, but whacking people on the head will certainly solve the problem. Well, therein lies the problem. Government's "solution" to all problems great and small is to put everyone at gunpoint. We may as well be dealing with mobsters. Whee!
I would not trust *any* encryption whose source is hidden from review. Anyone who wants to rely on Microsoft getting it right gets deserves whatever they get.
I have a few encrypted drives on Linux. Did an OS reinstall, and I can still get at the data. Microsoft always has to make things more difficult than they need to be. And if you loose your client base, you may as well kiss your business GOODBYE. Thank you Microsoft.
Not that it is prudent to encrypt on the server at that level, anyway, for performance and false sense of security reasons.
You know, all of the use cases you describe can be supported by ticking the 'encrypt' checkbox that Windows NT has had since version 4, or by storing commercial data on an encrypted partition, which pretty much all modern(ish) operating systems support. It's really not hard, and is probably the minimum that a small business should be doing anyway.
Sorry. You don't want to do that, for the reasons others have mentioned on this thread.
And not all of us are using NT out here. Beside, I think it's silly to be using Windows anything for e-commerce, but that's just my hard-nosed opinion.
Encrypting the file system does not protect you if your system is cracked, as was already mentioned. But it will also kill performance. If you want your customers to have a s-l-o-w experience, or if you want to spend more money on hardware, go for it. It just doesn't buy you much of anything in the way of security.
Encryption in transit is great. Encryption of backup tapes is great. Encryption of end-user systems which store the data is great.
But encryption of live servers and databases is a farce. Encryption without key management is itself a farce, and a servers which require keys to operate necessarily lack key management. Furthermore, server encryption is absurd because it can only protects against physical theft of the servers, not against hacking.
The only case in which server encryption would do a bit of good is if the datacenter has no physical security, and every time a system boots, someone has to walk over to it and type a 20+ character random password.
Yes, I work in IT security. Yes, I think encryption is great, but NOT ON SERVERS.
Agreed. I'm a MySQL guru (among other things), and I can't see keeping names and email addresses encrypted in the database on the server. Credit card numbers and other sensitive foreign account numbers? Absolutely. But what they are asking for is a joke. And what? The entire world would have to change how it stores things on its servers just to appease Massachusetts? Gee, if every territory starts lubbing its own rules about how the world should handle data of its residents/citizens, you can just kiss the Internet good-bye.
What this all means though is that the small startup/merchant/mom-and-pop Internet operations will find it more and more expensive to swim in these waters infested with little fiefdoms everywhere with delusions of hegemony.
Then again, it's always dangerous when politicians -- especially local ones -- try to legislate anything on the global Internet. Some years back some idiot New Hampshire legislature tried to impose a tax on -- are you sitting down? -- email. Can you believe it?
People go on holiday just to have a look around other countries. Humans went to the moon largely for the hell of it. Why would it be so unreasonable to expect that aliens would come here just out of interest?
Look at the economics of it. People may be willing to spend their own money to do crazy stuff, but would others want to pay for them to do the REALLY crazy and exotic stuff???
The higher the costs, the more you need a solid ROI and the less of a chance you'll get that funding just to smell the roses. Most humans don't think the way we do. Keep that in mind.
"It is sheer folly to think that an advance race went through all the trouble to cross many, many light-years of intergalactic space just to say "Hi"."
Yeah cause like we'd never go to great lengths just to cross new boundaries.;)
Why don't we have a permanent colony on the Moon yet? When was the last time a human foot stepped around there? And why don't we have someone already on Mars?
It's simple. Costs. It's not just great lengths for you, it's great lengths at the cost to others. That and the ROI factor. You and I might want to go to great lengths, but who's going to pay for it?
Damn right! Why is this point forgotten? Look at the Voyager probes, okay they're pretty primative in that they were launched right at the beginning of our space story, but they were launched not even to say "hi", let alone just to say it. Look at how much has been spent on the biggest experiement evaah, the LHC, just because of our curiosity. We're most interested in finding out if there's life on a Saturn moon, and that's the driving force for the probes we've sent there... not because we want to mine it!
You're right. We absolutely would.
No, we wouldn't. You're forgetting about the economic side of the effort.
A probe that has barely made it out of our solar system is NOT the same thing as mounting a major effort at interstellar travel, that would require a significant chunk of your civilization's resources, never mind the costs involved. Most people on our planet do NOT think the way we do. Most people think in terms of ROI: "What's in it for me?" Do you think all the governments of our planet would be willing to front such a gargantuan effort with all of the sacrifices that would entail just to travel a few light-years just to say, "Hello?" Did Columbus come to the US just to shake hands and kiss the natives? Or was he looking for an ROI for the efforts and investment and resources it took to cross the oceans of his time?
Well, I did enjoy being a dreamer a long time ago. But then I woke up.
You know, this is more or less precisely the reason I'd disagree with your argument. If they have mastered space travel and could either harness insane (by human standards) amounts of energy or making thousands of years trips, I'd imagine that Earth and humanity in general would hardly even register on their radar as either a target or even something of interest to study. Put in perspective, it'd be like humanity's fascination with anthills in far off-continents. To that end, I'd look at humanity's history so far. It's only in recent history that humanity has shown a clear interest in studying anthills and not merely intentionally plodding over them or ignoring them (the latter of which might result in accidentally plodding over them)
Keep in mind that our galaxy contains 100 billion or so stars, and we're just one out of the hundred billion. Even if there were as many as 100 space-fairing races in our galaxy, the likelihood one would be near us in not only space, but also time, is extremely remote. Our galaxy is 100,000 light-years in diameter, and about 3000 light-years thick where we are (recalling the Galaxy Song from Monty Python!!!!). Even if you are correct, the odds of some alien species kicking a Kupier object out of orbit is extremely remote.
I did not even speak of the engineering challenges of building spacecraft that can withstand journeys lasting thousands or tens of thousands of years, or even if they could convert matter into energy, they'd need several times the mass of their ships to reach, say, 90% light speed, and the same for the deceleration. If they carry the mass with them, then you'd need even more mass for the fuel!!!
Well, Larry Niven wrote of "ram scoops" in his stories that could scoop up interstellar gases, but is it practical to think that much mass could be scooped up to make such an interstellar flight possible? I can see perhaps scooping up charged particles, but how would you scoop up neutral hydrogen atoms? And scooping up that much mass would actually create a drag on the ship!
The more you think about it, the more it would appear that some "exotic physics" would be needed to make interstellar travel practical for any civilization. And you still have the speed of light as the limiting factor, so those who embark on such a mission may never see their friends alive at home again. Of course, they may not care about that, but that would be a factor.
Hey, I would LOVE to be proven wrong here!!! Don't just disagree with me, flat out make me look like a babbling idiot! I would just love to think interstellar travel would be possible in my lifetime.REALLY!!!!! But it looks VERY daunting both from the physics and economic standpoint.
What is so special that earth has that they wont find billions of on the way here ?
Habitable planet. No terraforming required.
With the effort -- and time -- it would take them to get here, it would be far easier for them to terraform a planet much closer to themselves -- probably within their own stellar system.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, there are many unanswered questions. But the fact we have questions of that nature speaks to the great level of understanding WE HAVE ALREADY ACHIEVED.
Considering that there are still many things in physics that haven't been solved yet I think your assertion is flawed. For example why does matter behave like both a wave and a particle? Is anyone close to solving that one yet?
Solve Schroedinger Equations!!!!
Seriously, there is much on the Internet about that issue. Just apply a little Google.
> It is sheer folly to think that an advance race went through all the trouble to cross many, many light-years of intergalactic space just to say "Hi"
No, if such travel gets reimbursed by the alien space program. Seriously, Hawking and some other terribly sharp minds cannot rule out all conceivable possibilities, so their logic achievements are flawed. Speculate all you want but do not assumed you have concluded anything. Hawking assumes aliens will make their arrival globally known, for instance, or their policy is to wage war openly. WE did not do that when selling colored glass to less advanced civilizations, dammit!
I assume nothing. I merely state that it's extremely unlikely, so unlikely we needn't worry ourselves with it. Quite frankly, I'd be much more concerned that our little neck in the woods might be taken out by a "near-by" supernova or star-quake. Or maybe a black hole comes drifting through our solar system. I think all that I've mentioned here is much more likely than an alien encounter.
Not impossible, but so unlikely we may as well treat it as impossible.
Did you ever hear of the "law of diminishing returns?"
I am not trolling. If anything, I hope one of you out there will be so inspired to prove me wrong that you do actually that -- prove me wrong and give us all cheap interstellar travel.
With the effort -- and time -- it would take them to get here, it would be far easier for them to terraform a planet much closer to themselves -- probably within their own stellar system.
You made 2 assumptions there.
1. We don't know that stable terraforming is even possible. Or perhaps only a few planets can be terraformed.
2. Space travel may be comparatively cheap.
The science behind terraforming is not that exotic. It's more than an engineering challenge than anything else. It may take deorbiting quite a few comets onto the surface of some chosen planet or moon, but it's definitely doable. Stability will definitely be a challenge, but that can be solved with the right bio-engineering for that specific purpose.
We all yearn for many things, and we humans have great imagination. The real test is whether or not we can turn imagination into reality. The test for that is Understanding. We may not know "everything". But we can certainly circumscribe the holes in our understanding, and make a fairly good determination of what may be possible, what is almost definitely impossible, and what we may have a shot at solving, and from that make a determination of where to place our resources for research and discovery.
Yes, I am being hard-nosed about this. And I can wish upon a star with the best of them. But unless we have another super-major upheaval in our current understanding of Physics on the scale of what happened 100 or so years ago (unlikely), we're wasting our time entertaining fantasies of cheap and easy interstellar travel.
Prove me wrong and create the cheap and easy way, and I'll give you a million bucks!
So, I deem it extremely unlikely that Humanity's fantasies about space travel will ever likely be true.
I'd generally agree with you except for this one line. If you hadn't used both "unlikely" and "ever" in the same sentence then it would be a valid claim. However, given the form of the assertion, I'd have to assume there was probably someone in history that made the same claims about flight. Based on the existing knowledge, they didn't see how it could ever be possible to fly. Knowledge changes and evolves. So, while it may not be feasible based on what we know today, what we know tomorrow may change that.
Often-heard theme.
Considering the level of knowledge we have TODAY vs. what was available at the time of the great Kitty Hawk event, it pales in comparasion. Around that time Einstein was just coming out with with Relativity and a bunch of other things that were soon to rock Physics in a BIG WAY. And many discoveries were made since then, and extremely rapid progress has been made in our understandings of cosmology and quantum physics and the like.
Today, unlike then, we know about the 4 fundamental "forces" of nature, another possible one or two that operates on cosmic scales ("dark energy", "dark matter"), know that the fine structure "constant" has itself evolved over time, etc.
Research going on at the LHC and other places may unlock something new and major -- I'm sure of it. But will it be something us mere mortals will be able to leverage for going to the stars? I seriously doubt it. We still struggle with making fusion useful, and only after many decades of research is there finally a fusion power plant on the drawing board, in Germany, I think.
Don't get me wrong -- I'd LOVE for there to be a cheap and practical way discovered that we can do interstellar travel. I'd LOVE to be proven wrong. It's just that it's extremely unlikely, and not something I am looking to pursue anymore. If you can prove me wrong, GO FOR IT! But if you burn your lifetime looking and die without finding it, I promise not to say "I told you so!" at your funeral. ;-)
Alpha centauri???? Not bloody likely.
I've been saying what Hawking is saying all along. It is sheer folly to think that an advance race went through all the trouble to cross many, many light-years of intergalactic space just to say "Hi".
That all depends on whether:
The enormity of the effort they would have to mount given the physics of space travel would be rather significant, and at great cost to themselves.
Either or both of these statements might be untrue. Maybe FTL is really cheap, but very difficult to figure out. Maybe there's naturally occurring phenomena (quasispace portals? wormholes?) which make FTL travel cheap, but we haven't discovered them yet. Maybe we haven't been discovered yet because our jump node is within our Sun.
If you look at the physics of the situation, you'll see that it is very unlikely that there is a "cheap" solution. Maybe in some other Universe, but definitely not ours.
I'd love to learn Superstrings someday so I can see what other universes can be like, and see if it is possible to have a universe that both supports life AND allows for cheap interstellar travel.
There was one horror story about one cryonics company that had equipment failure and their tanks warmed up, as in HOT! The contents were obviously lost, and I think there was a resultant lawsuit or two.
I also don't think you'll be the same person if they were to bring you "back" -- you'd be an identical copy that is fully convinced you're the original. But you won't be. You see, I have this theory of consciousness that it requires a continual activation to keep the true "you" you. And that link is broken if you die. Indeed, even if you were brought back from sudden hypothermia as sometimes happens when individuals fall into very frigid waters, I don't think you're the same if your brain went flat-line.
Of course, this raises all kinds of notions with regards to consciousness and humans, which is totally out of line for this topic.
I agree. I'm not sure where the "scary" angle comes from. The last couple versions of SQL Server have allowed encryption down to the field level. I would be surprised if Oracle and other competitors weren't offering similar functionality. It also makes sense to encrypt the transaction. The law covers two of the three major points of compromise (the database server itself, and main in the middle sniffing on the network).
And what good is field-level encryption if someone cracks the database? Also, can you index encrypted fields? Is the index itself encrypted on the hard drive? And it must represent a nasty performance hit, to boot.
I know some sites online will ask for the SSNO on a job application, but I never supply it. If they want it, they have to HIRE me first!!!!!
There are free encryption tools out there.
The last time I checked, SSL certificates that chain back to a CA in all the major browsers weren't free.
http://cert.startcom.org/
"Covered businesses range from neighborhood dry cleaners to Fortune 100 companies, but the law stipulates that the program be appropriate to the size and resources of the business."
It seems like they really do mean just about everyone. Within a year we'll start seeing stories about how part-time small business people doing exactly what you described are the new source of major data breaches, because their Excel files and whatnot are being stolen via trojans and viruses. And the data security industry will push for more laws and expensive software to remedy the situation. Just a cynical hunch...
Would having a password on a spreadsheet file constitute enough 'security'?
The deep and intricate details of security and encryption will typically NOT be understood by your neighbourhood dry cleaners, and I would even state that many in a so-called "Fortune 500" company would be equally as clueless, if not more so.
Oh, but whacking people on the head will certainly solve the problem. Well, therein lies the problem. Government's "solution" to all problems great and small is to put everyone at gunpoint. We may as well be dealing with mobsters. Whee!
I would not trust *any* encryption whose source is hidden from review. Anyone who wants to rely on Microsoft getting it right gets deserves whatever they get.
And besides, would you really want to rely on TrueCrypt on your e-commerce server?
Not that it is prudent to encrypt on the server at that level, anyway, for performance and false sense of security reasons.
You know, all of the use cases you describe can be supported by ticking the 'encrypt' checkbox that Windows NT has had since version 4, or by storing commercial data on an encrypted partition, which pretty much all modern(ish) operating systems support. It's really not hard, and is probably the minimum that a small business should be doing anyway.
Sorry. You don't want to do that, for the reasons others have mentioned on this thread.
And not all of us are using NT out here. Beside, I think it's silly to be using Windows anything for e-commerce, but that's just my hard-nosed opinion.
Encrypting the file system does not protect you if your system is cracked, as was already mentioned. But it will also kill performance. If you want your customers to have a s-l-o-w experience, or if you want to spend more money on hardware, go for it. It just doesn't buy you much of anything in the way of security.
Encryption in transit is great. Encryption of backup tapes is great. Encryption of end-user systems which store the data is great.
But encryption of live servers and databases is a farce. Encryption without key management is itself a farce, and a servers which require keys to operate necessarily lack key management. Furthermore, server encryption is absurd because it can only protects against physical theft of the servers, not against hacking.
The only case in which server encryption would do a bit of good is if the datacenter has no physical security, and every time a system boots, someone has to walk over to it and type a 20+ character random password.
Yes, I work in IT security. Yes, I think encryption is great, but NOT ON SERVERS.
Agreed. I'm a MySQL guru (among other things), and I can't see keeping names and email addresses encrypted in the database on the server. Credit card numbers and other sensitive foreign account numbers? Absolutely. But what they are asking for is a joke. And what? The entire world would have to change how it stores things on its servers just to appease Massachusetts? Gee, if every territory starts lubbing its own rules about how the world should handle data of its residents/citizens, you can just kiss the Internet good-bye.
What this all means though is that the small startup/merchant/mom-and-pop Internet operations will find it more and more expensive to swim in these waters infested with little fiefdoms everywhere with delusions of hegemony.
Then again, it's always dangerous when politicians -- especially local ones -- try to legislate anything on the global Internet. Some years back some idiot New Hampshire legislature tried to impose a tax on -- are you sitting down? -- email. Can you believe it?
People go on holiday just to have a look around other countries. Humans went to the moon largely for the hell of it. Why would it be so unreasonable to expect that aliens would come here just out of interest?
Look at the economics of it. People may be willing to spend their own money to do crazy stuff, but would others want to pay for them to do the REALLY crazy and exotic stuff???
The higher the costs, the more you need a solid ROI and the less of a chance you'll get that funding just to smell the roses. Most humans don't think the way we do. Keep that in mind.
"It is sheer folly to think that an advance race went through all the trouble to cross many, many light-years of intergalactic space just to say "Hi"."
Yeah cause like we'd never go to great lengths just to cross new boundaries. ;)
Why don't we have a permanent colony on the Moon yet? When was the last time a human foot stepped around there? And why don't we have someone already on Mars?
It's simple. Costs. It's not just great lengths for you, it's great lengths at the cost to others. That and the ROI factor. You and I might want to go to great lengths, but who's going to pay for it?
Columbus would've heard the same arguments from Neanderthals
Yeah, an all Columbus wanted to do was shake hands with the natives. Yeah, right.
Damn right! Why is this point forgotten? Look at the Voyager probes, okay they're pretty primative in that they were launched right at the beginning of our space story, but they were launched not even to say "hi", let alone just to say it. Look at how much has been spent on the biggest experiement evaah, the LHC, just because of our curiosity. We're most interested in finding out if there's life on a Saturn moon, and that's the driving force for the probes we've sent there... not because we want to mine it!
You're right. We absolutely would.
No, we wouldn't. You're forgetting about the economic side of the effort.
A probe that has barely made it out of our solar system is NOT the same thing as mounting a major effort at interstellar travel, that would require a significant chunk of your civilization's resources, never mind the costs involved. Most people on our planet do NOT think the way we do. Most people think in terms of ROI: "What's in it for me?" Do you think all the governments of our planet would be willing to front such a gargantuan effort with all of the sacrifices that would entail just to travel a few light-years just to say, "Hello?" Did Columbus come to the US just to shake hands and kiss the natives? Or was he looking for an ROI for the efforts and investment and resources it took to cross the oceans of his time?
Well, I did enjoy being a dreamer a long time ago. But then I woke up.
You know, this is more or less precisely the reason I'd disagree with your argument. If they have mastered space travel and could either harness insane (by human standards) amounts of energy or making thousands of years trips, I'd imagine that Earth and humanity in general would hardly even register on their radar as either a target or even something of interest to study. Put in perspective, it'd be like humanity's fascination with anthills in far off-continents. To that end, I'd look at humanity's history so far. It's only in recent history that humanity has shown a clear interest in studying anthills and not merely intentionally plodding over them or ignoring them (the latter of which might result in accidentally plodding over them)
Keep in mind that our galaxy contains 100 billion or so stars, and we're just one out of the hundred billion. Even if there were as many as 100 space-fairing races in our galaxy, the likelihood one would be near us in not only space, but also time, is extremely remote. Our galaxy is 100,000 light-years in diameter, and about 3000 light-years thick where we are (recalling the Galaxy Song from Monty Python!!!!). Even if you are correct, the odds of some alien species kicking a Kupier object out of orbit is extremely remote.
I did not even speak of the engineering challenges of building spacecraft that can withstand journeys lasting thousands or tens of thousands of years, or even if they could convert matter into energy, they'd need several times the mass of their ships to reach, say, 90% light speed, and the same for the deceleration. If they carry the mass with them, then you'd need even more mass for the fuel!!!
Well, Larry Niven wrote of "ram scoops" in his stories that could scoop up interstellar gases, but is it practical to think that much mass could be scooped up to make such an interstellar flight possible? I can see perhaps scooping up charged particles, but how would you scoop up neutral hydrogen atoms? And scooping up that much mass would actually create a drag on the ship!
The more you think about it, the more it would appear that some "exotic physics" would be needed to make interstellar travel practical for any civilization. And you still have the speed of light as the limiting factor, so those who embark on such a mission may never see their friends alive at home again. Of course, they may not care about that, but that would be a factor.
Hey, I would LOVE to be proven wrong here!!! Don't just disagree with me, flat out make me look like a babbling idiot! I would just love to think interstellar travel would be possible in my lifetime.REALLY!!!!! But it looks VERY daunting both from the physics and economic standpoint.
What is so special that earth has that they wont find billions of on the way here ?
Habitable planet. No terraforming required.
With the effort -- and time -- it would take them to get here, it would be far easier for them to terraform a planet much closer to themselves -- probably within their own stellar system.