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Anonymous Coward writes:
https://www.businessinsider.com/alien-civilizations-may-have-already-colonized-galaxy-study-2019-8
The Milky Way could be teeming with interstellar alien civilizations — we just don't know about it because they haven't paid us a visit in 10 million years.
A study published last month in The Astronomical Journal[$] posits that intelligent extraterrestrial life could be taking its time to explore the galaxy, harnessing star systems' movement to make star-hopping easier.
The work is a new response to a question known as the Fermi paradox, which asks why we haven't detected signs of extraterrestrial intelligence.
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Fermi Paradox Paper: Aliens Could Take Their Time Settling the Galaxy
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Can anyone remember when the times were not hard, and money not scarce?
(Score: 2) by takyon on Tuesday September 10 2019, @11:31AM (3 children)
We certainly can fathom how to travel to the nearest star.
We are probably decades out from having a stable multiplanetary presence in our own solar system. We could come up with a way to do interstellar travel, but it would be expensive and inefficient, and might require a generation ship or advanced robotics and frozen embryos. So maybe we should wait until the next century to make an attempt.
Decades to a century is a relatively short amount of time for humanity and in general. Short enough for us to avoid death by asteroid, cosmic ray burst, etc. that could be filters destroying intelligent or potentially intelligent life.
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(Score: 2) by HiThere on Tuesday September 10 2019, @08:39PM (2 children)
Sorry, but no. We've got parts of the answer of "how to travel to the nearest star", and if what you mean is "send a lump of metal" then we could do it now with enough effort. But our electronics wouldn't last under high velocity bombardment of particles, and we couldn't maintain a society that would man the listening devices.
We need lots of work on various areas, and one of the main ones is sociology.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by takyon on Tuesday September 10 2019, @09:01PM (1 child)
We can use those nanoscale vacuum tubes or some other radiation-tolerant technology for the electronics. Not sure what you mean by listening devices. Some old school navigation?
If you don't want to do a generation ship, you could send a small group of people with anti-aging treatments to keep them alive for hundreds of years. That isn't available today so you'll have to wait some decades.
For particles bombarding the ship, either slow the ship down or add more shielding. Or both.
If you want to lower mass, send a ship without life support that can deploy robots and an artificial womb to create humans on site. Or find a way to completely freeze and unfreeze humans and keep them in a car trunk-like volume.
If there is a moderate chance of failure, send duplicate missions to each habitable exoplanet.
There will be much better options available in the future. My opinion is that there is no pressing need to do it this century.
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(Score: 2) by HiThere on Tuesday September 10 2019, @10:47PM
The "man the listening devises" means if nobody's listening when it sends signals back, we might as well not have sent it. Society back home isn't all that stable these days. We have trouble holding a "5-year plan" together. By the time it gets there someone will have lost the key frequencies, or defunded the telescope, or...well, any number of things from the last decade. E.g., at one point the 1960 Census original results were lost. AFAIK they still are. We had a copy on even parity 800 BPI track tape that became unreadable, and when we tried to replace it the census bureau had lost the originals. (OK, original is dubious use here because the actual originals were Hollerith cards, but I'd bet those were destroyed as so as the tapes were made and copied.)
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.