[Skybird]

Originally Posted by TLAM Strike

People traveled the Pacific in canoes and colonized Australia and many islands. The primitive slow boat approach has the advantage of being less noticeable to other civilizations and that by the time it arives at its destination any civilization there has died out.

This is the kind of ocean our canoes deal with now:



If this is the new ocean you want to paddle on with new engines, than the Pacific witht hose canoes was a spoon with some drops of water. It doesn't compare in any way. All our thought-about future spacecraft engines trying to cover these distances make the canoes in the pacific look like Ferraris sprinting in 1 second to a finsihing line just 40m away.

Millions of tons of extraterrestrial material fall on the Earth every day. Its believed that the early amino acids the joined together to form the first string of protein and then on to be the first life on Earth were brought here on comets.

Stellar matter reaches earth in form of dust particles caught by Earth'S gravitation, and some meteorites that reaches deep enough i nto the atmosphere that afetr their burning to gas this gas cannot escape again the atmosphere/gravitation field of the planet. But that does not make "millions of tons per day".

How damaging a coincentraded massing of any agent or substance can be, you see in the disucssion about the dangers of methan-hydrate now thawing. All that stuff once was dissolved in the Earth's ocean and atmosphere - and has almost killed all life there was.

What we got running and what we are capable of are two different things. If politics had not killed Project Orion the solar system would be ours.

Our cultural thinking focusses around a money-driven system, and currently I do not see us abandoning that. So, money is a reality-defininf varoiable for us. So is our political system. But even if these things would be oragnised most optimally,I absolutely doubt that ther solar system then would be ours.Not with a technolcogy that is not intellogent in itself, is as vulnerable as it currently is, and has no ability to maintain and repair itself, autonomously (?), reacting to unforseen events with creative decision-making, etc. there is not one day without malfunctions in the ISS, and each time you take a flight over the atlantic remind yourself of that the many hundred processors they have in the cockpit produce between 60 and 400 malfunctions in those eight hours - fortunately most of them are so harmless that they do not even get nocitced by the pilots.

Wanna ride to Saturn with such a technology? I wouldn'T. Even Mars already is a high risk mission.

I agree with using robot probes (especially Von Neumann Probes) to explore and colonize space. When we arrive at that level of technological advance (its really not that far away) there is nothing preventing the designers of such probes from using them to seed human life on the worlds they visit.

And why should people on Earth need to want that? also, to support a colony of modern people that you somehow manage to get there, you would need a tremendous ammount of material, goods and tziems transported there. Or you are about transporting just the genetical blueprint, or frozen eggs and sperm cells at best, and release them into a foreign environment. Then you would need a tehcnology being intelligent and creative and autonomous to support these germs once you released them.

If it is an alien environment already carrying some kind of life, think about the invasion of foreign spoecies do in the shifting living habitats right here on earth. It often leads to pushing back and extinction of the once regional species by the new arriving ones. But in our case discussed here, it is most likely that those germs you are about to send there, simply would not survive.

Not to mention the eons the trip itself would take, and the many accidents and collisions that necessarily would mean.

And its also possible that those civilization have long since died out. The lack of signals and visible signs of (highly advanced) life in the MW tend to support this.

that is just antropomorphic self-reference - we would do something like we do, so we expect others to act in the same way. This ignored the meaning of this word in our language: alien. however, on the civilisations extincted, that is the full argument behind cosmologists arguing that most civilisation out there would be robot civilisations: they either have taken over from their biologic creators by killing them, or, and that is the real argument, these creators have designed their teczhnology to take over and transport theirn own intelligence, and who knows: maybe even their mind, deleting the need for vulnerable biological carriers of their "life".

The absence of signlas is somethign we cannot even speculate about. We hagve in no way any information that would enable us to make conclusions, to assume for inentional silence, or absence of any sender. We know nothing, and our behavior and desire and our technology hardly is the standard to which the rest of the universe must compare.

Maybe there is lots of communication going on - and we just do not have the means to perceive it or to recognise it as such.The biggest, most convincing argument against us contacting superior civilisations ist this: that every intelligence is capable only to perceive another intelligence that is relatively close to it's own intelligence level. We cannot reocgnise an intelloigence as such if it is too primitive - or too superior. It simply is beyond our perception range, appears to us as just nothing, or a chaos of signals whose order and nature we cannot recognize due to their superior structure, or as coincidences, or magic events which due to their magical nature we consider to be hallucinations. That ant under your show does not know about you thinking to step on it or not, for this ant it you do not even exist, and the signs of your intelligent life and culture and civilisation and examination of ants is beyiond it's recognition level. Some superintelligence out there could as well have not recongised our presence, or it has decided that we are too uninzeresting and unimportant in this huge universe as if it would see a need to deal with us. Becasue this also is problem for us: we cannot make the smallest of staements regarding a foreign intelligence'S motivations and goals. maybe it even considers our destruction right now - not because it is hostile to us, but because it cares as much for us as we care for that heap of dirt on the shovel that we push aside in order to flatten the ground for that new gardenway of ours - or that new radiotelescope we are about to construct.

This is right the reason why many prominent scientists, including stephen Hawking, have started to recommend that maybe we should not be so arrogant and eager to always send signlas into space in an attempt to make others aware of that we are here. We do not know about their nature and intentions, and cannot know it. Maybe it would be more clever to stay in hiding and observe with passive means what is - or is not - going on. Our own history tells us that almost every time when a superior civilisation meets an inferior, the first have crushed and destroyed the latter one. If others are like we are in this regard, our own nature and history should be a warning to us. Thewir morals may be different, if they even have any, and those robot civilisdations maybe are creative and clever and superintelloigent - but who said that they have emotions and sentiments at all, like we define them?

Then again we could be like a virus, once we escape confinement we slowly consume the host and spread until all is consumed, then we go dormant- like Spanish Flu.

And must we even want to be like that - a plague for the rest of this galaxy? maybe others are very well aware of our presence - and thus have decided to isolate us and not to answer to our signals - right because the reason you mentioned? And "ecaping confinement", you said, implying an idea of conflict, violently breaking through a barrier, hostility, invasion. That is typical for human civilisations. And maybe that is why we are not wanted out there.

And where we are not wanted, we can be stopped and crushed, if needed. Of this we better should be sure. Because we belong to the babyclass of civilisations in this galaxy, and we are babies playing with daddy's explosives and mines in the armoury.

We can consider ourselves lkucky if we manage to survive the coming one hundred years wiothout having blown ourselves up and without having ruined the ecosphere beyond a level where it can maintain higher life (in an understanding of lifeforms as to be met on earth).