“Able to” what exactly? Able to build SR probes? Yes, I agree with that. Able to launch them? Yes, I agree with that (though I have doubts an individual could).
But these probes need to do more than be built and launched in order for us to absolutely see evidence of them. They need to traverse many light years of interstellar space intact and they (and their many replicating generations) need to remain functional for millions of years. That is my only point of contention in this argument. It’s the difference between saying they will last millions of years, and they may last millions of years. We don’t know, because it hasn’t been tested.
We have Voyager 1 and 2 now in interstellar space (the farthest any man-made objects have traveled). Granted, that is incredible and it strengthens your side of the argument. If they remain intact and potentially functional (with a burst of energy) into the next star system, that bolsters your argument further, and I’ll retract my objection. But we have a while to wait to find out (even assuming we have some way to “see” them in another star system, which as far as I know, we don’t).
We also have Oumuamua which traversed interstellar space to reach our solar system. But that asteroid (?) isn’t a functional tech object. And, we don’t know how much damage or wear it sustained on the trip (maybe it started off much bigger).
There may be absolute astrophysical reasons why a probe-size tech object cannot remain intact and functional for millions of years and light years of interstellar space. My bet is that they can’t. Your bet is that they can. But, these are just guesses for both of us. Time will tell.
This isn’t a medieval map with “here there be dragons” scrawled on it. You are proposing that some physical mechanism is going to affect these probes on their way over to the next star*. What mechanism do you propose to explain this? Inventing such an arcane mechanism and claiming that’s the SIMPLER solution is odd to me.
*and by the way, this is not something that will take millions of years. The Parker Probe skimming the sun went at 0.05c; if we assume that we can never build anything faster than this ever, for some reason, then hetting to Alpha Centauri would take about 100 years, not thousands or millions. The whole point of building self replicating probes is that we’re not sending probes out from Earth straight to the galaxy’s edge; we are expanding through the stars on the way. And stars are relatively thin on the ground here, with 4.4 light years to the nearest ones. The average distance between stars in the galaxy is 0.013 light years. You could colonize the vast majority of it without ever making a 10 light year jump.
ETA:
My bad, the distance isn’t 0.013, that’s for the inner system only. Overall the average is around 5 LY which puts us right in the middle.
Still, that doesn’t change the overall point, which is that the probes never have to make a jump larger than 10 light years to cover most of the galaxy. And even if two stars are more than 10 light years apart, space only seems empty because it’s so big. It’s actually littered with dust, rocks, and even rogue planets. A probe that’s not in any kind of rush can find resources on such bodies (as can a self sustaining space habitat with a whole human population, potentially)
Then, I would conclude that there are no advanced civilizations in the Alpha Centauri system. How long would it take probes to reach us starting from half the diameter distance of the MW (~50,000ly)?
A quick Google says Parker is moving at 430,000 mph. That would mean it would take a bit over 6,800 years to get to Alpha Centauri. Which is pretty fast.
That assumes it never has to slow down and sails past at top speed. I have no idea how long it would take to slow down and stop there (even if it could, which it could not).
Why? All that needs to reach us is the light from the suns they’ve surrounded with so many solar panels that it shifts the wavelength from visible light to infrared blackbody radiation. So 50,000 years.
And to answer your specific question - 90 million years. So really not long at all compared to the billions that intelligent life has had to evolve and spread, if it was common.
Need to stop doing this from my phone, makes it hard to check cites… haha
Of course all these probes are either in our solar system and moving fast past the sun, or were meant to explore the outer system and just sailed past when we were done. If we actually wanted to accelerate something to the next star, we could definitely put more effort into specifically doing that.
The universe is old in comparison to me. The universe is young as a percentage of its lifespan. This universe looks slightly younger than the alternate universe which is the same except for more bearded Spocks and greater entropy. Except it’s just the beard that makes it look older.
Very few serious proponents of galactic colonization think that we will colonize in anything that looks like a spaceship. Asteroids of the dozen mile radius would probably be one of the more common methods of traversing the void.
But yes, rogue planets have long been considered to be excellent stepping stones, and as we are discovering them to be more common than previously thought, are coming to be more useful for such an endeavor.
Space only seems empty because it’s so big. If we were good enough at extracting resources from asteroids and dwarf planets, there’s really very little limit to expansion within the galaxy.
Is it true the universe will go on for another 10,000 trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion years? I got this info from a Time magazine I saved that is dated on June 25, 2001.
It’s certainly possible, but what the universe will become cannot really be described as a “universe” that would be conceivable or experientially meaningful to a human. It is possible the universe will enter a state in which a human literally could not exist, because matter as we now understand it will fall apart. Protons and neutrons will be gone, all decayed.
Also, I didn’t really get into this in the OP (which was tongue-in-cheek) but it annoys me a little when pop sci articles or videos talk about an “end state” for the universe with undue certainty.
Just about everything that we don’t know about the cosmos right now: the full properties of dark matter, dark energy, dark flow, inflation, whether entropy can have an end state for the whole universe, how supermassive black holes form etc etc would likely impact our models of the future evolution of our universe.
I mean, I’m fine with cosmologists saying “Based on what we know now, here are the most likely scenarios for the end state for the universe”. But it’s often not presented that way.
