In all seriousness, I read it as him simply saying we might not know everything… that includes the absolute certainty of C being an insurmountable obstacle.
Mr. President, I have good news and bad news.
The good news is that we have decoded the first interstellar communication, ever.
The bad news is that it reads as follows -
“There is no God but Allah, and Muhammad is his Prophet.”
Regards,
Shodan
Hawking’s analogy doesn’t strike me as a reasonable one. I agree (as Washington Irving and H.G. wells pointed out in the 19th century) thata race that could cross space would have the upper hand, and could potentially squash us, culturally. But that doesn’t take into account the awesome distances that have to be crossed and the outrageous expenditure in energy required. I seriously doubt that it would be worthwhile to them to cross space at that cost to conquer us – we wouldn’t have anything that would make it worthwhile. It’d be easier and cheaper to terraform their own system or siphon off resources from within their own solar system.
read the Larry Niven story “Assimilating our culture, that’s what they’re doing” (In the collections Convergent Series and Draco’s Tavern, among others) to find a more efficient way for Evil Bad Aliens to more efficiently exploit us lesser races.
Yeah. It’s just ducky to think of old episodes of “I Love Lucy”, etc., welcoming the little green guys.
Personally, I think they’ve already visited Earth and that they have galactic quarantine signs out on us.
Solar systems don’t last forever. We actually live in a fairly long-lasting one but we’re still screwed in about a billion years. Brown dwarf systems last much longer - but evidently not all civilizations develop around one of those.
But what if our sun was starting to grow and belch out too much dangerous radiation. What if scientists said in about 50,000 years life would be unlivable on earth. I bet we’d already be doing some heavy research in how to save our species by moving to another solar system.
Some stars only last 1 million years. Likely life cannot develop near them - but there is a whole range of star life cycles from there up. So it is totally possible and even likely somewhere aliens have already faced extintion from star death. And if humans last long enough, we will too.
I agree with Hawking, it’s not worth the risk.
Just because they are more intelligent than humans for long distance space travel, doesn’t necessarily mean they don’t want to harvest us and what’s left of our planet. Especially if its vital for their own survival. What would appear cruel and abnormal to us, may very well be nothing out of the ordinary to them. Farmer meet cow.
Where’s Ripley when you need her.
But, as you said, our system will likely last a billion years – longer by many estimates. Most solar systems would probably be the same. Your figure of 50,000 is an unlikely pull-out-of-the-hat.
And if it came to that, the extreme expenditure in energy and resources would probably be more usefully spent on erecting a nearby artificial environment than on trying to achieve interstellar travel.
Most solar systems will not be the same. They will be either longer or shorter. It depends entirely on how much fuel the star has and how fast it burns it.
And by current estimates in about a billion years the sun heats up enough to make life unlivable on earth. I’m not making that up. Our sun will still be around for a total lifespan of about 10 billion years - but life on earth is not possible for most of that time.
50,000 is just a number to illustrate why a species would leave their star. But whether it is in 50,000 or 100 billion years from the present - all stars eventually either wind up as black holes or white dwarfs.
Wrong. You’ll eventually run out of energy unless you’re near a star. Where is your artificial environment going to get its power from after the star is gone? How are you going to survive the supernova?
I’m talking about civilizations who want to last hundreds of millions or billions of years here. We’ll have to move around to stay alive. It is probably hard for some people to understand the time scales involved here.
Bolding added.
How can you make this statement when the only evidence of any civilization, anywhere, is our own?
So far all of the 450 or so planets discovered are large ones close to the parent star. None have been discovered around brown dwarf stars. We can’t yet say if brown dwarf stars even have planetary systems.
Right, so a civilisation that lasts millions or billions of years would have value for a tiny speck of dust orbiting a pretty average star?
It is hard for people to get a handle on these timescales.
A sentient race of comparable intelligence to humans is hardly going to be screwing around with ray guns and gang probing after “millions or billions of years”…I’d expect artificial star formation to be in such a species primordial past, let alone needing to appropriate dear earth.
So at the point where there’s no free-floating H in the universe, then maybe I’ll expect the “billions of years old Slash and Burn species” to come knocking. But we seem to be a long way off that.
In the 40s and 50s comic books often had depictions of aliens lusting after human women. Such notions seem silly to us now: not to rule them out, but we’d no more expect that than we’d expect aliens to paint pink polka dots on every yellow object they find.
But somehow people find pillaging far more plausible than rape, for reasons that don’t stand up to scrutiny.
All of the resources found on Earth, except those created by biological effort, can be found floating freely in space. No need for water, there’s plenty in space. No need to gold, or nitrogen, or silicon or iron, it’s all out there in asteroids and planetoids.
Unless, ala Avatar, we find Unobtainium on some distant world that gives us cause to spend scores of years and trillions of dollars on the effort to get there and bring it back, there is no viable economic reason to colonize space. This is exactly WHY we do not have orbiting cities, moon colonies and people on Mars. There’s no money in it. The only real purpose for colonizing space would be to remove some of the eggs from the single basket they are currently located in (Earth) - to preserve the Human Race against any extinction threats.
Oh sure, if we could somehow discover some ‘magic’ technology, like that in science fiction, that would allow us ultra-cheap FTL travel, it may someday be cheaper to colonize worlds, but the economic angle won’t go away. Unless there is Unobtainium on that world, any colony isn’t going to pay for itself. This doesn’t even consider the billions and trillions in research, development and infrastructure that would have to be invested well before we could ever get to the point of sending out colony ships.
So then, if we were engaged in this process, and somewhere along the line, we discovered an intelligent species that we were capable of communicating with and understanding, what would we do? Likely they’d be quarantined for their own safety as well as ours with only small groups of scientists allowed to study and interact with them - as we spend many times more than that to establish a military presence elsewhere in their home system to ensure that, should they enter space, we are firmly in control of the situation.
So then, what is likely if another, already space-faring race discovers us? Probably exactly that.
Because, as I said, evidently not all civilizations develop around a brown dwarf. Our civilization is evidence of that.
Read my sentence. It is about brown dwarfs - and I state there is evidence that not all civilizations are around them.
So your future advanced civilization is going to find it easier to create a star than to fly to one? That makes no sense. You need massive amounts of material to create a star - if doing such a thing could even even be possible.
And you need a star for energy. You can’t just pull energy out of your arse. The very fact stars are not infinite should clue you in that you’re not going to come up with an unlimited source from some other source.
Except for energy. Most of space is way too far away from stars to be enable efficient energy gathering. Without energy, good bye civilization.
What earth has, which is plausibly valuable to an alien, is about a billion years of sustainable, habitable area in which that alien can live energy efficiently.
Tough to say what humans could be like in one million years, much less one billion. We could have long since given up soft, organic bodies and we’ll actually find it fun to spread our solar wings and splash around in the expanding shell of the sun like dolphins splash around on the surface of the ocean today.
At any rate, in 50,000 years Earth may indeed be uninhabitable due in no part to the sun, and since the US just killed its manned space program I’m not really sensing a lot of forward thinking or concern in that area.
Agreed. That is ulitimately the only reason to travel to other planets. But once you start, how many eggs should you put in the basket?
If we/they discovers the other alien within their ability to fly to (even in generational ships at fractions of light speed), and given that the only purpose is to collect another ‘egg’, then conquest of the planet is what we would do - or what another civilization would do too. If an advanced alien visited earth I should expect to meet with death soon.
Ultimately I think it is life’s duty… the biology of life, to find new life through great hurdles and exponential momentum . Universal Organisms find and seek Lifesource instinctually. We need to find others and communicate, but I expect the parlay will be quite probing, initially.
I see natural organisms interacting… likely one of four things.
cooperation.
eat, or consume.
concealment and subsumation
parasitism
Given the extraordinary amount of effort and economics to get a very small colony ship to another planet, it seems extremely unlikely that we would invest many many times that amount to attempt to exterminate pre-existing life. Unless worlds in the habitable range turn out to be so unbelievably rare that the world we come across is pretty much the only one, there’s almost ZERO chance that we would spend so much effort to exterminate the life there in order to take it over. Even less that we’d attempt to ship what would very likely be many more times as many soldiers and military materials in an attempt to conquer that world.
If only because exposing ourselves to the life there would be exceedingly dangerous and filled with all sorts of completely unforseeable consequences. Who knows, we may find that their ordinary skin fungii is worse than Ebola to us, or that a common parasite that they don’t find even slightly troublesome absolutely loves Humans and is completely debilitating to us.
So again, unless it is the ONLY habitable world we come across, we quarantine, place observers, and move on.
(Then wait for our common microbes to have the same effect on them that the European germs had on the native American population.)
So far most of the posts on this thread are based on the assumption that the aliens will technologically far superior to us, to the point of developing practical interstellar travel. I think it’s more likely that they will be bound to their home solar system, as we are to ours, and that our communication will likely consist of making an interstellar ham radio contact.
So far most of our attempts at communicating with ETs have been passively listening rather than actively transmitting. It’s just too hard for us to broadcast a signal with enough power and enough gain to be detectable 10 or 50 or 100 LY away against the background noise of space. So it’s reasonable to think that when contact is made, the ETs will be a bit more advanced than we are - after all they produced a signal strong enough for our measly radio telescopes to detect, so they must have the whole energy thing down pat. In addition, if they heard us first and sent their signal in our direction, they must have some pretty awesome radio telescopes and some really good software to detect our weak signal against all that background noise.
However, I think that a civilization is much more likely to enter the “master in the transmission of EM radiation” stage of development than the “master of .7 c space travel” stage. Just think of how good we are at using radio waves, and how bad we are at making things go even .01 c (we can’t). And while I’m sure we’ll get better and better at using and converting energy, I’m not so sure that our civilization will ever get close to traveling at relativistic speeds. I’m not saying it can’t be obtained, I just think that for every civilization with interstellar travel there will be 100 or 1000 or more that can’t break .1 c.
So while it may be possible that the ETs might be able to send a craft our way 50 years or so after they learn of our existence, I think it’s more likely that we’ll just have a very slow, stilted conversation with each other.
On the other hand, what if a super-advanced space-fairing species tries to contact us, and we ignore them. Then 200 years later they show up on our doorstep, informing us that the period for public comment on the hyperspace bypass about to pass through our solar system has expired, and that maybe if we took a more healthy interest in local affairs we wouldn’t be facing the destruction of our planet. What then?
I heard that. . .