Well, maybe I’m confused but I thought the idea colonizing is to provide suitable places for the colonizers to live? A few hundred people living in lava tubes doesn’t really solve the ostensible problems for ‘colonizing the galaxy’ - to provide a second world for your home planet beings to live more-or-less as they did on the home planet. How would you have that without providing a suitable atmosphere and environment to grow food - non-regolith?
Is there a way to do that without terraforming?
Quite true. Spreading out all over the galaxy is very expensive and not worth doing just for the novelty of it. I believe it will always be an endeavor of such magnitude it will require a state effort. I doubt technology will ever advance to the point where a couple of guys could do it from their backyard. For the state to fund it, it will need to be very dire, IMHO.
Probably not. I was speaking in general there, not about the specific question of UFOs.
Of course, there’s another category of secrets the President doesn’t know: Secrets that are too technical for him to understand. The blueprints for atomic bombs, for instance, are very obviously and understandably classified, but most ordinary folks wouldn’t understand anything of them, if they were to see them. Since presidents aren’t selected based on their proficiency in nuclear engineering, it’s a safe bet that most of them don’t know how to make a bomb, even if they did want to.
Yes, live in an enclosed habitat. Which we’re already assuming that the travelers have been doing for thousands of years. If they’ve been living in their spaceship, then you can put that ship on a planet and they can keep on living in it. If you want the planet, which they probably don’t: Being in a solar system is good, because it gives you an easy source of energy and raw materials, but planets themselves are mostly just inconvenient.
But that makes no sense. The whole point of colonizing is to set up a civilization on a distant shore. The Polynesians didn’t sail over 3000 miles in canoes over the open ocean to live in those canoes on the beach. Same for the Greeks establishing colonies in the western Mediterranean, or the Norse settlements in Greenland or the early English settlements in what is now America. They set out to establish new larger communities.
Disagree, and none of this is ‘easy’. Getting there wouldn’t be easy and if you are living in a tin can on the planet’s surface hauling in raw materials in from an asteroid belt would not be easy. And what would be the point: you couldn’t ship them back to Earth and if you were only living in your original generation ship you wouldn’t have a big need for them.
No, the point of building a generation ship and sending a thousand of your kind into the great void would be to settle a distant planet.
Regarding the Fermi Paradox, Geoffrey A. Landis of the NASA Lewis Research Center opines:
"If even a very small fraction of the hundred billion stars in the galaxy are home to technological civilizations which colonize over interstellar distances, the entire galaxy could be completely colonized in a few million years."
The problem with technology is the infrastructure that supports it. Pretty much everything we enjoy in our technological lives is built atop long supply chains comprised of very complex and physically large industrial processes.
Back when Europeans were in colonisation mode, invading various continents and setting up shop, artisans could pack their trade into a large trunk and be up and running cutting trees and stone to build dwellings a day after they arrived. Industry was a bit slower, but you needed very little to bootstrap up a 17th century economy. Shipping, for the time, big stuff- like steam engines took a few weeks to months. So building up a 19th century technological society was not difficult.
The usual argument is that a really well developed technology will reach the point of self replicating machines that can make everything else. Just how big such a technological marvel might be is a different question.
Of course we are ourselves exactly such a machine.
Even with the best reasonable spacecraft technology it will take generations to reach other star systems. So any incentive of forging a new and better life for oneself isn’t a reason to go. Even one’s children probably won’t see a life beyond the metal walls of the craft. So there is very little reason for any given individual to ever embark. Arriving on a random planet that has enough of a hostile environment to require the colonists to remain inside little metal boxes for the entirety of their lives is not a happy answer either.
Overall the idea of the common SciFi colonisation ships make no sense. Other than SciFi that invents faster than light travel. Anyone who implicitly assumes that this comes with the advanced technology is to the best of our knowledge delusional.
One answer to the generations of life inside a spaceship is suspended animation. Another common SciFi approach. But how well this is likely to work isn’t known.
The whole idea of colonialism from the point of view of a society is to project the society and usually to make money. The actual colonists are just an implementation. They are not necessarily needed.
So we send out machines instead. Self replicating, adaptive, and capable of projecting our kind (for a loose definition of our kind) to new worlds. We know how to build that already.
So you get to the star seed hypothesis.
So it may be that we should not be looking outwards for colonising aliens. We may be them. (As would everything else on the planet.)
But if a civilization faces a population problem, I doubt whether, “Colonize the galaxy” would be the lowest cost solution, by orders of magnitude. Even under high tech scenarios.
If scientific knowledge is the goal, I don’t know whether remote viewing or space probes would be more cost effective 10 thousand years in the future.
If performance art is the goal, send test tubes or maybe hibernating aliens.
Honestly, it wouldn’t surprise me if we had a couple of Von Neumann machine collectives in our solar system, harvesting matter from the easiest source, which would be asteroids. I don’t see why Luna would be an especially attractive location.
It really isn’t. There are no good candidate worlds out there for terraforming among the 5787 worlds discovered so far. Look at Dr Deth’s list;
1/ Gliese 667Cc - 3x Earth’s mass = high gravity+ tidally locked - no day/night cycle
2/ Kepler-22b - 9x Earth’s mass = very high gravity - totally inhospitable for humans.
3/ Kepler-69c - a Super-Venus, 2x Earth’s mass, = hot.
4/ Kepler-62f - tidally locked = no day/night cycle. Hot on one side, freezing on the other.
5/ Kepler 186f - 50% chance of being tidally locked; if not it probably rotates very slowly, and is colder than Mars. This might be a borderline terraformable planet, but probably more difficult than Mars.
6/ Kepler-442b - 2.3 x Earth’s mass. High gravity, probably rotates slowly - another borderline terraformable planet. Humans wouldn’t like the high gravity much.
7/ Kepler-452b 5x Earth’s mass = too much gravity.
8/ Kepler-1649c - tidally locked = no day/night cycle. Hot on one side, freezing on the other.
9/ Proxima b - flare star = too much ultraviolet.
10/ TRAPPIST-1e - tidally locked - no day/night cycle = Hot on one side, freezing on the other.
Maybe some of these worlds could be made hospitable, but I expect that the people living there would not resemble current-day humans very closely.
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There really aren’t many suitable Earth-like planets out there, but there is plenty of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, iron, silicon - the raw material to make habitats. If we do colonise the galaxy, I’d expect fewer than one in a thousand people to live on a planet - all the rest would live in climate-controlled space habitats rotating to provide a custom level of gravity.
Right now any list of known exo-planets is still highly biased by the limited capability of our detection means.
That list is highly biased towards big planets because right now Earth-sized planets are much harder for us to detect. Despite your closing comment, there may in fact be far more of them than of the 3-10x larger planets we can now sorta-readily find.
Now you’re certainly right that even getting gravity between WAG 0.8x & 1.2x Earth’s is only one of many criteria before we get to ST:TOS’s oh so common “Class M” planets. e.g. Venus’s surface gravity (~0.9G) is just fine for humans. OTOH Venus overall is … not.
Having quibbled all that, IMO @Francis_Vaughan just nailed it a few posts ago. Building on this bit:
Largely true to get a historical colony established. The initial colonists were just an implementation detail. But once a colony is reasonably well established a different dynamic took / takes over …
From the POV of individual people in the home country, a colony represents a less crowded, less controlled place where a person of limited means might make a larger, better life. Or a place to escape mistakes made in their current life and location.
Heck, even as late as the 1920s a common sales line for Florida rural real estate was “Manless land for the landless man”. The come-on being “If you can’t afford to buy a usefully large farm in crowded PA or OH or wherever you are, come down here where you can get large acreage for small money and become the success you desire”. That was true in 1920s FL and was certainly true of much of the European colonial expansion of the 1500s-1800s.
All of that historical motivation will be utterly absent for a would-be colonist considering joining a generation ship to another star system. IMO the only recruits would be failures in the then-current Earth economy, or else wannabe refugees / escapees if Earth was a socio-political hell-hole akin to current Russia (or NK!). In which case the generation ship would probably more resemble a prison ship. Echoing how Britain initially populated Australia. And likely also echoing the strangely bifurcated society that developed between the offspring of prisoners who were “transported” there and the offspring of colonists who “traveled” there. Big difference. The sins of the fathers …
Damned little reason for anyone individually or collectively as a society to pay for that expensive effort. So as @Francis_Vaughan said, it (almost certainly) won’t happen.
I contend it is, in the context of this thread. The OP states:
It appears to me the OP believes there could very well be alien visitation to earth. A belief I don’t share. The Fermi Paradox assumes space colonization is easy and should have happened many times over by now. So, where is everybody?
In my post 49 (or 50?), I stated I did not think there is a paradox because I don’t think it would be easy to colonize the galaxy. However, taking the Fermi Paradox at it’s face, the number one reason to colonize the galaxy (for earthlings, anyway) is to preserve life as we know it. So in case global warming, asteroids or nuclear war wipes out life on earth, it will continue to flourish elsewhere.
That idea is why there are so many podcasts, YouTube channels and papers written about it. It’s a romantic notion but there is way too much hand-waving away of the very serious problems associated with actually making it happen.
I was arguing from the point of the commonly stated position of those who feel it could happen, which is actual colonization.
For the record, I don’t think we will ever build a generation ship or terraform distant worlds. I’m not ruling it out, but if it happens it will probably be thousands of years in the future. I also don’t think there’s a chance of building Von Neumann probes either. So I don’t think they are visiting us.
We seem to be arguing at cross purposes. Crossing the interstellar void to construct space habitats in distant solar systems is actual colonisation. If you only send generation ships to the tiny fraction of solar systems that contain a terraformable planet, you will only be colonising a thousandth of the galaxy. I assume that any advanced alien civilisation that can cross interstellar distances can also construct habitats when it gets there, otherwise it is not worth doing.
Note that the generation ship strategy is not the only possible interstellar strategy, but it does provide the travellers with a ready-made habitat when they arrive, so this provides shelter for them if there are no suitable planets to inhabit (which would almost certainly be the case).
If the UFO/UAP phenomenon is actually caused by aliens (which I don’t believe for a second), they don’t seem to be using the generation ship approach. Instead they are using the ‘spaceship propelled by exotic energy that is prone to crashing’ strategy, which seems even more risky.
As far as how the Army knew about the lecture: my guess is that the professor had submitted the lecture to their security division for review. This is a lifelong obligation for people who’ve held a security clearance. Although for people who no longer work in the intelligence community, it’s pretty much an honor system.
Although Tesla made some brilliant discoveries (e.g., the benefits of AC over DC) a quazi cult has grown around his legacy over the last forty or so years. Overclassification has probably fed this.
I think a large part of Tesla’s cult comes from the fact that, in addition to being a highly gifted engineer, he was also crazy. He made a lot of crazy claims that, if they worked, would have been amazing, but there was no chance they could possibly work. But a lot of people look at him and say “Well, since he was a genius, his other claims MUST have worked”. And then respond to the lack of actual existence of such devices with “Well, they must be classified”.
Exactly the same thing has happened with the rumours of extraterrestrial material held by the US government. Several ‘true believers’ have gone looking for this material in the Pentagon’s archives, and when they were unable to find it they have concluded that it is being held by private contractors, who are presumably subject to arrangements that are beyond top secret. Such material is probably in the same hangar as Peking Man and the Ark of the Covenant.
Apparently on Beta [Whatever] the locals really like watching vids of their influencers doing anal probing of the local fauna on whatever planet they visit.
