ANN and OT: Calling All SETI Enthusiasts

Richard Gaskin ambassador at fourthworld.com
Tue Mar 27 15:22:20 EDT 2012


Bob Sneidar wrote:

 > It's sobering to think someone so smart as Orville Wright could
 > get the two confused. Is it theoretically possible to travel
 > to another planet? Sure! Is it practically possible? Not a chance.
 > The difference between what is true and what is possible.

Respectfully, Bob, your post surprises me, coming from someone as 
technically savvy as yourself.

After all, your words came to me through a set of technologies that were 
impossible in Wright's time, and save for a small handful of sci-fi 
writers of the day, entirely inconceivable.  Heck, not even Xanadu would 
be dreamed of until decades later, and it took decades more to begin the 
baby steps toward our Internet, which is even now in its infancy.

The computer I'm typing this on seems commonplace enough, and indeed 
it's far from new, but it has millions of transistors, each of which was 
inconceivable prior to the early 1950s.

And even then, the idea that we would one day have so many millions of 
transistors on a surface only slightly larger than our thumb would have 
been laughable if it could have been dreamed of at all.   We make things 
so small now that we can't truly say WE make them at all - we had to 
first make robots to make them for us, because we humans can't work at 
that scale.  And even the robots we make are too big; modern processors 
are made by robots that were built by other robots.

Case in point:  the Intel Celeron G530 has 504 million transistors, 
build with a 32mn die.  You can buy it at NewEgg for about $50.  Most 
folks don't bother because it doesn't have the power we've become 
accustomed to.

For all the wonder of these gadgets, they only represent the extent of 
HUMAN knowledge, a species that just a few thousand years ago hadn't 
even mastered the most fundamental technology of all, the ability to 
make fire with sticks (a skill worth knowing even now, but that's 
another story).

If we take someone from an arbitrary midpoint between then and now, say 
Benjamin Franklin or Isaac Newton, and could drop them into our world, 
they would see many of the things we take for granted as complete magic, 
or perhaps demonism (see the old Omni Mag story, "Newton's Gift"). And 
they're from just a couple hundred years ago.

So here we are, flying through space at millions of miles an hours on 
Spaceship Earth, nowhere near the edge of the Universe, which is quite 
possibly several billion years older than our little corner of space.

If we consider a relatively near neighbor, say a planet just a million 
or two years older than our own - what might a civilization look like 
that's a couple million years years older than us?  What would we look 
like in a million years? What would our technology look like?  Would our 
current selves be able to understand it?  Would we even be able to 
recognize it as tech, or just be mystified by by flashing lights, no 
more than Neanderthal could appreciate a book of Shakespeare.

Sure, Einstein's Theory of Relativity suggests that the distance between 
two stars can only be traversed no faster than light, and we human don't 
live very long so it doesn't seem worth trying - for us, anyway.

But a fruit fly lives just a few days, while we live thousands of times 
longer.  Why should we expect that the life cycles of other beings are 
anything like our own?

And Einstein's Theory is just that, a theory.  It's not yet a law, and 
for good reason.  Every few years we hear from another quantum physicist 
suggesting that they may be on the edge of something that disproves it. 
  Wouldn't be the first time a new discovery completed shattered our 
understanding of how things work.

Given the vastness of space and the billions-of-years head start so many 
other solar systems have had over our own, it doesn't strike me as the 
least bit implausible that there are other civilizations out there, and 
that some are well-traveled.

In fact, given the math of it, it seems far more probable than not.

So while our primitive radio telemetry is indeed paltry and barely worth 
the time and CPU cycles to bother with, it's the best we have right now 
and certainly more fun than not trying at all.

-- 
  Richard Gaskin
  Fourth World Systems
  Software Design and Development for the Desktop, Mobile, and the Web
  ____________________________________________________________________
  Ambassador at FourthWorld.com                http://www.FourthWorld.com





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