MadSci Network: Astronomy |
Indeed, a common viewpoint is that interstellar travel is likely to be deemed unappealing by essentially all civilizations. But it is not a univerally held view. For example, some expect that we will soon (on the time scale of evolutionary processes) be 'downloading' ourselves into hardware. One can conceive that hardware-based beings could simply hibernate on long trips by slowing down their internal clock rate. I could think of several reasons why interstellar travel might still be considered undesirable by such a being, but, clearly, this all becomes so speculative that one cannot reasonably draw any signifigant conclusions. That is the real conclusion: we simply don't know enough to know what we are talking about when we discuss matters such as this. The famous 'Fermi Paradox' is interesting from a philosophical viewpoint, but not, I would hold, from a scientific standpoint. When, if ever, we make contact by some means or other with other civilizations, then we will have some real data, and be able to reach some more or less satisfactory conclusions about "what alien civilizations do". Until then, all one can do is what I am currently doing -- trying to find reproducible and verifiable evidence that other civilizations do, in fact, even exist. Right now, so far as scientific knowledge goes, supported by verified data, there could be alien civilizations located around EVERY star, or NONE. My personal guess is that they are fairly common, and that at least some persist for times comparable to the ages of stars. That guess is why I am willing to spend my time looking for evidence, as detailed at www.seti.org. But it is just a hypothesis. Until I get a data point, I'll just have to be patient and strive to do the best job of looking for some data that I can. Luckily for me, the search itself is kind of fun. I might also add that interstellar travel is certainly possible. It's just that from our current perspective it looks slow, expensive, boring, and dangerous. Many people have speculated that, from some future perspective, we may find out that physics actually allows some sort of easy faster-than-light travel. I would argue that one might as well anticipate travel by magic. No different really. The current phyical model of large scale phenomena in the universe is provided by General Relativity (or one of its near kindred). Many features of this theory have been tested against reality, and found to work extremely well. Although we do know that this theory is incomplete at the quantum scale, I would guess that it is rather unlikely that, regardless of whatever modifications will eventually be made to GR, we will suddenly find that the universe conforms to our personal WISHES that we could travel far and fast. My expectation is that we will need to learn to cope with the universe the way it is, whether we like it or not. Anti-gravity belts and time machines, I predict, are never going to be consumer products. But I could be, indeed I would be happy to be, wrong.
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