Of ansibles and FTL and where the hell is everybody?

[polaris93]

It's possible that the problem we have with discovering a means of communicating or transporting ourselves across interstellar distances lies in our assumption that both communication and transportation have to be serial and linear in nature, that is, going from point to contiguous point to the next contiguous point in a continuous set of such

Comments

[jordan179]

Well, we're probably searching in very much the wrong band for it

This has occurred to me. We look in the "water hole" of the radio part of the electromagnetic spectrum, but that simply happens to be the most convenient band in which a civilization using broadcast radio might transmit (owing to the relative lack of interference). It is more than a little arrogant of us to imagine that a technology that we only discovered ourselves a little over a century ago will remain the dominant form of long-distance signalling for millennia to come.

Mind you, it's not as if I have any better concrete idea -- the alternatives, such as some sort of quantum entangled supralight communication or an FTL-energy based "subspace radio," are still merely technobabble, since they go beyond our technology and even our physics in most cases. But it should remind us to be aware that absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

And at that, we have heard something like 160 anamolous signals from various directions in space. They just don't repeat

[polaris93]

With all of which I agree. The goals of SETI, by themselves, are exciting and attractive, but the assumptions on which their work is based leave a great deal to be desired. Unixronin has discussed some of this on his blog, as have others on LJ, but I've seen little discussion of these issues on the science blogs and in the science newsletters I get. The members of SETI are using all the same advanced technology nearly everyone else in our country is today, and grew up with tremendous advances in technology and the sciences, and yet their heads seem to be stuck in the same place that many of those who wrote for the science-fiction pulps had theirs back in the 1920 and 1930s, with no awareness of the very real and ongoing scientific and technological advances of their own day. It was "hop in your spaceship and buzz off to Aldebaran for a weekend of partying!", and who cares about such little nothings as the speed of light, what an accelaration of X-zillion km/sec2 would do to the human body, or any other such negligible matters? I

RKV

[polaris93]

Right now, a single moderate-mass near-light RKV could wreck our one and only world and end our story, and we should keep this in mind when we consider squawking from our nest.

It doesn't even have to be somebody outside our nest to do that, once we get out into the Solar System, establish bases in the Oort Cloud, and develop effective mass drivers. You could take some object in the Cloud and aim it at Earth at a very respectable speed, even if not quite relativistic speed. That's all that would be needed for religious fanatics like Al Qaeda to decide that yep, that's the way to get rid of those pesky infidels: aim a body about 15 miles in diameter at the continent where they live on Earth and get the mass driver going and send it Earthward and -- oops, what happened to Mecca? What happened to the rest of the planet?! Cargo cultists of that stripe being what they are, I sure as hell wouldn't put it past them.