Truly fascinating! I'm constantly amazed at the sheer number of galaxies, never mind those stars... 🤪

13 hours ago, n4gix said:

Truly fascinating! I'm constantly amazed at the sheer number of galaxies, never mind those stars... 🤪

 

Indeed, Mr. Bill. But I wonder if any civilizations out there can get here? Or are such immense distances forever untraversable? 🤔

According to the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy:  "Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind bogglingly big it is.  I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space."

6 hours ago, martin-w said:

But I wonder if any civilizations out there can get here?

Of course they can!  Any civilization that is smart enough not to destroy it's own planet is smart enough to travel through the stars to learn what they might be missing and thankful they didn't develop into what they might be seeing. 

Noel

5 hours ago, birdguy said:

Of course they can!  Any civilization that is smart enough not to destroy it's own planet is smart enough to travel through the stars to learn what they might be missing and thankful they didn't develop into what they might be seeing. 

Noel

 

It doesn't matter how smart a species is.... if the laws that govern reality don't allow it.

I'm talking, of course, about traveling across the vastness of the universe in a reasonable timee frame. Not, taking many  decades, or a lifetime in a generation ship, to reach a nearby star.

3 hours ago, martin-w said:

if the laws that govern reality don't allow it.

Do we know all the laws?  To some civilizations we might be considered primitives.  How much do we know about reality?  Each breakthrough we make we think we are getting closer.  Are we?  We might not be as smart and as intelligent as we think we are.  To many out there we might be considered primitives.

It could be the laws that govern reality do allow it.

Noel

8 hours ago, birdguy said:

Do we know all the laws? 

 

That's why I said IF the laws that govern reality don't allow it.

It's possible that something like the Alcubierre warp drive is possible. But again IF we discover there is such a thing as negative energy/mass.

If 2024 stutters from constant low bandwidth, then look for aliens from the far reaches to arrive very soon after November 19 and demonstrate their displeasure!

Come on, Fielder. We all know that aliens have been here for thousands of years. A few of them lived just down the road from Noel in the middle of the last century 😉

Edited October 21, 20241 yr by Christopher Low

It ain't that big!

On 10/19/2024 at 7:53 PM, birdguy said:

Do we know all the laws?  To some civilizations we might be considered primitives.  How much do we know about reality?  Each breakthrough we make we think we are getting closer.  Are we?  We might not be as smart and as intelligent as we think we are.  To many out there we might be considered primitives.

It could be the laws that govern reality do allow it.

Noel

You're right, Noel. 

There is a way to travel faster than light.  We just haven't figured it out yet.

BTW, I gave up arguing with people who like to think they are experts in all manner of scientific subjects and try to show off by throwing out some scientific jargon that they read in a magazine or internet article.

Dave

33 minutes ago, dave2013 said:

There is a way to travel faster than light.  We just haven't figured it out yet.

 

Well, that was very definitive. How would you know? We don't know that. 

If we haven't figured it out yet then we cant say it's definitively possible. We can only say it MIGHT or MIGHT NOT be possible. Or it could be that something like the Alcubierre warp drive is feasible, or wormhole travel, or something else, but just not practical due to the enormous amounts of energy required. 

At the moment we can only say MIGHT be feasible. It would be nice if we did, but we don't have all the answers. We would be foolish to presume we do. 

 

 

 

Edited October 21, 20241 yr by martin-w

1 hour ago, dave2013 said:

There is a way to travel faster than light.  We just haven't figured it out yet.

BTW, I gave up arguing with people who like to think they are experts in all manner of scientific subjects and try to show off by throwing out some scientific jargon that they read in a magazine or internet article.

Dave

Martin is spot on: current theories (the Einstein equation, to be precise) do not rule out faster-than-light travel, but they suggest that it is practically impossible because negative energy (i.e., energy extracted from a vacuum) would be required to create an Alcubierre drive. And no, I haven't just read that in some internet article, I work in the field.

To be clear: most experts on relativity do not rule out the possibility of faster-than-light travel in principle, they just think it is very unlikely and have very good reasons for this conclusion. Science generally does not make absolute statements. Science is just a method to narrow down possibilities as much as possible, and it is very good at that. Building skyscrapers and bridges, optical fibre networks, or PET scans in medicine are all applications of facts found in science. It could be that these facts are not absolutely true and that there are alternative explanations. However, nobody knows how, and science made it possible for us to create all this marvellous technology. It just doesn't allow us to travel at arbitrary speed yet, but who knows, maybe some aliens will show us on April 5, 2063 😉

Peter

Peter, science has given us marvelous things and technology.  But how far has science taken us so far?  At present we have no yardstick to measure our progress against.  We may be just a drop in the bucket or less.  Maybe we are halfway there.  Maybe we have come almost as far as we can go and are working hard to get warp drive.  We probably will get there if not sooner then later.

I do believe we are being observed by alien visitors.  Perhaps some are living among us.  When we developed nuclear weapons we made them nervous.  How will they feel if we do actually develop warp drive and have the ability to travel amongst them.  Given the history of our planet and the way we have been behaving up to now will they allow us to mingle with them?

Or maybe we are the only intelligent(?) beings in the universe and we continue our normal course.  Will we eventually destroy ourselves and leave only space probes and flags on moons and asteroids and uninhabited planets saying, "Kilroy was here"?

Noel