If I were a betting man, I would say FTL is not possible. However, life as we might design it, with replaceable and interchangeable parts and an intelligent program that can be backed up, might be capable of hibernating for a thousand or a million years without problems. That might go to the stars if it wanted to.
2 Likes
A lot of the parameters in the Drake equation are highly speculative. I doubt that we know many of them that accurately. With the vague figures we have, we an still guess that there may be many intelligences in our galaxy, but the nearest one is too far away in space, and perhaps time, for us to contact. Adding an extra qualifier for what, exactly, makes intelligence’ or ‘civilisation’ will not affect the result that much, if the new factor is somewhere between 0.1 and 1.0.
For me, the Drake equation is more about seeing the effect of adding new assumptions. Life on earth happened at margins: at shorelines, and sea vents, and suchlike. A tidally locked planet around a red dwarf may be able to evolve life on its twilight zone, and if the life can shelter from the flares, it might survive. There are lots of red dwarfs, so the nearest life might be on one of them.
2 Likes
I am here to point you towards a most excellent sci-fi ‘series’. tbh while A Deepness In The Sky is the second book in the series, I read it first and then the earlier work in the same universe (A Fire Upon The Deep), I was entranced. If you haven’t read any Vernor Vinge, you are welcome =`M You may recognize some of the same themes as your creation. Enjoy!
Gave my son a t-shirt for xmas last year from the SETI group that has Drake Equation on the front of it.
3 Likes
This is really key for people to realize. We could be staring right at a dozen alien civilizations and never see them because intelligent life is very short, very dark, and very quiet on the galactic scale. We can barely see things out there that scream at us for millions of years in the entire EM spectrum. Plus, the loud stuff makes the quiet stuff impossible to see. Even if we could detect the life, it’d be like trying to pick out a single photon in a car headlight. The noise overwhelms the signal way beyond what may even be possible to resolve.
Space is brain meltingly huge and we are not even bread mold on it.
6 Likes
when @cheem made that recommendation I looked into it and saw indeed it was a series, over 2100 pages! I’m not sure I can make that kind of commitment at my age ! 
hate to die without finishing, you know ! /s Also, no hardcopy available, just kindle. I do have a kindle fire, but I don’t know if I’d want to do over 2K pages with it. If times were different I would look in used book stores…one of the best in my community just closed 
I do recall liking other works by Vinge so I may try this one, thanks for the recommendation!
Just try A Deepness In The Sky (might be available via your local library or library ebook app like Libby?)
The ‘series’ is only loosely related and some of the others have a more shall we say YA (young adult) flavor that isn’t to my liking so mb skip those tho A Fire Upon The Deep is also pretty good.
2 Likes
I’ll give it a try…thanks
1 Like
Oh no! Did you undergo explosive decompression too? Any aliens, please be aware our atmosphere only has a pressure of 165 times the triple point of H2O. If that’s not enough to hold you together, please stick to our oceans or be prepared to use a pressure suit.
5 Likes
Hey @gatto, you might also like this. Just saw it in my feed this morning. It is also on topic for this thread. There are “basic rules” for how natural selection plays out. The hydrophobic ratchet is one of them.
Then, think about what these principles could be like in other substrate conditions. This kind of thing is fascinating to me!
2 Likes
trillions of magnitudes?
volume of known universe= 3.57×10^80 m^3
volume of oceans= 4,170, x 10^12 m^3
that’s only 68 orders of magnitudes. Gloriously impractical, but not trillions.
1 Like
It was hyperbole for effect.
3 Likes
I remember at the end of ADITS, the premise for the sequel was really obvious. The good guys are going to invade the slaver’s home system But what he ended up following it with, was from the defenders point of view. It forced me to consider that while I’d rather read about an invasion from the invader’s point of view, if it were happening to me personally, I’d far rather be on the defender’s side.
Y’know, after playing another round of Halo, it suddenly dawned on me, the most reasonable explaination for the Fermi paradox: there is simply no way for our galactic neighbors to reveal themselves to us, where they are not somehow blamed for all our problems. It doesn’t matter whether their gift is a cookbook or the cure to cancer, we are going to have a xenophobic allergic reaction to anything that doesn’t advance the same colonialist agenda as our governement.
It’s like an inkblot test to see what kind of nightmares we skry in the crystal.
Only when we stop seeing ourselves reflected back from the sky, will we be able to percieve the neighbors for what they are.
1 Like
This topic was automatically closed after 5 days. New replies are no longer allowed.
