agreed - there’s little hope for us finding aliens…maybe ever. we better get to developing terraforming so we can fill out this solar system at least. also we need to make real holodecks to amuse ourselves…even if it is an illusion, the placebo could be enough…
…are wormholes to other dimensions actually a thing? I suppose just an imaginary construct of DC comics or whoever they borrowed it from (anyone know the scifi origin of the concept?). it would be cool though!
Wormholes are one possible solution to the black hole equations. That doesn’t mean they exist, and it doesn’t mean they are useful. I think Einstein discovered the solution, but he never made any claims. I would imagine a real one would bathe you in deadly radiation and then rip you apart.
Oh, not another comment about Trump…although, bad poetry does explain his oratory style better than political direction.
I do take the fact that we haven’t been invaded by SOMEBODY as evidence physics prevents any kind of FTL drive.
Hey, I was about to post the story, but wanted to go through the thread first to avoid redundant posting. Timezones - sometimes you’re ahead of things, sometimes you’re behind…
But I did not know that there was a short film based on the story, so thanks for posting it!
I wish people would clarify that it isn’t really trump that they dislike per se - it is his nebulous rabid base that the media (can’t tell whether rightly or wrongly at this point) has us convinced (us being a certain demo) are racist culture/religion zealots who want to turn the clock back. I feel they are a waning minority. kale eaters will inherit the earth, 
See, I thought the whole Dark Forest theory was flawed. The reasoning is sound, but it is based on flawed assumptions. Indefinite unchecked exponential growth really doesn’t happen in nature, so it’s strange to assume that all life in the Universe will exhibit it. It also assumes the ability to detect species coincides with the ability to blow up their solar system.
The final problem is that if it were true, we should be dead already. The dinosaurs should have been detectable by the changes in the atmospheric concentrations (which would cause spectrum shifts when viewed through a telescope), and there has been ample time for a supposedly logical alien race to wipe us out. After all, one of the assumptions is that the technological explosion can happen at any time, so you need to wipe out the other solar systems at the first sign of life.
In the end it just doesn’t make sense.
Not too far out, Panspermia, either directed(spore containers shot out via railgun) or accidental(spore material ejected from a planet via supernova) are potential origins for life on earth, albeit unprovable.
The problem is that the colonization effort would have to go back 4 billion years. It’s hard to imagine a race that thinks on timescales that long.
It is, though. Charles Stross addresses this and points out that you need a robot capable of human-level cognitive ability and at least the ability to recognize and simulate emotions if you want to raise functional human beings, because the robots are going to be the sole care-givers. So human-equivalent AI, in other words. Which renders sending humans superfluous. (Especially given the issue of how humans would survive in a hostile alien environment.)
Yeah, one of the existential threats is a gamma-ray burst from a nearby star going supernova. This would be equally deadly on Mars or even on a nearby, i.e. reachable, exoplanet. Less so at the bottom of the ocean.
Life on any other planet (or station or spacecraft) is necessarily going to be inherently more precarious than on the Earth we’ve evolved to live on, so even as a long-term survival strategy, it’s not great. We’d colonize other planets and then have those colonies be wiped out multiple times over before the human population on Earth faced similar existential threats.
The huge trouble with these discussions about the evolution of intelligent alien life across the universe, is that we are unable to grasp the astronomical scale of time that has passed already.
Consider for a second that another alien intelligent life has evolved elsewhere - but just, a couple of millions years before us.
What do you think would be their level of technology? Of consciousness? Of invasive strategies?
With their level of sophistication; maybe they have already invaded/seeded/colonized earth a million years back! And we could have easily forgotten with our limited lifespan of 100 years.
With these kind of timescales; even your “fact”/basic premise that we haven’t been invaded is speculative…
Before the final inheritance, as meat becomes a rare luxury, long pig will emerge as a common menu item for the 1%.
Shit man, spoiler tags maybe? I specifically didn’t go into details.
IIRC, the Arbitrary and its crew vote to make Earth a “control” planet (in the sense of a control group in an experiment) to keep from Contact’s influence.
This and ‘And Then There Were None’ are my two favourite SF short stories.
Yeah, that. I have it on my Kindle, and will go re-read it again. As I recall, it was a case of “well, we fucked around with good intentions elsewhere, let’s see what happens if we leave one be. Give us some good comparison points.”
All in all, a very clever story, with Iain Banks’ elegant prose making it all come alive.
It’s not the first time they’ve left a planet alone as a control though, they do it with a certain percentage of planets to follow various variables. It’s not just to see if non intervention is better, they know it’s not as a rule, it’s to have a baseline for various variables.
Here we are, arguing about a fictive culture (ha!) and what they supposedly did some forty-odd years ago when they visited us. It will be fun to go dig up interviews with the late author, as I do think he did talk about this story. Something about the Minds also being devious enough that they already think they know the answer, but it gives the humans something to do.
Uh, what? I dislike Trump. I dislike him so much, I dislike anyone who likes him.
I often recommend it to science fiction readers who haven’t read a lot of short stories. The whole collection is really well done.
Yeah, there was a throwaway line in Excession where one of the ship’s Minds tells another something to the effect that it typically knows what course of action its crew will vote for before they do. The line seemed at once cynical in casting doubt on free will if the Minds could model human behavior in advance, and oddly optimistic in that the Minds apparently are so enlightened that don’t actively try to influence the outcome, to the extent that Minds caught doing so are shunned by the others.
