Ok ok I'm gonna try to not sound like a complete wacko here but I personally believe that knowledge of extraterrestrial life has already been discovered. It is often said that if aliens would be discovered it would be a problem for the world religions to deal with, perhaps that is exactly why it is being suppressed. just think about all the other political and social uproar it would cause. THE PEOPLE NEED TO KNOW WHAT WILL HAPPEN TO THERE RECTUM!
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My guess is what we have found so far is signs of very primitive extraterrestrial life, and science has not been able to conclusively prove that life exists outside of earth. I do think it is likely further mars missions will find definitive proof of life on mars, but it will be so primitive the religions of the world will dismiss it, and conclude it was god's plan, and their books words on the matter were simply just misinterpreted slightly.
Now if we found conclusive proof of intelligent life beyond our earth, that may be a bit harder for the various religions to reconcile.
It's not if there is alien life outside of earth. It's a matter of when they contact earth, that is when the human freak out will occur. Religions will have to do a tap dance to make them fit their belief systems. What if the aliens bring there own religion to earth? What if the alien religion is the conquering type, that erases all other religions but theirs?
Pure math/logic states that out of all the trillions of trillions of star systems out there, (10^24 is current estimate,) the odds are reasonable that there is other intelligent life out there, lots of it. Even if only 1 in trillion stars could harbor a planet with intelligent life, that is a trillion chances of intelligent life.
As for when, we could be waiting a long, long, LONG! time. It is nearly impossible to ever find or communicate, or: have other intelligent life find or communicate with us unless we find methods of travel/communication that is billions of times faster than the speed of light. Or the other other intelligent life does. And they may have, but require us to catch up in technology just to receive their faster than light communications, if faster than light is even possible.
My guess if we are ever going to have contact with intelligent life in the next 1000 years, someone will invent something that has to do with something that operates much much faster than the speed of light, and suddenly we will realize we are listening to communication from intelligent life. (Again if such a thing is even possible.)
Chances are far higher that: religions will be long gone, or humans will have wiped themselves out long before we figure out some sort of communication with aliens. Let alone get visited by them.
I also highly HIGHLY! doubt aliens would be the conquering type or even have religions. If an alien intelligence was advanced enough to figure out much faster than light speed travel, they would of shed the silly all powerful god idea long, long, before. Even on our own planet, we have greatly shed the powerful deity thing in the last 1000 years, at current rates religion as we know it today will be all but gone in the next 1000 years unless our rate of development greatly slows.
Alien invasion movies/books never scare me, it is pure fantasy fiction, there is many powerful logical reasons why it would never happen.
Mars missions could bring back really dire news for religions, especially the Abrahamic ones. If underground water on Mars harbors microbial life with Earth-type DNA, it could indicate that life originated on Mars and migrated here on debris from impact events. That would mean that we're all extraterrestrials. I like that.
"We are stardust, we are golden, we are billion year old carbon,
And we got to get ourselves back to the garden."
In desperation, the churches would probably tell us how the Garden of Eden was actually located on Mars, and that these sinful bacteria were expelled from the garden by a wrathful, meteor-hurling god.
Rectums and Aliens. Great basis for discussion there Biggus and probably more factual matter than theology can muster up. I mean, I find it to be less preposterous imagining aliens are galaxy hopping for black holes than imagining the existence of a god.
Of course life exists on other worlds. The problem is that in our area solar systems are so far apart that interstellar space travel is unreasonable. In other areas of space solar systems might be closer together, thereby making interstellar space travel more reasonable. However, very long distance space travel is highly unlikely because the distances are simply too great. It takes far too long to make a round trip. And based upon human history civilizations change too rapidly. Space travelers wouldn't recognize their own home world after a long space voyage.
We might be able to do something with the local planets and moons but that will most likely be the limit. And if we did bring back alien lifeforms (bacteria, viruses, etc.) they would most likely kill us off if they could survive on our world.
Yeah we will not be traveling very far at all unless we manage travel that is millions of times faster than the speed of light. Even a billion times faster, barely gets us out of our local neighborhood with 2 year long round trips. And if Einstein's theories hold up on relativity that says time moves very slowly for the passengers of a very fast moving spaceship just as they approach the speed of light, we would have serious issues indeed going a billion times faster than the speed of light, if that was even remotely possible.
LogicForTW,
I wonder if that excessive speed would create gravity problems? And how would you avoid foreign objects? How could you stop? Imagine the kind of computer you would need.
It's estimated that the Milky Way Galaxy is 100,000 light years in diameter. So to go from one side to the other would take 100,000 years at the speed of light. At a speed of 100 times the speed of light it would take 1,000 years one way. Consider the change in Earth during the past 2,000 years.
The Andromeda Galaxy is about 2.54 million light years from here. It'll be a nice trip but what would you do once you got there?
Well the first thing you would want to do is slow down; and that is going to be as hard as it was to speed up.
How large would a space ship have to be and what kind of energy source would it need to reach such speeds and distances? And it would have to carry enough fuel to make the return trip.
Special relativity stipulates that it takes an infinite amount of energy to reach the speed of light.
It gets worse too, that destination you want to go to that is 100k light years away? It is also 100k years ago. It has moved, A LOT since we last saw it. It may have been swallowed up by a supernova 50,000 years before we even considered going on the trip. Of course that problem multiplies going all the way to andromeda.
Also as I alluded to before, as you approach the speed of light, the passage of time slows down for those on the ship. Current theory has it that if you moved at true speed of light, time would stop. The speed effects time thing has already been proven in real world use too. They have to adjust the clocks on gps satellites to account for the fact that time passes a bit more slowly for them, then time does for people here on earth. And if the clocks on the gps satellites is off by even 1/100th of a second, it can make the gps satellite's accuracy go from 2-3 feet radius, to 100's of feet.
LogicForTW,
That's confusing to think about. If time stops at the speed of light would it regress if you go faster than the speed of light and by how much? How could you calculate what time period you would be in at your destination?
T = t / sqrt[1 - v^2]
T = time elapsed for object B
t = time elapsed for object A
v = difference in velocity between B and A, as a fraction of the speed of light
Things to notice:
The problem is once we got result E (a discontinuity), we should have retreated back to D. Functions should not be trusted to model real world phenomenon beyond such discontinuities.
So the answer is, no one really knows because the breakdown at E and F.
@Diotrophes: "It'll be a nice trip but what would you do once you got there?"
I felt like that after taking a super-fast bullet train from Tokyo to Osaka. The trip was a buzz, but Osaka is just another Tokyo with a slightly different accent.
I think most corners of the universe will be very similar to the one we inhabit. Traveling won't teach us much that our instruments can't discover for us. Opportunities for adventure, exploration, and enterprise abound in our own solar system. As far as the rest of the universe goes, we should concentrate on probes, long-range instruments, and if we're very lucky, communication with other intelligent species.
Suppose a spaceship of space aliens did come to Earth. Which city do you think they would land in?
Depends on their motive. But assuming aliens of vastly superior technology would have no reason to visit earth other than to purely explore, and meet other intelligent life, I imagine they will pick a spot that would seem the least threatening as possible, then send small unthreatening looking robots to meet various world leaders, just outside the secure areas of capitals to engage in communication.
It is kind of like religion, in the unlikely event aliens visit us in the next couple of decades, it will likely be absolutely nothing like the books and movies portray it.
If aliens wanted to destroy us, they would do it the easiest way possible, considering they had such a fast ship, they would nudge a few large asteroids off their paths, and let the giant rocks do the work for them.
The movie Arrival paints a really interesting picture of an alien race arriving and being utterly unable to communicate with us. It's one of the smartest sci-fi movies I've seen in a long time.
Watched it recently myself, I definitely enjoyed some aspects of that movie.
It is an interesting thought, aliens that operate in a way that they see all events of time at once, past, present and future, so they communicate in a way that speaks in circles representing thoughts that cover all spectrum of time, making communication with our single point in time communication exceedingly difficult.
I think that they would land in the largest city because it's usually the most important one. So hello Tokyo!
I highly doubt knowledge of aliens is being suppressed - given the ridiculous amount of leakage that seems to go on in governments the hokey conspiracy theories rolled out are obviously the work of paranoid delusions and not genuine leaks.
I'd like to think there is intelligent life somewhere out there - as clearly there is very little here on earth - present company of course excepted. :)
I suspect at some point we will master interstellar travel - although Einsteinian physics seems to preclude the possibility we don't know what we don't know. We are literally at the beginning of our journey as a civilization - we are only a few thousand years old in terms of science and technology - so it seems to me quite likely that if we survive long enough we would find some alternative means of exploring the stars. Quantum teleportation, manipulation of wormholes that effectively bypass space time, or some as yet undreamed of alternative approach, who knows?
That's all assuming Trump and Kim Jong Un don't wipe us all out first. :)
@KenCasey: "hokey conspiracy theories rolled out are obviously the work of paranoid delusions and not genuine leaks."
Government incompetence and leakiness are the biggest arguments against conspiracy theories about Area 51, etc. The Christian church, on the other hand, has successfully propagated a huge extraterrestrial myth for two millennia.
I think, personally, the most likely way we will explore the stars is by eventually going all digital and leaving our physical bodies behind. (We could inhabit other bodies/machines as needed, but we would be digital in nature.)
Being truly digital allows for some major advantages. We could copy our selves and all our thoughts/memories at will, and we could much more easily "sleep" for millions of years in digital form, for a million year journey to the other side of the universe at .9 lightspeed. All the while staying here, on earth interacting with our normal lives and connections. Our very concept of self, and what it is to be alive would have to change however, and certainly there would be no room in that kind of future for an all powerful "god" thing.
Our lives, are almost completely unrecognizable to someone from 1000 years ago. But our pace of change and innovation is only accelerating, the same gulf of difference will likely happen in 50-100 years now. With 1000 years from now, our lives being utterly foreign to how we live now. Given the current accelerating pace of innovation and change. (Which could really accelerate quickly with powerful AI/human cooperation bypassing normal human brain limitations, a process that is already well under way.)
That might not be possible.
Interesting, I have not run across that before. You are a great source of new ideas/concepts for me Nyarlathotep. If I understood it correctly, a perfect copy may well not be possible, but a copy that is "good enough" copy technology may still be developed, it just would not be a perfect copy down to the quantum state.
Right. Perfect copies are impossible (given the postulates of QM; again if those are wrong, all bets are off). The question now is: can a shitty copy be a reasonable approximation of someones brains/memories/etc. I don't think enough is known about those systems for anyone to give a convincing answer to that question.
@Nyarlathotep: "That might not be possible."
You'd certainly need a Heisenberg compensator.