Following On From Yesterday

[poliphilo]

Yes. I think it's very likely we have visitors. Planet Earth is at a crucial phase in its history: it's developing a global society, it has weapons of mass destruction, it has rudimentary space travel. We're no longer galactic peasants, we're becoming contenders. We're at an interesting age.  If I were an intelligent extraterrestrial I'd be motivated to drop by and take a peek- even perhaps violate the prime directive and give things a bit of a nudge.

We can no longer- plausibly- argue that we're alone in the universe. Our telescopes keep detecting planets in the orbit of neighbouring stars- and just the other day- for the first time-  we found one that replicates conditions on Earth. Actually there must be billions of them. 

Of course the visitors may not be coming from other planets. They may be sliding in from other dimensions. They may be hopping back from our own future. The old, mechanical universe our grandfathers had their heads in ruled such things out of court, but we're living in a quantum universe now. 

What would be really weird would be if everyone out there was ignoring us.

Comments

[xiphias.livejournal.com]

I think it's mathematically certain that there are other planets that have life, that free-moving organisms will start to need decision-making, that intelligence will evolve from basic decision-making, that actual sapience will evolve from intelligence, that civilizations will rise among sapient beings, and that technology will arise within civilizations.

So I am certain that there are other intelligent species in the universe. And I'm certain that among those species, there are people -- because they ARE people -- who WANT to travel among the stars and meet other alien people, like us.

The question is -- can they?

The speed of light is a hard limit. In order to get around the speed of light, you need time travel. (Because the speed of light is actually the speed of reality, and the speed of the fact of an event having happened -- things aren't ACTUALLY simultaneous, time isn't an absolute, and the speed of light is the speed of time, and to go faster than the speed of time, you have to go backward in time.)

For there to be aliens visiting us, they have to have the ability to travel in time. And it's not clear that such a thing is even POSSIBLE in this universe.

That said, I'm pretty darned certain that, if it IS possible, then someone CAN do it, and that, if someone CAN do it, somebody WILL want to use that to visit us.

The question isn't "is there somebody out there?" There is. The question is, "Do the other species out there even know about us, and, if they do, can they get here?"

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

If we could get to them, we would- because we're inquisitive so-and-sos. I don't suppose they're any different.

We're only just beginning to understand how the universe is put together. I suspect the speed of light isn't actually the barrier we currently think it is. Perhaps we'll get round it by folding space. Perhaps we'll use wormholes. After all, I remember a time (yes, I'm that old) when people thought we'd never get through the sound barrier.

[petercampbell.livejournal.com]

From what I understand (which is little, admittedly), the speed of light CAN be breached, in quantum conditions at least. The problem I have with the alien visitors people report seeing if that they look and behave much too similarly to humans for comfort.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

But maybe they adjust their appearance to make themselves more palatable to us.

[xiphias.livejournal.com]

The issue, of course, is that FTL = time travel = breaking the idea of cause and effect the way that we normally think about it.

However, I've talked to a few scientists who think that, well, maybe that's what we're just going to go ahead and do.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

Perhaps our problem is that we've got into the habit of thinking of Nature as having "Laws" when what it actually has is "conventions".