“Your Majesty crossing the Ocean would require a massive Horse the size of ten or even an hundred Elephants”
this post was submitted on 06 Aug 2023
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I don't understand his reasoning.
Once a civilization is thriving in space, materials are practically infinite, and self building factories mean that the only budget is time.
Personally I think that the great filter is surviving the pollution and climate destruction from a civilization's industrial revolution. And that very few civs make it past that to thrive in space. So we may get a big space faring civ every 10 million years or so, and we don't know whether a civ would stay as a space farer forever.
Unless there really is a whole field of physics that we haven't touched yet. If that's the case, all bets are off.
An unbelievably fast rocket? Seriously? We don't really know how we're going to get to other stars but one thing is for sure: it will not be with rockets.
We don't have any other workable idea, and there doesn't appear to be enough physics we don't know to allow for anything else
You know, Max Planck was told not to pursue physics because there wasn't much left to discover anyways. By a physics professor. 150 years ago.
You're statement is based on incomplete knowledge. There is now way to know how much there's left to know.
Believing that everything that needs to be known is totalitarian by definition.
Once truth becomes a known quantity, Correct Action becomes objectively calculable, and non-compliance to the Correct Action is seen as completely devoid of value.
This is why totalitarianism tends to become dictatorship.
Quantum theory was born of people filling in the corners of what was believed to be a complete physics.
Right and now that hole was filled in. We have less holes left, and we often have characterized the holes even though we don't understand them.
We have plenty of workable ideas. Ion drives, fusion drives, nuclear drives to name just the most common ones. These probably won't take us to the stars, but at least to the solar system and they're not rockets.
there doesn't appear to be enough physics we don't know to allow for anything else
until we do! (my admission that we hopefully have so much more to discover).
however, the issue at hand is the here and now. we have theroms that describe what we know to be theoretically possible - but those are far and away from what we think is possible now, e.g. LK-99... AFAIK, there is nothing that says we cant have RT/AP superconductivity, but did we really just make a breakthrough?! (hopeful, fawning sounds)
we do still have to deal in what we currently think of as "reality" and things like FTL and the tech required for alien visitation are way outside of our current understanding - to the point of being magic. surely no one should accept "magic" as an answer to a serious question on possible alien visitation.
Ignoring the absurdity in his reply, I honestly think he's probably just butthurt that if aliens are here, they haven't reached out to him yet.
He does casually brush it off, and money isn't a scientific reason to dismiss anything. I'm skeptical too, but this was a terrible approach.
Money represents effort and resources, so while it is worded flippant it is a valid point that we shouldn't assume interplanetary flight is just a weekend away for aliens.
We don't know the conditions on that theoretical alien world. They could be post-scarcity, or alternatively, they could be threatened to the extent that no cost is too high.
He is saying there is no reason to assume they have reached that point just to explain something that is most likely a misunderstanding of something mundane.
Capitalist says dumb thing. News at 11.
Person who doesn't know who Seth Shostak is comments on the internet.
I'm not sure which part of studying physics or teaching or working at a non-profit makes him a big scary capitalist but I'm willing to listen to an honest critique if you have one.
"I want to believe" as much as the next guy but shoehorning the most recent thing we're mad about into every conversation doesn't really contribute.
Him stating that they would need money to get here is why I called him a capitalist. It's an incredibly asinine thing to say when we know zero about aliens let alone if they would even have a society like ours. For all we know aliens could have a society like ants and have no need for money.
In this context "money" is shorthand for resources. He's not talking about literal coins and banknotes.
So then he, an astronomer, has a basic misunderstanding of the amount of resources the universe holds. I'm guessing that isn't the case and he means money.
He is trying to word a message that can be understood by people who don't know enough about science to understand how much energy it takes to move a tiny bit matter to lightspeed, or that we still don't have a theory for faster than lightspeed travel that doesn't break the known properties of the universe.
He wasn't speaking literally about money.
Ant-like species seem unlikely to develop meaningful interstellar travel. To advance to the level of research and resource processing likely required to reach Earth, or even just communicate with other species seems like it would've developed commerce at some point, even if it's a utopian collectivist society, they need some sort of resource allocation methodology and would need to agree to focus finite resources on free developing the kind of tech necessary for interstellar travel.
I mean yeah, interstellar bugs might be a thing but contact with them would be far less exciting than contact with a truly intelligent spacefaring race.