Why we will be alone. Speed of light limitations

Our earliest radio transmissions have travelled maybe 100 light years or so. That's nothing, it's unimaginably tiny. By the time we make 'contact' we will have obliterated ourselves to extinction or send ourselves back to the dark age from nuclear war, bio weapons, nerve gas etc...

Does that make anyone else profoundly sad?

Other urls found in this thread:

waitbutwhy.com/2016/03/cryonics.html
youtu.be/fZpJ7yUPwdU
twitter.com/AnonBabble

not really, there are a billion other random thoughts that would make me more sad

I guess it's the thought that in terms of mathematical probability there are likely intelligent life forms somewhere in the universe, but the laws of physics prevent any contact with them that makes me sad.

When will planetary """"""""""scientists"""""""""" finally drop their ego and admit that their predictions as to the prevalence of life in the universe are vast overestimates?

There's what, 200 billion stars in our galaxy? 1 in 200 billion seems fairly reasonable for the probability of life not only being started in the first place but evolving to the point where it becomes intelligent.

Face it, faggots, we are alone in this galaxy.

i mean yea that's a pretty sad thought overall, but relative to other, more pressing issues, it's really not on the scope of things to be considered... If most human problems on earth were solved, it would definitely be more pressing for me

Defeatist tripe. If everyone had your ambition, we'd've never gotten off the ground in the first place.

How is it defeatist, you moron?

>there's no life out there, so why bother building anything
You want funding, give people optimism. You want this tomb to collapse around us, give them that tripe.

>there's no life out there
Things I never said.

The only defeatist person here is you: claiming that we're stuck here to die in our solar system.

This is even more depressing than the idea they are out there but we can't make contact, no matter what.

Is there life elsewhere in the galaxy? I bet it's more common than most people think. Is there intelligent life? Ah, now here we must wonder. We've taken a somewhat low-res view of the galaxy and seen nothing. No vast space armadas or dyson spheres (maybe one dyson sphere, maybe). But the question deserves more nuance.

HAS there ever been intelligent life in the galaxy? I am willing to bet real cash there's at least one space-faring civilization before us. If intelligent life existed, I would like to think it could get off it's planet. But they were no masters of the universe; they probably left small relics like us that will disintegrate with eons.

Are humans the only ones alive, and if so, are there any xeno candidates for sentience in the universe? I honestly thing we may be the only ones. IF there was another space-faring civilization, they would probably be far advanced compared to us. The odds they're on our level are astronomically low. They're not showing up on our telescope. We don't hear from THEM. And they HAVE to have been on the stage longer. So they must all be dead, or so far away their first transmissions have not reached us. LONG dead, most likely.

see

A self-replicating probe can colonize the Milky Way in about 200,000 years. That is fucking NOTHING on cosmic timescales. Our species is already about 300,000 years old. We could easily colonize the galaxy. And once we do, nothing will stop us from colonizing the rest of the Hubble field.

>"face it, faggots, we are alone in this galaxy"
>refute this point
>????

>muh extinction meme

Killing all 7 billion of us is borderline impossible even with nuclear war. And in the next century we will be robust enough to protect against a wide range of natural threats. Fuck neurotic depressives who make these threads.

>A self-replicating probe
Yeah those are easy to bang out.

>expect people to do anything because I don't know how people work
Autist detected.
Interesting icentive + amazing results = progress

Sauce? Or are you just making this up to feel safe?

There's no accounting for ecological collapse or stellar phenomena user. It could literally just happen. A solar flare would probably do serious damage to our information and power infrastructure, and we just had one of those and are due for another.

Ultimately yes, it would take an apocalypse to totally wipe out humanity. But that's all it would take. And it would take far less to reduce humanity to the level of a barely sapient animal.

I disagree, a nuclear winter dependent on it's scale would be devastating. Famine would claim the lives of billions alone, then account for radioactive fallout, it could decimate our species.

>we haven't found anyone yet so we must be alone

>implying the stupid ones won't somehow make it out ok

Life on earth exports entropy the same way a Von Neumann probe would. We already have a rough idea of how they would work. We just need to work out the fine details, which could take decades but probably not centuries or millennia.

Consider two things. How long have we been recognizably homo sapiens, the builder of great wonders on this planet? 10,000 years? 14,000 maybe? The blink of an eye in cosmic terms, and we are already taking our first steps into the great cosmic unknown, driven not by necessity but curiosity.

Now, how long did we spend as an anatomically correct but primitive animal; prehistoric man? 150,000 years or so? And before that we were just another weird animal on the plains, not doing anything important.

150,000 years. Our whole existence. 10,000 as a barely civilized creature to a baby in LEO.

What are the odds there's a civilization that is matching up exactly? That they are taking their first baby steps JUST as we are taking ours? In all the billions of years this universe has existed?

Practically zero. If they exist, they should be a noticeably presence in the galaxy. And yet it is utterly quiet out there. It's spooky.

We are probably alone, though there may have been giants that came before. I wonder if we will find their ruins, their temples. Their great wonders in the dust.

It sucks being asked for sauce while on my phone. But there have been dozens of white papers analyzing the ramifications of a nuclear war back during the stockpile highs of the Cold War. The consensus: A third of humanity wiped out if all nuclear weapons were used. Chance of extinction smaller than 0.1%. Now the chance is closer to 0.01% because the stockpiles are smaller and there are just so many fucking people.

if you left earth at 99.99% the speed of light you could get anywhere in the universe in less than 24 hours. Because of the way relativity warps time and distance from your perspective. There is literally no reason to need to go faster.

The weapons are also higher payload since the Cold War. Surely their destructive power has increased since then. And I really doubt they had a comprehensive an understanding of what nuclear catastrophe would look like. We've had a lot of time to consider the implications since the fucking Cold War.

Even if these ridiculously low existimate were true (it's not, it's absurdly generous), the survivors would be inheriting a world of ash. Civilization would be rebooted.

A gamma ray burst, solar flare, or other stellar event could kill humanity, sure. But that's why I said "borderline." Such events at that scale are extremely rare, and they would have to happen fairly soon to wipe us out, since we may be on the cusp of another exponential growth mode.

>we could easily colonize the galaxy
>by building a robot that finds materials and make other robots

I'm far too stupid to know what that means or how that works.

>"we haven't heard anything going on around this puny island in the middle of the fucking ocean, guess we're the only humans to ever exist"

How do you know it's only 24 hours relative and not like months or years. I think you're full of shit.

I don't really care what happens to us. We're subpar trash.

Also, pulsed microwave fields will be what does us in, just so you know which way it'll most likely go.

Can you name a puny island in the ocean on planet Earth that hasn't been fucked with my white people?

If aliens are out there, they are big and vast and in charge, they're not kids in the kiddy pool like us. And yet we don't see their freighters hauling goods through space. We don't see distant cities or pick up alien broadcasts. It's deathly quiet. There's NOTHING my man, and several people have been looking with a purpose for decades. We are all alone, RIGHT NOW.

Or they are pulling a very, VERY clever trick by keeping us in some sort of information bubble.

Bigger ocean, my dude. You ain't dealing with kilometers, but lightyears. Plus, they may regard us as we do uncontacted tribes: best left alone until further notice.

>Plus, they may regard us as we do uncontacted tribes: best left alone until further notice.
Try to put yourself into the tribal perspective: they may not want to fuck with us, but they're everywhere and we know they're out there. Doing something in the big unknowable world beyond the ocean. We do not know their cities but we know their visitors to our island.

if there were aliens, any significant number, we'd probably have at least the equivalent of teenagers cruising through the neighborhood. But things like crop circles are easily debunked. There's not a single serious piece of evidence that anyone has been here before us.

>We're subpar

You clearly don't understand the meaning of the word subpar, considering we are the most advanced species we currently know of by a wide fucking margin

Anyway to answer the OP, we are probably the ancient wise ones who will do all of the Prometheus shit. I mean, if it does turn out that we are apparently alone in the universe, why the fuck wouldn't we seed it with (intelligent) life? Sure maybe our creations will annhialate us, but they will have to try really fucking hard to do so.

It just sucks we were born now and not a century or two later, lucky immortal-ish fucks

What about just wierd "flyby" shit?

>Or they are pulling a very, VERY clever trick by keeping us in some sort of information bubble.

Or maybe we just haven't built the right recievers yet

I wish I had the money to cryogenic myself and gamble on the slim chance that some x amount of time after my stasis humans will have survived long enough to develop the technology to wake me without killing my brain cells.

Now that would be a trip, good morning user and welcome to 2421 would you like to know what we discovered?

>civilization would be rebooted

That seems doubtful. We have a rich literature on what happened to ancient civilizations after catastrophes destroyed large swathed of the population.

The Black Death is the most notable. Contra the "apocalypse" genre of fiction, survivors of such catastrophes are incredibly wealthy and decadent due to the excess capital lying around in the form of land, resources, artifacts, tools, and nonperishables, not to mention reduced market competition for skills.

The generations immediately following a catastrophe, while traumatized, would be sitting on an embarrassment of riches. The world economy would plausibly double ever few years as the population recovered. If and whether it hits a Malthusian wall depends on the nature of the catastrophe, but that's by no means a foregone conclusion.

The biggest losses would be skill knowledge, innovation capacity (since most economic activity would just be "catching up"), special infrastructure such as dams, and social norms (due to initial panic, trauma; i.e. forget about freedom of speech, norms against xenophobia, etc.).

Civilizations are quite durable.

>if there were aliens, any significant number, we'd probably have at least the equivalent of teenagers cruising through the neighborhood.

That's a moderately retarded thing to say.

Do the inhabitants of the remote islands have teenagers cruising by? Nope.. and like the other user said, WAY bigger ocean

>If they exist, they should be a noticeably presence in the galaxy
not saying that ayys necessarily exist but it's silly to assume that they would colonize a galaxy just because they can, they might just colonise a couple planets to check it out and make sure they won't go extinct and then just chill and do super advanced ayy lmao things

>shit I don't understand is stupid and wrong

lmfao

What is all unexplainable quantum phenoma was the communications of aliens?

You should consider writing genre fiction. I like the reading about post-apocalypse or post-calamity civilizations and how they make use of the stuff left behind by the dead, with the new conditions thrust upon them. Alternative history fiction, that sort of thing.

Assuming travelling at light speed can get you anywhere in the universe, why do we measure distance in lightyears then? 1 light year = distance travelling for 1 year at the speed of light.

>I wish I had the money to cryogenic myself and gamble on the slim chance that some x amount of time after my stasis humans will have survived long enough to develop the technology to wake me without killing my brain cells.
>Now that would be a trip, good morning user and welcome to 2421 would you like to know what we discovered?

I unironically plan to do this, there are several extant facilities that have frozen heads already. Albeit they are kind of shit tier right now... IIRC at least one facility has already fucked up and let everyone thaw.

I'm banking on the fact that humanity has a collective 'oh shit' moment and stops going full retard on the whole "death is cool because it's natural, lmao why you afraid of heaven bro" mentality. Falsifying the existence of an afterlife would totally kick shit into gear. I'm thinking somekind of geothermal power system would be the way to go in order to make sure the place will have uninterrupted power for a century or two.

Sure it'll be expensive and I maybe will have a 0.00000000000001% chance of waking up, but the risk/reward ratio is off the motherfucking scale. Even if I wake up in stripes, I'll take that over non-existence any day of the week.

>Light-year
That applies to our frame of reference

From the frame of reference of a photon, travelling a light year is instantaneous. Which is what the dude is talking about.

Why would anyone ever browse Veeky Forums without understanding the basic premise of relativity?

>I'm banking on the fact that humanity has a collective 'oh shit' moment and stops going full retard on the whole "death is cool because it's natural, lmao why you afraid of heaven bro" mentality. Falsifying the existence of an afterlife would totally kick shit into gear.
We've already discovered biologically immortal forms of life and promising regenerative capacity in animals as high order as Mice, and yet there's practically no movement on either of these fronts. We are wasting time on palliatives.

CRISPR is probably going to change that though. Now it's economically sensible to fuck about with the genetic secret to ending senescence. Humans should potentially be able to live forever. They have good recovery capacity. Environmental damage, both macro and micro is what contributes to our decline.

waitbutwhy.com/2016/03/cryonics.html

This blog post actually changed my mind about it. It's really long and drawn out but the guy did his homework on it and it convinced me 100%.

it's not like anything other than light can actually travel at light speed so the whole discussion is silly

My apologies, relativity confuses the hell out of me.

There's no harm in it, just like there's no harm in betting on the afterlife. Neither really takes much in the grand scheme of things and the alternative is certain death or fiery damnation.

Yet, it's not hard to see why cryonic technology is a fool's gamble. We do not have the biological capacity to restore these dead people. They are dead and they are gone. Even if we revive the tissue (a morbid and disturbing idea), the person they were has left the building. I do not mean in a spiritual sense. Not even a metaphysical one. I mean their brain has stopped, and they are dead. And there is no calling forth Lazarus from his cave.

I honestly thing it's impossible to bring back the dead. The best technology could do in the future is re-create a dead person's mind, in a clone of their body.

You heard it here first.

>They are dead and they are gone. Even if we revive the tissue, the person they were has left the building
>it's impossible to bring back the dead.

Citation needed nigga.

You are putting far too much stock into the anthropogenic concept of "death"

ready to find out why you're wrong?
youtu.be/fZpJ7yUPwdU

this

I've watched half of this dreadful video and it's mostly about how Catholic belief requires being an uncritical fool. It doesn't call out Catholics but it's pretty obvious that's what it's after, even if only unconciously.

You can be a skeptic and a rational person and still have faith, believe it or not. This video is seriously fedora. I'll finish it though. maybe I'm wrong.

In the end, religious belief can give you not only a shot at paradise and life everlasting but real community here on Earth. I'm an atheist and I can't imagine a more lonely thing, honestly. Church is an easy way to be among others, and I can't even attend a mass sincerely.

>You are putting far too much stock into the anthropogenic concept of "death"
Biological cannot be relied upon to preserve the mind.

What other concept is there?

>tl;dr; being a christfag is dumb
great argument

OK, JUST FOR ONCE, I'M A BRAINLET WITHOUT NO KNOWELDGE OF HIGH LEVEL SCIENCE N' SHIT. WE WILL EVER BE ABLE TO TRAVEL AND COLONIZE OTHER PLANETS OR WE ARE DOOM TO DIED HERE?

No scientist formally claims anything regarding ayyys. There is no evidence, not direct or inferred. Fermi said some dumb unfounded shit that popsci eats up. That's it. Anyone else that claims such things is a pseudo-scientific retard.

Not beyond the solar system, at most the beings that result from us will go beyond. Like AI.

Can we modify our body to witstand longer space voyage and shit?

with the proper amount of research and resources maybe...
anything is possible with the power of science!
but that would require human experimentation, and let's not forget that "morals" and "ethics" are the biggest cockblockers in that field... but who knows, your guess is as good as mine

Please remember that We visited all Inhabited Islands in the 7 oceans. In history Europeans colonized once or visited every single one of them.

We also contacted every isolated tribe : Africans, Native Americans, Australian Abos, Southeast Asians, Siberian, Eskimos, Sahara Bedouins, etc. Every single one of them in entire Earth.

wasn't the counterargument for that thumbnail of the video, that god, because he posses all-knowledge, would know that you are just believing all the christian shit because of self-interest, instead of real faith? and thus he would deny you the entry to heaven and paradise?

just asking

>Biological cannot be relied upon to preserve the mind.

>What other concept is there?

Cryonics meaning pumping the human body full of chemicals that prevent water from freezing, henceforth preventing the cell death that would result from freezing cells. Keeping the cells in an extremely cold environment for an indefinite time until humanity develops the technology to revive the cells unharmed.

The thing that is the biggest barrier to cryonics is the holy Bible. Since our laws still are based upon it. It's legally defined homicide to cryonically preserve a healthy human, even if you 100% agree and sign paperwork. It's considered murder by law. So the only legal way people can get themselves cryonically preserved is via natural death, since the law considers it to be classified under "volunteering your corpse for scientific research". The catch 22 is that whatever a person's natural death will be is going to be due to either disease, infection, cancer, etc.... Which just leaves another challenge for the future doctors who have to find a way to cure your cause of death before reviving your body.

It's ridiculous because an individual would have a greater chance of success if they could choose to volunteer to undergo cryonic preservation while in a healthy state. It wouldn't even be considered technically death since the medical team will preserve the brain and it's cells from dying. They simply stop your heart and slip you into a coma, pump your brain full of the anti freeze and preservation chemicals then get you super cold for the long nap.

Exactly. People like to think a vast space-faring race would obey some non-intervention protocols. Why, exactly? There's probably nature preserves but the galaxy is a big place. If intelligent life is common, we're not going to be policing it. We will be exploiting it. It's not special, so it's not sacred. And humanity has an imperative to survive.

Inverse Square Law is a bitch.

Plus the voyager probes have revealed a complex solar magnetic field out in the edges of the solar system.

So our transmissions are unlikely to heard past Proxima Centauri.

The good news. Earth is brighter than the Sun now, in the longer wave lengths. So anyone in 20 light years with a radio telescope. Will see two stars in radio and 1 star in visible and higher frequency. Which should be a dead giveaway for a planet inhabited by post industrial civilization.

>implying it's the cosmic "current year," when they could be starting their maiden voyage

>t. anarchist

>>t. anarchist
I identify as a libertarian and I don't own a gun; not because I object to gun ownership but because I don't think I could use it if I had to.

I need a limited government of laws to safeguard my rights. Sadly government is as often a burden as a guardian to me.

Anyone tested this with local binary stars?

Sounds like a charmed life to live.

Oh, it's peachy. Let me tell you.

Imagine the Assholes at the Long Range Observatory some 17~ LY out going "It's really fucking Weird, Bob, Radio Spectro shows a Binary star system that's orbital patterns are completely inconsistent with standard gravitational deviation, however standerd spectrum and UV show only a Single star!"

It's just a glitch, move on to the next one, you brainlet

>Speed of light limitations cannot be overcome
>boo-fckn-hoo
Lrn2alcubierre warp drive fgt pls
>b-but, but, but
STFO

We won't annihilate ourselves if we become a species capable of living in space. If we have self sufficient space colonies, given sufficiently long periods of time we will make contact

Samefagging here:
You won't though
But alcubierre drive requires negative energy. We don't have that. Oh and because relativity works any FTL drive must violate causality.
>> STFO
What a childish response

Do aliens genuinely want to make contact with primitive cunts like us?

>By the time we make 'contact' we will have obliterated ourselves to extinction or send ourselves back to the dark age from nuclear war, bio weapons, nerve gas etc...

What is it about sending a kid to college that turns them into such a fatalistic faggot?

Do these degenerate hippie professors still walk into class barefoot and with their fifty year old love beads still clicking?

>"PEACE, MA-A-A-A-AN. To start with, let's all realize that we're DOOOMED, brothers and sisters..."

There has been one intelligent life form on earth out of several billion and all that just 500 million years before our earth dies.
I'd say the odds of us being the only intelligent life form in this galaxy is pretty good.

You're retarded
Light is fast
Not that fast

>fast foreward 10,000 years
>the quantum signularity finally happend
>people can control wormhole-like technology
>finally get message from Alpha Centauri
>message has super funky alien math
>Alpha Centauri is only 4.3 lightyears from earth
>everyone's super exited
>sending team on interstellar misson
>they arrive 10 days later thanks to wormhole technology
>apparently Alpha Centauri people wiped killed themselves in a nuclear war last year
>forever_alone.jpg

No supernova or black holes collision creates enough energy for wormholes. You can forget about this pipe dream.

God wouldn't build a universe this ridiculously huge without some sort of mechanism that allows FTL travel, I'm almost certain of this.

...

seems exactly what a god would do, fuck over people for lulz

>earliest radio transmissions have traveled maybe 100 light years
... It would take another 100 for us to hear anything back.

>implying any species is self destructive and the world is not actually becoming steadily less hostile.

Best of luck to you user

>no ayys
>full galaxy to conquer with no resistance
What's with the defeatist cuckery?
Makes no sense

>seems fairly reasonable for the probability of life not only being started in the first place but evolving to the point where it becomes intelligent
it also "seems fairly reasonable" for a bowling ball to drop faster than a bag of feathers

The whole galaxy is quite a big place, after all.

It's pretty ridiculous to assume we would know about some ants who live in the dirt of some planet thousands of lightyears from here.

We have no reason to assume we will ever meet the ayys, but we also have no reason to not assume we will met them. We just don't know, deal with it.

The laws of physics as we know them*

Just because you learned about GR in high school physics last week, doesnt mean that you, or anyone else, can definitively say "FTL travel is impossible".

>we are alone
>bad news
In universe you are either alone or dead.

>Humans haven't even into interplanetary habitation
>But aliens must be type III civilizations and if we don't see them (which we might not be able to anyway with a type 3 civ) that means we are alone.

Everything that we have observed points to the contrary, with all theoretically 'possible' ways involving other completely unobserved things like negative energy.

Problem solved.

Who cares? I have enough having to deal with illegal Aliens and black people stealing my stuff. Do you really want to end up meating another race that babbles their saliva around, shits everywhere and tries to steal your phone for futuristic, retro-wave cocaine?

>i am better than aliens because i am white
/pol/, the post

I am an Arab. The day white people are stealing my shit for cocaine and taking shit in my neighboorhods, I'll hate them too, don't worry.

my point is how self-centered do you have to be to think that if aliens exist, they will want to rob you.