im never saying never! i completely agree with you about most of what youve said. the work being done in non local particle interaction is incredibly exciting and could lead to anything. im just saying that given each species very short time frame to get this right, its just unlikely, as opposed to statistically inevitable. remember we are overdue for an extinction event, comets, bombardments of stellar radiation, colliding with other galaxies. its a dangerous universe out there, not very hospitable to life as we know or can imagine it. say we get hammered by a comet/asteroid in the next 200 years, would that be enough time for us to develop interstellar and faster than light travel? maybe, maybe not.forge wrote:(don't look now but your post count is 666!adventurepants_ wrote:i dont think you appreciate the scale of the universe. our nearest star is about 5 light years away. thats 5 years travel time at the speed of light. an average star is literally thousands of light years away. so even if they were sending us the encylopedia galactica encoded into the wavelength of light, it would take thousands, tens of thousands or millions of years to reach us.forge wrote: see I don;t agree with this - for the simple reason that if you think about it the technological level we are at now really has happened over the space of about 350 years since the industrial revolution
before then technology made really pretty small steps and technology wasn't a great deal different to what the Romans, Greeks and Persians etc had
so it is possible to go from inventing steam power to space flight and mapping the human DNA in under 400 years
that is an unbelievably small amount of time in cosmic terms to make such a massive leap
what if one other planet didn't have giant dangerous reptiles and the bi-pedal life forms with clever brains evolved 400 million years earlier?
and if the universe really is infinite then there are probably billions of worlds like this
I think tone deft's picture probably sums it up - we're probably being observed, but any higher intelligence must surely see there are too many reasons to not interfere - first there;s the chance we'll nuke them, but second they probably want to see what we do - it must be fascinating
plenty of time for a civilisation to grow, develop and die out from its own hand or an extinction event.)
that is based on the assumption that travel will involve A to B in the linear way we perceive it now
my point is we have only got to where we are now in about 350 years so we probably have a very long way to go and a lot to learn - one thing we know for sure is there is a hell of a lot that we can't explain
to me it seems perfectly feasible that there could be a form of travel that doesnt involve the 3 dimensional 'miles per hour' limitations we are used to
anyone who's had a psychedelic experience of any kind has probably had some kind of experience of the illogical simultaneous appreciation of the vastness of the universe while at the same time seeing the wholeness and completeness of the universe as one great entity
like the whole fractal thing where any one point is basically any other point at once - the same shit Buddha was on about (and many others)
okay so I sound like a tripped out hippy now, but I'm just saying that I think with logic alone based on our current understanding of physics we're just nowhere near having all the answers, so maybe it will possible one day to somehow figure out how [tachyons - or whatever it is] work and harness the force that makes them work and use it on a small enough scale to power a flying saucer
you dont know that will never happen!
ive always loved the Dune idea. navigators using the Spice to help their minds move ships inbetween interstellar space. its not as far fetched as some of the really weird stuff in quantum physics.
upper right imprint on the image. Martians rule.
