[Atmob-discuss] FW: Silent Sky - A Thought Experiment

[George Roberts]

>Subject: [Atmob-discuss] FW: Silent Sky - A Thought Experiment

First of all it takes an awful lot of energy to outshine a star or background 
radiation so you really have to *try hard* to communicate.  We haven't tried 
yet - not hard enough to be able to reach even the nearest star assuming they 
have looked with the same technology we are using at this time in the SETI 
project (I'm talking optical and radio).

Second of all, even our present communications are mostly digital with quite a 
bit of compression.  As the compression algorithms get better the signal looks 
more and more like noise - especially if you spread it out through broad band 
frequencies.  So again - they would have to dumb it down and *try* to 
communicate with simple code that stands out as from the noise.

But try this thought experiment instead.  Assume humans don't kill themselves 
off over the next 10,000 years.  That should be plenty of time to colonize a 
nearby star system even at very slow rates of travel (in city sized spinning 
spaceships full of small towns and farms and generations of people).  Actually 
500 years should be plenty of time but lets be conservative and say 10,000 
years.  If that cycle repeats then we should be able to populate the whole 
galaxy in 100 million years.  Some say we will do it in less than 100,000 years 
(1000 times faster).

But aliens don't seem to have arrived here yet (we seem to have evolved here). 
That implies that 1) we are the first intelligent species in our galaxy or that 
2) the kind of intelligence required to get off the planet is incredibly rare - 
one in a trillion ecosystems make it or that 3) intelligence is not a long term 
survival trait.  #3 seems most likely to me.  There is already evidence that a 
highly technological society with animal instincts is very unstable.

I hope we can survive 10,000 more years with current technologies but I suspect 
we will be lucky to keep up this technological society for more than another 100 
years or maybe even only another 20 years.  As technology gets better, the 
ability for a crazy individual or a small crazy group to kill everyone on the 
planet (or at least enough to go back to the bronze age) grows.  It could be the 
Large Hadron Collider creating black holes that kills us all or nanotech robots 
or designer germs or the destruction of the biosphere through pollution or some 
unimagined technology but I suspect we can't continue at this impressive pace 
without something going terribly wrong.

On the other hand - maybe we're the first!  Maybe we will be rulers of our 
galaxy.

- George Roberts