Only read the first page so far but to the OP.

Have you considered that an alien civilization might be aware of us, but have no desire at all to make any contact. Your assumption that if they could detect us that they would likely attempt some kind of contact or visitation, is troublesome. Maybe they have very good reasons, that we could never comprehend, since we are not on their intellectual level, to not want to attempt the contact.

Maybe they have done this before with other civilizations and it usually ends bad, with the host civilization not taking the visit well, and shooting missiles and **** at them. Maybe they are adversely affected by some kind of substance on the earth, maybe they are severely allergic to humans or something on the earth? Maybe when contact has been made before with other civilizations, terrible diseases spread between the aliens and the hosts and they just feel it is a bad idea to make contact. Maybe they are monitoring for when they think we are ready but they do not think we are ready for contact yet ? Maybe they are waiting until we have evolved to a certain point, where contact would work out better. Maybe they visit different civilizations on different planets, after they reach some kind of benchmark, that we are 100,000 years away from ?

Maybe they don't like us from the observations they have made and feel it would be better to let us blow ourselves up then even contact us ? Maybe they do not have the time to deal with us, because there is much more interesting civilizations out there to visit and contact. Basically you have a kind of "earth is the center of the universe" mentality where you think that if any alien civilization became aware of us, they would insta visit/contact, but imo that is being ignorant of several possible reasons they wouldn't want to or care to.

The answer to this question does not have to make sense to us. If some civ is 300,000 years ahead of us, almost anything they do isn't going to make sense to us, and is just not even close to comprehendable by us.

Go back 300,000 years in our past, and anything we do now would not be comprehendable by the inhabitants of the earth at that time.

So some civilization 300,000 years ahead of us is going to look at us how we look at the neanderthals or whatever type of being was around at that time.

We literally can not comprehend the answer to this question at all, and it making sense to us is just not practical.

http://news.discovery.com/space/alie...nd-120130.html

Well, that's bull****.

Clarke's Third Law.

Baxter, Reynolds, Clarke, Morgan to name a few. Kim Stanley Robinson's Martian Trilogy.

If you're not rollin' behind me and us, then, well, too bad.

durka,

ck out hnes and the goodmans common room. Precedent cover enabled. Ask Tanaka @ envirosci. Tell her I already have the framework.

TIA,

K.

If i was in charge we wouldn't. Id pass some kind of prime directive to keep people form impersonating Gods or introducing advanced technology to the primitives which could have unforeseen and disastrous consequences.

Agreed. It still gets broken anyway.

+1
LOL, smugglers gonna smuggle.

This statement and others like it get thrown around all the time by technophiles, and I simply don't get it. A person has an efficient lifespan of reasonably intelligent operation of 50 or 60 years. But we can't make a computer that doesn't crash every fiscal quarter or so.

I know that sounds a little facetious, but I mean it honestly. Machines break far more often than people do. Forget about having comparable capabilities--I just don't see any indication that we are anywhere near making a machine that could operate as reliably as a person.

mpethy,

that's mostly because there hasn't been an incentive to, and/or incentives pushing the other way

when software and operating systems and hardware (and prices) are improving on a yearly basis, it makes very little sense for someone to keep a machine going for ten or more years

but if, for the sake of experiment, someone tried this, what exactly do you envision the obstacles would be? think it through: all hardware is replaceable in the PC, assuming the parts are still obtainable, and you can back up / reinstall all software and files, therefore it is trivially feasible to keep what is 'formally' the same machine going and going indefinitely

I will grant that one can run into efficiency problems here: if you need a team of human technicians to fly along with your super-A.I.-can-survive-harsh-conditions machine, then you haven't really circumvented human presence and limitation in space exploration; so we need to reach a stage where machines can self-diagnose, self-repair, possess back up systems, and so on

I envision a 'smart' machine being sent out equipped with n amount of spare parts (rated to sustain the thing x years) and/or some kind of self-fixing or build-fresh-offspring capacity

I was being 100% sincere when I said "I don't get" the claim, as opposed to I disagree with it.

I have no idea what the obstacles are or would be. I only look around me and I see that computers have a lifespan best measured on a watch , and pretty much every other machine we make breaks more often in a shorter lifespan than the average person does and has.

I'll cheerfully concede the incentive argument, as it makes sense to me. And it even makes sense to a lesser extent for things like washing machines and cars, so-called "durable goods" that the average person wears out a half dozen or so of in the course of a lifetime.

So I'm not saying it can't be done. I am far too ignorant to have an opinion one way or another. I was really just remarking that the evidence seems to point strongly enough in the opposite direction that I don't understand how people can cavalierly imagine the future existence of immortal self-repairing AIs or whatever. Again, it sounds facetious, but technophiles have a view of the future in which these self-repairing AIs are out cruising the galaxy in the form of a spaceship, or in one, or whatever, for hundreds of years and effectively colonizing at the speed of light or whatever the guy upthread was suggesting. My view of that future is an AI starship designed by Microsoft that works great when launched, but quickly degrades so it runs too slowly to navigate at relativistic speeds, zigs when it should have zagged, crashes into a planet at .9997c, causing the extinction of a civilization of cute little Ewoks whose nasty neighbors come and destroy the earth in retaliation.

Why do we assume that the stuff we design in the future will work any better than the stuff we design now? How do we design different incentives? How do we get Microsoft to stop caring about profits from new sales? How do we get Microsoft programmers to stop getting up for a coffee break and then coming back and skipping ten lines of navigation code that needed debugging? Etc., etc.

From carbon to silicon to carbon-silicon to... yeah.

Gestural histories, oral histories, clay tablets Sumer+, now we're at digital media/emergent AI.

And all machines really are? Memory palaces... The WWW? That thang Jung was reppin' with the collective unconscious.

These steps in humanity cannot be accelerated. Future shock is a pretty nasty thing, and on the theoretical DSM spectra, it's well into the IR and most human beings cannot really explore their visible range to begin with. (Hopefully that makes sense to both.)

Well yeah, because we are the primitives. Which is just another good reason why if there are aliens they have not contacted us. Giving a bunch of humans the ability to go flinging around space is probably their worst nightmare. We would definitely **** **** up.

This is the fundamental proposition of most sci-fi (e.g. FTL or some other sort of magic)

The current cosmological thinking is that the expansion of the universe is accelerating which, if the speed of light is an important engineering, makes the density of intelligent life in the universe a shrinking quantity, thereby reducing the probability that any life is within a reasonable sphere of influence.

Not necessarily. Kardashev-III+ civs are old, old, old hands at handling transitions from 0.whatev to 1. Cyberspace, VR, etc. etc.

What, Enrico... yuh-huh. see you on luna.

Are you super-intelligent, super-educated and smoking an ounce of pot a day or something?

Anyone bring up the Drake Equation yet?