Lawrence B. Crowell

I do disucss the prospect of nanoprobes sent to other stars. I discuss using railgun type of technology to send the little buggers out to other stars. The fly in the ointment is how to stop them once they get there? But a small number of these might find their way to an asteroid on another solar system and once there they replicate to build a network which acts as an exploration-teleresponding system that sends data back to us.

We might end up unleashing self-relicating AI systems or nano-bots into the solar system or other solar systems. This might prove to be another uncontrolled experiment we humans are so good at setting up, where a case of this is global warming.

Lawrence B. Crowell

If you are a robot then you can travel at the speed of light from one civilization to another by uploading your brain to a machine located at the other civilization via radio communications or perhaps using lasers.

A civilization can spread itself to other uninhabited solar systems by sending nanotech machines that build up some infrastructure there. Then they can upload themselves to the new location.

You mention cost as a limiting factor. But in the twinkling of an eye, as we can anticipate even today, there will be armies of robots waiting on us hand and foot. Few now dispute that, except for the timing (which admittedly has always seemed to be “in about 20 years” ever since I can remember!).

As well as removing any advantages of having hordes of humans, as now (the point in my preceding post about populations declining), robots with their replication and self-repair abilities also obviously allow engineering projects of a qualitatively higher scale but at a similar “start up” cost, just as today’s PCs calculate PI to billions of d.p.s at the push of a button, in contrast to 19th century human calculators who struggled for years to find a mere 100 d.p.s or so.

Global warming? No problem – program an army of robots to excavate rock from under the antarctic ice sheets and build a vast 10,000 mile long perimeter wall round that continent to contain a repository of ice there twice as thick as it is today. (Actually the weight of all that extra ice would probably depress the crust, which might cause problems. But that’s an example of the kind of project which couldn’t be contemplated in practice today.)

The same applies in space. I imagine the first thing an alien (or future human) team will do on arriving in a new unoccupied solar system is to instruct robots to start mining asteriods and building tremendously long rail guns, or a relay of dozens of these, all to be aligned ready for their departure. In due course they would have the means to literally shoot out of that solar system at a large percent of light speed, after which the robots would dismantle it all including finally themselves, and leave everything as it was found.

You may be right about ET being a very rare occurrence, but the sheer number stars even in one galaxy (the number of grains in a large barrel full of sand) must increase the odds. Also, of course once one star-hopping ET civilization emerges perhaps one of their goals will be to nudge life in a direction favourable to the emergence of intelligent life, or even resculpt whole solar systems for that purpose if the fancy takes them. So it may not be solely a matter of blind chance.

In parting I’ll return to my first theme, the decline of population. With the knowledge of past multitudes that occupied the Earth, the few people living in that time will feel that in a sense the party’s over at least in its current form. As the Good Book says (Lamentations v1 ch1) “How doth the city sit solitary, that was full of people!”. I’m certain there will be a feeling that it’s time to move on to pastures new, reinforced by a growing belief (perhaps of a cult) that our solar sytem is only a stepping stone or “cradle” and our destiny lies in further travel. After all travel, or a change of scenery, is a human instinct, from our nomadic ancestors.

If we were to find a rocky planet around a star within 25 to 50 light years of Earth that has biological signatures a considerable scientific premium would be placed on plopping a probe down there to look at things close up.

Sending a crew to other stars does what we see with more parochial space exploration now, it magmifies the costs and energy requirements enormously. Any form of intelligent life is probably faced with the same resource/energy/cost limitations. I suspect that ET is a very rare occurrence in the universe (one per so many galaxies), and far rarer will be cases where they manage to control the external world in space on magnitudes seen in science fiction stories of star travel or with thinks such as ring worlds or Dyson spheres.

Lawrence B. Crowell

Once they’ve discovered all the laws of physics they can verify, and catalogued everything in nature on their planet, and written every tune and told every joke in a hundred ways (all preserved in some super-duper Wikipedia-like repository, perhaps plugged straight into their minds) the only thing left to save a remorseless decline is to head off for pastures new and see more of nature’s variety.

We’ve all heard about lone astronauts zooming off at close to the speed of light, and returning in a few of their years to find centuries or eons have passed back home, and this gloomy scenario is seen as proof that star travel is impractical.

But suppose *everyone* heads off at the same time, and coordinates their arrival elsewhere to compare notes. This isn’t so far-fetched when you consider that populations will probably decline once robots become ubiquitous, and when you take into account the likelihood of civilizations going stale or even turning ugly in some sense if they hang around together in the same place for too long.

I pursued this idea further in the final comment on Jennifer Ouellette’s recent blog article on Little Green Men.

In summary, I believe the reason we’re unlikely to see Dyson spheres, or intercept alien signals, is that from our standpoint all the aliens spend decades or centuries travelling at 0.99c and have no reason to be even awake during their journey let alone chattering via radio.

Of course, that’s not to say they’d be so quiet when they meet at their rendezvous, and recharge their batteries (perhaps literally).