CycleChat Ivestigates - Alien Life

[sungod]

If a star is 4 light years away, I take that to mean as an observer it takes light 4 years to get to me. Therefore if you 'could' travel at the sol, it would take 4 years for me as an observer on earth to watch them get there, but a matter of minutes/days/hours (how close to the sol) for the people on board.

So where does the 4,000 years come from?

i'd assume from someone being wrong!

 

[Hover Fly]

What if it's not aliens, but beings from way in the future, who can time travel, trying to save the human race from itself

They’re already here, but no one listens to the squids.

 

[Punkawallah]

I was thinking of doing religion next.

Famously, ‘philosophy is the top of a cereal box - religion is a smile on a dog’.

 

[Punkawallah]

Ha! Good luck with that one, future humans.

Yeah. If there are future humans, why are they coming back to our time? Surely they don’t need to be ‘saved’.

 

[markemark]

They’re already here, but no one listens to the squids.

I listen for the sizzle to make sure the pan is hot enough....

 

[classic33]

Yeah. If there are future humans, why are they coming back to our time? Surely they don’t need to be ‘saved’.

To put right what once went wrong!

 

[Punkawallah]

I listen for the sizzle to make sure the pan is hot enough....

First against the wall come the rise of Our Cephlapod Overlords. Have you a minute to talk about our Lord and Master, Dread Cthulhu?

 

[Ming the Merciless]

Famously, ‘philosophy is the top of a cereal box - religion is a smile on a dog’.

But which end of the dog?

 

[figbat]

On the subject of an assumed expectation that life forms will attain ‘intelligence’ in a similar manner that we have, we have been at it for a couple of hundred thousand years or so and look where we are. But before us the dinosaurs had hundreds of millions of years and, as far as we know, never developed any artificial objects or attained any advanced intelligence.

So there may be life out there of varying natural capabilities and a subset that have achieved some level of mechanical, industrial or electronic revolution.

For us it not only took us being in the ‘Goldilocks zone’, but also having an unusually large satellite, a protective geomagnetic field and an extinction event that cleared the way for us to evolve.

But still, given the numbers involved in terms of galaxies, stars and planets, this alignment of factors (or others with a similar outcome) should still be possible elsewhere.

 

[Ming the Merciless]

before us the dinosaurs had hundreds of millions of years and, as far as we know, never developed any artificial objects

[my bold]

If humanity was wiped out tomorrow, how many million years would our artificial objects exist before they turn to dust and all trace is lost?

 

[markemark]

[my bold]

If humanity was wiped out tomorrow, how many million years would our artificial objects exist before they turn to dust and all trace is lost?

My kids bowls of dried on Weetabix will outlive the universe.

 

[cyberknight]

Really? Please provide details.

its not a warp field yet but if they can make stuff move FTL on a small scale who knows whats possible in the future
https://www.ecoticias.com/en/laser-surpassed-speed-of-light/7079/

This is what physicists from the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and the University of Rochester have done using plasma, a hot stream of ionized particles. They used one laser to knock off electrons from hydrogen and helium ions and then changed the scenario of the second laser passing through the plasma. The result? To achieve this, the group velocity of the light pulses was controlled to be above 30 percent of the speed of light in a vacuum. Although the individual photons in the light pulse behave as described by the laws of physics, the wave moved faster than permitted.

 

[figbat]

[my bold]

If humanity was wiped out tomorrow, how many million years would our artificial objects exist before they turn to dust and all trace is lost?

Indeed, hence “as far as we know”. I suspect there would be indirect evidence in terms of skeletal evolution, diaspora etc.

 

[sungod]

its not a warp field yet but if they can make stuff move FTL on a small scale who knows whats possible in the future
https://www.ecoticias.com/en/laser-surpassed-speed-of-light/7079/

This is what physicists from the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and the University of Rochester have done using plasma, a hot stream of ionized particles. They used one laser to knock off electrons from hydrogen and helium ions and then changed the scenario of the second laser passing through the plasma. The result? To achieve this, the group velocity of the light pulses was controlled to be above 30 percent of the speed of light in a vacuum. Although the individual photons in the light pulse behave as described by the laws of physics, the wave moved faster than permitted.

it was the group velocity of photons, no 'stuff' moved at, let alone beyond, light speed

group velocity exceeding c has been known about for ages, it doesn't violate causality or allow transmission of information faster than light

a simple analogous phenomenon of 'faster than light' is this... imagine you have a powerful laser pointing at a large distant target, you can slew the laser so that the spot on the target 'moves' across the target faster than light, even though the photons are travelling at c

this has a pretty good explanation of group velocity https://skullsinthestars.com/2023/06/07/what-the-heck-is-the-speed-of-light-part-1/

 

[Ming the Merciless]

Let’s see who is up on the subject. What travels at the speed of light, but is not light?