From: Philip Goetz (philgoetz@gmail.com)
Date: Thu Jan 04 2007 - 10:38:31 MST
On 12/28/06, John K Clark <jonkc@att.net> wrote:
> "kevin.osborne" <kevin.osborne@gmail.com> Wrote:
>
> > presumably is going to be a lot more effective than our previous SETI
> > program of just scanning amongst the noise at relatively arbitrary points
> > in the star field.
>
> I don't see why pointing telescopes an individual planets is more effective
> than pointing it in random directions, ET is unlikely to remain chained to
> his home world for long, astronomically speaking. As a matter of fact I
> don't see why you'd need a telescope at all to find ET, it should be
> obvious to anyone who looks into the night sky. But it's not obvious,
> and I believe that tells us something.
>
> John K Clark
An ET with a tech equivalent to Earth 200 years from now would
probably live in a society in which time and energy were both very,
very valuable relative to their value to us. The energy that we use
in a single househould might provide life for millions of
human-equivalent beings. The time in a single Earth day might be
equivalent to a human lifetime to them.
If so, space travel would be very, very unappealing. Imagine the
government saying, "All right, we need to kill a trillion people in
order to get the energy to launch this spaceship, which has a small
chance of colonizing an insignificant, poisonous, mineral-poor chunk
of rock a billion years from now." That's the proposition space
travel would be putting forth.
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Wed Jul 17 2013 - 04:00:57 MDT