by rsch20 » Wed 28 Jun 2006, 02:20:26
Spec: it's basically just a lecture with 'proof' of UFO's, and claims that the government is hiding UFO technology like anti-gravity drives etc, said proof being from what I saw nothing but claims and witnesses, some of the witnesses do have interesting credentials but it's still boring as hell, illogical on the face of it, with no real proof that I saw, (i didn't watch the whole thing, watched about 20 mins of it then skipped ahead through a few of the speakers).
on the topic itself, my personal view is that life on other planets is highly likely, intelligence on other planets is possible, but that interstellar civilizations either don't exist or are irrelevant to our situation.
any species capable of interstellar travel would have to have gone through omega point, (intelligence explosion) which would put them an order of magnitude ahead of us. If 'they' were here, and wanted us to know, then we would know... since we don't know (not only is there no 'real' proof of 'visitors', but SETI is also still coming up dry which means we haven't even found any other civilizations broadcasting yet, let alone having little green men floating around in our stratosphere).
that means that either
a: they aren't there
b: they don't want us to know they are there.
either way, for all practical purposes, they are not there. no-one is bailing us out or it would have happened already (99.9%, anything is possible I guess, but this eventuality is pretty low on my list of possible futures and I've got some wild ones on the list).
$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Zardoz', 'I')nterstellar travel is impossible. Einstein was correct. The speed of light can't even be approached, much less exceeded.
you don't have to go faster than light to have interstellar travel, it just takes a lot longer without it. your basic point that it is not something that we should be focused on is correct though, the 'space race' will not help us right now.
I was listening to NPR today and they were talking about warren buffet of course, then they asked the same question posted here 'what would you do with a boatload of cash', and then went on to talk about how several of the new rich people, mostly computer folks (david carmack the writer of 'doom' and other internet billionaires) are investing in private spacecraft. They freely admitted to being inspiried by star trek (of course), the problem is that it's a lamentable waste of money and that we can't hope to achieve anything in space at our current level of development. In my opinion we either hit Omega Point soon, or we go bust from any one of literally dozens of global threats that we are now facing. AI is the best area to be investing money in if you really want to 'save mankind'.
So, from my point of view, the story about computer folks spending billions on private spacecraft just seems tragically ironic.
the fact that we have found no evidence of interstellar civilizations is also disheartening for our own future, it suggests one of three scenarios
1. we are unique (I rank this one fairly low, there are over 200 billion other stars in this galaxy alone, as they said several times in 'Contact' "it seems like an awful waste of space")
2. there are other civilizations, that keep themselves hidden from us, (this is possible, we are obviously unfit to be neighbors to any other species, we can't even be Friendly to each other, if there are other races they may be waiting for us to develop to their level, again though, if that is so that doesn't help us in our current situation, we are still either boom or bust, on our own)
3. all other civilizations have collapsed, been wiped out, or destroyed themselves before reaching omega point, or omega point is inherently unreachable. (sadly, this one seems the most likely to me.)