Moontanman

The book (fiction) solves the problem by using cartilage like a shark. Contrary to popular belief cartilage can be quite strong, ever carve up a shark?

In the book that image is based on the centaurs ate the same food as us, it was never clear but the upper rib cage seemed to be the lungs and the lower one the other organs. But it was just fiction no doubt a very good book, equal to lord of the rings in my estimation.. Um...Bioengineering should account for that! In the book I was referring to the Titanides didn't have a spine made of vertebrae, it was made of cartilage, they were designed by their god to be able to visit earth... Oops double quote...

What next Gee, shall we discuss the number of angels that can dance on the head of a pin and you win by default because I can't prove there are no angels? You cannot argue nonsense that cannot be investigated via the scientific method, by definition it is not to be believed or given credence if it cannot pass that test. I have seen this bollocks argued over and over nearly to infinity, to quote Aron Ra "If you can't show it you don't know it" Nonsense deserves to be ridiculed as do those that pervey fairy tales as fact...

I will be impressed when CRISPR can turn me into a centaur. They will have something then, I can see it now, real mermaids! Not those ugly dugongs!

Really Gees, I eat a plate of stupid before I post on religion? That is really insulting dude, couple that with John bending over so far to defend the undefendable he is showing his ignorance big time and trying to tell us it's only biker shorts and not his panties makes it doubly insulting. His completely unsupported views on religion which is in it's self unsupported shouldn't even be on here.

I was trying to clarify the assertions I had made. Ok, lets see how your assertion that we are sending out signals with the intention of notifying aliens we are here VIA the message sent by Arecibo. https://www.iop.org/resources/topic/archive/seti/index.html It is quite possible that I am confused about the interstellar medium interfering with radio signal leakage detection. I concede that point.

Nonetheless, time could very well separate civilizations as well as distance. If civilizations are rare this has to be a factor in the Fermi paradox. IMHO there is no Fermi paradox, the paradox is an illusion I would assert we see what should expect to see... https://www.forbes.com/sites/quora/2017/01/27/how-far-into-space-can-radio-telescopes-hear/#57df9f2f5de7 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_paradox Recent research has pushed the possible existence of life on Earth back to more than 4 billion years, this would appear to indicate that life starts as soon as it's possible. I was referring to life in the galaxy, there are so many ifs involved that this is nothing but speculation but even if life in not rare civilizations could still be separated in in not only space but in time as well. A million civilizations could be separated by thousands of light years but also hundreds of thousand years in time. At any one time there could only be a handful of civilizations active and those would likely be separated by tens of thousands of light years in space. A civilization that far away would not be aware of us and unless they were intentionally sending out a high powered omnidirectional signal for tens of thousands of years we would be unaware of them. And due to the speed of light limitations they could not be aware of us... There is no Fermi Paradox, we see what we should expect to see when passively looking for signals of ET... Ok, I'll concede that but the fact does remain that we could not detect a civilization equal to ours in the Alpha Centauri system unless they were intentionally trying to be recognised. No, not at all, the signal you are referring to was not omni directional, it was directed at the Magellanic clouds 16,000 light years away, it wasn't repeating over time and if we received such a signal it would be discounted. To have a real attempt at letting aliens know we are here would take a very powerful omnidirectional signal that we are currently incapable of generating due to both the power requirements and lack of infrastructure.

I love it, the micro cosmos is, IMHO, a source of information of how complex life advanced to us. Protests were the first step towards us!

We are binging on Stranger Things right now! Lost Girl is a great show if like super sexy super natural fae heroines...

Please be specific, how far back could life have existed? If it's just a few thousand years then you have a point if life could have existed several billion years ago I don't think you have a leg to stand on. Ok, even though it does state .3 light years as the limit. This one says 16 light years for certain signals and explains why military radar is different. https://www.forbes.com/sites/quora/2017/01/27/how-far-into-space-can-radio-telescopes-hear/#77c621915de7 http://curious.astro.cornell.edu/about-us/131-observational-astronomy/seti-and-extraterrestrial-life/seti/795-wouldn-t-the-vast-distances-of-space-distort-seti-signals-into-unintelligeble-forms-intermediate Ok, I can't find a direct reference to the interstellar medium problem, I know I've seen it, in fact i have posted a link to it in other threads in the past but for some reason I am google blind at the moment. I can't seem to find the right search criteria https://www.forbes.com/sites/quora/2017/01/27/how-far-into-space-can-radio-telescopes-hear/#77c621915de7 Now you are just being pedantic... The tech is advancing do rapidly I am not willing to use current problem to condemn the inevitability of autonomous cars... or airplanes...

Not if they were a million years apart in time, there are, estimate, 500 billion stars in the milky way, if one in a million have an advanced civilization then 500,000 of them exist but divide that by the age of the galaxy, I'm not sure what that is but let's just say a ballpark figure of 10 billion years. If an advanced technological civilization lasts 10,000 years then they could be a million years apart from each other in time. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_paradox Military radar is both high powered and directional, radio leakage is not. One short message directed at the magellanic clouds is hardly a concentrated effort to draw attention to ourselves... There are Military drones that can take off and land autonomously and autonomous cars already exist as well as tractor trailers.

If the ancient aliens claims drive you nuts then this might be for you!

They avoid gravity wells... Actually you have to assert that aliens want to come here before you can say anything. Time is also a factor, do alien civilizations last forever? Ours has lasted a few thousand years so far, time is as big a factor if not larger than space. There could have been a million civilizations in the Milky Way so far and they could be separated by not just thousands of light years but thousands of years as well. I am of the "opinion" that planets would be avoided due to the fact that life has adapted to the earth, finding an earth like planet is no guarantee that we could live there. In fact slight variations in chemicals could make a planet uninhabitable to us even though the life that has adapted to it is prolific. It makes much more sense to build your own worlds than to try and find a world that happens to be perfect for you. Some alien specialist might be interested in us for various reasons but landing on the white house lawn would destroy the study. There is no reason to think that aliens would want to contact us and the idea that we could simply see them through their radio "leakage" is false. It's doubtful that we could detect a civilization identical to us at Alpha Centauri unless they were specifically pointing a high powered transmitter directly at us. Our radio leakage fizzles out within a light year or so due to the interstellar medium. Military type radar would be an exception but it would unlikely be a repeating signal and we have detected such signals from various places in our galaxy but they are not given weight because they do not repeat. I think we don't see aliens because that is exactly what we would expect to see unless they are intentionally signaling us and we do not do that, why should they?

Self driving cars are already a thing, why not self flying cars?

Fusion is the only technology required for star travel via McKendrick type artificial worlds that don't already possess. Developing the technology to build such worlds may not be easy but the engineering has been worked out. Distance is not a limiting factor given fusion, when you can build worlds supporting many thousands of people miles long and wide encased in the debris left over from their making from asteroids the idea of a destination becomes close to meaningless. Yes i am speculating but I am not speculating about things that are in violation of what we know to be possible. No FTL, no force fields, no Clark Tech, just fusion. If we can't control fusion then we might be limited to building a Dyson swarm around our current fusion power source but even that means many thousands of times the surface area of the Earth and there are other possibilities for star travel like probes humans are stored electronically and reproduction occurs after the space craft gets there. Maybe hundreds of thousands of years after launch. Flying cars suffer from a lack of an energy source, nothing more.

I think I am making a point you refuse to consider, technology marches on, I have suggested nothing that requires new physics yet you continue to dismiss the possibilities based on what we can currently do much like the quote I gave.

People who think Mars is a great place to colonise should spend a year in Antarctica, Mars is far less hospitable, much harder to get to, and out of range of any possible timely help... Antarctica is a paradise compared to Mars but you don't see lines forming to homestead Antarctica... Earth at the orbit of Venus would be somewhat warmer, probably too warm to maintain Earth like conditions. Venus receives twice as much energy from the sun as the earth does and it is thought that oceans would begin to evaporate and a runaway greenhouse would ensue. As recently, according to some sources, as 2 billion years ago Venus might have had earth like conditions even with oceans and life but the sun is steadily getting warmer and will eventually do to the Earth what it did to Venus. For a while...

Ok you win, man will never reach the moon because we can't jump high enough...

Jupiter is not a stop over for interstellar travel, Jupiter is in fact a site for manufacturing habitats. The moons and Lagrange points of Jupiter contain all the materials necessary to build habitats. This would be the starting point for colonization of the solar system which would eventually lead to things like a Dyson swarm, and colonization of the Kuiper belt and the Oort cloud. A these habitats would be the next step for moving on out, it might take centuries to develop the technology to build habitats and set up laser highways and or stations to accelerate volatiles and other supplies to traveling habitats but the possibilities are not limited to stopping for gas...

The relevance is that no one is saying we will build a star ship in earth orbit and take off for the nearest earth like planet. It's like expecting European humans who were building log rafts to suddenly build 747's and fly to north america. We will build movable habitats for centuries all over the solar system before we even think of the oort cloud. The idea of a generational ship is not impossible and if you are taking your home with you stopping at some point to build more habitats is hardly stopping for gas in fact gas and dust could be harvested with out stopping and going from our Oort cloud to the next is not unreasonable. Why would you stop for gas at 0.01% of your trip? I don't get that.

Because you seem to be dismissing my assertions of the beginning taking place in the solar system... The silicone based life on a hot planet, organo-metallic based organisms might be more likely, but we know so little about what that might be like it's limitations are totally unknown..

So these things must start in interstellar space?

You keep assuming we are only talking about interstellar space. This would have to start inside the solar system, be perfected inside the solar system. In fact I would think millions of these things would be build inside the solar system for use inside the solar system before the tech developed to allow longer voyages. McKendree cylinders might be unproven but there is no reason to think they could not be built