Size a solution to Fermi Paradox?

[swansont]

1 hour ago, Moontanman said:

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.

But I think that's exactly what you are doing. Moving about the solar system is closer to log rafts, while interstellar travel is the 747.

1 hour ago, Moontanman said:

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.  

That's what you are proposing. Jupiter, one of the stopovers you mentioned, is less than a light-hour away from earth, so it's about 0.01% of a light-year. IOW the scale of this problem is 3 or 4 orders of magnitude larger than whatever we have to overcome for moving about the solar system.

[coderage9100]

On 7/13/2019 at 4:05 PM, MigL said:

Intelligent machines depend on the 'bags of protoplasm' having achieved an intelligence level facilitating their construction.
As such, they would be even more scarce ( being equivalent to a subset ).

I don’t know about that. Look how close we are to creating AI. Far from anything to be scared about, but we are constantly improving it. Maybe we would succeed in creating our AI overlords before achieving any interstellar space travel.  So maybe, like Danijel Gorupec said, it’s the machines that should ask where are the other machines. 

[swansont]

22 minutes ago, coderage9100 said:

I don’t know about that. Look how close we are to creating AI. 

Is there any objective measure of how close we are?

[coderage9100]

Not necessarily, but that’s why I said nothing to be scared about. Just that we have done a lot of pretty cool things.  Quick AI Achievements google search should set you up good. But As soon as they are able to learn on and past our capacity and self improve it’s basically their world after that.

[Moontanman]

7 hours ago, swansont said:

But I think that's exactly what you are doing. Moving about the solar system is closer to log rafts, while interstellar travel is the 747.

That's what you are proposing. Jupiter, one of the stopovers you mentioned, is less than a light-hour away from earth, so it's about 0.01% of a light-year. IOW the scale of this problem is 3 or 4 orders of magnitude larger than whatever we have to overcome for moving about the solar system.

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...    

[swansont]

15 minutes ago, Moontanman said:

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...    

So you've moved the starting line of the marathon a few meters down the road. And the Kuiper belt is about a factor of 10 further out. 

Highlighting these steps as significant means you're completely ignoring the scale of the trip. You're getting on your log raft to go across the ocean and saying "Don't worry. We won't jump on until the water is neck deep, and besides, I've packed a lunch." 

Or Sundance complaining he can't swim when it's the fall that will kill you. You are, quite literally, missing the big picture.

[Moontanman]

19 hours ago, swansont said:

So you've moved the starting line of the marathon a few meters down the road. And the Kuiper belt is about a factor of 10 further out. 

Highlighting these steps as significant means you're completely ignoring the scale of the trip. You're getting on your log raft to go across the ocean and saying "Don't worry. We won't jump on until the water is neck deep, and besides, I've packed a lunch." 

Or Sundance complaining he can't swim when it's the fall that will kill you. You are, quite literally, missing the big picture.

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

Quote

The demonstration that no possible combination of known substances, known forms of machinery and known forms of force, can be united in a practical machine by which men shall fly along distances through the air, seems to the writer as complete as it is possible for the demonstration to be. 
— Simon Newcomb, 1900

 

Edited July 18, 2019 by Moontanman

[dimreepr]

40 minutes ago, Moontanman said:

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

The point is:

“Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space.”

― Douglas Adams,

[swansont]

51 minutes ago, Moontanman said:

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

You should win some kind of award for missing the point.

[AUDI R6]

The solution is that we are alone in the universe . We are the first intelligent enough being to understand physics and chemistry and create our own civilization.

[Strange]

53 minutes ago, AUDI R6 said:

The solution is that we are alone in the universe . We are the first intelligent enough being to understand physics and chemistry and create our own civilization.

Do you have any evidence for that?

[AUDI R6]

5 minutes ago, Strange said:

Do you have any evidence for that?

My evidence is the lack of evidence of another civilization.

[swansont]

2 minutes ago, AUDI R6 said:

My evidence is the lack of evidence of another civilization.

So it sounds like you're basically arguing the opposite of what I am. That it's trivially easy to move through interstellar space and visit other stars, so the only reason we haven't had visitors is that they don't exist. OK, make your case.

[AUDI R6]

1 minute ago, swansont said:

So it sounds like you're basically arguing the opposite of what I am. That it's trivially easy to move through interstellar space and visit other stars, so the only reason we haven't had visitors is that they don't exist. OK, make your case.

If they were we would have detected something . Intelligent species want to explore and have curiousity , so they would be searching for us too.;)

[Phi for All]

50 minutes ago, AUDI R6 said:

If they were we would have detected something . Intelligent species want to explore and have curiousity , so they would be searching for us too.;)

Everything you're saying is a guess, obviously. You have no way to know any of this. This is why your subjective opinion doesn't mean anything in science.

You can't possibly know we're the first intelligent creatures in the whole universe. No amount of solid reasoning could support such obvious guesswork. 

Friendly advice: you should confine your assertions to your own threads. If you keep polluting mainstream threads with your misunderstandings and preachings, you're going to get banned. Mainstream science only in mainstream sections. If you want to disprove science, start in Speculations and bring tons of evidence.

[swansont]

1 hour ago, AUDI R6 said:

If they were we would have detected something . Intelligent species want to explore and have curiousity , so they would be searching for us too.;)

Wow. No science at all.

Dolphins are intelligent. Why haven't they launched any space probes? They even breathe air. Why haven't they launched probes to explore land here on earth?

[Moontanman]

3 hours ago, swansont said:

You should win some kind of award for missing the point.

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. 

[swansont]

8 minutes ago, Moontanman said:

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. 

On the contrary. Technology marches on and I'm in that parade. I've been doing R&D for >25 years. Not requiring new physics is an insufficient answer. I've witnessed firsthand that every time you try to get an incremental improvement that some new problem crops up, usually something unanticipated, that needs to be solved. There are theoretical limits to everything, even if you aren't aware of them.  

"technology marches on" is a slogan, not science. It's not even a guarantee. We've been "50 years away" from fusion for ... 50 years. Flying cars are not ubiquitous  — and for good reasons, that people didn't seem to discuss back in the day, and reminiscent of the arc of this thread. There's no new physics required for them (either of them), after all.

[Phi for All]

2 hours ago, AUDI R6 said:

My evidence is the lack of evidence of another civilization.

Yuck, that's terrible reasoning. Lack of evidence for or against something is NOT evidence of lack. Your reasoning might hold up in a court trying to convict someone, but lack of evidence for another civilization simply means we haven't encountered one, NOT that they can't exist. We are allowed to say "We don't know", you know.

[Moontanman]

1 minute ago, swansont said:

On the contrary. Technology marches on and I'm in that parade. I've been doing R&D for >25 years. Not requiring new physics is an insufficient answer. I've witnessed firsthand that every time you try to get an incremental improvement that some new problem crops up, usually something unanticipated, that needs to be solved. There are theoretical limits to everything, even if you aren't aware of them.  

"technology marches on" is a slogan, not science. It's not even a guarantee. We've been "50 years away" from fusion for ... 50 years. Flying cars are not ubiquitous  — and for good reasons, that people didn't seem to discuss back in the day, and reminiscent of the arc of this thread. There's no new physics required for them (either of them), after all.

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. 

12 minutes ago, swansont said:

On the contrary. Technology marches on and I'm in that parade. I've been doing R&D for >25 years. Not requiring new physics is an insufficient answer. I've witnessed firsthand that every time you try to get an incremental improvement that some new problem crops up, usually something unanticipated, that needs to be solved. There are theoretical limits to everything, even if you aren't aware of them.  

"technology marches on" is a slogan, not science. It's not even a guarantee. We've been "50 years away" from fusion for ... 50 years. Flying cars are not ubiquitous  — and for good reasons, that people didn't seem to discuss back in the day, and reminiscent of the arc of this thread. There's no new physics required for them (either of them), after all.

Flying cars suffer from a lack of an energy source, nothing more. 

[swansont]

I guess you must be in the "there are no aliens" camp, too, seeing as there are no actual barriers to interstellar space travel, and your answer to the OP sounds like it's "no, space is not too big".

If not, where are they?

[FreeWill]

4 minutes ago, swansont said:

where are they?

Everywhere.

Yet we do not know the math and physics required to understand what and where they communicate. 

[Phi for All]

11 minutes ago, Moontanman said:

Flying cars suffer from a lack of an energy source, nothing more. 

Do you really think most drivers could learn 3D? I don't, and I can't even imagine what it would cost to insure a flying car, much less all the things it might collide with. Right now I'm probably not covered if I plow into the 35th floor of a high-rise building. Also, we're going to need a few orders of magnitude more air-traffic controllers. I'm skeptical that energy is the only thing flying cars suffer from.

[FreeWill]

The real proof of Humanities (required) intelligence will be when we can participate in the interstellar/intergalactic communication.

I really hope that our advanced AI will be able to help us out.

[Moontanman]

8 minutes ago, Phi for All said:

Do you really think most drivers could learn 3D? I don't, and I can't even imagine what it would cost to insure a flying car, much less all the things it might collide with. Right now I'm probably not covered if I plow into the 35th floor of a high-rise building. Also, we're going to need a few orders of magnitude more air-traffic controllers. I'm skeptical that energy is the only thing flying cars suffer from.

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