> Hi All, I just joined the list last night after finding a reference to it on > a page about the now mothballed (??) Startide movie. > > Of the 40 or so posts added overnight this is the only one that I would have > thought is especially relevant to the list. Are the discussions usually > more or less David Brin / Science Fiction orientated or are they always > about bad language and the situation in the middle east? > > As for giant space ships streaking at great speeds through the sky I have a > couple of comments. First an unoriginal one. If it was possible it should > of happened by now, unless of course intelligent life is very rare, and we > are it in this corner of the universe. > > I'd imagine that in one way or another we ourselves have at least a 5% > chance of colonizing the galaxy in the next few million years. What I was > thinking, is that given the Andromeda Galaxy is larger than our the chances > of intelligent life evolving there a few tens of millions years earlier than > here would seem to be good. Has any one given any thought to the best way > of trying to detect a galaxy spanning civilization in Andromeda, for each of > the possible colonization scenarios possible. (Big space ships, nanotech, > etc.) > > Regards, > > Wayne Eddy > Mildura, Australia.
<whisper> everyone, be nice, there are new people around. let's see if we can get them to stay </whisper> Hi Wayne, thanks for stopping by. We talk about David Brin all the time! In fact we talked about him so much that he got mad at us and left the group. Haha, just kidding. He left because we stopped treating him like a god. Haha, more jokes. It was actually the whisper campaign. Not laughing now. Anyway. I don't think being larger will give Andromeda that much greater a chance of developing a civilization, especially so much earlier. Luckily we won't have to wait long, Andromeda will be HERE soon: http://www.haydenplanetarium.org/hp/vo/ava/avapages/G0601andmilwy.html Here are my ideas: Let's say that we have this solar system completely colonized. Settlements around Saturn, Jupiter, the asteroid belt, on Mars, the moon, heck even Mercury. But we never get beyond radio or microwave communication. How much energy will be needed for system wide communications? We would know exactly when we could send a message from here to there, the signals would be tight-beam. Even if the signals were constant, how much would leak, how easily could an easdropping civilization pick them just four light years away? Or father out? Just wondering if the failure, so far I hope, of SETI means that we are being very optomistic or a strong indicator that we are alone. I think Contact had Vega as the star where we were detected, 40 LYs away. Was Hitler's Olympic TV signal really that strong, how much above background noise would that signal be after 40 years? Don't remember if Sagen used the same contact method in the book. For the same system wide communications, will lasers become more common? Won't a laser signal be that much harder to detect a few LYs away? We keep on raising the frequency of our communications, up to 2.4Ghz at least, will that make us more noticible or less? I do think when we get space telescopes capable of seeing earth sized planets around other stars, ten to twenty years, we will get a better handle on how often a water free planet occurs. But even if they are everywhere, it will be a long time before we have enough resources to send something to another star. Kevin Tarr Up way too late.
