Bob Sneidar wrote:
> It's sobering to think someone so smart as Orville Wright could
> get the two confused. Is it theoretically possible to travel
> to another planet? Sure! Is it practically possible? Not a chance.
> The difference between what is true and what is possible.
Respectfully, Bob, your post surprises me, coming from someone as
technically savvy as yourself.
After all, your words came to me through a set of technologies that were
impossible in Wright's time, and save for a small handful of sci-fi
writers of the day, entirely inconceivable. Heck, not even Xanadu would
be dreamed of until decades later, and it took decades more to begin the
baby steps toward our Internet, which is even now in its infancy.
The computer I'm typing this on seems commonplace enough, and indeed
it's far from new, but it has millions of transistors, each of which was
inconceivable prior to the early 1950s.
And even then, the idea that we would one day have so many millions of
transistors on a surface only slightly larger than our thumb would have
been laughable if it could have been dreamed of at all. We make things
so small now that we can't truly say WE make them at all - we had to
first make robots to make them for us, because we humans can't work at
that scale. And even the robots we make are too big; modern processors
are made by robots that were built by other robots.
Case in point: the Intel Celeron G530 has 504 million transistors,
build with a 32mn die. You can buy it at NewEgg for about $50. Most
folks don't bother because it doesn't have the power we've become
accustomed to.
For all the wonder of these gadgets, they only represent the extent of
HUMAN knowledge, a species that just a few thousand years ago hadn't
even mastered the most fundamental technology of all, the ability to
make fire with sticks (a skill worth knowing even now, but that's
another story).
If we take someone from an arbitrary midpoint between then and now, say
Benjamin Franklin or Isaac Newton, and could drop them into our world,
they would see many of the things we take for granted as complete magic,
or perhaps demonism (see the old Omni Mag story, "Newton's Gift"). And
they're from just a couple hundred years ago.
So here we are, flying through space at millions of miles an hours on
Spaceship Earth, nowhere near the edge of the Universe, which is quite
possibly several billion years older than our little corner of space.
If we consider a relatively near neighbor, say a planet just a million
or two years older than our own - what might a civilization look like
that's a couple million years years older than us? What would we look
like in a million years? What would our technology look like? Would our
current selves be able to understand it? Would we even be able to
recognize it as tech, or just be mystified by by flashing lights, no
more than Neanderthal could appreciate a book of Shakespeare.
Sure, Einstein's Theory of Relativity suggests that the distance between
two stars can only be traversed no faster than light, and we human don't
live very long so it doesn't seem worth trying - for us, anyway.
But a fruit fly lives just a few days, while we live thousands of times
longer. Why should we expect that the life cycles of other beings are
anything like our own?
And Einstein's Theory is just that, a theory. It's not yet a law, and
for good reason. Every few years we hear from another quantum physicist
suggesting that they may be on the edge of something that disproves it.
Wouldn't be the first time a new discovery completed shattered our
understanding of how things work.
Given the vastness of space and the billions-of-years head start so many
other solar systems have had over our own, it doesn't strike me as the
least bit implausible that there are other civilizations out there, and
that some are well-traveled.
In fact, given the math of it, it seems far more probable than not.
So while our primitive radio telemetry is indeed paltry and barely worth
the time and CPU cycles to bother with, it's the best we have right now
and certainly more fun than not trying at all.
--
Richard Gaskin
Fourth World Systems
Software Design and Development for the Desktop, Mobile, and the Web
____________________________________________________________________
ambassa...@fourthworld.com http://www.FourthWorld.com
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