It's more a matter of how long it will take. Keep in mind the magic box that gets cold inside, from the point of view of an Amazonian tribesman, or for that matter cargo cults. The products and effects of a sufficiently advanced technology are indistinguishable from magic. And we went from vacuum tubes to microprocessors in thirty years. And from floppy canvas wings to the Moon in sixty. Prepare to be future shocked.Horwood Beer-Master wrote:I have doubts. Particularly regarding the gap between what technically can be achived, and what practically will be. Also nanotechnology will not increase the total (limited) mass of our planet - so there's still ultimately a limit to be reachedSchneibster wrote:...Nanotechnology is really going to change everything...
As far as the limits of the mass of the Earth, or even just the parts that are fairly easily accessible to us...
let's try it this way: If the Earth were a thirty meter sphere, the thickness of everything from the bottom of the Marianas trench's Challenger Depth to the top of Everest is less than the thickness of a coat of paint on the outside of that sphere; an order of magnitude less, actually. That's one hell of a lot of space, man, and the Earth is like ten or more orders of magnitude more, if you count the interior. Fifty or a hundred billion might easily survive here, if that were the only limit. The limit isn't the Earth, it's the incoming energy from the Sun.
Radio is pretty easy. It's pretty obvious, and the places where things are quiet, where you'd try to communicate, are pretty obvious too.Horwood Beer-Master wrote:My favoured answer is that while life may occur frequently, complex life is much less common, intelligent life less common still, and technological life rarer still - and of that technological life there no telling how much of it has the remotest interest in reaching out into the cosmos to discover other technological life.Schneibster wrote:...Have you ever heard of Fermi's Paradox?
It can be quite succinctly stated as, "where the fuck is everybody?"
One of the answers is, "Intelligence is self-limiting; it discovers [nuclear weapons, nanotech grey goop, some other destructive technology we ain't thought up yet, encounters Malthusian limits, etc.] and kills itself off." ...
It's a big ol' universe and we ain't scratched it's surface.
Diddly squat, man. That says something. Either they're not talkin', in which case, oh shit how come the forest got all quiet all of a sudden, or else they're usin' somethin' else, and we know enough to know there ain't nothin' else obvious, or they're plain flat not there.
Horwood Beer-Master wrote:Of course, just because intelligent life generally may not self limiting - doesn't mean we won't prove to be. It could be that we are just a particularly crappy fucked-up form of (so called) "intelligent" life.
