Random Thought of the Day

Quote: Nareed

They could hide their technology, but not their atmosphere.

An article I was reading earlier had a comment about how advanced another civilization might be. The point was made though we sometimes think in hundreds of years difference, it could also be thousands of years difference or even a hundred thousand years difference.

That's a lot of time to figure out how a lot of things work and to accomplish things quite off the scale of imagination.

One species may be dominating our area of the Universe already. If they were thousands of years ahead of our technology today --well...

We may just be their Ant Farm. They could easily fool our technology to detect them.

I might add, even on Earth, we still have people living in the Stone age. Most of them are aware of the rest of civilization even if they still choose to live the way they do.

Technology can really advance in one place and fail to advance (or be lost perhaps) on our little planet.

Quote: rxwine

An article I was reading earlier had a comment about how advanced another civilization might be. The point was made though we sometimes think in hundreds of years difference, it could also be thousands of years difference or even a hundred thousand years difference.

You seem to be jumping to embrace Clarke's Law, but with a twist. Clarke held any sufficiently advanced technology would be indistinguishable from magic. The twist seems to be: any sufficiently advanced technology is magic.

Can you hide an atmosphere from an observer? Sure. You're not hiding the atmosphere, but only the sunlight which passes through it, and which reaches the world your observer is in.

But for that you'd need to know there is an observer in a far-off world, and that world's position in relation to your own. We've been able to identify chemical elements in astronomical objects since around the 1830s or so. That is, by then the capability and the knowledge existed.

Your hypothetical shy aliens need not know this. They may assume any sentient beings will eventually figure it out, thus they'd hide their atmosphere since they learned of our existence. When would this be? Anywhere from yesterday to 1.2 million years or so, even farther if they could extrapolate the possibilities of evolution.

I think my assumptions break down by now.

There is a secret message on this tombstone.

Quote: rxwine

There is a secret message on this tombstone.

Is that message from the person in the grave to world or form the deceased "friends" to the deceased?

there is a thread about the tombstone somewhere at WoV started by the Wizard. I think he is a tombstone tourist or something and has visited this tombstone

Quote: kenarman

Is that message from the person in the grave to world or form the deceased "friends" to the deceased?

I've wondered too, but I think it is the latter. It would take a lot of planning of your own funeral to be the former, and someone who would do that usually is pretty focused on having it be nice.

This is completely insane, and I'd love to know how you can land with crosswinds of 100 kph. I wish them luck:

http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2015-08/17/thothx-tower-space-elevator

It would also be a neat idea for an SF story.

Discussions about alien life are incredibly frustrating because we have exactly zero evidence mixed with megatons of speculation.

Unfortunately all we can say is that, as of today, the minimum existent content of life is one planet per universe.

Since Donald Trump has said essentially he doesn't have time to worry about being politically correct I wonder if he is going to bring back "retard" and
"spaz" or something else.

One person's offense is another person's being asked to be too pc.