One point consistently glossed over is the fact that if you believe nothing can exceed the speed of light then even if we find intelligent life we will never communicate in any meaningful sense of the word. It would be more like mutual observation. Are there any sci-fi works that acknowledge this depressing reality and somehow manage to make a workable story?
A Deepness in the Sky deals with interstellar traders that do not have FTL.
The universe the book is set in has a gimmick to allow FTL, but that book doesn't use FTL (part of the gimmick is that it isn't possible in much of the galaxy).
Edit: The Revelation Space books also have lots of people moving between stars at below light speed.
The author is also a computer scientist so many of his books are well detailed for those versed in related fields (the way biologists write sci-fi books that scatter biology details other readers not versed in the subject would miss) like people here.
A Deepness in the Sky, for example, touches on open source, technical debt, project management, memory density, branching, DRM, encryption, stenography, and other more nuanced topics; but it's a sci-fi novel first. All in the backdrop of a universe with no FTL (at least for this book in the "series", more like books in the same universe).
He also does great alien races (the other book in the series, A Fire upon the Deep, has alien races which behave on different computational architectures to achieve sentience; and touches on obfuscated code (among other topics) in a great way).
> The Revelation Space books also have lots of people moving between stars at below light speed.
House of Suns (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_of_Suns) was one of the best examples of that. Starship chases lasting thousands of years, people making 200,000 year circuits of the galaxy...
I was very taken with the portrayal of the Queng Ho in 'A Deepness in the Sky'. I liked the idea that a trading culture would foster technological development across a large swath of space by broadcasting "here's how you bootstrap an advanced civilization" instructions to anyone who got as far as inventing radios.
Then they'd wander around at relativistic speeds, trying to time their visits to each system to coincide with periods of high-tech development so they could do some trading (before each civilization inevitably choked on its own complexity. That part was a bummer)
I don't think it's glossed over. It's a separate issue though.
Just knowing for certain that there is intelligent life - or any life - on other worlds would have huge ramifications for how humanity views itself and the universe.
It would be interesting to see how major religions responded to confirmation that there is other intelligent life that is not made in the same image as us.
> Just knowing for certain that there is intelligent life - or any life - on other worlds would have huge ramifications for how humanity views itself and the universe.
I think our species chauvinism is pretty strong. I think the discovery of life on other worlds would have very little practical change to our daily lives.
For example, we seemed to have handled the fact that the dolphins and whales in our oceans are fairly intelligent. Why would finding intelligent whales in Enceladus oceans be any different?
> if you believe nothing can exceed the speed of light then even if we find intelligent life we will never communicate in any meaningful sense of the word.
Quantum entanglement could very plausibly allow for superluminal communication. Yes, I know that it isn't proven, or even considered plausible as yet, but call me an optimist.
There have been a number of such works. Olaf Stapledon's Starmaker takes a somewhat poetic approach to the idea. And restraining oneself to an Einsteinian universe where nothing exceeds C was a hallmark of "hard-sci-fi" although even Arthur C. Clarke fudged and went for hyperspace when the plot was otherwise going to drag for a few millennia.
For a more recent take on the topic check out Karl Schroeder's Permanence [1] which is a damn fine read and doesn't run the hyperspace cheat and is all the more operatic for that.
Yes, it's a staple of hard science fiction. It's generally assumed that interstellar cultures are isolated, extremely long lived, and/or have solved the problems of practical interstellar travel (maintaining high thrust, dealing with radiation, not going splat on a dust particle at .99999c).
And for those not familiar with relativity, in any case of course after traversing 1480 light years the civilization you intend to meet will be at least 1480 years in the future.
If two civilization were to meet the most efficient way of communication might be mediated through an AI. Exchange computer with some clear protocol for communication (probably based on elementary mathematical/physical principles) with an AI capable of conveying the intentions and the cumulative knowledge that you want to share.
Exchange computer with some clear protocol for
communication (probably based on elementary
mathematical/physical principles)
I always see people talk about stuff like this, but it's never really clear to me how elementary math or physics will help us communicate with other species---species that will likely have sufficiently different biochemistry from us to make communication at least as difficult as talking to a dolphin or an elephant.
I believe it's assumed that if a species is capable of producing a mechanism to communicate with other interstellar species, then they necessarily have an understanding of math and physics.
I shared the same confusion before, but I do have some ideas:
I think you could establish a communication protocol with an alien species with something like this:
First, establish the meaning of a set of mathematical symbols by choosing recognisable / universal mathematical entities and demonstrating the symbolic relationship between them
That means things like eg. a picture of euler's identity and then symbolic representations beside it, then varying the individual elements and showing the results.
This isn't easy (if you've ever played that boardgame about inferring another player's rules with pyramids, you'll know what I mean...) but it is probably doable.
And you might be able to symbolically demonstrate Peano Arithmetic or something.
Once you've established a vocabulary of mathematical symbols, you can maybe use that to pin down a basic physical vocabulary. You could maybe identify different elements based on eg. their atomic number. You can establish a time vocabulary by giving a formula for the orbit of their nearest star and asking them to solve for x. You can describe spatial relationships between things.
It seems very difficult to go from there to a yet higher level vocabulary - but who knows, it may be possible.
It's actually not a problem at all. It'll be extremely unlikely that two civilizatizations in this case are about same level in terms of science and technology (+/-1000 years).
So when the two communicate, the advanced one can easily understand the other.
The Forever War, by Joe Haldeman, has both sides in the conflict sending spaceships at .99c to where they think the enemy will be.. with the unfortunate reality that if the enemy has populated & developed from that location first, the arriving fleet will be thousands of years of innovation behind and be wiped out without a chance.
Written by a survivor of the Vietnam War and a frighteningly poignant read.
"'The laws have changed sir, you no longer get a discharge after 1000 years. We're shipping you back out in 2 weeks' and of course the bastards only pay you for your subjective time, otherwise we'd have soldiers getting rich"
It's also important to keep in mind that this depressing perspective is a contemporary, anthropomorphic one.
It might be the case that communications using electromagnetic radiation are an unremarkable blip on the timeline of technological progress. The modern era has only been in full-swing for a paltry few hundred years!
I like to think that the size and scope of the universe suggests that there absolutely are many many ways to travel and communicate faster than light (and presumably well beyond), that we haven't even imagined yet. Zoom out enough, and any speed or distance scale appears tiny.
For one, we know nothing of the remote party's biology and medical achievements. In fact we don't even know whether the remote party would be a biological entity at all. They could be an engineered AI built by a species long gone or marginalized. Bottomline is we have no clue of their lifespan and mortality.
On the other hand, we can also change beyond recognition within a single roundtrip so if human progress is sufficient then by the time the conversation really gets going it may become possible.
Also, the nearest interesting stars are much closer than 1480 ly [1]. Generally under the most primitive assumptions about star distribution (uniform) we have a fast increase (O(n^3) within distance n ly) in the number of systems we could talk to.
Alastair Reynolds is a hard scifi author with a PhD in astrophysics, and most of his works deal with this in some fashion. One is Pushing Ice (SPOILER IN REST OF POST), which tackles your question about civilizations not really having the ability to communicate with each other, not only because the galaxy 100,000 light years across, but also because it's billions of years old. That is, you could have lots of civilizations rise and fall, even in the same neighborhood of the galaxy.
So the big idea revealed at the end of the book (most of it is structured as "what is going on!?") is that one of the early civilizations planted lots of moons around the galaxy that would lure in and trap ships and then accelerate off somewhere. At high accelerations, for various small amounts of subjective time, millions or billions of years could pass. By calibrating all the moon traps then, lots of different civlizations from different corners of the galaxy, each originating in different eras, would be arriving at about the same time/place.
Its a neophillia thing. Plenty of interesting cultural exchange topics exist pre-600 AD. Ship them the complete works of the Greco Roman era, the Pāli Tipitaka, the bible... About 110 years ago Oxford Press published a 50 book series of English translations called "The sacred books of the east" off the top of my head I believe all the originals predate 600 AD? We certainly wouldn't lack for discussion topics.
Its interesting that no era thinks they're particularly dumb or ignorant. They didn't know many cool programming algorithms, we (in general, as a population) don't know as much euclidian geometry or stoic philosophy. I'm sure we'd have plenty to say about some topic even if the topic would change over 1400 or so years.
There's also a general insistence on culture shock, which I disbelieve in. I'm not that old, and something like Plutarch isn't that much closer in age to me than to a newly graduated kid. "We" would do just fine.
I don't think Seti look for intelligent life because they want to have a conversation. They are searching because finding evidence of intelligent life out there would be a very important discovery. Perhaps one of the most important discoveries we could ever make. Are we alone in the universe? It seems like we should not be, but we have a sample size of 1 so far. It's a big big big question.
I think your reasoning is somewhat an artifact of bias in science fiction in the first place. You see presumption of FTL all over the place, and so it's depressing to consider that it is very likely a hard impossibility, because it rules out a lot of those stories. But, there isn't a lot of science fiction which explores the consequences of eliminating biological aging, or anything else which might make 1500 years actually a rather short span of time for intelligent life.
Maybe the galaxy is full of life which thinks nothing of going on a journey that would take thousands of our years, or longer.
My favorite sci-fi work on this topic (and I dare say my favorite sci-fi work ever) is a series of posts on kuro5hin by localroger, together titled "Passages in the void." You can find them on http://localroger.com/ . The speed of light issue is solved without inventing new physics, which is extremely satisfying, but there is still enough of a leap of faith to make it satisfying sci-fi. Brilliant work.
God will talk using just about any random process as an oracle. You have to do an offering by talking to Hi for 5 minute being witty and charming, praise, perhaps writing a hymn.
When my great grandma was born, we didn't have flight, radar, lasers, radio, etc... Why would we think that a civilization capable of building massive space structures would be communicating in such a slow and imprecise way. The idea that we've discovered all there is to know about communication over vast distances is hubris.
We can't see anything because we have not yet discovered what we're looking for.
We'll likely never abandon radio technology because it is an absurdly cheap and universal means of communication that propagates throughout the universe at the speed of light, a hard practical limit for how fast anything can send information. We certainly don't know everything, not by a long shot, and there are theoretical frameworks for FTL communication, but we don't have any hard observational or experimental evidence that this universal speed limit can be broken after a century of research that was more productive than the previous ten thousand years.
It's great to be hopeful and work towards such technology but you can't discard the very, very real possibility that the speed of light can't be exceeded or that doing so to communicate might require a Type II or III civilization, which might also be practically impossible to achieve due to the speed limit for travel.
For those equality puzzled about what akiselev meant by Type II / III civilizations, it comes from the Kardashev scale:
"The Kardashev scale is a method of measuring a civilization's level of technological advancement, based on the amount of energy a civilization is able to utilize.[1] The scale has three designated categories called Type I, II, and III. A Type I civilization uses only resources available on its home planet, Type II harnesses all needed energy from its local star, and Type III of its galaxy."
It's almost as if you've never read historical journals of scientists saying silly things like "This obviously if the height of human achievement, we'll never possibly find anything better", over and over and over throughout history.
That's a great cop out when you don't want to think critically about the history or current state of science. Besides, I didn't say that we are at the "height of human achievement" but that there are physical laws that remain practically unchallenged by centuries of observational or experimental evidence. the speed of light as a cosmic speed limit happens to be one of those.
Yes, it is. That argument is nonsense because it can never be falsified. No matter how much we learn, even if it's trillions of years into the future and we're short seconds away from the heat death of the universe, anyone who is too lazy to look at the state of science can just claim "We don't know everything! That magic anti-entropy perpetual motion machine is just around the corner!" and be done with it. It's the scientific equivalent of "God did it."
One cherry picked quote demonstrating a famous scientist's lack of imagination does not represent the scientific consensus, especially since da Vinci's lift and thurst research (based on heavier than air flying birds) from centuries earlier was well known.
No it's not. Two words, Em drive. Seriously, we are infants in our scientific understanding of the universe and physics. You speak as if we have a clue. If we had proven unified theory of everything, then your argument wouldn't be nearly as ignorant. But we don't. We don't even know what accounts for the majority of the universe. To assume we already have the answers is literally stupid.
Back to the original question and your EM Drive. Using waves and radars, EM Drives will easily be detected by radars and technology we have today - as the magnetic forces are ultimately form of energy..
That we would receive a signal with the radio telescope discussed here would pretty much demand either that they make tremendous use of a very specific form of propulsion, or that they are putting a substantial fraction of their available energy into contacting civilizations of precisely our technological level. There's no thought that we'd pick up their radio chatter between themselves- we couldn't pick up Earth's radio noise from that distance, and we're only getting quieter as our technology becomes more effective.
Aliens in the business of contacting emerging civilizations must find themselves with an interesting tradeoff between transmitter power usage and contactee technology level- at a guess, it would be exponentially more expensive to contact species earlier on in their development. We may still just not be far along enough that the cost-benefit ratio makes sense to talk to us.
First time I started reading about quantum computers and the idea of entangled particles I immediately thought it would be a neat way to solve long distance space Comms. Anyone with a better brain than me care to explain if it could be a possibility?
In short, "it doesn't work the way you think it does"
People keep digging in this area because it's hard to measure accurately so we're not 100% yet, but the current consensus is that the interaction between entangled particles, isn't faster than light and should not be faster than light.
For starters we can easily talk/communicate to your grandmother and any human in history.
So I assume that you think they fear being found and are not trying to communicate (I find it unlikely they just don't care, as humans we are very interested in working out communications in the most simplest animals and plants)
Yet we have found them with our 'primitive' technology.
No, these structures would have started being built before we knew knew how to calculate volume. Our radio waves will not reach them for 1300 years. With the degradation of signal, and amplification of noise, we're not sure if what they detect will even be decipherable from noise. They may have discovered a way to communicate that is more efficient, so they may not even be listening on those frequencies.
We found them because they built massive space structures. 1300 years ago, we were invisible.
1480 light years away...it's just too far for practical travel on any sort of scale, and I assume scale would be required to "do something" to us beyond taking a glance - and even that seems far-fetched.
Assuming a Type 2 civilization has 10x population of the earth, each individual of it would consumes more energy than all of human beings combined. It's reasonable to suggest that light-year to it would be less challenging than AU to us.
Mining minerals ? Nobody mines minerals in on a planet, you use asteroids for that. Microgravity will make separation easier.
Occupying another planet ?
Everybody with understanding of history knows that it does not work, endless conflicts, suffering, problem, etc. Makes no sense, just take another one.
But our planet is so special!!
No its not, even our next neighbors have statistically speaking one habitable planet. Just because we only see the huge gas planets with our current observation tech does not mean there are not many smaller ones. Remember 15 years ago, they were unsure if planets in other systems did even exist, now we have 1000s found.
To far away ?
~ 1480 ly is not easily done, you need a type 2 spaceship with double fields which gives you restrictions on the minimum size and still there will be some upper limit on the travel speed for complex biological system like us. We have currently only type 0 spaceships (impulse based). EM-Drive is a type 1 thruster, but a very bad one. How fast you can be there really depends on your tech, it can be from 16h - 100s of years.
Just because you don't know if they are not doing anything, does not make it so. Its not a valid deduction.
Anyway, don't worry, most of the Galaxy is very friendly and we are the Klingon-Ferengi type of idiot the rest is laughing about.
If somebody wanted, they would have overtaken us already. Everything we have are toys compared to whats possible. Conflicts would just be so devastating, nobody would win. War never has winners, someone just looses more then the other, something we as a species still have not understood.
Well, if it's actually a Dyson swarm in the making, we'll find out, watching the star go gradually dark during the next few hundred (or thousand?) years..
It's an interesting idea. For a civilisation is constructing a Dyson swarm, the time required to build a 20% coverage one to 30% one should be less than a decade. If I remember correctly, NASA is already be able to observe 1% of the difference. So we only need to wait for a year.
Correction:
"No signal that we use Detected from KIC 8462852"
And ? Nobody with good physical understanding uses Hertz EM waves for communication except emergency broadcasts if he is clever. Assumptions over assumptions and not looking outside the box, this is what SETI does and that's why they are not seeing anything of interest.
64 comments
[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 68.5 ms ] threadOne point consistently glossed over is the fact that if you believe nothing can exceed the speed of light then even if we find intelligent life we will never communicate in any meaningful sense of the word. It would be more like mutual observation. Are there any sci-fi works that acknowledge this depressing reality and somehow manage to make a workable story?
The universe the book is set in has a gimmick to allow FTL, but that book doesn't use FTL (part of the gimmick is that it isn't possible in much of the galaxy).
Edit: The Revelation Space books also have lots of people moving between stars at below light speed.
A Deepness in the Sky, for example, touches on open source, technical debt, project management, memory density, branching, DRM, encryption, stenography, and other more nuanced topics; but it's a sci-fi novel first. All in the backdrop of a universe with no FTL (at least for this book in the "series", more like books in the same universe).
He also does great alien races (the other book in the series, A Fire upon the Deep, has alien races which behave on different computational architectures to achieve sentience; and touches on obfuscated code (among other topics) in a great way).
House of Suns (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_of_Suns) was one of the best examples of that. Starship chases lasting thousands of years, people making 200,000 year circuits of the galaxy...
Just knowing for certain that there is intelligent life - or any life - on other worlds would have huge ramifications for how humanity views itself and the universe.
It would be interesting to see how major religions responded to confirmation that there is other intelligent life that is not made in the same image as us.
Do aliens go to Heaven?
I think our species chauvinism is pretty strong. I think the discovery of life on other worlds would have very little practical change to our daily lives.
For example, we seemed to have handled the fact that the dolphins and whales in our oceans are fairly intelligent. Why would finding intelligent whales in Enceladus oceans be any different?
Quantum entanglement could very plausibly allow for superluminal communication. Yes, I know that it isn't proven, or even considered plausible as yet, but call me an optimist.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superluminal_communication
If by "plausibly", you mean "in contravention to all currently established theory". As the Wikipedia article you linked itself states.
For a more recent take on the topic check out Karl Schroeder's Permanence [1] which is a damn fine read and doesn't run the hyperspace cheat and is all the more operatic for that.
1. http://amzn.to/1LYhwwm
[1]: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/17910135-lockstep
It's interesting to note that a traveler on a spaceship that can maintain 1g of acceleration would experience 14 years subjective time while traversing 1480 light years. (According to http://convertalot.com/relativistic_star_ship_calculator.htm...)
If two civilization were to meet the most efficient way of communication might be mediated through an AI. Exchange computer with some clear protocol for communication (probably based on elementary mathematical/physical principles) with an AI capable of conveying the intentions and the cumulative knowledge that you want to share.
I think you could establish a communication protocol with an alien species with something like this:
First, establish the meaning of a set of mathematical symbols by choosing recognisable / universal mathematical entities and demonstrating the symbolic relationship between them
That means things like eg. a picture of euler's identity and then symbolic representations beside it, then varying the individual elements and showing the results.
This isn't easy (if you've ever played that boardgame about inferring another player's rules with pyramids, you'll know what I mean...) but it is probably doable.
And you might be able to symbolically demonstrate Peano Arithmetic or something.
Once you've established a vocabulary of mathematical symbols, you can maybe use that to pin down a basic physical vocabulary. You could maybe identify different elements based on eg. their atomic number. You can establish a time vocabulary by giving a formula for the orbit of their nearest star and asking them to solve for x. You can describe spatial relationships between things.
It seems very difficult to go from there to a yet higher level vocabulary - but who knows, it may be possible.
Written by a survivor of the Vietnam War and a frighteningly poignant read.
"'The laws have changed sir, you no longer get a discharge after 1000 years. We're shipping you back out in 2 weeks' and of course the bastards only pay you for your subjective time, otherwise we'd have soldiers getting rich"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Forever_War
It might be the case that communications using electromagnetic radiation are an unremarkable blip on the timeline of technological progress. The modern era has only been in full-swing for a paltry few hundred years!
I like to think that the size and scope of the universe suggests that there absolutely are many many ways to travel and communicate faster than light (and presumably well beyond), that we haven't even imagined yet. Zoom out enough, and any speed or distance scale appears tiny.
For one, we know nothing of the remote party's biology and medical achievements. In fact we don't even know whether the remote party would be a biological entity at all. They could be an engineered AI built by a species long gone or marginalized. Bottomline is we have no clue of their lifespan and mortality.
On the other hand, we can also change beyond recognition within a single roundtrip so if human progress is sufficient then by the time the conversation really gets going it may become possible.
Also, the nearest interesting stars are much closer than 1480 ly [1]. Generally under the most primitive assumptions about star distribution (uniform) we have a fast increase (O(n^3) within distance n ly) in the number of systems we could talk to.
[1] http://www.space.com/18964-the-nearest-stars-to-earth-infogr...
So the big idea revealed at the end of the book (most of it is structured as "what is going on!?") is that one of the early civilizations planted lots of moons around the galaxy that would lure in and trap ships and then accelerate off somewhere. At high accelerations, for various small amounts of subjective time, millions or billions of years could pass. By calibrating all the moon traps then, lots of different civlizations from different corners of the galaxy, each originating in different eras, would be arriving at about the same time/place.
Its interesting that no era thinks they're particularly dumb or ignorant. They didn't know many cool programming algorithms, we (in general, as a population) don't know as much euclidian geometry or stoic philosophy. I'm sure we'd have plenty to say about some topic even if the topic would change over 1400 or so years.
There's also a general insistence on culture shock, which I disbelieve in. I'm not that old, and something like Plutarch isn't that much closer in age to me than to a newly graduated kid. "We" would do just fine.
Maybe the galaxy is full of life which thinks nothing of going on a journey that would take thousands of our years, or longer.
We can't see anything because we have not yet discovered what we're looking for.
It's great to be hopeful and work towards such technology but you can't discard the very, very real possibility that the speed of light can't be exceeded or that doing so to communicate might require a Type II or III civilization, which might also be practically impossible to achieve due to the speed limit for travel.
"The Kardashev scale is a method of measuring a civilization's level of technological advancement, based on the amount of energy a civilization is able to utilize.[1] The scale has three designated categories called Type I, II, and III. A Type I civilization uses only resources available on its home planet, Type II harnesses all needed energy from its local star, and Type III of its galaxy."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kardashev_scale
"Heavier than air flying machines are impossible." -- Lord Kelvin
The physics didn't change, just our understanding of how to manipulate them.
One cherry picked quote demonstrating a famous scientist's lack of imagination does not represent the scientific consensus, especially since da Vinci's lift and thurst research (based on heavier than air flying birds) from centuries earlier was well known.
Aliens in the business of contacting emerging civilizations must find themselves with an interesting tradeoff between transmitter power usage and contactee technology level- at a guess, it would be exponentially more expensive to contact species earlier on in their development. We may still just not be far along enough that the cost-benefit ratio makes sense to talk to us.
People keep digging in this area because it's hard to measure accurately so we're not 100% yet, but the current consensus is that the interaction between entangled particles, isn't faster than light and should not be faster than light.
So I assume that you think they fear being found and are not trying to communicate (I find it unlikely they just don't care, as humans we are very interested in working out communications in the most simplest animals and plants)
Yet we have found them with our 'primitive' technology.
We found them because they built massive space structures. 1300 years ago, we were invisible.
Mining minerals ? Nobody mines minerals in on a planet, you use asteroids for that. Microgravity will make separation easier.
Occupying another planet ?
Everybody with understanding of history knows that it does not work, endless conflicts, suffering, problem, etc. Makes no sense, just take another one.
But our planet is so special!! No its not, even our next neighbors have statistically speaking one habitable planet. Just because we only see the huge gas planets with our current observation tech does not mean there are not many smaller ones. Remember 15 years ago, they were unsure if planets in other systems did even exist, now we have 1000s found.
To far away ? ~ 1480 ly is not easily done, you need a type 2 spaceship with double fields which gives you restrictions on the minimum size and still there will be some upper limit on the travel speed for complex biological system like us. We have currently only type 0 spaceships (impulse based). EM-Drive is a type 1 thruster, but a very bad one. How fast you can be there really depends on your tech, it can be from 16h - 100s of years.
Just because you don't know if they are not doing anything, does not make it so. Its not a valid deduction.
Anyway, don't worry, most of the Galaxy is very friendly and we are the Klingon-Ferengi type of idiot the rest is laughing about.
If somebody wanted, they would have overtaken us already. Everything we have are toys compared to whats possible. Conflicts would just be so devastating, nobody would win. War never has winners, someone just looses more then the other, something we as a species still have not understood.
And ? Nobody with good physical understanding uses Hertz EM waves for communication except emergency broadcasts if he is clever. Assumptions over assumptions and not looking outside the box, this is what SETI does and that's why they are not seeing anything of interest.