Well you're right in saying it lacks predictive powers ...
But it's an interesting thing to think about and fun to speculate on.
I don't quite agree that ' .... pure speculation is useless ... "
something 'Useless' can be entertaining.
Frontier's Answer To The Drake Equation --
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Well you're right in saying it lacks predictive powers ...
But it's an interesting thing to think about and fun to speculate on.
I don't quite agree that ' .... pure speculation is useless ... "
something 'Useless' can be entertaining.
I'm old enough to have seen the first moon walk live on TV as a child. I had pre-Apollo picture book entitled "You will go to the moon". I feel cheated, I fully expected to visit the moon in my lifetime.
The way I understand it those machines were first and foremost meant to protect their creator's civilization. Besides the fact that simply wiping out any civilization that might colonize beyond its home world at some point to protect anyone is... uhm... quite harsh.
It did remind me of the "Xenon" or "Terraformers" from the X Series, don't know how many of you played that. I played X2 - The Threat a lot and read all the novels from that universe (which were great btw). The Xenon were originally meant as self-replicating and self-improving terraforming machines, finding suitable planets and making them ready for colonization. In essence, they would spread through the galaxy as a wavefront, leaving behind many worlds the human race can spread to. But apparently somebody goofed and forgot to tell those machines that "Terraforming" does not include "if a planet already has life on, it wipe it out and then terraform it for the masters" effectively turning them into a faction of rogue killer machines. Nice job, humans. At least they also got their fair share of it when a Xenon fleet eventually showed up in the solar system and insisted on terraforming Earth...
As for my on view on the paradox I'm inclined to believe that civilizations that capable, willing, and long-lived enough to expand past their home system would be extraordinarily rare, and the vastness of space would then take care of the rest. The "willing" part is particularly interesting to me. Because a lot has been discussed about capability, technology, cost... not so much about the willingness. Some people have already expressed their disappointment / disillusion regarding human space exploration in our time:
Everyone who knows some Chemistry and Physics knows how reactions, objects and entire systems "strive" for a state of minimal / ideal energy. And I think the same applies to human society. Think of Industrial Revolution and Globalization. Every development human society/societies go through has a set direction and is usually irreversible because of that principle. And similar to chemistry, some processes may be catalyzed (education, inventions, research, propaganda ...), others may be helped along by turning up the heat from the outside (investment, diplomatic pressure, environmental circumstances ...), but the there are limits to that and cost goes up. And this is regardless of whether or not that development is reasonable, fair or otherwise desirable. It just needs to have enough pull to it, be it because it actually makes sense (see humanism / enlightenment) or because enough elements with enough influence benefit from it (see capitalism). Eventually reaching out to other worlds would make sense for a civilization, but there is no way of telling if it will automatically happen. So we may need to live with the possible disappointment of the world just not progressing that way (yet).
Also, I believe that before larger-scale manned space flight or even such enormous efforts as colonization are even possible, a planet (Earth in this case) would need to be much more unified than we are today. You can't move on with your career or invest in the future if your life is a disorganized mess and your house is at risk, can you? But at the same time, space exploration may actually be a catalyst to that unification. As Dr. Tyson famously put it, and I will end on that note:
(Video Link for those interested, the part about Apollo 8 and the "Earthrise" picture starts at around 1:10)Neil DeGrasse Tyson said:
Hats off to Frontier for making a game that sparks such conversations. Awesome thread too, thanks for everyone's thoughts and ideas!
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Yes - even a galaxy is mostly empty space. Which completely and utterly blows my mind.
The gravitational effects from the supermassive black holes at the centers of Milky Way and Andromeda are going to be interesting. And by "interesting" I mean "good thing none of us will be around for it although it'd make a cool movie" interesting.
Isn't this what Universe Sandbox is for, is it? Oh, and I think they'll release Universe Sandbox 2 sometime in 2015.
Yes!
But, what I'm getting at is that FD's underlying simulation would actually allow us to plug in the values that FD is using, if we tried, I suppose. I don't think it would mean anything, except that we'd learn something about FD's view of the universe.
If we took a sampling of all the systems that have been mapped in ED we could see how many of them have life, how many are in the "goldilocks zone" and how many have indigenous life (FD is vague about that: does that mean the planet has non-technical civilizations? Or dinosaurs?) I have seen one planet that had indigenous life. I personally mapped 4 water worlds that had life on my last expedition. So I am getting the impression that FD feels that life is probably fairly common, while advanced technological life is very very rare.
The place where it all collides is when you break relativity and allow travel faster than light - suddenly it becomes not only possible but inevitable that advanced civilizations will encounter eachother. I would observe on that score that the probability that they'd be at the same level of technological advancement would be fairly low. There'd be a lot of stress resulting from that.
I'm 37 and feel exactly the same
I'd never heard of it!!! Just ran to google and was looking at the video on their front page, of a planetary collision. OMG! How fun is that!?! Thank you, you just wasted my day!!
Yes we're far larger and more massive than most galaxies are, clearly 2nd in our local group of >50 galaxies.
Yet we've been advertising for over 100 years with radio waves. There's no reason to believe that another intelligent civilisation wouldn't have done the same even if they later realised it was a mistake.
The chances of there being *many* intelligent civs with the capability of sending out messages - and all of them deciding not to (which is what the evidence or lack of suggests) - must be extremely remote.
The logical answer is, it's us and us alone.
The former is how I remember David Braben describing it when I saw him give a talk towards the end of last year.
David Brin's novel Existence had a pretty interesting take on the Fermi Paradox, covering the ability to spread throughout the galaxy at sub-light speeds, slowly but eventually, and also different eras of Great Filtering - http://io9.com/5918983/existene-david-brin-tackles-near-future-sci-fi-with-amazing-results
I seem t remember an article somewhere (could of been from the Orions Arm world building project by Anders Sandburg link: www.[B]orionsarm[/B].com ) that if we went ooff 10 probes with the ability to replicate at their target system using asteroidal matter as a resource and able to make decisions on where to spread to next, we could 'spread' to most of the galaxy in under 150,000 years at sub light speed. Now that assumed each probe made 10 copies of itself and sent them off further, making the growth pattern exponential but it also did assume zero development of the systems aside from factories to make more probes to send off over a given time period except for systems within a 100ly range of Sol for eventual human habitation. Now it's been over 10 years since I read this so keep in mind the numbers will be off
Now we could start this sort of exploration in under 40 years, sending to the nearest starts using the best tech we have for propulsion, given another 100 years of travel, the first wave of probes would be at their destination and building the second generation of 100 probes, which then does the same thing another 100ish years later and sends out 1,000..then 10,000 then 100,000 after roughly 500 years, 600 years at 1 million. Also the closer they get to the center of the galaxy the faster the curve increases due to the small distance involved between stars, however materials may be harder to get hold of, depending on how planets and asteriods interact with that much gravity pulling in all directions from stars being sub 2 ly apart. Even so, it was a good study and I will look into finding the article after work today assuming I remember.
Now we could start this sort of exploration in under 40 years, sending to the nearest starts using the best tech we have for propulsion, given another 100 years of travel, the first wave of probes would be at their destination and building the second generation of 100 probes, which then does the same thing another 100ish years later and sends out 1,000..then 10,000 then 100,000 after roughly 500 years, 600 years at 1 million. Also the closer they get to the center of the galaxy the faster the curve increases due to the small distance involved between stars, however materials may be harder to get hold of, depending on how planets and asteriods interact with that much gravity pulling in all directions from stars being sub 2 ly apart. Even so, it was a good study and I will look into finding the article after work today assuming I remember.