This is hilarious, a win-win in my book. I get to laugh at the ridiculous claim about radio waves frying people’s brains or whatever, and at the same time, every day of stalling hurts an exploitive POS telecom company.

I’m rooting for the loonies! Protect our kids! You show those lizard people!

Yeah agreed, there’s no way we’re picking up alien radio broadcasts, not over the noise produced by a star.

On the other hand, if a civilization were creating a Dyson sphere, or other large constructions, we’d be able to see those unusual elements in the light spectrum coming off the star. So it is conspicuous that we haven’t seen anything like that.

I’m sure that’s the case. You can travel to other stars without ftl, it’s just a lot slower and probably one way. It’s really pretty limiting for society, for instance, without ftl an interstellar “civilization” is basically out of the question, you can’t govern another star system without at the very least faster communication.

We don’t know what the Great Filter is, but it must be pretty destructive for a civ. I just want to point out the fact that the Great Filter is probably still ahead of us and that we shouldn’t take our existence for granted.

If there is a great filter…

I mean, as you said, we’re pretty early to the scene. Why can’t we be the first in this galaxy? Perhaps planets like earth aren’t rare over the lifetime of a galaxy, but they are rare in these early years of a galaxy. In other words, earth just developed quickly, so now we’re here before any other earth-like planets have had a chance to develop intelligent life.

Xenoanthroplology. We’re obviously not crazy and our many cultures are presumably much different from theirs. There would be enormous amounts to learn from studying our differences and our similarities.

Unless they’ve already simulated alien life in computer models… Then there’s not a lot left to learn.

It’s simple. We’re the first intelligent life in the galaxy. There is nobody else yet in our galaxy.

Also, probably nobody capable of traveling the stars wants to settle a planet. Once you figure out how to make huge spaceships (which you’ll need to travel interstellar space) you’ve essentially learned how to make cities in space. Our solar system would support a lot of people if we just used the resources available for space habitats, and by “lot” I mean in the quadrillions. And it turns out that all you need to support that population is a star to provide energy, and some planets to source materials from.

So with that in mind, why bother finding another habitable planet?

No, it really isn’t.

Whoa! Juno is still transmitting?! I thought that spacecraft had a really limited lifespan, due to the radiation ring around Jupiter. Pretty awesome that it’s still working!

Well if there’s not enough sun, wind could be a better option. I don’t know much about the climate in slovenia, so either could make more sense.

As for these new kinds of batteries, I don’t have the hard numbers on hand, but I know the current installed capacity is really small. So as a product, they’re still really new.

Grid scale storage has come a long way. There are saltwater batteries and flow batteries in use now, those technologies are here, they’re just still being iterated on and improved. And as the renewables get increasingly affordable, the demand for storage will rise with it. Now we’re still mostly deploying expensive lithium batteries, but as more of that gets installed, the demand for cheaper storage will skyrocket. And production generally follows demand.

So what’s the battery chemistry? Also, do they actually have an aircraft design, or is this just battery news?

Yeah, it totally could be.

That’s true, it does assume interstellar travel is physically possible, but at this point there are forms of interstellar travel that we know are possible.

Solar sails for instance, we know those work, we’ve tried it. Now if you wanted to travel to another star system with a solar sail, it’s just a matter of scaling that proven technology way up. We’re not ready to do that today, and we won’t be ready in the next 20 years, but to think that we wouldn’t be ready in 500 years, I find that idea far fetched.

But a much better technology would be fusion propulsion. With fusion drives you could get your cruising speed up to a meaningful fraction of the speed of light (perhaps 5-10%). At that rate you can make it to the closest stars in less than 100 years. And that technology is not at all far fetched. We truly are approaching working fusion power plants, it’s extremely likely that we can eventually develop fusion propulsion, or at the very least, fusion powered electrical propulsion (ion drive).

As for if it will ever be economically possible, I’m not at all worried about that. The fact is, there are a lot of resources and opportunities right here in our solar system, just waiting for people to utilize them. So people definitely will start mining and manufacturing in space eventually. And as we start to operate more in space, we will naturally continue to iterate and improve our methods of getting around. In short, over time it’s going to get cheaper and cheaper to make space ships and we’re going to get better and better at doing it. The economic factors are likely to fall into place eventually.

And finally, will interstellar travel ever be possible socially? Hey, your guess is as good as mine. I don’t think we have any way to answer that…

That’s definitely the right question! And honestly we don’t know, but it’s evident that we are first.

Given the age of the universe, statistically it should have already happened by now.

I’m not sure that’s true… I’m pretty sure that our sun is old for a main sequence yellow star in our galaxy. When you compare how long it takes for a star to get to the point ours is now, compared to the age of our galaxy, I believe it suggests that sol is part of a first wave of stars of its type. So if life really requires a star like this one to start up, then intelligent life starting just now could be right on time.

Now why is our start perfect for life? Again, we don’t know, but evidently it is. Sadly we only have this one data point, this is the only star where we know there’s life. So assuming that something about our type of star is perfect is about as sensible as assuming that life could start around any star. Is it that other kinds of stars produce too much radiation in the Goldilocks zone? Or is it that other kinds of stars are too variable in the amount of heat they produce? Or that other kinds of stars don’t tend to have rocky planets? We don’t know, but something about main sequence yellow stars could be special, and we have one of the first of those stars in this galaxy.

So declaring “we’re the first” requires some assumptions, but they aren’t crazy assumptions, and a lack of evidence of other older civilizations makes those assumptions stronger.

And to your point, the universe is much older than this our star, so I suspect intelligent life has developed many times before us, at least in older galaxies. But sadly I don’t expect us to ever meet life from another galaxy. While I think stars within a galaxy are close enough for travel between them, galaxies are very, very far apart. I don’t think life has much chance of traveling to other galaxies, at least not without some method of ftl travel (which I am also not optimistic about).

The whole ship either has to have enough energy to last potentially 100000 years.

Well, that depends on how far you’re going. If you pick a nice close target, let’s say 3 light years away, you can potentially get there pretty quickly. With fusion propulsion systems you could make the trip is something like 70 years, coasting most of the way. I’d need to check the math to get exact numbers, but I recall fusion allowing for pretty reasonable trip times.

But if you can survive for hundreds or thousands of years, then solar sails become an option. Then it becomes a materials science problem of how thin can you make a sail that will still hold together. The greater the sail to payload ratio, the faster you go.

Or synthetic life. (Robots)

Not really. Galaxies are pretty stable, stars orbit around the central black hole in the galaxy. You can absolutely travel between stars in the same galaxy, even if it takes a thousand years.

I don’t think there is a great filter. I think there’s an easy solution to the fermi paradox that doesn’t require great filters, we’re just the first intelligence in this galaxy.

Here’s my reasoning: intelligent species that manage to develop space travel probably do tend to expand out into their galaxy. When they achieve this level of technology they can settle most of all of their galaxy in a matter of 10,000 years or so. That time period is very brief on an evolutionary scale. It’s estimated that life began on earth 3.7 billion years ago. That means it took about 3.7 billion years for earth to produce intelligent life, and then from that point it would take a mere 10,000 years to reach modern day, and 10,000 more years to settle the whole galaxy. That expansion happens so quickly compared to how long it took the planet to develop intelligent life, that the chance of two civilizations rising at the same time becomes very small.

It all boils down to this: there are no intelligent aliens out there in our galaxy, because we are the first intelligent species in our galaxy. We know we’re the first because if we were second, then aliens would already have settled this star system.

Probably there are lots of alien civilizations out there in the universe, but they’re in different galaxies.

Um, I think you’re mistaking species with kingdom.

“Birds” are not a species, “mammals” are not a species. I don’t think viruses are even described in terms of species because they don’t reproduce sexually. I think you’ll find that when you actually consider species, most of my points hold.

Various species have methods of communicating, from bees dancing to each other to whales having distinct regional dialects. Yes, humans have added some complexity to it by introducing technology, but that’s realy what it comes down to. Technology.

Yes, many species have some rudimentary way of communicating some kinds of information. But obviously bee dances don’t compare to any human language, of which there are literally hundreds. A bee for instance has no way to express appreciation or derision for the English language. My whole point here was that humans, on hundreds of distinct occasions, developed languages capable of conveying complex ideas. No other species has developed a language half as capable as any of ours.

Rather than picking the rest of that post apart, I’m just going to stop here. It’s pretty self evident that humans are impressive as hell. Denying that is… pretty dumb, and purely rhetorical.

As a side note, don’t get too excited about fusion, it’s largely a dead end. I expect it will only be really useful in niche applications (like spacecraft). It will be far more expensive than nuclear fision and not really offer any benefits besides abundance of fuel. There’s still a huge radioactive waste problem. On the other hand, the sun provides all the energy we’ll ever need, and we’re getting better at collecting it. I’m really not concerned about increasing energy demands.

How many predators can take down prey 50 times their size? How many species can thrive in tundra, jungles, plains, forests, mountains and deserts? How many species can be found on every continent? How many species figured out how to fly despite never developing wings? How many species developed hundreds of distinct methods of communication? How many species have been to the moon?

Humans are fucking badass…