An Interesting SETI Candidate in Hercules

Centauri Dreams ^ | 8/27/16 | Paul Gilster

[sparklite2]

To get a notion of ‘warm neptune,’ google ‘hot jupiter.’

[Windflier]

“At 95 light years away, even if they do find us, none of us will be alive by the time they get here...”

Just because we haven’t figured out faster-than-light propulsion technology, doesn’t mean others haven’t.

They could be here next week, for all we know.

[Boogieman]

“Just because we haven’t figured out faster-than-light propulsion technology, doesn’t mean others haven’t.”

Except it’s not that “we haven’t figured it out”, it’s that we have figured out it’s basically physically impossible.

Let’s review the possible ways one could travel faster-than-light and why they don’t work:

1 - Acceleration (conventional rockets, etc): Doesn’t work because you can never accelerate a mass to light speed, much less above it.

2 - Wormholes : We don’t even know that they can exist, and if they did, they would take more energy than we can generate to create them, and even if we could create one, we could not traverse them and survive.

3 - Warp drive : Requires creating a zone of negative energy density, which doesn’t seem to actually be possible in this universe.

So that pretty much covers all the bases. Don’t hold your breath hoping for FTL travel, either by humans or aliens.

[minnesota_bound]

The photo shows where the UFO saucer will land.........

[Windflier]

,,,it’s not that “we haven’t figured it out”, it’s that we have figured out it’s basically physically impossible.

"Heavier than air travel is impossible!"

Thus spake the leading scientists and wizened thinkers of the late 19th century. The Wright brothers ignored them and kept on working toward their goal of mechanized flight.

If there's one thing history teaches, it's that every generation believes it has reached the pinnacle of all knowledge in the sciences - and that every generation has been proven wrong.

We're no different than prior generations, and will see our scientific canons and fixed rules fall by the way, in time.

[Boogieman]

“Thus spake the leading scientists and wizened thinkers of the late 19th century.”

Nonsense. If you want to make an argument like that, at least make one that is accurate instead of appealing to urban legends. People in the west understood the basic principles of heavier-than-air flight since the renaissance but simply hadn’t been successful at creating a working design. What they had dismissed as folly was believing that a man could simply strap wings to himself and fly under his own power, and rightly so, since they had scientifically disproved that was possible, both in theory and in practice.

Also, you’re operating on a faulty premise: that nothing actually is impossible, we just need to reach the proper level of scientific knowledge to achieve it. That’s a falsehood. Certain things are impossible and we will simply never achieve them, no matter how far science and technology progresses. Faster-than-light travel is almost certainly one of those cases, but people are loathe to admit it because they love to entertain their fantasies.

[SunkenCiv]

10 SETI Messages That We May Not Want to Receive An exploration of alternative SETI messages that may not say hello. | Published on Nov 6, 2017 | John Michael Godier | from his Patreon page -- "I am passionate about all science fiction, however with my own writing I want to create hard science fiction stories that blow people's minds but stay within the confines of the scientifically possible. Plus, I just want to spin a good old fashioned entertaining yarn in the process. In addition, I am an aspiring documentary filmmaker and maintain a science and technology based YouTube channel showcasing interesting and unusual subjects from the realm of hard science and futurism." John Michael Godier

"But I am not really willing to accept your premise, because it may well be that the means of communications they have are of a kind that we do not know how to receive, and that they would not have the means of communicating with sufficiently powerful radio or optical signals. That is something which, technologically, is too difficult for them but they would have some other means we would not recognize." -- Thomas J. Gold, 'Communication with Extraterrestial Intelligence' (Sagan, ed)

"To consider the Earth as the only populated world in infinite space is as absurd as to assert that in an entire field of millet, only one grain will grow." -- Metrodorus, 4th c BC Greek philosopher

"Heaven and earth are large, yet in the whole of space they are but as a small grain of rice. How unreasonable it would be to suppose that, besides the heaven and earth which we can see, there are no other heavens and no other earths." -- Teng Mu, 13th c AD Chinese philosopher