There’s always some space kadet whose understanding of physics approaches that of a grasshopper. It doesn’t matter how smart you are you still have the same rules. Physics is the same for your theoretical smart civilization as it is for us. You have to go an appreciable fraction of the speed of light to cover the distances between the stars. And Newton doesn’t go away; the energy needed to do this goes up with square of the speed. A 100kg mass going 10% has approximately the same energy as was released by the castle bravo test. And that’s just 100kg going 10% of C. Interstellar travel is science fiction. It isn’t engineering it’s physics. Get it?
J.D. Vance says the aliens may be demons. In other words, interdimensional.
Again.. our current understanding of physics. Doesn’t mean someone or thing has figured out ways to manipulate that.
Time is another issue. Time is perceived both as an objective dimension in physics and a subjective construct in human consciousness.
Human perception of time could be completely different elsewhere.
I’m open to other possibilities..
Then there are those who think we already know all there is to know.
Physics is the same for your theoretical smart civilization as it is for us
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Not necessarily. Take James Clerk Maxwell [ 13 June 1831 - 5 November 1879. a Scottish physicist and mathematician ] who postulated 200 field equations of which only 4 were used by Oliver Heaviside and converted into vector equations. Why only 4? Why converted? Because he hated field equations which he thought of as abominations.
What the 4 equations do? They gave us everything we know about the entire electromagnetic spectrum.
His •original• book [ “A Dynamical Theory of the Electromagnetic Field” ] is so rare that only a few copies exist. There are ‘modern’ versions, but they omit much of the original materiel.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Clerk_Maxwell
The unused 196 field equations predict free energy [ was inspiration for N. Tesla ], his discoveries helped usher in the era of modern physics, laying the foundations for such fields as relativity, also being the one to introduce the term into physics, and quantum mechanics [ was inspiration for A. Einstein ], and the ability to move from one place in the Universe to another by merely stepping through ].
What if those “alien” discovered the same principles that Maxwell did and acted on them? How far in advance of us would they be in physics and everything else? Their physics would be vastly different from ours.