Posted on 04/26/2026 9:45:44 PM PDT by chickenlips
“There is a silence in the night sky that has bothered me for as long as I can remember.”
That line, attributed to Richard Feynman, lands because it gets at a simple, stubborn feeling. The sky looks full. Stars crowd the darkness. It seems reasonable to think someone else should be out there, and close enough to find. Yet the deeper physicists look into the laws that govern the universe, the more that silence starts to seem less like a cosmic riddle and more like a built-in feature of reality.
Human intuition is not much help. It developed for ordinary distances, daily motion, and short-term survival. It did not develop for light years, relativistic speeds, or timescales longer than the history of civilization. As Feynman puts it, “When you take that human intuition and apply it to the scale of the universe, it doesn’t just fail. It snaps.”
That mismatch sits at the center of the story. Five barriers shape the quiet: distance, the speed of light, propulsion, biology, and time. Taken together, they form what Feynman called “absolute walls that prevent civilizations from ever meeting.”
(Excerpt) Read more at yahoo.com ...
Waste of money and time looking for that stuff. They should be looking for resources we can use to support a human population.
Then who is probing all those Arkansas trailer park folk?
*”When they see how we behave they lock their doors and move on. Can’t blame ‘em.”*
“Uh... no that’s bad. We can’t just ignore the plight of the inner cities. See the plight kids?”
Feynman is so darn concise and understandable.
Hard to understand why so many have trouble with his teaching.
You read too much S-F
Mea Culpa
“Then who is probing all those Arkansas trailer park folk?”
Invaders from San Fagsicko?
I saw him in the Summer of ‘80 in Louisville.
There were no UFOs.
“It will never go off. And I speak as an expert on explosives.”
Admiral Richard Leahy, USN, on the Atomic bomb, 1945
It is much more likely we’d pick up their radio broadcasts than getting an actual visit. We’ve been broadcasting over a hundred years so anybody within 100 light years would know about us.
As a back up to Civilization. Nuclear weapons have put our continued survival here on Earth in jeopardy. Having Civilization spread all over the Solar System would have the additional benefit of not having to put up with people you don't want near you.
Horse puckey! (As a famous colonel often said.)
Haven’t all the doubters read or watched Stargate SG-1 or Stargate Atlantis???
. Just lots and lots of nothing. Way more nothing than anything.
We may not be alone, but the HOA is very happy how far our nearest neighorhood is away.
I read that if you were to shoot off in any direction not pointed at something visible you would have a 99.99% chance of going all the way across the universe without hitting anything.
What hubris, of course we are not.
Would I go all the way to NYC to see times square?
Why bother.
Would other intelligent life take the time, effort and resources to come see us.
Why bother.
Of course you can subscribe to the 'Dark Forest theory.'
I used to think all that. But watching Artemis2 for 10 days gave me a new perspective. The earth is the exception to what’s out there. Most of the universe, at least the part we can observe, is just dead matter - bits and pieces of dead matter millions of miles from each other. There’s no place like earth. We will never flourish on another planet the way we do here even though it may be technically possible to creates bases. If we destroy this then sayonara to the only oasis of civilization in the middle of a vast nothingness.
Now this is a very realistic view.
There is no rover on Mars.
Man doesn’t fly with his naked body only. He has invented lots of things that he has to don or get into. Those things fly.
To escape global warming.
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