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 ...
If we on earth have been visited, how likely is it that the Visitor knows where to find us because they are future descendants of ours who eventually learn(ed) how to travel into the past?
He probably was an expert on chemical explosives. But many of the scientists weren’t sure it would work either because they couldn’t build a device to harness the nuclear physics reactions.
Apparently some of the scientists believed that first bomb going off would cause a worldwide nuclear reaction destroying the whole planet . They had bets going on the outcome.
Didn’t Costner have that ‘urine back into water thing’ solved
In ‘Waterworld’? ( otherwise known as Kevin’s Gate )
Only fools speak with certainty about things that are unknowable.
Some scientist. He has the limited mind of a pessimist. He’s the kind of scientist that fought the idea of the Earth revolving around the Sun instead of the Sun revolving around the Earth.
That solves it for the naysayer and demon believers here.
Closed kinds are not the best thing to have especially coming from a physicist which is just bizarre. There can be no new discoveries because we already no it all.
Physics based on knowledge as we understand it, biologics as we understand it, distance and time as we understand it anything else is impossible.....
No thanks, I’ll keep an open mind.
Minds not kinds..damnit!
“...Alien civilizations have not visited Earth...”
Those physicist must never have seen a Somali.
“So, why do some peeps want to go to Mars?”
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Because it’s there like climbing mountains.
Humans shouldn’t go until they can take enough with them to get back.
Mars will be a robot place.
Alas, I'll never have a drink at Quark's bar.
I find the arrogance of man very interesting. Man has convinced himself that he is master of the universe, some would even go so far as to think that they are god, and then they die, failing the final test - proving their invincibility.
That classic Bar Scene from the first Star Wars movie comes to mind.
It is the challenging harshness of Space that will keep Civilization itself going. The conditions there will not tolerate dumb mistakes. The kind of people who will survive out there have to be , by necessity, our most competent. Right now Space travel is a big money pit. Elon has proved it can make money. Profit. That is what Space expansion needs and with automation getting better ever day that is how it it is going to make the big bucks . Wherever profit grows people will follow.
If one looks at how much more we think we know of science today versus 200 years ago, it begs the question, “How much more will we know 200 years in the future?” With science, it’s always about not knowing what we don’t know.
One should be careful using the word “never.”
The word has a specific meaning. It is an absolute. Often when it is used, it fails in short order.
Then you should stop listening to idiots.
Unless we can create something like warp drive or learn to create worm holes or create a device which can control or manipulate gravity we are stuck inside this solar system where even getting to neighboring planets and moons takes months and years. A moon or Mars colony won’t survive without a constant stream of vital supplies from earth and if nuclear war does happen that gravy train would surly end.
Such small people who make declarations based on their own short lives.
"I've never seen it so it's never happened."
Arrogance.
Another article claiming, in essence, that we know everything, and therefore there is nothing new to learn. This is the same sentiment that prevailed in science in the 50s, when only a few more details were needed to fill-in the complete picture of existence.
An article for the closed-minded who are smug about science and existence.
Do you know who Richard Feynman was? A genuis a giant in physics winner of the Nobel prize for explaining how liht works. One of the more interesting minds humanity has produced.
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