Alien Megastructure?

[josephpalazzo]

If there are a lot of civilizations out there we'd have to ask why they would bother with us.

Interstellar travelling might prove to be impossible.

[drunkenshoe]

Errr...highly unlikely.

However, even it turned out to be something real; proved, I pretty much doubt they would ever make an open declaration of the sort.

Can you imagine the consequences? The impact of that sort of information, -esp. officially confirmed-  on various human cultures and societies in the world would be a disaster. I mean we are talking about a culture with the general tendency of making fatal bullshit out of its ass with so little to go, fantasising its own doom pretty much it learned to scrible down, with something this... OWWW. Can't watch.

Start from mass suicides, 'Jesus landed there', 'his summer house is there', 'we told you he was coming', 'it's the fucking apocalypse number 157678o798, 'those were the lands of the gods who created us!', 'no, that's where angels live', 'see, we were created by aliens!', 'it's an illuminati headquarters!', new crazy cults that would make Scientology look like a fun club, people starting to form communes...etc. *Cries.

The whole thing makes me want to watch the 94 Stargate with a bowl of popcorn.

[trdsf]

My point would be if we have the capability of finding them- assuming we do- then if they are capable of building such megastructures, they certainly have the capability of finding us. But 1,500 light years is a long way. Even if they sent robot craft it would take millennia to get here; and it is quite possible, given the technology, that they have identified other inhabited planets. But until/unless the speed of light is somehow overcome and something like a warp engine developed, doubtful any species or culture has the desire to bridge that distance just to contact another life form.

The other thing is that there is no known effort made to contact us, at least that we are aware of, so like I said previously, they might have scoped us out by whatever means they possess and decided we aren't worth their time. Even if they are more advanced technologically, the light barrier would still make getting messages out an impossible time. If they messaged us some way 500 years ago, it would still take 1,000 years to get here, and we might be extinct by then.

The most they could tell by direct observation is that we have an unstable atmosphere; the amount of O₂ in our atmosphere is a strong indicator of life, although not of intelligent life.  Some sort of ongoing process would need to produce free oxygen; it's highly reactive and cheerily hooks up with almost anything it encounters: hydrogen (water), carbon (carbon dioxide), silicon (sand and rocks), iron (rust), etc.  So while it's not demonstrative of life, it's highly suggestive of it.  I think the estimate is that if all photosynthetic production of oxygen shut down today, in a couple hundred years there would be no free oxygen in the atmosphere.

However, even if they spotted that thousands, even tens of thousands of years ago and immediately dispatched a probe to check things out, the most they can possibly know is that the dominant intelligent species is a) not highly technological and b) in decline -- I'm of course assuming there's no end run around Einstein, and I'm also assuming orbital probes capable of decimeter resolution.  That's not a big ask; so far as we know, Einstein is solid, and the most detailed Google Maps are already in the 5-6 decimeter range; DigitalGlobe operates at 3 decimeter, so we'll probably have decimeter resolution ourselves in the next five to ten years.

Without landing anything, and without resolution better than that, they can't learn our languages.  Generally speaking, we don't write with meter-scale lettering, even on monuments -- and 1500 years ago, that was meant to be read from the ground, not from the air.  The most advanced buildings they would see are the Great Wall(s) of China and the Pyramids, and the only building even close to that scale that went up in the 6th Century CW was the Hagia Sophia -- that era is the most recent they could see, still assuming Einstein hasn't a loophole.

It would be an act of supreme optimism to look at this world 1500 years ago and decide to send a radio message anyway.  Had they been watching for some time, they might have sent a message at the peak of Egyptian, or Greek, or early Chinese, or Roman civilizations, thinking that by the time it reached here, we should have at least an early technological society.  By the time 500CE rolled around, it would have been perfectly reasonable for them to turn the signal off on the grounds that we were a civilization in terminal decline.

[stromboli]

right, all the above. To me the big picture is simply it wouldn't make sense to make the effort to do anything exploratory, because there is nothing to be gained by it. Any resource available on earth is far more available and abundant everywhere else, and we simply aren't worth the effort as a culture. To an advanced culture we are probably no more than a warren of rats, if even that.

It would take a culture so far advanced technologically that getting here would be no more difficult than for me to drive to California to see Yosemite. And at that stage, they could and would have learned anything they wanted far in advance of that ability, so it simply isn't a likelihood, period.

[aitm]

Once they got the upload of Entertainment  Tonight and got a head full of Snooki, the Kardashians, Miley Cyrus and an assortment of all our higher educated stars they pretty much drew a big, NO GO X on our planet.

[stromboli]

Once they got the upload of Entertainment  Tonight and got a head full of Snooki, the Kardashians, Miley Cyrus and an assortment of all our higher educated stars they pretty much drew a big, NO GO X on our planet.

If we could only get an alien abduction of the Kardashians, that alone would raise the average IQ level a few points.

[Unbeliever]

Actually, it wouldn't. The average IQ is defined to be 100. Even if everyone under that IQ were to go away, the average would still be 100.

Sorry to nitpick!

:d030:

[Termin]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l6XdvlQ8glk