Re: SETI
- From: Paul J Gans <gans@xxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Sat, 29 Apr 2006 04:13:03 +0000 (UTC)
Desertphile <desertphile@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Paul J Gans wrote:
Desertphile <desertphile@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
It could easily take 50,000 years for us to visit any other
radio-centric civilization in the universe; it would also take
trillions and trillions of dollars to do so. That is almost certainly
roughly true for any other radio-centric civilization that would come
to us.
While probably right, that makes all sorts of unwarranted
assumptions about the basic nature of physics and what can
and cannot be done.
Humanity already knows many of the limitations placed upon the world:
the speed of light being a good example.
One may argue that using relatavistic speeds will shorten the trip for
individuals on the craft; however, to get to relatavistic speeds one
must still get pretty close to the speed of light first, and of course
that takes a massive amount of energy.
We've had physics for what? Four hundred years?
Want to give it four thousand and see what human physicists
come up with?
I think humanity doesn't have 4,000 years left to it; maybe another
400, at a stretch.
NASA somewhat recently published several dozen papers on speculative
propulsion hypothesies; nearly all of them are based upon the ZPF (Zero
Point Field). The ZPF has been shown via experiment to exist, but there
is no consensus regarding how much energy the ZPF might contain let
alone if it can be harnessed. One calculated value for the ZPF shows
there is enough energy in the volume of vacuum the size of Earth to
heat a cup of tea to a pleasing temperatue; other calculated values
place the energy inside the volume of vacuum the size of a tea cup to
be enough to vaporize Earth's oceans.
There is only one known hypothesis that will allow humans to explore
the nearest stars in anything close to human life spans. That
hypothesis is based upon the supposition that inertia is extrinsic to
mass, and that inertia is rather the effect of mass propagating through
the Zero Point Field (acting as a kind of "drag" or "resistance" when
the vector changes, and acting as a kind of capillary attraction when
the vector is constant). If interia can be negated, large masses can be
accelerated nearly instantly at astonishing relative speeds with
current technologies (and just as instantly come to relative rest).
So far it looks like inertia is intrinsic to mass. (Which I for one
greatly dissapoints me.)
You've just written a basic manual on why what I wrote is
true. All that you wrote has been discovered in the last
50 years or less.
And yet you seem to think that that's the answer for all time
to come.
Thirty-five years from now some woman is going to come up with
the Universal Theory of Communication and Ex-Communication which
is going to show how you can combine string theory and Bayesian
probability to allow the manufacture of a device that will allow
us to visit certain selected patches of a companion universe
born at the same time ours was but which is no longer in direct
communication with ours.
If you are reasonably careful, you'll still be around to see
this. And you will think how silly we all were in the first
decade of the 21st century to think that we'd discovered most
all of fundamental physics.
----- Paul J. Gans
.
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