Yes indeedy.
]]>But that lag is unrelated to the speed-of-light lag. Your scenario applies on an instantaneous network or a light-speed-lagged one. You have to see the other nodes "go dark" before you can act in self-defence, seeing them "go dark" occur several seconds or several years after the actual infection doesn't buy you additional seconds or years, the only lag is only the time between the light from "go dark" and the arrival of the attack vector. The speed-of-light lag adds no buffer.
]]>You think we're all garbage, and yet here you are communicating with some of us. Why wouldn't the same be true of alien civilisations?
whitroth: "Maybe they're waiting until we get our shit together, and get off planet" "why? After you've run into a few dozen intelligent races, you've seen them all, and another one's just not going to give you ROI for the go-find-them-and-then-figure-out-how-to-talk-to-them-and-what-they-have-that-we-want mission."
All of them? There are no extroverts out there? No variation amongst cultures?
(Aside: You don't have to travel to talk. Radio works for neighbours. Relays work for distance. Talking about physically spreading is just to show that we should see signs, visible to us, even in other galaxies, if intelligence is widespread.)
whitroth: "1. Their tech would have to be within a few hundred years of ours." "My guess is that most are either far, far ahead of us"
If we're just coming into radio-civilisation now, within the last century, and there is a distribution of stellar ages of sun-like stars, ie, many older, many younger, then there isn't just one group of ancient alien civilisations, "them", and one baby, us. Instead there would be a continuous age distribution from the oldest to the youngest. Some will be billions of years older, some millions, some thousands, some just a century or so.
If the older civilisations won't talk to the younger, what's stopping them from talking to each other? And once it starts, then all of them, except the very first chatty species, were contacted by an older civilisation. It'll seem normal, natural, so many of them will contact yet younger species. And those species will contact other, even younger ones. It doesn't matter if not every species is so extroverted, it doesn't matter if it's a trend of youth and older races eventually get sick of contacting new races: given normal distribution curves, there'll be a culture of communication between civilisations and a culture of contacting younger civilisations.
If there isn't a culture of galactic communication, then either life is rare-to-non-existent (not just in our galaxy, but in general), or Something is making everyone else be Very Quiet.
(And that Something can't just be a policy of non-interference. As above, you can't prevent other people from communicating by not interfering with them.)
]]>You aren't allowing for the fact that these are not analogous situations. The light speed lag doesn't give you "warning", it doesn't give you time to you prepare. Because the first moment any sign of an attack on that-section-over-there arrives is also the first moment the attack itself arrives in your section.
(And assuming that people (AI or natural) only become aware of the attack after it has occurred, their warning will actually be behind the spread of the attack.)
]]>10^6. 10^31. 10^13.
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All: Fermi Paradox solutions in the various.
Re: Maybe they are hiding from us.
All of them? Why? It might be physically possible for some magitech to let them violate thermodynamics, and some might choose to hide themselves. But all of them? Why? And should I, a member of a young species without access to such magitech, be concerned that there's something out there that magitech-level races are so utterly afraid of?
Re: Dyson-Birch Matryoshka Brains.
Charlie got closest. A layered system that more efficiently extracts energy until the outer layer's waste heat is 40K black-body. It might explain why the Dyson survey around our neighbourhood didn't find any classic >0degC Dyson stars, but it has other flaws.
We have surveyed galaxies at 40k microwave. Not only is there no sign of lots of 40K, or 30K, or 10K hidden galaxies around us, there's also no pattern of greater hiding over time. (Of galaxies-like-ours billions of years ago, slowly reducing in visibility as we approach our galactic neighbourhood and current time.) Even if their disappearance was complete, not even a 40K signature, nothing at all, there's no temporal component to suggest an emergence of that technology.
Re: They are to us, as we are to a tapeworm.
A common riff (although usually us and ants) but it also fails the exclusivity rule. Only two levels of development exist? Every not-us civilisation is no less than that far ahead of us? There's no slightly-more-advanced tapeworms? No more-advanced-than-tapeworms-but-still-has-fond-memories-of-when-they-were-tapeworms. No yet-further-advanced-but-enjoys-mentoring-tapeworms.
Implies something is eating all the in-between civilisations, but by some amazing coincidence is not only not touching us, but not leaving any visible traces elsewhere.
]]>The vendor wouldn't accept such a system. At the very least, they need to know they aren't being gouged by the transport company, pricing for a further address than the actual. They need to also assess address distribution (vs cost) to see if it's worth internalising transport for high-volume delivery areas.
Which brings up a broader point, the only people who introduce transaction systems are vendors and financiers. Customers don't get a say, expect so far as they have a choice between systems.
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Re: Improved e-transactions.
If this were an actual priority for anyone with a say in the game, then 20 years after paypal we wouldn't still be giving our actual credit-card numbers directly to online vendors.
]]>Agreed. This isn't a mark against asteroids, but a mark for. You build rotating habs inside an asteroid. Shielding, gravity and you strip volatile asteroids/comets for air/water/ammonia and other volatiles. With any planet, you are taking what you are given, wrong gravity, wrong air-pressure and O2 levels, wrong rotation rate, etc. With artificial habitats, you tune them to whatever you like.
However, "So you need to go for dead planets, with a reducing atmosphere, seed photosynthetic organisms and all the infrastructure they need, and wait."
You'll be waiting a long time. There was a billion years between Earth getting oxygen-producing life and Earth seeing an accumulation of oxygen in the air.
It takes a really long time to oxidise a planet.
]]>The world is full of crackpots thinking they've found some obvious flaw in physics, it can often be hard for a non-expert to see the specific flaw they've made, but I find the above statement is a pretty good indicator.
(Likewise when you consider that physicists aren't afraid of proposing and debating FTL implications of QM'ing Relativity. There's hardly a conspiracy against FTL. Oh and when every single proposed "loop-hole" has turned out to not actually allow FTL, in the normal sense, I always think it's worth accepting that the universe is trying to tell you something.)
"The standard arguments against FTL are [...] (b) that it is equivalent to time travel into the past."
No, it's that it's always possible to construct a frame of reference in which FTL is time-travel. Regardless of the proposed FTL method.
For example, your own proposal that there's an FTL speed-limit precisely turned to prevent time-travel. Does the FTL method somehow magically "know" that there's a relativistic ship flying along your route before you jump? (A ship in a frame of reference enabling it to see you return to your origin before you left, immediately creating a causality paradox in its frame of reference, even if not in yours.) It's not enough to look at the velocities of the start and finish, you have to account for the state of every possible observer.
]]>"Is there's anything I can do?" and "Oh, how sad, I remember when my [xxx] got [yyy] and I had to..." are virtually the only things the surviving family hears for months. It doesn't help and it really gets old.
]]>The scenario you are creating is a variant on the old sub-light colonisation-wave idea. Going back to Fermi & co. If we can find any way to travel between the stars, we can colonise the galaxy in bare millions of years.
Combined with the follow-on thought experiment on that expansion: that once you get the first colonies seeding their own daughter colonies, you will end up with a culture selected for nothing but expansion, purely thanks to statistical selection. The most aggressively expanding colony will be the first to throw out its own colony ships, and seed the most colonies. And the most aggressively expanding of those seeded colonies will be the first to expand further. Rinse, repeat. Burning faster and faster across the galaxy. And it doesn't matter if that's a terrible culture for the parent colonies after they've send out colony ships, or even if they collapse immediately after; as long as it doesn't hurt the daughter colonies, it's irrelevant to this process.
[A few people have mentioned Brin's Uplift stories. This scenario is closer to his Existence novel, with AI-seeds subbing in for the colonies, burning out civilisations in order to reproduce.]
Your AI-gifted magic FTL is just one "way" of the "any way to travel between the stars".
That said, FTL fast enough to span the galaxy in a short time (days, weeks), might break the statistical inevitability of the "locust" wave. If early colonies pop up randomly across the galaxy, then expand around themselves, they'll hit each other's bubbles fairly quickly, and the strategy for success changes. Plus fast FTL makes for a better exchange of culture and trade, smoothing out the hyper-expansionist "wave" culture and adding secondary value to the core behind them.
Or it might just push it out to the intergalactic level.
]]>The model (at least in the original proposal) is packet switching. Small capsules with few people all going to the same destination, accelerated in a side tube, then ejected at full speed into the main loop (and decelerated the same way). It doesn't really work if you use the serial-stops rail model.
"none of this is as exciting as losing the vacuum with multiple capsules at full speed inside."
Depends how quickly you lose the near-vacuum. Increased air pressure in the tube simply slows the capsules. Only explosive decompression will hurt (because the air can rush through the tube at greater than the speed of sound of the surrounding air, it'll hit the first capsules like a supersonic wall, even if the capsule has stopped.)
A more common risk would be losing air from the capsules.
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On the main topic, the weird thing isn't the super-villain-like nature of a few of the main players, but that super-villainy seems to be so much the default setting that the whole system is designed to accept it, even when its been explicitly set up against that specific type of villainy. Standard business practice, standard politics, etc. Everyone at high levels seems to think of themselves as either super-villains or minions with aspirations of super-villainy (not in those terms, but in how the game is played). The only change over the last decade or so is that they've stopped even pretending to pretend to be something else. They now expect you to admire them for the cleverness of their villainy. They're shocked when you don't. You must be pretending, playing your own super-villain games against them; that inter-villain rivalry is something they understand. If you're not pretending, if you genuinely despise their actions, the cognitive dissonance makes them angrier with you.
]]>"steam engine time"
A variation of the idea that you don't get railways until its time for railways. But this idea fails when looking at Briton itself. Around 80-100 years before the first practical railway lines, there was interregional trade of such volume that it exceeded the available waterways to the point where it actually paid to dig artificial "rivers". Clearly the limit was technological, not sociological or economic.
(In the same way, millennia before the first spark-gap transmitter (well, receiver, the transmitters are easy), there were a myriad of methods of long distance communication, up to and including waving flags at each other from hill-tops, ships, etc. And spy-glasses would have had a market centuries before optical glass was developed. Etc etc.)
Hence I wonder if the attempts by historians in moving away from "big man history", and its parallel in "great inventions that changed the world" (with its own "big man", the inventor), has swung the pendulum too far in the other direction.
]]>Not how immunity and common viruses works.
If anything on the plane isn't killing the passengers (and us in 2017), then it won't kill the locals in 2037. It's already evolved into a low-mortality version of whatever it is. I mean, do you think humans have had long enough to evolve become immune to the Spanish flu?
(The same will be true in reverse. Unless they've have something nasty that's killed off everyone who's susceptible.)
]]>Yes, these systems are incredibly conservative. And that's why they won't go anywhere in the next couple of decades.
During an emergency, it's typical to fail-back technologically when you experience communications failures. The modern shiny fails all the time.
Automated systems will fail (they are changing those around all the time, bunchajerks), as will routine monitoring of older emergency frequencies (hugebunchajerks), but basic voice comms capability will survive long after everyone thinks it should've died out. Precisely because you never know what the other guy will resort to when all else fails.
Even if VHF somehow got completely bumped from commercial aviation, VHF would still be used for marine radio in many, many parts of the world that the US Navy operates, especially in emergencies. Navy comms will therefore be still capable of using VHF in 2137.
That said, given the obvious lack of awareness by the B777 pilots about their circumstances, and the 2037 biases of the Naval officers, there's still a good chance that the time-travelling pilots wouldn't know that they need to signify their peaceful intent. Cognitive dissonance is just as bad as completely comms failure, hell it may be worse. (For example, the Navy insists they redirect to such'n'such airport (the new post-quake main SF airport) which in our time is grossly undersized for a B777. So the B777 pilots override the instruction (having declared an emergency, it is their right) and insist on "descending to SF".)
Aside: Interesting that radio is the only part of the sequence I find hard to believe.
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