by Chris Peterson » Thu Aug 04, 2022 2:32 pm
johnnydeep wrote: ↑Thu Aug 04, 2022 2:26 pm
Chris Peterson wrote: ↑Thu Aug 04, 2022 2:09 pm
johnnydeep wrote: ↑Thu Aug 04, 2022 2:06 pm
I took the original question to be about whether a "people", that is, a technological civilization not related to humans, living on some other planet orbiting some other star, would be seeing our Sun explode and "pondering" upon it. I think that is a much(*) more likely scenario than that we humans will be around in 5 Gy to be able to do the same. Of course, even if "we humans" are still around then, we won't be
anything like what we are now!
(*) - As for how likely there are - or ever were, or ever will be - ANY other advanced technological civilizations in the universe besides us, that is a very debatable topic. :ssmile: For purely romantic reasons, I'd
like to believe that "we are not alone", but it's pretty hard to draw any conclusions from a single data point.
I very much doubt we're alone. But I don't imagine it's likely that any other (brief) technological species that happen to overlap our own (brief) technological species are close enough to detect. If the like of us only last a few thousand years, which seems likely, there can't be many at any one time.
Yup, the overlapping time window problem is very real. But we still have only one data point for how long advanced civilizations last, namely us at our present state of development. I don't really consider past "advanced" civilizations to be examples since they weren't as advanced as we are technologically, but that could just be personal bias speaking. We could very well be more likely to annihilate ourselves sooner than any past civilization did.
But in the case of some other civilization detecting our Sun exploding, we get multiple time windows to overlap with since the speed of light is not infinite! That is, the light from our Sun exploding gets many chances to reach different windows at different distances from us as it travels ever farther outward.
Well, the demise of the Sun isn't going to be very impressive. Not a supernova, so most likely something that will only be observable from within our own galaxy, and likely only parts of the galaxy. So that drops the observation window down to something on the order of 100,000 years, which probably isn't much different from zero when considering advanced technological observers.
[quote=johnnydeep post_id=324810 time=1659623207 user_id=132061]
[quote="Chris Peterson" post_id=324809 time=1659622185 user_id=117706]
[quote=johnnydeep post_id=324808 time=1659621975 user_id=132061]
I took the original question to be about whether a "people", that is, a technological civilization not related to humans, living on some other planet orbiting some other star, would be seeing our Sun explode and "pondering" upon it. I think that is a much(*) more likely scenario than that we humans will be around in 5 Gy to be able to do the same. Of course, even if "we humans" are still around then, we won't be [b][i][u]anything[/u][/i][/b] like what we are now!
(*) - As for how likely there are - or ever were, or ever will be - ANY other advanced technological civilizations in the universe besides us, that is a very debatable topic. :ssmile: For purely romantic reasons, I'd [b][i]like[/i][/b] to believe that "we are not alone", but it's pretty hard to draw any conclusions from a single data point.
[/quote]
I very much doubt we're alone. But I don't imagine it's likely that any other (brief) technological species that happen to overlap our own (brief) technological species are close enough to detect. If the like of us only last a few thousand years, which seems likely, there can't be many at any one time.
[/quote]
Yup, the overlapping time window problem is very real. But we still have only one data point for how long advanced civilizations last, namely us at our present state of development. I don't really consider past "advanced" civilizations to be examples since they weren't as advanced as we are technologically, but that could just be personal bias speaking. We could very well be more likely to annihilate ourselves sooner than any past civilization did.
But in the case of some other civilization detecting our Sun exploding, we get multiple time windows to overlap with since the speed of light is not infinite! That is, the light from our Sun exploding gets many chances to reach different windows at different distances from us as it travels ever farther outward.
[/quote]
Well, the demise of the Sun isn't going to be very impressive. Not a supernova, so most likely something that will only be observable from within our own galaxy, and likely only parts of the galaxy. So that drops the observation window down to something on the order of 100,000 years, which probably isn't much different from zero when considering advanced technological observers.