Interstellar travel?

warpus said:
I mean, they probably did use trees for rolling purposes. But they didn't seem to have made a leap to turn this into wheels. And yeah, in the Americans not a lot of animals were domesticated, at least compared to the old world. From what I remember reading the locals just did not use animals to pull things over long distances at all, not until the Europeans arrived
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My point was that enslaved humans are just as effective as domesticated animals, so the lack of domesticated animals isn't that solid a handicap. If they didn't have things being pulled it would be due to a lack of interest, not a lack of muscle.
 
Samez said:
All this discussions on finding developed civilizations by finding their radio signature asume that the extraterrestrials also live in a capitalistic growth based society i.e. the further developed the more emission. It is well possible that a society further developed than ours won't use more but less resources and those more efficient. This would also reduce their radio visibility if it is not their explicit aim to be found.
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I think the assumption is questionable, even from another angle: Even a growth based society might decrease their radio emissions into space just for economic reasons. There is simply no point in having large emitters blast radio waves into space, where there is no one to receive it. Instead, you can shape your antennas to keep the signal closer to the ground. Using the spectrum just for one big emitter is also has much less value than using many small emitters a much lower power, which can transfer more data. Or advanced civilizations might just transfer most of their communication by (fiber-optic) cables. Already, terrestrial distribution of TV signals has become much less important than it once was and those big TV antennas might be shut down at one point in the future.

I think that even a growth-based society will hit peak radio waves emission at one point and Earth might be already past that. This leaves a very short window for detecting alien societies by their radio waves.
 
Bootstoots said:
My suspicion about the Fermi paradox is depressing for those of us who really do want to see interstellar travel or at least communication on a regular basis. It's that intelligent life is rare enough that it's uncommon for radio signals to be picked up between civilizations, especially during the fairly brief window where radio communication is loud enough to be picked up because of inefficient transmission.

But maybe intelligent life is not ultra-rare. The main barrier is that it never really makes any kind of economic sense to leave your star system and colonize anywhere else, or to send out von Neumann machines or anything like that. The distances are too vast, and it's rare to encounter a planet which is so similar to the home planet of a species that it can, or would want to, live on that other planet.

Just a hunch - I can't prove it. But I think it's quite likely that we just never will become a space-faring civilization, at least outside of the Solar System.
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I'd say my personal bet on the Fermi paradox is rather that intelligent life is extremely rare. My reasoning for this is that, in the 1500 million years our planet has hosted life, only one species (AFAWK) seems to have ever reached the treshold to be able to even think about going into space. TBH, I think that intelligence just isn't a very good survival tool in itself, and requires a lot of conditions to be actually useful (like being social and having an appendage which allows to meaningfully manipulate the environment, and living long enough to learn and do things).
Self-extinction and the physical laws of physics combined with vastness of space make for the rest of the Great Filter.

Now, that's just guesswork from a moderately informed person without any serious background. But well, at least it would make sense.
 
Timsup2nothin said:
My point was that enslaved humans are just as effective as domesticated animals, so the lack of domesticated animals isn't that solid a handicap. If they didn't have things being pulled it would be due to a lack of interest, not a lack of muscle.
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I also think the civilizations in the Andes lacked flat roads? As for slaves, they can be rather expendable

Either way I don't think it's fair to label the invention of the wheel as "meh" or "obvious". It must have been at one point an idea somebody had that hadn't been tried before. Whether it seems obvious in hindsight is beside the point

Akka said:
I'd say my personal bet on the Fermi paradox is rather that intelligent life is extremely rare. My reasoning for this is that, in the 1500 million years our planet has hosted life, only one species (AFAWK) seems to have ever reached the treshold to be able to even think about going into space. TBH, I think that intelligence just isn't a very good survival tool in itself, and requires a lot of conditions to be actually useful (like being social and having an appendage which allows to meaningfully manipulate the environment, and living long enough to learn and do things).
Self-extinction and the physical laws of physics combined with vastness of space make for the rest of the Great Filter.

Now, that's just guesswork from a moderately informed person without any serious background. But well, at least it would make sense.
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Even given all these limitations, there should still be a whole bunch of space-faring civilizations out there, given how insanely huge the universe is.

IMO I think you are right and such civilizations are super rare.. but even if they were super rare, we should still be seeing something out there.

I really do think most of the ones that survived are hiding. It just makes sense to hide, knowing that out there might be civilizations millions of years more advanced than you. You could go extinct in a matter of seconds, it's too big of a risk
 
warpus said:
I also think the civilizations in the Andes lacked flat roads? As for slaves, they can be rather expendable

Either way I don't think it's fair to label the invention of the wheel as "meh" or "obvious". It must have been at one point an idea somebody had that hadn't been tried before. Whether it seems obvious in hindsight is beside the point
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It's not about hindsight. There's a saying; necessity is the mother of invention. There were probably thousands, if not millions, of ancients who "made the leap" to use rollers. It's hard to imagine that there wouldn't be a bunch of them saying "hey, roller works good, must be a way to take that with me." Hard to say where the lightening of rollers using whatever means were available would cross the line into a wheel, but it probably was more of an evolution than an 'ahah' moment. Most things are.
 
Hunter gatherers dont need wheels, they kill something too large to move they chop it up and walk it away. Rollers are sturdier than wheels and axles/hubs/spokes are tougher to produce and even then they couldn't support enough weight.

google the Baalbek monolith... the only way to move something that big was with rollers. We dont even have modern machinery that can move that monstrosity.
 
Berzerker said:
Hunter gatherers dont need wheels, they kill something too large to move they chop it up and walk it away. Rollers are sturdier than wheels and axles/hubs/spokes are tougher to produce and even then they couldn't support enough weight.

google the Baalbek monolith... the only way to move something that big was with rollers. We dont even have modern machinery that can move that monstrosity.
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No really. That monolith weighs around 1500 tons and shipyard cranes can manage that weight easily, the record being at 20000 tons.
 
Only off by a factor of thirteen or so. He's done worse.
 
Timsup2nothin said:
it probably was more of an evolution than an 'ahah' moment. Most things are.
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I mean, you've got to notice that a log can roll... and then think.. "Hey what if we cut that log into discs and attach 2 discs to a stick somehow"

And then you still gotta figure out how to put something on that. I'm not saying all of this would be a crazy challenge, but for millions of years nobody was using wheels at all. At some point there was the first person to do that, and like you imply there were probably several independent inventors, or maybe not, who knows I guess..

Either way it seems like that's what happened, and not logs slowly evolving into wheels. Somebody had to conceptualize cutting the log into pieces and then somehow solving all the problems you have to solve when building a vehicle.
 
warpus said:
I mean, you've got to notice that a log can roll... and then think.. "Hey what if we cut that log into discs and attach 2 discs to a stick somehow"

And then you still gotta figure out how to put something on that. I'm not saying all of this would be a crazy challenge, but for millions of years nobody was using wheels at all. At some point there was the first person to do that, and like you imply there were probably several independent inventors, or maybe not, who knows I guess..

Either way it seems like that's what happened, and not logs slowly evolving into wheels. Somebody had to conceptualize cutting the log into pieces and then somehow solving all the problems you have to solve when building a vehicle.
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You have some rollers...as you say, probably logs. They're pretty heavy, and dragging them around in front of the load is still hard work. Plus they do have some irregularities that they get hung up on. So you start thinking about shaping them smoother, maybe cutting them down to be lighter. As long as we have tools to work wood I'm in.

Somewhere along the line maybe you have some rollers that are so good you drag 'em back to the cave to keep. Maybe I want to drag them back over to where I'm cutting big blocks and there's no good trees to make rollers. We both might think that rolling them is easier than dragging them.

Either of us might think that a handle on each end and a rope means we can drag them and roll them at the same time.

People don't conceptualize. Tools evolve, driven by the most powerful forces known to man; necessity and laziness.
 
do you keep it hidden behind a computer?

accuracy merits the correction... and I received his and offered mine without hate or bitterness

when I make a mistake, you respond with insults... when you make a mistake, you respond with insults
 
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Berzerker said:
do you keep it hidden behind a computer?

accuracy merits the correction... and I received his and offered mine without hate or bitterness

when I make a mistake, you respond with insults... when you make a mistake, you respond with insults
Click to expand...

Did I miss the "all about Tim" thread title?
 
Still it would not be a trivial thing to move that monolith specifically since you would need to use mobile crawlers. So you would need at least a couple of these (750 tons each) and still fall short:

liebherr21.jpg


So to be safe you would need the biggest one in this pic, which could lift almost two monoliths (3000tons), with the second biggest one being able to lift 1350 tons only.

ag8Lm.jpg
 
Thank you guys, such enjoyment reading the bleeding minds of the best!

We have one more thing to consider though. We are not leaving TODAY! We are looking after mankind as is.

So say, this attempt will take place in 200 years, THE BIG ESCAPE!

Will we evolve enough to get to the Einstein or Tesla level? Maybe, or maybe not looking at the kids today, lol.

And also as a tease, I DO believe we have been big before as a species, but ruined it. Read about Indus Valley and the book Mahabharata. They had flying machines (vimanas) and atomic bombs too, which destroyed Harappa and Mohenjo-Daru. Something like 8-10 thousand years ago.

I think humanity lives by a rise and fall, IF we can survive the current matters, we can reach much further.

This means we can evolve and get smarter in 200 years, and maybe figure out what the frigging universe is about, outside physics.

I am not as smart as anyone, but I like an open space, where I can consider ideas, and you peeps have been most helpful. Thank you.
 
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