No, I’ve not. Between chess, civ and Pdx games, my free time is, uh, not really my own. It belongs to the games, I guess. The adaptations made to no FTL travel do however sound entirely plausible; there’d be pretty radical but necessary social adjustments that’d need to be made should humanity ever endeavor to colonize the stars
Someone created a game based on Cherryh's novels. Its name is "The Company Wars". I haven't played it myself, as I've never been able to find a copy.
I highly recommend her books, though. She's a multi-award-winning science fiction author who I'd rank on par with the best of the best, in her diligent extrapolation of plausible science, economics, the workings of merchant ships, warships, starbases, and how these and the social sciences work over vast interstellar civilizations. I'd specifically recommend
Downbelow Station,
Cyteen and its sequel
Regenesis, and the various novels about the Merchanters (ie.
Finity's End,
Tripoint Station,
Rimrunners, etc.). I've had the pleasure of meeting C.J. Cherryh twice (she was the Guest of Honor at the first SF convention I ever attended, in 1982 and was a return guest some years later). I consider
Cyteen to be her best novel. It's huge, and a gourmet feast for the science-literate reader. I've read it many times and gain new insights with every re-read.
Agreed, with present tech, it is not exactly practical. If you’re a starfaring civ that can approach light speed, it becomes much more practical. Even with current practical difficulties, however, if ET were proven beyond dispute tomorrow, we would immediately begin devoting resources at a considerable scale to their study. People who’ve studied competition would be aware that regardless of observed behavior/stated intent, the possibility of ET power being projected would merit close attention.
I wonder if we would grow up or if it would become a fiasco as depicted in Carl Sagan's novel
Contact and the movie based on it. Granted the movie is unlike the novel in many aspects, but the point is the divide between science and religion, as each side has its own view of the meaning of the Message.
Presuming human behavior is unexceptional, it’s easy for me to imagine things like establishment of observation posts. Other than the implosion of the universe itself, what existential threats would a starfaring species face? Little to none, the sole possible exception being warfare with another advanced, sapient, tool-making species. It’s the one thing that’d register and provoke the threat radar to action.
Starfaring species wouldn't be immune to accidents, unexpected stellar events, or biological consequences if something goes wrong medically or genetically.
But with that said, I don’t think you can assume aliens would act in a way you’d find entirely rational. You mention pranking us, and alotta supposed encounters do seem like horsing around. Doesn’t seem rational.
Of course it doesn't seem rational. Given the vast distances and resources and time required for interstellar travel, to go to a planet and "prank" the indigenous life is extremely
irrational.
thing is though, across the world today, more than one man will take a woman to a zoo and decide that it’d impress said woman if he “bravely” jumps into the Gorilla enclosure. If humans are unexceptional, aliens may similarly determine that what appears at first to be irrational is a justifiable risk if it could lead to some sort of potential social reward.
Any woman who would be impressed by such a stunt is an idiot.
BTW, I rewatched the
Cosmos scene in which Sagan discusses Democritus. Thank you for the reminder, as I found all the Greek-related content of that series to be utterly fascinating. So much was lost over the centuries for various reasons and we had to retrace steps to rediscover it, or at least make use of the initial ideas and do proper research to see where they would lead.
The Drake Equation suggests a series of variables to determine the odds of intelligent and technically advanced civilizations. To me, the critical variable is the 'intelligent life' variable. The reason for this is that here on Earth, evolution worked its way through more than a Billion different species of life in the last Billion of years or so. Only a few of these species developed advanced brains and only one survived to today - Homo Sapiens aka humans. Evolutions attempt to specifically increase the size of the brain in a species, increasing its potential survivability, came relatively late compared to all the other early evolutionary branches we have discovered so far. All plant life to our knowledge never developed brains, there even exists animal life with no brains. It's not a foregone conclusion that life will materialize in the development of a brain. With that said, we can only base such hypotheses on what we know and we only know the history of evolution on our own planet.
I just rewatched the Drake Equation scene from
Cosmos, and the problem with this equation is that it provides a sentence structure, but not the actual objectively correct words. It's a beautiful equation that has lent itself to beautiful ideas - I've seen cross-stitch projects made from this equation.
But the fact is that while we can estimate the number of stars and at the time of
Cosmos Sagan didn't know about all the exoplanets we know about now, plus the fact that
Cosmos was made during the Cold War when nuclear destruction was a very real possibility, we are still guessing at most of the variables in that equation.
On the issue of intelligent life on Earth, humans are not the only ones if you go by criteria other than how many doodads have ever been manufactured. I'm talking about gorillas (some have been taught to communicate with humans via sign language), whales and dolphins (research is ongoing), elephants, and crows (are much more intelligent than most give them credit for, and they use tools).
If we're to find intelligent life, we need to stop with the myopic notion that it has to look like us, or even be mammalian.
May be that, if a trend towards greater intelligence exists on Earth, most exoplanets hosting life would see a similar trend and produce a sapient species comparable to humans with time
So far I've not heard of any exoplanets that has the scientists jumping for joy to discover one that could host life similar to what we have currently. A rocky core is not enough by itself. There are a host of other variables that are needed to make it more likely.
As for "comparable to humans"... we just might not be the higher form, and intelligent life could be in a form that literally doesn't notice us because we're
too different.