"Alien probe" according to researchers at HarvardSmithsonian

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_DarkHelmet
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Re: "Alien probe" according to researchers at HarvardSmithso

Post by _DarkHelmet »

Chap wrote:
Res Ipsa wrote:You’ve described why the rational thing for an advanced species to do is to preemptively destroy any sign of life it finds. Can’t remember if you’ve read The Three Body Problem.


And surely any group capable of faster than light travel (i.e. capable to doing what currently appears to be impossible) would send a dinky little probe to see what the inhabitants were up to before committing themselves to any contact?

I mean, remember the lesson in the manual 'Time spent on reconnaissance is never wasted'.

Oh, back to the OP ...


I imagine nuclear missiles would be primitive weapons to an alien race that figured out how to make the jump to light speed.
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Re: "Alien probe" according to researchers at HarvardSmithso

Post by _SteelHead »

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Re: "Alien probe" according to researchers at HarvardSmithso

Post by _Water Dog »

Doctor CamNC4Me wrote:Aliens. You know. The sheer volume of nuclear weapons available for deployment to anywhere on or near the planet is mind boggling. You want to see a real force of terror? Give humanity a common enemy. There is nowhere in the solar system you could hide to escape the unholy shitstorm headed your way should your first strike fail to kill us off.

​Try to imagine this. It's 40 years ago, you're 40 light years away and headed to earth with big invasion plans. You've caught some signals from 1938 broadcasts and realized there's an infant civilization that's entering a massive war with itself. All signs point to a war torn ruin of easy pickings awaiting you. You set off with a hefty army of 15,000,000 soldiers in 3 different juggernauts that are ~2 miles long a piece. What are these idiots using explosive powered blowguns even going to do to you if there are any of them left alive?

​So you come out of warp just 200 miles from Earth. You've come from outside the solar system you're in the Earth's shadow. Except it's not dark. The entire continent in front of you is glowing. Almost immediately your communications are flooded by millions of incoming signals. The scanners light up like a Christmas tree with potential inbound missiles and suddenly orders follow to brace for impact. Several massive blasts ensue before anyone realizes that you're in the cross section of hundreds of satellites in orbit.

​The information you had from 80 years prior about humanity entering WWII in no way suggested the species was even capable of escape velocity. Now not only do they have a space program but they've had one for so long that you're being pelted by their god damn space trash. All the sudden there's a massive crash; a roadster has slammed into the command deck of the flagship. Panic ensues as you realize you've been broadsided by a 3,500 lbs metal projectile moving at 18,000 mph that someone put there as a practical joke.

​Suddenly you realize you're being hailed on all frequencies by a digital signal. The captain calls for it to be displayed on the main screen. The picture comes through crystal clear. It's Donald Trump and he's pissed, ranting about illegal alien immigration and pointing upward. Behind him bright orange plumes of fire rise into the sky. The LIDAR lock-on alarm sounds seconds later; ten, twenty...fifty missiles inbound at 15k mph and accelerating!

​Engineering suddenly interrupts Trump's speech screaming about an insane radiation signature. An emergency proposal to eject the ship's drive core carries on for almost a full minute before someone points out the radiation signature isn't coming from inside the ship. It's a fertile fission signature from thousands of high yield nuclear weapons, several dozen of them rapidly closing in. You can't possibly destroy them all in time. The captain orders his comm link broadcast on all channels in all known languages in a last act of desperation:

​"Please! We come in peace!"

​After several terrifying moments of silence, the communications officer shouts there's been a reply. The main screen is suddenly illuminated by the unsettling orange glow of Donald Trump starring into directly into the camera, a half dozen advisors on either side of him seemingly pleading for his attention. He ignores them all and instead roars his reply;

​"FAKE NEWS!"

​Before anyone can even begin to interpret what the “F” that even means the entire ship is engulfed in a halo of nuclear fire. Amid the screams and explosions all you can do is wonder what happened to the primitive war torn world from the grainy videos.


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_DoubtingThomas
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Re: "Alien probe" according to researchers at HarvardSmithso

Post by _DoubtingThomas »

Chap wrote:
Doctor Steuss wrote: still don't understand what any of this has to do with your earlier insinuation that an alien civilization would abandon an entire spectrum as well as insulate all technology to prevent it from emitting that same frequency.

Me neither.

A radio signal can be ambiguous.

https://youtu.be/37oC2Q2cNnM?t=352
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Re: "Alien probe" according to researchers at HarvardSmithso

Post by _DoubtingThomas »

Doctor CamNC4Me wrote: Try to imagine this. It's 40 years ago, you're 40 light years away and headed to earth with big invasion plans. You've caught some signals from 1938 broadcasts and realized there's an infant civilization that's entering a massive war with itself.


Aliens 40 light years away would need a radio telescope the size of Utah to detect our radio emissions.
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_DoubtingThomas
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Re: "Alien probe" according to researchers at HarvardSmithso

Post by _DoubtingThomas »

I imagine nuclear missiles would be primitive weapons to an alien race that figured out how to make the jump to light speed.


Right. We humans are still in our technological infancy.
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Re: "Alien probe" according to researchers at HarvardSmithso

Post by _Chap »

DoubtingThomas wrote:
I imagine nuclear missiles would be primitive weapons to an alien race that figured out how to make the jump to light speed.


Right. We humans are still in our technological infancy.



That sounds a very deep kind of thing to say. But in fact, you are applying a metaphor to the human race derived from the birth-to-death cycle of animals, in which there is a stage of varying lengths in which the animal is a pre-adult growing to maturity. It imports a false optimism: 'One day we shall be grown-ups, and we shall have much greater abilities and understand a lot more'.

There is no reason to suppose that this applies to the human race as a whole. We have only observed one intelligent species with rapidly advancing technical capacities - ourselves. There is absolutely nothing we can compare ourselves with, and no reason whatsoever for allowing false optimism to reduce the state of considerable anxiety with which it is appropriate to regard what is currently (and very obviously) happening to us.
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Re: "Alien probe" according to researchers at HarvardSmithso

Post by _Gunnar »

This thread reminds me of one of my favorite Arthur C. Clarke's Novels, Rendezvous with Rama. If you haven't already read it, I highly recommend it.
Rendezvous with Rama is a science fiction novel by British writer Arthur C. Clarke first published in 1973. Set in the 2130s, the story involves a 50-kilometre (31 mi) cylindrical alien starship that enters the Solar System. The story is told from the point of view of a group of human explorers who intercept the ship in an attempt to unlock its mysteries. The novel won both the Hugo[4] and Nebula[5] awards upon its release, and is regarded as one of the cornerstones in Clarke's bibliography. The concept was later extended with several sequels.

Plot

After an asteroid falls in Northeast Italy in 2077, creating a major disaster, the government of Earth sets up the Spaceguard system as an early warning of arrivals from deep space.

The "Rama" of the title is an alien starship, initially mistaken for an asteroid categorised as "31/439". It is detected by astronomers in the year 2131 while it is still outside the orbit of Jupiter. Its speed (100,000 km/h) and the angle of its trajectory clearly indicate it is not on a long orbit around the sun, but comes from interstellar space. The astronomers' interest is further piqued when they realise the asteroid has an extremely rapid rotation period of 4 minutes and is exceptionally large. It is named Rama after the Hindu god,[6] and an unmanned space probe dubbed Sita is launched from the Mars moon Phobos to intercept and photograph it. The resulting images reveal that Rama is a perfect cylinder, 20 kilometres (12 mi) in diameter and 54 kilometres (34 mi) long, and almost completely featureless, making this humankind's first encounter with an alien spacecraft.

The solar survey vessel Endeavour is sent to study Rama, as it is the only ship close enough to do so in the brief period Rama will spend in the solar system. Endeavour manages to rendezvous with Rama one month after it first comes to Earth's attention, when the alien ship is already inside Venus' orbit. The crew, led by Commander Bill Norton, enters Rama through a dual safety system consisting of two sets of triple airlocks, and explores the vast 16-km wide by 50-km long cylindrical world of its interior, but the nature and purpose of the starship and its creators remain enigmatic throughout the book. Rama's inner surfaces hold vast "cities" of geometric structures that resemble buildings and are separated by streets with shallow trenches. A mammoth band of water, dubbed the Cylindrical Sea, stretches around Rama's central circumference. Massive cones, which the astronauts theorise are part of Rama's propulsion system, stand at its 'southern' end. They also find that Rama's atmosphere is breathable.


I calculated that a rotation period of 4 minutes would be enough to create an artificial gravity due to centrifugal force of about 0.7 gees near the outer perimeter of a cylinder 20 kilometers in diameter, as described in the novel.
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Re: "Alien probe" according to researchers at HarvardSmithso

Post by _Gunnar »

DoubtingThomas wrote:
I imagine nuclear missiles would be primitive weapons to an alien race that figured out how to make the jump to light speed.


Right. We humans are still in our technological infancy.



Chap wrote:That sounds a very deep kind of thing to say. But in fact, you are applying a metaphor to the human race derived from the birth-to-death cycle of animals, in which there is a stage of varying lengths in which the animal is a pre-adult growing to maturity. It imports a false optimism: 'One day we shall be grown-ups, and we shall have much greater abilities and understand a lot more'.

There is no reason to suppose that this applies to the human race as a whole. We have only observed one intelligent species with rapidly advancing technical capacities - ourselves. There is absolutely nothing we can compare ourselves with, and no reason whatsoever for allowing false optimism to reduce the state of considerable anxiety with which it is appropriate to regard what is currently (and very obviously) happening to us.


I can't help but agree with you, Chap. It doesn't bode well for the human race when we have ignorant leaders of major nations like Trump of the USA and Bolsonaro of Brazil choosing to dismiss out of hand a near universal scientific consensus that we are endangering our planet by our heavy dependence on fossil fuels for our energy needs.
No precept or claim is more likely to be false than one that can only be supported by invoking the claim of Divine authority for it--no matter who or what claims such authority.

“If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; but if you really make them think, they'll hate you.”
― Harlan Ellison
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Re: "Alien probe" according to researchers at HarvardSmithso

Post by _subgenius »

DoubtingThomas wrote:
I imagine nuclear missiles would be primitive weapons to an alien race that figured out how to make the jump to light speed.


Right. We humans are still in our technological infancy.

How so? What measure are using for "technological adulthood", Star Trek?

To argue that jumping to light speed must equal immunity from nuclear weapons for aliens seems rather ignorant and assumes a whole lot human-like-ness projected on to aliens.
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