Hacker News Reader

Comment by gwbas1c | Hacker News Reader

One thing that I constantly think of when I read this article is just how recent in history electromagnetic broadcasts are. What if there's another planet in our neighborhood, but its society is just a mere 1000 years behind us? 1000 years is almost nothing when looking at just how old the universe is, and just how long our planet has had life.

But, what if we develop some other means to communicate in the next 100, 200, or 300 years? It means the window of time that intelligent life uses electromagnetic communication is very, vey short.

View on HN

Or, what if we're the first. Someone has to be the first. The Universe is devoid of intelligent life, and we're without technological peers.

A billion years pass, the Universe is rich with intelligent life. And they can still detect the echoes of the ones who were first, crying out across the universe in search of companionship.

>A billion years pass, the Universe is rich with intelligent life. And they can still detect the echoes of the ones who were first, crying out across the universe in search of companionship.

Or what if the window of time in which life can exist on a planet is so short compared to how long it takes for life to appear on that planet, that it is extremely unlikely for two planets to have life at the same time?

A lot of questions, and a lot of possible answers

I think it was in was in one of Stanisław Lem’s novels where a character postulated that the window of opportunity where a civilization is advanced enough to communicate with others but not yet advanced enough to not care about that any more is a mere 3.000 years. Even if it was 300.000 years ...

Assuming all star systems in our vicinity have inhabitable planets and they all develop such civilizations – what are the chances any of those two windows overlapping?

This means that if we wanted to communicate reliably with up and coming extraterrestrial lifeforms, we would need to maintain older forms of communication, and that extraterrestrial civilizations that are ahead of us, that want to be talked to would do the same. In my opinion it is worth exploring how religion came into existence, given that many of them share the common theme of regularly attempting to communicate with some extraterrestrial entity or entities with some level of certainty.

A scifi book whose title I've forgotten had jumpable spaceships with quantum communicators that went back to a central switching station. Viola - instant communication with every other communicator in the universe, and with no leakage. Maybe future us has quantum Dick Tracy watches.

Sounds like an ansible [1]. I thought this was from Orson Scott Card but apparently it pre-dates him, instead going back to Ursula Le Guin.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ansible

Reply on news.ycombinator.com