Hacker News Reader

Comment by avaldes | Hacker News Reader

> Finally. Is this the state of cutting-edge research on SETI? This wishful-thinking make-believe "look what I made Mum!" stuff? If this was a bootcamp dev showing off their WebGL modelling demo, I'd be impressed. 'nuff said. Sorry to be harsh, but... really? this is it?

I mean, when all you have to work is literally nothing all you can do is speculate. It is disappointing but what can they do but throw everything at the wall and see if it sticks.

View on HN

Well they don’t have absolutely nothing. We know how much it costs to get mass into orbit, we know the launch cadence we’re capable of, we know how long it takes to build huge vessels like nuclear powered submarines and aircraft carriers, we have realistic proposals for propulsion techniques that could get us to our nearest neighbour. You could make limited extrapolations from these points to figure out how much it would cost and how long it would take to build a colony ship. That would tell you a bit about the conditions necessary to begin colonizing the galaxy and you’d be able to tell if those conditions were likely to occur in the near future. We know how long it took to colonize the Americas so you could adjust that data. That should give you both the rate at which you can create colony ships and how long it takes for a colony to reach the point that it can begin building them.

It seems like this is an entirely different question than the one evaluated in the article.

IT is a an interesting question, but it seems weird to fault the article for not being something different.

Alternatively, one could argue that all of this data is worthless in predicting the industrial capacity of spacefaring culture, at least 100,000 years more advanced. Im guessing this is why they didn't bother.

this. But I see no attempt to do any of this work. Just "1 colony ship every 100,000 years, limited to 15 light years"

Reply on news.ycombinator.com