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Comment by meepmorp | Hacker News Reader

What about in comparison to a distance we'd be likely to reach before we annihilate ourselves?

I keep hearing this argument. But physically traveling there is pretty stupid if you think about it. It's much simpler to set up a communication channel.

Sure it'll have a 50 year latency, but we could easily stream all of youtube (or the entire internet really) to them, and so could they. Assuming they're more advanced and their cameras capture the environment in spherical 3D, we could recreate what it's like to stand on their soil pretty accurately from home.

Besides just browsing their extranet would be amazing in itself.

So we discover another civilization and send them 4chan?

Mind you, seeing another species' civilization's sense of humor would be pretty amazing.

> Sure it'll have a 50 year latency, but we could easily stream all of youtube (or the entire internet really) to them

Well Eric Schmidt who's probably in a better position to estimate than most, said that Google estimates the internet is made up of 5 million terabytes.

5 million terabytes / 10gbps = 126.8 years

and I very much doubt 10gbps is even remotely achievable over interstellar distances. I don't what kind of data rates are achievable but I would expect it to be extremely slow relative to Gigabit speeds.

I imagine by the time we find extra terrestrial intelligence, 10gbps will be childs play. I HOPE we find some way to use entanglement as a communications mechanism by then, although I don't know if that's even possible.

Or we could, you know, use more than one channel.

I wonder if the singularity happens like they say, and we can upload our minds into the computer, if we can send a slow probe to another star with a receiving dish and by the time it gets there, we can just beam our consciousnesses there, with maybe enough know-how to roll up an entirely new world with minimal resources.

Irrelevant to the fact being stated.

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