GGHeart
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Post by GGHeart on Aug 16, 2020 5:29:42 GMT
The observable universe is a big place that has been around for more than 13 billion years. Up to two trillion galaxies made up of something like 20,000 billion billion stars surround our home galaxy. In the milky way alone scientists assume there are some 40 billion earth like planets in the habitable zone of their stars. When we look at these numbers it is hard to imagine that there is nobody else out there.
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Post by karl on Aug 16, 2020 10:35:16 GMT
The observable universe is a big place that has been around for more than 13 billion years. Up to two trillion galaxies made up of something like 20,000 billion billion stars surround our home galaxy. In the milky way alone scientists assume there are some 40 billion earth like planets in the habitable zone of their stars. When we look at these numbers it is hard to imagine that there is nobody else out there.
Humanity is in a time bubble where we've seen exponential technological growth over the course of a few centuries, going from transport with horses to spacecraft, from communication through shout to the Internet. This has given people the expectation that the technological development will continue into eternity. But this expectation is no dissimilar to that of someone expecting that a market boom will last forever. As technology becomes more advanced, it's increased complexity causes problems that are often not straightforward to solve. For now one has been able to deal with all the issues caused by the complexity of computer technology, from bugs and compatibility issues to malware, viruses, and hacking. And problems caused by increased power consumption have been resolved with larger and more numerous fans, new design of cases of motherboards, and increasing number of cores rather than clock speed of processor. These problems might be nothing compared to the challenges one will face in regards to quantum computers.
In the 70's one imagined space tourism by the year 2000. That never happened simply due to that the practical problems involved are still the same as back then. When one tries to colonise Mars, my guess is that one will find that the practical issues will be close to impossible to overcome, giving an indication of what a massive challenge star travel would entail.
I suspect the reason why we haven't seen a trace of type 2, 3, and 4 civilizations, is that such civilizations don't exist due to the stagnation of technological development. There could be a point of diminishing return, where the complexity of advanced technology produces more problems than it solves.
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