Re: Fermi's Paradox and FTL drives

"David Johnston" <david@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote in message 
news:im0cq3t0oi2rbnm8gr4t2gif5j619dgsmd@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> On Sun, 03 Feb 2008 05:37:06 GMT, Gene Ward Smith <gene@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
>
> wrote:
>
>>If the sheer implusibility of FTL drives, given what we now
>>know, has not convinced you, you might want to ponder the
>>added weight it gives to Fermi's "paradox". If such a thing is
>>possible and can be expected to be discovered by any advanced
>>civilization, then we really would expect them to be showing
>>up.
>
> Only if advanced civilisations exist in this galaxy.



When I read of absolute conclusions, two opposite kinds of thing
come to mind.  One is stories in ASF, back in the late 1940's.
In one of these stories someone was trying to build a force
field generator that could enclose a volume to make a space
****p, but it was impossible to make the field stable.  There was
a good engineering solution to that.  And the other had some
engineers facing proof the Germans had built an antigravity
device, but what was at hand didn't show how they did it.  At
story's end, they had built the antigravity device -- and it
turned out, that the Germans had not solved the antigravity
problem at all, it wasn't so.  Somebody gamed the engineers, who
having been convinced it was possible -- did it.

At the other extreme, is mathematical proofs that you cannot do
certain things.  These enable the wise mathematician to avoid a
lot of unproductive effort.

Now, at Philcon and again at Arisia, I heard speakers about the
practical limitations in physics to travelling at light speed
(or faster).  I'm not saying I understood it -- because I didn't
-- but I could catch the key point that if you do that,
lightspeed or better, then you cannot wind up at the time and
point in space both, you thought you were going to get to.  So
that stuff wants listening to.

And Fermi's paradox doesn't get the fair hearing it deserves:
when the universe gets an om -- order of magnitude -- older by a
factor of ten, that's long enough for something to happen.  For
a life form to appear, evolve, gain sentience, develop a
culture, grow to space travel, grow to ftl if it's possible.
But ...ten times?  From 10e-35 sec after the Big Bang, up to 1
sec after the Big Bang, that's *35* oms.  And lots more after.

Are you telling me, well, there wasn't life then.  How do you
know that?  And galaxies have been around ever since sometime in
the first billion years, ballpark 13 of those billions, and
today we don't find any trace of aliens.  Could it be, Fermi was
telling us something?  ??

That's a crummy thought, but sometimes being rational, tells you
something.

Realistically -- Martha Adams     [rasff 2008 Feb 03]