XPost: sci.skeptic, alt.atheism, alt.alien.research   
   XPost: alt.alien.visitors   
   From: Dawn.Belle.Flood@gmail.com   
      
   On 9/21/2025 12:26 PM, JTEM wrote:   
   > On 9/21/25 12:46 PM, Dawn Flood wrote:   
   >   
   >> In my opinion, interstellar space travel is, now and forever, a   
   >> technological impossibility.  No matter how advanced a civilization   
   >> becomes, F = ma will still be true, and so, getting from one place to   
   >> another (an interstellar transfer orbit) requires energy, lots of it.   
   >> The bigger the rocket, the more energy, the bigger the rocket, ..., if   
   >> you get my point here.   
   >>   
   >> This is probably also the reason that human beings will never set foot   
   >> on the planet Mars.   
   >   
   > I'm slightly more optimistic than you. I believe Mars is reachable and   
   > if we limit ourselves to unmanned tech, even Proxima Centauri &   
   > beyond. It's even claimed that if we had maintained the funding on   
   > nuclear propulsion we might already be there!   
   >   
   > We = unmanned tech   
   >   
   > But there's a temporal divide and not just one of distance.   
   >   
   > Let's say aliens send a probe to investigate the life on earth.   
   >   
   > Great. Life is BILLIONS of years old. So the odds say that it arrived   
   > a couple of billion years before we evolved.   
   >   
   > Homo, humans, are only like 2.5 million years old, starting with Homo   
   > habilis...   
   >   
   > So if a probe arrives once every million years, there's been two to   
   > three since habilis.   
   >   
   > Suddenly our odds of even detecting the debris from an alien probe   
   > become ultra slim.   
   >   
      
   I would have to take issue even with unmanned space probes, all of which   
   require some energy to function, even if they are sitting in standby   
   mode.  Even the PCBs in the spacecraft will degrade over time, as it   
   would take tens of thousands of years for one to travel the distance to   
   the nearest star (other than our Sun), Proxima Centauri.  When (and if)   
   such a probe arrived, it would be completely dead.   
      
   Dawn   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)