Originally Posted by zevokes

i would just like to interject with the idea that, yes, it's nice to come onto this forum and speculate on such topics as this with music lovers, but if one is actually going to have an opinion, they should do their research. AND, if it interests one enough to do that research, it should occur to said one that it might actually mean something.

it's been said here already that when imagining the goings-on of a species far more advanced than we are, the line between possible and impossible becomes quite blurred. in my own opinion, the impossible, many times, almost becomes probable.

as soon as a civilization creates its first tool, the inherently exponential growth of information and technology begins. it's also been said that we are a young solar system and that the last hundred years has proved humanity a formidable presence in the realm of information gatherers and technology builders... which is indicative of exponential growth when juxtaposed with the rest of what we know as human history. we just keep going faster. and anybody reading this knows just as well as i do that man alive will not allow that learning curve to stop. we've learned to build things to learn for us.

100 years ago, we didn't have things to learn for us. now, we've been to the moon. we have thousands of satellites orbiting our own planet and others in our solar system. we can take close-up pictures of the f*cking sun. mag-lev trains. the large hadron collider. solar panels. he even have the technology to drill giant holes in the ocean floor and create an oil leak which affect the world for a very long time to come.

so, imagine 100 years from now, being a part of the mass that never halted in its lust for information. hard, but perhaps possible to imagine.



how about 1000 years? your brain would just make stuff up.





100,000 years?

completely and utterly unimaginable.


so, being that our solar system is young, and the universe being so damn pretty big, 100,000 years is nothing. and if it so happens that there are species other than us, there's more than one, and you can probably bet some of them know every corner of the universe.

why?

because we would if we could.

EDIT: another answer to the why, is given that the nature of information's growth is exponential, it's almost impossible for the bearers of information to NOT become all-knowing.

Originally Posted by tore

Well, yes - if you accept that there will be no constraints on what science can do, then your assumption should be valid. If you believe there are limits to what can be achieved, for example faster than light travel, then you have a constraint. If you believe creating a wormholes is practically impossible because it requires just about all the energy in the known universe to create one, then you have another constraint. If you take a picture of a quasar, that picture can show a galaxy which is actually billions of years old. You can almost see the start of our universe up there, that's how relatively slow information travels when distances becomes enormous - yet another constraint.

Based on your assumption, it sounds like we should've been visited by a whole bunch of extraterrestrial species already, but where are they? If we visited a different planet that had primitive intelligent life on it and a wealth of other organisms and resources, do you think we would've just left? I don't think so, I think we would've tried to use those resources for ourselves or, from a more positive perspective, at least nurture those resources. If these aliens visited planet earth, they left no proof behind that we've found like f.ex alien technology. They are not trying to stop us destroying our oasis in space either.

If you say we must have been visited by aliens, you should also come up with some answers to such questions.