No spoilers
The other good bet is aliens coming here, being nice (for whatever reasons) and just giving us the technology.
Or finding a wormhole near Pluto.
All very unlikely.
I'm certain too and I have even used it. mass effect
Ten years from now. Which according to some scientists (like the physic nobelist Gerard 't Hooft) have 0% chance of happening and a more realistic time for colonizing Mars would be next century. Saying that, I fully expect a human to walk in Mars within 2050, but making a colony there (especially a colony that is indpendent from Earth) in my opinion won't happen in my lifetime.
Yeah, there are all sorts of theories about it. I was just reading an article about it - this one - which was really good. Some of the potential arguments are ones I'd never thought of, for example that the reason we don't receive signals from other species is that there are predator species who go around homing in on worlds that reveal themselves via that kind of technology... makes movies like Independence Day seem a hell of a lot more plausible.
Yep, it is a great article. And after that, I read another one (I posted it on AI thread) that is as much interesting:
Yep, that's the technological singularity. The rate of progress is (or at least appears to be) increasing at an exponential rate. We have a book about it, really interesting subject. There's a risk that our civilisation will destroy itself before it reaches the spike though, or at least runs out of resources. Plus there's also the question of whether our direction should really be considered "progress" at all
Yep, all of those possibilities are really interesting. Always think it's fertile ground for sci-fi which is often left untouched. The whole thing about Earth potentially being an alien experiment does sound utterly insane... but it's not outside the realms of possibility!
I'm pretty sure the wormhole itself is just our spatial dimensions cutting through the bulk as a shortcut, so I think there'd be standard relativistic dilation depending on the length of the wormhole. If wormholes exist and are able to be traversed, though, it does allow the possibility of backwards time travel due to the peculiarities of relativity. But you'd also need handy access to a black hole.
Feck, just after I get into work!
Cheers for the link though.I only get a partial eclipse in Manchester
We'll find out soon. NASA aren't saying too much about it, but if they've stumbled onto creating a warp field it'll be one of the first steps to massive improvements in space travel.
To early to call it (if it is real) 'the biggest scientific discovery of all time'.
People seem to be taking it seriously, so one to watch at the very least.
A good and objective (and fairly sciencey) article on the developments so far, and potential future uses - http://www.nasaspaceflight.com/2015/04/evaluating-nasas-futuristic-em-drive/
Hidden right down the bottom in science talk is the part, I believe, where it mentions that positive tests for the warp effect have occurred
Oh come on. Why would you call it 'delta-V' when you're not going to write up the mathematical expressions anyway? cnuts.
Yup, fascinating. I'm treating the "warp drive" stuff as highly unlikely to come to fruition, but the stuff about the EM drive enabling travel to Saturn in 9 months would be revolutionary and would open up the solar system for exploration by itself, and they seem to have genuine experimental evidence of it.
Could be either! Looking forward to seeing some pics of it that aren't massively over-exposed.
Intelligent life is the biggie though. The Fermi paradox does make you wonder.
I very much doubt that, a much more probably thought is that we are as insignificant to the actual intelligent life as an ant is to us. They see us all the time but have no interest whatsoever in finding out anything about our world.
I can't imagine that to be the case, if they were intelligent enough to have discovered us then they'd also clearly be highly developed scientifically, which wouldn't lend itself to such an apathetic way of viewing intelligent life from elsewhere.
