Do you believe we are alone in the universe?

The universe is far, far, far too big and ancient a place to reasonably rule out life elsewhere. Even if the galaxy is currently lacking intelligent life other than our own (and I'm not convinced it is - our expectations of what intelligent life should be doing with itself is, obviously, prejudiced toward our own ideals), I don't think it was nor will be. I'm also much more optimistic about FTL.

 

[Shasarak]

We already do this with current technology for assembly-line robots, and STILL errors creep in over time. Software errors happen (either due to coding errors or what radiation does to computer systems); manufacturing dies erode and fall ouside of QC tolerances; moving parts degrade; material fatigue destroys parts.

So we know this already and we already have ways to deal with it now. Right now. And yet in the future replication is going to be so complicated that we will not be able to deal with a simple quality control issue? How exactly does that work?

Are we suddenly going to run out of Iphones because someone loses the plans? Is the 1,001 copy going to spontaneously develop an AI? Does the existance of an Iphone X suddenly mean that an Iphone 4 does not work anymore?

We seem to have achieved a lot in our existence without "perfect" replication.

I would be supremely suprised if any biologist asserted that there is a terrestrial species that has remained unchanged at the genetic level for a million years.

I am guessing that there were a lot of surprised people when scientists finally proved that the Earth was round.

 

[Shasarak]

I was listening to Avi Loeb talking about his interstellar project to get a 1g probe to Alpha Centuri at 0.2c. So 20 years to get there and then 4 years to get a signal back to Earth the future really is now.

 

[Maxperson]

No, it isn't. Remember that even if the aliens are immortal, the stars aren't! There are at least 100 billion stars in the Milky Way (possibly up to 400 billion). And the lifespan of a star like the Sun is about 10 billion years.

Let us say that you only want to visit 10% of the stars in the galaxy - that's 10 to 40 billion stars. Even if you visit one every single year, most of the stars will burn out long before you can reach them! Oh, and in only 4 billion years, the Milky Way is going to collide with Andromeda, and what do you figure that's going to do with your 10-billion-year exploration plan?

Nah. It wouldn't take anywhere near that long. This is a race that is highly advanced, so it has the capabilities to farm their other planets, asteroids, comets, etc. for resources. They would be capable of making trillions of these probes to send to the various stars. There are an estimated 100-400 billion stars. They could send enough probes to send multiples to each star to investigate, so we're still looking at about 10 million years to search the whole galaxy, and much less time to reach the majority of stars.

 

[Maxperson]

To put a different spin on things than those who have replied before me...

Even if you assume the building of a single probe, it is still going to need the functional equivalen of perfect replication to perform explorations over millions of years just to keep itself functioning. Never mind unexpected collisions or cosmic events- parts wear out and need replacing, even when operating entirely within design parameters. Materials deteriorate.

We are still finding/inventing more and more durable materials. It is very reasonable to think that an alien civilization that advanced could have come up with a material that will take longer than 10 million years to break down to the point where the probes lose the ability to function properly.

https://futurism.com/mit-unveils-new-material-thats-strongest-and-lightest-on-earth

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

So we know this already and we already have ways to deal with it now. Right now. And yet in the future replication is going to be so complicated that we will not be able to deal with a simple quality control issue? How exactly does that work?

We deal with it by making new parts with new tools; by installing new software; by creating and revising blueprints- IOW, by the expenditure of more energy and resources in imperfect replication.

A probe on a million year mission will not have that option. When its blueprints go bad, there won’t be someone there to reload them.

Are we suddenly going to run out of Iphones because someone loses the plans? Is the 1,001 copy going to spontaneously develop an AI? Does the existance of an Iphone X suddenly mean that an Iphone 4 does not work anymore?

No. But look at any mass produced good and you’ll see the effects of entropy. A certain % of iPhones are never released from the factory every year due to their failing QC tests. And STILL defective phones hit the market. The iPhone 5 had a period when they had to recall a fairly sizeable number of phones they sold somehow passed QC despite being visibly damaged.

We seem to have achieved a lot in our existence without "perfect" replication.

Yes, by expending more resources and correcting the inevitable errors. We’re still subject to the laws of thermodynamics.

I am guessing that there were a lot of surprised people when scientists finally proved that the Earth was round.

Hellenistic astronomers considered the spherical nature of the earth as a given by 3rd century BC. So really, not as many as you seem to imply.

 

[Umbran]

Yes, by expending more resources and correcting the inevitable errors.

More important - we don't have a rather specific mission we are intended to complete over a million years. With no particular goal, we are free to wander around, and not be the same generation to generation.

Or, to put it another way, imagine that we had been created to be a specific way, and do a specific thing... back when we were, oh, Homo erectus. How far off script are we now?

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

We are still finding/inventing more and more durable materials. It is very reasonable to think that an alien civilization that advanced could have come up with a material that will take longer than 10 million years to break down to the point where the probes lose the ability to function properly.

https://futurism.com/mit-unveils-new-material-thats-strongest-and-lightest-on-earth

Possible? Perhaps. Probable? Mmmmmmmmmm. Color me skeptical.

It is highly improbable that any one kind of “Unobtanium” will have all of the necessary properties to make a million year probe.

Think about the properties of materials that would be required to make a million year probe. You need electrical conductivity. You need electrical insulators. You need thermal conductors. You need thermal insulators. You need things that are hard but not brittle. You need materials that are ductile but not weak.

If you only have a shell of Unobtanium, but you’re still reliant on things like silicon, palladium, and the like for internal parts, you’re still going to have a probe that fails well short of mission’s end.

While there are (as I recall) materials whose physical properties can change radically or even diametrically under certain circumstances, they probably do so only in different physical states- something may conceivably be an insulator as a solid but a conductor as a plasma.

Furthermore radiation- from internal and external sources- can radically affect any and all of a given material’s physical properties.
https://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/19710015558.pdf

So asking for materials to make immutable million year probes to get around entropy at that time scale probably raises as many practical problems than it solves.

 

[Hussar]

I was listening to Avi Loeb talking about his interstellar project to get a 1g probe to Alpha Centuri at 0.2c. So 20 years to get there and then 4 years to get a signal back to Earth the future really is now.

I think you linked the wrong article in that second link. That's an article about a comet that there are some questions about how it's accelerating.

But, I did a bit of googling and found this article:

Lubin’s roadmap laid out myriad obstacles that any laser-propelled interstellar mission would have to overcome, such as linking many smaller lasers into a kilometer-scale array and engineering lightweight, gossamer-thin sails strong enough to endure the array’s gigawatt-scale pulses as well as persuading policy makers to allow the construction of a laser system that could in principle be used as a weapon. The probes will also need to transmit observations back to Earth using onboard lasers with just a few watts of power—a problem potentially solvable by using the giant Earthbound laser array as a receiver. But the biggest obstacle of all was simply a matter of cost: At an estimated present-day price of approximately $10 per watt of laser power, building and operating Breakthrough Starshot’s 100-gigawatt array today could cost as much as $1 trillion.

Yeah, good luck with that. A trillion dollars to send a 1 gram probe. That's somewhere near 1% of the WORLD's GDP.

 

[Umbran]

Possible? Perhaps. Probable? Mmmmmmmmmm. Color me skeptical.

It is highly improbable that any one kind of “Unobtanium” will have all of the necessary properties to make a million year probe.

To be fair - you don't need an individual probe to last a million years. You need the *species* to last that long.

Each probe has to last the journey from one star system to the next. At that point, it probably unpacks itself, does its harvesting and replication. It probably does *not* pack itself up to then go on to another star system - its children do that.

I think people underestimate how harsh the interstellar environment is, but we dont' need each individual probe to last to the end of the project.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

To be fair - you don't need an individual probe to last a million years. You need the *species* to last that long.

Each probe has to last the journey from one star system to the next. At that point, it probably unpacks itself, does its harvesting and replication. It probably does *not* pack itself up to then go on to another star system - its children do that.

I think people underestimate how harsh the interstellar environment is, but we dont' need each individual probe to last to the end of the project.

I’m pretty sure some in this thread were postulating super-high tech materials to get around the requirement of a replication process, which is what I was responding to. I mean, take a look at Maxperson’s post I quoted and correct me if I’m wrong.