Mood:
celebratoryTopic: General
Happy Birthday, Mister Clarke!
During the cutting of the cake Mister 2001 rattled off a list of wishes, and among them was the desire to live to see first contact with an alien species.
...yeah... good luck with that, Arthur.
I think that, if we're lucky (or, perhaps, unlucky!) then my great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great- great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great- great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great- great-great-great-great-great-great-grandchildren will have a fairly good chance at making contact with someone in another goldilocks zone. (let's see: what is that? About 1000 years?... carry the one... factor in the 20th 'great'... uh...)
Well, it'll be a f**king long time, put another way.
What do you wanna do, huh? We've got a century's worth of electronic transmission currently hurtling through the void of space (so we've managed to cover, liberally, about 100 light years distance, but given signal degradation and everything else... well...)
So an alien race detects our broadcasts (being supremely optimistic and ignoring many of the tenants of the Drake Equation, the ones that depress me...) and then what? Assuming we haven't developed the power to hear THEIR broadcasts, then we'd be waiting for however many hundreds of years it would take them to send a focused, detectable signal in our direction.
(BTW: my grasping of general relativity is ridiculously shallow, but given the evidence, I don't see any way of surpassing certain limits as far as travel is concerned... sorry, but 3e8 m/s/s seems to be the limit for us)
Yeah, yeah, yeah: in my own (fictional) books I insinuate that raw data (energy) can be 'skimmed' out from point A to point B in an APPARENT violation of relativity (ie: about 60 to 100 times faster than light, give or take...) but, first of all, TYPERS is fiction, and second of all, the 'skimming' I describe in the book relies upon (fictional) interdimensional issues, so again: the data is only APPARENTLY going faster than light...
...that (fictional) plot point is the one I hate the most about my books' scientific rigor... (at least objects with detectable MASS do go much, much, much slower than the speed of light when they 'skim'...)
Fictionally speaking, of course.
(and don't rag on me that my own books detail an 'alien invasion war': ain't no alien invasion, since the BYDO are as home-grown as ma's vine-ripened tomatoes... probably don't taste as good, though...)
Back to the point at hand:
The romantic in me has always indulged the idea that, millenia from now, some alien race that's been listening to an odd smattering of organized data streaking though their territory (ie: Earth noise) goes out into the night and stumbles upon one of the Pioneer probes...
...I could see them hauling it back home and then getting to work; after several generations of toil and study they'd possibly be able to decipher the Pioneer plaque itself...
We could've made it easier, I think. Something like this:
And, after another 1000 years or so, something of theirs could possibly reach our home turf.
What the hell would they find in this Solar System after that amount of time?
I couldn't imagine.
But Mister Clarke did, once, and while that story ain't likely to pan out in the long run (remember all the people still using typewriters in '2001'?) here's to a legendary, visionary, and intellectually brilliant writer who dared to dream......
Hacks like me can only marvel at his work, and if we really try, we can learn as well.
