It's been a while since I've studied this, but aren't we a very young planet? I'd have to imagine that if folding space was possible that a much older civilization would have figured it out by now.
Wormholes are all well and good, but even if they exist, using them as a practical means of transportation seems exceedingly unlikely. Either that or figuring it out is harder than building a holodeck. Anything harder than building a holodeck can never be invented, because nobody would even try.
I believe that aliens exist, but I sincerely doubt they will ever come to our planet. At least not for a very long time.
I think we're the aliens. Some more intelligent form of life has us in their little experiment for 8th grade science fair; or a few million years ago, some Being bought a Build-Your-Own Universe-in-a-snow-globe kit for their kid, and we're sitting on their shelf right now.
I remember an article I read a long time ago that compared some of the technology in the BSG remake to realistic technology. Amid overly detailed criticism of the the shipboard gravity systems and comparisons of RADAR to DRADIS, there was a section that mentioned how the FTL drives actually worked by folding space in the series, but it went on to discuss that this is apparently quite possible, in theory. IF such a thing were possible, though, it would likely be the only method of long-distance interstellar travel. As I understand it, folding space is much more plausible (again, in theory) than actually exceeding the speed of light. That said, how would we even go about detecting the use of such a system? I'm with the people who strongly believe in life on other planets, but only of the nonintelligent type. Given the unique conditions found on and around Earth that allow us to exist here, even if there were other intelligent life, I would only imagine there would be a tiny handful of other planets, and they would likely be far enough away that we would never reach them. Still, space exploration is one thing about my old age I have to look forward to. By the time I'm seventy, assuming we haven't all wiped ourselves out, I think we'll have an understanding and capability of space search/exploration that will make the moon landing and current "deep-space" probes look like child's toys. Fuck, maybe by then we'll have the damn Collider actually running, and we can understand what the fuck dark matter is, because right now for all we know dark matter is an intelligent lifeform that abducts crazy rednecks and sticks a hairbrush... And that's what it comes down to. We just don't really have the means to really explore at this point.
All science fiction nonsense about wormholes aside (whose mere existence is highly uncertain for a bunch of different reasons), light is a strict upper bound on the speed any body can attain. As such, even if there is intelligent life elsewhere in the universe (very possible), we'll never meet it. Which probably isn't a bad thing, since, as others noted, they would probably kill and/or enslave us all.
I don't know why everybody is so pessimistic about their intentions, look at how much the quality of life improved for Native Americans when they were discovered.
Ok guys, why do people think that a species that can cross the inky blackness of space needs our resources? Let’s get one thing straight, once you have reached a tech level that can master space/time the synthesis of water, gold, oxygen & anuses would be rudimentary science. The danger is a grab for real estate, if earth like planets are really rare and a species evolved on just such a planet then Earth would be of significant value, although NOT to a species that is truly intergalactic, rare becomes irrelevant when your talking in the multiple trillions, a true intergalactic would simply find a planet less likely to nuke itself via it's psychotic naked ape natives. Danger lies nearby, say 100 light years. Think not so civilised, from ruined planet, ark ships, and a one way roll of the dice to take our planet. Unlikely. But it would be a dirty shitfight.
It's not that we think all aliens are white, just the ones that manage to accomplish anything useful, like space travel.
Why? It has been a while since I've studied physics, but I seem to remember a theory about how you don't age, or at least age far slower, when you are traveling at the speed of light. I know its very Planet of the Apes, but if this theory is true it would make interstellar travel at least plausible. Is this theory still around, or has it been debunked?
You "age" less because time moves slower. So you don't really age less, you just experience time at a different rate than on earth. When something is 250 million light years away, it will take 250 million years to get there travelling at light speed. It's still 250 million years.
You bring up a good point. I think if we're going to be destroyed by an alien civilization, it certainly won't be for our resources. I think the most plausible explanation for "evil aliens" destroying our planet or wiping out mankind would be so we don't continue to advance and pose a threat to them thousands of years in the future. Self preservation is the name of the game. If you like science fiction, a few books that deal with that subject matter are Forge of God and its sequel Anvil of the Stars. As far as the "is there life elsewhere?" debate, I think it's a certainty. I've seen several people voice their opinions that while life is sure to exist, the probability of intelligent life is lower. Why? What makes humans think we're so unique with a seemingly infinite number of planets in the known universe? (There are an estimated 70 sextillion stars in the universe, so the amount of planets is unbelievably absurd) You seriously think we're the only ones who have figured out how to shit indoors? It's amazing to me that even among the scholarly elite, humankind's arrogance and self-importance is blinding. I'll say this, if we're the only intelligent beings in a universe that's roughly 93,000,000,000 light years in diameter, then I'd better start going to church because humans are a miracle of unimaginable importance.
Not to sound naive, but what is with the whole "never going faster than lightspeed" thing? I'm not saying that people far smarter than me have not done some truly mind boggling math to prove this to be true. But people far smarter than me were certain that sound was an "unbreakable" barrier. People smarter than me were certain human flight was impossible. And ect. It just seems to me that every "impossible task" humanity has ran across has been conquered. All it takes is that one crazy person who wont accept no. Furthermore, as others have said, what kind of hubris does it take to believe in the entire brain fucking vastness of space that we are alone in the intelligent life category? I firmly belive that there are many intelligent species throughout the workable INFINITY of space. Hell there are multiple species on this very planet that are approaching a point we might condescend to call intelligent. Do I think we have been visited? The short answer is no. Because if they have been visited for as long as there have been reports, then I don't see why they haven't made some sort of proclomation to the people of earth yet. But then again an alien civilizations mesure of time might be so vastly different than ours that they feel 100 years is just due dilligence. All I know is there are more things in heaven and earth than dreamed of in our science, and our sience dreams pretty damn big.
It's not just math, it's experiments that validate the math. The short, simple version is basically this: relativity predicts that as anything with mass gets faster, it takes more and more force to accelerate it. To accelerate it near the speed of light you need truly incredible amounts of energy. To accelerate it to the speed of light, you need an infinite amount of energy. We can verify the predictions of relativity in particle accelerators and such. Because of the strength of relativity's predictions, scientists have considered clever ways of getting from Point A to Point B effectively faster than light, without actually going faster than light. These usually involve some manipulation of space. That is, you squeeze the universe to bring Point A and Point B closer together, or you create a shortcut (e.g., a wormhole) between the two points - so rather than going a long distance quickly, you shorten the distance. We know that things with mass bend space around them, although it takes a truly epic amount of mass (like that of a black hole) for this bending to be practically meaningful. Wormholes are theoretically-permitted (but not observed) shortcuts between two distant points in the universe. When we say "theoretically permitted," we mean that their existence would not necessarily violate any of the known laws of physics - but that they have never actually been observed. You can read more about some of the hypotheses surrounding wormholes here. It's pretty far-out stuff, and you get into things like "well, we could maybe, hypothetically, if we had infinite control over the universe, create a stable wormhole. All we would need is a large quantity of a type of matter that, again, is only theoretically permitted and has never been seen anywhere in nature." With human flight, we could look up and see birds and insects actually flying. We have never observed an object with mass traveling faster than light, and when we accelerate things with mass, we see the predictions of relativity playing out. As romantic as it is to think anything is possible with enough application of will, the universe does have rules.