Helios II is the fastest man-made object ever. If it survives, it will act as a sign of other intelligent life in the Universe for some possible Intelligent Life form living at the currently known edge of the Universe ,14 billion light years away.
But fast as Helios II is, it is only about one four thousandth the speed of light, so it would take at least 60 trillion years to reach that civilization at the bleeding edge of the currently visible universe.
Only if Intelligent Life is very close indeed , basically existing on the planets orbiting the stars closest to us, we should we care - ours and their civilizations will be long dead - by natural star death alone - long before we reach each other.
Even without humanity's best current efforts to speed up the process (shout out to the denier classes !) , the Earth's life will be gone in two billion years .
At Helios II's top speed (not really sustainable, in practise, for very long) that will take our messenger only 1/60,000 of the way across the Universe and back with its response, if it expects to find any humans left to care.
I don't believe humanity will ever meet and greet other intelligent life - we might find a few invisible, but living viable, bacteria deep down a hole on Mars, at best.
But we could get HG Wells in reverse - that Martian bacteria could end up killing all us humans rather than earthly bacteria killing all the Martians.
Maybe its for the best, if we never find other life off Earth 1.0 ....
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Why My Urgency ?
- Michael Marshall
- Nova Scotia
- Histories of WWII all start with the presumption that it was a war raged between humans and human ideologies, with Nature’s climate and geography as side issues easily surmounted.My blog, on the contrary will only accept that it was conflict between humans and their ideology that STARTED the war but that it was the barriers thrown up by Mother Nature (geography & climate) that turned it into a war that lasted between 6 to 15 years and expanded to thoroughly involve all the world’s oceans and continents. High Modernity may have started the war convinced that Nature had been conquered and was about to be soon replaced by human Synthetic Autarky and that only human Tiger tanks and human Typhoon planes were to be feared. But by the end, more and more people had lost their naive faith in Scientism and were beginning to accept that humanity was thoroughly entangled with both the Nature of plants, animals & microbes as well as the Nature of so called “lesser” humanity. By 1965, the world was definitely entering the Age of Entanglement. Billions still believed - at least in part -with the promises of High Modernity but intellectually & emotionally, it was no longer dominant...
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