The fastest human-made (physical object) ever is Helios Two which travels at about .02% the speed of light. It takes 5000 years to travel the distance that man-made light signals would travel in one year.
The next nearest star (with any sort of planets) would take Helios Two 40,000 years to travel to and back.
But the first star with a planet very very very close to Earth in features (and thus supporting intelligent life) could easily be 100 light years away - taking Helios Two a million years to travel to and back to visit our closest relatives.
So we decide to 'can' the holiday vacation to this particular paradise -pity because Jill Tarter's fund-raising SETI brochure looked so nice : no summer vacation is that long - not even for Canadian MPs.
But since we got a signal from Planet X's beings (but we can't figure anything about the language it is in), we decide to type out a brief texting message back in English (hey it works with foreign waiters, doesn't it ?).
And we wait and wait and wait (100 years) for the reply.
Rather we don't - our great-great-grandchildren wait for the reply.
Long distance ping-pong.
And since the Chinese also invented water torture as well as ping pong, call it the slow drip,drip version ping pong.
Yawn --- or maybe, SCREAM !!!!!!......
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
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...
No comments:
Post a Comment