UFO Proliferation

[TimberWolf]

Like he says, so long as you change Planck's constant and the charge on the electron too then everything would be the same, but that wasn't what was speculated.

Anyway, I've often wondered why c is so low. It puts a limit on technological development and as noted quarantines the various star systems off from each other. Maybe that is the plan. Perhaps we should have a word with the great maker to get it changed?

I was more interested in avoiding having rewriting physics to accommodate a change in light speed since just on philosophical grounds I believe it would make no difference. If it were 'less', relativistic affects would appear 'earlier', distances would 'appear' longer and so if the speed of light changed we wouldn't even know it.

A fixed speed of light is a philosophical interpretation of reality anyway, a postulate of special relativity. I imagine other interpretation are possible, though less useful.

[TimberWolf]

Fermi Paradox specifies sub-light speed travel. It is the time-scales involved that raise the paradox.
Use a mind-game. Imagine the human race in 100 million years time. Would we still be pottering about on planet Earth messing with computers and stuff? No. We have I guess 100 stars within 20 light years, most with planetary systems. They'd be colonised, at least by mining colonies. And the 10,000 stars within 20 light years of those? Them too. Imagine our energy / signal output, it would be hard to miss even from 1000 light years away.
So the time has been there but we see nothing. And personally, if I try to visualise the human race in 100m yrs, I don't see it happening. In fact I'm stretching to see us around in 200!

100 million years needs a heck of a lot of imagination though! Why would these being want to roam? Why mine, surely elements could be manufactured from other matter or from energy?

[TheBigYinJames]

100 million years needs a heck of a lot of imagination though! Why would these being want to roam? Why mine, surely elements could be manufactured from other matter or from energy?

Also we wouldn't waste energy pumping it out uselessly into the cosmos. Advanced civilisations will be invisible from more than a few light years away.

[HairyArsedBloke]

I dispair sometimes... you lot haven't even found dilithium yet...

Come on, get on with it...

I don't want to be stuck here for ever.

They already have; it was ages ago. It’s a conspiracy by the big oil companies to hide it so as to protect their profits. You lizards should know that. After all, it’s you lot that are behind it all.

[TimberWolf]

Also we wouldn't waste energy pumping it out uselessly into the cosmos. Advanced civilisations will be invisible from more than a few light years away.

It's also hard to speculate on the Fermi paradox when we don't even know where 90% of the matter in the universe is! Early days.

[Marina]

It's also hard to speculate on the Fermi paradox when we don't even know where 90% of the matter in the universe is! Early days.

I think physicists know pretty much *where* most of it is. They just don't know *what* most of it is.

baryon ("ordinary") matter that we're made of and radiation makes up only 4% of mass/energy. So called dark matter makes up 22%, and the remaining 74% is uniform dark energy which drives cosmic expansion.

So in a way we and all we can see are simply froth on some murky bulk of material and energy whose nature is still an almost complete mystery.

[HairyArsedBloke]

Blimy, another one!

[Diver]

Mass Hysteria Rules