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by Enginerrrd
640 days ago
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Side issue, but if you don't care about travel time, you also have another big problem. The frequency with which stuff happens that matters to civilizations has increased significantly over time. Meaning that the time intervals that matter have gone down a LOT as we've evolved and that seems like a natural tendency on the basis of natural selection: higher frequency strategies will tend to dominate. So then you have this massive juxtaposition between probe travel times and things civilizations care about. It's a total mismatch. By the time the probe reaches its destination and can come back, the civilization will likely have completely changed and/or forgotten about it. |
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Technological change is probably a sigmoid like most things. There could be people out there who have already won physics, figured out the entire unified theory of how everything works, and have developed most of the core technological stuff they ever will. At that point they might calm back down and become more stable over long periods of time. These are the kinds of civilizations that would send slow probes or one-way colony ships out and would be willing and able to wait.
It's very hard to think about potential aliens without dragging in anthropocentric or even recent-history-centric assumptions.