Sorry for the digression in my last post. I think the aliens may be visitors from the future. Or an alternate dimension. Or a archetypical vision. Or maybe it's all bull chit. Has David Jacobs ever been on the show? He seems to think they are out to get us.
Sure, they
could be from the future, a parallel dimension, the
Jungian Collective Unconsciousness, or from
Homer's Land Of Chocolate. Anything could be possible given the reported extreme flight characteristics of these things. I'm not disparaging these theories, or trying to discredit them -- merely pointing out that they're not necessary.
Given the lack of available data, assume that we're average. Not too smart, not too dumb. Just in the middle area of the bell curve. Like most other civilizations. This seems to be a good rational place to start.
Currently, we're about a .7 on the 0-3
Kardashev scale which attempts to map out the amount of energy available to a civilization. Assuming we're the first technological civilization in the solar system, it's taken 4.5 billion years (about the midway point of our rather average G2 star) to end up with us being able to chuck an object 10 times our own body mass from our planet to the edge of the solar system. Interestingly, we have also uncovered the means of our own construction during this time - DNA.
Very interestingly, we are now on the cusp of imaging planets our own size... so if we're very lucky, we'd know where to go to find other inhabited worlds.
So if we found a viable target world we could, at this very minute, start a construction project on a voyager-sized probe containing the building blocks of our own organism and launch it to another world where there might be life. It might take a long time to get there (say 10K-100K years) but it
could make it. If we were really smart we might even get it to soft land and start creating a foetus human being. To those who say "you can't get there from here" I say you're not being imaginitive enough. A purely academic exercise to be sure, but you get the point.
So that's where we've gotten to in 4.5 billion years.
If it's average for a life-sustaining world, consider this -- there
billions of sun-like stars in our galaxy alone. All about the same age as our sun give or take a few billion years.
But why stop there?
The average PC my youngest child will use at my age will have the equivalent horespower as my brain. Not a supercomputer, an average $1000 home PC.
In 50-100 years it is a resonable extension of our current technology to think that we will be able to image our own brain at the atomic level
as it functions. If we can image a functioning brain, we can run a virtual copy on a computer... and
perhaps, just
perhaps, have the first fully functional AI. Which would also effectively be immortal.
100-200 years after that, we may cease to use our meat bodies at all. What purpose would we have? We could always construct equivalents if needed (assuming viable nanotechnology allows this)... but for what purpose?
So in a few hundred years (a rounding error on 4.5 billion years) we could reasonably extrapolate that our world could send digital copies of our consciousness to other worlds complete with
nanotech universal assemblers to build whatever we needed using the raw materials found on or near other potentially inhabited worlds. These assemblers are also plausible extrapolations of our current understanding; after all, we're the evolution of one (bacteria).
I'd personally assume at that point we'd at least be a 1.0 on the Kardashev scale -- capable of using all the energy available on the planet. So instead of taking 10K-100K years to get somewhere, maybe it's a thousand years. Or a hundred. Doesn't matter too much anyway; you could always power down the digital consciousness stored and spin it up when you got close.
No magic warp drive/interdimensional travel/bugaboo physics required. Not that we won't have developed it by then; the human species is extremely proficient at hacking around the laws of nature.
All in 4.5 billion years. Give or take. On average.
So imagine what the smart guys could be capable of.
