News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

A comment on SETI spots dozens of new mysterious signals emanating from distant galaxy. Parent comment

Re:SETI spots dozens of new mysterious signals emanating fro... by simonh on Friday September 14, 2018 @03:43AM (#17985430)
>Agreed that it's a flight of fancy to speculate on these yet unknown capabilities, but that doesn't mean they aren't highly likely to exist.

It's just as likely that there are constraints on what is possible that we are not aware of. Take Newtonian physics for example. It turns out physical systems are significantly more constrained by relativity than Newton would have supposed. Relativity makes less possible, not more.

We might assume that super advanced civilizations can do things based on our understanding of physics, but we might be wrong. A Newtonian physicist might assume an advanced civilization could accelerate rockets to arbitrarily fast speeds and get to the nearest star in less than 4 years, but would have been wrong.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:SETI spots dozens of new mysterious signals emanating fro... by adrianN on Friday September 14, 2018 @06:34AM (#17986119)
A Newtonian physicist would also have known that it would take an awesome amount of fuel to accelerate to very high speeds. Being unaware of nuclear power they would have concluded that it's utterly impossible to go fast enough to reach even the nearest star in reasonable time frames.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:SETI spots dozens of new mysterious signals emanating fro... by maxerickson on Friday September 14, 2018 @06:06AM (#17986018)
At 1 g of sustained acceleration you do get to nearby stars in a number of years.

The big impact of relativity is that less time passes on the ship.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:SETI spots dozens of new mysterious signals emanating fro... by colordrops on Friday September 14, 2018 @07:24AM (#17986350)
> Relativity makes less possible, not more

That's not strictly true. Before relativity, time dilation was not know to be possible.

[ Parent | on HN ]