Re:Aliens on 1k nearby stars could see us, new study suggests
by tsimionescu on Sunday October 25, 2020 @06:20AM
(#24885196)
I am referring to all of the machinery on the ship in general - whether it's life support systems, engines, monitoring/navigation systems etc. Even if you could take a ship to outer space, freeze it to ~absolute 0, and launch it on its trajectory, you still need a computer to allow it to warm back up and land at its destination.
Keeping a computer running in outer space for a few thousand or hundred thousand years is a gigantic engineering task, far beyond anything we could achieve today.
And of course, in reality its unlikely you could rely on a single computer system and on 0 propulsion. It's far more likely that you'll need life support, engines, complex medical equipment, cooling systems, lights, all sorts of mechanical parts that will need power, replacements, and that degrade in time, especially at such huge scales.
Keeping a computer running in outer space for a few thousand or hundred thousand years is a gigantic engineering task, far beyond anything we could achieve today.
And of course, in reality its unlikely you could rely on a single computer system and on 0 propulsion. It's far more likely that you'll need life support, engines, complex medical equipment, cooling systems, lights, all sorts of mechanical parts that will need power, replacements, and that degrade in time, especially at such huge scales.