Re:It’s not aliens. It’ll probably never be aliens. So stop....
by RetpolineDrama on Tuesday February 14, 2023 @10:40AM
(#34790877)
>Any alien race with technology to reach Sol will also have superior technology to defend themselves.
Actually I was surprised to find this isn't _strictly_ true, but it is likely.
One possibility is other solar systems (far away) with a different blend of materials that make certain advancements "easier". One hypothetical example is a far away solar system having high quantities of "exotic" stable super-heavy elements that make things like FTL possible.
In such a scenario we wouldn't discover it because it's not naturally occurring in our solar system, and we wouldn't stumble on it until we built a large enough particle accelerator. So another race could be _way_ ahead of us with respect to FTL, but way behind us in things like material science or computers. Imagine if their solar system was completely missing say... silicon.
Actually I was surprised to find this isn't _strictly_ true, but it is likely.
One possibility is other solar systems (far away) with a different blend of materials that make certain advancements "easier". One hypothetical example is a far away solar system having high quantities of "exotic" stable super-heavy elements that make things like FTL possible.
In such a scenario we wouldn't discover it because it's not naturally occurring in our solar system, and we wouldn't stumble on it until we built a large enough particle accelerator. So another race could be _way_ ahead of us with respect to FTL, but way behind us in things like material science or computers. Imagine if their solar system was completely missing say... silicon.