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3I/ATLAS: Probably NOT an alien interstellar probe

Still far too slow for practical interstellar travel. Thousands of years of travel time between stars would be playing an incredibly long game.....
Sure, if thousands of years is a long time.

A mayfly would look at Apollo, and say "Ten years is far too slow for a practical Moon landing program. Who would bother with a project that will take three thousand lifetimes to complete?".

Aliens are, if nothing else, alien. Assuming that their practicalities are the same as ours seems like a poor idea.
 
Still far too slow for practical interstellar travel. Thousands of years of travel time between stars would be playing an incredibly long game.....
Sure, if thousands of years is a long time.

A mayfly would look at Apollo, and say "Ten years is far too slow for a practical Moon landing program. Who would bother with a project that will take three thousand lifetimes to complete?".

Aliens are, if nothing else, alien. Assuming that their practicalities are the same as ours seems like a poor idea.

Maybe so, could well be, but Fermi's Paradox appears to suggest the galaxy is populated by Mayflies.
 
Fermi's "paradox" suggests that the galaxy (or rather, the nearby bits of it) isn't populated at all.

Which wouldn't surprise me.

We have only had the capability to even start looking, for a few decades. We are a LONG way from being able to send out a probe to even a nearby star - the Voyagers have only just left our own solar system - and for an alien civilisation to spot them would be a massive ask, even if they happen to eventually pass close to any such civilisation.

The chance of us spotting aliens is (crudely) the same as chance of them spotting us, multiplied by the number of alien civilisations that are in a position to do so.

That first number is so close to zero that unless the local star systems are absolutely teeming with civilisations, the chance is also zero (any non-huge number multiplied by almost zero, is almost zero).

We don't stand out. Our strongest broadcasts would struggle to produce the Wow! signal on even a nearby star.

If we live in a galaxy teeming with intelligent life, we shouldn't expect to know it. Space is just too BIG.

We don't know what an interstellar probe from an alien world might look like, but we do know what one from our world looks like. And the Voyagers and Pioneers (and more recently, New Horizons) don't look like 3I/ATLAS at all. Nor are any future solar escape probes likely to look like it in the foreseeable future.
 
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Still far too slow for practical interstellar travel. Thousands of years of travel time between stars would be playing an incredibly long game.....

If any one node can duplicate itself and occupy a 2nd node once every 30,000 years, that's 32 nodes after just 150,000 years; 1K nodes after 300,000 years; 1 million nodes after 600,000 years, 1 trillion nodes -- as many as stars in the Milky Way -- after a mere 1.2 million years.

  • "Adopt the pace of nature: her secret is patience.": — Ralph Waldo Emerson
  • "He that can have patience can have what he will.": — Benjamin Franklin
  • "To lose patience is to lose the battle.": — Mahatma Gandhi
 

Maybe so, could well be, but Fermi's Paradox appears to suggest the galaxy is populated by Mayflies.
From looking at how the world is going I think it very likely the Great Filter is ahead of us.
 
Fermi's "paradox" suggests that the galaxy (or rather, the nearby bits of it) isn't populated at all.

Which wouldn't surprise me.

We have only had the capability to even start looking, for a few decades. We are a LONG way from being able to send out a probe to even a nearby star - the Voyagers have only just left our own solar system - and for an alien civilisation to spot them would be a massive ask, even if they happen to eventually pass close to any such civilisation.

The chance of us spotting aliens is (crudely) the same as chance of them spotting us, multiplied by the number of alien civilisations that are in a position to do so.

That first number is so close to zero that unless the local star systems are absolutely teeming with civilisations, the chance is also zero (any non-huge number multiplied by almost zero, is almost zero).

We don't stand out. Our strongest broadcasts would struggle to produce the Wow! signal on even a nearby star.

If we live in a galaxy teeming with intelligent life, we shouldn't expect to know it. Space is just too BIG.

We don't know what an interstellar probe from an alien world might look like, but we do know what one from our world looks like. And the Voyagers and Pioneers (and more recently, New Horizons) don't look like 3I/ATLAS at all. Nor are any future solar escape probes likely to look like it in the foreseeable future.
If a civilization stays around their star I would agree with your analysis. But I see no reason to think that no members of an advanced civilization would be interested in going elsewhere. You need enough people to support a technological civilization at your destination, or you need machines capable of removing the need for covering all needed fields of knowledge. And note that if upload becomes possible (and why wouldn't it?) you get a situation where the equipment goes by slowboat but the people move at lightspeed. All it takes is one tiny subset of one species and the galaxy teems with advanced race(s).

And note that even if we stay home--a K2 civilization can be detected at short intergalactic range by the Webb telescope if there isn't dust in the way. (Many parts of the Milky Way are blocked by dust, we can actually see Andromeda better than we can see our own galaxy.)
 

Maybe so, could well be, but Fermi's Paradox appears to suggest the galaxy is populated by Mayflies.
From looking at how the world is going I think it very likely the Great Filter is ahead of us.

That's how it looks, but who knows, perhaps Fermi's Paradox is a matter of intelligent life being extremely rare and interstellar travel too difficult.
 
Fermi's "paradox" suggests that the galaxy (or rather, the nearby bits of it) isn't populated at all.

Which wouldn't surprise me.

We have only had the capability to even start looking, for a few decades. We are a LONG way from being able to send out a probe to even a nearby star - the Voyagers have only just left our own solar system - and for an alien civilisation to spot them would be a massive ask, even if they happen to eventually pass close to any such civilisation.

The chance of us spotting aliens is (crudely) the same as chance of them spotting us, multiplied by the number of alien civilisations that are in a position to do so.

That first number is so close to zero that unless the local star systems are absolutely teeming with civilisations, the chance is also zero (any non-huge number multiplied by almost zero, is almost zero).

We don't stand out. Our strongest broadcasts would struggle to produce the Wow! signal on even a nearby star.

If we live in a galaxy teeming with intelligent life, we shouldn't expect to know it. Space is just too BIG.

We don't know what an interstellar probe from an alien world might look like, but we do know what one from our world looks like. And the Voyagers and Pioneers (and more recently, New Horizons) don't look like 3I/ATLAS at all. Nor are any future solar escape probes likely to look like it in the foreseeable future.
If a civilization stays around their star I would agree with your analysis.
And it seems that the physical constraints of sheer distance mean that they will.
But I see no reason to think that no members of an advanced civilization would be interested in going elsewhere.
I am interested in going to the Moon. But I can't. Nobody can. Well, a dozen people did; But that was a massive undertaking, just to travel a paltry 1.3 light seconds.
You need enough people to support a technological civilization at your destination, or you need machines capable of removing the need for covering all needed fields of knowledge.
None of which exists. Or is likely to.
And note that if upload becomes possible (and why wouldn't it?)
Why would it?
you get a situation where the equipment goes by slowboat but the people move at lightspeed. All it takes is one tiny subset of one species and the galaxy teems with advanced race(s).
Sure. But even for just that one, it needs to be achievable.
And note that even if we stay home--a K2 civilization can be detected at short intergalactic range by the Webb telescope if there isn't dust in the way.
There hasn't been time for a K2 civilisation to arise within a short range of us. We have only made it to about K0.75 on Sagan's adjusted scale, and there seems little need for much more growth, particularly as human population has essentially peaked.
(Many parts of the Milky Way are blocked by dust, we can actually see Andromeda better than we can see our own galaxy.)
Sure. But we couldn't detect our own civilisation right now, from just a few tens of lightyears away - and there wasn't any such civilisation to detect from any further away than that.
 
But I see no reason to think that no members of an advanced civilization would be interested in going elsewhere.
I am interested in going to the Moon. But I can't. Nobody can. Well, a dozen people did; But that was a massive undertaking, just to travel a paltry 1.3 light seconds.
80 years ago nobody had been in space. Now tourists go. Things become easier over time.

You need enough people to support a technological civilization at your destination, or you need machines capable of removing the need for covering all needed fields of knowledge.
None of which exists. Or is likely to.
I find your ideas on what technology can do very pessimistic. And yet you are extremely optimistic about the possibility of survival if things go wrong.
And note that if upload becomes possible (and why wouldn't it?)
Why would it?
Why wouldn't it? Even if we never truly understand how the human mind works we can emulate the hardware. Might cost 100x on the performance but that puts it in Apollo range (remember, the human brain is highly parallel, thus it can be emulated by a bunch of computers in parallel.) That means the only true limitation is performing an adequate read to load the emulator with and I find it hard to believe that would be impossible given extreme pressure + extreme cold (keep the ice crystals from expanding and doing damage) followed by ablating away the material to read what's underneath. This is of course destructive and the first cases would be hail mary's--but someone near death for reasons that do not involve the brain very well might be willing to take the chance once it had been demonstrated on animals.

you get a situation where the equipment goes by slowboat but the people move at lightspeed. All it takes is one tiny subset of one species and the galaxy teems with advanced race(s).
Sure. But even for just that one, it needs to be achievable.
A craft that is mostly lightsail and using current production techniques can do about 1% of lightspeed, you can add a bit with lasers to overcome drag losses but you'll need to arrive with only .01c for a sunlike star unless there's a laser there to slow you down.
And note that even if we stay home--a K2 civilization can be detected at short intergalactic range by the Webb telescope if there isn't dust in the way.
There hasn't been time for a K2 civilisation to arise within a short range of us. We have only made it to about K0.75 on Sagan's adjusted scale, and there seems little need for much more growth, particularly as human population has essentially peaked.
Short intergalactic range. Like Andromeda.
(Many parts of the Milky Way are blocked by dust, we can actually see Andromeda better than we can see our own galaxy.)
Sure. But we couldn't detect our own civilisation right now, from just a few tens of lightyears away - and there wasn't any such civilisation to detect from any further away than that.
Someone carefully looking could find us at tens of light years. Earth is far too noisy in the radio spectrum, you don't need to be able to decode individual transmissions, just note the presence of excess energy in specific frequency bands. While there might be a natural source of radio energy it's not going to exhibit the sharp frequency edges of Earth. (Frequencies used for radar, especially military radars.)
 
80 years ago nobody had been in space. Now tourists go.
Billionaire tourists, who don't care about the fact that "space" just means "above the Karman Line", and is barely "space" at all. 12 people have visited another celestial body, none since 1972, none "tourists" of any kind.

This is not a stepping stone to interstellar travel. It's barely a stepping stone to interplanetary travel.
 
Maybe so, could well be, but Fermi's Paradox appears to suggest the galaxy is populated by Mayflies.
From looking at how the world is going I think it very likely the Great Filter is ahead of us.
That's how it looks, but who knows, perhaps Fermi's Paradox is a matter of intelligent life being extremely rare and interstellar travel too difficult.
Or else there is not a single Great Filter but several filters, behind us in time, at us in time, and ahead of us in time.

Looking at our emergence, there are some events that happened several times, and some other events that happened only once.

Did they happen only once because they are rare? Or did they happen only once because they preempted other events? Or did they happen only once because there has to be a first one of them?
 
And note that if upload becomes possible (and why wouldn't it?)
Why would it?
Why wouldn't it? Even if we never truly understand how the human mind works we can emulate the hardware. Might cost 100x on the performance but that puts it in Apollo range (remember, the human brain is highly parallel, thus it can be emulated by a bunch of computers in parallel.) That means the only true limitation is performing an adequate read to load the emulator with and I find it hard to believe that would be impossible given extreme pressure + extreme cold (keep the ice crystals from expanding and doing damage) followed by ablating away the material to read what's underneath. This is of course destructive and the first cases would be hail mary's--but someone near death for reasons that do not involve the brain very well might be willing to take the chance once it had been demonstrated on animals.
I currently have no reason to believe that this kind of technology wouldn’t simply kill me and make a copy who thinks it is me. But “I” would be dead.

This is how I view Star Trek transporters.
 
Earthlike planets orbiting Sunlike stars? These may be rare, because many of the planetary systems that we have found are very unusual by Solar-System standards.

Origin of life? All our planet's present biota is descended from only one origin event, as is all earlier biota with recoverable biochemisry, like gene sequences. Furthermore, there was a lot of evolution between that event and the Last Universal Common Ancestor (LUCA). That organism was much like present-day methanogens, though it likely released acetic acid instead of methane.

Rarity? Preemption?

Phototrophy: extracting energy from light.

This evolved two times, what I call chlorophyll and retinal phototrophy.

Retinal phototrophy is done by only a few kinds of organisms, the halobacteria. It pumps hydrogen ions out of the cell across the cell membrane, a very widespread form of energy metabolism ("chemiosmosis").

Chlorophyll phototrophy, photosynthesis, is much more common. It energizes electrons to be transferred to various raw materials for biosynthesis, and their energy can also pump hydrogen ions across a membrane.

The most familiar kind uses water as an electron source, with this electron-deficient water becoming hydrogen ions and oxygen molecules. This also evolved only once.
 
Star Trek transporters had' Heisenberg Compensators' to get around the Uncertainty Principle when scanning particles in an object.

You could also hear explosions and a full orchestra in a vacuum.

But then that is scifi, real science and imagined science as props and plot lines.

Some seem to take scifi as reality.

If you get to 1% C how do you stop or make a turn?

The kinetic energy would be .5*(mass of ship)*(,01*C)^2.

Th energy has to go somewhere.

Micrometeorites were a problem for the space shuttle. There are pictures of damage on the net somewhere.

The ISS protects itself from micrometeorites using multi-layered Whipple shields, which consist of a thin outer aluminum bumper and one or more inner layers of materials like Kevlar and Nextel. The outer bumper vaporizes and breaks up the impacting object into a dispersed cloud of smaller fragments, preventing a single, damaging impact on the module's main hull. While this system effectively shields against smaller particles, larger debris can cause significant damage, leading to potential hull breaches and depressurization that astronauts must manage through emergency procedures.



The Whipple shield or Whipple bumper, invented by Fred Whipple,[1] is a type of spaced armor shielding to protect crewed and uncrewed spacecraft from hypervelocity impact / collisions with micrometeoroids and orbital debris whose velocities generally range between 3 and 18 kilometres per second (1.9 and 11.2 mi/s). According to NASA, the Whipple shield is designed to withstand collisions with debris up to 1 cm.[2]

There are several variations on the simple Whipple shield. Multi-shock shields,[3][4] like the one used on the Stardust spacecraft, use multiple bumpers spaced apart to increase the shield's ability to protect the spacecraft. Whipple shields that have a filling between the rigid layers of the shield are called stuffed Whipple shields.[5][6] The filling in these shields is usually a high-strength material like Kevlar or Nextel aluminium oxide fiber.[7] The type of shield, the material, thickness and distance between layers are varied to produce a shield with minimal mass that will also minimize the probability of penetration. There are over 100 shield configurations on the International Space Station alone,[8] with important and high-risk areas having better shielding.
 
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Micrometeorites were a problem for the space shuttle. There are pictures of damage on the net somewhere.
The Whipple shield or Whipple bumper, invented by Fred Whipple,[1] is a type of spaced armor shielding to protect crewed and uncrewed spacecraft from hypervelocity impact / collisions with micrometeoroids and orbital debris whose velocities generally range between 3 and 18 kilometres per second (1.9 and 11.2 mi/s). According to NASA, the Whipple shield is designed to withstand collisions with debris up to 1 cm.[2]

Bear in mind that for a spacecraft travelling at 1%c relative to the local interstellar medium, micrometeorites will hit not at a mere 3-18 km/s, but at more like 3,000 km/s. Kinetic energy varies with the square of velocity, so the shield needs to be about a million times as effective, in order to give a similar level of protection.

And of course, the ISS is close enough to Earth that the shield can be repaired or replaced if necessary, during the few decades of the station's life. An interstellar probe might get up to 1% of c eventually, but it's going to take a while to accelerate. The fastest manmade objects so far took six decades to get to the heliopause, compared to the ISS fifteen year initial design lifespan (and maybe thirty years of extended lifespan).

So you need a shield that's a million times as effective, with a design life that's many times as long (for an interstellar voyage at 1%c, likely a century or more), and with no possibility of obtaining replacement shielding materials for any repairs.

The best material for such a shield is probably either unobtanium or handwavium.
 
Multicellularity evolved numerous times - [Diversity of 'simple' multicellular eukaryotes: 45 independent cases and six types of multicellularity - PubMed](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/37475165/) - but most kinds are relatively simple. Complex multicellularity is much rarer - The Multiple Origins of Complex Multicellularity | Annual Reviews - only six: animals, land plants, kelp, some red algae, and two big groupings of fungi.

Multicellularity by architecture:
  • Animallike - only once
  • Plantlike - several times
  • Funguslike - at least twice
  • Slime-moldlike - several times

If animallike multicellularity is rare, then might there be some planet with lots of trees and mushrooms and seaweed and the like but no animals?
 
Looking at colonization of land, plants did that only once and animals several times. Why plants only once?

Of animals that moved onto land, most of these colonizers have relatively small descendants.  Largest and heaviest animals largest masses (all present day unless stated otherwise):
  • Mollusks: Giant African snail (Achatina achatina) - 1 kg
  • Annelids: African giant earthworm (Microchaetus rappi). - 1.5 kg
  • Arthropods:
    • Insects: Goliath beetle (Goliathus goliatus, G. regius) - 100 g
    • Arachnids: Goliath birdeater (Theraphosa blondi), a tarantula - 175 g
    • Crustaceans: coconut crab (Birgus latro) - 4 kg
  • Vertebrates:
    • African bush elephant (Loxodonta africana) - avg 6 mt, max 10.4 mt
    • All time: sauropod Giraffatitan brancai - 30 to 60 mt (largest with well-preserved fossils)
What helped vertebrates grow large is an internal skeleton, and that evolved maybe only once.
 
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