“Your Majesty crossing the Ocean would require a massive Horse the size of ten or even an hundred Elephants”
I don’t understand his reasoning.
Once a civilization is thriving in space, materials are practically infinite, and self building factories mean that the only budget is time.
Personally I think that the great filter is surviving the pollution and climate destruction from a civilization’s industrial revolution. And that very few civs make it past that to thrive in space. So we may get a big space faring civ every 10 million years or so, and we don’t know whether a civ would stay as a space farer forever.
Unless there really is a whole field of physics that we haven’t touched yet. If that’s the case, all bets are off.
An unbelievably fast rocket? Seriously? We don’t really know how we’re going to get to other stars but one thing is for sure: it will not be with rockets.
We don’t have any other workable idea, and there doesn’t appear to be enough physics we don’t know to allow for anything else
Quantum theory was born of people filling in the corners of what was believed to be a complete physics.
Right and now that hole was filled in. We have less holes left, and we often have characterized the holes even though we don’t understand them.
You know, Max Planck was told not to pursue physics because there wasn’t much left to discover anyways. By a physics professor. 150 years ago.
You’re statement is based on incomplete knowledge. There is now way to know how much there’s left to know.
Believing that everything that needs to be known is totalitarian by definition.
Once truth becomes a known quantity, Correct Action becomes objectively calculable, and non-compliance to the Correct Action is seen as completely devoid of value.
This is why totalitarianism tends to become dictatorship.
there doesn’t appear to be enough physics we don’t know to allow for anything else
until we do! (my admission that we hopefully have so much more to discover).
however, the issue at hand is the here and now. we have theroms that describe what we know to be theoretically possible - but those are far and away from what we think is possible now, e.g. LK-99… AFAIK, there is nothing that says we cant have RT/AP superconductivity, but did we really just make a breakthrough?! (hopeful, fawning sounds)
we do still have to deal in what we currently think of as “reality” and things like FTL and the tech required for alien visitation are way outside of our current understanding - to the point of being magic. surely no one should accept “magic” as an answer to a serious question on possible alien visitation.
He does casually brush it off, and money isn’t a scientific reason to dismiss anything. I’m skeptical too, but this was a terrible approach.
Money represents effort and resources, so while it is worded flippant it is a valid point that we shouldn’t assume interplanetary flight is just a weekend away for aliens.
We don’t know the conditions on that theoretical alien world. They could be post-scarcity, or alternatively, they could be threatened to the extent that no cost is too high.
He is saying there is no reason to assume they have reached that point just to explain something that is most likely a misunderstanding of something mundane.
Ignoring the absurdity in his reply, I honestly think he’s probably just butthurt that if aliens are here, they haven’t reached out to him yet.