Edward SnowdenTalks Alien Communications With Neil deGrasse Tyson 142
An anonymous reader writes: Edward Snowden, the former contractor who leaked National Security Agency secrets publicly in 2013, is now getting attention for an odd subject: aliens. In a podcast interview with astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, Snowden suggested that alien communications might be encrypted so well that humans trying to eavesdrop on extraterrestrials would have no idea they were hearing anything but noise. There's only a small window in the development of communication in which unencrypted messages are the norm, Snowden said.
it's all alien spam (Score:5, Funny)
9 out of 10 alien messages are for tentacle enlargement pills
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they tentacled aliens are quite concerned in the negative population growth there as the supply of japanese school girls will be squeezed
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When the aliens find out they don't work, they'll get pissed and annihilate us for the hell of it.
Compression (Score:5, Insightful)
Sufficiently advanced compression could be indistinguishable from encryption (esp. if have a standard table to draw from).
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The Encrypted (Score:2)
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Usage~
Q: "Where's Jimmy?"
A: "I hear he got Encrypted!"
Damn...
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I think the gang name would be The Crypts.
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Maybe they don't even use RF (Score:5, Interesting)
All we know is radio, and listening with radio telescopes has yielded nothing. What if they use neutrinos or some other weird method that we don't know of?
Re:Maybe they don't even use RF (Score:5, Insightful)
Or just as likely, highly directional communications. They're the only type that would be of much use over interstellar distances anyway, and unless they happen to be pointed straight at our little blue marble they may as well not exist.
Re:Maybe they don't even use RF (Score:5, Informative)
Like Lasers, which allow them to use less power if they are transmitting their own data amongst there own solar system or galaxy.
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Or some kind of faster than light communication. If we're expecting them to have interstellar communication, why wouldn't it be faster than light? We presently have all of about zero means of detecting that kind of communication.
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faster than light communication?
even if that were possible, imagine the disk space it would take to store even a few seconds of it!
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Throughput is different from latency, you know.
But really, if there were aliens out there advanced enough to pick up our signals, they'd be advanced enough to crack our crypto.
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Never underestimate the bandwidth of a space Winnebago full of HDDs hurtling through a Stargate.
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According to our understanding of physics, FTL communication is completely impossible. So of course we assume that our understanding of physics is complete and that it is indeed impossible, and since we use radio for communications, we assume the ETs must use radio too.
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____________________________________
So far as someone else's assertion about encryption so good that it might be indistinguishable from background noise: Entirely plausble. Wouldn't well-encrypted data ideally have no repeating patte
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SETI has talked about looking for occasional brief flashes of lasers that just happen to be aimed our way. Unlike radio waves, lasers could allow us to listen in on civilizations many galaxies away.
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As soon as it starts spreading it rapidly becomes indistinguishable from background noise, especially over insterstellar distances. And all of that's assuming the laser isn't occluded by whatever it's targeting, which it probably would be 99% of the time. No, I fear the chances that random stray communications of whatever sort might hit us would probably be vanishingly unlikely, especially over the short period we've been listening.
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As soon as it starts spreading it rapidly becomes indistinguishable from background noise, especially over insterstellar distances. And all of that's assuming the laser isn't occluded by whatever it's targeting, which it probably would be 99% of the time. No, I fear the chances that random stray communications of whatever sort might hit us would probably be vanishingly unlikely, especially over the short period we've been listening.
Well, we could search for unexplained and very localized increases in white noise. Also the universe background noise isn't completely white.
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We're not looking for directed communications, but for accidental 'leakage'.
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How would electrons be any easier? That requires having wires between your communications nodes.
Maybe you're thinking of electromagnetic waves (radio). Those aren't electrons.
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Or maybe they don't use radio the way we do. We've got a whole planet here full of millions of life forms and only one of them ever discovered and harnessed radio, and then only very recently. So it appears life doesn't need radio to thrive.
Humans use it because we have a need to tell our old campfire stories at a distance, and because we like to or need to talk to each other. There is no reason to suspect another species would have these same needs. None of our nearly identical genetic cousins have the
Re:Maybe they don't even use RF (Score:4, Informative)
I think Snowden means to say, that if you have an uncompressed data signal there will be many repeating symbols which would stand out if we could see it.
However compressed data and encrypted data has ideally a pure random distribution of symbols, and therefor we won't be able to differentiate it with background noise (unless it is powerful random noise).
We know this is true because our own encryption methods are already ideal enough that we can't differentiate it from random noise. Compression algorithms come close but still detectable at the moment.
Re:Maybe they don't even use RF (Score:4, Funny)
we can't differentiate it from random noise
reminds me of fox news...
Re:Maybe they don't even use RF (Score:4, Funny)
No, no. There is a clear pattern there.
I won't go so far as to suggest it's being transmitted by intelligent life, but it's an interesting signal none-the-less.
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Yes, exactly!
In our own telecommunication history, VHF and UHF stations broadcasting TV signals sent sync pulses (for timing, to keep the picture from jittering) periodically. Those sync pulses were a kind of modulation that would make it easy to detect; if the signal were swamped in noise, the repetitive nature meant that a FFT of the received signa
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Snowden's theory is pointless as well because there is no way to prove or disprove it.
What he's trying to say is we should be encrypting our communications so aliens can't surveil them.
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So your idea is why would aliens see value in us, why bother. Consider the idea of aligned development where different species are in a similar development cycle at the same time, the most postulated theory for communications. The problem with that, is that cycle has three likely significantly different stages, primitive, transitional and modern. Primitive would be long quite long, millions of years long and modern (not us) would also be quite long again millions of years, where as transitional is much sho
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You can communicate at or near the noise floor. You'd never know you were hearing anything.
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Re:Maybe they don't even use RF (Score:5, Interesting)
Thing is, high entropy electromagnetic communications would be indistinguishable from noise -- and even if it weren't, it would be hard to compete with the ridiculously powerful noise of their star. Since entropy is approximately the same thing as information, we should expect to see nothing but noise even if we got a perfect noise-free replica of their communication. It'll only get worse -- higher entropy and higher directionality -- as the technological level improves.
Only way we're finding aliens is if they're also doing a SETI program and use radio waves to do so.
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Mmmm,
The arrogant assumption is that our 50 year old RF broadcast model will continue on ad infinitum and that no advances will occur in a civilisation that is truly adanced because we represent the pinnacle of what is possible for any race.
Bottom line: RF (and indeed any electromagnetic broadcast) is utterly unsuited for a communications medium in systems that compris even planetary colonies, let alone ones based on interstellar distances. About the only place it is (marginally) suitable is for a single pl
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Why the hell wouldn't any advanced civilisation be communicating using quantum entanglement, quantum tanneling, gravitonic/proto-singularity channels and a host of other real-time, instantaneous-irrespective-of-distance alterantives, (e.g. paired meson?) that operate point-to-point rather than broadcast, that we could not possibly intercept, detect or connect with even if we knew they were occurring?
I believe most space aliens use fluid routers for instantaneous communications across the universe. Rumor has it you can top up your sim with super correlated liquid helium at any of the 23,452,187 "Zorg Shack" kiosks thought the galaxy.
Assuming that early to mid 20th Century communications technology will be in use in such civilations represents the height of arrogance, ignorance and blindness that seems to be characteristic of our species. If there are alien civilisations, we are probably the local neighbourhood's primitive bogans ... not the uncrowned technolgical geniuses of the known universe we assume we are.
In the real world you are required to make assumptions in order to get anything accomplished. You can chose to base your assumptions on available evidence or opt for possibilities for which no evidence exists (e.g. quantum nonsense). Your choice.
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That's pretty funny, considering that you just made that post utilising several technologies that depend on "quantum nonsense".
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You may have misunderstood what technologies he labeled "quantum nonsense".
Quantum entangled particles are not nonsense, but the notion of communication "instantaneous-irrespective-of-distance" is.
Correlated particles have correlated-yet-unpredictable states irrespective of the order of their measurement. But to experience the correlation, you need to measure both. Some observers will observe that measurement A takes place before measurement B, thus the "communication" being "transmitted" from A to B, whil
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It is funnier still.
The system of the daughter consenting or not consenting to paying the expenses, and the funeral at the other end of the communications channel, is an entangled system, such that if you measure if the daughter consents or not, and also measure if the funeral is being held or not, you will either find that both are the case, or none. But the two are not causally related. They are random, but correlated. Some observers see the funeral being held first, and the daughter consenting to paying
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About the only place it is (marginally) suitable is for a single planet based medium, and even then latency, interference and bandwidth constraints are bad compared to alternatives.
WTF are you talking about? What alternatives? Right now, there are none. You can talk about sci-fi comm stuff all you want, but those aren't real, they're only theoretical at best. "Gravitonic/proto-singularity channels"?? WTF? There's no known way to generate or alter gravity, aside from adding and subtracting mass. "ins
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We won't ever get off this rock.
We already have. And the technology to live on other rocks in the solar system is entirely plausible. The real limiting factor is the cost of doing so right now.
Our efforts are better spent elsewhere.
Not really. The useful resources available on or near the surface of the earth, chemical and mineral, are dwarfed by the amount of resources floating around on other rocks, asteroids and such, in the solar system. As I mentioned the real problem is the cost of getting things from earth to orbit. However once we can access the resources such as aster
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Not really. The useful resources available on or near the surface of the earth, chemical and mineral, are dwarfed by the amount of resources floating around on other rocks, asteroids and such, in the solar system.
The usefull resources available on or near the surface of the earth, chemical and mineral, are dwarfed by the amount of resources deeper below the surface of the earth.
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First, getting to those resources is even more difficult and costly than going to space and grabbing some asteroids. In space, you only have to deal with containing 1 atm of pressure inside your ship. Underwater, you have to deal with tens or hundreds of atm of pressure. Deep underground (as in below the crust, inside the mantle), you're looking at much higher pressures plus a lot of heat, since it's hot enough down there to melt rock.
Secondly, all the resources are in the crust, not deeper. Deeper than
This guy can decode it no problem! (Score:1)
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Observation: Some people have too much free time.
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Observation: Some people have too much free time.
I was abducted while fishing when I was 12 years old so I know something about it. Put it this way it takes more than a tin foil hat to block their signals. So in my free time I fish like a mad man and communicate. But I prefer chironomid fishing just after ice off. In winter it is too hard to cut a hole in the ice long enough to get in a good cast!
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We go ice fishing up my way. Well, the locals/natives do. I used to go ice drinking but I don't drink any more. I've never once tried to fish through the ice unless you count jigging for smelts which, I guess, sort of qualifies as fishing and I did not even do that for long. I was mostly hell bent on getting drunk - which is all I've ever done out in the ice shacks. Some of them are pretty nice, too. In fact, I've gotten drunk in lots of ice shacks and not once really fished to the best of my recollection.
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We go ice fishing up my way. Well, the locals/natives do. I used to go ice drinking but I don't drink any more. I've never once tried to fish through the ice unless you count jigging for smelts which, I guess, sort of qualifies as fishing and I did not even do that for long. I was mostly hell bent on getting drunk - which is all I've ever done out in the ice shacks. Some of them are pretty nice, too. In fact, I've gotten drunk in lots of ice shacks and not once really fished to the best of my recollection. No alien abductions though.
We go ice fishing up my way. Well, the locals/natives do. I used to go ice drinking but I don't drink any more. I've never once tried to fish through the ice unless you count jigging for smelts which, I guess, sort of qualifies as fishing and I did not even do that for long. I was mostly hell bent on getting drunk - which is all I've ever done out in the ice shacks. Some of them are pretty nice, too. In fact, I've gotten drunk in lots of ice shacks and not once really fished to the best of my recollection. No alien abductions though.
I highly encourage those who ice fish to get drunk, drive their gear out on the lake, drill as many holes as possible all around their shack! Sorry if my humor went way over your head, next time duck.
Whoa (Score:3)
Re:Whoa (Score:4, Funny)
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Yes they are. They're hiding from the cavemen with the nuclear weapons.
Any civilization with the technology required to travel interstellar distances has the ability to create weapons that make our biggest nukes look like fire crackers.
There's two options (Score:2)
They're trying to communicate with us, in which case i doubt they'd be so stupid as to encrypt unless they're sharing information, instead of simply saying "hello, we're here," that they deem should be reserved for a "sufficiently advanced" society (
Re:There's two options (Score:4, Interesting)
another mutual friend where he attempted to play the "i'm superior to you" card by switching into talking Russian.
I had a college French course circa 1961 with a prof who was convinced his shit smelled rosy, because -- of all the silly-ass reasons -- he could also speak Spanish. One day we were translating text from a French novel into English -- one of the simplest possible exercises in a foreign-language course -- and he turned to a student who was a recent refugee from Cuba. He said "Senor Hernandez, would you please translate the next paragraph into (visibly puffing himself up) "any language you please?"
The guy came back at him in Japanese.
Hey Snowden (Score:2)
Regardless of the contents of my Slashdot sig... don't let your nerd celebrity cred go to your head too much. This sort of stuff just makes you easier to simply dismiss when it comes to the general populace.
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Regardless of if the communication is encrypted or not it shall be possible to detect the existence of radio waves.
If the aliens uses something else, then we are blind.
Aliens encrypt all their transmissions? (Score:2)
Sure, because they don't want the NSA or the FBI to find out about their tunnels under the border.
Oh, he meant Space Aliens? I bet they don't want the NSA or FBI to read their emails either.
Close to random but cannot be random. (Score:2)
We know this, and have tests to verify deviation from true random noise to detect encoding candidates, even if you can't, perhaps ever, crack it.
Actually, I hypothesize this is what SETI and so on are doing. If not, they should.
It cannot be mathematically identical to true randomness over the long run, even though the closer to statistically random data you get with your encoding, the more compressed.
Encrypted is still not natural (Score:5, Interesting)
I think he is confusing encryption and steganography. Encrypted signals will still require framing, will still be likely to be bandwidth limited, and so will not appear truly natural, even if we can never break the code. As the Brits found through traffic analysis in World War II, you can learn a lot from observing alien communications, even if you never decode a single word.
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Encrypted signals will still require framing, will still be likely to be bandwidth limited, and so will not appear truly natural, even if we can never break the code.
That's a good point.
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Even a nearly worst case scenario (unframed encrypted transmissions) still need to be of high enough power to be heard over the actual environmental noise, and can be detected as non-natural. Directionality of those transmissions is the much bigger problem, as others have stated. However, if we're an average civilization, there's still plenty of unencrypted unidirectional traffic being pumped around, and will continue to be for quite some time. Ter
Spread To Sub Thermal (Score:1)
One method of Encryption is to use very wide (high chipping rate) Direct Sequence Spread Spectrum (DSSS). This has the advantage of
digital processing gain that looks like an incredibly good filter, and also spread the signal over a very wide bandwidth. GPS satellite use this
so they can all transmit on the same frequency at the same time, but use different codes (CDMA Code Division Multiple Access) This
makes the GPS signals approximately sub thermal. Sub thermal means that the background noise is as powerfu
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GPS has been de-fuzzed for the civilian side since the Clinton administration, because differential GPS made it TOAB useless.
During fuzzed NAVSTAR GPS:
Sit on known point. Calculate the vector of the fuzz. Use this vector for the rest of your survey. Get same results as Military. EVERYBODY did this.
Because it was that easy to beat.
After GPS fuzzing: Use GPS as designed, which makes it actually more useful for commerce. Instead of a toy for the military and land surveyors, it became useful enough for ai
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Just about every one of your claims about how GPS (and SA) works are wrong.
I'm telling you that you're an unfounded ass rather than downmoding you. Just so you know,.
Seriously, I don't know many things, but I know the back-end mechanics of GPS. If this is how you talk out-of-your-ass repeating shit you may have heard elsewhere w/o comprehension or understanding you need to evaluate your life.
Stupid SoundCloud (Score:1)
Encrypted for a good reason? (Score:2)
See why:
http://www.amazon.com/Bootstrap-Trilogy-Book-1-ebook/dp/B014Z09UAQ
Why wound they radiate information anyway? (Score:1)
Only sustainable civilisations survive, now that is a hypothesis that is more likely, so extreme efficiency would be a very large factor in the difficulty in sensing such a civilisation. And as other's have pointed out this would require compress
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why should puny humans even expect to detect waste heat from an advanced civilisation? Surely it would make more sense to dump it back into the nearest star?
Excuse me? Of all the possible ways to get rid of heat, transferring it into a high-temperature object is the worst. You unload heat by removing it at LOW temperature. Second Law, and all that.
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Snowden needs positive attention. Despite his status as a hero, the press haven't been very kind to him. I agree that it makes sense for him to engage in this sort of talk.
Tyson is a showman. He just needs attention to keep himself employed. It's a shame that he's decided to take advantage of one of the greatest Americans of this century to keep his name in the papers.
All the rest is silly nonsense; being little more than fuel for the space nutters, armchair science cheerleaders, and conspiracy theorist
Alien Language + Codec + Compression (Score:2)
I've long thought this could be the case. First, you'd have the communication be in an alien language. We're not just talking a foreign language, like Spanish, that has the same (or nearly the same) alphabet as English or even a language, like Russian or Hebrew, that has a completely different alphabet. Those languages were still made by humans. We'd be talking about a language formed by a completely different creature that evolved in a completely different environment.
After this, you'd have the communi
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Where I live, a distant band of coyotes starts baying every morning about 4 am. This causes one hopeful local dog to bark. That dog is our village Tyson, vainly trying to communicate with aliens.
I told You so. (Score:2)
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Good thing I saw this post in time! I'll have the $100k I was going to send Snowden for his insight wired to you instead as the first person to ever consider data modification as a solution to the fermi paradox. Please send me your account numbers and passwords. ...Or should I send it to this guy?
https://bitcointalk.org/index.... [bitcointalk.org]
Media pesonalities (Score:2)
As much as /.ers hate Joe Sixpack and his fascination with the Kardashians - they sure perk up their ears when their media darlings pontificate.
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As much as /.ers hate Joe Sixpack and his fascination with the Kardashians - they sure perk up their ears when their media darlings pontificate.
Guess it's my one day of the month to get trolled, so...
We listen to NdGT and ES because they say stuff that makes sense. Joe6P doesn't listen to the Kardashians: he stares at their boobs and butts. See the difference? (unless you're obsessed wth Snowden's butt, which I suppose is possible)
No difference. (Score:2)
You both stare at the things that attract you, regardless of actual value, so no - there isn't any difference.
Encrypted so well we cannotcannot decrypt it? Real (Score:2)
First question that come into my mind, why the hell aliens would send encrypted message in the galaxy? If I wanted to send a message to Aliens, my first reflex would write it in so many different way so that any aliens will know it's a message for them. The only reason it should be encrypted is to hide it from someone they know and odds are thar they a far more advanced than us and that some random communication wont reach anyone esle than the disignated targed let alone leaving their solar system.
Spread Spectrum (Score:2)
It is fundamental that a well designed Spread Spectrum transmission is essentially the same as wideband noise, and unless you know the code, is un-crackable.
The Spreading Code itself provides the Encryption (eg via Gold-Codes, or if necessary, via a one-time pad)
The idea of Extra Terrestrial Intelligence using Spread Spectrum is not a new idea. It dates back to the '40's when Spread Spectrum was first declassified.
I wonder if he read ... (Score:2)
I wonder if he read My [slashdot.org]
I wonder if he read ... (Score:3)
I wonder if he read my November 24 2014 post [slashdot.org].
In it I pointed out that modern radios, in order to approach the Shannon limit, put out signals that are very close to random noise (and essentially indistinguishable from band-limited theral noise once distorted too much for clean reception).
And that this would make the window between no radio and radio that is indistinguishable at a distance from thermal noise very short - in our case, about 120 years from Tesla and Hertz to mostly OFDM, m-QAM, and the like.
Who the hell (Score:2)
is Edward SnowdenTalks?
Why encryption? (Score:2)
He seems to be implying that all communications will tend to encryption at some point in a species existence. That's far from the case. Even if we did all get angry at the snooping of our government and start encrypting everything there are many use cases left for unencrypted content. Think the type of content that we go out of our way to transmit in a common language so we're sure that everyone can understand without problems.
Encryption may be the solution to oppression but it is also a hindrance to common
No! (Score:2)
Re: No! (Score:1)
china was very advanced, but had a hard time defending against mongolian, english, american, japanese barbarians. they built massive walls and punished their own pirates, but still their civilization was raped until mao employed euro brutishness (communism) in order to defend the realm.
this message comes from germany, not from space. ganz sicher.
They will come looking for us ... (Score:2)
At this point we would start looking for laborers outside the home planet.
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If they're that smart, they will get machines to do their dirty work. We're not so smart, and we're trending that way.
Cortez and his ilk only had to spend a few months exploring. Going to the next inhabitable planet is a bigger problem.
This is true. (Score:2)
Think about the technology a scientist from a bare fifty years ago, or even thirty, would need to invent, just to be able to BEGIN to work on a sample of wifi communications, or a Blu-ray.
They have to invent the equipment to listen to it, decrypt it, figure out the file formats, and so on. And these technologies are all designed specifically to prevent that.
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He knows what he's talking about (Score:1)
he should know better (Score:2)