So, That’s the torque for you. now the fun begins.
AANNNNNDDDDD…..
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So, this ship is a suicide mission. A toe in the (probably boiling) water, to see if the aliens are bluffing.
Or is this a trick by Orion the sleeper, to get them to cancel the mission?
Told ya. Humpers and pickpockets. We aren’t invited and they got bouncers.
Or…the ship is a weapon, and our crew are no more than the delivery boys and girls.
Yeah. I sort of got the impression that this was building up to some sort of plot to get the aliens to kill the crew.
… What makes me scratch my head however is WHY the government would resort to such a needlessly complex plan just to kill off a few unwanted individuals. Has the idea of just shooting people somehow gone out of vogue by this period of the future? Whatever happened to the tired and true method of just sending a few government spooks after these folks to just “disappear” them. Did they really feel that wasting what has to be trillions of dollars of mechanical hardware and resources and risk causing a interstellar war was somehow the more practical solution? Or is the hope of causing an interstellar war the actual desired outcome for some unfathomable reason? It just raises questions is all I’m saying. š
The ship wasn’t sent by a government. The governments might have prohibited any ships being sent, but private concerns can be greedy enough to ignore warnings and risk even the whole human race.
The funny part is, we actually got a message very similar to this in August of 1958.
To date, nobody has developed a working star drive, and odds are good that any serious attempts to do so will be nipped quietly in the bud. It’s also no coincidence that the public face of SETI has been decades of “no results.”
By the way, has anyone noticed that the date for effective fusion power systems seems to endlessly retreat into the future?
What happened in August 1958.
Also, regarding the second point, SETI’s search methodology, as pointed out by a number of scientists, including Neil DeGrasse Tyson and Lawrence Krauss, is incredibly restrictive, able to “look” at certain portions of the sky at any one time and only “listening” to certain frequencies.
The fact they’ve had no results could just a easily be the fact that they’re looking in the wrong places, rather than that they’re intentionally hiding something from the public.
As for nuclear fusion, my guess is is that it’s for the same reason colonies on the Moon, jet-packs and hover-cars don’t exists yet, a) they’re a bit more difficult to develop from basic principles than the general public understands (it’s worth notin here that a lot of these “estimates” are taken from the more liberal (here meaning “lax”) estimates, and generally ignore potential roadblocks) and b) lack of funding. Going back to the Moon again, funding in regards to lunar projects by the U.S. Government was effectively cut to nothing back in 1972 after the Apollo 17 mission, just 3 years after the first manned mission to the lunar surface.
As Neil DeGrasse Tyson and Michio Kaku have pointed out (and I think Stephem Hawking here in the U.K.) political terms are much shorter than the periods of time in which scientific research into new fields yields technologically innovative and financially beneficial results, meaning that focussing on long-term scientific research and technological innovation is not necessarily within the best interest of politicians given that they may only be in office for a total of 4 to 10 years at the national level.
Developments in developing maintainable and sustainable nuclear fusion on Earth, despite it’s notable advantages, simply isn’t receiving the funding necessary to continue working on it in any real sense.
There’s no conspiracy here, simply scientific apathy amongst politicians and the people they represent through elections. I mean, look at the number of comments you’ll see online or in real-life saying NASA funding is too high and yet per tax-dollar, NASA receives, IIRC, one-tenth of a cent, a figure dwarfed by military spending and the U.S. benefits system, even within that dollar. You’ll forever see people saying “but why look at the stars or at the smallest subatomic particles when we’re still suffering from disease and famine”, not realising that the very means by which they communicate those ideas wouldn’t be possible without the investigations and studies of a bunch of people working over 60 years ago. Modern computers wouldn’t even be a thing without quantum mechanics or the theory of electromagnetism, and yet people constantly take the scientific research and development behind them for granted.
I’m not saying we’re entering a period of stagnation or anything (and annoyingly a lot of what I know of how science is viewed, thanks to the internet, related predominantly to the U.S.), but unless we can reasonably change people ideas and misconceptions regarding what science is and what science can do, nuclear fusion on Earth as a means of sustainable power will be a dream we CAN realise, but a dream we WON’T realise. It’s not a pipe dream, it’s just a dream the majority of people seem incapable of understanding is actually relatively cheap and within their grasp.
(I think to some extent as well, people are generally afraid, and I’m hoping attitudes towards state-funding of the sciences will increase with time š )
So they are on a one way mission. Nice timing with the message retrieval and translation. Just after turn around. I have an idea that at least 2 are enemy agents from rival companies. But as to why they sent them with this bit of revelation is puzzling.
We have had nuclear fusion since our star first lit up. And yet we are hardly tapping that power being sent to us every day 24 hours a day. We should tap that first. And the wind too. Plenty of places off shore and a bit higher up in the atmosphere the wind is blowing but not being used to generate power. Clean power.
I would like more than just 1% of the sky being observed at any one time for asteroids that may strike us.
I’m thinking providing a causus belli, in the apparent unprovoked destruction of a peaceful diplomatic mission, is the actual point of the exercise, and these particular crewmembers are only relevant insofar as they’re considered expendable.
Since they’re decelerating, at what point will Vagus catch up to them?
@Marc: Neil DeGrasse Tyson and Michio Kaku are ENTERTAINERS.
I think John hit the nail on the head. It’s a Wag the Dog scenario. Traditional war-for-profit greedy manipulation. Some group or other is more concerned about what they might get out of inciting a war with an extraterrestrial species then on whether or not the world will actually be able to handle the consequences.
This is why everyone on board is skilled, but expendable, useful, but intolerable. This ship has everything it needs to get there, no means of defense, and will easily be destroyed as per the warning. Which will so easily be spun as alien aggression by opportunists. It’s an expensive bait. But when has money been an obstacle to those who play the game?
The real question now is… what will they do with this information. What can they do? Do they proceed and hope they can persuade the alien species to spare them? Turn back and hope, perhaps in vain, that they can reveal the truth? And when it all comes down to brass tacks, can these misfits rally together to instead prove that humanity has redeeming value?
Or, Gordon may be wrong or lying through his keister.
@waldobaby: And that devalues their opinions how?
@Coyoty: It is a government mission. see http://baldwinpage.com/012414-why-were-all-here/
They are highly educated “entertainers”, as in: they actually understand what they are talking about. Clearly not acceptable in the opinion business!
Waldobaby, could you be any more insulting to two scientists who are trying to spread the interest of science beyond the labs and universities? So to you “entertainers” must be lesser beings regardless of the good they do? Such a cynic.
You must have missed it. We have already been told, via comments that Vagus was vaporized upon debarking into the cross fields of th Higgs/TET.
Tyson and Kaku are more directly, Popularizers of science and technology, since STEAM education in the US has been so neglected since the ’70s.
Tyson’s remake of COSMOS is just finishing up, just as Carl Sagan tried to bring us the ‘sensa-wonder’ with his first version of that marvelous program.
Now we’re finding we live in this Cosmic shooting gallery, we really Need to be looking UP more (HOW many more city-buster asteroids lurking out there in the Big Dark?)
We just about have the capability (but for the will) to get a colony established outside the Ten Ring of the bullseye, and it’s past time we got some of our eggs out of the one basket.