The idea that aliens would fly around in spaceships is kind of ridiculous

I don't mean to be a downer, but it doesn't make any sense to me. Space is an extremely hostile place, especially for organic organisms. Gamma ray bursts, micrometeorites, radiation, vacuum etc.. would make long-term, biological exploration of the galaxy an extremely expensive and daunting task. Not only do you have to keep the organisms supplied with oxygen, food, and water, but you then need systems to counteract the dangers of space. You're going to need radiation shielding, artificial gravity, and some kind of point defense system against space dust and micrometeorites, especially if you're going to be flying for long periods of time. The bigger your ship is, the more of these things you'll need and the less efficient it becomes.

Unless you have actual warp drives, space exploration for biological beings is not in the cards.

Now, I'm pretty sure aliens exist. The idea that we are alone will one day become the geocenrism of the 21st century. When weighed with Occam's razor, the lack of concrete evidence for aliens points to human ignorance rather than lack of intelligent beings in the universe. The scientists theorizing today that we are alone, or at least that intelligent life is extremely rare, are people who have the same physiology and intelligence as those who once thought the earth was flat. As our science progresses, our view of the universe slowly expands. We barely confirmed exoplanets in the 1990s, and they are massive objects. Hell, we may or may not have another planetary body in our own solar system that we can't confirm. Jumping to the conclusion that we must be alone because "well, we looked and didn't see any Star Destroyers flying around, oh well" is completely asinine.

Back to my original point. I also think it's asinine to assume aliens would physically pilot craft. It's not necessary, and the need for biological beings to pilot craft is already becoming an antiquated idea, even with our own comparatively primitive technology that we have now.

Any evidence of aliens we find is going consist of AI, or preprogrammed probes. Why? You can make them tiny. I'm talking the size of a USB stick or smaller. They could be the size of BBs or even grains of sand. When they are this small, they need far less energy to accelerate, they don't need complicated life support systems, they have a smaller chance of colliding with objects in interstellar vacuums, and they can just send back their data autonomously. I'm thinking of a pellet sized robot made out of graphene or some highly durable composite material that is blasted out of an alien space station and just cruises until it finds a candidate system. There could be billions of these launched in some kind of deployment pod. Once a pellet finds a system, it fires its one time use engine, brakes in atmosphere and just rides the air currents of the planet, sending back simple binary data on what it finds. A true (1) ping for each molecule or item it finds in significant quantities, in sequence.

Oxygen: 1

Argon: 1

Nitrogen: 1

...

Biological life: 1

Machine life: 0

etc...

Anyway, that's just what I'd do if I wanted to explore the universe. No sense in sending out giant, chrome spaceships. Even more likely, they're just looking at us with a big ass telescope.

Submitted February 14, 2022 at 08:08PM by awms11 https://ift.tt/8KgcbU6