X-Message-Number: 11303 Date: Mon, 22 Feb 1999 12:44:24 +0100 From: (John de Rivaz) Subject: Re: Fermi's paradox In article: <> Crevier <> writes: > because I believe that interstellar travel can happen. The Planetary Report <http://www.planetory.org> carried a relevant article in the current issue, and one which is relevant to all futurian extrapolation, our own included. The moon trip happened less than 100 years after the Wright brothers, but their Wright Flyer took two guys with a bicycle repair shop to build. Apollo 11, was two guys with $200 billion and 10,000 scientists and engineers and the mandate of a beloved assassinated president. NASA spent $1,000,000 developing the astronaut pen (which writes in zero gravity and upside down on earth). The Soviets used a pencil. Economic and freedom (from taxation) consideratiuons may keep homo sapiens with its feet on the ground for a long time yet. The article concluded that maybe the answer is wormholes made in a garage (like "Sliders") or some similarly fantastic and unlikely technology. Pickover and others have written about how to make wormholes, time machines and so on, but the energy requirements and technology is well beyond even governments for way beyond the forseable future. http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN=0195120426/longevitybooksA/ Another solution, arising from this thread, may be uploading into systems that are orders of magnitude smaller than evolutionary lifeforms. Tiny grains of "sand" could be launched into space by laser beams for costs of the same order of magnitude as the present space program. If these grains of sand could contain useful intelligence and the ability to manipulate matter, maybe they could create man-sized bodies the other end. But again that is fanciful and could only happen beyond the time horizon of practical science and engineering. -- Sincerely, John de Rivaz Homepage: http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/JohndeR Longevity Report: http://www.geocities.com/HotSprings/Sauna/3748/lr.htm Fractal Report: http://www.longevb.demon.co.uk/fr.htm PCS - a Singles listing sheet for people in Cornwall http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/JohndeR/pcs.htm Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=11303