Re: several groups are proposing a fly-by of 2017 U1

On 6/2/24 04:11, [email protected] wrote:
> It was the first confirmed interstellar visitor.
> But was it a rock or was it something else.
> Several groups want to find out and are trying to cook up reasonable
> ways to get out to the fast-receding 'Oumuamua. But it's close to impossible.
> It's estimated a very fast probe might catch up with it 150 AU out in several
> decades. 

Man O' Man.  It is gone. As in Goners.
Spend money on looking and planning for next one.

I'm reminded of the "Starglider" in James C. Clarke's
book "Fountains of Paradise".  It was also an
"interstellar visitor" that was a artificial intelligence
scout, ambassador, announcer and greeter.

Some greedy scientist types realized how advanced it was
and wanted to chase after it to capture it, but wiser heads
prevailed.

from
https://www.centauri-dreams.org/2023/12/06/talking-to-starglider/

alking to Starglider
by Paul Gilster | Dec 6, 2023 | Astrobiology and SETI | 30 comments

When we’ve discussed interstellar ‘interlopers’ like ‘Oumuamua and 
2I/Borisov, the science fiction-minded among us have now and then noted 
Arthur Clarke’s Rendezvous with Rama (Gollancz, 1973). Although we’ve 
yet to figure out definitively what ‘Oumuamua is (2/I Borisov is 
definitely a comet), the Clarke reference is an imaginative nod to the 
possibility that one day an alien craft might enter our Solar System 
during a gravitational assist maneuver and be flung outward on whatever 
its mission was (in Rama’s case, out in the direction of the Large 
Magellanic Cloud).

Since we’ll never see ‘Oumuamua again, we wait with great anticipation 
the work of the Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST), which will be 
run via the Vera Rubin Telescope (first light in 2025). Estimates vary 
widely but the consensus seems to be that with a telescope capable of 
imaging the entire visible sky in the southern hemisphere every few 
nights, the LSST should produce more than a few interstellar objects, 
perhaps ten or more, every year. We probably won’t find a Rama, but who 
knows?

Meanwhile, I’m reminded of another Clarke novel that rarely gets the 
attention in this regard that Rendezvous with Rama does. This is 1979’s 
The Fountains of Paradise (BCA/Gollancz). Although known primarily for 
its exploration of space elevators (and its reality-distorting 
geography), the novel includes as a separate theme another entry into 
the Solar System, this time by a craft that, unlike Rama, is willing to 
take notice of us. Starglider is its name, and it represents a 
civilization that is cataloging planetary systems through probes 
scattered across a host of nearby stars.

Starglider has a 500 kilometer antenna to communicate with its home star 
(humans name this Starholme), and in the words of a report on its 
activities within the novel, it more or less ‘charges its batteries’ 
each time it makes a close stellar pass. Having explored the Alpha 
Centauri trio, its next destination after the Sun is Tau Ceti. The game 
plan is that each stellar encounter will gather data and open 
communications with any civilization found there as a precursor to 
long-term radio contact and, presumably, entry into some kind of 
interstellar information network.

This is rather fascinating. For Starglider is smart enough to have 
studied human languages and is able to converse, after a fashion. From 
the novel:

It was obvious from its first messages that Starglider understood the 
meaning of several thousand basic English and Chinese words, which it 
had deduced from an analysis of television, radio, and especially 
broadcast video-text services. But what it had picked up during its 
approach was a very unrepresentative sample from the whole spectrum of 
human culture; it contained little advanced science, still less advanced 
mathematics, and only a random selection of literature, music, and the 
visual arts.

Like any self-taught genius,therefore, Starglider had huge gaps in its 
education. On the principle that it was better to give too much than too 
little, as soon as contact was established, Starglider was presented 
with the Oxford English Dictionary, the Great Chinese Dictionary 
(Mandarin edition), and the Encyclopedia Terrae. Their digital 
transmission required little more than fifty minutes, and it was notable 
that immediately thereafter Starglider was silent for almost four hours 
— its longest period off the air. When it resumed contact, its 
vocabulary was immensely enlarged, and more than ninety-nine percent of 
the time it could pass the Turing test with ease — that is, there was no 
way of telling from the messages received that Starglider was a machine, 
and not a highly intelligent human.

Clarke slyly notes the cultural differences between species as opposed 
to the commonality of, say, mathematics, saying that Starglider had 
little comprehension of lines like this from Keats:

Charm’d casements, opening on the foam
Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn…

And it drew a blank on Shakespeare as well:

Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate…

Well, these are aliens, after all. We have enough trouble with 
cross-cultural references here on Earth. Humans broadcast thousands of 
hours of music and video drama to Starglider to help it out, but here, 
of course, we run into the messaging problem. Just how much do we want 
to reveal of ourselves to a culture about which we have all too little 
information other than that it is markedly more advanced than our own? 
You’ll find that aspect of the METI debate explored as a core part of 
the Starglider subplot.

Some have panned Starglider’s appearance in the novel because it seems 
intrusive to the plot (although I suppose I could argue that autonomous 
probes cataloging stellar systems almost have to be intrusive to get 
their job done). But in the midst of the Starglider passages, we learn 
that the chatty aliens, now freely talking to humans via radio, catalog 
the civilizations they find on a scale based on their technological 
accomplishments. Is this Clarke channeling Nikolai Kardashev?

Whatever the case, Clarke as always takes the long view, and the long 
view by its very nature always pushes out into mystery. Consider the 
scale used by Starglider:

I. Stone Tools

II. Metals, fire

III. Writing, handicrafts, ships

IV. Steam power, basic science

V. Atomic energy, space travel

VI. “…the ability to convert matter completely into energy, and to 
transmute all elements on an industrial scale.”

On this scale of one through six we can place our species at level 5, as 
Starglider sees us. But are there further levels? Clarke is wise to 
imply their existence without exploring it any further, as this lets the 
reader’s imagination do the job. He’s expert at this:

“And is there a Category Seven?” Starglider was immediately asked. The 
reply was a brief “Affirmative.” When pressed for details, the probe 
explained: “I am not allowed to describe the technology of a 
higher-grade culture to a lower one.” There the matter remained, right 
up to the moment of the final message, despite all the leading questions 
designed by the most ingenious legal brains of Earth.

When the University of Chicago’s Department of Philosophy transmits the 
whole of Thomas Aquinas’ Summa Theologica to Starglider, all hell breaks 
loose. I turn you to the novel for more.



Image; Hubble took this image on Oct. 12, 2019, when comet 2I/Borisov 
was about 418 million kilometers from Earth. The image shows dust 
concentrated around the nucleus, but the nucleus itself was too small to 
be seen by Hubble. We are on the cusp of a windfall of ‘interstellar 
interloper’ data as the LSST comes online within a few years. Will we 
ever find a Rama, or a Starglider, amidst our observations? Credit: 
NASA, ESA and D. Jewitt (UCLA).

As I mentioned, some critics fault The Fountains of Paradise for 
Starglider’s very presence, noting that there are essentially two plots 
at work here. In fact there are in fact three plots taking place on 
different timescales here, one of them dating back several thousand 
years, and recall that the voyage of Starglider itself spans millennia, 
the mission having began some 60,000 years before the events of the main 
part of the novel – construction of the space elevator – take place. 
This kind of chronological juggling, allows Clarke to inspire deeper 
reflection on humanity’s place in the universe and I find it enormously 
effective.

Wonders fairly pop out of Clarke’s early novels and much of his later 
work. On that score, I likewise refuse to fault him severely because he 
cannot achieve complex characterization. A case can be made (James Gunn 
makes it strongly) that science fiction of Clarke’s ilk needs to put the 
wonder first. Rich, strange and complicated characters confronting rich, 
strange and wondrous events may lead to one richness too many. For we, 
the readers, to absorb the mystery, we need to see how a relatively 
straightforward character reacts. It’s that contrast that Clarke aims to 
mine.

That’s only one way of doing science fiction, but much science fiction 
of the 1950s, which I consider the genre’s true golden age (with a nod 
to the late 1930s, as one must) often operated with precisely this 
conceit. And that’s okay, because when writers of greater literary style 
began to emerge – writers like Alfred Bester, say, with his staggering 
The Stars My Destination (1956) we were able to see complex characters 
confronting the deeply strange in ways that simply added depth to the 
experience. Look at Robert Silverberg in the 1960s as an exemplar of an 
almost magical insight into what makes the individual human tick. Once 
you’ve begun on that journey, the field is altered forever, but that 
doesn’t negate its rich past.

In fact, none of this subsequent growth nullifies Clarke’s 
accomplishment in the realm of big ideas. Consider him a writer of a 
kind of SF that flourished and fed a mighty stream into what has now 
become a river of wildly untamed ideas and insights. And sometimes only 
Clarke will do. Thus when i read, for the umpteenth time, The City and 
the Stars, I’m again dazzled by the very title, and the first few pages 
take me back into a realm where there are suns not quite our own casting 
a numinous glow over landscapes we learn to navigate through characters 
who learn with us. Like Stapledon’s, like Asimov’s, Clarke’s is a voice 
we’ll celebrate deep into the future.



30 Comments
Alex Tolley on December 6, 2023 at 18:00
It is intriguing to think that 45 years after the publication of TFoP, 
Clarke’s novel has Earth improving Starglider’s ability to converse by 
throwing a lot of verbiage at it to digest. This exactly mimics what we 
currently do to train Large Language Models (LLMs) like ChatGPT. Of 
course, Starglider, being a much more advanced technology, needed far 
less data input to reach its comparable level of conversation.

But was it hallucinating that response about the discovery of the origin 
of the universe? ;-)

Starglider is a nice alternative view of the universe compared to the 
enigmatic Rama, with the ETI at Starholme apparently willing to 
communicate with Earth. Is a level 7 civilization more like the 
disembodied ETI of many of Clarke’s novels reaching back almost to the 
beginning and emulating Olaf Stapleton’s views on God-like intelligence 
– and ending, in 3001: The Final Odyssey, with the merged entity of 
Bowman and HAL9000 helping Frank Poole and Earth from being destroyed?

Reply
henry cordova on December 6, 2023 at 22:04
The ‘Oumuamua and 2I/Borisov encounters have us all excited with the 
prospect of extrasolar visitors. The occurrence of natural objects like 
planetoids or comets is certainly intriguing, but the possibility of 
artifacts, ships, probes and so on, is really exciting. What can we 
reasonably expect will be the kinematic properties of these objects?

Clarke’s Rama flies through the solar system at a relatively low 
velocity, the Earth ship sent to investigate it is able to match 
velocities with it and still have enough fuel (reaction mass?) to make 
it to base afterwards, so Rama is certainly not traveling at a velocity 
comparable to the technological level of its builders. The Earth ship (I 
don’t recall if it was reassigned to explore Rama, or if it was on a 
specific mission to “board and search”; either way, Rama was within the 
performance envelope of the Earth vessel sent to investigate it.

Natural objects traveling within the solar system typically have 
velocities on the order of several tens of kilometers per second. Today, 
our spacecraft achieve these speeds, sometimes a bit faster, by engaging 
in clever gravity assist rendezvous maneuvers. I would expect machines 
from other stars would probably be traveling at speeds greater than 
typical for objects drifting in the general stream of the solar 
neighborhood. This would mean velocities greater than several 10’s of 
Km/sec. The Local Standard of Rest (LSR) velocity of the the solar 
neighborhood around the galactic center is on the order of several 
hundred km/sec, but most of Sol’s neighbors share this general orbital 
drift. A look at the radial velocities and proper motions of nearby 
stars show velocities relative to Sol of well under a 100 km/sec. I 
suspect alien probes would be going faster than the general drift of the 
other “islands in the stream”. There are high-velocity stars (and, I 
presume, high velocity comets and asteroids) intersecting the galactic 
disk at several hundred km/sec, but of Sol’s 5 parsec neighbors, only 
one exceeds a relative radial velocity of 200 km/sec, Kapteyn’s Star. 
The next fastest, Barnard’s star, is about half of that. Proper motion 
velocities are similarly distributed.

I’m taking a leap of faith here to suggest that natural obects’ 
velocities would be distributed similarly (except for those coming out 
of the Halo), that is, roughly comparable to the speeds exhibited by our 
two interstellar visitors.

No one can second-guess alien strategy, but I suspect any object 
traveling less than several hundred km/sec is a natural object. Why 
would a highly advanced civilization launch a probe if it couldn’t 
exceed the LSR drift by at least an order of magnitude? Even higher 
speeds could easily be orbital debris originating somewhere in the 
Galactic Halo. If an intruder zips through the system at several hundred 
km/sec or faster, the odds of it being a probe of some sort are 
certainly worth considering! Anything slower than that is probably just 
a rock or a snowball.

Reply
Paul Carter on December 7, 2023 at 2:54
As a long time Clarke fan, I enjoy The Fountains of Paradise and read it 
through several times. But I absolutely love the Starglider sequences 
and have listened to them so many times on audio I know them verbatim. I 
had no idea critics actually criticised them, and harshly it seems. They 
frame the terrestrial story IMHO, and bookend well when the actual 
aliens arrive 15 centuries after the Tower is built. I just enjoy the 
wonder of the idea, so I guess I won’t be reading what critics have to say.

I feel the same sense of wonder, potentially anyway, regarding the (I 
suppose remote) possibility that the Vera Rubin detects something 
technological passing through the solar system. To use an obscure quote 
from 3001 (another Clarke work i’m supposed to dismiss apparently but 
can’t help enjoying), Hope I live to see it!

Reply
Tom Hannen on December 7, 2023 at 8:15
Very interesting as always Paul. Tiny typo (can’t DM otherwise I would 
have) “one richness to many”

Reply
Paul Gilster on December 7, 2023 at 12:58
Thanks, Tom! Now fixed.

Reply
tesh on December 7, 2023 at 10:50
Are these objects a way to the expanse?

If an object fits the desired parameters (size vs trajectory vs make up) 
could we plant a colony to “go”???

Reply
Alex Tolley on December 7, 2023 at 17:27
Yes : theoretically, in the future.

Currently, no. We don’t have the technology to send a colonization ship 
to the required velocity – say 100 km/s. We do not have the ECLSS needed 
for long-term survival. We don’t have the fusion energy technology to 
make use of the hydrogen isotopes. If hoping to reach another star 
system, then it would be trapping a population in deep space with no 
hope of escape. It would make even St. Helena in the Atlantic (where 
Napoleon was finally exiled) seem like a luxury, and possibly Devil’s 
Island a preferable location to live.

If you just want to occupy a suitable resource body in the solar system, 
Ceres would be a good bet, and if your colony wanted more privacy, a 
Kuiper Belt or even Oort cloud object might fit the bill. All these 
options allow for trade and escape back to the inner system. [Of course, 
the belters in the S A Corey “The Expanse” books did not live great 
lives on Ceres, although life on that future Earth wasn’t great for most 
of the population, too.] However, you still need the ECLSS to work, and 
on Ceres fusion energy might be optional.

Reply
henry cordova on December 7, 2023 at 22:42
Once again, I would like to remind my fellow Centaurs of a convenient 
and frequently updated source of astronomical information of great value 
to students of SETI and related topics: The “Observer’s Handbook” of the 
Royal Astronomical Society of Canada. This handy pocket almanac is 
crammed full of useful astronomical data. Ephemeral tables for solar 
system objects are provided, as well as observing lists, stellar and DSO 
catalogues, the year’s astronomical events such as occultations, 
eclipses, oppositions, conjunctions, meteor showers, comets, and objects 
favorably placed for observation, like asteroids.

Also included are informative articles that are frequently updated. One 
of the many items I consult frequently is the “catalog of nearby stars”, 
listing every stellar system within 5 parsecs, along with every one of 
the multiple star members, brown dwarfs, and all major exoplanetary 
discoveries up to the time of publication. The list is kept up to date 
and is revised every year. It gives a valuable glimpse at our nearest 
stellar neighbors and is a useful sampler of our corner of the galaxy. 
Information such as name, coordinates, spectral class, proper motion, 
radial velocity, parallax and so forth are provided for both the nearest 
stars as well as the brightest, and observing lists for the special 
objects, such as binaries and variables..

This data is all available in the literature, and can be tracked down on 
the internet, but its nice to have it all in one compact volume that 
easily fits in your observing kit. It is invaluable for amateur 
astronomers, but written at a level of technical detail sufficient to 
satisfy any professional. Older copies can be given away to your 
friends, or kept in the bathroom for emergency reading material!

I logged on to the RASC website last night and ordered the 2024 edition. 
Highly recommended, eh?

Reply
Paul Gilster on December 8, 2023 at 5:29
A solid resource! Thanks, Henry. I plan to order mine today.

Reply
Robin Datta on December 8, 2023 at 11:07
If Starglider could connect to and commandeer the Internet, its unknown 
capabilities may lead to unforeseen consequences.

Reply
Alex Tolley on December 9, 2023 at 12:10
In that YouTube piece, it almost seems that John Michael Godier hasn’t 
read Charlie Stross’ 2005 novel “Accelerando”.

“Unintended consequences” are not to be feared, but enjoyed. Our 
civilization has been built on them. Did those ancient hunter-gatherers 
think of the consequences of agriculture? Apart from Jared Diamond 
suggesting this may have been a mistake, do we want to return to that 
hunter-gatherer way of life? While civilizations have upended cultures, 
most notably the indigenous cultures of the Americas, do we really 
believe that the accomplishments of technological civilization should be 
given an even greater extreme Thanos treatment in some attempt to 
“correct” this outcome?

Humans have created their own, pre-technological “AIs” – we call them 
organizations that are built of hive minds, that create rules for 
thoughts (e.g. religion) and action (corporations, nations). When the 
Soviet Union collapsed, Francis Fukuyama suggested that the era of 
Western liberal democracy had conquered all and it was the “end of 
history“. [A bit premature, as it turned out.]

What Godier is implying, is that humanity should now fear a new enemy, 
that of machine intelligence. That is a fear of humans being toppled 
from our perch at the top of the social pyramid. I don’t believe it is 
necessarily worse than the corporate juggernaut that seeks to increase 
profits at the expense of our planet’s habitability for most humans, 
starting with the populations near the equator and where weather 
patterns will deprive many populations of fresh water. We may find their 
actions make many places look like what is being done in Gaza.

It would be an interesting turnaround if AIs become “benevolent 
dictators” ensuring a better world, even if some actions seem as 
repressive as those in “Colossus: The Forbin Project” that prevent human 
self-destruction.

Lastly, there is no reason to believe AIs would force technological 
civilizations to become solipsist (to explain the Fermi Paradox). Far 
more likely it seems to me, that they would attempt to find out what is 
out there, both attempting to communicate with other [AI] civilizations 
both remotely and physically.

Reply
henry cordova on December 10, 2023 at 22:19
AI is painted as some malevolent supermind that will take over human 
civilization like some sort of mechanized dictatorship. You’ve hit the 
nail squarely. AI is no different in principle from any government, 
church, bureaucracy, religion, etc. AI is only the latest in a string of 
automated soulless bureaucracies that have changed human life 
periodically since the Paleolithic. Every new technology has altered us 
irrevocably; language, fire, stone tools, agriculture, urbanization, 
metallurgy, writing, gunpowder, printing, steam, electricity, internal 
combustion, electronics, digital computers. AI is different (maybe) only 
in kind, but not in degree.

My fear is not that AI will “take over”/ My fear is that IT will be 
taken over for purely commercial purposes. I’m old enough to remember 
when television was being introduced, and how it was expected to 
revolutionize education and public information. They used it to sell 
soap and cigarettes. The internet was supposed to usher in a new age of 
information freedom and enlightened citizenry. We got porn and fake news 
instead.

Any new technology has the potential to take us to the stars, IF we 
don’t let the business majors hijack it first.

As for “unintended consequences”, they’re all well and good when the 
world is a vast wilderness dotted with a few scattered city-states. But 
have you noticed things are fundamentally different this time? Yes, we 
may yet enjoy a brief, brilliant flash of pure civilized glory. But for 
now, we’re all locked up behind the city walls, the Spartans are 
rampaging through the countryside, a plague has broken out in the Agora, 
a tyrant is marching on the Acropolis, and new world-threatening menaces 
are arising in the West and North..

Reply
FRED * on December 8, 2023 at 12:39
Comment *Hello,
About a 7th Starglider ladder: I don’t remember if it was Kardhasev who 
said that after a certain level of energy mastery, a highly advanced 
civilization (type IV or higher) would be all-powerful in the universe. 
It would then be able to travel close to the speed of light, and thus 
find all the materials it needed to manufacture or transmute whatever it 
wanted, or even better, bend space-time (Alcubiere). It would no longer 
need to travel, and would become a universal “spiritual” civilization. 
We can then imagine anything we like about a civilization that possesses 
infinite energy and could explore a black “hole”, or break Planck’s wall :)

I have a radio amateur question: do you know of a website where it is 
possible to listen to the frequencies of radio telescopes that are 
listening to space? I’ve found this one, http://websdr.camras.nl:8901/ 
but I’d be more interested in listening to the universe on 1,420.4 MHz, 
the hydrogen line.

WebDSR is interesting for visualizing how difficult it is to detect a 
signal in the ocean of noise and the multitude of frequencies…just on 
earth. So imagine in the univers !

F5CEY 73 QRT Fred

Reply
Paul Gilster on December 8, 2023 at 20:43
Maybe one of the readers can weigh in on this, Fred. There must be a 
resource out there somewhere.

Reply
fred on December 13, 2023 at 13:31
I’ve done some research but I haven’t found any possibility of listening 
to the universe via webSDR (including the 21cm line). On the sites of 
radio astronomy observatories like Parkes, you can find some archive 
files, sometimes accessible to non-researchers but not always, but these 
files are huge and in a format that isn’t standard for us. On the other 
hand, there’s plenty of fun radio tinkering to be done. Here are a few 
links:

https://radiojove.gsfc.nasa.gov/gettingstarted/

https://breakthroughinitiatives.org/opendatasearch?project=GBT&file_type=all&ra=&ra_range=&decl=&decl_range=&mjd=&mjd_range=&freq=&freq_range=&target=&perPage=&search=Search

https://lea.hamradio.si/~s53rm/Radio%20Astronomy.htm

by the way, I was wondering if ET couldn’t communicate in binary on the 
two states of the hydrogen atom :)

Reply
henry cordova on December 9, 2023 at 18:18
The pressure variations of a human voice can be represented by squiggles 
on an oscilloscope screen, but you can stare at those all day long and 
not be able to decipher the content of human speech from them. In fact, 
unless you have prior knowledge of what they are, you will not be able 
to determine any content in them. Some familiarity of the physiologic 
parameters of human speech and hearing (not to mention a familiarity 
with the language being spoken) is required before the raw data can be 
translated to meaningful context The oscilloscope trace may allow us to 
preserve and transmit the original signal precisely, but without the 
additional ‘metadata’ it will make no sense at all. When you consider 
that the original signal will probably be transmitted with some form of 
formatting to allow redundancy, error correction or to take advantage of 
engineering requirements and limitations (such as peculiarities of the 
transmitters or the expected receivers), it is unlikely any information 
will be extracted from the signal, except possibly that it is not of 
natural origin.

The aliens may be eavesdropping on old episodes of “The Honeymooners”, 
or “I Love Lucy”, but I doubt they’ll be even able to identify them as 
audio/visual data, much less than that they are artificially stylized 
representations of the domestic lives of the transmitting species. The 
best sense they’ll probably be able to make of them is that they are not 
of some astrophysical origin.

An analog signal (say, old style TV) will be made up of alternating 
lines of an image, flickering at 60 Hz (determined by the frequency of 
alternating current and the ability of the human eye to stop motion) 
with the pixel brightness represented by a signal strength, as opposed 
to a binary number. There is no way some alien will be able to 
unscramble that mess and make sense of it. They may be able to interpret 
its artificial origin by noting no natural process creates that signal, 
but that’s about it.

Reply
Alex Tolley on December 9, 2023 at 21:11
The pressure variations of a human voice can be represented by squiggles 
on an oscilloscope screen, but you can stare at those all day long and 
not be able to decipher the content of human speech from them.

And it was precisely the recognition of those squiggles that was an 
important clue in this week’s episode of Dr. Who “The Giggle”. ;-)

Reply
Benjamin R Stockton on December 10, 2023 at 14:16
Slow Boat to Centauri
Being older than most of you, I read many of the iconic Science Fiction 
works of the masters beginning in 1955 (when I cut my foot and had to 
take a week off school). As much as I love this stuff, our modern 
imaginations are too small. I won’t recant what you all know, I’ll jump 
right to my point. Humans won’t travel interstellar unless we use a 
generational ship. Going anywhere just takes too long. If you get real, 
there won’t be any “suspended animation”, there aren’t any “wormholes”, 
there is no “hyperspace”, and going into a black hole will both crush 
you and not let you out. Because of everything you know already, the 
distances, the radiation, the limits of power/mass ratios, the limited 
life spans, and all the rest, prevent practical “ships” as we conceive 
them from being built.

What we need is nothing less than a plantetoid. We need enough mass to 
provide functional gravity (humans wither without gravity). We need 
large amounts of water which functions both as radiation shield and 
fuel. We need a large population in order to avoid deterioration of our 
genomes, and we need to be able to grow many generations of large crops 
to feed them. We also need animal protein in order to thrive. In order 
to travel far, we need to be able to write books, school children, make 
movies, create songs and stories, and go out to a bar in the evenings. 
In short, we need a cultural life to sustain us along the way.

In order to travel to another solar system, we essentially need a small 
planet and a lot of patience. Once you have all that capability pulled 
together, why go anywhere? Just take up an orbit around our current 
star. Within a few tens of cycles, collecting water and mineral bearing 
asteroids and comets as we go, perhaps we could sling shot around the 
sun and head off on a 300 year journey.

I don’t worry about the fuel and the propulsion – those are technical 
things. Instead, I worry about the human animal and whether we will ever 
develop the culture that would generate such a project, and I worry 
about whether that same animal can sustain a functional society and 
culture over those long generations.

Reply
Robin Datta on December 10, 2023 at 19:16
BRStockton: Yes indeed – while flesh holds many possibilities for 
evolution, it falls short when stressed in ways to which it was not 
adapted through biological evolution. Hence a provision of the necessary 
resources to cover those shortcomings would be mandatory. And the 
consequences of the breeding program for humans can only be guessed.

Reply
Alex Tolley on December 10, 2023 at 20:38
Biological humans as crew probably won’t go without technologies we 
don’t know about yet, and may never have. But we don’t need them.

A robotic ship does not need the life support of a biological crew to 
make the journeys.

If a future human society wants to seed the stars with human beings, 
then we will send seed ships instead, with machines to nurture human 
life until it is ready to colonize another, suitable world. The morality 
to allow this will be very different from today, but well within what 
has been done historically.

How small could such ships be? It depends on how much self-assembly is 
possible. Ships that can acquire resources at a target star system to 
build out the needed equipment to gestate the human eggs/embryos and the 
machines to take care of the first few generations until the human 
population can take care of itself. This might be quite small, and 
certainly much smaller and more efficient than moving planets.

No planets are needed to make the journey.

Reply
Benjamin R Stockton on December 12, 2023 at 6:58
Alex,
I’m all in for robotic exploration! Another weird thing is that, due to 
communications delays, the sponsoring organization may never know the 
outcome of its “seeding” operation. Sigh..

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henry cordova on December 11, 2023 at 1:40
You do make valid points, Ben. Humans don’t necessarily want to go to 
the stars, space enthusiasts want to go to the stars. And let’s face it, 
when we get there, we are not going to find a planet as suitable as the 
one we live on now. If we want to terraform, we can do that to Mars, or 
just clean up our own world. Both will be cheaper, and faster..

We can hollow out an asteroid and take generational voyages to other 
systems, but all we’ll find there are comets, asteroids and starshine, 
and we have plenty of that here! Once we have the tech to build space 
habitats, we’ll have no need to haul them out into the void. Just park 
them right here.

On the other hand, if there are other cultures out there, they may feel 
very differently about it…

To avoid extinction, it might be prudent to colonize a few nearby stars, 
but after that, the need to expand further out rapidly diminishes. 
Besides, as a species, we’ve never exhibited much talent for long term 
planning.

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Benjamin R Stockton on December 12, 2023 at 7:01
Henry,
“as a species, we’ve never exhibited much talent for long term 
planning.” Exactly. Even worse, there is no “we” from a species 
perspective. I hope we can keep this planet and all of our 
co-inhabitants alive long enough that the challenges considered in this 
forum can actually arise!

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fred on December 12, 2023 at 12:54
Hello Benjamin

You wrote : “as a species, we’ve never exhibited much talent for long 
term planning.” I don’t think we’re capable of envisioning the distant 
future (except on this website ;) because the human species needs a 
certain “slowness” to develop, step by step, and there are an infinite 
number of possibilities for the future we are not able to imagine. It’s 
the story of the butterfly that was crushed in prehistoric times… What 
would happen if an ETI civilization suddenly brought us 10,000 years of 
technological knowledge? Would our current civilization be able to 
withstand such a shock? Not sure…

in a way, we are IN the world and we let ourselves be carried along by 
it, believing that the little impulses we give it make us its masters.
Fred

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Adam Crowl on December 12, 2023 at 8:10
Hi Paul
The idea of a garrulous alien probe has a certain appeal – Greg Benford 
did it before Clarke with Nigel Walmsley’s brief encounter with the 
Snark probe, a herald of the inimical machine intelligences that would 
follow. The Snark itself was friendly, but with a covert agenda. 
Starglider had no covert agenda, but was seemingly oblivious to the 
philosophical impact of its off-hand responses to the monuments of human 
reasoning. Not that St Thomas Aquinas didn’t have it coming – 
Starglider’s replies echo the kind of Humean scepticism that eventually 
rotted the core out of philosophical arguments for so-called “natural 
religion”. Bad arguments for a Creator haven’t gone away because the 
need for ‘God’ hasn’t gone away. It’s just less of a scandal 
philosophically to admit the limits of human knowledge either side of 
the question of God’s existence. As much as the Rationalist tradition 
hates to admit it, but there are some things which we must just take on 
faith, even if we can hope for future updates and revisions of our 
understanding. The Post-Modernist critique – and the post-Post-Modernism 
we’re now a part of – have taught us to be sceptical of the power 
structures and motives that are typically behind any philosophical position.

Which segues neatly into my next thought – that imagining alien 
intelligences and how they might differ to our own, helps us gain 
perspective on what we take for granted in our human point of view. 
Starglider’s revelation that intelligent species with sexual 
differentiation and family life are the only ones that develop a concept 
of God is a bit obvious. Human gods are usually in our own Image, just 
like most imagined aliens aren’t much better than “Star Trek” humanoids. 
With such a diversity of animal life on just one planet, our ability to 
relate to Other Life seems terribly parochial.

Which makes me wonder just how we’d relate to completely different 
evolutionary histories. Nature is not only stranger than we imagine, but 
stranger than we CAN imagine. That’s why the quest for Other Life is so 
compelling.

As a side-note, I’m intrigued by the recent genetic detective work that 
hints strongly that we have at least two independent animal lineages – 
the one which led to the Ctenophores (Comb Jellies) and the lineage with 
just about everyone else. What else can Nature dream up?

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Paul Gilster on December 12, 2023 at 12:13
I’m glad you reminded me of Greg’s ‘Snark.’ I need to write that one up 
as well.

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fred on December 12, 2023 at 13:15
This is where we realize the limits of our species. I don’t know if this 
point has already been made here, but many biologists are adamant that 
it’s virtually impossible for any other form of life in the universe to 
be similar to ours, i.e. to the fact that we’re symmetrical beings; from 
the point of view of biochemistry in the Universe, it’s something quite 
disturbing (and it always makes me laugh to see movie ETs with 2 skinny 
arms 2 legs and big eyes, they’ll never have that shape :) I reread 
Solaris: the idea is much more appealing, and Stan LEM’s genius must be 
recognized.

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Alex Tolley on December 12, 2023 at 19:49
@Fred. There are both visible and invisible differences. Convergent 
evolution resulted in sharks, ichthyosaurs, and dolphins taking on very 
similar forms even though their internal biologies are rather different. 
IOW, we might just find humanoid ETI if that form is highly adapted to 
technological development.

But even if that is not the case, is it possible that our intellectual 
output = e.g. math, science, even engineering, take on the same forms as 
ours, simply because much of it reflects the nature of the universe and 
may be the best way to deal with it? ETI may be like spiders, but their 
technologies might be surprisingly familiar to us.

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Adam Crowl on December 12, 2023 at 20:15
Hi Fred
My favourite Lem is “Fiasco”, with all its insights into Alien and human 
motivations, as well as the tragedy of the misunderstanding between the 
two. It’s a possibility that will haunt SETI until we do make Contact. 
And there’s no guarantee we’ll be able to understand anything about 
Alien consciousness or experience. We might be able to share universals 
– if such exist – and completely miss the essence of what makes us 
different. Only an existence proof can settle the question.

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Fred on December 13, 2023 at 13:14
Thank you, Adam. It’s terrible, I realize that my “classic” SF section 
in the library is very poor! I’ll take note of all your reading 
suggestions. In the 60s and 70s we had a lot of great authors translated 
in France, but it was their main novels like Lem’s, Bradbury’s or 
Clark’s; their other productions remained in the shadows. Some authors 
are still not translated, and as I used to draw during my English 
lessons, it’s a bit hard :) For the past few years, science fiction here 
seems to me to be more oriented towards fantasy novels – I personally 
don’t like them – or towards a “social” side (I’m thinking of SILO). 
“Hard-fiction” literature, which I think is more interesting, is 
becoming rare. I’d have to decide to come to the USA :)

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