So ... not much more than infinite amounts, only a little more? What findings do you refer to?


Whether it is an artifact in measurement or real is still up for debate. And if it can reliably pass on information quantum dynamics has some serious errors, which isn't hinted at anywhwere else. Not saying it's impossible, but it's not very probable..


Or other worlds. Unlike conventional Space Opera space travel, that would make perfect sense in the world of Shadowrun. Or a webway/stargate kind of thing.


Not to mention wasted immense amounts of your scarce ressources on the possibility that this ship can somehow drag back more than it cost to build in ressources.

Only if you use the constants they give you. Break it down and use your own constants according to your own judgement. You still have a very high probability of something being out there.

There are billions superclusters, full of galaxies, each galaxy with billions and billions of stars. And with over 300 exoplanets now discovered all very close to us, many of the initial numbers from the drake's equation are looking pretty conservative.

Next time put the PSA before the link. Almost caught me there.

http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/136408-...s-are-plausible

Right, but wasn't there a warning that it might be a spectacular firework?

Ah, that. It's not really new, and the design has other flaws, like this.
Edit: ninja'd.

Because living in a giant tin can isn't very comfortable. Said giant ship is probably pretty cramped out of necessity. And probably, such ships have most of its inhabitants in cryostasis in order to maximize transported population density.

And when i talk about resources, i'm not talking about them coming to earth and digging up our iron and stuff and shipping it back home. If thats all they wanted, they would just go planet cracking nearby unihabited planets.

When i say resources, i mean the land. livable land. With breathable atmosphere and relatively stable climate. Also, there's plenty of meat to go around. 5 billion humans worth of meat.

Of which i'm aware, but it still proves the point. The fact is, its not ruled out as pure science fiction yet.

Actually a little over seven billion humans... who are armed with, among other sundry unpleasantness, several thousand fusion warheads. The odds of being able to conquer a Nuclear-Age planet without seeing said planet turned into a radioactive cinder are pretty low.

Uhh, no?

The odds of a single cell of life being brought about by random chance is greater then the sum of all the atoms in the universe to one. It's why when some scientists talk about abiogenesis, their leading theory is life came to us from somewhere else, where conditions are unlike anything they can even hypothesize about.

Those branches of 'science' tend to be more about make-believe though, so I wouldn't put too much weight on it.

Tanegar: Ironically, they might have a better chance of doing exactly that in Shadowrun, with its bullshit plot override on nukes, than in actuality.



But yeah. Humans would totally rather frag our own planet all to hell than let some alien assholes conquer our shit and take it from us. Cue the grey goo, the blood magic, the Horrors, etcetera.

That would be a fight like a navi of the 16. century against a modern hunter submarine or destroyer...

It not so much the firepower... It is the precision, the sensors and all the stuff around...

Before we probably even know that they are here, they may have infiltratet every nuklear silo/system on the planet or at least tagged it.

And if they strike (probably USA->Russia->China+Europe) the US Military gets wind of the attack after the aliens finished the EU. Europe gets the heads up from the alien invadors.
Like: "You lost!"
"WTF there was a war?"

Who make a tiny fraction of the planetary biomass. However, what would that alien race gain from wasting half THEIR limited ressources on some Lebensraum project that will have to fight tooth and claw against the creatures already living where they want to live? And why do you assume they could even live here? Not even Earth's own inhabitants can live everywhere on the planet (in fact, we, it's technical civilisation, mostly contend outselves with 30% of it). Maybe they need a different environment? Or some ubiquous substance in most of earth's organisms is toxic to them? Colonising foreign planets is fairly nonsensical, and even if you do, you shoukld stick to planets where you can, if need be, send more supplies or communicate effectively with.


Why? You again assume these aliens to be carbon copies or Western human civilisation. Not even all human civilisations pushed science mainly for weaponisation. That's a speciality of our civilisation; most others studied for theological reasons, for the fun of it or to improve engineering and infrastructure. Or because it's colourful and makes bang, like China used blackpowder for almost 1000 years. Weaponisation there was an afterthought.

The chance of life developing is up for debate, so your assertion is your own opinion, not fact. Unfortunately, everything regarding this subject is speculative, so there is no way to rule definitively one way or the other. It can be argued, that any earthlike planet will eventually develop simple life, of which, maybe 2/3 of those planets will develop into complex life. It go the other way that the chances of life developing are incredibly small...the Rare Earth concept.

I think the rare earth concept is just as conceited as the idea that the sun and other planets revolve around the earth and we're the center of the universe.

The main fact is all we have is a single data point. Us. With only one data point we can't know for sure what the chances of life developing on another planet would be. As such, all we can do is make assumptions given the information that we do have.

Where do you take these odds from? Of the three 'habitable' Earth-like planets in our solar system, one developed life.

And even if life is so abundant, human-equivalent civilisatons hardly will be.

Our definition of life is rather narrow aswell, it make certain assumptions that only apply to things given the same conditions as we have.
and in it's most basic form life is chemistry... which is not governed by chance.

You'd be surprised.

Drake's equation says nothing more than that the probability of alien life depends on several other (unknown) probabilities. Possibly the most overhyped "discovery" ever.


Entanglement exists, but it does not have any special properties which would make FTL communications more likely...


That's like saying shamanism is not magic. The rules of the SR universe are extremely clear with regard to psionics (and shamans): They are awakened, end of discussion.

No, it's the theory of scientists who hold a very different idea of how life originated then I do, so you're wrong on both counts.



You really display a lack of understanding on just how complex life is.



Given that we can't create entirely new forms of life (Not attempting to replicate existing life nor using parts of living things) in a laboratory with controlled environments and guided actions, your assertion that life can just happen is in error.




If we can't create life under the most ideal of circumstances, we can make a pretty good guess that it's going to have a harder time developing under less-then-ideal circumstances, or broken down, since we're at zero, there's a less then zero chance it happened somewhere else.

Alien life might not even be considered life under our definition, we can't know the likeliness as we don't know what other possible configurations that can create viable life, afterall Virae is not considered lifeforms.

First, I agree with you that they would probably not need any of our resources. I mean mining in low gravity enivronments ought to be much better anyway. Asteroids etc.

The point is the interstellar travel thing. Thats far beyond our scope.

Even if the aliens would not research military technology at all, they would need less than a year to get the technology that far. Probably they could cook something up on the flight...

An interstellar civilsation is probably as far away from our level of technology as we are from the ancient time.
Just to get an image. The mars is the most distant point we could send somebody up. That means at most 20 light min. (Min. 3 light min)
The next solar system (alpha centauri) is 4.34 light years away.

Thats like comparing walking one meter to going from Paris to New York.

Because they do not replicate of their own. They're more like naturally occurring, predatory nanomachines.

Our definition of life basically is "something that builds structures of a highter order that require energy to maintain, and can replicate itself in some way from itself". If alien life doesn't fall in that definition, it is not life, because life, as such, is a definition that is human-made, not a universal constant of mystical properties as you seem to think.


And why should they spend their flight cooking up weapons? Besides, who says they can even survive in Earth's atmosphere, or are well adapted for it's gravity.

And if they have any meaningful weaponry at all, or care to have. Sure, they cna reverse-engineer earth weapons if they find out their preferred weapons are not up to speed, but if they first get hit by a few nuclear weapons, all their supertechnology will not save them.


... and if the ancient warriors fight intelligently and learn from observation, they'd give a modern army a hell of a fight. The Brits in Afghanistan, America in the Phillipines, Vietnam, Afghanistan (again).


Where does that come from? Not that I disagree on principle, but so far, the most distant point we "sent someone up" is the moon. Mars is probable, yes. Venus too, and we could sure send someone to the outer planets if we were so incluned and wouldn't expect them to return.

And mostly, that means interstellar civilisations are very unlikely to exist at all.

It obviously wouldn't be life, but what would you call it?

You are confusing observed results and probabilities. I know nobody who has won the lottery, what does that say about the chances of winning? Well, certainly not that the probability is zero. There is a high probability that the probability is small, but maybe we are all just unlucky...

We don't know, but considering that we are made primarily of the 4 most abundant elements in the universe (5 minus helium since its inert and doesn't react chemically), there's a good chance that other life will at least be carbon based (ie organic) and will be able to metabolise at least some earth food. Aliens that function with a completely different processes such that they would be incompatable with life on earth is unlikely.

Something to remember is that while we may only use live on 30% of of our globe, water takes up a lot of space, and where there arn't cities, and other dwellings, there is lots and lots of farmland. we are starting to run low on workable, non-protected land for agricultural production. As population increases, and dwellings take more space, we get LESS land for food production. Which means less food for that rising population. They will have to expand. Either that or continually destroy themselves with bloody wars. And sending them off to try to colonize an inhabited planet solves that problem both ways.

Assuming this race first expands to its own solar system, colonizing the other, likely dead planets, and breaking others open for their mineral rich cores, they will have an abundance of material for large vessels. Their first targets are likely going to be simple colonizations to near exoplanets that are hopefully uninhabited. Planetary vessels like this would probably be one use, one way trips. Once it reaches destination, it goes into orbit and colonization on the new planet begins, as they scavenge everything they can from the planetary vessel. Once this is done a few times, and they perfect their method of planetary travel, if they found a relatively close goldilocks planet like the earth and even though its inhabited, it could be a tempting target if they are sufficiently advanced. Which brings me to my next point.



Because we're talking on the concept of such a race attempting to invade earth. Such a suffeciently advnaced race isn't going to apply their great intellect to trying to take earth by force using less advanced weaponry. They're going to apply their current technology level to their weapons. The idea of an advanced spacefaring race using gunpowder based firearms or something else you might find as modern day weaponry...is just absurd. Their main weapons are going to be their logistics, computer controlled weapons, and devestating firepower. In the words of Sun Tsu, you don't start a fight unless you know you will win. As Irion said, they'll make sure they know everything about us, strike hard, fast and cripple our ability to strike back with decisive force.

There will be no X-com (as fun as that is), it would be a complete one sided victory on their part.

not even a discovery, just a theory. Yes, its based on a lot of unknown probabilites, but each of those probabilites are can be pretty well estimated. The only variables that are really up for debate are which earthlike planets, which happen to be in inhabitable zones are likely to develop life.



No. They say that Psionics are just deluded magicians. they are not really psionics. So its really more like saying shamans are magicians, (which they are) just like psionics....IE, they are all awakened (magicians).

What i said, is that there may be these "psionic" magicians, but that doesn't say that you can't have actual psionics either.

If no one you know has ever won the lottery, there is no recorded event in history of anyone ever winning the lottery, no evidence has ever been found that someone won the lottery, and entire branches of science dedicated to hypothesizing how someone could ever win the lottery say if anyone did, it's probably because they won the lottery on another planet and then came here?

I'd say the chances are pretty slim, if not impossible.



Mathematical impossibility doesn't demand that the probability is zero, just infinitesimally small.

You really display a lack of understanding in logic. theory /= fact. idea /=fact
Ideas are something you have in your own head, similar to an opinion.

Right on both accounts.




The chances for a planet developing life is calculated over a period of a billion years...I'm not aware of any controlled experiments that have had such a period of study. If you know of any, could you direct me to them?

Two things that may be of interest to this discussion.

One is a debate between various people in the field, including Frank Drake, that I found interesting.

http://www.astrobio.net/debate/236/complex...in-the-universe


The other kind of hits on what Almost normal was saying, to less of an extreme

http://www.dailygalaxy.com/my_weblog/2012/...l-thinking.html

The problem is that besides not knowing the chances of life developing at all, we don't even know how long it will take assuming it does. Earth is around 4.5 billion years old, and early life arose some 0.5-0.7 billion years after that, and early homo sapiens around ~400-250 million years ago. That is to say, going from planet formation to intelligent life (here defining intelligent life on Earth as "humans") took over 4 billion years, and then from that, it took hundreds of millions of years for us to send messages that could potentially reach space (radio being invented somewhere around ~1880). We can't really make any qualified statement about other planets getting there faster, but we know that it took a long time for us.

We'd have to make up a term, I'd guess. Though if it doesn'T replicate, and doesn't uphold complex shapes against entropy, it's probably just rocks.


Quite a stretch, since there are an awful lot of ways these elements can combine.


No. Not only will climate change result in a net plus of arable land (sucks if you live near the equator though), a lot of arable land is very badly developed, if at all. Africa, this means you. And it's much cheaper to just expand conventional farming upward than trying to colonise the sea floor.


Oh, it's that argument again.

Nobody says population growth is inevitable. Many developed nations are models that disprove this claim. China shows you can stop population growth - or at least, slow considerably - as a top-down order too. And who says Aliens don't go the cheap route and euthanasise? And that is assuming their way of procreation si a carbon copy of ours, which already is *quite* a stretch. Finally, interstellar expeditions are incredibly ressource intensive. If you're on a string ressource wise already, wasting more ressources you will never see again instead of enforcing a one-child policy equivalent is idiotic.


They will also have no real reason for interstellar colonisation that spends those ressources for the most expensive way to execute excess population possible. Seriously, if they need population reduction that much, there are much more effective ways to ensure that while keeping all these ressources for themselves. They could build giant space stations for their excess population, too, which keeps most of those ressources intact that otherwiese would have to be burned up for fuel on their interstellar colonisation shenanigans.


If all your points lead up only to ID4 in SR, why do you even try to justify them? Any god-like, perfect scifi race isn't going to waste their ressources on such a lousy endeavour, PERIOD, because they're sufficiently anthroporphic to think in such terms. The idea defeats itself, realistically.


What logistics? Burning up the other half of their solar system for reinforcements that arive in a few decades? Please.


Your location says "midwest". Kansas?

Also... what tin can? You still aren't grasping the scale involved in this undertaking. Hollow out an asteroid, spin it for gravity, and terraform the interior: boom, you have a perfectly lovely, custom-landscaped, inside-out world, complete with its own ecology. Cryostasis? Where a power failure could kill everyone? No engineer in his right mind would design a ship like that.

Still wrong. Gravity = theory = fact.
The Mathematical probabilities of life happening by chance are also not my own inventions. Since you've stated that they are, once again, you're still wrong on both counts.






Wrong. The chances for a planet developing life *by chance* are calculated by whatever figure of time you wish.

The chances for a study to create life under the most ideal conditions, which in fact, sometime little resemble anything natural the earth ever experienced, have nothing to do with the flow of time.

Again you display a lack of basic understanding in science.

Which is why that particular bit is part of the updated drake's equation. there may be a good chance of there being life in just the milky way, but the chances that life has developed to a level where they are sentient, capable of sending/receiving radio signals into space is much lower (since we have at least a 3 billion year window of time where life hasn't even developed central nervous systems).

Why, after colonising this asteroid, waste ressources that all agree have to be scarce in order to start colonising schemes to begin with on propelling this asteroid over several light years? Just populate it and keep it where it was. Everything else is a waste of your scarce ressources because your hypothetical race is too pro-life to get it's excessive reproduction under conrtol. think of all teh little aliens the energy wasted on colonisation would feed! Why won't anyone think of the little aliens.

Well, Are they tasty with Cocktail Sauce?

Still right. Gravity = Law (not theory) = Fact
Look up what a theory is. look in the dictionary.
Idea formulates a Theory. Once you prove a theory, it becomes a law. until then, it is just a that...a theory.




your in rare form today.

Chance has EVERYTHING to do with time. lets say, you are generating a random number between 1 and 1 trillion twice. Lets say it takes you 1 second to generate both numbers and compare for a match. I'll give you a year and see if you ever generate the same number simultaneously.


Now i'll give you a billion years....

Can't get enough ... ^_^

...it stops being an analogue for life, because we know quite sure that life has come into existence at least once

Actually, I would have MUCH preferred that the creators of SR put their foot down and say that Psionics didn't exist, period, end of sentence. I also don't have ANY problem with SR interpretation of Werewolves (Shifters), vampires, and other beasts. I know that this is not D&D, so please don't insult me Neraph.

@Hermit: Actually I dislike Star Trek's take on Psionic abilities, but I don't want to go on a rant about that here.


////
Second, the rule set I made up for Psionics has the Psion with a limited set of abilities. Also, without the ability to boost your power with foci, the power level is much lower. I mean think about it: a Mage with Magic 6, a Rating 6 Spellcasting Foci, in a beneficial mana field (in this case +2) will have the ability to cast a effectively Rating 14 Magic.

My rule set would not allow ANY of those shenanigans. There is no Psionic power foci, and no beneficial mana field. Yes there is no drawbacks, but I accounted for them by limiting the number of abilities that a Psion could get to their Psi rating. Psi rating of 2... congrats you have TWO powers and can not learn any more until you raise your Psi rating. Unlike a mage who can spend 5 Karma to learn a new spell.

If anyone wants to take a look at the rule set I made and tell me how I can make it better and more balanced with the current SR rule set, then PM me and I'll send you a copy.

Of course. It's just the hubris of "Since we're here, our theories on why we're here must be right!' that annoys the hell out of me.

Loup Garou.

Technically not correct, theories are based on and supported by facts, but they're not facts in themselves.
A theory is a unifying explanation of a natural phenomenon.

A fact tells us what happens
A theory attempts to explain why it happens

This by no means make a theory less valid.

Is random chance really that relevant in this although?
My layman understanding of abiogenesis suggest that on the most basic level: Before there is a cell or even a RNA sequence, it has way more to do with the chemical interaction of basic organic matter.
organic/=life but you knew that already


Worth noting is that there is a scale of time aswell, other planets might have had life at some point that is extinct by this point in time.

Ummmmm. Functionally Wrong on the MAge issue. With a 6 Magic Rating, he could cast at a Force 12 (as an Overcast Effect), but his Magic is still only a 6. The Power Focus and the Mana Field have absolutely no positive effect on the Magic Rating Directly. The Rating 6 Focus and the +2 Mana Field add DICE, not RATING to the test.

This thread is ugly and should be ashamed of itself.

That's misguiding, absolute proof is only relevant (and possible) in physics and mathematics.

It's also a horrible misrepresentation of the scientific method.
A theory in common speech is NOT a scientific theory.

Again! A theory is a unifying explanation of a natural phenomenon.
Its based on facts derived from empirical observation and experiments.
Theories are the highest form of proof that can be achieved outside of mathematics or physics.

Also the gravitational laws and the theory of gravity is not the same thing

Um... that's exactly what they did do. Anyone who believes that he is psychic is actually a magician. There are no psychic powers, end of sentence.

Don't get me wrong. I am not saying a bunch of roman legionairs wouldn't be able to get the drop on a group of modern infantery. (despite firearms)
(Considering that the romans would probably be stronger and faster, suggested by archologists)
The point is, they wouldn't know how to fight us. Take our ability to comunicate over long distances. They wouldn't have a single clue how to stop us from doing it.


Well, there is a robot on the mars and nasa could have send humans if they were in to spend a lot of money for less results... And not returning at all should be kind of a deal breaker...

Well, lets say unlikely to visit us. What the probablitie for a civilastion is to exist in two solar systems I do not know. And it depends what you may count...
One "generation" lab in the next solar system or colonized several planets...

I guess we have to set some things straight.
1. Yes, the scenario is at all unrealistic.
2. But if we assume they are comming here with spaceships, well our chances are very low.

Yes, there are other fantasy scenarios. A very aggressive species which just happened to find some way to teleport between Solar systems, directly on the planets. Now, everything is possible...


@Psionic
The only thing that bugs me a bit about the Psionic tradition is, that RAW is actually what they believe... But they are wrong by RAW...

Pardon my misuse of terms, but my point stands for the reasons you yourself said.

Sometimes I mix up things i learned way back in high school with what i learned through my own studies, and get these little details mixed up.

Unless they're considered a critter?