Time Is Short
April 27th, 2007 by WaltPeople of Earth,
Now that this has happened, time is short. I can only assume that the inhabitants of the planet around Gliese 581 have left us unmolested up to this point is that as long as we did not know of their existence we were no threat. Now that the word is out, I can only assume that their long-prepared invasion fleet is under way. Fortunately, we have 20.5 years until word reaches them, and another 20.5 before their planet-killing machines can acheive Earth orbit, so we must use the 41 years of peace left to us to prepare. I am not a crank.
Sincerely,
Walt
April 27th, 2007 at 11:47 pm
Worse yet, they’re coming from a planet orbiting a red sun. Bathed in the rays of our yellow sun they’ll be unstoppable.
April 28th, 2007 at 12:31 pm
41 years — that’s a prime number of years. What remains are the prime years of our lives. This is a crank comment. The kryptonite discovered in a mine in Serbia is white kryptonite. The search for red, green, Bizarro, and other kryptonites is highly classified, by Homeplanet Defense.
By the way, today, 28 April 2007, is the 101st birthday of Kurt Gödel. 101 years is a prime number of years. This comment refers to itself. So does this sentence.
“This sentence contains ten words, eighteen syllables, and sixty-four letters.”
April 28th, 2007 at 9:48 pm
Their planet killing machines are massless?
April 29th, 2007 at 4:49 am
Of course, being so close, it is far more probable that denizens of that planet are already here on Earth than that they have yet to arrive. Hungarians — at last, your secret is revealed!
This new planet is close enough to eliminate any claims for alien primacy by the Dogon people of Mali, with their (supposedly) advanced knowledge of astronomy:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dogon_people#Controversy
April 29th, 2007 at 8:46 pm
we … are … so … uncool. All the other species have FTL.
May 6th, 2007 at 7:17 pm
Science Forum about Starflight without warp drive featuring Geoffrey A. Landis, David Brin, Robert L. Forward, and Jonathan Vos Post.
http://www.sff.net/people/Geoffrey.Landis/stl.htp
May 13th, 2007 at 5:18 pm
Netizens of Earth (human or otherwise):
Here’s the problem: we don’t know how scientifically advanced the aliens are, just that they are more advanced than we are, they’ll be here Very Soon, and they probably won’t be friendly. So how can we militarily deter an ARBITRARILY advanced opponent?
Only one solution seems possible: by a natural evolution of the MAD strategy (mutual assured destruction) which avoided (if only very narrowly) nuclear war during the Cold War, it is neccessary to develop the capability to destroy the universe itself. Only then can we hope to deter an arbitrarily advanced alien civilization from acting in any way inimical to our interest.
Sir Roger Penrose has suggested a suitable scheme: produce a gravitational wave which develops a null curvature singularity which destroys the universe as it propagates (at the speed of light, so evasion is futile). Such waves are certainly permitted by our gold standard theory of gravitation, general relativity, since one can easily write down simple exact solutions (certain pp-waves) having this property. So the only question is how to generate such a “wave of death”. Or more precisely, a “thunderbolt” which only destroys spacetime along the direction of a beam of radiation. Fear not, work is in progress and (according to well-informed sources) is nearing the experimental stage.