And by aliens I mean, outer space creatures and UFO. For whatever reason all UFO sighting footage looks either fake or like recorded with a Casio keyboard. And I find hard to believe we don’t have any decent footage of them with all the surveillance and technology we have now.
Edit: 🍿
Honestly, I feel like too many people have a cognitive bias from living in a time of unparalleled technological advancement. We’ve gone from, e.g. mechanical chronometers to calculate longitude on wooden vessels propelled by the wind to GPS-guided international flights in a historical blink of an eye. The pace of technological change even in living memory has been immense.
Not knowing how any of it works, it’s easy to think of it akin to magic, and to extrapolate from “18th century humans -> 21st century humans” to “21st century humans -> alien technology”. The catch is that this technological surge has come about because we’ve figured out how the physical universe works, not in spite of missing out on big chunks of potential knowledge.
All of our technology has plumbed the depths of our physical, scientific knowledge. The same physical knowledge that allows us to do wonders also shows us the limits, and provides the definitive answers as to why there’s not “alien technology” out there that would seem like magic to us.
Put another way, it would be really bonkers if the scientific knowledge that has enabled us to do so many practical things, like create tiny devices like the one I’m using to tap out a message, was somehow totally wrong.
I feel like you’re completely leaving out the gap that there will between what we’ve achieved now vs 1000 years from now. If there’s advanced life out there that’s been around for long enough, I don’t think it’s biased to say that there’s a chance their tech is far more advanced than ours. I understand what you’re saying, but let’s not pretend we’re the true generation where there won’t be any major breakthroughs. There will be, but they’ll just take longer than before. To make technological leaps comparable from the 1800s to now, it may very well take from now to the year 3000, but the point is the notion that we’re past the point of major leaps is unfounded and based on the false notion that I’m saying in 300 years we can expect technological leaps as large as we’ve seen in the last 300 years.
Ah, but “major technological breakthroughs” != “major technological breakthroughs concerning faster-than-light travel”. Certainly, there will be more of the former in the next 300 years, but our understanding of physics precludes the latter.
The quality of our understanding of physics is proved by the technological advances that we’ve already made with it. Yes, we’re missing some major pieces, like how to unify general relativity and quantum mechanics (how to quantize gravity), but the problem that physicists face on this front is actually how stunningly well the Standard Model holds up, and has so far resisted attempts to break it. It’s highly unlikely that we’ll discover anything which completely upends the laws of physics as we know them.
The space for functioning systems to co-exist within a wrong underlying model is huge. A Turing machine does not care about mathematics or logic. It just matches a sequence and swaps in a value and maybe ticks in a different direction. You could argue that the patterns themselves require a minimum of math/logic, but truthfully - no, they don’t - for the same reason that you cut cheese without needing to know what the knife is doing at the molecular level: if the input gives an expected output, you can construct entire worlds on that alone.
You don’t need to understand the composition of cheese and bread to make a grilled sandwich.
That’s true, but our theory of physics is far more complex than those simple patterns. It actually consists of many, many interrelated theories that mutually reinforce each other. And that so many of them describe phenomena described with c as a term strongly indicates the speed of causality of pretty fundamental.
In any case, I’d be very interested to learn how it shakes out, but I probably won’t be around in 300 years to do so!