I'm no physicist, but I was inspired by this article "The Physics of Extraterrestrial Civilizations". How smart can extraterrestrial (aliens) be? The author Michio Kaku quotes Karl Sagan:
“What does it mean for a civilization to be a million yea
rs old? We have had radio telescopes and spaceships for a few decades; our technical civilization is a few hundred years old... an advanced civilization millions of years old is as much beyond us as we are beyond a bush baby or a macaque.”
Basically, if we assume:
- Let A = "age of a extraterrestrial technology"
- Let h = "age of human technology"
Being generous, we can say h = 400. But we don't know A. So taking an 'h' at random, we know almost for sure that h > 400. In fact, it is most likely that h >> 400 (much greater than). Theoretically, as long as the extraterrestrials didn't kill each other, we could have 'h' being thousands or even millions (or hundreds of millions of years old). Thus, alien technology likely dwarfs our own.
How smart can aliens be? Well, if you think Google is good now, just imagine how smart Google will be in 100 million years! Mega-cloud computing. Or perhaps galaxy-computing.
On that note, if I were an extraterrestrial, I'd want my first visit on earth to be the Google campus in Mountain View. However, if they get Wi-Fi on their planet, they may not need to visit at all. :)
Yeah bookmaking this wasn't a speculative conclusion outstanding post! .
Posted by: zofia | January 28, 2013 at 12:05 PM