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Luna
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this post was submitted on 27 Dec 2024
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Don't be mean. I promise to do my best to judge that fairly.
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But hey, if it happened once, maybe we'll get to find some remains of another system to which this happened as well. Or maybe, someday, someone else will find ours. Or perhaps gravity is the only force keeping us from drifting off the surface of our rock, preventing us from falling into the darkest void for eternity, with the vain hope that your frozen corpse will someday land in someone else's yard, like a cosmic frisbee.
The universe is large enough that similar combinations of events could have happened elsewhere too. But it's also large enough that those places are most likely further from us than our species will ever travel.
Perhaps too far to ever travel, but if we can detect it to at least be aware of their existence, then that might be enough for us. Just an answer.
Honestly, if we ever got a really credible answer, I'm sure we'd dramatically increase the pace of space travel research, to the point where we might innovate a way to get there. Maybe we do one of the space/time bending options, or maybe we find a way to punch a hole through spacetime or something like that. If there's a will, we'll put a ton of resources into exhausting every potential way to do it before giving up. It might even create multi-national unity in a way that we've never thought possible.
So please, if you're an alien that's been quietly listening to our broadcasts, please send an answer somehow.
I feel like the most disappointing answer but likely answer is that life is out there (and even if we do get some whisper of communication with them), but a method of travel capable of crossing the distance between us is downright impossible to make. Like "break the laws of physics" impossible.
Our understanding of the laws of physics is constantly changing, and there's almost always some loophole to accomplish some seemingly impossible task by satisfying the requirements in some other way. For example, we know that information can't travel faster than the speed of light, but we also know that the light bends around massive objects, meaning we can cause light to take longer to reach a given place by making the distance longer. If we can make distances shorter, we don't need to break the laws of physics to travel seemingly faster than light.
We're pretty good at innovating ourselves out of seemingly impossible challenges. We figured out how to split atoms and control it well enough to produce energy, we figured out how to heat a room by transferring heat from a colder room, and I think we'll figure out how to make long-distance space travel possible by working around our current understanding of the laws of physics.