We have a pair of kites that regularly land in a tree a few meters from my garden. They are beautiful looking creatures (even if not very beautiful sounding). It always lifts my spirits to see them. I hope the reintroduction of Eagles is similarly successful.
So many people carry this dull heavy just in their pockets to fend off all attempts to revive the sense of wonder they buried deep in their childhood.
For me, just the very fact that there exist time, space, laws of physics, enormous complexity stemming from deceptive "simplicity", is absolutely awe-inspiring.
"Just" Could you create the laws of physics? If all of humanity got together in a common effort, could we make one law of physics or change one law of physics?
Something which has always existed, which created the entire universe, is ever present through space and time, and invisible. Something which can never be resisted because it is almighty. Not even for one second.
Something which will create beautiful sculptures out of dull stone in places hidden from the world.
Similarly for Gericault's 'Raft of the Medusa'. I had only seen it in a book and had no idea how big it was. It is enormous. Go see it if you are ever at the Louvre (much more impressive than the Moca Lisa IMHO).
London, Bristol, Southampton, Coventry and various other English cities were heavily bombed by Germany before the UK's major bomber offensive on Germany.
It would take ~5 million years (in the sender's frame of reference) for a probe to make the journey to Andromeda and then send another back with any information. What would the point of that be?
I read an interesting book called Count to a Trillion.
Astronomers detected an antimatter star a mere 50 light–years from Earth, and the US launched an unmanned mission to go there and learn what it could. Luckily the probe was programmed to transmit its findings multiple times, because the first few transmissions were missed; terrorists had launched a bioweapon that nearly caused an extinction event. Eventually Europe recovered enough to be paying attention. Appended like a footnote to the end of the probe’s transmission of everything it found were pictures of the writing covering the surface of the only moon of the only planet in the system, a gas giant.
The Europeans launched a manned mission a few decades later. One token American, the inventor of the suspended animation technique the crew would be using, was invited along. They went, they learned quite a lot from the Monument, they harvested a quite a lot of antimatter, and then they returned.
What they could decode from the Monument was mostly mathematics. A large portion of it was proofs for various theorems of [cliometrics](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cliometrics), or quantitative history. With a proper understanding of the mathematics, anyone can predict and even control the evolution of any complex system. It could be a computer program, a network, an organism, an ecology, a society, or all of the above at once. The other interesting bit of math was a complete proof of a system for calculating the value of a trade, given the distance between the participants and their relative level of technology and intelligence. It proves that profitable trade is possible between distant star systems, provided both sides know enough. Proper use of the system allows both sides to know the profit of any trade in advance, meaning no prior coordination need be required. Any two parties can use it to launch trade missions that take millennia to arrive knowing that the other side will already have made the same calculations and be expecting the mission.
The rest of what they decode is astronomy and history. The Monument records that a group of aliens in the dwarf galaxy M3 claim ownership and responsibility for the whole galaxy. Through several layers of delegation they are organizing the creation of life here in the Milky Way. In particular, any and all life arising near the antimatter star was seeded by an intelligence inhabiting a globular cluster 1000 light–years away. Therefore humans owe that intelligence a huge debt and must repay it, effectively making everyone on Earth a slave. As soon as they detect anyone tampering with the antimatter star they are instructed to send a mission to deracinate the planet, carry away whatever life they find, and use it to colonize other star systems. This mission cannot not be sent quickly, as we’re expected to be quite primitive and thus not worth spending very much on, but it will arrive in ~11,000 years whether anyone likes it or not. The crew of the ship then depart for Earth.
When they got back to Earth they found that the whole world was strange. Hundreds of years have past, all the countries are different, and their homes are gone. They end up using some of the antimatter as weapons, defeating the militaries of the world and declaring themselves ruler of all. Between their military power, their knowledge of cliometrics (primitive though it is at this point), and the vast riches of the antimatter that they brought with them, they manage to live in some style.
The main character (the token American from before) and his fiance discover one additional proof of importance: any form of life can be elevated above their boss if they can prove themselves more capable of long–term thinking. All you have to do is engage in really long–term trade. They decide that they should make Humanity equal to their boss’s boss’s boss’s boss, the intelligence at the dwarf galaxy M3, by sending a mission there and back. It’ll take 77,000 years but as long as Humanity survives that long and doesn’t forget about them then Humanity will be vindicated and will no longer be enslaved to anyone. They plan to depart the day after their wedding. They spend the night after their wedding in a disused hotel thousands of miles above the Pacific ocean in the middle of a space elevator.
Alas, that night the main character’s rival calls him out for a duel. He agrees and meets the guy at the base of the elevator. But the duel is a trap; his rival cheats and the space elevator is severed. He is buried under the rubble, wounded but alive, as his wife makes her way up to the ship. She can’t turn the ship around and come back for him and so must continue the mission without him. He decides that one night with his wife is not enough and has to find a way to live on Earth for the next 77,000 years or so until she gets back. Cue sequels.
So there you go. Love seems like a pretty good answer to me, but technically any sufficiently long–term motivation would suffice. I’m sure that you could imagine some, if you put your mind to it.
I was never convinced by cliometrics (including the Asimov version in Foundation). Yes, there are patterns and structural forces, but history is too subject to chaos (in the mathematical sense) for any precise long range predictions.
That's probably true (although not proven!), but every science fiction story is allowed to ask the reader to suspend disbelief when it breaks one law of physics. (At least according to Campbell.) Since the story has no FTL travel or communications it can use that forbearance somewhere else.
So a probe travelling between galaxies at 99%c can't hit anything bigger than 1.46×10−12 kg? It is ~2.5 million light-years between us and Andromeda. I don't know how much matter there is between the galaxies (does anyone?). But travelling that sort of distance without hitting anything above that tiny mass seems very unlikely. Also how is your tiny robot probe supposed to power any guidance or maintenance systems for that sort of duration of trip?
The paper uses a minimal weight of 30g and surface area of 1cm² for a replicator. On page 13 it says that you need at least 40 of them to travel through intergalactic space, but also states that there is more mass floating around in interstellar space. The probes should create muliple staging areas.
I assume if such a replicating probe would really be possible, it should be straightforward to just send of a million of them and hope for the best.
In my opinion, a huge limiting factor is communication. How do you know if those probes reached their target?
There's also an ethical aspect to it. Should we really fill the universe with self replicating paperclips? Because once you start the process, when and how would you stop it?
A customer contacts me and says 'I have an error'. After several emails I manage to get them to send me a screenshot of the error. The error message describes the exact problem and what to do about in one short sentence. I type pretty much exactly the error message text into my reply. This solves their problem. I think they see 'error' or 'warning' and they don't even read the rest of the sentence. Extraordinary. But it has happened more than once.
They were taught not to read errors because they encountered thousands of errors (in other software) that were less helpful than that one.
Most people have an adversarial relationship with software: it is just the pile of broken glass they have to crawl through on the way to getting their task done. This understanding is reinforced and becomes more entrenched with each next paper cut.
I guess it is a mindset thing. Techies see something like this as a problem to solve. Non-techies often panic at the slightest variance from what they were expecting. See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learned_helplessness
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