JWST reveals its first direct image discovery of an exoplanet

Yet another reminder that space is huge and no matter how big we can imagine, due to the realities of physics, there is a good chance that we might never be able to reach the far stars and galaxies.

The depressing, if that's the right word, counterpoint to all the "oh my god it's fun of stars" deep fields crammed with millions of galaxies per square arcsecond is that the expansion of the universe means that nearly all of them are permanently and irrevocably out of reach even with near-lightspeed travel: they'll literally wink out of observable reality before we could ever get to them, leaving only a few nearby galaxies in the sky. At best you can reach the handful of gravitationally-bound galaxies in the local group.

Not that the Milky Way is a small place, but even most sci-fi featuring FTL and all sorts of handwaves has to content itself with shenanigans confined to a single galaxy due to the mindblowing, and accelerating, gaps between galaxies.

It's a shame, but in a glass-falf-full sense the fact that this planet is our little boat in the ocean and all that we got is also a quite helpful focusing reminder and scope constraint.

That the stars are beyond reach might be depressing, how aggresively we are gambling our little boat is on the other hand actively scary and perhaps the dominant limit on humanity's effective reach.

Biological humans won't reach the stars but our immortal robotic offspring can.

There was an article I saw about how long it would take the fastest spacecraft built with "non-speculative" physics - phenomena that has actually been observed in labs or in nature, ignoring any manufacturing and budget infeasibility (as in no handwaving sci-fi) and we're still talking like an entire lifetime to the next star.

In a way we're kind of still like an ancient village who can only travel by boats made of reeds

Unlikely. There are both economical and moral reasons to never build a self replicating robotic fleet of probes. I think a sufficiently advanced civilization will always prefer telescopes over probes for anything more distant then the nearest couple of solar systems.

Just to ring the point home, we are technically (but not yet economically) capable of creating small telescopes which use our sun as a gravitational lens, which would be able to take photographs of exoplanets. In the far future we could potentially build very large telescopes which can do the same and see very distant objects with a fine resolution. That would be a much better investment then to send out self replicating robotic probes.

Might be Charles Stross’s blog post The High Frontier: http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2007/06/the-high...

"There are both economical and moral reasons to never build a self replicating robotic fleet of probes."

Such as?

" I think a sufficiently advanced civilization will always prefer telescopes over probes for anything more distant then the nearest couple of solar systems."

What part of "immortal" don't you understand? traveling at 1% of c doesn't feel slow if you just turn off or slow down your brain during the trip.

I would expect that the probe makers would want some benefits from the fleet of probes they sent, the only benefit I can think of to be had are information about far away objects, which is of scientific value. The probe’s makers will therefor have to keep contact with an ever expanding fleet of probes and sift through an exponentially increasing amount of information for millions of years. This just does not seem practical when you can just build a telescope. Now time may not pass that slowly from the perspective of the probe, but for the civilization on the homeworld, this method is painfully slow. They could have built thousands or millions of telescopes during that time to gather the same information (albeit of lower quality). Which is why you would probably want to probe your nearest neighboring solar systems, but nothing farther.

As for the moral reasons to not send out a fleet of self replicating probes. These are an extreme pollution hazard. An ever expanding fleet of robots traveling across the galaxy over millions of years, growing in numbers exponentially, exploiting resources in foreign worlds, with nothing to stop them if something happens to their makers. Over millions of years these things would be everywhere, and—in the best case—be a huge nuisance, but at worse they would be a risk to the public safety of the worlds they travel to. With these risks I believe a sufficiently advanced civilization would just build telescopes for their exploration needs.

You don't understand. The "probes" WOULD BE the creators. Biological life is far too fragile to survive interstellar travel but AI running on much more durable hardware makes it downright easy.

And they wouldn't have to be inherently self-replicating.

When you can live millions of years your idea of what is "slow" changes pretty drastically.

I think this is the solution to the Fermi paradox, that space is simply too big for civilizations across the galaxy too discover each other, let alone interact with each other.

Further more I don't think technologically advanced civilizations will be wasting their time and resources in colonizing new works, space is simply too big for that. And that they would conduct their explorations with telescopes, not probes, space is simply too big for probes.