What do we do if SETI is successful?

this is a question i have explored as part of my own scifi world building:

what is a realistic timeline for first contact, and how will it actually happen?

so we decode a message that we are pretty sure is of alien origin.

we send a message back and then wait a few decades or centuries.

we don't know how far away the origin of the message is. let's assume that it is less than 50 light years. that's still a round trip of 100 years. in other words it's a generational project, and we don't know if our first response is understood. we'll have to keep iterating until we can confirm that we are actually communicating. and then, the next step will be to try to understand each other.

with a round trip that long, even under the most optimal conditions just establishing a dialog based on say math is going to take a few centuries.

of course once we have a dialog, communication is going to speed up because then we can send longer messages.

but then it could still take anywhere from 500 to 1000 years before a common language is developed and we are able to share actual scientific and engineering knowledge.

once we reached that level of communication however, we can collaborate on developing FTL.

contrary to star trek, it was always my idea that FTL travel is not developed by the inhabitants of each planet/star system on their own, but only in collaboration across multiple such systems. maybe even more than two. driven by the desire to meet each other.

so from the point of the first received message it will be one millennium before we get to learn anything about and from these aliens, and another millennium before we can meet them in person.

and that's the optimistic projection. it could just as well take 10 times as long.

I predict that if FTL travel is possible, it will happen in our lifetimes, perhaps even as soon as 20 years ago.

uhm, develop FTL ? Break causality and the universe ?

I don't know about faster than light, but as soon as we have real AI, it will simply be information and should be able to travel at about speed of light.

We fleshy humans will never visit other stars, but our AI children will be able to explore the galaxy with all the time in the world.

Consider that, if the time separation is long enough via light then physical limits make it such that we do not ever have a chance of contact in which case this exchange is essentially indistinguishable from communication with supernatural beings.

Not that I believe they are the same, but many people will come to this conclusion and they would not be probably wrong. Causality is strange.

I'm in an AI cult. Send help. No don't.

It may be simply information, but if you put it into a radio signal and send it into the universe it won’t do anything on its own. Not unless someone receives it and understands it well enough to execute it. Assuming they’d want to - I guess it’s the interstellar equivalent of downloading and running a program from a spam email.

Because hardware never breaks, especially not on galactic timescales, and without resources to perpetually replace failing components.

They will have whole galaxies of resources! Massive amounts of redundancy. Mines, Refineries, and Factories on planetary scales.

Not going to happen tomorrow, but perhaps in the next few thousand years something will be ready to begin its journey.

That's what they said 30 years ago

You the Neptunes Pride guy?

Looks great - curious to know what broweser tech is it built with?

if you like science fiction, you may enjoy reading the bobiverse by dennis e. taylor. it describes exactly that scenario, except that the AI is an uploaded human. but that's pretty much the same thing.

well there are two options. without FTL traveling to other stars is impossible and the future won't go beyond communicating with aliens.

so i am being optimistic and hope that FTL is possible.

It's probably not possible, but don't worry, you can still reach other galaxies in your lifetime due to time dilation.

Yes! NP was originally written in 2010 so it's vanilla js on the client. Had a python server for many years, but when I had to move from python 2, I switched to js for the server as well. When the server was python I was using googles app engine database (can't remember what its called right now). These days, just a vanilla postgres and boring old SQL statements.

We wouldn’t have a long back and forth to establish a common language, we would likely send something like https://cosmicos.github.io.

“CosmicOS is a way to create messages suitable for communication across large gulfs of time and space. It is inspired by Hans Freudenthal's language, Lincos, and Carl Sagan's book, Contact. CosmicOS, at its core, is a programming language, capable of expressing simulations. Simulations are a way to talk, by anology, about the real thing they model.

CosmicOS is structured to communicate the usual math and logic basics, then use that to show how to run programs, then send interesting programs that demonstrate behaviors and interactions, and start communicating ideas through ”theater” and simulations. This is inspired by Freudenthal's idea of staging conversations between his imaginary characters Ha and Hb.”

What are you working on these days?

Built 15 years ago and still running!

Is Neptune's Pride still paying your bills?

Haha. Time travel :D

While physically possible, that is even less likely than FTL. It takes enormous amounts of fuel to reach relativistic speeds even with things like antimatter engines. Speeds fast enough for other galaxies are not possible unless invent impossible reactionless drive.

err. NP never paid any bills :) Was always just a hobby project. It makes enough to cover the hosting, but not much more than that.

My day job is working in a small games company called BlueManchu. We made Void Bastards, Wild Bastards, and have a new one we are prototyping now.

I don't know how you can say it's even less likely than FTL since everything we know shows that FTL is impossible. Virtually impossible is much easier than actually impossible.

Well, someone on the internet predicted it. That's noteworthy.