Oh, LEA must be aliens using tachyon technology, because there are now many offences you can commit even though you haven't done anything harmful, you have thought Bad Thoughts.
Oh, pls don't bring such realistic and desperate story into this amusing and SF-like story! Well, LEA have to always move beyond the speed of light! (299,792.458 [km/s])
Aliens arguably don't care about our porn, or even our plans for world domination. They're arguably looking for those 939 MeV photons from hydrogen + anti-hydrogen annihilation, which imply that FTL relativistic spaceflight is immanent. That's when they target us with relativistic impacters See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Killing_Star
We don't know what a value the alien have, possibly they may have incredible amount of interest in pizza so may search everything about pizza including one you ate yesterday, so they collect receipt about your pizza order and tap your order call and do the same thing against all human on earth... BTW even in SF I don't buy idea of FTL (if it means "faster than light") spaceflight is possible by hydrogen + anti-hydrogen annihilation (except they slowed the light significantly, but then what the point...we can overtake light by foot in that case). Both E=mc^2 and antimatter come from theory of relativity (exactly, the latter is from relativistic quantum mechanism), but it prohibits we overtake the speed of light in vacuum by acceleration. A hope is nobody knows if Th-R is absolutely right, so author of the book can build a theory which overcome Th-R. Well, maybe it's worth digging more. The author in OP's link said It's based on symmetry in physics, but it is known there're some "break" in symmetry, initially found in collapse of Kaon, now it turns out symmetry is still kept if you integrate charge (matter-antimatter) and parity but recent observation suggests CPT symmetry also broken a bit....I wish if I could learn physics much more! Even w/out that, I think the OP's statement that "And for that reason, as a matter of principle, we can’t rule out the possibility that some civilization of the very far future, whether human or alien, could piece together what was written on your paper even after you’d burned it to a crisp." leave other problem and that is matter of observation, well known as wave function collapse. How can we know exact past when we can't know exact current?
@142395 Yes, I wasn't paying attention. I meant to say relativistic spaceflight, and not FTL. Thanks. Edited.
I don't know how you would calculate the probability that there are alien creatures who are aware of us but I am sure it is infinitesimally small. When you consider in the four billion years of our planets existence and of the billions of species that have lived on our planet only one is/has been capable of rudimentary space flight and only for a period of barely fifty years it is highly probable that 99.999999999% of planets capable of supporting life are populated by dumb animals. Also when you consider on our own planet it appears the most peaceful animals are the least advanced in terms of building things and creating societies and the more warlike creatures such as ants and wasps (and us) are the ones who create and build things it seems to be a fact that being a warlike creature is a prerequisite to technological advancement so any creature that does develop such technology is probably teetering on the brink of self annihilation every day (as we are with politicians who have tens of thousands of nuclear weapons at their disposal) I would imagine the chances of any species possessing such advanced technology and surviving 500 years with it are quite small so if any of those planets ever did have or ever will have creatures that develop space flight it was probably millions of years ago and did not last very long or will be millions of years in the future and millions or billions of light years away from our location.
http://arstechnica.com/science/2014/04/habitable-exoplanets-are-bad-news-for-humanity/ I have to wonder if "intelligent" life has a way of destroying itself with its own technology. Humanity itself would be a good argument for that position. Many of our biggest "advances" were first used as weapons. The majority of the rest were used to consolidate power and wealth into the hands of a few. Most all of them are destructive to the environment and to the planet itself. If this mentality is typical for "intelligent" life, it's not surprising that there isn't much of it out there. OTOH, if intelligent life with technology equal or superior to our own does exist, I doubt they'd want us to know of their existence.
This is a well trod topic in scifi in relation to evolution of advanced species. Most are thought to "flame out" before they become a potential risk to whoever/whatever is out there and made it through that particular bottleneck which is one plausible way to explain why no aliens have visited this planet that we can prove...
I think flame out is probably the most accurate theory. It makes the most sense. Technologically speaking we are probably in the evolutionary version of an economic bubble right now, so far from the mean average it is just a matter of time before the bubble bursts us back to the stone age.
Flame out could be a prophetic choice of words. There's so many things we're doing that could have catastrophic results for ourselves and everything else on the planet. As for going back to the stone age, that might be the best thing that could happen to this planet. We've consumed so much of the planets resources that it wouldn't be possible to build this mess a 2nd time.
With computer technology being used more and more in weapons systems it is probably just a matter of time before they are affected by some kind of malware attack and I wouldn't be surprised if hackers take control of an armed drone at some point in the next few years.
I'd be most worried about malware infecting a powerful AI at some point in the future, even if an AI is coded initially for benevolence, it may not stay that way
Don't recognize that reference. Last I knew, that is the name of an insect repelling plant. Without some kind of major advance in portable power, I don't see AI getting that far.
It's from Dark Intelligence by Neal Asher http://www.amazon.co.uk/Dark-Intelligence-Transformation-Book-One/dp/0230750729
I think it depends what you mean by AI, abstract thought, imaginative and creative ideas probably a way off still, but basic decision making is already here and now and so is everything else to make automated cops, terminators etc. Consider an automated droid that can fly around by itself, has weapons on it, uses GPS to navigate and knows when fuel level demands it go back to base and refuel etc, quite easy to program that. Put into it a camera and facial recognition technology which already exists, then give it the ability to connect and establish a satellite link to a database which holds records of everyone's cell phone location, everyone's credit card transactions etc. We know that technology already exists. The droid now knows where to fly to, to look for its target, scanning everyone it sees and when it gets a facial recognition match ... do whatever it is programmed to do. Everything to do that has gradually been sneaked into our everyday lives a little bit here a little bit there, always for apparently innocuous reasons.