Looking in the Wrong Direction?

[krpalmer]

As “post something every so often” started nudging me harder, I realised I didn’t seem to have any ideas to write about. While I have been working my way through a few things I thought I might comment on, I haven’t finished them yet. Not altogether satisfied with the last few posts I’ve made and remembering how the arid patch that had pushed me to sign up for Tumblr hit in a February, I went so far as to reconsider something I’d watched through an educational channel’s streaming service and dwelt on an unfortunate announcement reminding me of something I’d drifted away from a while ago. At the same time, though, I did get to wondering whether “expressing an opinion about everything taken in” is really that great, even if I might not be quite in a “get led along with ‘likes’ for the sake of selling online ads someone else makes money on” position.

Then, while going to a space news site to see how the checkouts of the James Webb Space Telescope are progressing, I happened to see an item about a search for extraterrestrial intelligence looking at the centre of our galaxy. The search didn’t turn up anything, and so long as that’s the case people will keep worrying about “technological civilizations expiring in short order.” Even so, and acknowledging it would be a foolish thing to let “science fiction” decide everything for actual science, I did happen to think of Vernor Vinge’s A Fire Upon the Deep, where towards the centre of the galaxy thought itself flickers out but “space opera” machinery works further out than we are. (I then thought of Poul Anderson’s earlier Brain Wave, although its “smart zones of space” aren’t in the same configuration.) So far as another predilection of Vinge and others goes (and acknowledging it might just be unproductive wishful thinking), I also got to thinking about “why not speculate about ‘advanced civilizations’ getting to a point where they aren’t detectable from a distance with our current technology?”