Latest blog post: Redraw of chapter 1 is happening (2024-05-11)

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Ashran

Lmao we were already able to detect a fridge's lightbulb on the other end of the solar system back in the 80s

With the amount of heat they are spewing out every amateur astronomer will clock them the moment the light gets to the planet. Plus the neutrino detectors probably detected that wormhole. Bad time to try and be sneaky.

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Darth_Biomech

Imagine that you have a telescope with which you can get a closeup of an ant on the ground from 10km (or 10 miles, whatever) away. Now imagine you're being placed on top of a hill and being told "There's ant somewhere around these parts, find it for me please". Easy, right, you have that telescope after all?

That's kinda the reality with those "lightbulb from across the system" claims - we use humongous unwieldy radiotelescope, and we know where exactly we need to look for it. If Voyager suddenly inexplicably shifts a couple of million kilometers in a random direction - we'll probably lose it forever.

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Borg (transfer from Disqus)

It's reasonable thinking for an eager researcher, but the mission commander should know better than to trust that a single-planet civilization will be easy to hide from on its home planet.

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Lord Eric (transfer from Disqus)

maybe we could do [a] covert landing
I haven't [said] "yes" yet

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Carefulrogue (transfer from Disqus)

Ah, I really do like the trope of assuming humanity is primitive. These poor aliens are going to have such a bad day.

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Lord Eric (transfer from Disqus)

If wishful thinking were heat, Gharr would spontaneously combust. Just off the top of my head I can think of at least three reasons a civ could be throwing around lots of radio at a tech level far past the point where Alliance textbooks say that radio should be obsolete. And that's assuming the textbooks themselves are right.

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Siren (transfer from Disqus)

Yeah... They made some assumptions they maybe shouldn't have. No laser comms but lots of satellites and radar.






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TRIVIA
There's no way to communicate faster than light. If you want to send your message to another solar system, your best bet is to use a courier spaceship. It can take even a month for it to finally reach the destination, but it still beats sending it as a transmission and expecting it to arrive decades or thousands of years later.