Surlethe wrote:
Simon_Jester wrote:
I would advise against asking about Alcubierre drives, because the most likely show-stopper is the trivially simple "We can't find any piece of matter with less than zero mass." Which would tell us very little that we don't already know (or can't reasonably infer).
Good point - we want to avoid questions with potentially trivial answers. Do you have any questions that you'd like to put forward?
The only ones I can think of are broadly similar the ones that virtually everyone here is already suggesting.
For choice I'd ask physics-related questions:
"Is string theory valid, and if so, which one?"
[I do not understand string theory, and am not qualified to formulate this question precisely]
"How do you fit dark matter and/or dark energy into your models of particle physics and forces?"
Those are the only ones that come to mind.
I doubt we could or should ask questions about
our own biology, because they almost certainly won't know enough details to tell us much we don't already know, unless we are luckier than we deserve. Asking questions about
their biology would be interesting, but might not tell us anything we could actually use.
Likewise, it is probably not a good idea to ask a pure
engineering question, such as "what is the best way to colonize our solar system?" unless we can confidently expect to get complete blueprints for all the devices we'd need, including instructions on how to build the tools to make the devices. And that might be too much to ask for. We do not have a critical shortage of capable engineers, and most pure engineering problems can be solved (in the sense of "we know how to do this," not in the sense of "we have done this") by throwing talent at the problem. Plus, engineering talent is relatively fungible, because there are usually many engineers capable of doing front line work on a given problem. Scientific problems are trickier, because they often depend on serendipity, nonfungible talent that only a very few people have, and a healthy dose of blind luck.
If we want answers we can use to questions we probably couldn't have answered on our own in a reasonable time frame, I think physics, math, and computation are the best subjects.
This gets a lot easier if we are allowed to engage in at least a modest dialogue, such that "I don't know" as the answer to our first question doesn't mean we've blown an irrecoverable opportunity.
RedImperator wrote:
The "crew" could be a group of uploaded brain-states stored on a computer, on a ship the size of a sunflower seed, built by a culture that has enshrouded its home star in a Dyson cloud of solar panels for making antimatter. It would be trivial for that kind of civilization to shotgun ships and crews at relativistic speeds all over the galaxy.
If the ship is that small we'll never find it, let alone work out a useful way to communicate it. And I'm not sure it will be able to stop long enough for us to ask it a question.
But I do take your meaning; uploads are a very plausible form of "crew" for such a ship, and they greatly reduce the potential costs of STL travel.
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