Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP
Posting-Version: version B 2.10.1 6/24/83; site mmintl.UUCP
Path: utzoo!linus!philabs!pwa-b!mmintl!franka
From: franka@mmintl.UUCP (Frank Adams)
Newsgroups: net.sf-lovers
Subject: Re: why nobody's visited
Message-ID: <559@mmintl.UUCP>
Date: Mon, 5-Aug-85 11:50:01 EDT
Article-I.D.: mmintl.559
Posted: Mon Aug  5 11:50:01 1985
Date-Received: Thu, 8-Aug-85 01:30:59 EDT
References: <3065@topaz.ARPA>
Reply-To: franka@mmintl.UUCP (Frank Adams)
Organization: Multimate International, E. Hartford, CT
Lines: 18
Summary: You don't need habitable planets


In article <3065@topaz.ARPA> DP0N@CMU-CS-A.ARPA writes:
>From: Don.Provan@CMU-CS-A
>
>Remember the classic SF short that theorized that detecting which
>stars had habitable planets was such a trick that one extremely
>advanced civilization never found it and finally just died out
> [...]
>
>This seems so likely (except it probably isn't possibile to detect
>which systems are worth visiting, not merely hard) that I don't
>find it the least bit surprising that we haven't been visited.

This seems superficially plausible, but it doesn't stand up to closer
examination.  You don't need habitable planets!  You don't even need
planets at all.  All you need is materials to make habitats out of,
and a power source (= a star).  It seems likely that most if not all
stars have matter orbiting them; we know that several nearby ones do
(Vega, for example).