The idea that astronomers had stumbled on such a structure triggered headlines round the globe – though not for long. Subsequent research has now undermined the idea. “We have found that light of different wavelengths is blocked in different amounts: exactly what you would expect from starlight passing through a dust cloud,” said Lintott.
I mean, if alien species could build star-spanning structures, they could easily do interstellar travel and colonization. So the Fermi argument says this couldn't actually have been aliens -- someone would have turned the Milky Way into a completely colonized urban area billions of years ago. All the other galaxies would have been colonized too (IR observations say < 1 in 100,000 have been urbanized.)
I think people are misled by all the SF stories with galactic empires that somehow left Earth alone for billions of years, not realizing stories are there to entertain, not reflect what could be real.
That's not clear actually. We could, given a religious like motivation, build massive space stations right now with today's rockets, materials, and lifetimes. It's incremental building.
We could not get to the nearest star with today's rockets (or eq.), materials, or lifetimes. There's no incremental engineering there.
The star is just 1470 light years from our solar system. So, either a huge coincidence occurred, or there are many stars like this in the Milky Way. In the latter case, you are proposing that every one of the alien civilizations that built each of these things had the same motivational inhibition to colonization. Even more, you are proposing that all such civilizations in the past, and all such civilizations in other galaxies, were similarly inhibited.
A star-spanning civilization would have far more than enough energy to propel interstellar vehicles, for example by laser beaming.
I'm proposing no such thing. GP said that if they had built large structures then it was obvious they could do interstellar travel.
I said that implication was false, it's clear how we might build large orbital structures but not clear how we might to interstellar travel. As a counter example.
The implication is as clearly true as such things could be.
The barrier to interstellar travel is largely economic(*). The resources needed to construct star-spanning structures are many orders of magnitude greater than needed to construct and launch a starship (or a laser with an aperture capable of projecting a beam to interstellar distances).
One of the problems with this stuff is most of the problems are analyzed by physicists, who tend to reduce the problem to "can we make the physics work" rather than looking at more practical problems like "do we know if any materials will stand up to getting front-row seats to nuclear explosions?" and the other kinds of engineering problems that have bedeviled rocket science in its entire existence. And that's before getting into more fundamental issues like "what is the effect of space life on human biology?" (to which the answer appears to be somewhere between "maybe unmitigatably harmful" to "catastrophic").
There's a lot of questions that need to be answered before we can truly answer the question "what does it take to make interstellar travel", and the fact that many boosters for space exploration are glibly ignoring those questions is perhaps the biggest barrier of all.
We are getting close to fusion with magnetic containment. So at some point, regular materials won’t be a limit
But materials are improving at a rapid pace. So many orders of scale to co-optimize meta materials. Materials in the future will be magic compared to the limits we have now.
Materials won’t be a barrier to interstellar travel
We are only decades away from being able to do it, for very low mass ships/probes with AI. Long before we will be able to create mega structures
And my point mostly is proven here: We could build a giant space station with spaceX + more iron into space. We could build an interstellar probe in "Some point - we're getting close" or "future" or "a few decades".
Since this whole discussion has been about putative aliens with billions of times our production, not about what we ourselves can do soon, I'm not sure why you're harping on this.
The propulsion may have been theorized to get us up to speed, but there are many other factors, not least of which is shielding from objects while you're going a decent fraction of the speed of light. There's no obstacle avoidance routines with that much momentum.
The risk with these if they are sufficiently large would be an explosion on impact. This is dealt with by placing a thin barrier in front of the vehicle. The particle explodes on impact with the barrier, cutting a small hole. The debris shoots forward, spreading, and is absorbed on a shield. At 0.01 c, a 1 microgram particle deposits 450 joules of energy. This is called a "Whipple Shield".
If necessary, parts of this system could be replaced during the journey.
I just want to be clear that this is all heavily theorized. The density of interstellar space has an assumed ablative rate based on speed of travel, but it wouldn't take much to exceed that. We are at least a few trial runs away from knowing, and that alone makes the prospect of interstellar travel far into the future. (again, repeating my main point)
The technologies within our reach which would be very helpful with building massive space stations are such that they would very much allow for getting to the nearest star within a human lifetime.
The only reason we don't actually reach out for those technologies right now is that many of us have a religious fear of anything nuclear.
This just isn't true. It seems true, because we can treat interstellar travel as a problem of scale, but it doesn't follow that "build big rocket" equates to "go fast and go safe".
The energetics of interstellar dust, radiation, the long timelines of travel. It's not clear at all.
Beamed propulsion is a farther out technology, requiring development of more powerful lasers capable of pushing a crewed vehicle in reasonable amounts of time and has the issue that it is difficult to slow down at the destination.
Nuclear rocket engines were already being developed during the cold war.
Both suffer from the irrationality that the more useful they are capable of being, the more they can be misconstrued as orbital weapons.
I am amused you are objecting to a technology for interstellar travel on the grounds it is "farther out", especially in the context of what hypothetical aliens that are around for millions or billions of years would be using.
We could build a 1% c starship using hydrogen bombs. But it wouldn't make much sense to build it, since in the time it would take to get to even the nearest star we'd likely have something much faster.
I'm not objecting to it, my initial post was trying to emphasize the closeness of technologies capable of reaching the nearest stars, lasers are an option, but imo nuclear propulsion is "closer" in terms of time taken to achieve the energy densities needed to take humans there.
Sure it's only a difference of a couple of decades at worst between the two but in the context of a human lifetime, that's significant.
If we sent a nuclear craft today, a future laser or other propulsion craft will still get there much sooner.
Worse, we don’t actually have a nuclear craft design. By the time we worked out a design and built it, the other tech will already be ready.
That is because other tech will require less mass, which will “massively” simplify and reduce cost of the venture.
Given the time the trip will take, it will actually be decades at least, before the optimal time to design and send a ship - even if we had an unlimited budget with the only objective of getting there the soonest we can
Star spanning structures requires the ability to move mass at scale which requires enormous but diffused in time and space amounts of controlled energy.
Moving between stars requires immense energy focused on a single thing. The amount of acceleration required to any meaningful mass to speed necessary to travel between stars and maintain a coherent civilization is extraordinary and implies many things about the mass being accelerated as well. Most things would simply be crushed instantly, including any organism. The speed of light is also a major impediment as is time dilation, as is the need to decelerate, which require equal and opposite energy away from the destination. Ok - accelerate with large lasers based at home - how do you then stop? You first need to build large lasers both at home and destination. The problems expand, and this only helps for very local travel between close stars.
It’s difficult but plausible with today’s technology scales up to build star spanning structures because they’re built incrementally and the need for near light speed travel doesn’t exist. Further the existence of a star spanning structure might enable interstellar travel, but not intergalactic.
I’d also note that SF is meant to entertain with a story that is possible given some assumptions of progress or hidden nature of reality or small modifications to what is. It’s not meant to be built on magic and other absurdities (not meant as a pejorative!). Many science fiction stories become true and many more will. Often science fiction inspires us to achieve what doesn’t exist today but could. To couch it in something that’s dismissible as say Gandalf the Wizard fighting a Balrog is to greatly underestimate what science fiction is. It’s a roadmap to the future that helps us understand what to avoid on the road.
Building a starship reaching 1% of the speed of light seems quite reasonable without substantial technological advance (Dyson's 1968 H-bomb propelled Orion). What it would need would be lots of deuterium, but that's just a matter of large scale industry, which this putative civilization would have.
If you are saying this civilization does its work over very extended periods of time, you're saying they're comfortable with efforts that take centuries or millenia or even longer. That alone makes interstellar travel and colonization much easier; the energy needed scales as the inverse square of the travel time (assuming Isp optimized for the travel time chosen and assuming non-relativistic travel).
We (or they) do not need close to light speed travel for interstellar colonization.
Typical distance between any two stars in the Milky Way is 5 light years, which at 1% speed of light would take 500 years to get there. Assuming 25 years per generation, that represents a travel time of 20 human generations.
That's like a family from the 1500's committing for their children and 19 following generations to live on a shitty rocket. They'd have just arrived.
I wonder what 500 years of food, water, and oxygen looks like for a civilization-founding crew. What's the backup plan if the target planet isn't livable? Cyanide tablets?
Colonization wouldn't be aimed at planets, it would be aimed at structures in space. You know, like we're assuming this star-spanning civilization has been building in astronomical numbers?
Food and air would be manufactured during the trip. All that's needed is a source of energy. At 1% c, that probably means a nuclear source (or beamed power), but at higher speeds they could simply exploit the energy being deposited by interstellar matter. At 1 proton/cm^3 and .1 c, the power is 22 W/m^2.
If we're talking inter-stellar travel then it doesn't seem to matter what the destination is (planet or space habitat). The travel time remains the same, and the only source of materials (incl. food etc) would be what you bring with you until you arrive at a planet (i.e. at nearest star that has a planet that has useful resources).
Even if this were a robotic terraforming mission, it's hard to see humans committing to the expense of such an endeavor with no payoff for generations to come. Heck, we're reluctant to act to save the planet our lives depend on right now.
If we're talking about a species that has exploited the resources of its star system, and done so at a scale that includes noticeably blocking the light from its star, then said economy has billions of times the energy we're currently consuming. Proportionally, the cost of an interstellar spacecraft would be less than one week of your salary.
But it’s also not necessarily useful. The only reasons to go to another star are
- exploration and curiosity
- scarcity at home
- building species level resilience
- interactions with some other species
- escape from local political or other turmoil
All of these are human except for scarcity. The others don’t require sending more than a small vessel. But if you can build stellar scale structures, maybe the value of interstellar travel once the novelty wears off is pretty minimal. And perhaps while your local star neighborhood is only 5 LY away, the next advanced civilization may be thousands away. Without superluminal communications and travel, or at least very close to the speed of light travel, maybe there’s really no such thing as populating the entire galaxy in the time a species is advanced enough to even consider it. Maybe 500 years to travel isn’t extreme (although for humans it feels like an impossibly long time over which to reliably keep social cohesion and purpose), but 10,000 of 100,000 is just absurd.
The point I was making is that proportionally, funding an interstellar colony would be as easy for that civilization as things that are completely frivolous for us. I mean, it could be done by the equivalent of Kickstarter, and it wouldn't even be close.
From wikipedia: It has been suggested that it is an alien megastructure, but evidence tends to discount this suggestion
Just read wiki on the topic seems to be the best idea these days, much less pompous and no fabulation unlike the article. It also has distant red dwarf companion, of course no mention of this at all in the article.
Not sure why guardian needs to chase sensationalism, I guess view count trumps all other metrics.
Also, haven't heard any rational objections for Dark forest theory, any sufficiently advanced civilization to build this would be tremendously stupid to expose themselves to whole Milky way and few surrounding galaxies.
The big weakness of the Dark Forest scenario, is that if the galaxy was a dangerous place, it would already have been defensively/offensively explored.
There wouldn’t be a star system with primitives like us that wasn’t identified many millions of years ago.
But for credible scenarios, your “too much smarter than us to predict” principle is a good one.
“They went into another dimension” for instance, seems fantastical. But we have no idea what millions of years of science and technology will allow.
For all we know, the re-acceleration of dark energy is the side effect of successive new civilizations harnessing the fine structure of space-time creating their own private megaverses.
Super intelligent aliens want to wait millions of years to mess with us because … ?
Whatever “apple blossoms” they want, they can create themselves. We don’t have unobtainium.
We are never going to be a threat to life far more advanced than us. The solar system is just resources like any other, unless they leave more primitive life alone.
If you mean that they are tricking anybody, that doesn't follow. We are already curious, and we are literally infants doing first baby steps and TBH we are still pretty much clueless about things like how universe works via single set of principles, how many dimensions are there and so on. Can't get even to nearest star in reasonable time. You don't hide yourself by doing something so far unique and extremely visible in cca whole galaxy and even beyond.
The real threat to such 'builders' would be much more advanced civ than us that can clearly see and understand what they see.
'What if' can be a nice mental game if you let your imagination loose in right direction, but its just a game and this one doesn't stand on any solid facts, so lets treat it as such.
In this specific instance:
The idea that astronomers had stumbled on such a structure triggered headlines round the globe – though not for long. Subsequent research has now undermined the idea. “We have found that light of different wavelengths is blocked in different amounts: exactly what you would expect from starlight passing through a dust cloud,” said Lintott.
I mean, if alien species could build star-spanning structures, they could easily do interstellar travel and colonization. So the Fermi argument says this couldn't actually have been aliens -- someone would have turned the Milky Way into a completely colonized urban area billions of years ago. All the other galaxies would have been colonized too (IR observations say < 1 in 100,000 have been urbanized.)
I think people are misled by all the SF stories with galactic empires that somehow left Earth alone for billions of years, not realizing stories are there to entertain, not reflect what could be real.
That's not clear actually. We could, given a religious like motivation, build massive space stations right now with today's rockets, materials, and lifetimes. It's incremental building.
We could not get to the nearest star with today's rockets (or eq.), materials, or lifetimes. There's no incremental engineering there.
The star is just 1470 light years from our solar system. So, either a huge coincidence occurred, or there are many stars like this in the Milky Way. In the latter case, you are proposing that every one of the alien civilizations that built each of these things had the same motivational inhibition to colonization. Even more, you are proposing that all such civilizations in the past, and all such civilizations in other galaxies, were similarly inhibited.
A star-spanning civilization would have far more than enough energy to propel interstellar vehicles, for example by laser beaming.
I'm proposing no such thing. GP said that if they had built large structures then it was obvious they could do interstellar travel.
I said that implication was false, it's clear how we might build large orbital structures but not clear how we might to interstellar travel. As a counter example.
The implication is as clearly true as such things could be.
The barrier to interstellar travel is largely economic(*). The resources needed to construct star-spanning structures are many orders of magnitude greater than needed to construct and launch a starship (or a laser with an aperture capable of projecting a beam to interstellar distances).
(*) https://galileo.phys.virginia.edu/classes/109.jvn.spring00/n...
One of the problems with this stuff is most of the problems are analyzed by physicists, who tend to reduce the problem to "can we make the physics work" rather than looking at more practical problems like "do we know if any materials will stand up to getting front-row seats to nuclear explosions?" and the other kinds of engineering problems that have bedeviled rocket science in its entire existence. And that's before getting into more fundamental issues like "what is the effect of space life on human biology?" (to which the answer appears to be somewhere between "maybe unmitigatably harmful" to "catastrophic").
There's a lot of questions that need to be answered before we can truly answer the question "what does it take to make interstellar travel", and the fact that many boosters for space exploration are glibly ignoring those questions is perhaps the biggest barrier of all.
We are getting close to fusion with magnetic containment. So at some point, regular materials won’t be a limit
But materials are improving at a rapid pace. So many orders of scale to co-optimize meta materials. Materials in the future will be magic compared to the limits we have now.
Materials won’t be a barrier to interstellar travel
We are only decades away from being able to do it, for very low mass ships/probes with AI. Long before we will be able to create mega structures
And my point mostly is proven here: We could build a giant space station with spaceX + more iron into space. We could build an interstellar probe in "Some point - we're getting close" or "future" or "a few decades".
Since this whole discussion has been about putative aliens with billions of times our production, not about what we ourselves can do soon, I'm not sure why you're harping on this.
Oh we absolutely could, we could have done it with 1960s technology in fact: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Orion_(nuclear_propu...
The propulsion may have been theorized to get us up to speed, but there are many other factors, not least of which is shielding from objects while you're going a decent fraction of the speed of light. There's no obstacle avoidance routines with that much momentum.
At 1% of the speed of light, the energy of a proton is 47 keV. This is trivially easy to shield against. The energy of an electron is just 26 eV.
One would need to shield against galactic cosmic radiation, but this really isn't much more of a problem than shielding a vehicle in the solar system.
What about a micrometeoroid?
The risk with these if they are sufficiently large would be an explosion on impact. This is dealt with by placing a thin barrier in front of the vehicle. The particle explodes on impact with the barrier, cutting a small hole. The debris shoots forward, spreading, and is absorbed on a shield. At 0.01 c, a 1 microgram particle deposits 450 joules of energy. This is called a "Whipple Shield".
If necessary, parts of this system could be replaced during the journey.
I just want to be clear that this is all heavily theorized. The density of interstellar space has an assumed ablative rate based on speed of travel, but it wouldn't take much to exceed that. We are at least a few trial runs away from knowing, and that alone makes the prospect of interstellar travel far into the future. (again, repeating my main point)
The technologies within our reach which would be very helpful with building massive space stations are such that they would very much allow for getting to the nearest star within a human lifetime.
The only reason we don't actually reach out for those technologies right now is that many of us have a religious fear of anything nuclear.
This just isn't true. It seems true, because we can treat interstellar travel as a problem of scale, but it doesn't follow that "build big rocket" equates to "go fast and go safe".
The energetics of interstellar dust, radiation, the long timelines of travel. It's not clear at all.
Nuclear energy isn't needed for interstellar travel. Beamed propulsion would likely be faster.
Beamed propulsion is a farther out technology, requiring development of more powerful lasers capable of pushing a crewed vehicle in reasonable amounts of time and has the issue that it is difficult to slow down at the destination.
Nuclear rocket engines were already being developed during the cold war.
Both suffer from the irrationality that the more useful they are capable of being, the more they can be misconstrued as orbital weapons.
I am amused you are objecting to a technology for interstellar travel on the grounds it is "farther out", especially in the context of what hypothetical aliens that are around for millions or billions of years would be using.
We could build a 1% c starship using hydrogen bombs. But it wouldn't make much sense to build it, since in the time it would take to get to even the nearest star we'd likely have something much faster.
I'm not objecting to it, my initial post was trying to emphasize the closeness of technologies capable of reaching the nearest stars, lasers are an option, but imo nuclear propulsion is "closer" in terms of time taken to achieve the energy densities needed to take humans there.
Sure it's only a difference of a couple of decades at worst between the two but in the context of a human lifetime, that's significant.
In what important sense is nuclear closer?
If we sent a nuclear craft today, a future laser or other propulsion craft will still get there much sooner.
Worse, we don’t actually have a nuclear craft design. By the time we worked out a design and built it, the other tech will already be ready.
That is because other tech will require less mass, which will “massively” simplify and reduce cost of the venture.
Given the time the trip will take, it will actually be decades at least, before the optimal time to design and send a ship - even if we had an unlimited budget with the only objective of getting there the soonest we can
This line of logic doesn’t hold.
Star spanning structures requires the ability to move mass at scale which requires enormous but diffused in time and space amounts of controlled energy.
Moving between stars requires immense energy focused on a single thing. The amount of acceleration required to any meaningful mass to speed necessary to travel between stars and maintain a coherent civilization is extraordinary and implies many things about the mass being accelerated as well. Most things would simply be crushed instantly, including any organism. The speed of light is also a major impediment as is time dilation, as is the need to decelerate, which require equal and opposite energy away from the destination. Ok - accelerate with large lasers based at home - how do you then stop? You first need to build large lasers both at home and destination. The problems expand, and this only helps for very local travel between close stars.
It’s difficult but plausible with today’s technology scales up to build star spanning structures because they’re built incrementally and the need for near light speed travel doesn’t exist. Further the existence of a star spanning structure might enable interstellar travel, but not intergalactic.
I’d also note that SF is meant to entertain with a story that is possible given some assumptions of progress or hidden nature of reality or small modifications to what is. It’s not meant to be built on magic and other absurdities (not meant as a pejorative!). Many science fiction stories become true and many more will. Often science fiction inspires us to achieve what doesn’t exist today but could. To couch it in something that’s dismissible as say Gandalf the Wizard fighting a Balrog is to greatly underestimate what science fiction is. It’s a roadmap to the future that helps us understand what to avoid on the road.
Building a starship reaching 1% of the speed of light seems quite reasonable without substantial technological advance (Dyson's 1968 H-bomb propelled Orion). What it would need would be lots of deuterium, but that's just a matter of large scale industry, which this putative civilization would have.
If you are saying this civilization does its work over very extended periods of time, you're saying they're comfortable with efforts that take centuries or millenia or even longer. That alone makes interstellar travel and colonization much easier; the energy needed scales as the inverse square of the travel time (assuming Isp optimized for the travel time chosen and assuming non-relativistic travel).
We (or they) do not need close to light speed travel for interstellar colonization.
Typical distance between any two stars in the Milky Way is 5 light years, which at 1% speed of light would take 500 years to get there. Assuming 25 years per generation, that represents a travel time of 20 human generations.
That's like a family from the 1500's committing for their children and 19 following generations to live on a shitty rocket. They'd have just arrived.
I wonder what 500 years of food, water, and oxygen looks like for a civilization-founding crew. What's the backup plan if the target planet isn't livable? Cyanide tablets?
Colonization wouldn't be aimed at planets, it would be aimed at structures in space. You know, like we're assuming this star-spanning civilization has been building in astronomical numbers?
Food and air would be manufactured during the trip. All that's needed is a source of energy. At 1% c, that probably means a nuclear source (or beamed power), but at higher speeds they could simply exploit the energy being deposited by interstellar matter. At 1 proton/cm^3 and .1 c, the power is 22 W/m^2.
If we're talking inter-stellar travel then it doesn't seem to matter what the destination is (planet or space habitat). The travel time remains the same, and the only source of materials (incl. food etc) would be what you bring with you until you arrive at a planet (i.e. at nearest star that has a planet that has useful resources).
Even if this were a robotic terraforming mission, it's hard to see humans committing to the expense of such an endeavor with no payoff for generations to come. Heck, we're reluctant to act to save the planet our lives depend on right now.
If we're talking about a species that has exploited the resources of its star system, and done so at a scale that includes noticeably blocking the light from its star, then said economy has billions of times the energy we're currently consuming. Proportionally, the cost of an interstellar spacecraft would be less than one week of your salary.
But it’s also not necessarily useful. The only reasons to go to another star are
- exploration and curiosity
- scarcity at home
- building species level resilience
- interactions with some other species
- escape from local political or other turmoil
All of these are human except for scarcity. The others don’t require sending more than a small vessel. But if you can build stellar scale structures, maybe the value of interstellar travel once the novelty wears off is pretty minimal. And perhaps while your local star neighborhood is only 5 LY away, the next advanced civilization may be thousands away. Without superluminal communications and travel, or at least very close to the speed of light travel, maybe there’s really no such thing as populating the entire galaxy in the time a species is advanced enough to even consider it. Maybe 500 years to travel isn’t extreme (although for humans it feels like an impossibly long time over which to reliably keep social cohesion and purpose), but 10,000 of 100,000 is just absurd.
The point I was making is that proportionally, funding an interstellar colony would be as easy for that civilization as things that are completely frivolous for us. I mean, it could be done by the equivalent of Kickstarter, and it wouldn't even be close.
It’s not advanced alien technology because it doesn’t work like advanced alien technology.
It’s not advanced alien technology because it doesn’t work like our concept of advanced alien technology.
The Moon isn't a space station because it doesn't look like our concept of a space station.
More likely it's just the Moon than an advance alien space station though.
From wikipedia: It has been suggested that it is an alien megastructure, but evidence tends to discount this suggestion
Just read wiki on the topic seems to be the best idea these days, much less pompous and no fabulation unlike the article. It also has distant red dwarf companion, of course no mention of this at all in the article.
Not sure why guardian needs to chase sensationalism, I guess view count trumps all other metrics.
Also, haven't heard any rational objections for Dark forest theory, any sufficiently advanced civilization to build this would be tremendously stupid to expose themselves to whole Milky way and few surrounding galaxies.
Ducks: “evidence suggest duck blinds are just reeds”
Which is a fun way to say the rules for evidence change a bit when what you’re studying could be actively deceiving you and is smarter than you.
How do the rules change? No idea.
The big weakness of the Dark Forest scenario, is that if the galaxy was a dangerous place, it would already have been defensively/offensively explored.
There wouldn’t be a star system with primitives like us that wasn’t identified many millions of years ago.
But for credible scenarios, your “too much smarter than us to predict” principle is a good one.
“They went into another dimension” for instance, seems fantastical. But we have no idea what millions of years of science and technology will allow.
For all we know, the re-acceleration of dark energy is the side effect of successive new civilizations harnessing the fine structure of space-time creating their own private megaverses.
Do you pick apple blossoms or do you wait for the apples?
What does that mean?
Super intelligent aliens want to wait millions of years to mess with us because … ?
Whatever “apple blossoms” they want, they can create themselves. We don’t have unobtainium.
We are never going to be a threat to life far more advanced than us. The solar system is just resources like any other, unless they leave more primitive life alone.
Which would not be the Dark Forest scenario.
If you mean that they are tricking anybody, that doesn't follow. We are already curious, and we are literally infants doing first baby steps and TBH we are still pretty much clueless about things like how universe works via single set of principles, how many dimensions are there and so on. Can't get even to nearest star in reasonable time. You don't hide yourself by doing something so far unique and extremely visible in cca whole galaxy and even beyond.
The real threat to such 'builders' would be much more advanced civ than us that can clearly see and understand what they see.
'What if' can be a nice mental game if you let your imagination loose in right direction, but its just a game and this one doesn't stand on any solid facts, so lets treat it as such.