AMiTe Treffpunkt

 

Treffpunkte or Schelling Points in the Local Group
(adapted by DG from original Local Group graphic by AZ Colvin)

An engineer approaches challenges from the point of view of a specification: how to solve a well-posed technological problem, and always asks if any constraints can be relaxed to convert an impossibility to a possibility. In this case it’s Brian Cox’s (semi-quantified) hunch that the probable nearest alien civilisation is “Forever Inaccessible”. Suppose you relax the constraints…

This was a fun lockdown challenge bringing together several strands of thought, from my own calcs on demographics, SETI, and basic geometries on the M-light-year scale. I’d never heard of ‘Schelling Points’ so used a cosy German phrase from my past. The paper was published in the Feb 2021 issue (32) of ‘Principium’, the magazine of the Initiative and Institute for Interstellar Studies i4is.org. The paper posits nothing beyond (very efficient!) fusion technology. Further thought and calculation has revealed a surprising new observational target proposal (paper to be written) of relevance in our own lifetimes.

Abstract (2021 paper)

This paper proposes the ‘AMiTe’ point - the Andromeda/Milky-Way Treffpunkt - as a meeting point of civilisations driven by a shared motive. It takes the basic Local Group geometries as its starting point and discusses whether ‘Kardashev Type IIb civilisations’ [dormant] would find any absolute impediments to sending probes there to make contact. It is based on published analyses of interstellar mission profiles, communication and energy budgets. The proposal is to model a 59 million-year mission comprising 1,000,000 Daedalus-class ‘Ships of the Line’, forming a chain of communication at a nominal 4.19 light-year inter-ship separation. This line, extended in space and time, would attempt to make contact with a similar line, travelling anti-parallel or parallel in the region of AMiTe, sent by long-lived, overlapping and similarly motivated Type IIb civilisations (to be defined in this paper). These could be from either M31 Andromeda or our own galaxy. The extragalactic meeting point is proposed in order to solve the ‘uniqueness’ problem of where to go looking.

"Wake me up when there's something to see"

Keywords

AMiTe Point

Daedalus Project

Schelling points

SETI

Brian Cox

Michael Hippke

Global population

Interstellar communication

Population collapse

i4is.org