Space probes from extraterrestrial beings will reportedly arrive in reverse to the human civilization due to technological disparity.
Communication With Extraterrestrial Civilization (ETC) Can Be Daunting
A space probe from ETC that will arrive in the Solar System where they will detect us and send a probe to introduce themselves to learn more about it will be a daunting task. It could even change the civilization's trajectory, Science Alert reported.
It will reportedly take centuries and generations of humans will live and die, and everything from that probe will sit in a museum.
Imagine the sensors detect another probe but are less advanced than the previous one. Humans will be surprised to receive, retrieve and study it, only to find out it's not as advanced than the previous one and contains older information than the first one. It has less advanced technology and will be more primitive.
Graeme Smith, a professor and astronomer at the Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics at the University of California, said it would likely be the case. He published a paper in the International Journal of Astrobiology titled "On the first probe to transit between two interstellar civilizations," pointing out that sending probes between two extreme distances could mean the first one received wouldn't be the first one sent. According to Smith, the first one to arrive is likely the last one sent as it is likely equipped with more advanced capability, with faster speed, suggesting that the messages would be received in reverse order.
He added that the more distant the site from which an ETC launches probes, the greater would be the technology gap between a first encounter probe and terrestrial technology.
Smith's paper touches on a similar study that examined the idea that an ETC might be able to spread through Milky Way with self-replicating probes rather than using SETI to search for radio signals. He focuses on a hypothetical ETC in the early stages of a probe-sending program with lots of technological advancement in its future.
Technology Gap Between Human, Extraterrestrial Civilization Space Probe
Smith is not the first one to point out the technology gap between human and extraterrestrial civilizations. Andrew Kennedy published a paper in the Journal of the British Interplanetary Society titled "Interstellar Travel - The Wait Calculation and the Incentive Trap of Progress".
According to him, civilizations know their technology will progress, so they may wait before sending another probe, fully aware that it will surpass their first efforts. Smith assumes ETC won't wait and would launch a program without waiting until technology reaches some critical stage.
He believed that ETC would continue its efforts to advance its technology for better probes. The faster the interstellar transit times, the better.
Loose Illustrative Case
To support his point, Smith recounted how the first spacecraft left the Solar System within 100 years of the launch of the first liquid-fuel rocket by Robert Goddard. A next-generation would be launched every 100 years as Earth transitioned from a passive to an active ETC.
A decade is the same span of time between Goddard's rocket and the Voyager probes. With the use of Voyager 2 probe as humanity's generation zero probe, Smith calculates it will reach the interstellar target in the stellar neighborhood in about 80,000 years and every 100 years, the human civilization would launch another probe to the same destination at a higher speed.
In 2,700 years, we would be launching our 27th generation probe and it would travel with more advanced technology and higher speed. It would reach the same destination as the zero-generation probe in only 5,560 years, 74,000 years earlier than the Voyager 2.
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