SETI again

the thing is they would not go to austalia without knowing what was
out there. why should they when they knew what they were up against
in the american west. the same can be said about people going to
stars. why would they want to uproot and go, with no knowledge of
what was at the new start when they had all the materials they needed
there at home. if they have the material to build a ship capable of
traveling the intersteller space, they can easily build a new station
that is more to their liking. If they are planet bound they would
have to over come any fears of living in a closed space and having
no place for their dependants to expand to.

let me point to SF for more details of what I'm trying to say. in the
pern series, Anne Mccaffrey wrote of a planet that was 15 years away
from other stars systems of the federation. with the means of travel
they had, 15 years was not that far. a few years after settling on
the planet, they discovered that the planet was periodically
bombarded from space by a menace that they could not fight. they had
no ships to fight it, they had no means of escaping it. and they had
no means of getting any immediate help. a signal rocket was launched
to ask for help, against the wishes of the majority of the colonist.
It DID arrive, in the form of a single exploration ship some 20 years
later. the exploration ship was able to find a small family of
survivors still clinging to the area of the landing, still trying to
survive in the same style of the original colonist. they did not find
the civilization that had develop, moved to another part of the
planet, and began building back from the rubble, with a new way of
living. the children of that one family went back to live in a system
that was just as alien to them as if it had never been connected to
the colonist. several hundred years later, the new civilizations
found the remnants of that colonizing attempt, and found the
information about the other systems, and found that they could make
contact with that star spanning civilizations, IF they choose. the
did not do so (at least in the last book of the series i read) and
had no interest in doing so. that civilization would have been
considered alien by the federation from which they came, even though
for the most part they would still have been able to interbreed with
them. they even had the ability to leave the planet as it was. again
there was no desire at that time to do so.

any colonizing attempt to leave the home system of any civilization
that does not have faster than light travel, will have to go with the
knowledge that they are on their own. they will have to go with the
knowledge that they cant send home for more resources. they will go
with the knowledge that any thing that they create will be theirs and
theirs alone. with this as part of the main drive, why would they try
to maintain contact with the home world, other than to send and
receive news. Once faster than light travel becomes possible, they
might have a different outlook. as long as it will take more than a
generation for help to come, they will not be asking for it. with
nothing but news to share with the home world. the likelihood that
they will maintain their communication equipment needed to listen to
a far message will laps into near nothing. if there is any disaster
that sticks them (and there will be many) and they will either die or
become so self reliant that they have no interest of sharing with
the other stars. the exponential increases in populations is
completely dependant on there being no major catastrophes. that is
unlikely to happen.

--- In spacesettlers@yahoogroups.com, "Lucio de Souza Coelho"
wrote:
>
> On 7/23/06, Robert wrote:
> (...)
> > as i understand it they were basically kicked out of the country
they
> > called home. If i understand the situation back there, there was
> > little area in South American that would have been better. also,
i am
> > under the impression that there is a practically impenetrable
jungle
> > there that would make any attempt at colonizing extremely
difficult.
> (...)
>
> That's a wrong impression, for those Jews lived here for many
> generations and were *used* to the Brazilian tropical environment.
> (Which is not always a jungle. Close to Recife for instance you can
> for instance find semi-desertic areas.) As I stressed, the
environment
> in New Amsterdam was the one completely alien to them, with
> unimaginable stuff like snowfall and lakes freezing in the winter.
> Most Brazilians consider the temperate zones inhabitable just part
of
> the year, to give you a more accurate idea.
>
> Anyhow, the point was indeed to show that there *are* different
> situations than the "colonists in a wagon" that you assumed to be
the
> only existing one. And so there is possibility of people migrating
to