Odds of communicating with 36 other possible intelligent civilizations are small
Forget travel. Even radio communications seem unlikely. I recently got depressed trying to calculate how much energy would be required to establish a radio link with a colony on a planet orbiting the nearest star (about 5 light years).<p>Even if we use the entire output of a nuclear reactor to power the transmitter, even if we tighten the beam ten times beyond what&#x27;s currently possible and even if the receiving collector is square kilometers wide, the signal is still going to be very weak.<p>I can&#x27;t even fathom how to make this work at 10K light year scale.