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I'd say best candidates for something revolutionary in hindsight would be gravitational wave detection, cosmic background radiation, a ton of space stuff discovered / proven (black holes, active galaxies, exoplanets). Maybe a bunch of high energy physics stuff from colliders, neutrino detectors.
Even a lot of planetary science was at most theorized even 100 years ago and we had never seen the moon or another planet up close - people didn't know Venus was a greenhouse hell. Not to mention biotechnology (DNA sequencing, CRISPR) and AI all definitely have major possible roles in space travel, exploration, or detection of alien life.
We don't necessarily know which ones will suddenly give us a flash of insight and up a breakthrough, but all those things are genuine possibilities for answering some of these questions down the line. Not as core obvious basic and fundamental breakthroughs as things like radioactivity or relativity, but still pushing the boundaries in possibly important ways.
Suffice to say a LOT has come after that.
We have somewhere around 5500 confirmed exoplanets, not all of which have been characterized.
Estimates vary, but even at the low end there's thought to be billions of planets in our galaxy.
It's a little soon to be claiming that the JWST has confirmed anything about the 'specialness' of Earth. Earth-like conditions can be very rare and one-in-10,000,000, but if we take a conservative six billion planets in the galaxy, that's still, like, 600 Earths.
It's also important to be careful of the foibles of the anthropic principle. A moon is useful for stirring up water, but not the only source of motion for chemistry, for example.
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Confirmation of gravity waves could be the next one, if it allows physiscts to finally accept that gravity is not a natural force carried by a particle like weak, strong, and electro-magnetism. They've been trying to square that circle for a long time and they refuse to see that it might only be a triangle.
For future science, I like to think being able to harness the probabilistic nature of the universe to make the improbable happen will be the next true great advancement of science.
Also our current methods of detecting planets are biased against finding Earth-likes. They require either transit (easier with planets close to stars) or large masses.
I might be misreading this, but even this is "Wrong". The idea of "digitized" humans being better able to transit interstellar space makes so many bogus assumptions it's not funny. If you are talking some kind of point to point transmission, as of today, you are still limited to speed of light, not to you are PROBABLY talking about something that needs to be lossless, but most of our lossless transmission protocols require 2 way traffic. Can you imagine a TCP ack sequence with a RTT of like 9 YEARS? That's assuming we can beamform tight enough to transfer that data appropriately, and... you'll still need to have sent a receiver and some kind of... stuff for the conciousness to exist and do things in.
Assuming you are discussing sending a digitized copy of the person in storage or in an active computer state, we presently aren't even remotely close to know what kind of hardware you would need for that, so it's entirely possibly it's losing out to the "meatship". Even if it's not, it's still vulnerable to a lot of the same physics constraints.
But critically not all the same physics constraints, is the idea. Way less mass to accelerate/decelerate, no worries about sustained 30g burns if needed, no need to support all the various energy/chemistry cycles on which mammalian life depends, etc. The “brains on thumb drives in a Coke can” (to simplify to the point of mockery the idea Charles Stross presents in his writing) isn’t meant to be a difference in kind from a generation ship, just enough of a difference in degree that the generation ship no longer makes sense to do.
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Transit detection also requires the plane of the exoplanet orbit be in line with the earth. That immediately excludes more than 95% of star systems.
And them the universe is expanding and huge parts of it we are literally unable to interact with at all because they are getting farther away faster than we can go.
One of the most powerful signals we put out was the Aricibo message and that would be technically detectible by a similarly capable radio telescope about 25000 light years away. But most terrestrial radio sources will degrade below the cosmic microwave background within a few 10's of light years. Air traffic control radar would be detectable about 10 light years away for example. There are only ten stars within that range of us. And as technology improves, the power of most of our radio signals is going down, not up, and look more and more like random noise to start with so the prospect gets worse with time unless the signal is deliberate. SETI actually focuses more on "unusual" radio bands that are more able to propagate further through interstellar space and are much more obvious that the source would be artificial.
This is where I should look up that one joke experiment with an optical disk hitched to a snail as a data transfer beating a network connection.
It may seem creepy, but you might be able to generate minds based on very condensed data sets (diaries) expanded through procedural generation on top of one or several functional frameworks. Not actual people, but close enough.
Need more people later on? Send more diaries. Text files are small but cover a lot of territory. (Swanwick had a character whose personality was overwritten with one based on Samuel Pepys diaries)
On the other hand, generation ships tend to need lots of people because even one person’s life support systems tend to need many specialists to keep them going. You scale up until you have enough redundancy to keep the tech going + medical and psychological support and sociologists… it never ends!
You don't really even need to go much further than a few hundred lightyears in any direction to effectively colonize the entire galaxy. The Sun is moving through the Milky Way at 230 km/s and only takes around 200 million years to orbit the ecliptic. That's only a single order of magnitude off from your estimate and requires significantly less investment. We can just wait for our solar system to swing by another interesting system and pop over for a spot of colonization or just a bit of exploration. Our solar system has made at least 20 trips around the entire Milky Way since life showed up.
And that applies for other solar systems as well. Any civilization capable of existing on astronomical timescales shouldn't have much of a problem with a (comparatively) quick jump to the next system over. If our solar system looked interesting enough it's not inconceivable that they would leave a Von Neumann probe behind to keep an eye on things until the next time the 2 systems are close.
The galaxy isn't fixed in place while the solar system orbits it. While other stars are all moving on slightly different trajectories meaning the stars won't maintain their current positions relative to the sun over time, on average nearby stars are also orbiting the galaxy in the same direction and same speed as the sun.
Alpha Centauri will be a little easier to reach in 30000 years as it passes by at 3 light years instead of it's current 4. Gliese 710 is currently 62 light years away but will get so close it will pass through the Oort cloud in 1.3 million years. But a star on the opposite side of the galaxy from the sun is still going to be on the opposite side of the galaxy from the sun in 125 million years because both are orbiting it.
All the stars do indeed orbit at slightly different velocities so it's not inconceivable that a star system on the other side of the galaxy would eventually wander close enough. Plus, once you have probes in more than 1 system, it becomes exponentially easier to spread to other systems as they swing by. There's a great video on Youtube that covers the subject in more detail than I care to get into here.
Where there is a digital heaven, there must surely be a digital hell. I'd much prefer the certainty of oblivion.
I remember a short story where people were using digitized personalities as disposable labor to do mundane tasks. They'd boot up an instance, tell it whatever they'd figured out (by trial and error) would make it most cooperative (e.g., "hi, it's 2344, we're testing the digitzer system, can you please do some tasks so we can see how well it worked?"), and then set it loose converting file formats or something. And when the personality started to get suspicious and then disillusioned and less productive, they'd shut it down, spin up another copy, and start fresh.
https://qntm.org/mmacevedo
One of the scariest short fictions I've ever read
Spoiler for Surface Detail (Culure series)
@Soggybiscuit that's the one, thanks! I couldn't remember any names to google it by.
Or maybe it's not!?!?!??!
As an aside, it's kind of interesting how many science fiction settings seem to ignore the existence of science fiction, like no one in the universe ever thought about these concepts until they were confronted with them directly in reality.
Zombie fiction does the same thing.
Lena is a metaphor for how we treat people right now, not an attempt at creating a realistic world. A lot of SF is the same way.
As far as zombie fiction goes if you want self aware try Feed, where George Romero is openly credited with saving the world.
We do have a fairly reliable way to triangulate our star’s position in the galaxy by giving distances and directions to several pulsars of known frequency. We put such a map on the Voyager golden discs next to our nude selfie.
Of course, there’s always the risk that the “reply” takes the form of making our star go nova or whatever similar total biome kill response your more zero-sum-oriented civilizations might choose to deploy instead of building a transmitter to say hello, but fortunately that’s a problem for far future folks and not us.
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I think in that one they eventually figured out how to unionize.
Hexapodia is the key insight.
The real problem will be that most of the galactic internet is porn. Also that our anti-virus isn't up to snuff.
https://news.yahoo.com/alien-corpses-shown-congress-ufo-092014024.html
Here’s a video debunking the alien mummies.
Someone made that mummy jerky from Futurama?
Same way when 'unknown substances' pop up. There's no single 'identify this!' test that can be used on everything all the time.
Please, I've seen <insert cop show or science fiction movie here>, and you can just get a DNA sample from even damn near vaporized tissue and then you just look at the spirals and see if they match.