|
Stereotype posted:The biggest problem with aliens is that if there are some cosmic intelligent beings that can travel across the vastness of space and visit billions of stars and worlds then why would they give a poo poo about us? Either we are all alone in the universe and very very unique and special, or there is lots of life all over and we are hopelessly boring and common. If it is anywhere in between that, and there are a few other instances of life scattered around the universe, then we will never know or communicate with another one anyway so its no different from there being zero. We're so incredibly primitive it's hard to even take a guess at how things work in the universe. It seems logical to assume there's extremely advanced and intelligent life out there. My best dumb ape-brained guess is either travel and communicate is really just that hard to achieve through long stretches of space or we simply don't have near the intelligence or technology to even attempt communication. We're probably not even considered self-aware or conscious by the standards of an advanced civilization.
|
#
?
Nov 29, 2018 08:32
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 12, 2024 04:28 |
|
|
StealthArcher posted:IIRC, mitochondria happened exactly one way, one time. The event that created mitochondria isnt unique though. A separate and similar process was required to give plants Chloroplasts (they have both).
|
|
#
?
Nov 29, 2018 08:34
|
|
|
Stereotype posted:The biggest problem with aliens is that if there are some cosmic intelligent beings that can travel across the vastness of space and visit billions of stars and worlds then why would they give a poo poo about us? Either we are all alone in the universe and very very unique and special, or there is lots of life all over and we are hopelessly boring and common. If it is anywhere in between that, and there are a few other instances of life scattered around the universe, then we will never know or communicate with another one anyway so its no different from there being zero. Earth is a pretty awesome planet I reckon, we've got nice beaches and poo poo. And the fjords! How good are the fjords. If I was an alien I'd totally want to check it out.
|
|
#
?
Nov 29, 2018 08:44
|
|
|
Socialism is the next stage of cosmic evolution.
|
|
#
?
Nov 29, 2018 08:45
|
|
|
MSDOS KAPITAL posted:I strongly suspect that the answer to the paradox is that there is no other intelligent life. That seems like the least likely answer to me. The universe is just too incomprehensibly big to think nothing else has ever popped up. Humanity has only thoroughly explored one planet ever and it has a ton of life on it. The next one over that humanity has barely explored shows evidence of having or had at least simple life. We don't really know what the hell is going on with most of the other planets and moons in even this solar system. And there's so mind-boggling more other solar systems with planets and moons and ways of life possible (probably) existing it seems the odds are next to zero this is the only planet in the universe to have intelligent life.
|
|
#
?
Nov 29, 2018 08:47
|
|
|
Stereotype posted:If we really wanna make a big impact on the universe, we should just start launching probes full of the hardiest bacteria and extremophiles we can find all over the loving place at every big rock we can see. Then maybe in 10M years there will be aliens. Isn't one new pet theory that tardigrades are aliens? They can survive in a vacuum and there's reason to believe they may not be from Earth originally. See that's the funny thing about real life as opposed to science fiction, a lot of times the space aliens are tiny microscopic things.
|
|
#
?
Nov 29, 2018 08:48
|
|
|
RuanGacho posted:Socialism is the next stage of cosmic evolution. It's communism op
|
|
#
?
Nov 29, 2018 08:48
|
|
|
Lightning Knight posted:See this doesn’t make sense to me unless there’s something glaringly wrong about our understanding of science and evolution. See, we're at the point in our technological development where we can reason about harnessing the energy of entire stars and colonizing an entire galaxy. The sort of stuff that is really easy to notice if anyone's done it, or has ever done it. Moreover we don't need a lot more technological advancement to get there: the biggest hurdle in fact is probably modifying our own bodies both to survive the trips between stars and to live long enough to make making the trip worthwhile for a single individual (and the second part is optional, strictly speaking, though we'd probably want to do it and almost certainly could do it provided we've already solved the first bit). Our actual space travel technology is pretty rudimentary but suitable for purpose, or nearly so, if we had more rugged bodies. Point being that even if we do destroy ourselves, we can conceive of another species similar to ourselves but a little less self-destructive and tribal, and consequently a little bit better at global civilization, which doesn't destroy itself. Instead, they build themselves better bodies and use space travel technology not much better than our own, to travel to other stars and within a few million years or so colonize an entire galaxy. And they build up their industry to the point that they can feasibly build Dyson spheres or Dyson swarms or what-have-you over the course of a few hundred thousand years or something, which is peanuts to an immortal species of intelligent life which has adapted itself to living in space. If we were to look at such a galaxy with a telescope, it would be immediately apparent to us that that galaxy was populated with intelligent life. We have found no such galaxy, in spite of a lot of looking. My guess is that if there is intelligent life like us in the universe it must occur only once in every several hundred thousand galaxies or so. Or maybe it's never occurred and we're the first. It doesn't mean that there will never be other intelligent life. There are a lot of red dwarf stars in the universe, and the planets orbiting them in their habitable zones have hundreds of billions or even in some cases a few trillion years to develop intelligent life. There may come an age of the universe where it is teeming with intelligent life all growing up and discovering one another, but it seems like that age is far off. Like "several multiples of the current age of the universe" far off.
|
|
#
?
Nov 29, 2018 08:50
|
|
|
1glitch0 posted:That seems like the least likely answer to me. The universe is just too incomprehensibly big to think nothing else has ever popped up. Humanity has only thoroughly explored one planet ever and it has a ton of life on it. The next one over that humanity has barely explored shows evidence of having or had at least simple life. We don't really know what the hell is going on with most of the other planets and moons in even this solar system. And there's so mind-boggling more other solar systems with planets and moons and ways of life possible (probably) existing it seems the odds are next to zero this is the only planet in the universe to have intelligent life.
|
|
#
?
Nov 29, 2018 08:52
|
|
|
Esplanade posted:Gonna steal this concept for a new spy movie franchise: I'm going to launch a competitor franchise called Mission Impassable.
|
|
#
?
Nov 29, 2018 08:56
|
|
|
Democratic primary results: "When asked who they would support today in the 2020 Democratic presidential primary among nine possible candidates, 19 percent of respondents indicated Biden, with 14 percent supporting Sanders and 11 percent supporting Warren. Rep. Beto O’Rourke, who gained national attention while taking on Texas Senator Ted Cruz in the 2018 mid-term, finished fourth with 10 percent. Twenty-seven percent of voters indicated they were undecided." Did I mention this is a Massachusetts Democratic primary poll? Warren is done. Groovelord Neato posted:ben's rear end voted for more yemeni children to starve to death btw. As much as we mock John McCain and Jeff Flake (rightfully), at least they can be considered moderate Republicans - as much as a moderate Republican can exist - and did vote against the worst of Trump's excesses once every thousand years. Ben's rear end has a Trumpist voting record. Mr Ice Cream Glove posted:MAGA is trying their own late night comedy show "The President can take it" Raenir Salazar posted:A couple of those got a smile or a chuckle but probably only because I find them funny for reasons conservatives wouldn't. The one about Obama using drones when Trump has used more in 2 years (I believe.) It would be okay if the writer wasn't a Trumpist writing for Republicans who like to ignore that.
|
|
#
?
Nov 29, 2018 09:05
|
|
|
MSDOS KAPITAL posted:If we were to look at such a galaxy with a telescope, it would be immediately apparent to us that that galaxy was populated with intelligent life. We have found no such galaxy, in spite of a lot of looking. My guess is that if there is intelligent life like us in the universe it must occur only once in every several hundred thousand galaxies or so. Or maybe it's never occurred and we're the first. We have been looking for a very short period of time, and in very limited fashion.
|
|
#
?
Nov 29, 2018 09:08
|
|
|
Anyway let’s forget about aliens and focus on what we can achieve in our own solar system within the next 500 years. Or hopefully shorter. https://vimeo.com/108650530
|
|
#
?
Nov 29, 2018 09:10
|
|
|
I'd imagine any aliens capable of coming here would be capable of observing us without our knowledge
|
|
#
?
Nov 29, 2018 09:18
|
|
|
MSDOS KAPITAL posted:Even an apex predator species or hegemonising swarm would want to develop at least enough industry to do its work, and that would probably be visible to us. I think you might be looking at this from a very human-perspective. It's a very child-like analogy, but sixty years ago a computer took up an entire room and couldn't do a lot, now we all have one in our pockets that is infinitely more powerful. While we're looking for Dyson spheres or whatever, an advanced civilization might have the equivalent of an iPhone that can orbit a sun and give them all the energy they need. Or maybe colonization of entire galaxies with a large population isn't even the best path for an intelligent species to take. We only look for, and can only really look for, what we would consider advanced or can imagine. Maybe another species' environment or biology or technological path led them somewhere that we can't even comprehend. Dark matter is a complete mystery. And there's probably other many other mysteries we haven't even discovered that could go a long way to explain where everyone else is. And if you want to go a route more similar to us there's now two "super structures" around distant stars that we can't properly explain. As much as we like to pretend we have a grasp on what's happening in the universe we still live on a planet where last week a guy took a boat to an island to tell people about his belief in a supernatural entity and got shot to death by arrows by the locals because they don't like outsiders.
|
|
#
?
Nov 29, 2018 09:18
|
|
|
MSDOS KAPITAL posted:Even an apex predator species or hegemonising swarm would want to develop at least enough industry to do its work, and that would probably be visible to us. I think you're really overestimating out ability to look into space and not thinking about how long it takes for light and energy to travel across space. Humans have only had the technology to even emit radio waves and other poo poo that could travel across outer space for like 100 years, and we've only existed as a species for 200,000 years, and the Galaxy is 100,000 Light Years in diameter. The idea that we 100% would have noticed SOMETHING by now if there was anything to notice is ridiculous. An intelligent species that evolved 50,000 years before us on the far side of the galaxy could have only invented radio 5000 years ago due to a slower rate of development, taken another 3000 years after the invention of radio to develop space travel roughly on par with ours, and another 2000 years colonizing their own solar system with that technology so they would be ready for President Space JFK to get up on a podium today ang give a speech about how before this decade is out Lizardkind will develop its first FTL drive, and we wouldn't have a loving clue they even exist for another 95,000 years when their first radio signals get here. Assuming nothing blocked them on the trip. Frankly given the limitations on our observational technologies I don't even find the "we would have totally seen if there were any Dyson Spheres or Hyperspace Gates or whatever therefore there can't possible be any interstellar civilization" all that compelling. We could have seen the poo poo and not even noticed it was on the screen or mistook it for something mundane, or our ideas of what galactic-level infrastructure are could be hilariously wrong.
|
|
#
?
Nov 29, 2018 09:19
|
|
|
VH4Ever posted:Isn't one new pet theory that tardigrades are aliens? They can survive in a vacuum and there's reason to believe they may not be from Earth originally. See that's the funny thing about real life as opposed to science fiction, a lot of times the space aliens are tiny microscopic things. Nope. Relatives of nematodes or arthropods. http://tolweb.org/Bilateria/2459 https://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/journal.pbio.2002266
|
|
#
?
Nov 29, 2018 09:41
|
|
|
1glitch0 posted:I think you might be looking at this from a very human-perspective. It's a very child-like analogy, but sixty years ago a computer took up an entire room and couldn't do a lot, now we all have one in our pockets that is infinitely more powerful. While we're looking for Dyson spheres or whatever, an advanced civilization might have the equivalent of an iPhone that can orbit a sun and give them all the energy they need. Or maybe colonization of entire galaxies with a large population isn't even the best path for an intelligent species to take. We only look for, and can only really look for, what we would consider advanced or can imagine. Maybe another species' environment or biology or technological path led them somewhere that we can't even comprehend. Dark matter is a complete mystery. And there's probably other many other mysteries we haven't even discovered that could go a long way to explain where everyone else is. Honestly I think part of the insistence that there must be other intelligent life out there is borne of a desire not to be human-centric just for the sake of not being human-centric. But unless we have a really, really flawed understanding of physics, we really are at essentially the very beginning of the history of life in the universe. Even if intelligent life formed immediately after the Big Bang, in the grand scheme of things humans arose not too long after that. The other consequence of this desire to not be human-centric is the idea that, well intelligent life exists it's just so advanced that it's really all around us and we can't possibly comprehend it. But it seems unlikely that all intelligent life would evolve technologically in such a way that they would be utterly imperceptible to us. That's a sort of hubris on it's own kinda, IMO  I guess the point I'm driving at is this: I can step outside my front door, and see all around me incontrovertible evidence of the existence of life on Earth. If I stepped outside my front door and saw nothing but land devoid of any evidence of life no matter where I looked, I might start to guess that I was alone. Why would the universe be any different in this regard?
|
|
#
?
Nov 29, 2018 09:47
|
|
|
MSDOS KAPITAL posted:I guess the point I'm driving at is this: I can step outside my front door, and see all around me incontrovertible evidence of the existence of life on Earth. If I stepped outside my front door and saw nothing but land devoid of any evidence of life no matter where I looked, I might start to guess that I was alone. Why would the universe be any different in this regard? Because there are plenty of places on earth you could step outside, see land devoid of any evidence of life as far as the eye can see, and even walk the 50ish miles your feet can carry you in about 12 hours of walking, and still find no life. And then it turns out there was a city about 15 miles further forward. I live in Arizona, so I live that situation. Your vision and feet are too limited to make judgments about whether life exists just from what they can see right now. All that being said, I do like the idea of humans as the Elder Race of the Galaxy. Turns out we were the Elves (or maybe C'thulus) all along.
|
|
#
?
Nov 29, 2018 10:13
|
|
|
Sanguinia posted:I think you're really overestimating out ability to look into space and not thinking about how long it takes for light and energy to travel across space. Humans have only had the technology to even emit radio waves and other poo poo that could travel across outer space for like 100 years, and we've only existed as a species for 200,000 years, and the Galaxy is 100,000 Light Years in diameter. The idea that we 100% would have noticed SOMETHING by now if there was anything to notice is ridiculous. An intelligent species that evolved 50,000 years before us on the far side of the galaxy could have only invented radio 5000 years ago due to a slower rate of development, taken another 3000 years after the invention of radio to develop space travel roughly on par with ours, and another 2000 years colonizing their own solar system with that technology so they would be ready for President Space JFK to get up on a podium today ang give a speech about how before this decade is out Lizardkind will develop its first FTL drive, and we wouldn't have a loving clue they even exist for another 95,000 years when their first radio signals get here. Assuming nothing blocked them on the trip. Yeah, for all our vaunted technology the sheer scale of things and the limitations of observable lightwaves means we really don't know all that much about our immediate neighbourhood and like you say, our assumptions might be dead wrong. What if we're in a Dark Forest such as described by Liu Cixin? Everyone is doing everything they can to not be noticed? We don't know that's not the case, and we couldn't know even if we tried to find out. Sanguinia posted:Because there are plenty of places on earth you could step outside, see land devoid of any evidence of life as far as the eye can see, and even walk the 50ish miles your feet can carry you in about 12 hours of walking, and still find no life. And then it turns out there was a city about 15 miles further forward. I live in Arizona, so I live that situation. I love the Fermi paradox and related discussions and I wish there was a thread on it, because it comes up all the time. My personal take is that while life isn't rare, intelligent life such as humans probably is extremely rare and that there are multitudes of great filters along our history. Maybe it's survivorship bias, but all that really means is that we can only extrapolate the most basic things from our own history and planet. Maybe we're early, maybe intelligent life in civilizations has a time limit for the most part, and maybe we're seperated from other intelligent species not only by distance but also by time. We have existed for a galactic blink of an eye, and the analogy is really that it might be that three people occupy the state of Arizona, they never meet because one of them lived in the second century BC and the third won't be born for thousands of years. They could be right next to eachother even in the vastness of Arizona and never know it.
|
|
#
?
Nov 29, 2018 10:45
|
|
|
Ague Proof posted:Democratic primary results: What? Do you really believe in strong state loyalty for presidential elections? Why would Warren be done?
|
|
#
?
Nov 29, 2018 11:27
|
|
|
The Fermi paradox discussion is a good reprieve from current political affairs to be sure. MY take is that it's pretty early in the universe for life. If you think about it, we're a third generation star, and the first and second generations wouldn't have the right materials to support a civilization. Everything heavier than iron needs to come from a dying star, so an intelligent species that found itself around a second generation star would just never be able to go anywhere. After that, well, as much as it may kill us in the end, fossil fuels are responsible for a lot of our rapid growth, so maybe if you come around too early on your world there just isn't enough coal and oil to get an industrial civilization started. Anyways, hopefully it means we can be cool wise elderly aliens to a galaxy of life in the distant future. That, or deranged Xenophobes putting up walls between the stars.
|
|
#
?
Nov 29, 2018 12:01
|
|
|
Killer-of-Lawyers posted:Anyways, hopefully it means we can be cool wise elderly aliens to a galaxy of life in the distant future. That, or deranged Xenophobes putting up walls between the stars. My fear is we’ll end up becoming like the Engineers from the Alien series where we end up being responsible for letting lose a perfect weapon that can adapt to any environment, procreate, and destroy all life in the environments it ends up in
|
|
#
?
Nov 29, 2018 12:31
|
|
|
Sorry to interrupt idealism chat, but we're not gonna live long enough to colonize gently caress. https://twitter.com/Reuters/status/1068105027380801536 And another. https://www.politico.com/story/2018/11/29/suicide-overdose-life-expectancy-1025922 quote:Life expectancy in the United States declined again last year amid the twin scourges of opioid addiction and an unrelenting rise in suicides. Starting from the presidential election of 2016, we've been killing ourselves more often every year lmao.
|
|
#
?
Nov 29, 2018 12:52
|
|
|
I think the answer to the femi paradox is that it would be almost impossible to know you detected aliens because we don't have a clean alien free universe to compare things to do and jumping to "aliens did it" for any random anomaly is laughable and insane. So we probably have detected aliens a bunch of minor ways but how the hell would we know? Like maybe in a thousand years when we meet bleep blorp we will be able to go back retroactively and say "oh cool, even as early as 2002 they we had noticed the fast radio signal bursts his engines gave off and noticed that there was too much mercury of a certain isotope that is the exhaust his people polluted the galaxy with" but it's not like anyone sane can say that non-retroactively and just jump to some weird greek god "aliens did it" explanation every single time we see anything deviate any way from our expectations.
|
|
#
?
Nov 29, 2018 13:35
|
|
|
https://twitter.com/RealPressSecBot/status/1068120904440266757 Example #8975832 that the president doesn't understand who pays tariffs.
|
|
#
?
Nov 29, 2018 13:37
|
|
|
VH4Ever posted:Isn't one new pet theory that tardigrades are aliens? They can survive in a vacuum and there's reason to believe they may not be from Earth originally. See that's the funny thing about real life as opposed to science fiction, a lot of times the space aliens are tiny microscopic things. To elaborate on this the reason people think tardigrades may be aliens is because the extremes they can tolerate are not extremes common on earth and would have not been naturally selected for, ie vacuums, extreme radiation, and to a lesser extent total dehydration and long terms of being frozen solid. The dehydration one is crazy to me. You can nearly freeze dry a tardigrade and it will wake back up when you drop it in water.
|
|
#
?
Nov 29, 2018 13:37
|
|
|
Killer-of-Lawyers posted:Anyways, hopefully it means we can be cool wise elderly aliens to a galaxy of life in the distant future. That, or deranged Xenophobes putting up walls between the stars. "We are gonna build a dyson sphere and make Xorp-38 pay for it"
|
|
#
?
Nov 29, 2018 13:40
|
|
|
https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1068116413498429445
|
|
#
?
Nov 29, 2018 13:41
|
|
|
Wasn't it 30 million like two days ago? Wonder what it'll be two days from now! E: It was  . As if you needed more proof that Donny has pudding for brains and can't remember anything he tweets.
|
|
#
?
Nov 29, 2018 13:44
|
|
|
 I might make a thread about potential alien life and the Fermi paradox later but for now we should let it go itt.
|
|
#
?
Nov 29, 2018 13:48
|
|
|
Fritz Coldcockin posted:Wasn't it 30 million like two days ago? Wonder what it'll be two days from now! Even if it was that expensive, aren't they in the black based on the value of the assets they seized from Rick Gates and Paul Manafort? Ostrich sportcoats aren't cheap.
|
|
#
?
Nov 29, 2018 13:51
|
|
|
Rednik posted:Even if it was that expensive, aren't they in the black based on the value of the assets they seized from Rick Gates and Paul Manafort? Ostrich sportcoats aren't cheap. I thought the investigation had only registered in the 4-5 million range, and considering all the loving money those turds spent investigating Benghazi, the BUTTERY MAILS and Bill Clinton's boxer shorts, I could really give a poo poo if Bob Mueller needs more money to get to the truth. Wonder what Mueller spent 10 million bucks on in two days though--I guess solid gold jet skis don't come cheap 
|
|
#
?
Nov 29, 2018 13:55
|
|
|
edit: whoops
|
|
#
?
Nov 29, 2018 13:55
|
|
|
cr0y posted:"We are gonna build a dyson sphere and make Xorp-38 pay for it"
|
|
#
?
Nov 29, 2018 13:55
|
|
|
Lightning Knight posted:
Do it, I wanna talk about aliens.
|
|
#
?
Nov 29, 2018 13:57
|
|
|
Fritz Coldcockin posted:Wasn't it 30 million like two days ago? Wonder what it'll be two days from now! The numbers go up up up. How many angry democrats are we up to at last count?
|
|
#
?
Nov 29, 2018 13:58
|
|
|
Lightning Knight posted:
Yeah please make a thread, I think it's an interesting topic when you dig into the meta issues.
|
|
#
?
Nov 29, 2018 14:03
|
|
|
Tsietisin posted:The numbers go up up up. Seventeen, I believe. E: I think we need an Angry Democrats gangtag
|
|
#
?
Nov 29, 2018 14:04
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 12, 2024 04:28 |
|
|
Lightning Knight posted:
Bring back the paranormal subforum!
|
|
#
?
Nov 29, 2018 14:10
|
|
