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Adar posted:A little but not quite. Sci fi tends to focus on one race being conquered by another or an automated threat like von Neumanns. But even in those cases the conquerer or probe is not going to be the Biggest Bad, because across the entire universe the probability of that is effectively 0. In fact no sane race would ever deploy a von Neumann voluntarily because a Bigger Bad, which the probes will eventually always encounter, will trace them back to their source. The law of large numbers is a real bitch when you think in those terms. if the only logical conclusion is that there must always be a bigger bad out there, wouldn't this also stop the biggest bad from operating? and then the first/biggest bad to get over their fear would quickly outpace the ones that are afraid of the theoretical biggest bad
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Nov 30, 2018 00:43
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Using this thread as an excuse to refresh my space knowledge,and I found a bad infographic while googling the fastest man made object: https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/infographics/infographic.view.php?id=11489 Which would take 6000 years to get to Proxima Centauri... BUT! I didn't know about this new telescope that will potentially be able to actually image exoplanets: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extremely_Large_Telescope I'm still bummed NASA won't send a probe to Venus. Sure, the Russian ones melted, but it seems like a much more interesting destination than Mars.
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Nov 30, 2018 00:45
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:Also a dude not being able to go isn't really a barrier to a species spreading to a whole galaxy like if it's a million years from now and we are really sure we absolutely can't send any dudes we could still just send bunches and bunches of those bacteria that live 6 miles deep in rocks in little sealed up ecosystems and spray them in every direction nonstop and make sure to include plenty of very sturdy bibles and ayn rand books or whatever it is we feel will be important for our weird kids to find in a hundred million years to pass on to them. we could still colonize the galaxy with earth life even if we don't get to come personally  holy loving poo poo is the the single most horrendous thing i've seen posted in a long timelike what the actual gently caress is wrong with you to even think something this horrific (USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST)
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Nov 30, 2018 00:45
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HappyHippo posted:There are also extremeophiles that can survive intense radiation. I don't know of any reason that genetic engineering couldn't achieve the same given enough time. This doesn't seem like a "laws of physics" issue to me. Oh, my point isn't "this stuff isn't possible," but rather "it might not be possible." There is nothing guaranteeing that stuff like "putting human minds inside machines" is even possible (particularly in any sense that would prefer the "self" of the original). You can't really divorce the human brain from the human body (since so much of the way it works and what makes us who we are is dependent upon the specific biology), so the idea of somehow wholly reproducing the human mind inside a mechanical body isn't necessarily a thing that is possible. Genetically engineering humans to be able to survive in harsher environments, as you sorta mention, is actually more plausible, IMO.
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Nov 30, 2018 00:49
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Failson posted:Using this thread as an excuse to refresh my space knowledge,and I found a bad infographic while googling the fastest man made object: I read a pretty interesting thing a bit back that Venus might be a more workable 2nd Earth than Mars, provided we live in essentially a space station. Venus has Earth-like atmospheric pressure and temperature a few miles up and you wouldn't need a spacesuit, just something to provide oxygen, unlike Mars where it's basically a vacuum and terraforming isn't real technology right now. axeil fucked around with this message at 00:59 on Nov 30, 2018 |
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Nov 30, 2018 00:55
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Kerning Chameleon posted:
People only like spooky visions of the bad future, if you ever name anything nice happening it gets written off as nonsense (by you for example) so instead of sending normal bacteria we will only send bacteria where the most conserved regions of the DNA are genetically altered to include the entire text of fountainhead. only sending out bacteria with a hope they eventually evolve into intelligences millions of years later after we are long dead as a way to colonize the universe is sad but like, all living things ever do is send their kids off to carry things on long after they are gone. plus all it takes is one alien species doing that that doesn't think it's too sad and loves space cumming all over the entire universe for it to happen.
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Nov 30, 2018 00:56
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:People only like spooky visions of the bad future, if you ever name anything nice happening it gets written off as nonsense (by you for example) so instead of sending normal bacteria we will only send bacteria where the most conserved regions of the DNA are genetically altered to include the entire text of fountainhead. twist ending: this already happened and we are the end-result of Earth being life-seeded.
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Nov 30, 2018 01:00
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axeil posted:I read a pretty interesting thing a bit back that Venus might be a more workable 2nd Earth than Mars, provided we live in essentially a space station. Venus has Earth-like atmospheric pressure and temperature a few miles up and you wouldn't need a spacesuit, just something to provide oxygen, unlike Mars where it's basically a vacuum and terraforming isn't real technology right now.
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Nov 30, 2018 01:01
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axeil posted:I read a pretty interesting thing a bit back that Venus might be a more workable 2nd Earth than Mars, provided we live in essentially a space station. Venus has Earth-like atmospheric pressure and temperature a few miles up and you wouldn't need a spacesuit, just something to provide oxygen, unlike Mars where it's basically a vacuum and terraforming isn't real technology right now. There are a lot of sociological and logistical problems with this though and at a certain point, it seems like it would be easier to just make a space station over Earth than Venus.
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Nov 30, 2018 01:03
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Verviticus posted:if the only logical conclusion is that there must always be a bigger bad out there, wouldn't this also stop the biggest bad from operating? and then the first/biggest bad to get over their fear would quickly outpace the ones that are afraid of the theoretical biggest bad unfortunately that only works if everyone is rational and/or sensor technology doesn't outpace other stuff. if a spacefaring race is rational, aware of this paradox and wants to avoid it they would naturally throw themselves into sensor research and shielding communications, which leads us back here. the implications of the universe containing a very close to infinite number of planets and thus a near infinite number of eldritch horrors threatening each of them are pretty grim.
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Nov 30, 2018 01:05
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Verviticus posted:if the only logical conclusion is that there must always be a bigger bad out there, wouldn't this also stop the biggest bad from operating? and then the first/biggest bad to get over their fear would quickly outpace the ones that are afraid of the theoretical biggest bad Doesn't this apply to basically everything? Isn't this literally how ecosystems work? Just constant churn of different species killing each other and hiding from being killed and fighting back from being killed over and over till it settles into slowly shifting ongoing patterns forever.
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Nov 30, 2018 01:10
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:Doesn't this apply to basically everything? Isn't this literally how ecosystems work? Just constant churn of different species killing each other and hiding from being killed and fighting back from being killed over and over till it settles into slowly shifting ongoing patterns forever. I mean, implicitly, there's usually an apex predator in any given ecosystem, no? I don't think that translates well to a solar system or galactic scale though.
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Nov 30, 2018 01:12
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Aliens don't have interstellar civilizations for exactly the same reason humans never will: it costs way, way, waaaay too much energy, and is way too slow. A physicist on another forum I frequent broke it down like this:quote:Everyone thinks that space is big, but they're wrong. It isn't big, it's big. People don't comprehend the scale. When I hear people talking about 'fast space travel' I start to itch a little bit. People that say that sort of thing don't mean 'fast' in the sense of being able to send a tiny unmanned probe to the nearest exoplanet in 'only' a few million years, they mean being able to hop a space-bus and have a family vacation in Betelgeuse. And that isn't going to happen, not ever. I don't care what kind of weird future technology and vast oceans of clean cheap energy you postulate. We are stuck on Sol forever, and let me show you why.
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Nov 30, 2018 02:21
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Haystack posted:Aliens don't have interstellar civilizations for exactly the same reason humans never will: it costs way, way, waaaay too much energy, and is way too slow. A physicist on another forum I frequent broke it down like this: I put this in the OP since it's from an actual scientist and is quite interesting.
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Nov 30, 2018 02:30
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It's telling that, for one example, the Star Trek universe is based 100% on finding what essentially is a wholly new source of propulsion based on a limitless energy output and a process to use it that doesn't exist. You sort of have to start at unobtainium because yeah, the science as it stands now pretty much keeps us locked into our galactic neighborhood.
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Nov 30, 2018 02:50
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Sending a human between the stars requires new physics, building a von Neumann machine that goes off and eats Jupiter to build a starship that cruises at a small percentage of lightspeed is incredibly difficult, pointless, time consuming, and offensive to amateur astronomers, but it doesn't need any physics breakthroughs.
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Nov 30, 2018 03:03
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twodot posted:Sending a human between the stars requires new physics, building a von Neumann machine that goes off and eats Jupiter to build a starship that cruises at a small percentage of lightspeed is incredibly difficult, pointless, time consuming, and offensive to amateur astronomers, but it doesn't need any physics breakthroughs. Eh... the energetics are better, but the timescale is a huge problem. You're talking about a process that has to keep working towards a goal for tens of thousands of years per generation in unimaginably harsh conditions with zero room for error. Entropy is not a kind mistress.
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Nov 30, 2018 03:16
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twodot posted:Sending a human between the stars requires new physics, building a von Neumann machine that goes off and eats Jupiter to build a starship that cruises at a small percentage of lightspeed is incredibly difficult, pointless, time consuming, and offensive to amateur astronomers, but it doesn't need any physics breakthroughs. That's kind of the thing of it, yeah. It isn't that some form of interstellar travel is explicitly impossible, it's just that, as far as anyone can tell, all the ways of doing it are ways that no one in their right mind would ever want to do it. It's entirely likely that our descendants will never visit the stars for the same reason we never built those moon-bases or flying cars: by the time technology caught up with the dream, we'd discovered and fully explored all the reasons why the dream was dumb and wasteful, and anyway, we'd found new obsessions in the mean-time. The final Great Filter doesn't need to be an all-consuming alien or internal menace, it can just be smart-phones and holodecks.
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Nov 30, 2018 03:18
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Haystack posted:Eh... the energetics are better, but the timescale is a huge problem. You're talking about a process that has to keep working towards a goal for tens of thousands of years per generation in unimaginably harsh conditions with zero room for error. Entropy is not a kind mistress.
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Nov 30, 2018 03:28
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sNhhvQGsMEc This is an interesting, short take on the Fermi Paradox. Lightning Knight fucked around with this message at 03:36 on Nov 30, 2018 |
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Nov 30, 2018 03:31
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Haystack posted:Aliens don't have interstellar civilizations for exactly the same reason humans never will: it costs way, way, waaaay too much energy, and is way too slow. A physicist on another forum I frequent broke it down like this: Graphs like that don't impress me because they don't think long term enough. Let's take 0.5c and quadruple the cost: a 30 year trip with the ISS, 26 in subjective time, takes 56 "globes" in 2018 terms. Here's the graph of energy consumption since 1800:  Like everything else it's an exponential curve. 56 globes is unimaginable today but a hundred years ago it would've been 560 globes and there's no real physical reason that it can't be .056 globes in 300 more years. It doesn't even have to be on Earth itself. A few centuries from now a space elevator and outsourcing the energy costs to the massive solar farms a few million kilometers out that power the laser that shoots into the lightsail probably won't look that bad. Adar fucked around with this message at 03:53 on Nov 30, 2018 |
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Nov 30, 2018 03:46
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Why do we need to eat jupiter when mercury has enough hematite to build solar arrays around the sun. 75 years after completion we have giga amounts of usable energy. And a directed heat beam if we need to defend from aliens
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Nov 30, 2018 03:52
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Alright spoilsports, how implausible is a Dyson sphere.
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Nov 30, 2018 04:17
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zoux posted:Alright spoilsports, how implausible is a Dyson sphere. Sphere is pretty hard man. However rings are much more stable structures. We dont need a megadeathstarsun to create a very viable energy source out of our sun. Space is a much easier environment to navigate for automation than Earth. Weve had satellites for 50 years. Automation has emerged from this, space is a numerical game for navigation. We are barely able to get robots running across forests,but we can navigate something millions of miles away in space. Its an easier 3d environment. Our only hope to making real progress on living through this warm universe is to expand our energy production throigh automated mining of mercury for hematite then building eitjer solar arrays or a full on ring setup.
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Nov 30, 2018 05:13
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In USPOL there was mention of alien microbes living among us, including the idea that tardigrades are that. Tardigrades are definitely from Earth, but, there's still potential that microbes of an alien source could be hiding all over Earth and we just haven't spotted them yet. More likely, but also yet unproven, is the idea there is life that evolved on Earth alongside the life we know, but that we haven't noticed yet--it'd all be microbial also, most likely. The reason this is a question is because of how we study microbial life. To discover a new species of microbe a scientist has to: 1. Spot it in a microscope 2. Spot many of it 3. Figure out how to grow a colony of it 4. Study its biochemical and genetic composition Right now the way we tend to study microbial life is by looking for biochemistry that works the same as it does in the macro life we can study much more easily; almost all microbes we know of have very similar biochemistry to us and all plants and animals. I say "almost" because recently scientists have nailed down an organism that is, to our knowledge, of Earth, but also differs more from all known life than we differ from fungi. The organism is hemimastigote and was first spotted in a microscope back in the 19th century but were only studied under a microscope before modern biochemistry had arisen which didn't reveal how truly weird they were until they were re-discovered now. So where could alien (extraterrestrial or terrestrial) life be hiding on Earth? It could be anywhere in our biosphere. Say you were to collect a random sample of matter--much like what was done that lead to the hemimastigotes being rediscovered--and separated out the abiotic parts (which could also be where you accidentally throw out the evidence of alien microbes because it looks abiotic to you). What you were left with that you are sure was a living organism or came from an organism would include a portion of biological dark matter. Biological dark matter includes things like junk DNA--which we can find even in our own bodies, but could also potentially contain remnants or genetic material of organisms with completely different biochemistry from us. As I mentioned before, most of our ability to study microbial life relies on it having the same biochemistry as us, which our cutting edge ways of analyzing biological material rely on more and more heavily. This all leads to a hypothesis that there could be a shadow biosphere that contains microbial life that works so differently than what we've identified and studied that it could be hiding in plain sight without us identifying it. Of course, so far there's scant evidence to support this, which could be because it doesn't exist, but much like aliens not on our planet, could also be because we just haven't discovered it yet. And hemimastigotes are still having their biochemistry studied, they could still contain surprises even more amazing than they already do.
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Nov 30, 2018 10:07
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zoux posted:1. Titan ... and its goddam beautiful 
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Nov 30, 2018 10:17
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LtStorm posted:there's still potential that microbes of an alien source could be hiding all over Earth and we just haven't spotted them yet. More likely, but also yet unproven, is the idea there is life that evolved on Earth alongside the life we know, but that we haven't noticed yet--it'd all be microbial also, most likely. Hiding all in the earth probably. We know there are bacteria that go 7km down into the crust of the earth at least, they eat sulfur and iron, live for centuries, can dehydrate indefinitely, have massive radiation resistance and have a bunch of extra dna repair abilities. Some bacteria sitting in a pond getting to another planet seems like it would require so many unlikely coincidences. But a lithovore seems almost perfectly suited to the point it's hard to imagine it DOESN'T happen. Like you couldn't drop a horse on any other planet and have it make it, but a bacteria inside a rock wouldn't care what planet it's on or even if it's on a planet as long as it's living in a rock, and we know asteroid strikes can cause intact ejecta, it seems like it'd be so easy for some bit of bacterial life to make it off a planet, luck into getting into an asteroid belt, then just slowly over millions of years transfer asteroid to asteroid as they bump and then slowly spread out everywhere as the asteroids fly off, sometimes landing on planets even. The fact from the bacteria's perspective it's just continuing to sit embedded in a rock reducing iron and sulfur and not caring it's flying around the universe means it can spread nearly anywhere there is rocks. And it's not like bacteria need breeding pairs or anything, you don't need millions of bacteria to survive any specific step, even one is enough to potentially colonize a whole planet on it's own.
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Nov 30, 2018 13:40
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New theory: surface life is a silly transitional state and all real life lives in the pores in rocks, with anyone being silly enough to walk around on the tiny surface area eventually wising up, inventing micro-microchips and moving their progeny back into the only sane environment to live in long term across planets, we don't see radio waves because everyone communicates with rock piercing neutrinos. Actually I think steven baxter wrote a story with that, where most intelligence was naturally occuring neural networks of deep crust bacteria. He is really good at writing vaguely plausible non earthlike life. Like creatures that exist as cellular automata in the interaction of magnetic plasma on and in stars. One of his long running stories has the primary conflict between dark matter creatures that live in the gravity of white dwarfs and aliens that need suns for energy who constantly are at war of trying to direct galactic evolution into conditions that make white dwarfs or long lasting stars in a resource war planning a trillion years ahead. I kinda really like his writing, the general idea is that ANYTHING that could possibly have evolutionary forces on it will eventually lead to something like life given enough time and tries, and earth life is one of the weirder manifestations of it compared to more simple things like storm cells on gas giants.
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Nov 30, 2018 14:25
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My favorite sci fi aliens from a uniqueness perspective are the ones from Blindsight. The idea of a non-self-aware intelligence is so difficult to wrap my head around, but it's such a good reminder that we approach ideas about alien life from such a limited and entrenched perspective that it may be literally impossible for the human mind to imagine it. Which could also be one of the explanations to the Paradox; that we just can't recognize ET intelligence because it's so different from our own.
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Nov 30, 2018 17:02
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zoux posted:that we just can't recognize ET intelligence because it's so different from our own. This but not even lovecraft style of magically unknowable. Like historically victorians were looking at mars for victorian aliens that turned into world war I aliens then we had world war Ii aliens where everything was nuclear, then sneaky cold war aliens, people in the old days talked about people from the stars coming in boats and stuff. Like when we look for aliens we look for popular tv show star trek. with the specific things that contemporary sci-fi looks do, instead of some other sort of sci-fi narrative. like we look for: boat sized ships, ftl, talking on olde timey radio but with pictures sometimes, culture acting just the same even though they invented magic (then agreed to never use it to change society in any unrecognizable way). etc. My human intelligence is exactly the same as my great great great x100 granddad but my motivations and actions would be vastly incomprehensible to him.
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Nov 30, 2018 17:55
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Cable Guy posted:I'd have to put Enceladus at least on a par with Europa, and probably above it. Volcanic activity, liquid water, complex organic molecules. A really good candidate for life... On the same note, is anyone else as  as I am about NASA's focus on Mars, when the biggest, most interesting focus for interplanetary exploration would be to send a mission to Europa or Enceladus to search for life under the ice? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Europa_Lander_(NASA) It's not even on the mission plan yet, it's just a proposal. I think it's a big mistake to be all gung-ho about sending a manned mission to the Moon or whatever when the biggest potential discovery is with submarine missions to the watery moons.
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Nov 30, 2018 19:26
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I think we should attempt no landings there.
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Nov 30, 2018 19:31
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DrSunshine posted:On the same note, is anyone else as I mean admittedly, Mars is closer. What kind of control delay does a lander on Europa? I know it's like 20 seconds on Mars, right?
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Nov 30, 2018 19:32
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DrSunshine posted:On the same note, is anyone else as Mars is really extremely close compared to other things. Probes go and get there in less than a year. Mariner 7 got there in 131 days. They are launching a jupiter moons probe in 2022 but it's not going to be there till 2030, the mars probe that just landed two days ago launched may 5th.
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Nov 30, 2018 19:43
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:There is radiation in space but like, you are wildly overstating things, there is less radiation in interstellar space than in the solar system. It's a thing you'd have to design for but it's not some mystical force that would reduce all physical objects to ruin. You can just put a wall in front of something and it stops radiation too, and our solar system and most others have very convenient giant collections of free rocks you can take in any size you need for the trip right at the exits. With sufficient technology you could just send frozen sperm and eggs and inseminate / incubate upon landing. Maybe do some shifts - start with the anerobic bacteria, then once the atmosphere is good in a few thousand years move on to other bacteria and fungi, then plants and animals etc with a goal of launching your first batch of humans 5,000 - 10,000 years after landing. Maybe you have a master ship that sits in orbit and launches poo poo down to the planet as needed. As technology increases it opens new avenues for colonization. Technological advance also makes old avenues that were deemed too costly or inappropriate more accessible for smaller groups of people. Maybe 10,000 years from now Earth could come together to create the USS Inseminator and send her to the stars, but in 11,000 years a single country could do it, and in 13,000 years it could be a school time capsule type project. I guess the same goes for world ending technology. Today the world could probably unite and create a disease that wipes us all out. In the year 2218 maybe Canada can do it alone. In 2518 maybe a small group of incels can do it. Maybe that’s the solution - as tech advances it just gets too easy for a handful of idiots to kill everyone.
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Nov 30, 2018 19:50
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What's the name of the theory that life exists right now, but we won't see evidence of it for billions of years? That conditions aren't unique to earth, but that the 3rd generation star is a hard requirement so there aren't all that many with a 4-billion year head start on us that are less than 4bn LY away. Or more succinctly, you solve the fermi paradox by limiting the number of exoplanets to a very local shell that expands outwards 1LY per year. E: The only other assumption that makes is that earth is on the early end of the "life develops" bell curve. Doesn't have to be first, just not near the end. Harik fucked around with this message at 19:54 on Nov 30, 2018 |
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Nov 30, 2018 19:52
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It doesn't matter whether it's Von Neumann probes, radio bursts, surrounding a star in a flickering polarized screen, or whatever. A sufficiently powerful civilization that wants to let the galaxy know they exist can do it. We ourselves may be in realistic striking distance of this goal in the next century or so. And evidently, they haven't. Not one, not in the dozens or hundreds of civilizations that should have become capable of this during the past. This should be alarming on every conceivable level, because either we are alone which is terrible, or we are in a galaxy where other intelligent beings are disinclined to be friendly, which is almost certainly worse. Back when Fermi was first kicking this around with his buddies, it was a fun thought experiment. As decades pass and we get better and better and NOT finding anything...? Yeah, not lookin' good for a happy answer to the paradox. Edit: Or this is all a machine dream, and there's no aliens because the construct doesn't use them, and I'm about to wake up in my cryotube or whatever. physeter fucked around with this message at 20:01 on Nov 30, 2018 |
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Nov 30, 2018 19:59
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LtStorm posted:In USPOL there was mention of alien microbes living among us, including the idea that tardigrades are that. Tardigrades are definitely from Earth, but, there's still potential that microbes of an alien source could be hiding all over Earth and we just haven't spotted them yet. More likely, but also yet unproven, is the idea there is life that evolved on Earth alongside the life we know, but that we haven't noticed yet--it'd all be microbial also, most likely. Man this kind of thing is so loving neat, like the researcher was out on a hike and arbitrarily decides to grab a soil sample and then whoa, scientific discovery of her life. Also possibly alien. (Not really) This a great thread thanks LK, I love this conversation although my inner 12 year old is sad that the reality of the answer to the Fermi paradox is probably a combination of “we don’t have the ability to even know what we don’t know and also interstellar travel is a fantasy for any civilization...”
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Nov 30, 2018 20:21
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physeter posted:It doesn't matter whether it's Von Neumann probes, radio bursts, surrounding a star in a flickering polarized screen, or whatever. A sufficiently powerful civilization that wants to let the galaxy know they exist can do it. Yeah, but we haven't actually investigated any of those to any sort of level where we can say "welp, we looked everywhere" or even "welp, we looked at all". Like the space roar thing where we assumed a certain CM range of radio broadcasts would be clear if we got out of the atmosphere and then when we actually checked there was a nonstop giant roaring sound coming from every one of the directions checked. Thats not to say that is aliens, but I am saying again "the idea we looked real hard yet is incorrect" science is still ongoing and we are just barely scratching the surface of the start of a bunch of astrophysical research, not something where we are near the end and there is only a few loose spots an alien might hide. Like what percent of stars have we checked for flickering polarized screens? What percent of radio have we checked? Seti only has checked a tiny tiny spectrum and even that is famous for having only found an alien like signal one time and not more.
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Nov 30, 2018 20:37
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Harik posted:What's the name of the theory that life exists right now, but we won't see evidence of it for billions of years? That conditions aren't unique to earth, but that the 3rd generation star is a hard requirement so there aren't all that many with a 4-billion year head start on us that are less than 4bn LY away. Due to the Sun's expansion, somewhere between 500 million and 1 billion years from now the Earth's oceans will boil away. The Goldilocks zone isn't a constant for a given solar system and moves outwards over time as the sun gets bigger. Even multicellular life is at least 600 million years old or so, so you can make a credible claim that if multicellular life is the Filter, humans arrived roughly at the midpoint of viability. Of course, that assumes water/carbon is necessary for life which isn't a safe assumption at all. We could easily discover a silicon based organism that doesn't use DNA in some deep rocks tomorrow and it wouldn't even be a total surprise.
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Nov 30, 2018 20:45
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