|
physeter posted: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. You wish you had a cryotube, current science moved on from simulation being the most likely thing to Boltzmann brains. That after the "heat death of the universe" every quadrillions of years randomly, a functioning mind experiencing any moment would appear in the vacuum experiance that single experiance and presumably fall instantly because it's just whatever minimum parts you need to be conscious floating in an endless vacuum. But since this has infinite time to happen it doesn't matter how rare it is and consciousnesses that happened this way would outnumber the real sort infinity to 1 so no one has any chance to be anything but that. So odds are, you aren't even a real person, or even a simulation of a person, you are an instantaneous random combination of very cold fluctuating atoms that randomly came together to experiance the exact thing you are now then fall apart with no past or future. And you are just lucky this combination was a reasonably coherent thought instead of the quadrillions of less put together random nonsense that each of the minds that appear once every orders of magnitude longer than the age of the universe get.
|
#
?
Nov 30, 2018 20:47
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 12, 2024 13:06 |
|
|
Lightning Knight posted: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? Between 4 minutes and 20 minutes for Mars, depending on orbital position. Current ly 35 light minutes to europa, don't know the distance for farthest approach.
|
|
#
?
Nov 30, 2018 21:28
|
|
|
Shaddak posted:Between 4 minutes and 20 minutes for Mars, depending on orbital position. Current ly 35 light minutes to europa, don't know the distance for farthest approach. Oh poo poo my bad I was told 20 minutes. 
|
|
#
?
Nov 30, 2018 21:36
|
|
|
DrSunshine posted:On the same note, is anyone else as It's a constant bummer that any space exploration is in the hands of politicians budget considerations and private-sector sociopaths. Wait... No one has posted Meat yet? http://www.terrybisson.com/page6/page6.html And even that's kinda optimistic, since the aliens find us disgusting and leave us be, instead of spraying the planet with interstellar disinfectant.
|
|
#
?
Nov 30, 2018 22:17
|
|
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?
|
A GIANT PARSNIP posted: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. Here's an idea: how about we don't further infect the galaxy with our brand of disgusting bio spooge. Maybe Earth-originated life isn't a very good thing in the cosmic view of things, and we should endeavor to contain it instead of spewing it everywhere out of some bullshit lizard-brain directive to "GROW, EXPAND, EXPLODE". Like, anyone who makes that argument always sounds like a cancer cell learned how to talk, it's really gross. (USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST)
|
|
#
?
Nov 30, 2018 22:26
|
|
|
Kerning Chameleon posted:Here's an idea: how about we don't further infect the galaxy with our brand of disgusting bio spooge. Maybe Earth-originated life isn't a very good thing in the cosmic view of things, and we should endeavor to contain it instead of spewing it everywhere out of some bullshit lizard-brain directive to "GROW, EXPAND, EXPLODE". I hate to bring up the law of large numbers again but if we assume a trillion trillion planets, I promise you Earth spooge is a distant 10^10^10th worst at best and will not hold a candle to the Andromeda shoggoth
|
|
#
?
Nov 30, 2018 23:27
|
|
|
Kerning Chameleon posted:Here's an idea: how about we don't further infect the galaxy with our brand of disgusting bio spooge. Maybe Earth-originated life isn't a very good thing in the cosmic view of things, and we should endeavor to contain it instead of spewing it everywhere out of some bullshit lizard-brain directive to "GROW, EXPAND, EXPLODE". Congrats on missing the point that as technology advances it takes less people and a smaller share of resources to do something like this, which means eventually you'll reach a point where a small group with a moderate resource budget can do it, and they won't care about your morality or mine or anyone's besides their own. Also the first few hundred million years on earth were single celled life figuring poo poo out, and whoever cornered GROW/EXPAND/EXPLODE seems to have ran away with that game - I'm not sure how you imagine single celled life dominating with a different strategy? I know it probably feels great to sit there and declare your galaxy brain view that the history of life on earth and all of the creatures contained within are a disgusting cancer that should be exterminated from the pure and noble cosmos, but what I don't understand is how you picture single celled life evolving without some drive to grow or expand itself in some capacity. I guess I should just be surprised that it took more than 2 pages to reach "earth life is a cancer that should be exterminated".
|
|
#
?
Dec 1, 2018 01:52
|
|
|
Adar posted:I hate to bring up the law of large numbers again but if we assume a trillion trillion planets, I promise you Earth spooge is a distant 10^10^10th worst at best and will not hold a candle to the Andromeda shoggoth i've been pondering alternative usernames to spend money switching to, and Earth Spooge and Andromeda Shoggoth are both pretty cool options
|
|
#
?
Dec 1, 2018 03:51
|
|
|
Violator posted:“Aliens don’t exist because we have millions of camera phones and no photographic evidence” doesn’t make sense. Most UFO sightings last seconds and camera phone sensors are about 1/4 the size of your pinky finger nail. I feel like I can’t even get a good photo of my cat unless the conditions are right, getting something in the sky 30 miles away during a fleeting sighting with likely suboptimal lighting is basically impossible. You also have to be an expert photographer with hobbyist level equipment to get a good shot of the moon with a digital camera. Also, while you're reading this argument, you're not looking at the sky, are you? You're likely loving up your posture and your nightsight looking at a phone. Fewer and fewer people are looking at the moonlit or moonless sky-if this trend continues infinitely, there will be no sky. For those of you on computers, have you even been outside tonight? No? If you're reading this on a console please go look at the moon right now. Others will be with you shortly, because lolgoons.
|
|
#
?
Dec 1, 2018 04:01
|
|
|
Nah I saw the Moon on Thanksgiving when it was full and it was so bright I couldn't see the stars. gently caress off Moon!
|
|
#
?
Dec 1, 2018 04:17
|
|
|
How are you sure it's the same moon if you haven't looked at it since thanksgiving?
|
|
#
?
Dec 1, 2018 05:07
|
|
|
If you have the capability of generating the insane energy to travel between stars, you wouldnt bother spending it on going through a tremendous amount of emptiness. It's like building a refinery in your backyard and burning gasoline to warm a house down the block.
|
|
#
?
Dec 1, 2018 06:42
|
|
|
Sometimes I think too hard about fundamental physics poo poo and get all bothered by it before dumping it from my brain and getting drunk and watching hockey or whatever. It's incredibly frustrating. Why is the speed of light an exact and specifically measurable thing instead of any other arbitrary value? What the gently caress is gravity even? It's a force, based on mass, and we can clearly measure it, but what the hell is acting on what to generate it? Again, why at the same rules and not others? Why even have time (in the space time sense ) and not just space? Or vice versa. It feels like someone or something could have set a bunch of arbitrary rules and fired off a simulation starting from the also inexplicable big bang to test them out. There is no reason any sufficiently advanced system couldn't simulate human brains to the point where the sims wouldn't have the full and rich lives we currently experience. Any of the natural phenomenon that just make up the base rules of the universe could have been equally as set up by an alien nerd in his parent's basement running a hyper-dimensional gigacomputer or a magical divinity also creating the universe for kicks with random rules. Neither of which satisfies the final question of who the gently caress created the alien basement goon or the bored and detached creator god.
|
|
#
?
Dec 1, 2018 09:22
|
|
|
zoux posted:I think we should attempt no landings there.  Edit: The Butcher posted:... Neither of which satisfies the final question of who the gently caress created the alien basement goon or the bored and detached creator god. (Edit 2: As conciliation I will concede that we may not have been created in a basement.) Cable Guy fucked around with this message at 10:46 on Dec 1, 2018 |
|
#
?
Dec 1, 2018 10:01
|
|
|
EdithUpwards posted:You also have to be an expert photographer with hobbyist level equipment to get a good shot of the moon with a digital camera. What? I took this with an 80 dollar camera. Even crap cameras are amazing these days. Someone with a fancy DLSR that knew what an f-stop is would have taken a better picture than this, but it's an okay picture, if I do say so myself. 
|
|
#
?
Dec 1, 2018 15:01
|
|
|
Great topic LK! Here's my opinion as a molecular and synthetic biologist: there are three Great Filters of consequence, the Nucleosynthesis filter, the Intelligence filter, and the Synthetic Biology filter. The Nucleosynthesis filter is the apparent requirement of heavy elements to do biochemistry. While life is made out of a skeleton of hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, and carbon, elements like phosphorous, sulfur, iron, manganese, magnesium, copper, and other elements are found everywhere and are essential to basic enzymatic function. Planets that form too early will have concentrations of these elements that are too low for complex biochemistry to evolve. This Filter means that life can only evolve once enough first and second generation stars have died to produce these elements. The Intelligence filter is based on the fact that we've seen intelligence involve only once on our planet. Like many adaptations, intelligence evolved in response to a specific environment encountered by a specific species. The odds of this happening is likely very low, as the physiological cost and prerequdited of intelligence is high. The Synthetic Biology filter is the one we're going through right now. We can't survive in any meaningful way in space, and evolution is too slow. We have to redesign ourselves to get off the planet, and now we have the tool to do it in RNA-guided nucleases like Cas9 and Cpf1. If an intelligent species evolved such that they could not engineer themselves for whatever reason, they'd be homebound. Well, that's my two cents on the topic.
|
|
#
?
Dec 1, 2018 19:52
|
|
|
mycomancy posted:The Intelligence filter is based on the fact that we've seen intelligence involve only once on our planet. Like many adaptations, intelligence evolved in response to a specific environment encountered by a specific species. The odds of this happening is likely very low, as the physiological cost and prerequdited of intelligence is high. This whole post was really interesting and I put it in the OP, but I have a specific question about this part. There are other species on Earth that seem obviously intelligent, but they didn't make the jump to intelligence as we understand it. Is this because of humans providing ecological pressure and effectively crowding them out, or is it because intelligence is actually a rare trait? Is there a way to know that?
|
|
#
?
Dec 1, 2018 22:29
|
|
|
Lightning Knight posted:This whole post was really interesting and I put it in the OP, but I have a specific question about this part. There are other species on Earth that seem obviously intelligent, but they didn't make the jump to intelligence as we understand it. Is this because of humans providing ecological pressure and effectively crowding them out, or is it because intelligence is actually a rare trait? Is there a way to know that? Other than some weirdos like squid and crows that are doing their own thing most of the really smart animals are mammals and generally are modern versions that evolved pretty recently. Like bottlenose dolphins are ~5 million years old. We crossed the magic line where being a tiny bit smarter hits the singularity and we invent complex language and explode into being able to make cellphones like 100 generations later but that isn't really that far ahead in the grand scheme of things. It's not like everyone else has been failing and failing for ages. The other smart animals are only a little older (or younger!) than we are. We won the race, but just barely, lots and lots of mammals have been rapidly developing more neural complexity. We have only been around a short amount of time, with tons and tons of animals only slightly behind us. we are loving up elephants so there isn't going to be much elephant future left, but if they had another few million years, they probably aren't much dumber than we were a few million years ago.
|
|
#
?
Dec 1, 2018 23:07
|
|
|
Lightning Knight posted:This whole post was really interesting and I put it in the OP, but I have a specific question about this part. There are other species on Earth that seem obviously intelligent, but they didn't make the jump to intelligence as we understand it. Is this because of humans providing ecological pressure and effectively crowding them out, or is it because intelligence is actually a rare trait? Is there a way to know that? Did you put my dumb, sleep deprived spelling error in there too?  To answer your question, here's the short list of animals we think of as being at least somewhat intelligent: us, pigs, dogs, elephants, various cetaceans, various apes, various corvids, and maaaaaaybe octopi. So we aren't crowding out intelligence at low levels. Despite these numerous examples of "low level intelligence," we don't seen other intelligence peers on the planet even though presumably the apes at least are as smart as our common ancestors were. So why? There's a certain level of anthrocentricism when we discuss the evolution of human intelligence. WE'RE intelligent, and we see the good in it, so we think it'd be good for any organism to evolve. To borrow from Larry Niven's Known Space books, Finagle Was Right: The Perversity Of The Universe Tends Towards Maximum aka the Universe doesn't give a gently caress about what humans want, need, or think, and it's gonna do what it does without consideration towards us. So, my expert opinion is that we're probably the first intelligent species in the observable universe, and likely we're the last. The spark of intelligence dies with us. And, with the way the world is going, that'll be in about 20 years.
|
|
#
?
Dec 1, 2018 23:12
|
|
|
mycomancy posted:Did you put my dumb, sleep deprived spelling error in there too? I put it in exactly as you wrote it!  And this one too. That seems like a fairly sad take to me but I defer to your scientific background.
|
|
#
?
Dec 1, 2018 23:17
|
|
|
Lightning Knight posted:I put it in exactly as you wrote it! Well, take a look at it this way: if we're the first, then we have a duty to wake up the "dumb" universe and spread intelligence to every point of light in the sky. We can turn anything on Earth capable of supporting the neurology into an intelligent animal, we can build AI in our image, we can try to bring our dead ancestral species back to life, or we can augment our own intelligence to the point of becoming alien.
|
|
#
?
Dec 1, 2018 23:28
|
|
|
mycomancy posted:Well, take a look at it this way: if we're the first, then we have a duty to wake up the "dumb" universe and spread intelligence to every point of light in the sky. We can turn anything on Earth capable of supporting the neurology into an intelligent animal, we can build AI in our image, we can try to bring our dead ancestral species back to life, or we can augment our own intelligence to the point of becoming alien. This seems like it would have a lot of philosophical implications, as well as questions about our political relationship with said alien life and if it constitutes colonialism.
|
|
#
?
Dec 1, 2018 23:29
|
|
|
mycomancy posted:There's a certain level of anthrocentricism when we discuss the evolution of human intelligence. WE'RE intelligent, and we see the good in it, so we think it'd be good for any organism to evolve. To borrow from Larry Niven's Known Space books, Finagle Was Right: The Perversity Of The Universe Tends Towards Maximum aka the Universe doesn't give a gently caress about what humans want, need, or think, and it's gonna do what it does without consideration towards us. How can you say that and not mention Larry Niven's Footfall!? If anyone would like to read a really, really good book about elephant sorta aliens stomping the loving Earth, uh... bam. Read that. It is actually good though. mycomancy posted:So, my expert opinion is that we're probably the first intelligent species in the observable universe, and likely we're the last. The spark of intelligence dies with us. And, with the way the world is going, that'll be in about 20 years. This is silly though. Odds don't support it. Also we are really good at surviving and there are a lot of us, even if we are due for significant population loss, it's not gonna be in 20 years and it's not gonna wipe us out. Could be due for a few "resets" but we gently caress good and make more people pretty fast. If we are still being sci-fi nerdy about this, another book recommendo that talks a lot about this would be Vernor Vinge's A Fire Upon the Deep and A Deepness In The Sky. IMO deepness is better, but best to read in order.
|
|
#
?
Dec 1, 2018 23:32
|
|
|
mycomancy posted:To answer your question, here's the short list of animals we think of as being at least somewhat intelligent: us, pigs, dogs, elephants, various cetaceans, various apes, various corvids, and maaaaaaybe octopi. So we aren't crowding out intelligence at low levels. Despite these numerous examples of "low level intelligence," we don't seen other intelligence peers on the planet even though presumably the apes at least are as smart as our common ancestors were. So why? like pigs and dogs are only a few thousand years old and come from ancestors like wolves and boars that are only evolved 4-8 million years ago, bottle nose dolphins are only 5 million years old, chimps are 5-8 (and basically did evolve intelligence by being us), modern elephants have only been around for a million years. Like we aren't THAT far ahead of other animals, and they are mostly animals that are some dumber than us, but also not any older than us. It isn't really like a bunch of candidate animals have been sitting around for billions of years failing to make the jump. It's more like mammals got a bunch of neural complexity and we are just one inch ahead and got fire that let us eat more soft meat that let us invent language that let us invent writing that let us invent space ships. Like we were as dumb as an elephant really recently, but there is a line you cross and apparent intelligence goes vertical but we only crossed that a little ahead of everything else, they haven't been failing to cross it for much longer than we did.
|
|
#
?
Dec 1, 2018 23:37
|
|
|
The Butcher posted:
is that the one about crabs that have sex at the wrong time of year and turn into crab minorities?
|
|
#
?
Dec 1, 2018 23:38
|
|
|
Lightning Knight posted:This seems like it would have a lot of philosophical implications, as well as questions about our political relationship with said alien life and if it constitutes colonialism. Sure, there's a ton of ethical concerns with in essence birthing a new species into realization that they're trapped in a rotting meat cage on a planet that has a maximum of 500 million years left before it gets roasted and that we're never leaving this solar system.
|
|
#
?
Dec 1, 2018 23:43
|
|
|
mycomancy posted:Sure, there's a ton of ethical concerns with in essence birthing a new species into realization that they're trapped in a rotting meat cage on a planet that has a maximum of 500 million years left before it gets roasted and that we're never leaving this solar system.  I'm actually kind of sad now lol.
|
|
#
?
Dec 1, 2018 23:44
|
|
|
Lightning Knight posted:
Sorry dude. It IS a depressing topic when you weed out the sci-fi and get to the hard facts.
|
|
#
?
Dec 1, 2018 23:46
|
|
|
mycomancy posted:Sorry dude. It IS a depressing topic when you weed out the sci-fi and get to the hard facts. This is my experience with science in general to be honest. So what did you mean by "trapped in a rotting meat cage" exactly?
|
|
#
?
Dec 1, 2018 23:47
|
|
|
Owlofcreamcheese posted:is that the one about crabs that have sex at the wrong time of year and turn into crab minorities? Close but giant spiders. The first (fire) is about medieval level dog packs that each pack basically makes up a singular intelligent individual. Also the galaxy communicates over usenet equiv. And physics gets to change based on local galaxy scale mass density. That sounds dumb as hell writing it out but I'm serious, both really good books.
|
|
#
?
Dec 1, 2018 23:50
|
|
|
Lightning Knight posted:This is my experience with science in general to be honest. That's my sarcophobia rearing its head. You're an intelligent information pattern that's running on a biological substrate that decays as it ages. Being made out of meat is degrading.
|
|
#
?
Dec 1, 2018 23:50
|
|
|
mycomancy posted:Sorry dude. It IS a depressing topic when you weed out the sci-fi and get to the hard facts. Just saying wristcutter stuff doesn't make something more serious. You are not being some extra grown up adult calling living things "rotting meat cages" and worrying about the year 500 million AD killing off a bunch of intelligent animals. 1990s comics infected your brain that just saying gritty things is more serious than saying nicer things. The Butcher posted:Close but giant spiders. I'm not mocking it either, I read it when I was a kid and it was new and literally all I remember is the crab (spider) people had a mating season when the sun came out but once they invented electric lights you could mate all year long but if you did everyone made your spider baby an oppressed minority.
|
|
#
?
Dec 1, 2018 23:54
|
|
|
Owlofcreamcheese posted:Just saying wristcutter stuff doesn't make something more serious. You are not being some extra grown up adult calling living things "rotting meat cages" and worrying about the year 500 million AD killing off a bunch of intelligent animals. 1990s comics infected your brain that just saying gritty things is more serious than saying nicer things. Show us your hog OOCC.
|
|
#
?
Dec 1, 2018 23:56
|
|
|
mycomancy posted:So, my expert opinion is that we're probably the first intelligent species in the observable universe, and likely we're the last. The spark of intelligence dies with us. And, with the way the world is going, that'll be in about 20 years.
|
|
#
?
Dec 2, 2018 00:03
|
|
|
MSDOS KAPITAL posted:Intelligent life has trillions of years to evolve on other worlds. We might be the first, and basic mathematics will prove that we're among the first at the very least, but it's also very unlikely we're the last. I see the arguments for both, but my point is that human level intelligence has appeared once on this planet even though there are currently and have been previously a multitude of animals that could support the neurology. There's no concept of progress or advancement in evolution, there's just survival.
|
|
#
?
Dec 2, 2018 00:09
|
|
|
mycomancy posted:Show us your hog OOCC. You have posted this a couple times in multiple threads and I don't feel like I get the joke.
|
|
#
?
Dec 2, 2018 00:10
|
|
|
Owlofcreamcheese posted:I'm not mocking it either, I read it when I was a kid and it was new and literally all I remember is the crab (spider) people had a mating season when the sun came out but once they invented electric lights you could mate all year long but if you did everyone made your spider baby an oppressed minority. That's a great kid memory of it lol. I'd strongly recommend a reread as an adult sometime. Hit some pretty cool topics and ideas I haven't seen elsewhere. Deffo would have missed a lot of the interesting stuff as a kid.
|
|
#
?
Dec 2, 2018 00:10
|
|
|
Owlofcreamcheese posted:You have posted this a couple times in multiple threads and I don't feel like I get the joke. Let's see that cock or take a walk.
|
|
#
?
Dec 2, 2018 00:12
|
|
|
mycomancy posted:there are currently and have been previously a multitude of animals that could support the neurology. There isn't really semi-intelligent animals that have been on earth significantly longer than people have been. dolphins and elephants are younger species than humans, dogs and pigs are younger than agriculture, and aren't from animals that have been around any longer than people. octopus and crows are amazing and some of the coolest and most clever things that exist, but die young and aren't really as smart as a dolphin or chimp, just alien and cool about how clever they are. Like we are ahead of the other semi-intelligent animals, but not really much, like we beat them, but just so barely. many of them are younger than we are. It's not like we evolved intelligence while everything else tried and failed for a billion years or something, we beat everything else by like a week.
|
|
#
?
Dec 2, 2018 00:17
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 12, 2024 13:06 |
|
|
Owlofcreamcheese posted:You have posted this a couple times in multiple threads and I don't feel like I get the joke. (USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST)
|
|
#
?
Dec 2, 2018 00:21
|
|