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axeil posted:I have a hard time believing you're not just trolling. Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity 
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Dec 6, 2018 14:46
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I CANNOT EJACULATE WITHOUT SEEING NATIVE AMERICANS BRUTALISED!
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science is Gay tho
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Dec 6, 2018 17:45
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CAROL posted:science is Gay tho large hardon collider.
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Dec 6, 2018 17:50
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suck my woke dick posted:Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity Nah.
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Dec 6, 2018 18:39
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axeil posted:Factorization is division where you can only have integer results. Multiplying 2 integers together is easy. Dividing a number so that the result is 2 integers is hard. quote:Do you have a rebuttal for my post on number theory and cryptography?
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Dec 6, 2018 19:21
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:large hardon collider. Collided in the butt by massive hadrons
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Dec 6, 2018 19:36
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The fact that most of the universe hasn't been eaten by endlessly self-replicating robot space probes is pretty good circumstantial evidence that humanity is alone, at least for the moment. It wouldn't take that long (relatively speaking) for such probes to spread throughout the entire galaxy.
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Dec 6, 2018 22:08
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AGGGGH BEES posted:The fact that most of the universe hasn't been eaten by endlessly self-replicating robot space probes is pretty good circumstantial evidence that humanity is alone, at least for the moment. It wouldn't take that long (relatively speaking) for such probes to spread throughout the entire galaxy. I just thought about something -- call it perhaps the "Lilypad Hypothesis". What if the reason we don't see the universe eaten up by Von Neumann probes is because right now, it is about half filled with them, and the spaces which we observe to be free of Von Neumann probes is simply just on the very verge of being swarmed by them as they replicate exponentially?
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Dec 6, 2018 22:26
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AGGGGH BEES posted:The fact that most of the universe hasn't been eaten by endlessly self-replicating robot space probes is pretty good circumstantial evidence that humanity is alone, at least for the moment. It wouldn't take that long (relatively speaking) for such probes to spread throughout the entire galaxy. We can account for only 5% of the mass in the universe, have no solid explanation for where all the antimatter went, are missing a bunch of lithium from the entire universe and know of several billion light year wide areas that have barely any galaxies in them. We need to get a way better map of the universe before we know who ate what. maybe this is what a stripped bare probe eaten universe looks like. Maybe the probes came by 8 billion years ago, scooped up whatever it is they wanted and are now returning a significant mass of the entire universe along the dark flow lines to eventually build a giant ring of rotating black holes and travel back in time or whatever it is aliens like.
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Dec 6, 2018 22:37
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I'm a little bit disappointed that so much talk around the Fermi parodox in this thread so far has been fixated on corny sci-fi concepts like a super advanced race of implacable predators that manage to get advanced enough to destroy every other species (for seemingly no reason) effortlessly despite the inevitably massive gaps in time and distance they'd have to deal with under our current understanding of physics. Or the federation from Star Trek enacting the Prime Directive on us even though their giant star spanning empire should be nearly impossible to hide under our current understanding of physics and all it would take is one bad actor among their giant star empire to completely ruin their whole plan. I want to posit a few more grounded ideas, one I was thinking about recently revolves around the fact that we know that Super Earths are extremely common in the galaxy, and it seems that our Solar System is quite aberrant in not having one (though I've heard that Planet 9 could be a Super Earth, but it's so insanely far away that it doesn't count). Super Earths commonly occupy positions around the parent star similar to our own rocky planets including actual Earth, some scientists have suggested that their greater mass could make them overall much more conductive towards the evolution of life compared to smaller planets like our own, the size will help keep a molten, dynamic core around for a lot longer with the magnetic field to protect the planet (compare against Mars), as well promote the process of plate tectonics which might be critical in maintaining a healthy carbon cycle and continent formation (compare against Venus!) and finally hold on and keep a thick atmosphere (compare against Mercury!). With assumptions like this Super-Earths might actually be the site of the vast majority of life in the universe and perhaps Earth is on the very lowest end of planetary size to keep stable conditions long enough for life like we know it to flourish. The catch comes with the fact that Super Earths are, well, super, their significantly larger mass makes it far more difficult for any civilization to escape the gravitational pull of the planet using only technology they manage to develop with terrestrial methods and resources. We can already see the gigantic amounts of fuel that needs to be invested on Earth to get even small amounts of material into orbit (and things like Kessler syndrome could make things far worse in the future). If Earth really is on the lowest end of planetary habitability it could mean that it is so ridiculously difficult or simply impossible to create a space faring civilization due to the hard realities of the energy expenditure to get off the vast majority of life supporting planets in existence that it just doesn't happen with any kind of frequency. The universe could be teeming with tens of millions of technological civilizations, but biases in planet suitability mean that the planets most likely to develop stable life end up locking them into a planetary prison permanently as a cruelly ironic twist, stuck waiting out the days until their planet becomes uninhabitable either due to natural processes like their sun brightening or if they ruin things themselves like we seem set to do. A flip on this could be that planets that are smaller could develop life fine, but somewhere like earth has been blessed with just enough critical resources of things like rare metals that planets with less simply cannot build the technological civilization needed to get into space, even if they wanted, or maybe smaller planets are just naturally more barren which prevents the creation of a big enough critical mass of their local intelligent creature to kick-start civilization (sorry I know that's a bit of a loaded term in this context, but creating high density mass-agricultural societies around fertile areas could well be crucial to end up building rocket ships) and especially industrialization. khwarezm fucked around with this message at 00:11 on Dec 7, 2018 |
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Dec 6, 2018 23:59
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khwarezm posted:I'm a little bit disappointed that so much talk around the Fermi parodox in this thread so far has been fixated on corny sci-fi concepts like a super advanced race of implacable predators that manage to get advanced enough to destroy every other species (for seemingly no reason) effortlessly despite the inevitably massive gaps in time and distance they'd have to deal with under our current understanding of physics. Or the federation from Star Trek enacting the Prime Directive on us even though their giant star spanning empire should be nearly impossible to hide under our current understanding of physics and all it would take is one bad actor among their giant star empire to completely ruin their whole plan. I like the more grounded view of things, but any variant of the Rare Earth Hypothesis always makes me roll my eyes because it implies a specialness and uniqueness to our planet and species that, quite frankly, flies in the face of everything we're learned about both so far over the last few thousand years. The absence of evidence is not necessarily evidence of absence, it's just evidence that our current data sets and scientific instrumentation are both woefully inadequate to understanding the situation, and the hard limits imposed upon us by the fundamental laws of physics and the less fundamental laws of sociology makes it likely we never will have adequate instruments or data.
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Dec 7, 2018 00:17
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Big earth seems like it'd maybe prevent our crazy thing where we went from first airplane to moon in one lifetime, but unless someone lived on a neutron star or something it seems pretty silly to think aliens would just sit around for thousands of years without anyone ever expending the slightly more resources to have a slightly smaller space program over a longer period of time. Like we do it way less than we put things in orbit but we've already shot 5 objects with the escape velocity to leave the solar system entirely. And if the idea is that that can't happen because every alien possible always with 100% certainty won't have a thousand more years with zero exceptions ever then you have just reinvented the great filter thing and the big planet stuff was irrelevant,
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Dec 7, 2018 00:48
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khwarezm posted:The catch comes with the fact that Super Earths are, well, super, their significantly larger mass makes it far more difficult for any civilization to escape the gravitational pull of the planet using only technology they manage to develop with terrestrial methods and resources. We can already see the gigantic amounts of fuel that needs to be invested on Earth to get even small amounts of material into orbit (and things like Kessler syndrome could make things far worse in the future). If Earth really is on the lowest end of planetary habitability it could mean that it is so ridiculously difficult or simply impossible to create a space faring civilization due to the hard realities of the energy expenditure to get off the vast majority of life supporting planets in existence that it just doesn't happen with any kind of frequency. The universe could be teeming with tens of millions of technological civilizations, but biases in planet suitability mean that the planets most likely to develop stable life end up locking them into a planetary prison permanently as a cruelly ironic twist, stuck waiting out the days until their planet becomes uninhabitable either due to natural processes like their sun brightening or if they ruin things themselves like we seem set to do. Conclusion: we shall form the Intergalactic Earthling Empire unopposed. Kerning Chameleon posted:I like the more grounded view of things, but any variant of the Rare Earth Hypothesis always makes me roll my eyes because it implies a specialness and uniqueness to our planet and species that, quite frankly, flies in the face of everything we're learned about both so far over the last few thousand years. There isn't sufficient data yet to make a statement either way, and while "Earth is ~special~" is somewhat eyeroll inducing, a weak anthropic principle-based position cannot be ruled out meaningfully.
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Dec 7, 2018 00:48
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Maybe there is a bunch of life up there, we just can't see it? We only just started seeing exoplanets. Maybe James Webb will let us see some? That would be cool. Also, "great filter" seems a bit black and white. Seems there could be a middle ground. Maybe it takes a whole lot of effort to get a single colony on a different celestial body than the home planet. Humans are probably currently capable of sending extremophiles to another world. Then if you're lucky and the colony takes hold, it has to go through a whole new round of evolution and development before there's even a chance of making another jump. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5XyNe8UESTs
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Dec 7, 2018 00:56
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I think I've got a pitch for Netflix's next sci-fi miniseries: we follow a bunch of people who woke up in various different relativistic colony ships as they arrive at their target planets. Each planet was chosen because it was determined they had the highest probability for either Earth-life colonization or existing intelligent life. Every episode, a different planet and different crew. Except the twist is every single planet is actually uninhabitable or the aliens are all long dead. This one actually turned out to just be Venus, that one the aliens trapped themselves by Kessler Syndrome and nuked themselves in resource wars, this one the star expanded just enough while we were traveling and baked the surface, etc. You could advertise it as "Star Trek, but hard sci-fi, really!" but it would turn out to actually be "Threads/Black Mirror for space nerds." Kerning Chameleon fucked around with this message at 01:02 on Dec 7, 2018 |
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Dec 7, 2018 00:59
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Kerning Chameleon posted:I think I've got a pitch for Netflix's next sci-fi miniseries: we follow a bunch of people who woke up in various different relativistic colony ships as they arrive at their target planets. Each planet was chosen because it was determined they had the highest probability for either Earth-life colonization or existing intelligent life. Every episode, a different planet and different crew. I would totally watch that, but that'd be really cool irl too
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Dec 7, 2018 01:02
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I also think the Rare Earth hypothesis is absurd and frankly narcissistic. We don't know how life developed, and we barely know what sorts of planets are common or rare, but no Earth is a special butterfly. For a decidedly different take on the matter of life on other planets, here's an interesting site that I hope hasn't been posted already: http://www.worlddreambank.org/P/PLANETS.HTM Its basically some eccentric fellow who dreams up planets, sculpts them (I think) and uses knoweldge of planetary geology to describe how they work. He's done a wide variety of worlds which are habitable, including ones that, by design, fly in the face of the rare Earth hypothesis. For anyone that likes to think about life forming on alien worlds, I really suggest checking it out, its extremely interesting. e: Kerning Chameleon posted:You could advertise it as "Star Trek, but hard sci-fi, really!" but it would turn out to actually be "Threads/Black Mirror for space nerds." You should read Aurora, by Kim Stanley Robinson.
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Dec 7, 2018 01:03
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khwarezm posted:I'm a little bit disappointed that so much talk around the Fermi parodox in this thread so far has been fixated on corny sci-fi concepts like a super advanced race of implacable predators that manage to get advanced enough to destroy every other species (for seemingly no reason) effortlessly despite the inevitably massive gaps in time and distance they'd have to deal with under our current understanding of physics. Or the federation from Star Trek enacting the Prime Directive on us even though their giant star spanning empire should be nearly impossible to hide under our current understanding of physics and all it would take is one bad actor among their giant star empire to completely ruin their whole plan. Even so, with the laws of probability and just given the sheer numbers involved here -- 250 +/- 150 billion stars -- it somewhat strains belief that out of all the low-gravity earths that exist, only one of them (us) in the past 5 billion years would have been given birth to a spacefaring (or nearly) spacefaring civilization. It would only take one, after all. It may very well be that there are lots of intelligent civilizations that can't escape from their super earth worlds, but even if only a tiny tiny fraction of them were capable of it, you'd think that they would be the ones out there expanding across the galaxy. Or it could be that we might be the first.
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Dec 7, 2018 01:13
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Oh hey, PBS spacetime is on topic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=REl20rlZGTw (Does everyone watch PBS space time? not the specific episode but I'm always constantly impressed at how good a job it does explaining actual modern science in non-talked down terms)
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Dec 7, 2018 01:19
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AGGGGH BEES posted:The fact that most of the universe hasn't been eaten by endlessly self-replicating robot space probes is pretty good circumstantial evidence that humanity is alone, at least for the moment. It wouldn't take that long (relatively speaking) for such probes to spread throughout the entire galaxy. Lotsa ways to argue around that one. Maybe the tech level required to make self replicating probes is so advanced that nobody would gently caress up bad enough to let them get out of control. Maybe if some race does make ones that go out of control, a more advanced race will clean them up before they eat everything (this comes up a few times in the Culture books with them basically acting as galactic clean up crew). 
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Dec 7, 2018 01:45
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Count Roland posted:
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Dec 7, 2018 02:29
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suck my woke dick posted:At the same time, large seemingly-wasteful projects which have novelty as their main feature can massively accelerate the development of technologies which would normally be hard to justify due to taking too long to fit into quarterly reports or one or two legislative terms. You don't really believe this. If massive science and engineering projects like space travel, moon bases, etc. are good not because of their intended goal, and but instead are good just because they are jobs programs and occasionally generate side benefits like unexpected scientific & technology development, then I would think that you'd really like US defense spending. But instead, you whine about US defense spending. suck my woke dick posted:What, pray tell, is socially responsible research? The US government can be pretty smart, and tends to fund scientific research for things which have a better chance of mattering to society, like medical research, more heavily than esoteric subjects. suck my woke dick posted:For instance, the NIH alone has 2x the budget of NASA This is a good thing. We should be funding medical researchers more heavily than NASA. Or esoteric particle detectors. suck my woke dick posted:Quantum physics or relativity doesn't really inform or matter to anybody apart from a bunch of theoretical physics nerds. Nothing has really changed. Classical mechanics allows us to build steam engines and battleship guns just fine. I predict this will remain true forever. QM is kind of the opposite of the Higgs Boson though. Like when QM came out, it almost immediately helped people solve a bunch of scientific problems in a bunch of fields. It pretty immediately allowed people to generate key insights to various real-world, common phenomena, and to reinterpret experiments done by tinkerers. These key insights led to new things. This is to be contrasted with the Higgs Boson. Reducing some thing into constituent parts doesn't necessarily add understanding or help other people, especially if you have zero way to engineer or control the constituent parts. If breaking down something into constituent parts doesn't help you make predictions about things that matter (not extremely unlikely events inside of billion dollar apparatuses) then it isn't very useful. General relativity isn't really a very technologically or socially relevant science though. Owlofcreamcheese posted:This seems so dumb. Like not getting that pure research into space has tangible benefits seems like one thing, but arguing that basic physics research never gets us anything seems insane. That's not what I'm saying. It definitely isn't as productive as it used to be though. Owlofcreamcheese posted:even if we never make a toaster that cooks things with the higgs field or something eventually your gameboy will play better games because better understanding of the standard model of particle physics makes us better able to design things that use physics. The Higgs Boson cannot be engineered. Its presence is only inferred from a 1 part in a billion event or something like that in a special billion dollar machine, which generates a very contrived situation which might be the total opposite of normal conditions here on Earth. The theory of the Higgs Boson doesn't really help anybody else, even other physicists outside of the world of high energy physics, solve their problems. No one has a use for the Higgs Boson. We have had the theory of the Higgs Boson for quite a while now. Reducing some thing into constituent parts doesn't necessarily add understanding or help other people, especially if you have zero way to engineer or control the constituent parts. If breaking down something into constituent parts doesn't help you make predictions about things that matter (not extremely unlikely events inside of billion dollar apparatuses) then it isn't very useful. axeil posted:Do you have a rebuttal for my post on number theory and cryptography? Math is cheap. It makes sense for the government to pay some people to study and research math. Most of the time it is pretty useless, but occasionally it matters to society. axeil posted:edit: additionally the GPS network only works because of relativity. General relativity is only supposed to provide like a 1 part in a billion correction to GPS systems, and this is supposed to be the crown jewel technological application of GR. I would find that embarrassing. We might have been able to figure out the correction empirically! axeil posted:Computers only work because of our understanding of quantum mechanics. Quantum Mechanics' relevance to integrated circuit technology (this is what you are referring to, I assume) is totally overstated. Integrated circuits are really not that quantum mechanical. There are some insights that can only be gained by viewing the problem through a QM perspective, but the way the science & technology was developed was not by solving ab-initio physics problems and viewing the problem in a reductionist way. The way the science and technology was developed was more like chemistry research. silence_kit fucked around with this message at 05:21 on Dec 7, 2018 |
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Dec 7, 2018 04:45
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I too believe that learning how the universe works and came into being is a pointless endevour unless it can make the next iPhone run better, for cheaper.
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Dec 7, 2018 05:01
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The Butcher posted:I too believe that learning how the universe works and came into being is a pointless endevour unless it can make the next iPhone run better, for cheaper. Cosmology is definitely worth studying pretty much purely for the reason that knowledge in and of itself has an abstract value. It is worth spending some money on, but it really isn't very useful and doesn't really change how people live their lives.
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Dec 7, 2018 05:08
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silence_kit posted:Cosmology is definitely worth studying pretty much purely for the reason that knowledge in and of itself has an abstract value. It is worth spending some money on, but it really isn't very useful and doesn't really change how people live their lives. The money we spend overall on scientific pursuits is literally irrelevant in even the medium term and going on about how NASA or particle accelerators are these huge boondoggle wastes of money or even relevant parts of the US budget rather than rounding errors is asinine so long as we're committed to building a dozen aircraft carrier battlegroups every 50 years.
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Dec 7, 2018 05:57
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God drat "yeah we should stop exploring this area of science" is the dumbest loving take I could possibly imagine. What kind of sad, wonderless life do you lead when you consider that meager amount of money to be wasted?
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Dec 7, 2018 08:31
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silence_kit posted:You don't really believe this. If massive science and engineering projects like space travel, moon bases, etc. are good not because of their intended goal, and but instead are good just because they are jobs programs and occasionally generate side benefits like unexpected scientific & technology development, then I would think that you'd really like US defense spending. But instead, you whine about US defense spending. This implies: R&D aimed at novel knowledge and capabilities good, buying a gazillion F-35s after a vastly pork-inflated inefficient drawn-out R&D process focused on banal engineering problems created by the Marines asking for VTOL capability bad. Building long range space probes and launching ever more capable telescopes on top of modern rockets good, hamfistedly inserting Shuttle contractors' outdated equipment into the Senate Launch System bad, spamming satellites into LEO only interesting as far as their daily applications. quote:The US government can be pretty smart, and tends to fund scientific research for things which have a better chance of mattering to society, like medical research, more heavily than esoteric subjects. UHHHHHhhhhhhhhhhhhh... The thing is, excessively focusing government funding on impact-driven (or, in effect, profit-driven) research is dumb and doesn't even work in its stated goal. Vital policy-informing lines of research in the social sciences or culturally-relevant investment in the arts are extremely underfunded (you could increase the National Endowment for the Arts tenfold by introducing a like 1% tax on rich people art auctions where paintings made by starving artists are sold  ) because they don't ~support techbro/investor-friendly/defense-related~ activities and are full of unwashed lefties. Environmental research, while better-funded in absolute terms, is similarly starved in relative terms (you need research planes/boats and satellites and such).The situation for basic science is also bad (and I'd argue that basic non-impact driven science is severely underfunded) because it's essentially a form of infrastructure. Basic research keeps producing a vast amount of knowledge an unpredictable portion of which becomes extremely useful at an unpredictable time after a long process of investigation, and it maintains a cadre of highly-skilled and knowledgeable scientists who can be called to serve in times of societal need. Given that time travel isn't a thing, it is impossible to predict which fields to fund when beforehand, and it is also a bad idea to fund only really loving cheap basic research because people drawn to stressful and underpaid research jobs at least want to do something cool and novel during their nth hour of overtime. In general, short-sighted political control of research funding is a bad idea, and especially so when Republicans get elected on a semi-regular basis and filibuster policy when they're not. quote:This is a good thing. We should be funding medical researchers more heavily than NASA. Or esoteric particle detectors. If you actually want to increase research efficiency, go revamp funding rules instead of throwing a fit about the fact that particle accelerators cost a few billions (with a b) over decades of operation, which is an utterly trivial expense for a first world country. Offer ongoing basic funding to every scientist of professor/group leader rank to ensure institutional knowledge, equipment, and a modest level of research activity can be maintained without writing outrageous numbers of grants just to avoid slipping through the cracks of the system. Hire more staff scientists permanently instead of on 1-3 year contracts. If doing results-oriented research, commit to long-term funding streams where the participating groups are expected to stick it out and are only cut off from funding after a prolonged period of failure instead of having a new round of competitions every year and rotating through an army of three-year-participant research groups none of which are left to work undisturbed (or even efficiently, as most of them will need to grapple with the challenge for a while before becoming productive) on their vastly different approaches to developing a solution. It's no coincidence that institutions with permanent funding streams and a large degree of independence from the whims of grant funders and politicians are disproportionately represented among the most successful institutions in terms of major research outputs (the others are universities so renowned that they have disproportionate ease in getting grants funded, to the disadvantage of every other grant-seeking institution). This includes some of the premier institutes of the world, such as the Laboratory of Molecular Biology (you'll find more Nobel laureates who went through one shoddily-built campus somewhere in a drained British swamp than were born on most continents), the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (you should have heard of it), the Max Planck Society institutes (the heavyweight of German science and exclusively aimed at basic research), the US National Labs, and during the long term planning of Ma Bell's monopoly years Bell Labs (ask a living physics Nobel laureate about their career and it's about 50% likely they'll start with "back in the day at Bell Labs"). This even makes sense from a narrow economic perspective for uncivilised idiots like yourself: employing a researcher and not giving them funding and support staff is a total waste of money as they literally can't do their job, and even researchers who successfully get major grants on a semi-regular basis have the problem of support staff leaving for other jobs whenever there's a gap between grants, taking away institutional knowledge that enables the next batch of grant-funded postdocs and PhD students to start working efficiently right away. Writing excessive numbers of grant applications is therefore critical to ensure at least one gets through to plug any gaps, and someone has to review all these applications 80% of which statistically cannot be funded no matter how excellent. This by itself wastes a double-digit percentage of grants (e.g. 20% in the Netherlands, where science funding is still less insane than in the US) as the overwhelming majority of paid time spent on grant writing and reviewing is completely wasted. quote:That's not what I'm saying. It definitely isn't as productive as it used to be though. quote:The Higgs Boson cannot be engineered. Its presence is only inferred from a 1 part in a billion event or something like that in a special billion dollar machine, which generates a very contrived situation which might be the total opposite of normal conditions here on Earth. Also, BardoTheConsumer posted:God drat "yeah we should stop exploring this area of science" is the dumbest loving take I could possibly imagine. What kind of sad, wonderless life do you lead when you consider that meager amount of money to be wasted? 
suck my woke dick fucked around with this message at 18:44 on Dec 7, 2018 |
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Dec 7, 2018 14:04
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khwarezm posted:I'm a little bit disappointed that so much talk around the Fermi parodox in this thread so far has been fixated on corny sci-fi concepts like a super advanced race of implacable predators that manage to get advanced enough to destroy every other species (for seemingly no reason) effortlessly despite the inevitably massive gaps in time and distance they'd have to deal with under our current understanding of physics. Or the federation from Star Trek enacting the Prime Directive on us even though their giant star spanning empire should be nearly impossible to hide under our current understanding of physics and all it would take is one bad actor among their giant star empire to completely ruin their whole plan. khwarezm posted:If Earth really is on the lowest end of planetary habitability it could mean that it is so ridiculously difficult or simply impossible to create a space faring civilization due to the hard realities of the energy expenditure to get off the vast majority of life supporting planets in existence that it just doesn't happen with any kind of frequency. The universe could be teeming with tens of millions of technological civilizations, but biases in planet suitability mean that the planets most likely to develop stable life end up locking them into a planetary prison permanently as a cruelly ironic twist, stuck waiting out the days until their planet becomes uninhabitable either due to natural processes like their sun brightening or if they ruin things themselves like we seem set to do.
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Dec 7, 2018 17:31
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physeter posted:Some people think the Earth-Moon arrangement is a little too convenient to be a natural accident. IIRC Jeff Bezos was tip-toeing around that in an interview a couple years ago, which I thought was funny. Could you elaborate on this idea? I.e. who thinks this and why?
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Dec 7, 2018 17:36
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twodot posted:Again completely wrong. Multiplying two numbers 8 * 2 = 16. Dividing two numbers 16 / 2 = 8. These are the same complexity, multiplication isn't weird, division isn't harder than multiplication or requires guess work. Factorizing a number, the factors of 16 are 1, 2, 4, 8, 16. Factorization is a totally different (and harder) task from division. It's amusing how angry you're getting about a simple difference in definition and not understanding what I'm saying. Last time I'll try and explain. If we're dealing with numbers that are created from multiplying prime numbers together, then yes, division and factorization are functionally the same thing. You're picking really trivial examples and rolling your eyes at me, but if we're talking about how you divide 239,812,851,035,039 into 2 integers then you're doing division because there are only 2 factors that aren't trivial. Count Roland posted:I also think the Rare Earth hypothesis is absurd and frankly narcissistic. We don't know how life developed, and we barely know what sorts of planets are common or rare, but no Earth is a special butterfly. these hypothetical planets are super interesting, thanks for sharing! the world 1000 years after catastrophic climate change is pretty sobering.  I also liked the one with the poles on ocean  It's analog, both poles on land is a pretty hellish planet though and the author talks about how if you have to have global warming or global cooling (not that either are good), warming is probably the better one because it at least doesn't dry everything out. 
axeil fucked around with this message at 18:30 on Dec 7, 2018 |
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Dec 7, 2018 17:37
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silence_kit posted:You don't really believe this. If massive science and engineering projects like space travel, moon bases, etc. are good not because of their intended goal, and but instead are good just because they are jobs programs and occasionally generate side benefits like unexpected scientific & technology development, then I would think that you'd really like US defense spending. But instead, you whine about US defense spending. This is the dumbest thing I've seen in D&D in over a decade of lurking/posting, and I've read every single jrodefeld post.
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Dec 7, 2018 17:57
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Lightning Knight posted:Could you elaborate on this idea? I.e. who thinks this and why? That can get you started down the path of crazy. It really is just this concept that seems to have drifted through sci fi literature and conspiracy theorists for years. Everything from the moon is a completely artificial construct, to the moon's creation was caused by intelligent intervention. Admittedly, in our solar system, the moon is obviously an anomaly (which is where this probably all started). If it was a captured asteroid like Phobos or Deimos that'd be fine, but it isn't. Its orbit is perfectly positioned to occlude the sun with occasional total solar eclipses, which some people think was deliberate positioning. The resources that we think are there, such as a poo poo ton of H3 and ice are incredibly conducive to settling on it, at least for a little while. Etc etc. So some folks just kinda think it was created as a spring board for spacefaring life originating on Earth. Whenever moon chat comes up around a sufficient number of nerds there will always be "that guy" who will start hinting at his thoughts on this. I'm not really a fan, mostly because it's completely irrelevant. Doesn't matter if it was on purpose or not, it's there so let's use it.
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Dec 7, 2018 18:12
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physeter posted:http://listverse.com/2017/11/15/10-weird-anomalies-and-bizarre-conspiracies-of-the-moon/ And the moon doesn't totally occlude the sun at perigee anyway 
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Dec 7, 2018 19:31
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DrSunshine posted:Even so, with the laws of probability and just given the sheer numbers involved here -- 250 +/- 150 billion stars -- it somewhat strains belief that out of all the low-gravity earths that exist, only one of them (us) in the past 5 billion years would have been given birth to a spacefaring (or nearly) spacefaring civilization. It would only take one, after all. It may very well be that there are lots of intelligent civilizations that can't escape from their super earth worlds, but even if only a tiny tiny fraction of them were capable of it, you'd think that they would be the ones out there expanding across the galaxy. Some more numbers that might help: -with 250B stars the galaxy's likely to have > a trillion planets -the Goldilocks zone doesn't necessarily matter, since life doesn't need to be water based (and if it's silicon or some other weirder thing it should be able to build space stuff orders of magnitude easier and faster) -life seems to have spent a billion years or more in the single cell stage, another few hundred million in the oceans, another few hundred million loving around with reptiles/amphibians (which could have been smart, we don't know)...but after the asteroid, a spacefaring civilization evolved in a relative eyeblink. basically, even with our sample size of one, we know that the jump from a mass extinction (which we've had 5 of) to space can take as little as 65 million years. the total carbon based habitable lifespan of the Earth is about 2-3 billion years. that's 3% at worst. -even on Earth itself, there was no real reason the planet had to spend the Triassic-Cretaceous eras with some version of a dinosaur as a dominant species. if the Permian extinction had gone a little differently and their warm blooded shrew equivalent happened to come out on top that time instead of the other time, mammals could theoretically have been in space 200 million years ago. this ignores all the other mass extinction setbacks as well as the couple of times that nearly everything on the planet froze to death but we happen not to have good fossil records of. -we aren't the first, that's nuts. Space predator/prey interaction sounds crazy, but Earth is so thoroughly dominated by predator/prey interaction that we don't really have a single complex animal that doesn't predate in some way! If it hasn't evolved chlorophyll or an equivalent, it lives off some other living organism. This is a Problem when thinking about benevolent alien overlords.
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Dec 7, 2018 19:57
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MSDOS KAPITAL posted:Uhhhh... Uhhhh
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Dec 7, 2018 20:23
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physeter posted:Uhhhh 
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Dec 7, 2018 20:39
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Is our moon really the only moon we know of which is 1:1 tidal locked with it's mother planet? Also, 400 times smaller and 400 times closer, so it's a perfect overlap! I'm convinced. Obviously put there by progenitor races to create tidal forces with all that entails for the evolution of life. I'm off to make youtube videos and spread the word!
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Dec 7, 2018 21:24
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Adar posted:-the Goldilocks zone doesn't necessarily matter, since life doesn't need to be water based (and if it's silicon or some other weirder thing it should be able to build space stuff orders of magnitude easier and faster) Just to take this issue with this, silicon-based life would mostly be varieties of rock anemones. Carbon-based life was able to eat the Earth and evolve and poo poo because Carbon is super-flexible, chemically-speaking, and can do all sorts of fun tricks that silicon just can't. Not saying it can't exist, I'm just saying it'd be stuck to the bottom of oceans or whatever, not being a spacefaring species or even that mobile lava mama thing from Star Trek: TOS. Citing The Disappearing Spoon for this one.
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Dec 7, 2018 21:28
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axeil posted:It's amusing how angry you're getting about a simple difference in definition and not understanding what I'm saying. axeil posted:See, cryptography works because multiplication is weird. It's very easy to multiply 2 numbers to get an answer, but it's very, very hard to get the divisors of 2 numbers out of a single number. edit: Also literally all composite numbers are created by multiplying prime numbers together, so if you're saying: quote:If we're dealing with numbers that are created from multiplying prime numbers together, then yes, division and factorization are functionally the same thing. twodot fucked around with this message at 21:42 on Dec 7, 2018 |
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Dec 7, 2018 21:29
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| # ? May 11, 2024 12:39 |
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Space predators being the resolution to the Fermi paradox seems unlikely to me because why would an alien species that doesn't share common descent like all life we've heretofore observed on Earth be able to naturally digest anything it finds here, let alone everything. Even if you assume that only carbon-based life is possible and sugars are the building block of energy storage/release in every possible lifeform (or at least lifeforms complex enough to invent interstellar travel), there's still a bunch of proteins and possible carbohydrate configurations that you can't break down unless you evolved alongside the organisms making it so you have the enzymes you need. There's an enzyme in our spit that breaks down the carbohydrates in starchy foods like crackers and potatoes, if you don't have that you can't get the glucose out of them, you just have to poo poo out all that energy untouched like we do with cellulose. The energy in cellulose is enough to sustain cows and even giant fat-rear end elephants if they eat enough of it, but even their bodies can't break it down, they rely on symbiotic organisms in their gut to ferment the cellulose down into something their bodies know how to produce the enzymes to handle. Even to eat another mammal or even a nearly-identical human, I can't break down and use their proteins without special enzymes produced in my liver and a low-pH environment for the reaction to take place in, and of course all that needs to happen in a protected enclosed area of my body so the enzymes and acid don't get out and I don't digest my own muscles and organs. If you're born without one of those critical enzymes then eating meat literally poisons you. Or one of the most common dietary restrictions on earth is lactose intolerance where your body says "okay I'm not a baby anymore time to stop wasting energy on an enzyme to break down milk sugars since I probably won't encounter any" and so most people on earth can't eat the same food they ate as a baby unless they're from a few subpopulations of humans whose ancestors lived in a culture that depended so much on animal husbandry for survival that persistence of lactose tolerance into adulthood was selected for. And all those problems exist among creatures that have evolved to eat each other, planet earth is filled with organisms with weird proteins and strange sugars and other chemicals that might as well be alien compounds from another planet because you can't do anything with them, at best you excrete them out untouched, or maybe they blister your skin or maybe they just kill you, or maybe they mimic or block neurotransmitters and do weird things to you like make you hallucinate or get you high or paralyze your nervous system and suffocate you to death. Even if everything goes well you can have unexpected problems if your environment provides too little of an important nutrient (iodine deficiency was common in isolated landlocked areas before we added it to salt to supplement everyone's diet) or too much (if you eat a dog's liver you will die from too much vitamin A, this was a problem when early arctic expeditions ran into trouble and started eating their pack animals). When you look at how digestion works you have to conclude it's hilariously impossible that a predator alien could show up and just start eating earth life. Even if we don't lack a single element they need nor contain any elements in lethal overdoses for them, their bodies wouldn't be able to digest the life they found here just like we can't digest a lot of life we find here. And digestion has to evolve this way. Energy efficiency is extremely important, if you can expend 1% less energy than the neighboring species to obtain the same food you're going to outcompete them. The purpose of enzymes is, like all chemical catalysts, to lower the input energy required for a chemical reaction. You can't carry around a reactor in your stomach to incinerate everything you eat into its constituent parts because the energy requirement would be enormous and you'd lose out to the animal using specialized enzymes to break down food at cold temperatures (and how would you protect your own body from it, we can coat our stomach in pus that the acid and enzymes can't break down, but a universal digestor by definition would break down anything organic it touches). And you can't make enzymes for every conceivable energy-rich molecule you might ever encounter because (a) if you've never been exposed to a given molecule there's no selection pressure to create a way to digest it, and (b) creating enzymes costs energy so making ones you never use makes you less competitive than the next guy who only makes the ones they need for the food they eat (again why most humans become lactose intolerant at ages when their ancestors stopped drinking breastmilk, or why humans are the only animal susceptible to scurvy. Most animals make their own Vitamin C, but at some point in our and our great ape cousins' history we lost that ability because we stopped making a critical enzyme in the chain, most likely Vitamin C was so readily available in our immediate environment that apes who didn't bother to make the enzymes survived better than the ones who did). It makes for a fun creepy sci-fi premise, but practically speaking it's biologically impossible that we would make a good food source for a lifeform that evolved from an independent line of descent, and that's before you even get to the practical problems of the insane amount of energy expenditure it takes to come here versus just growing food on your home planet or in artificial constructs in your own solar system or manufacturing it from base elements or whatever (these are the same problems behind theories that aliens would conquer us for our natural resources, all of which are more plentiful and easily found in space without having to lift them out of a planet-size gravity well, but at least our gold or uranium is something aliens would conceivably want unlike our proteins which would be useless or even lethal to them) VitalSigns fucked around with this message at 21:48 on Dec 7, 2018 |
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Dec 7, 2018 21:42
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