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hi avs
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Jan 10, 2019 11:25
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Let me just pass it through the machine that adds Fully and Automated and Luxury and Gay and Space to the beginning of words and see if it works like that.
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Jan 10, 2019 13:03
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twodot posted:Name a single possibility that is eliminated by a sample size of 2.  Why are you so combative? Ok, sure I didn't state my response to you precisely. It depends on what the second data point is. Luckily we're actually talking about a real example. If we see a giant radio pulse made by life in another galaxy, it eliminates the possinility that we're as far along the tech path as life ever gets.
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Jan 10, 2019 18:03
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If an alien race did aim radio waves at us, would we even be able to comprehend any meaning from it? I know a lot of the projects about sending stuff into space translate into binary, but would aliens even be able to understand that?
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Jan 10, 2019 19:13
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Lightning Knight posted:If an alien race did aim radio waves at us, would we even be able to comprehend any meaning from it? How hard would it be for you to go to Pluto, then build a receiver to pick up your old local news broadcast stations, with the stipulations that you have to build the decoder for the digital signal from scratch with absolutely zero documentation about it and your degree in communications is from the 1940s? We'll assume getting you to Pluto, making so you don't immediately die, and giving you the semi-raw materials for the equipment are the freebies in this experiment.
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Jan 10, 2019 19:20
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Kerning Chameleon posted:How hard would it be for you to go to Pluto, then build a receiver to pick up your old local news broadcast stations, with the stipulations that you have to build the decoder for the digital signal from scratch with absolutely zero documentation about it and your degree in communications is from the 1940s? I'm not sure I understand the analogy here.
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Jan 10, 2019 19:33
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Epitope posted:
Like I said you can twist it however you want, if you think we're as far along the tech path as life has ever gotten you can think "Ah, the solution to the paradox is we are actually unique because we beat some 1 in a trillion Great Filter, and now we're speed running the galaxy" or "You need metal rich stars to do anything interesting, we got there first or near to first, we'll have friends soon-ish" or "Our filter is still ahead, we just have an unusually good score". If you find someone making giant radio pulses you can think "We're not unique, but I'm still going to declare we've beat the Great Filter because this is all made up anyways" or "They got there first, we'll join up soon-ish" or "People making giant radio pulses are unique or sufficiently rare that there is a Great Filter between protein soup and giant radio pulses, and that could easily be ahead of us".
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Jan 10, 2019 19:33
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Lightning Knight posted:I'm not sure I understand the analogy here. The analogy is that the absurd scenario I posited still has a much better chance of success than of us
We'd pretty much have to have aliens parked right next to Earth with a giant cartoony bullhorn to be able to have a realistic chance of figuring what, if anything, they're trying to say.
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Jan 10, 2019 20:20
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Kerning Chameleon posted:The analogy is that the absurd scenario I posited still has a much better chance of success than of us If there are aliens in range to get our broadcasts and reply within our lifetimes, the two prerequisites of FTL and lots of practice doing this before are very close to 100% certain.
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Jan 10, 2019 20:25
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Lightning Knight posted:If an alien race did aim radio waves at us, would we even be able to comprehend any meaning from it? Depends what they sent. Things like AM radio are very literal analog translations of audio into radio. Picking up radio with your fillings is a real thing, because AM radio has no processing or decoding. Likewise FM radio and black and white television are things you could reasonably figure out from a signal. If it's digital and uncompressed you could probably figure out a signal eventually. If someone sent a bunch of simple bmps over a wire and you just had the list of electrical pulses you could eventually figure out it was a drawing of a square. If you get into compressed data or encrypted data you get more and more towards it being physically impossible to figure out. An encrypted signal can look mathematically identical to random noise if you want. A compressed signal requires a lot of foreknowledge about what you are uncompressing to reverse engineer and could be impossible if you truly had no idea what the signal you received was at all.
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Jan 10, 2019 20:36
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twodot posted:Because you don't understand what you're talking about, and you attempted to badly correct someone. In this conversation, people care about that life appears to be rare because "Why is that life appears to be rare, and do we need to worry about that?". If the reason life appears to be rare is "There is a filter that stops civilizations from getting to the point of making a giant radio pulse", and we find a civilization that is actually making giant radio pulses, that doesn't eliminate any possibilities for us. All that tells us is that they got lucky. It could be that we got lucky also, and we've already beat the filter, and will some day make giant radio pulses of our own. It could be that the filter is in between where we are now and making giant radio pulses. It could be both! Maybe we already beat a huge filter (multicellular life), and have more equally huge filters in front of us (abuse of fossil fuels, nuclear weapons, et cetera). Hmm, ok I see what you're saying and I dig it. Seems the guy I originally engaged was making the same kind of argument, so I'm still a little confused why you're arguing with me and not him. Also, while a second data point maybe doesn't change the equation with regard to filters, it sure would rule out a hard ceiling. That seems pretty dang significant to me
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Jan 10, 2019 23:07
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Im still confused as how going to pluto would let you pick up old broadcasts.
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Jan 11, 2019 02:11
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Epitope posted:Hmm, ok I see what you're saying and I dig it. Seems the guy I originally engaged was making the same kind of argument, so I'm still a little confused why you're arguing with me and not him. quote:Also, while a second data point maybe doesn't change the equation with regard to filters, it sure would rule out a hard ceiling. That seems pretty dang significant to me
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Jan 11, 2019 04:11
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twodot posted:Because that person posted a self-consistent conjecture backed by argumentation and assumption, which even if I disagree with is at least well-trodden. You posted a flat contradiction backed by ???. A signal putting out a year of the suns output in a second repeatedly tells us a lot about what we should expect the future limits of science as a hard ceiling
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Jan 11, 2019 04:57
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:A signal putting out a year of the suns output in a second repeatedly tells us a lot about what we should expect the future limits of science as a hard ceiling
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Jan 11, 2019 05:21
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twodot posted:Implying a hard ceiling exists, so please fight the person who said it would rule out a hard ceiling and not me, thanks. That seems pedantic beyond words.
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Jan 11, 2019 05:34
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:That seems pedantic beyond words.
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Jan 11, 2019 05:48
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twodot posted:We both agree that a hard ceiling exists, and your complaint about me telling a poster who says there is evidence that would "sure rule out a hard ceiling" that they are definitely wrong is that it's pedantic to assert the thing that we both agree on? That is insane. Finding out there is aliens directing the energy of a galaxy into a telephone call at least twice unlimits the bounds of possible achievable technology so far beyond Star Trek any of our understanding of limits is out the window.
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Jan 11, 2019 06:02
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twodot posted:Because that person posted a self-consistent conjecture backed by argumentation and assumption, which even if I disagree with is at least well-trodden. You posted a flat contradiction backed by ???. Mate I appreciate the passion, but I don't think you've thought this through. The Fermi paradox and the great filter arguments all start with the premise that we see a sky full of stars and no signs of anybody spreading out among them. So if we find that alien life at or below our tech is common, the odds of us spreading out to the stars seems to go down. But if we start seeing Dyson sphere/swarm type stuff, or giant propulsion systems you can hear from other galaxies, that is weight on the other side of the equation. That we have a chance to do the same. Owlofcreamcheese posted:That seems pedantic beyond words. Ya... Did he really think I meant no hard ceiling ever, rather than no hard ceiling between us and the guys we observe? Sheesh, no wonder he thinks I'm an idiot.
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Jan 11, 2019 15:42
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Legit question: is there any biological reason to think humans are smarter than any of the other intelligent creatures? Like, we can make philosophical arguments that humans build skyscrapers and make paintings and poo poo, but would a feral human be smarter than a wild dolphin? I'm not sure how you could ever test this hypothesis, but maybe the great filter is capitalism? Realistically, a small group of humans has no reason to care about exploring more than a mile from where they're born let alone to a new planet. But capitalism led to us wanting to put a flag in every bit of land on Earth and now that we have all that we want to get started on claiming the rest of the planets. We're assuming that this is just a natural thought to have but our only evidence is that it's a thought we have. Beyond that, I think intelligence and capitalism are inherently linked. I don't mean that in a Reaganomics way, I just mean your thoughts are only as complex as your language allows. Ownership, trade, and large scale agrarian communes required more complex language than small hunter gatherer tribes which opened the way for more complex thought. But at some point a tribe of humans said "hey, maybe instead of migration let's stay here and hunt our food supply to exhaustion" which seems inherently counterintuitive to survival. So perhaps there's plenty of species who evolved as "smart" as humans but we have a crazy defect of laziness that would be fatal to most species and we luckily survived in spite of it.
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Jan 11, 2019 20:22
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The idea that the great filter is capitalism is a hugely presumptuous assumption that relies on the idea that other intelligent life would have even vaguely similar social structures and develop institutions like humans have. The great filter is much more likely to be something related to a natural resource, like global warming or nuclear war, than it is to be related to a social construct like capitalism, and even both of those options are presumptuous of how other intelligent life might develop technology or how other planets might have resources distributed.
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Jan 11, 2019 20:29
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MixMastaTJ posted:
Small tribes of humans put flags on everything and wiped out other small tribes of humans so long ago that we have uncovered 100,000 year old fossilized massacres. Even gorillas fight wars. Which brings me back to the point that nearly all life on Earth is a prey or a predator species, and if there's a universal theme for intelligent life out there it may well be that prey/predator interactions are required for quick evolution and sapience aka RIP us.
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Jan 11, 2019 20:36
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MixMastaTJ posted:Legit question: is there any biological reason to think humans are smarter than any of the other intelligent creatures? Our brains are bigger and more complex than most animals. Everything has either less complex brains or less neurons or some combination of being really big but being obviously in use for something (like whales having huge brains but accountable for nerves controlling specific huge muscles). Elephants are the only one where it gets really complicated, where they have a similarly complex brain structure and also more neurons and connections, and have the "big animals have big brains" thing but still come out around human level if you account for size anyway, where as far as anyone knows they are just "real smart animal" but maybe they are people and if we set up elephant schools they would be making ipads too?
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Jan 11, 2019 20:40
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Lightning Knight posted:The idea that the great filter is capitalism is a hugely presumptuous assumption that relies on the idea that other intelligent life would have even vaguely similar social structures and develop institutions like humans have. The great filter, if it's anything is still very clearly the jump from bacterial life. Literally every other step is things that happened in a weekend in geological time, steps from bacterial to multicellular life is the only step that seems to have taken literally any more time than is possibly physically imaginable. The second the earth cooled there was life, nerves followed bodies existing in a blink of an eye, brains followed nerves as fast as that could have happened, intelligent life was a blink of the eye in geological terms, civilization happened about as soon as something smart enough to have one existed, space ships happened the same generation as cars did. Etc, literally the only part that seemed like there was any struggle was cellular life spinning it's wheels for billions of years. Anything that makes the great filter "capitalism" or "global warming" or "nuclear war: whatever is dumb, it's clearly not that. none of that would be any sort of near impossible thing to overcome even if we eventually don't. The only step that is like "maybe this is just near impossible to overcome" is the part where it took billions of years to glue two cells together into one animal.
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Jan 11, 2019 20:48
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Lightning Knight posted:The idea that the great filter is capitalism is a hugely presumptuous assumption that relies on the idea that other intelligent life would have even vaguely similar social structures and develop institutions like humans have. quote:Small tribes of humans put flags on everything and wiped out other small tribes of humans so long ago that we have uncovered 100,000 year old fossilized massacres. Even gorillas fight wars. On what scale, though? Of course there are territory skirmishes but do we have evidence of pre-agricultural societies fighttong over an area the size of a country? Did they ever fight over anything that wasn't an immediately visible resource? quote:Our brains are bigger and more complex than most animals. Everything has either less complex brains or less neurons or some combination of being really big but being obviously in use for something (like whales having huge brains but accountable for nerves controlling specific huge muscles). Elephants are the only one where it gets really complicated, where they have a similarly complex brain structure and also more neurons and connections, and have the "big animals have big brains" thing but still come out around human level if you account for size anyway, where as far as anyone knows they are just "real smart animal" but maybe they are people and if we set up elephant schools they would be making ipads too? But how are we defining complex brains? My understanding is studies on feral humans their brains developed less complex. If you aren't exposed to language your brain uses that space for something else.
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Jan 11, 2019 22:02
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:Anything that makes the great filter "capitalism" or "global warming" or "nuclear war: whatever is dumb, it's clearly not that. A system of government/economics doesn't seem like it could be a filter, unless I don't understand that guy's point. But why couldn't global warming or nuclear war? To be capable of interstellar colonization a life form needs to control a large amount of power. That amount of power is also capable of destroying the planetary system that gave rise to that life. Either deliberately (e.g. nuclear war) or accidentally (e.g. global warming). Maybe that's the point that capitalism (read: not being able to cooperate as a unified entity) is why we can't wield the power without clobbering our self with it.
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Jan 11, 2019 22:07
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Epitope posted:A system of government/economics doesn't seem like it could be a filter, unless I don't understand that guy's point. But why couldn't global warming or nuclear war? To be capable of interstellar colonization a life form needs to control a large amount of power. That amount of power is also capable of destroying the planetary system that gave rise to that life. Either deliberately (e.g. nuclear war) or accidentally (e.g. global warming). Maybe that's the point that capitalism (read: not being able to cooperate as a unified entity) is why we can't wield the power without clobbering our self with it. The idea of a great filter is something so bad and so inevitable that virtually every planet is stopped by it. It's not supposed to just be any old thing that might end humans on earth. Like, it's easily imaginable to think of races not having a nuclear war, or surviving them, or recovering. Likewise it's easily imaginable a planet not suffering from global warming, or it not causing total extinction. There is nothing inevitable about them ending the story of various alien life. It doesn't even seem inevitable we are going to literally end our technological evolution, even if either happen and kill billions. it doesn't even have to posit that all the aliens are better than us, planet nazi might just not deal with global warming because the rich keep culling everyone till there is not excess people, or maybe their elon musk is a trillionaire instead of a billionaire and takes all his friends to space mars. Or whatever.
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Jan 11, 2019 22:26
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The Great Filter could just be the fact that interstellar space is fundamentally physically impractical. That means you could have some star system-wide civilizations, but physics hems them in their home star systems. That seems like it would kill a lot of sci-fi wet dreams pretty stone dead. Also, why can't there be more than one Great Filter? Maybe multicellular life is hard AND you can't travel between stars.
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Jan 11, 2019 22:34
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Kerning Chameleon posted:Also, why can't there be more than one Great Filter? I mean, the point of the concept of the great filter is that there is some "THE REASON" there are no aliens. That is what differentiates it from other solutions to the fermi paradox. It being some specific step that fails for everyone always with almost no exceptions. There are other solutions. Like "it's just lots of things".
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Jan 11, 2019 23:03
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I'm not sure how this "You can't travel to the stars, DINGUS, haha I'm so smart" meme became so prevalent on SA -- maybe it's some reaction to the hubris of assholes like Elon Musk and Eleizer Yudkowsky, but, uh, actually we can. It'll take us tens of thousands of drat years, but sure, Voyager 2 will definitely get there. There isn't anything stopping us, really. Even thirty thousand years is a blink of the eye in universal terms.
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Jan 12, 2019 04:09
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DrSunshine posted:I'm not sure how this "You can't travel to the stars, DINGUS, haha I'm so smart" meme became so prevalent on SA -- maybe it's some reaction to the hubris of assholes like Elon Musk and Eleizer Yudkowsky, but, uh, actually we can. It'll take us tens of thousands of drat years, but sure, Voyager 2 will definitely get there. There isn't anything stopping us, really. Even thirty thousand years is a blink of the eye in universal terms. The more pessimistic you are the more grown up you are. If one person says the human race will go extinct in 50 years someone will tell you the are the most grown up so they know it will be ten years. It’s the shittiest circle jerk.
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Jan 12, 2019 04:43
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:That is insane. Finding out there is aliens directing the energy of a galaxy into a telephone call at least twice unlimits the bounds of possible achievable technology so far beyond Star Trek any of our understanding of limits is out the window. Epitope posted:Mate I appreciate the passion, but I don't think you've thought this through. The Fermi paradox and the great filter arguments all start with the premise that we see a sky full of stars and no signs of anybody spreading out among them. So if we find that alien life at or below our tech is common quote:Ya... Did he really think I meant no hard ceiling ever, rather than no hard ceiling between us and the guys we observe? Sheesh, no wonder he thinks I'm an idiot. Epitope posted:Also, while a second data point maybe doesn't change the equation with regard to filters, it sure would rule out a hard ceiling. That seems pretty dang significant to me
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Jan 12, 2019 05:08
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twodot posted:A hard ceiling either exists or doesn't, pick one. Is there a particular point you are making that a civilization that is outputting an entire galaxy worth of energy in a second is only functionally infinite instead of literal infinite?
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Jan 12, 2019 05:15
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:Is there a particular point you are making that a civilization that is outputting an entire galaxy worth of energy in a second is only functionally infinite instead of literal infinite?
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Jan 12, 2019 05:21
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twodot posted:perhaps they've got physics we don't that allow them specifically to do that, ????
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Jan 12, 2019 05:22
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These are your words:Owlofcreamcheese posted:That is insane. Finding out there is aliens directing the energy of a galaxy into a telephone call at least twice unlimits the bounds of possible achievable technology so far beyond Star Trek any of our understanding of limits is out the window.
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Jan 12, 2019 05:27
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twodot posted:These are your words: I have literally no idea what sort of point you are trying to make at all. I guess like maybe aliens could be setting up giant repeating intergalactic radio bursts that are trillions of times more energy than we've ever produced because they think it looks cool? But it's not useful for anything for some reason? More power to you cool aliens I guess?
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Jan 12, 2019 05:56
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Im pretty sure humans had continent spaning empires before capitalism. I also seem to recall a very large one recwntly that was very not capitalist, but maybe im wrong.
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Jan 12, 2019 08:09
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:I have literally no idea what sort of point you are trying to make at all. Hes saying for all we know they might be colossiods and it was just a burp. We can't infer it means we have any viable tech paths. Which, fair enough, but he also seems angry at us at being like "woah cool, aliens man" in the aliens thread
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Jan 12, 2019 08:15
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Killer-of-Lawyers posted:Im pretty sure humans had continent spaning empires before capitalism. I also seem to recall a very large one recwntly that was very not capitalist, but maybe im wrong. What early empires didn't have private property and a hiearchy based off labor exploitation? Or do you mean before the word "capitalism?" Because, yes, I'm aware civilization didn't start with Adam Smith.
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Jan 12, 2019 11:13
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