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ashpanash posted:The aliens have already arrived. Three billion years ago. They were fungal spores. Except that Fungi are clearly related to Kingdom Animalia. Owned.
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Jul 12, 2019 00:53
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mycomancy posted:Except that Fungi are clearly related to Kingdom Animalia. That's what they want you to think, maaaaaaan
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Jul 12, 2019 00:59
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mycomancy posted:Except that Fungi are clearly related to Kingdom Animalia. Your foul mycomantic corruption won't influence me!
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Jul 12, 2019 01:02
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I finally saw John Carpenter’s The Thing last night and now I hope there are no aliens lol.
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Jul 12, 2019 01:16
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Lightning Knight posted:I finally saw John Carpenter’s The Thing last night and now I hope there are no aliens lol. I hope there are no aliens so we can assume that we are beyond any hypothetical great filter. If there is even basic life in our solar system it means we're so utterly hosed. If we're alone then it's almost for sure behind us. Since we have no idea I'll wager that we're at least alone in our general area and that we have not been visited by anything sentient or sapient. Now we absolutely could have been hit with a rock from another star system and maybe it had something like life on it. Maybe the collision that formed the moon ejected material with life on it out of our solar system towards a distant unknown world.
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Jul 12, 2019 03:34
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Oh boy, so many posts about chemistry! I'm sad I couldn't jump into the discussion earlier.Stoner Sloth posted:Again, nope. Carbon chemistry is pretty unequivocally the norm. Seriously based on the basic physics and chemistry of this alone - there really isn't a realistic replacement for it. More than that oxygen, water and carbon chemistry seems to be not only common but probably the only conceivable way to make life that we know of so far. This sample size of 1 stuff ignores things that we know with greater certainty than how gravity works. Not only that but we have a fairly good idea of many of the limiting factors of life. Temperature is a big one but surprisingly pressure is not a problem. Free water is huge, but pH is probably not. Stoner Sloth posted:I agree with what you say... but the thing is not so much 'we've observed this directly' but that 'theories we trust for literally everything else, that have enormous explanatory power and no examples of exceptions tells us that this is why we should expect life not to vary from certain things' Stoner Sloth posted:Here's the thing... carbon chemistry is more complex than pretty much any other chemistry. To form the sort of complex molecules capable of storing and reliably reproducing information necessary to direct pattern formation in a growing, living thing... should we really be that surprised that few things have that capacity. We can't rule it out in other things... but it'd be really, really specialized conditions. Compare this to something that seems almost cosmically inevitable - there's just that much starting basis for carbon based life that we'd predict it to be relatively common anywhere that liquid water can form, and anywhere there's also free oxygen we could predict complex life being possible. So, uh, you've really gone to bat for the idea that carbon-based life recognizable to us is some sort of norm. I'd like to discuss that, because it's kind of why we're here in this particular topic. A few questions for you; What things are being ignored that we know with greater certainty than how gravity works? Where do you get the idea that pH probably isn't a limit on life as we know it? Which theories are we talking about here that state carbon-based life is preferable and don't have exceptions or, presumably, limits? Do you know what the exact complexities of carbon chemistry are that make it unique? Why is free oxygen is necessary for complex carbon-based life to be possible? 1glitch0 posted:And I totally agree. This is the best we know right now. But we aren't very advanced, so it's hard to tell if we're just the smart asses who think the Earth is flat because it's the best theory we have at this moment. I know we're talking science fiction, but there could be life in other dimensions we haven't even begun to comprehend and could be communicating in ways we can't even imagine. Fun fact: Physics as we know it today says; 1. FTL = Time Travel 2. Time Travel is only possible under extremely constrained circumstances 3. FTL is completely impossible 4. Parallel universes can exist 5. We can visit or be visited from parallel universes Those last two don't really matter until someone solves all the daunting engineering problems between us and proving or disproving that. Nothing is changing about the first three without us discovering something majorly upsetting about physics that destroys or radically transforms our current models. ashpanash posted:There are people in this very thread not only speculating but almost outright declaring that blurry infrared images and a handful of second-hand stories of mistaken eyewitness accounts of misidentified jets are actually interplanetary starships or probes. Like, that’s the level this thread is on. That’s not to mention the near assertions that intelligent alien life exists despite there being absolutely no evidence for it whatsoever. None. Ooh, that person was me! Please re-read that post, it's first-hand stories and blurry infrared videos. Second-hand stories and blurry infrared images are so passe! Speculative chemistry is a lot of fun because that's sort of the starting point for chemistry research. You speculate on what could be, then you go into the lab and ruin your day (or week or month or career) by finding out it can't be. And yeah, the art major remark is loving hilarious. It's science fiction, what the hell kind of sci-fi exists that isn't art major stuff? The scientists that wade into sci-fi are just going in with a head start on making their fiction sound plausible to laypeople. And STEM education absolutely needs the humanities, otherwise you're some dork that can't communicate your research to people who aren't as enthusiastic about your lovely research as you are. Moridin920 posted:The universe is fairly uniform. The laws of physics aren't going to be radically different the next galaxy over, def not elsewhere in the Milky Way. The basic building blocks don't really change. Life in general is not very likely from what we currently know, but also the universe is unfathomably large to the point anything with even the slimmest possibility of happening could be happening somewhere in the known or unknown universe. Not that it matters to us here on Earth because yeah, we have no current way to escape or communicate outside of our very local piece of the galaxy. Speaking of the state of the universe as we understand it, dark matter is about as ludicrous a concept as phlogiston or luminiferous aether were, but until we figure out what we're missing about how gravity works at universe-scale distances we're stuck with an elusive form of matter.
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Jul 12, 2019 05:02
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i just wanna kill alien badass and gently caress swede supermodles
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Jul 12, 2019 06:22
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LtStorm posted:Oh boy, so many posts about chemistry! I'm sad I couldn't jump into the discussion earlier. To be fair my initial point was more that saying life forms similar to us in terms of biochemistry was much less likely than visits by space ghost type creatures was kinda silly imo. But largely I was pretty drunk for my last few posts and probably over enthusiastic/bad at posting. That said, in order. -Stuff directly emerging from the standard model of physics - we have a better grasp on it than gravity which we know must be an incomplete model since we're unable to effectively understand how gravity works at the smallest scales yet. -pH limits don't seem terribly hard since we have things living in extremely acidic or alkaline environments even on earth. That said beyond certain points it could make it harder for advanced life to flourish. Pressure seems even less of a problem - there is nothing inherent in the standard model of physics that we know of that would suggest particularly hard limits on either of these factors as much as anything. Contrast this with temperature at which too low a temp and chemistry moves at a glacial pace too slowly for a living thing to even repair itself let alone reproduce, and too high and damage to the living thing accumulates too quickly. -Organic chemistry is so vast a field that we've barely made a dent in discovering all the combinations that carbon can form. Carbon has not only the ability to form four bonds, a vital trait to form long chain complex molecules, but those bonds are about the right strength to be stable but not so stable that they can't easily form new compounds. If you go further down the periodic table that changes. Silicon is the generally considered the best offered substitute but its chemistry is far, far less interesting, variable and useful to make the sort of complex compounds that carbon effortlessly can - even where it is used in living things it tends to just produce mineral like compounds rather than say substitutes for nucleic acids or fats or proteins. Given how common it is and that we mostly just see silicon dioxide in the real world it shows that at temperatures compatible with life it's just not that interesting chemistry wise. On the other hand we find amino acids and all sorts of complex carbon chemistry spontaneously generated even in deep space, let alone on earth. -Right place in the periodic table to put it one simple way - it's the right size, the right electronegativity, the right ability to form multiple bonds that allow for the formation of large chain molecules. It's also relatively common compared to heavier elements and has largely stable isotopes. -Free oxygen isn't necessary for carbon based life - never meant to suggest it was. What it does seem necessary for is complex life - largely because while we know of things that use other mechanisms to produce energy, they are way, way less efficient at doing so. And again we have good reasons based in chemistry (and ultimately physics) to suggest that this is likely to be the case. As with variance from carbon chemistry, we can't entirely rule it out but we should be pretty skeptical given that our understanding based on massive amounts of evidence from independent sources and different well understood theories suggests it's highly unlikely. LtStorm posted:And yeah, the art major remark is loving hilarious. It's science fiction, what the hell kind of sci-fi exists that isn't art major stuff? The scientists that wade into sci-fi are just going in with a head start on making their fiction sound plausible to laypeople. And STEM education absolutely needs the humanities, otherwise you're some dork that can't communicate your research to people who aren't as enthusiastic about your lovely research as you are. As for the art major thing, I guess my point was more that it's using the wrong set of tools to try and bring that perspective to replace what we do know about basic physics and chemistry with pure imagination unconstrained by any attempt at rigor. Not that humanities or arts aren't valuable but if you try and use that same approach to dealing with the physical world then you're looking at things kinda wrong - they deal with a different approach that is useful, and vital, for other aspects of reality that we're attempting to model. It's like people who go 'well science is just peoples theories, man, therefore my personal theories are just as good' and you see it in bad science fiction all of the time. Jeez I watched a movie on netflix the other day in which people reached 'the end of the universe' in 13 years (which was extra funny because they went to the trouble of specifying their acceleration) so yeah. Then something something quantum happened which switched them into another universe where instead another set of astronauts had gone on the mission instead... it was so poorly done that the movie was essentially internally incoherent and just 'and then this happened for no discernible reason' type of story writing. Also it had Kevin Sorbo starring in it to add to its awfulness. I'll admit I did put my point very badly and stupidly and wasn't meaning to hate on arts or humanities, which are certainly important and should definitely be a part of everyone's education - just suggesting that maybe it shouldn't replace science in terms of trying to understand facts about physical reality. It's just as bad as when people go all STEMlord on anything where a scientific viewpoint isn't the most relevant or appropriate way of analyzing something or thinking about it. And sure artistic ways of looking at things are most of science fiction, but we were talking about likelihoods in the real world given present understanding of it not bad space opera (now with midicholorians). Sure it's all highly speculative but speculation without some basis is just imagining things. Nothing wrong with that but it's not quite the same thing. Hope that clarifies what I'm saying a bit better anyways. Stoner Sloth fucked around with this message at 18:18 on Jul 12, 2019 |
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Jul 12, 2019 10:41
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We can be fairly confident that physics is the same within the entire visible universe, since it looks the same in every direction we look, and the boundary between regions with different physics would probably be extremely noticable and have deeply strange things occuring. Beyond that, I think it's an immenently sensible idea not to assume that only carbon chemistry is the only thing capable of forming a complex self replicating pattern capable of evolution. I don't think that's the "artistic" view point, I think that's the basic common sense viewpoint until we can survey some of the more extreme environments in the universe and rule it out. That said, for the purposes of our current SETI efforts, it's reasonable to search assuming that what we're looking for is a lot like us. Maybe you can be a life form that's a pattern passed between the pasta matter of a neutron star, or formed out of magnetic vertexes in a star, but such a form of life is unlikely to be able to make easily detectable changes outside of it's medium. We need something that's electromagnetically very noisy, or drastically changing the chemistry of it's environment to detect it with our current technology, and that means we're looking for someone with very advanced technology, or something photo or chemo synthetic relatively nearby.
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Jul 12, 2019 12:42
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Bug Squash posted:That said, for the purposes of our current SETI efforts, it's reasonable to search assuming that what we're looking for is a lot like us. Current seti research is largely looking for broadcasts in the 1.4-1.6GHz radio range, which like like, a range we largely don't do much broadcasting on. We pick that for pragmatic reasons because it's a frequency that will travel well through space but also will not be blocked by the atmosphere. But it's pretty much the definition of looking for someone not like us at all to pick a spectrum we don't use much ourself to go looking for someone like us. Even if it makes sense why that is a spectrum to look at for purely practical reasons. We are basically counting on aliens having totally different ideas than us on how to use radio signals.
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Jul 12, 2019 15:54
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"like us" in the broad biological or psychological sense, but with access to much more powerful energy sources and basically trying to be spotted. I doubt we'd notice a perfect mirror of earth and human civilization existing even within 10 light years at the moment.
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Jul 12, 2019 16:01
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Bug Squash posted:"like us" in the broad biological or psychological sense, but with access to much more powerful energy sources and basically trying to be spotted. I doubt we'd notice a perfect mirror of earth and human civilization existing even within 10 light years at the moment. I don't know, if an alien had a brain made out of photonic crystals or something would they specifically have a reason to make broadcasts on a specific radio frequency vs if their brain was made of cells? Our choices on SETI are basically based on nothing but pragmatism of what is something we can scan easily. I don't think there is any grand reasoning of what sort of story would generate aliens using the band we picked, we just picked that band because it's easy to look at for not much money.
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Jul 12, 2019 16:39
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Yeah, that's fair, I was mostly thinking about the more out there ideas.
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Jul 12, 2019 16:44
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I feel like the thing about detecting aliens is that you'd do it by finding an unexplainable anomaly, but we are still at the genesis of astronomy to the point we find unexplainable anomalies all the time and it's going to be decades and centuries before finding something unexpected can be pointed towards something like aliens instead of "oh, we don't know that yet". Like very rarely short wave radio signals will just echo back many seconds later and science legitimately has no idea why, with suggestions being everything from bouncing off plasma around the sun, to signals getting stuck in fiberoptic loops in the atmosphere to radio waves getting converted naturally to audio then naturally back to radio miles away tp taking dozens of trips to the moon and back and people just honestly don't know why it happens. It's a legitimate mystery. Maybe it's passing aliens repeating messages to try to hail us. It could be that, but that is a dumb suggestion because that is the sort of thing you suggest once everything else is ruled out, and we just aren't there yet. There is so much science we don't know yet there is no reason to suggest stuff like that yet. Like you can speak into a radio and say hello and one out of million times it'll just repeat back hello many seconds later, but even something like that is just "we don't know why" instead of "aliens did it!" because we don't know tons of stuff still. 500 years from now when we have super complete books listing every law of physics exactly how they should work we could find anomalies like that and know "someone did this" instead of what is reasonable now to say "something to do with the sun maybe? or the moon? maybe the auroras? we don't really know yet" Owlofcreamcheese fucked around with this message at 17:19 on Jul 12, 2019 |
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Jul 12, 2019 17:17
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Moridin920 posted:The universe is fairly uniform. The laws of physics aren't going to be radically different the next galaxy over, def not elsewhere in the Milky Way. The basic building blocks don't really change. Are you sure? With the information we know, are you sure? We've gotten to the moon. We put a few robots on Mars. We have telescopes. These are amazing accomplishments for a bunch of monkeys, but we don't understand anything going on in the entire universe. We have our best ideas. We don't know even what's happening with Tabby's Star. That might be definite proof of alien life. We don't know.
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Jul 12, 2019 20:36
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1glitch0 posted:Are you sure? With the information we know, are you sure? We've gotten to the moon. We put a few robots on Mars. We have telescopes. These are amazing accomplishments for a bunch of monkeys, but we don't understand anything going on in the entire universe. We have our best ideas. As I mentioned earlier, yes, we are very sure the laws of physics are the same as far as we can see. We can calculate what would happen if they were slightly different, and we don't see that happening. Instead we see the same standard candles and types of supernovas in every direction, all the way out. Within the visible universe, the fundamental laws appear to be identical and we have no reason to think otherwise. We might speculate that they are different in parallel universes, or parts of the universe unimaginably far away, but that's not relevant for the possibility of searching for life.
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Jul 12, 2019 20:48
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1glitch0 posted:Are you sure? With the information we know, are you sure? We've gotten to the moon. We put a few robots on Mars. We have telescopes. These are amazing accomplishments for a bunch of monkeys, but we don't understand anything going on in the entire universe. We have our best ideas. we know whats going on with tabby's star stop believing hyped bullshit.
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Jul 12, 2019 21:09
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Bug Squash posted:We can calculate what would happen if they were slightly different, and we don't see that happening. Instead we see the same standard candles and types of supernovas in every direction, all the way out. Within the visible universe, the fundamental laws appear to be identical and we have no reason to think otherwise. I don't think we can calculate physics from first principles at all yet. And there is plenty of stuff we calculated that doesn't match at all and we don't know why. Like we calculated the mass of galaxies and are off by 95% and now just accept there is some sort of unknown substance that exists giving the extra weight. Or we calculated the amount of lithium in the universe and are off by 4x. Or we calculated the biggest "object" (thing shaped by interaction with other things) that the speed of expansion would allow then found objects much larger anyway. We calculated the hubble constant using supernova and by using cepheid variables and got different answers and just accept that. Like none of this is proof of aliens or weird physics or anything, it definitely isn't aliens or lovecraft mystery universe stuff, but if there was aliens or weird physics we'd hardly know yet. We have a lot of theories with a lot of anomalous observations but we need to cook our theories for like, hundreds of more years before the crazy stuff looks like the real solution. We are still at the "look out into the universe and see stuff we don't understand" phase, instead of the "look out and have it all figured out and can know if we saw something weird" stage.
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Jul 12, 2019 21:10
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:I don't think we can calculate physics from first principles at all yet. And there is plenty of stuff we calculated that doesn't match at all and we don't know why. Like we calculated the mass of galaxies and are off by 95% and now just accept there is some sort of unknown substance that exists giving the extra weight. Or we calculated the amount of lithium in the universe and are off by 4x. Or we calculated the biggest "object" (thing shaped by interaction with other things) that the speed of expansion would allow then found objects much larger anyway. We calculated the hubble constant using supernova and by using cepheid variables and got different answers and just accept that. There's clearly a vast amount of unknown physics out there, I definitely agree with you there, but I'm very confident it's going to be the same unknown physics in every direction for many times greater than the cosmological horizon.
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Jul 12, 2019 21:28
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Bug Squash posted:These are all legitimate comments, but they're not really addressing my defense of the Copernican principal. We obviously can't just derive the universe from theory currently, but we do know that if certain fundamental laws or values were even slightly different, then stars and other astronomical objects would behave differently. We don't see that. So we safely conclude physics is constant in the visible universe. But we do see objects "behaving differently" and don't currently know why. Like there is a whole class of white dwarfs that are too small that sometimes go supernova anyway and put out more energy than our models of supernovas say they should. No one knows why. But like, in 2019 that is fine, people will study that and write papers and probably figure that out eventually. We aren't far enough along in our study of the universe to jump right to "woah! this deviated from our model! time to sound the alarm! this must exist in a region of space the laws of physics have varied!" or something. Like we are so much in the data gathering phase it's hard to imagine what could possibly be found that would be so deviant that we would be able to jump right to "aliens" or "variable physics" or something, since we constantly find simple unexplainable things (that we currently have no reason to think won't be explainable with future better models, but can't actually know that till we make those models someday in the future). Like we calculated how close stars could orbit each other then found stars orbiting closer than that. There is literally zero reason to think that means anything but our original calculation was wrong. I don't think anyone would get very far trying to write papers saying our calculations are definitely for sure right and that means those stars we found are actually just using different values for gravity. Maybe in 90 years if it's still a mystery someone could start poking at that. But right now the obvious answer is still "our calculations were wrong, lets figure this out"
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Jul 12, 2019 22:10
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Saw that special on PBS about the moon landings, and while most of it was rather appalling blowjobs to MURICA, SCIENCE, AND gently caress DA RUSSKIES and ended on a naked propaganda note to supprt landing on Mars, I was struck by the civil rights leaders of the day bravely denouncing the endeavor. Dr King himself equated the Apollo Project to the horror of the Vietnam War. Got me thinking, and so I went and found a good article about the immorality of space exploration: The racist language of space exploration:quote:Presidents have also used frontierism and colonialism to get white citizens behind their agenda. When President John F. Kennedy announced his intention to bring Americans to the Moon in 1962, he paraphrased one of the earliest colonists on the North American continent. But no, tell me again about how space colonialism is only upsides. 
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Jul 12, 2019 23:30
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Heck Yes! Loam! posted:we know whats going on with tabby's star stop believing hyped bullshit. Oh, what is it?
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Jul 13, 2019 00:07
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Kerning Chameleon posted:But no, tell me again about how space colonialism is only upsides. This seems more about how language has certain in-built history. However this seems to suggest maybe using more ethically neutral language without baggage; what are the practical downsides if you're critical of the upsides?
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Jul 13, 2019 01:09
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Wow what a long essay to say "space travel is bad for all the standard complaints, and also because the word colony is racist and violent". Total waste of time in my opinion, since they just assert their opinions without ever really substantiating them.
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Jul 13, 2019 01:47
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Man, it's good to hear we finally solved physics. Maybe we can do math next.
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Jul 13, 2019 02:40
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1glitch0 posted:Oh, what is it? Dust
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Jul 13, 2019 02:57
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So I have things to say about chemistry still but my day of checking the news has been seeing how many more people now have joined an event to storm Area 51 and see them aliens. I guess this is the D&D topic most appropriate for this until someone in that 500,000 jumps the gun and we find out what the government's response to that is in YOOL 2019.
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Jul 13, 2019 04:03
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LtStorm posted:So I have things to say about chemistry still but my day of checking the news has been seeing how many more people now have joined an event to storm Area 51 and see them aliens. My own bad posting aside, I'm genuinely interested to read what you have to say about chemistry. Could stand to learn more (though guessing that was pretty obvious). Also really hoping no one gets themselves shot.
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Jul 13, 2019 04:41
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Unoriginal Name posted:Man, it's good to hear we finally solved physics. I don't know where people are pulling this idea that I'm saying that we've solved physics from. That's clearly untrue. What I'm saying is that yes, there's weird stuff out there, but it's the same weird stuff in every direction. The Copernican principal is one of the best supported assumptions there is in modern physics. The only seriously challenge to it is Dark Flow, and that's a pretty outside possibility. If the strong nuclear force was double in another part of the universe, we'd absolutely notice that because stars as we know them wouldn't be able to function. If another part had 10x gravity, it would look completely different to the other parts. I'm just completely unable to understand how people can think that parts of the universe can have different physics, and yet look exactly like every other part. Bug Squash fucked around with this message at 11:59 on Jul 13, 2019 |
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Jul 13, 2019 08:27
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LtStorm posted:So I have things to say about chemistry still but my day of checking the news has been seeing how many more people now have joined an event to storm Area 51 and see them aliens. If only this wasn’t a total joke event. Also they should be storming S4.
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Jul 13, 2019 13:43
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Kerning Chameleon posted:Saw that special on PBS about the moon landings, and while most of it was rather appalling blowjobs to MURICA, SCIENCE, AND gently caress DA RUSSKIES and ended on a naked propaganda note to supprt landing on Mars, I was struck by the civil rights leaders of the day bravely denouncing the endeavor. Dr King himself equated the Apollo Project to the horror of the Vietnam War. Got me thinking, and so I went and found a good article about the immorality of space exploration: The racist language of space exploration: You unironically support a Khmer Rouge style dictatorship and cultural revolution against all educated people, and want to kill millions to revert humanity back to a pre-technological existence. This is your solution to climate change, as you've posted in other threads, like the Climate Change thread or USPOL. Why should anyone listen to you? EDIT: Tell us, after this glorious revolutionary vanguard has used all the most advanced technology in the world to systematically reduce the human race to the Stone Age, how would you ensure that, having won the most tremendous power in all of human history, this vanguard class could be trusted not to simply ... keep their political power and transfer it to their appointed successors? DrSunshine fucked around with this message at 14:09 on Jul 13, 2019 |
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Jul 13, 2019 14:04
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Bug Squash posted:If the strong nuclear force was double in another part of the universe, we'd absolutely notice that because stars as we know them wouldn't be able to function. If another part had 10x gravity, it would look completely different to the other parts. I'm just completely unable to understand how people can think that parts of the universe can have different physics, and yet look exactly like every other part. Different physics is a crazy answer, same as "aliens did it". But like, seriously, space is full of anomalous readings, name a topic and you can find things that don't fit our current theories. Very easily. in 2019 that is very clearly because our current theories on just about everything are quite incomplete. When everything is anomalies then you aren't at the point you can find real anomalies. Like you can find stars and galaxies and areas of space that don't fit predicted models that we can't yet fully explain. This is almost absolutely definitely because current models need to get better. To assume anything else at this point is totally unwarranted. But it's not like an alarm would go off at science headquarters if we found something weird and it was weird because of weird reasons. Like, current theory says that given the amount of random distribution in the early universe and the amount of time that has passed that we should see no 'structure' in the universe bigger than 1.2 billion light years across, there would simply be no time for anything bigger to form from a random start. Yet we see multiple structures that are 5 or 10 billion light years wide. Which are 'impossible". In all likelihood that is going to get someone a PHD when they figure out the theory on how that works. But it's also what it would look like to live in 2019 in a universe that had godlike aliens moving stuff around, or regions of space with different physics breaking our expectations. There is no reason to jump to the crazy explanations, because we are so early. But we do live in the universe right now where we look up in the sky and constantly see major things that defy our current explanations. (because our current explanations largely are very preliminary).
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Jul 13, 2019 14:04
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DrSunshine posted:You unironically support a Khmer Rouge style dictatorship and cultural revolution against all educated people, and want to kill millions to revert humanity back to a pre-technological existence. This is your solution to climate change, as you've posted in other threads, like the Climate Change thread or USPOL. Why should anyone listen to you? Is Kerning seriously not even a "Space exploration is bad because we should be solving ALL OTHER ISSUES FIRST IN ORDER" luddite but a "Thanos was right" ideologue?
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Jul 13, 2019 17:00
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Raenir Salazar posted:Is Kerning seriously not even a "Space exploration is bad because we should be solving ALL OTHER ISSUES FIRST IN ORDER" luddite but a "Thanos was right" ideologue? Oh no, not even close. Thanos only wanted half of all life gone. 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".
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Jul 13, 2019 18:22
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Kerning Chameleon posted:Saw that special on PBS about the moon landings, and while most of it was rather appalling blowjobs to MURICA, SCIENCE, AND gently caress DA RUSSKIES and ended on a naked propaganda note to supprt landing on Mars, I was struck by the civil rights leaders of the day bravely denouncing the endeavor. Dr King himself equated the Apollo Project to the horror of the Vietnam War. Got me thinking, and so I went and found a good article about the immorality of space exploration: The racist language of space exploration: Keming Chameleon bravely standing up for the rights of rocks ITT.
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Jul 13, 2019 20:16
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I CANNOT EJACULATE WITHOUT SEEING NATIVE AMERICANS BRUTALISED!
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suck my woke dick posted:Keming Chameleon bravely standing up for the rights of rocks ITT. Apollo 18 was right!
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Jul 13, 2019 20:17
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If everything that Paul Hellyer said is true, we're totally hosed. I want to know!!!! Tell me! What the gently caress is happening!!! This kerning guy is right, we're a species that's raised brutality and domination to an art. We might have nothing to offer anyone but worry over using our fission weapons and wrecking a nice planet. On the other hand, this sort of killer nature could be a normal product of selection. Even plants steal lifegiving water and sun from other plants. In the end, our (theoretical) alien masters will be the judge and jury Dejan Bimble fucked around with this message at 22:19 on Jul 13, 2019 |
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Jul 13, 2019 22:13
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LtStorm posted:Speaking of the state of the universe as we understand it, dark matter is about as ludicrous a concept as phlogiston or luminiferous aether were, but until we figure out what we're missing about how gravity works at universe-scale distances we're stuck with an elusive form of matter. Dark matter has far more observational evidence than either of those things ever had. A concept of things that interact only gravitationally and (perhaps) weakly is also in no way ludicrous, seeing as we already know of the existence of things like that (neutrinos). And I'd bet you a lot of cash that we're not missing anything about how gravity works at universe scale distances. Einstein's theory of relativity's predictive power proved so insane over the last century the guy is (rightly) synonymous with unparalleled creative genius. If anything, we're missing how it works at subatomic distances, and we'll need a theory of quantum gravity to understand that. I might be biased in big E's favor though, as it's my area of research dex_sda fucked around with this message at 23:30 on Jul 13, 2019 |
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Jul 13, 2019 23:25
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suck my woke dick posted:Keming Chameleon bravely standing up for the rights of rocks ITT. Broke: Life is precious and we should make sure it doesn't get obliterated by a random gamma ray burst or the sun going nova. Woke: Actually life is bad and rocks, dust, and gas are oppressed by it.
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Jul 14, 2019 00:12
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DrSunshine posted:Broke: Life is precious and we should make sure it doesn't get obliterated by a random gamma ray burst or the sun going nova. People make fun of the guy, but he has a very good point. We might just not be worth expanding as a species. We might (probably) cause more ill than good. We've polluted the planet beyond the point of no return, the second we were able to get into orbit we started polluting that with space junk. Hell, Amazon wants to send up 3,000 satellites soon. Anything we've been able to touch from the moon to Mars we've just left poo poo on. If life exists somewhere like Europa then humanity somehow getting to Europa is probably the worst case scenario for life on Europa.
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Jul 14, 2019 00:25
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