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Raenir Salazar posted:This begs the question then, do we know enough to know some idea of the odds? My coworker insisted he read about how some scientist out there insisted that the odds were so small, that even if we factor in we already exist, that the odds are so small that even over billions of years and billions of worlds that the chance of it even happening once is basically nigh impossible. How valid is that and are you perhaps familiar with which scientist made that claim? I hear it was some dude who was originally a physicist who switched to biochemistry or something. lmao physicists
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Oct 17, 2019 16:19
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Conspiratiorist posted:lmao physicists Be aware I am getting this extremely second hand.
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Oct 17, 2019 16:20
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Raenir Salazar posted:This begs the question then, do we know enough to know some idea of the odds? My coworker insisted he read about how some scientist out there insisted that the odds were so small, that even if we factor in we already exist, that the odds are so small that even over billions of years and billions of worlds that the chance of it even happening once is basically nigh impossible. How valid is that and are you perhaps familiar with which scientist made that claim? I hear it was some dude who was originally a physicist who switched to biochemistry or something. About 100 billion stars in our galaxy and likely 200 billion galaxies in the universe, and the universe is 14 billion years old while earth is only 4.5 billion years old, and we only evolved 2 million years ago. But no, we're that loving special that we're the only ones that there have ever been. It just sounds ludicrous. The only way it makes sense is divine design.
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Oct 17, 2019 16:22
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Nail Rat posted:About 100 billion stars in our galaxy and likely 200 billion galaxies in the universe, and the universe is 14 billion years old while earth is only 4.5 billion years old, and we only evolved 2 million years ago. But no, we're that loving special that we're the only ones that there have ever been. On top of those 'odds' being determined in a complete bubble of supposition and ignorance. Its like, "Listen, we've got some data, who knows how much of the total it is; we can make a wild rear end guess about this data on the assumption that its complete and our understanding of it is infallible and correct". Please believe us.
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Oct 17, 2019 16:27
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Yeah ask him to show you his probability calculations. It’s going to be a bunch of wild assumptions and generalizations based on tentative findings. We. Don’t. Know.
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Oct 17, 2019 16:53
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Raenir Salazar posted:This begs the question then, do we know enough to know some idea of the odds? My coworker insisted he read about how some scientist out there insisted that the odds were so small, that even if we factor in we already exist, that the odds are so small that even over billions of years and billions of worlds that the chance of it even happening once is basically nigh impossible. How valid is that and are you perhaps familiar with which scientist made that claim? I hear it was some dude who was originally a physicist who switched to biochemistry or something. Christ, this rings a bell, but I can't for the life of me remember the guy's name. His argument was that if all the components of the simplest possible cell filled the entire universe, it would take billions of times longer than the age of the universe to assemble by chance into the simplest possible cell. The maths behind that is technically correct, but it's also a stupid argument, since it assumes: that modern cells are not more complex than whatever the first cells looked like; that there were no semi-living chemistries on the way to fully fledge life that could still manage reproduction; that energy gradients tend to cause complex chemistry to form; and a thousand other factors which probably contributed to life forming out of non-life. Bug Squash fucked around with this message at 17:15 on Oct 17, 2019 |
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Oct 17, 2019 16:58
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Bug Squash posted:Christ, this rings a bell, but I can't for the life of me remember the guy's name. Yeah this was exactly the argument, that there were too many permutations between each step.
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Oct 17, 2019 17:08
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This isn't my field so I could be wildly off and would welcone clarification or correction, but I thought it was the case that RNA like self replicating things, for lack of a more precise term, are not uniquely novel in the realm of ochem, even if the things are not efficient in terms of copy integrity or energy use in relation to RNA/DNA/Cells. So long as that is true, you would expect that where you can have conditions for Earth like "primordial soup" for the ochem to play out it just becomes a question of time and iterations both on planet and across planets for something resembling very basic Earh-like primitive biology to exist. How that then evolves and adapts and yadda yadda yadda is a whole other can of worms in a separate conversation. But just strictly life down at the monocellular level is well within our current scope of provable knowledge to bolt into known probabilities of galaxies/stars/planets that would allow it to exist. And again, of course, that says nothing about our ability to prove it exists or even meaningfully test for its existence and so on.
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Oct 17, 2019 17:24
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In the context of the great filter it's importance since currently my understanding is we don't know enough to know for sure if this step is certain and inevitable, and currently if we've found NOTHING outside of earth that proves that step occurred then maybe that's where the filter is. Every step we manage to prove after that first step makes things increasing nervous of course. It's weird because I remember from a popular science article by Asimov written in like the 70's he had mentioned that did prove that part, they took some inert gases, mixed it into the soup, put in some electricity and POOF rna or whatever it is they were expecting; but then maybe that experiment wasn't actually replicated under truly sterile lab conditions? I dunno.
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Oct 17, 2019 19:41
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Raenir Salazar posted:In the context of the great filter it's importance since currently my understanding is we don't know enough to know for sure if this step is certain and inevitable, and currently if we've found NOTHING outside of earth that proves that step occurred then maybe that's where the filter is. I'm pretty sure you're thinking of the https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miller%E2%80%93Urey_experiment. It establishes that a wide range of amino acids could be created from simpler molecules based on conditions that could plausibility have existed on the early Earth. It's an important experiment, but we are still a long way from establishing how you go from non-life to life. We probably had around a million years and the entire planets surface running the experiment the first time, so duplicating it overnight in a lab might be a bit ambitious given current technology. There's a lot or really good theories on how it might have happened, and we can make good guesses about possible intermediate stages (RNA world, metabolism first reproduction, crystal aided compartmentalisation). But at present, we just don't know for certain.
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Oct 17, 2019 20:09
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https://www.nbcsandiego.com/blogs/s...-563648621.html So he has been claiming for a while that TTSA had materials from these craft. Apparently it is real enough they have signed a contract with the army.
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Oct 24, 2019 19:03
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Dameius posted:We recently gene spliced photo synthesis to be more efficient because the way plants evolved to do it was extra energy intensive. Have chemsists deconstructing the reactions down at the level you are working with come across anything else like that? Or just any other cool poo poo you've seen/done/learned in field? it's pretty stupid but i recently found out you can make alcohol from coal and the thought of people getting drunk drinking dinosaurs* has me giggling *yes I know coal isn't made from dinosaurs
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Oct 24, 2019 19:35
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Was there a proper discussion in here about the navy encounters? I've tried reading the thread a couple times but it's just constant poo poo from the likes of Kerning and OOCC.
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Oct 24, 2019 23:22
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Ratios and Tendency posted:Was there a proper discussion in here about the navy encounters? I've tried reading the thread a couple times but it's just constant poo poo from the likes of Kerning and OOCC. Check my post history, I made some effort posts about it and the state of current UFO research back in June. I need to make another post here but holy poo poo I've been busy the past few weeks driving or flying places to get elbow deep in scientific equipment.
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Oct 25, 2019 00:07
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Raenir Salazar posted:This begs the question then, do we know enough to know some idea of the odds? My coworker insisted he read about how some scientist out there insisted that the odds were so small, that even if we factor in we already exist, that the odds are so small that even over billions of years and billions of worlds that the chance of it even happening once is basically nigh impossible. How valid is that and are you perhaps familiar with which scientist made that claim? I hear it was some dude who was originally a physicist who switched to biochemistry or something. Sounds like any of the "Intelligent Design" dudes. Behe or Dembski, most likely.
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Oct 27, 2019 22:20
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FFT posted:Sounds like any of the "Intelligent Design" dudes. Behe or Dembski, most likely. Did a bit of googling, and I think it's Stephen Meyer, in his 2009 book Signiture in the Cell. He was hanging out with the usual crowd during the Intelligent Design trials.
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Oct 27, 2019 22:48
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You see colonizing planets is cool and all earth habital yadda yadda. but the big daddy $$ is in the black hole colonization. And that's a mega-deal. In reality we will probably gang up on a half dozen planets at most maybe 20 over the course of a 10,000 years. And at the end of that we won't even be recognizable. Scribbling down the decadent ways of the past generations to simple simulated experiences of pleasure. Here is a handy chart for your kickstarter.
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Oct 29, 2019 06:57
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Bug Squash posted:Did a bit of googling, and I think it's Stephen Meyer, in his 2009 book Signiture in the Cell. Ah, I did forget Meyer. Stopped arguing all the time with creationists and totally-not-creationists-honestly probably half a decade or so ago so I'm not as on top of it any more.
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Oct 29, 2019 08:42
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I just finished "Jack Glass", written by Adam Roberts. Decent book and while not explicitly about the Fermi paradox or the Great Filter there's an interesting idea in it, which is a main plot point Spoilers for the novel "Jack Glass": FTL travel is possible, but the mechanics of it make it perfect as a weapon. So, any culture that discovers it wipes themselves out by destroying their sun (by accident, terrorists, religious zealots, etc.). This explains all the observations of "champagne supernovas" (which, it turns out, are a real thing) - each one is a technologically advanced civilisation going extinct It does a decent job of painting a solar system where humanity has expanded, but only has sub-FTL methods of travel (journeys between the planets are lengthy and dull) Amphigory fucked around with this message at 21:36 on Nov 2, 2019 |
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Nov 2, 2019 21:34
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https://www.physics-astronomy.org/2019/04/pluto-has-been-officially-reclassified.html A sad day for all those who has spent the last decade correcting people who said that Pluto was a planet.
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Nov 24, 2019 12:31
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Alhazred posted:https://www.physics-astronomy.org/2019/04/pluto-has-been-officially-reclassified.html A sadder day for people who don't read the links they post
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Nov 24, 2019 12:39
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Alhazred posted:https://www.physics-astronomy.org/2019/04/pluto-has-been-officially-reclassified.html Look at the date of that article. Also, next time you can avoid this by looking at the source first, especially if the posting date of the article seems to be weird
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Nov 24, 2019 12:47
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Alhazred posted:https://www.physics-astronomy.org/2019/04/pluto-has-been-officially-reclassified.html “We didn’t think anyone would really care if a little clump of ice and rock on the outskirts of the solar system was reclassified. Clearly, we dun messed up, and that makes me super sad face. Today, we take steps to correct this most grievous of errors.” In addition to Pluto’s reclassification, Dr. Joggy has also proposed that the IAU create a new category of planet called a “hyper-planet.” These hyper-planets, according to Dr. Joggy, are like regular planets but at least two times as awesome (thanks to the fancy, fancy name). It has also been proposed that Pluto be made an honorary member of this new planetary class. “In all honesty, we feel bad for the way we treated Pluto and, more importantly, all those that cared about it so greatly- the public showed us our error. Hopefully, the new class of planet will be created without a hitch, and Pluto will be added as the first member. It’s only fair.”
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Nov 24, 2019 12:48
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To get away from Alhazred's Embarrassment Hour, some actual science news: New method used to study planets' geochemistry implies that Earth is not unique This new method is studying White Dwarfs to see what kind of elements the remnants of its system have remaining. The idea behind this is: The White Dwarf uses Gravity on nearby leftovers of its system, and It's Super Effective, so they get drawn in into the lich star. Now we can study the elements in the star itself to take an educated guess to what kind of elements the old system may have had available in large numbers. So far, those ancient dead star systems have enough elements from rocky planets like Earth or Venus in them that the average number of rock-type planets in your typical system must be a lot higher then previously thought. DrSunshine posted:Well. Galactic Extrism Second thing I found, this from Scientific American: A new paper on the probability of alien civilizations in our galaxy. Highlights from the paper linked in the article: * Alien civilizations may want to colonize planets for more reasons than just getting more resources and spreading themselves like mold on your bread slices, like religious or ideological reasons. Aliens may be just weird like that! * If a civilization has an average life, instead of just going on forever, depending on high or low that lifespan is, we may either sit in a dead bubble of space after multiple colonization waves over billions of years passed us by, or in a smaller dead bubble because a statistic fluke put us somewhere with not many life-bearing planets or even colonizable rocks available. The next bubble of interstellar civilization may be just far enough away we haven't noticed them yet. * Lots of math. Since I'm bad at math, I skipped all that. There's also a lot of discussion about the different assumptions possible or which ones went into the calculations. Like for example, they assumed colonization by sublight probes constructed to slowly travel to a colonizable world and spreading their kind of life like that. No advanced space ships or anything. Also, the calculations are vastly different depending on if you assume the probes are made from some sort of ULTIMATE METAL and therefore with unlimited range and 100% success rate, or if they put in a limited lifespan to simulate the rigors of space: In the first case, xeno civilization can indeed cross the entire galaxy in short order (well, still millions of years), in the latter, not so much and you only get localized "bubbles" of life separated by huge galactic deserts (if civilizations have a limited life span) or slow-moving "waves" of colonization, with dead space erupting behind them as the civilizations break down again (if civilizations have a limited life span). They point out that the Fermi-Paradox only makes sense if you both assume the spreading agent (in this case space probes) and the lifespan of a civilization/species is infinite. Which yeah, is probably only a mathematical edge case that has no place in reality. The short of this is, the plausible main reason we can't see aliens right now is possible because we either sit in a dead bubble surrounded by many growing and collapsing bubbles of life far away, or because we sit in a dead zone left behind by an earlier colonization wave. Less likely and still plausible: We're the first of our own local expansion wave. Fake edit: One another thing the scientists behind the paper mention is to remember every reader multiple times that the time spans involved are ranging up to gigayears, billions of years, so even if it turns out yeah, one dumb species evolved on the other end of the galaxy 100 million years ago and they now have super-tech and are immortal, they'll still take 1-2 billion years to slowly fill up the entire galaxy and nothing in this universe demands that this kind of poo poo has to happen long enough ago to make this very unlikely far future our actual present. In other words, the Fermi Paradox still doesn't work even if all assumptions are in its favor, as it could be that the civilizations filling up the galaxy just haven't reached us yet. (And maybe even won't before we're either extinct or have met someone else, completely unrelated to these hypothetical Galaxy Devourers.)
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Nov 24, 2019 13:20
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This feels really anti-intellectual, but if there’s no way to travel faster than light then there’s no real reason to colonize an entire galaxy or ever spread out much beyond what you need to survive, as you’d basically never know what happened to the colonies outside contact range. It would be like achieving immortality by making an immortal digital copy of yourself who says hello and then goes off to live inside a mainframe somewhere: technically what you set out to do but without meaningful benefit to you.
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Nov 24, 2019 15:56
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Antifa Turkeesian posted:This feels really anti-intellectual, but if there’s no way to travel faster than light then there’s no real reason to colonize an entire galaxy or ever spread out much beyond what you need to survive, as you’d basically never know what happened to the colonies outside contact range. It would be like achieving immortality by making an immortal digital copy of yourself who says hello and then goes off to live inside a mainframe somewhere: technically what you set out to do but without meaningful benefit to you. You're doing this thing where you're conflating your opinion on things for the opinion of the entire world, just now you're brazen enough to substitute "the world" with "the entire universe". I don't want to insult you, but that kind of thinking always seemed like an incredibly perverse amount of arrogance to weigh yourself down with. It's also pretty ballsy to come with this poo poo just after I posted arguments as to why you are wrong
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Nov 24, 2019 16:41
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Antifa Turkeesian posted:This feels really anti-intellectual, but if there’s no way to travel faster than light then there’s no real reason to colonize an entire galaxy or ever spread out much beyond what you need to survive, as you’d basically never know what happened to the colonies outside contact range. It would be like achieving immortality by making an immortal digital copy of yourself who says hello and then goes off to live inside a mainframe somewhere: technically what you set out to do but without meaningful benefit to you. I feel like this is... a really bad analogy. Not because it doesn't work, but because it definitely doesn't make the point that you're going for. How many despots have spent untold fortunes on useless monuments that were intended to outlast them? How many rich "philanthropists" have basically used charity as a way for their magnanimity to be clearly evident to future generations? I'm sure just about everyone would jump at a chance for real immortality, but plenty of people would settle for knowing that there's an eternal digital copy with access to vast resources that would forever carry out their wishes exactly as they'd want them to be carried out. Do you really think that someone like Bill Gates wouldn't jump at the chance of having a Cyber-Bill to guide humanity's future forever? The point is, we explore because we loving want to. Probably the vast majority of real-world exploration was just vanity projects, with brutal exploitation just being the icing on the cake. Plenty of exploration and settlement also happened because people just wanted to get the gently caress away from whatever government they were a part of. The best argument for why colonization of the solar system is likely to happen isn't because there's scientific or practical value, it's because there are some rich people who really loving want it to happen. If interstellar travel and colonization is possible, then sooner or later some human with resources will want it badly enough to do it.
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Nov 24, 2019 18:05
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Paradoxish posted:How many despots have spent untold fortunes on useless monuments that were intended to outlast them? How many rich "philanthropists" have basically used charity as a way for their magnanimity to be clearly evident to future generations? Both these things are because those people can interact in some way with the things they made to satisfy their ego. The person's you're quoting point is that if there is no FTL, there is no meaningful reason to go far beyond your local solar system, as those places in spacetime might as well not exist from your frame of reference. Which is physically - as in, from the point of view of the science known as 'physics' - true.
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Nov 24, 2019 21:29
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AIs flying around at .9c will be fine with interstellar time and distance.
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Nov 24, 2019 21:57
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Ratios and Tendency posted:AIs flying around at .9c will be fine with interstellar time and distance. Yeah, it hasnt bothered the wizards in my imagination at all
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Nov 24, 2019 22:51
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Nicholas Funai - Using quantum energy teleportation to create exotic spacetimes https://youtube.com/watch?v=i-mStC-E1l0 What do you guys think about QET and negative energy production to create exotic spacetimes, like wormholes or alcubere drives
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Nov 24, 2019 23:17
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It's kinda irrelevant that the future descendents on future worlds extremely far away aren't interactable. They existing means our species ultimately surviving until the heat death of the universe, as the only means to preserve our culture and history. Creating a colony ship and sending it out somewhere is the same thing as backing up all of our everything and preserving it for all time; and those descendents will want to do the same thing and repeat the process forever to preserve their own unique history and culture.
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Nov 24, 2019 23:51
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Antifa Turkeesian posted:This feels really anti-intellectual, but if there’s no way to travel faster than light then there’s no real reason to colonize an entire galaxy or ever spread out much beyond what you need to survive, as you’d basically never know what happened to the colonies outside contact range. It would be like achieving immortality by making an immortal digital copy of yourself who says hello and then goes off to live inside a mainframe somewhere: technically what you set out to do but without meaningful benefit to you. Well, I mean... you'd know eventually, probably. It might take a few thousand years (about 100k, for the Milky Way) to find out whatever happened to those folks on the other side of the galaxy, but you'd find out. And really, it never really stopped people from spreading. The Polynesians may as well have been separated from each other by interstellar gulfs for how isolated some places were from others, and the expanse of the Pacific Ocean didn't seem to stop them from colonizing almost every habitable island there. They of course splintered into hundreds of separate sub-civilizations, but I don't think any of them would've thought it was pointless. Libluini posted:You're doing this thing where you're conflating your opinion on things for the opinion of the entire world, just now you're brazen enough to substitute "the world" with "the entire universe". I don't want to insult you, but that kind of thinking always seemed like an incredibly perverse amount of arrogance to weigh yourself down with. Wow, that's, uh, kind of scarily combative of you. :o
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Nov 25, 2019 00:51
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Also if we do manage to travel at like 0.9c then there exists some set of people who can use time dilation to visit hundreds of worlds and experience tens of thousands of years of history while only a few years passes for them; so there could exist some sort of class of people, especially if biologically and genetically engineered for long lives, like a sort of space illuminati. Additionally, to follow up from my previous post, it isn't like your ancestors 100,000 years ago will ever get a chance to meet you today; space colonization is the same. Your descendents will appreciate existing and not being preemptively aborted.
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Nov 25, 2019 01:15
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DrSunshine posted:Well, I mean... you'd know eventually, probably. It might take a few thousand years (about 100k, for the Milky Way) to find out whatever happened to those folks on the other side of the galaxy, but you'd find out. And really, it never really stopped people from spreading. The Polynesians may as well have been separated from each other by interstellar gulfs for how isolated some places were from others, and the expanse of the Pacific Ocean didn't seem to stop them from colonizing almost every habitable island there. They of course splintered into hundreds of separate sub-civilizations, but I don't think any of them would've thought it was pointless. Yeah, that’s definitely true. I guess I was thinking in terms of the development of a galaxy-spanning civilization likely to be detected because of its scale as a unified phenomenon. Successive scattershot waves of outward expansion over hundreds of millions of years without a clear long-term goal make sense, and we wouldn’t know what to look for to find it, either.
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Nov 25, 2019 01:19
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Anyone technically inclined want to speak on those Hungarian researchers who were looking for dark matter and think they may have found evidence of another fundamental force?
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Nov 25, 2019 07:09
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Yadoppsi posted:Anyone technically inclined want to speak on those Hungarian researchers who were looking for dark matter and think they may have found evidence of another fundamental force? Gravitrons. I rest my case.
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Nov 25, 2019 07:16
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Yadoppsi posted:Anyone technically inclined want to speak on those Hungarian researchers who were looking for dark matter and think they may have found evidence of another fundamental force? Not peer reviewed yet. Poor theoretical background model for what is supposedly such a discovery. Extremely poor accounting for systematic errors. Same group already 'discovered' two particles that turned out to have been experimental anomalies. Even 5sigma results done decently turned out to be bunk in particle physics (pentaquark), let alone when the study is poor quality. In short: probably not, no.
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Nov 25, 2019 13:44
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So uh, sorry to dredge up an old topic, but how exactly are von Neumann probes not something completely in the realm of fiction? It seems like there are enormous issues of practicality with a self contained space probe that needs to bear the enormous weight cost of housing resource extraction, processing, and a manufactory for its own duplicate? And then there's also the issue that entropy would make it nigh certain to introduce errors in reproduction that would make the whole infinite replication impossible? Like hand waving the difficult parts seems to be carrying an incredible amount of weight here
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Nov 25, 2019 18:54
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A big flaming stink posted:So uh, sorry to dredge up an old topic, but how exactly are von Neumann probes not something completely in the realm of fiction? They aren't currently possible, but they are theortically possible without breaking any physical laws. One of those "if it is possible it will happen" kind of things.
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Nov 25, 2019 19:01
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