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Owlofcreamcheese posted:No scientific claims are saying climate change are the end of times. They are claiming that it's very bad, and will hurt huge numbers of people, but there is no science saying "everyone dies and civilization ends" This is a tired and worthless strawman, as I know you're well aware by now.
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Apr 11, 2020 14:55
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Classon Ave. Robot posted:This is a tired and worthless strawman, as I know you're well aware by now. It is if you are talking about if climate change is or isn't a big deal, it's not a straw man if you are discussing if climate change universally kills every alien with such sureness that it acts as the great filter that has prevented any alien life from colonizing the galaxy even one time.
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Apr 11, 2020 14:59
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StratGoatCom posted:
tell me: does being aware of some of the conditions for doom do anything? make you feel better? allow you to prepare for it? is there anything at all that keeping your head out of the sand will do to prevent or mitigate this doom? there isn't, so- maybe take that to a climate doomwank thread or something. this isn't aliens and poo poo itt, it's moaning about a cruel world that- guess what- we all suffer in, and feel the looming crisis in our bones, not just you.
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Apr 11, 2020 15:00
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We got 50-60 years of soil left, the clathrate gun is cocked, and we're having fascist irruptions everywhere. I don't have patience for folks who stick their head in the sand.
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Classon Ave. Robot posted:Name literally one generation that had scientific backing for the "end times" as you so ridiculously describe them. Not to dismiss or downplay global warming in any way, but the threat of nuclear annihilation has been around since before my generation and has pretty good scientific backing imo
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Apr 11, 2020 15:02
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Wafflecopper posted:Not to dismiss or downplay global warming in any way, but the threat of nuclear annihilation has been around since before my generation and has pretty good scientific backing imo Nuclear war is a political event, it is not guaranteed by scientific analysis of our current situation, nor was it of the one that previous generations inhabited. It seems foolish to me to decide that climate change is not the "great filter", if such a thing does exist. It is the thing that will or already has prevented our species from ever leaving this planet in any meaningful way, I see no reason to believe that this situation could not be universal. Classon Ave. Robot fucked around with this message at 15:34 on Apr 11, 2020 |
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Apr 11, 2020 15:22
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People seem to be confusing 'things that make human civilization more difficult' with a great filter that is an inevitable event that prevents humanity from persisting. Climate change is not a great filter. Its just a hole in our foot where we shot ourselves . A great filter is a GRB, or a metoer impact, or something we have no control over. Lastly, where the gently caress did anyone get the idea that we only have 50 years of soil left? That's loving stupid. ^^^ Climate change does not prevent us from leaving the planet What the hell people
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Apr 11, 2020 15:36
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The collapse of industrial supply lines and halt of scientific advancement very much does prevent us from leaving the planet. A situation where no members of the species are able to leave the planet and colonize other parts of the universe seems to fit the definition pretty well. A thousand years from now when whatever's left of our species finishes picking up the pieces and puts together a functioning civilization again, those people will not have access to a trillion easy barrels of oil that they can burn to advance their technology into space, they'll be stuck here.
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Apr 11, 2020 15:51
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Peanut Butler posted:tell me: does being aware of some of the conditions for doom do anything? make you feel better? allow you to prepare for it? is there anything at all that keeping your head out of the sand will do to prevent or mitigate this doom? It is directly relevant to what I am training to do for a living, yes. quote:Lastly, where the gently caress did anyone get the idea that we only have 50 years of soil left? That's loving stupid. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/earth-insight/2013/jun/07/peak-soil-industrial-civilisation-eating-itself https://www.reuters.com/article/us-peaksoil-agriculture/peak-soil-threatens-future-global-food-security-idUSKBN0FM1HC20140717 If anything, it's worse. Put down the Atomic Rockets and all the yammering about Delta-V, and read some ecology - I mean, for gently caress's sake, you need ecology if you want to do anything other then plant flags and fire off space probes anyhow. quote:It seems foolish to me to decide that climate change is not the "great filter", if such a thing does exist. It is the thing that will or already has prevented our species from ever leaving this planet in any meaningful way, I see no reason to believe that this situation could not be universal. It seems the most plausible cause for the Great Silence, besides the other catastrophe we squeaked by by millimeters, namely the Cold War.
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Apr 11, 2020 16:31
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Look at this person, they can see the future! A bona-fide prophet. Tell me, why aren't you richer than Jeff Bezos yet? EDIT: I studied climate science in college. Our models have gotten better since then, and they're saying that the "most extreme" scenario - on the end of 4-6 C by the end of the century, is less likely. Global climate change, even under the business as usual scenario, is not a likely candidate for human extinction. Classon Ave. Robot posted:The collapse of industrial supply lines and halt of scientific advancement very much does prevent us from leaving the planet. A situation where no members of the species are able to leave the planet and colonize other parts of the universe seems to fit the definition pretty well. OK, I've given it a bit more thought, and actually this does align with one of my concerns regarding global catastrophic risks such as nuclear war and abrupt climate change. A significantly powerful systemic shock that's sufficient to cause a regression of civilization could, in the asymptotic analysis, be an existential risk if civilization is never able to reach the threshold of escaping the gravity well. In that logic, the demise of life is intimately interrelated with the life-cycle of the parent star. Still, I think these depend on some extremely tenuous probabilistic arguments that can be picked apart on some of the premises. How are you certain that a civilization won't be able to return to a 21st century level of development? How are you certain that the present stressors will definitely lead to a collapse of civilization? Unless you've developed a reliable system of Foundation-like psychohistory, any theories about how civilizations collapse and predictions of our own present trajectory will be speculative. DrSunshine fucked around with this message at 16:53 on Apr 11, 2020 |
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Apr 11, 2020 16:32
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Classon Ave. Robot posted:A thousand years from now when whatever's left of our species finishes picking up the pieces and puts together a functioning civilization again, those people will not have access to a trillion easy barrels of oil that they can burn to advance their technology into space, they'll be stuck here. This argument never made sense to me, because there's plenty of available energy sources, particularly if you're not concerned about pesky things like the well-being of those around you. It's pretty silly to assume that a civilization crawling back from the ashes will be even as close to as concerned about the environment or the welfare of the general public as we are today (which as it currently stands is: not very much.) If you're trying to predict the political power structure of the future, take a lesson from history: you're always going to be wrong. There's more than enough wiggle room in the hundreds of billions of potential permutations of intelligent life in the universe to make 'self-caused environmental collapse' a poor excuse for a great filter. It's almost certainly a minor player, at best.
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Apr 11, 2020 17:17
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Its complete bollox, but I like to think one of the antigrav/free energy things will eventually pan out & we'll all be left thinking 'duh! why didnt we think of that before'. Failing that, we get fusion working for things other than bombs. I know, wishful thinking.
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Apr 11, 2020 17:20
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Do people not realize you can fission yourself of the planet, and that requires little to no fossil fuels? I'm also loving laughing at the peak soil article. Jesus Christ.
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Apr 11, 2020 18:34
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You guys are once again conflating total extinction with not sending out space probes anymore.
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Apr 11, 2020 19:30
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Arglebargle III posted:You guys are once again conflating total extinction with not sending out space probes anymore. As was pointed out you don't need oil to send out space probes. You don't need it for much of anything really. It's just convenient. As long as a meaningful fraction of humanity survives we'll eventually get where we were again. It won't even take very long. e: I'm not trying to downplay billions of people dying. It's just not a candidate for the great silence really (global warming in this case). Nuclear war might be if that happens, but even then it's more likely that some would survive and it'd just take a very long time to come back. At this point it really would probably take an exterior event like a closeby supernova or a massive meteor to truly wipe us out. Nurge fucked around with this message at 03:41 on Apr 12, 2020 |
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Apr 12, 2020 03:37
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Things will get harder, there's no doubt about that. Climate change is going to massively displace a large amount of people, it's going to cause a fundamental shift in our way of life. It might even push some states into Fascism. We've been through most if not all of that before, about a hundred years ago even. We came out of it and improved, we have technologies that people in that era couldn't even dream of. Predictions of total doom have never been used for anything except masturbatory self-aggrandizing. Things are going to be difficult. People are going to die. We didn't have to do things this way. There will be more misery in the world than there could've been. This is unlikely to be a Great Filter event.
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Apr 12, 2020 04:20
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Why do so many people talk about the great filter like it’s particularly likely or that it answers the question it was designed to solve? We haven’t been looking at space very long and don’t have a very good idea of what we’re looking for, and there’s no evidence that a sufficiently advanced technological civilization gains any particular benefit from spreading out across an entire galaxy. It seems like it would be a lot of effort for almost nothing in return, unless you were robots that could live in space. Without instantaneous communication or travel faster than light, what’s the point? Your home system or one nearby would have enough resources for many times the number habitable worlds there. It is fun to think about, I’ll admit.
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Apr 12, 2020 04:55
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Nurge posted:As was pointed out you don't need oil to send out space probes. You don't need it for much of anything really. It's just convenient. As long as a meaningful fraction of humanity survives we'll eventually get where we were again. It won't even take very long. [citation impossible]
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Apr 12, 2020 05:14
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Antifa Turkeesian posted:Without instantaneous communication or travel faster than light, what’s the point? Humans lived nearly all of history without fast travel or instant communication and did not seem to mind overly much.
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Apr 12, 2020 05:22
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:Humans lived nearly all of history without fast travel or instant communication and did not seem to mind overly much. A year would be pretty fast communication for people in space.
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Apr 12, 2020 05:24
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Arglebargle III posted:[citation impossible] If you have liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen you can launch a rocket. You can create those with electricity and water. You can create electricity from moving water.
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Apr 12, 2020 05:43
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A GIANT PARSNIP posted:If you have liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen you can launch a rocket. You can create those with electricity and water. You can create electricity from moving water. What about the rocket itself, or the chemical practicality of making some parts? Petrochemicals are a scaffold that allow systems to be grown in ways that would be very difficult or impracticable without them. Its doable, but an utter bastard to do without. And fundamentally a post collapse system would have to rebuild a lot from scratch - knowledgebases and industrial bases atrophy without use, before the ravages of collapse or simply having different resource priorities.
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Apr 12, 2020 06:05
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A GIANT PARSNIP posted:If you have liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen you can launch a rocket. You can create those with electricity and water. You can create electricity from moving water. Even better, nuclear propulsion far outstrips anything else we've found in efficiency. The only reason people don't use it is because nukes r scary. That wouldn't be a problem necessarily in our future scenario. In fact if we had used nukes for everything we possibly can to begin with the climate would be in a lot better shape. People are idiots. Nurge fucked around with this message at 06:40 on Apr 12, 2020 |
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Apr 12, 2020 06:36
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StratGoatCom posted:What about the rocket itself, or the chemical practicality of making some parts? Petrochemicals are a scaffold that allow systems to be grown in ways that would be very difficult or impracticable without them. Its doable, but an utter bastard to do without. Yes, but if you didn't know petrochemicals were a thing then would you really think that mystery method B is too difficult/impractical? I keep coming back to this, but large scale civilization and engineering projects were acomplished in the Americas before Europeans ever showed up, and we are still figuring out how the gently caress they did certain things without using the materials and systems that Europeans were familar with. For fucks sake we have literally alien conspiracies about it because people can't wrap their heads around it. Telsa Cola fucked around with this message at 06:43 on Apr 12, 2020 |
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Apr 12, 2020 06:37
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Antifa Turkeesian posted:Why do so many people talk about the great filter like it’s particularly likely or that it answers the question it was designed to solve? We haven’t been looking at space very long and don’t have a very good idea of what we’re looking for, and there’s no evidence that a sufficiently advanced technological civilization gains any particular benefit from spreading out across an entire galaxy. It seems like it would be a lot of effort for almost nothing in return, unless you were robots that could live in space. Without instantaneous communication or travel faster than light, what’s the point? Your home system or one nearby would have enough resources for many times the number habitable worlds there. Well the simplest explanation is that advanced civilizations that want to communicate rarely come into existence in the first place. Assuming they come into existence and are then destroyed is a weird complication.
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Apr 12, 2020 07:02
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StratGoatCom posted:The great filter is what prevents civs from contacting each other; doesn't mean they die off, it's just that they can't or won't any more. I didn't see anyone respond to this, but this is incorrect. The Great Filter is one of the disturbing fridge logic conclusions to the following thought experiment: Given Von Neumann Probes, why no alien life? Because given even some conservative estimates on how long it takes to construct a colony ship that can travel to a reasonably close nearby star with systems that can be settled or terraformed; a million years is a drop in the bucket in terms of time scales and a galactic spanning Type 2/3 Civilization should be the norm; but it appears to not be the case, and if so, why? The Great Filter is just one possible explanation. That there is something that with near certainty, unerringly strikes your civilization down, because it is a given that interstellar colonization being inevitable for any intelligent technologically advance civilization only needs to be true once to have billions of colonized worlds on the time scales involved. The Great Filter posits a a set of possible reasons why, mainly with respect to ourselves. It's just one possible solution but its an interesting and disturbing one. Like starring at some kind of horrifying art piece. Antifa Turkeesian posted:and there’s no evidence that a sufficiently advanced technological civilization gains any particular benefit from spreading out across an entire continent an ocean away Imagine how silly this would sound.
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Apr 12, 2020 07:32
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Antifa Turkeesian posted:Why do so many people talk about the great filter like it’s particularly likely or that it answers the question it was designed to solve? We haven’t been looking at space very long and don’t have a very good idea of what we’re looking for, and there’s no evidence that a sufficiently advanced technological civilization gains any particular benefit from spreading out across an entire galaxy. It seems like it would be a lot of effort for almost nothing in return, unless you were robots that could live in space. Without instantaneous communication or travel faster than light, what’s the point? Your home system or one nearby would have enough resources for many times the number habitable worlds there. Because it allows sad nerds with no power and a mediocre grasp of the science involved to make proclamations to scare other nerds and make themselves feel good and powerful.
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Apr 12, 2020 08:32
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Captain Monkey posted:Because it allows sad nerds with no power and a mediocre grasp of the science involved to make proclamations to scare other nerds and make themselves feel good and powerful. But no one is talking about Roko's Basilisk.
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Apr 12, 2020 08:50
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Raenir Salazar posted:But no one is talking about Roko's Basilisk. See also: Medieval and Renaissance Scholars and the Devil. Telsa Cola posted:Yes, but if you didn't know petrochemicals were a thing then would you really think that mystery method B is too difficult/impractical? Oooh! Can you tell me where you might've read about this? I've read 1491, about how there were large-scale civilizations in Pre-Columbian America, but I thought they were all fairly non-mysterious large mounds and waterways and so on, not the "complete mystery" part. I'd be interested in reading about this! EDIT: I think we should assemble a reading list for this thread. DrSunshine fucked around with this message at 14:18 on Apr 12, 2020 |
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Apr 12, 2020 14:13
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There are a lot of solutions for the Fermi paradox that aren't the great filter, and those are the ones I find more interesting Like- a lot of the great filter talk seems anthropocentric (or like earth-creature-psychology-centric) which makes sense but also ignores the idea that alien life might perceive the universe in a fundamentally different way The drive for exploration and colonization might just be a thing we do, or maybe there are aliens and they know we exist but it doesn't occur to them to do anything about it- like not in a "we are too lowly" way but in a "they cannot conceive what we are" kind of way I've thought this for a while, since I was a kid and heard the proclamation that we haven't detected EM transmissions that suggest civilization- why would radio communication be a prerequisite? Why not a civilization that transmits over cabling, or light, or some exotic method that they came up with in their infancy but escapes us due to a different psychology or physiology? It seems like (natural and understandable) projection. A lot of people think of alien contact as either being an invasion or a diplomatic love mission, but it seems more likely to me that it'd be something weird and outside our understanding of how sapience works. Something like showing up every few years and depositing a cubic mile of gelatin with the word "LEG" embedded in germanium polymer, and even that doesn't feel weird enough
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Apr 12, 2020 14:50
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Peanut Butler posted:There are a lot of solutions for the Fermi paradox that aren't the great filter, and those are the ones I find more interesting It's all the missing socks out of pairs, isn't it? The loving aliens are stealing my socks. I knew it.
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Apr 12, 2020 15:03
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Piggybacking on that, the actions of another sentient being, an alien sentience, might be so different from our human-centered understanding of the universe as to be unrecognizable as such. We already seem to fail to grasp how dolphins, corvid birds and elephants perceive the universe -- for the longest time, we even failed to recognize their sentience at all, and still to this day treat them like objects. And they are fellow earthlings! Would we recognize some silicon-based crystalline being that communicates by singing in the form of scintillating electromagnetic fields to be sentient, or even alive in the first place?
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Apr 12, 2020 15:04
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DrSunshine posted:Piggybacking on that, the actions of another sentient being, an alien sentience, might be so different from our human-centered understanding of the universe as to be unrecognizable as such. We already seem to fail to grasp how dolphins, corvid birds and elephants perceive the universe -- for the longest time, we even failed to recognize their sentience at all, and still to this day treat them like objects. And they are fellow earthlings! Would we recognize some silicon-based crystalline being that communicates by singing in the form of scintillating electromagnetic fields to be sentient, or even alive in the first place? Not only that but we have almost no way of saying for sure how other people perceive the universe. I mean there are common points, but just because we call something the same name doesn't mean we see something in the same way.
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Apr 12, 2020 15:07
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DrSunshine posted:Would we recognize some silicon-based crystalline being that communicates by singing in the form of scintillating electromagnetic fields to be sentient, or even alive in the first place? maybe stars are all sorta like boltzmann brains and we've been bathing in their transmissions, thriving on them, needing them to live, while being completely incapable of recognizing eons-long patterns of sapience I have no angle of belief here, and it sounds like crazy bullshit, but it seems like non-terrestrial sapience would involve a lot of crazy bullshit
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Apr 12, 2020 15:28
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Peanut Butler posted:maybe stars are all sorta like boltzmann brains and we've been bathing in their transmissions, thriving on them, needing them to live, while being completely incapable of recognizing eons-long patterns of sapience This was in The Star Maker by Olaf Stapledon. It's some trippy stuff, including a war between group minds and sentient stars because the stars realized that the organic sentiences were trying to mess up their great dance, orchestrated over millions of years.
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Apr 12, 2020 15:38
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Raenir Salazar posted:Imagine how silly this would sound. Settlement of the Americas and Australia didn't benefit people in the old world at all until technology got to a point where trade was possible some 12.000 and 80.000 years later respectively. By your own analogy it won't be useful until trade is possible.
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Apr 12, 2020 15:44
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Owling Howl posted:Settlement of the Americas and Australia didn't benefit people in the old world at all until technology got to a point where trade was possible some 12.000 and 80.000 years later respectively. By your own analogy it won't be useful until trade is possible. The use is in continuation of humanity. There are a bunch of different events that could easily take out an entire solar system, or several ones close to eachother. Maybe eventually tech gets good enough that you could predict all of them, but it still seems like a good idea to scatter as far as possible if you're able to. e: Not to mention we already know andromeda is coming at us, so colonizing as much of the galaxy as possible would at least make sure someone survives because that's going to be some wild poo poo. In aabout *looks at wrist hairs* 4 billion years. Nurge fucked around with this message at 15:56 on Apr 12, 2020 |
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Apr 12, 2020 15:54
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StratGoatCom posted:What about the rocket itself, or the chemical practicality of making some parts? Petrochemicals are a scaffold that allow systems to be grown in ways that would be very difficult or impracticable without them. Its doable, but an utter bastard to do without. Let’s assume you need petrochemicals to create a rocket. You know that petrochemicals were not created at the time of the Big Bang, right? Every drop of oil or whiff of natural gas was created by subjecting organic matter to heat and pressure. Organic matter isn’t going away and if you have electricity you can make heat and pressure. This is also assuming it is impossible to create a rocket without petrochemicals - something I have not seen proven. I understand that trying to run a modern 2020 style industrial system seems impossible without petrochemicals, but that’s because our current system was designed around them. If you are starting from scratch and do not have them, you will develop differently. Electricity is the key, and I see no reason why a civilization couldn’t go from water wheels to dams to some mix of wind/solar/fission.
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Apr 12, 2020 16:00
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Peanut Butler posted:I've thought this for a while, since I was a kid and heard the proclamation that we haven't detected EM transmissions that suggest civilization- why would radio communication be a prerequisite? Why not a civilization that transmits over cabling, or light, or some exotic method that they came up with in their infancy but escapes us due to a different psychology or physiology? I don't disagree with you, but the flip-side of this coin is that we can only make (reasonable) postulations based on our own understanding. We know and even sort of understand how EM waves work, but we have no working conception of telepathy, or other 'exotic' phenomena. And on another level, the original (ie. Fermi-period) conversation was more about someone out there actually trying specifically to communicate their existence outwards. The whole idea that aliens will find us via Hitler appearing on a television screen (because those were our first television broadcasts) is silly, those signals won't get very far. So the eggheads sat around and figured out the best way of going about this, using the neutral hydrogen band as your channel and so forth, and yet we can't see anyone transmitting anything that way, what gives? Every living being (even the crystalline ones) must be aware of EM in some way, since that's what stars do. It could be that this doesn't occur to the aliens because they're psychic, and they're trying to beam out really hard WE ARE HERE and yet no one's listening, what gives? But that goes a bit beyond the bounds of what we can rationally discuss. I realize this isn't very satisfying, but here we are. Pun unintended.
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Apr 12, 2020 16:35
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Rappaport posted:It could be that this doesn't occur to the aliens because they're psychic, and they're trying to beam out really hard WE ARE HERE and yet no one's listening, what gives? But that goes a bit beyond the bounds of what we can rationally discuss. I realize this isn't very satisfying, but here we are. Pun unintended. makes sense, yeah- and when you're a scientist working from known principles it gets uncomfortably vague when stepping away from those known quantities and into the realm of pure imagination - but I can't help but see the hard hewing towards the assumption that their psychology would be remotely similar. Beaming out WE ARE HERE might just be an impulse that's extremely rare, like not out of fear of whatever but because it wouldn't occur to an alien sapience to do it (or to intentionally refrain)
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Apr 12, 2020 16:43
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Rappaport posted:I don't disagree with you, but the flip-side of this coin is that we can only make (reasonable) postulations based on our own understanding. We know and even sort of understand how EM waves work, but we have no working conception of telepathy, or other 'exotic' phenomena. Maybe they're using neutrinos to transmit messages. Because of the nature of them there's almost 0 signal degradation over arbitrary distances, but we just don't have the neutrino net or whatever to actually capture enough of them to decipher anything.
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Apr 12, 2020 16:44
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