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Gaius Marius posted:Thread poll. Are aliens real? Whether it is possible to travel through space on that scale without supernatural attainments is another story, although Gadgadasvara appears to have had some sort of sound-powered craft with him.
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Jul 23, 2022 03:38
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Gaius Marius posted:Thread poll. Are aliens real? Seems self-centered to say humans are the only intelligent life in all the wide universe. Either something like what made us could happen or something totally unknown to us could also have happened. The existence of life on other planets and its impact on religions is a fascinating topic to me. How does it impact the Garden of Eden story? In the most literal sense, it should have no bearing on life from other planets but not many people nowadays take it literally. Of course if some alien came down and started talking about ideas similar or identical to a religion we already have, that would be earth-shattering.
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Jul 23, 2022 03:39
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Nessus posted:Yes. Gadgadasvara in the Lotus Sutra is clearly an alien being who explicitly shows up to hear a teaching from Shakyamuni. Gadgadasvara is not described as being remarkable or somehow "the only other planet of intelligence" or anything like that. Gadgadasvara is also described as having attained many virtues and to be in conversation with the Buddha of his (their?) planet, demonstrating that the dharma is essentially universal; suffering is not a condition unique to Homo sapiens. Ohtori Akio posted:I hope there are other sentient lives out there, and I hope they and us both understand selfless love by the time we ever make contact. Odd thing to say. If Ikuhara hadn't seen that UFO Utena wouldn't exist NikkolasKing posted:Seems self-centered to say humans are the only intelligent life in all the wide universe. Either something like what made us could happen or something totally unknown to us could also have happened.
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Jul 23, 2022 04:51
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Gaius Marius posted:Odd thing to say. If Ikuhara hadn't seen that UFO Utena wouldn't exist as an aspiring good quaker, i choose to interpret the ufo as ikuhara receiving divine leading
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Jul 23, 2022 04:55
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Gaius Marius posted:Thread poll. Are aliens real? Let's just say that I think the speed of light is an excellent quarantine. I've watched a lot of Star Trek and whatever but if real aliens actually showed up I'm not too proud to admit I'd be existentially terrified. There's not many ways that could go well and a lot of ways it could go very poorly.
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Jul 23, 2022 05:33
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Gaius Marius posted:These guys get it. However it seems as though most of these challenges are hypothetical or are challenging regional folk-orthodoxies rather than like, core concepts. As for Gadgadasvara here's one that's really going to blow your mind: quote:At that time the Buddha Wisdom of Pure Flower Constellation King told the Bodhisattva Wondrous Sound (Gadgadasvara) "You should not look lightly upon that country or think of it as inferior. Good man, the Saha world is uneven, its earth, stones, and mountains are filled with filth and evil. The Buddha’s body is lowly and small. The Bodhisattvas are also small in shape. Your body is forty-two thousand yojanas in height. My body is six hundred and eighty myriad yojanas in height. Your body is superb and upright, with a hundred thousand myriad blessings and fine and subtle light. Therefore, if you go, do not look lightly upon that country, its Buddha, Bodhisattvas, or lands."
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Jul 23, 2022 05:59
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Winifred Madgers posted:Let's just say that I think the speed of light is an excellent quarantine. I've watched a lot of Star Trek and whatever but if real aliens actually showed up I'm not too proud to admit I'd be existentially terrified. There's not many ways that could go well and a lot of ways it could go very poorly. I agree with you to a point, but I think there are just as many positive or neutral possible outcomes as negative. It feels weird to write that, I don't usually think of myself as an optimist, but a hypothetical alien could arrive in countless ways for countless reasons, and without any real frame of reference I think it's impossible to say that one possibility is more likely than another.
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Jul 23, 2022 08:47
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I hope so! One of the exciting things about it would be to learn other ways of thinking and understanding and it could only improve our understanding of God and the universe to speak with these distant siblings of ours.
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Jul 23, 2022 09:37
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HopperUK posted:I hope so! One of the exciting things about it would be to learn other ways of thinking and understanding and it could only improve our understanding of God and the universe to speak with these distant siblings of ours.
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Jul 23, 2022 10:32
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It seems to me that the very vastness of the cosmos that leads us to suppose for sheer probabilistic reasons that it harbors other life also poses an insurmountable obstacle to ever detecting that other life. We're situated not only in a very small corner of space but also in a very narrow slice of time. Imagine that on two separate occasions over the course of a century, someone starting from an unknown position got lost in the Sahara, the wind blowing their footprints away behind them so they couldn't be followed, and you're one of the two. You don't know if you're the first or the second person, and both your survival and theirs are uncertain. Proportionally speaking, this analogy greatly understates the mutual isolation of life in space. One might say that contact of any sort would be miraculous in itself.
Bongo Bill fucked around with this message at 10:45 on Jul 23, 2022 |
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Jul 23, 2022 10:36
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Nessus posted:Indeed. And if these aliens were, for instance, some sort of enormous space-cloud Bodhisattva, you would have very little to worry about on the old, "dark forest paradox" front. I can assure you -- your risk of discorporation would be very low indeed. It would be absolutely worth it to see an enormous spacecloud Bodhisattva. I would trust such a being to do the right thing. Especially if it looked like the gods used to look in the old Monkey TV show which for a long time was everything I knew about Buddhism.
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Jul 23, 2022 11:48
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Gaius Marius posted:Thread poll. Are aliens real? Is there life other places in the universe? Very probable. I would say a massive YES. Will we ever meet or interact with them? No. Distances and numbers are simply to great.
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Jul 23, 2022 11:58
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Gaius Marius posted:Thread poll. Are aliens real? Captain Stormfield's visit to Heaven by Mark Twain posted:I drifted up to a gate with a swarm of people, and when it was my turn the head clerk says, in a business-like way-- I'm with Mark Twain on this one.
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Jul 23, 2022 14:41
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Apparently this order also excludes people with a bipolar disorder out of hand, I kinda wish he had told me that last time we met when I revealed it instead of waiting five days and getting me up early on a Saturday to tell me. On topic: I think there may be life, but not sentient life.
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Jul 23, 2022 14:53
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^^^ that's rough. I pray you can find a place where you'll fit in. Jesus was an alien, technically.
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Jul 23, 2022 14:57
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Deteriorata posted:^^^ that's rough. I pray you can find a place where you'll fit in. Go on, how was he? 
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Jul 23, 2022 15:12
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HopperUK posted:Go on, how was he? John 8:23
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Jul 23, 2022 15:14
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Deteriorata posted:John 8:23 Fair!
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Jul 23, 2022 15:17
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Worthleast posted:I'm with Mark Twain on this one. I wish I liked Mr. Clemen's writings more, dude had a real thinking mans brain. Praying for Satan is such an obvious thing to realize, but most people would never think to attack any question in such a way to come to that conclusion. The Time Distance "Problem" has always seemed pointless in the way most think of it. Saying the speed of light is X and nothing is able to go faster than that in a vacuum should be the starting point not the end. If one sees an ocean that is impossible to swim across the solution isn't to give up, it's to create a boat. To say we even have an elementary understanding of physics is misplaced, and yet people wield spatial dimensions like a sabre to strike down any who would dream of escaping. The Whole Dark Forest paradigm is incredibly dumb, but I can't imagine people here are that cynical that they'd believe that swill
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Jul 23, 2022 17:57
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Gaius Marius posted:I wish I liked Mr. Clemen's writings more, dude had a real thinking mans brain. Praying for Satan is such an obvious thing to realize, but most people would never think to attack any question in such a way to come to that conclusion. I mean - I studied physics and right now our understanding says that the lightspeed barrier is uncrossable, it can't be exceeded. People who say that aren't killjoys or being unkind. This isn't an arbitrary thing people are saying to be dismissive. You're right about the boat, but boats in this context are 'ways of folding space somehow' or 'hoping we are just wrong about phenomena that have been directly observed'. I hope you're right. I hope there's a way round it. But you don't need to characterise those who've accepted relativity as somehow cruel.
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Jul 23, 2022 18:08
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Gaius Marius posted:Thread poll. Are aliens real? On the grand scale? Yes, absolutely. The universe is too grand in scale for us to be alone in it, and I have nowhere near sufficient hubris to think we are the best God could do. If we would recognize other life as sentient is a better question.
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Jul 23, 2022 18:14
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Gaius Marius posted:Thread poll. Are aliens real? All the various indigenous teachers I've learned from, had tribal legends about 'star people'. Most were emphatic about their alien-ness and cautioned me never to want to meet them, though.
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Jul 23, 2022 19:45
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Gaius Marius posted:The Time Distance "Problem" has always seemed pointless in the way most think of it. Saying the speed of light is X and nothing is able to go faster than that in a vacuum should be the starting point not the end. If one sees an ocean that is impossible to swim across the solution isn't to give up, it's to create a boat. To say we even have an elementary understanding of physics is misplaced, and yet people wield spatial dimensions like a sabre to strike down any who would dream of escaping. It does not seem like a huge projection from where we are now, to hypothesize some sort of AI-powered robot factory which could be sent to another solar system. It would certainly be a very long term research project but we cannot assume other intelligent life forms will have the same life cycle and habits as the domesticated hunam found in suburban habitats throughout Earth. Program the robot factory to find a suitable asteroid and mine it and produce reconnaissance craft to study that solar system and its lifebearing worlds. These craft could well appear to be "alien spacecraft" without actually being piloted by live organic species members. The factory could report back - my understanding is that if there was a fairly narrow beam towards the origin star and it was happening from well outside of the general Earth area we would perhaps be literally unable to detect it. From there, who knows? My own values would incline me to have the robots try to avoid native surveillance to the greatest possible extent, but if obviously and completely made, either deactivate and wipe the disk or broadcast As for 'the dark forest,' it seems like this is a case where the aliens in space, like the cynosures and anthropotorso men of yore, are a way to project out what YOU think about HUMANS... perhaps even yourself. So if you feel that humans are ultimately bitter, cruel, prejudiced, and such, the Dark Forest makes perfect sense.
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Jul 23, 2022 19:46
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my understanding of Dark Forest Theory is that it's part of the plot of a rather fantastical science fiction novel, not a serious cosmological claim. i enjoyed those books quite a lot and they are very thought provoking. i thought the first book was one of the more interesting "first contact" stories i've read, and i really enjoyed where he took it in the other two. the scale of the whole thing is incredible. but still it's very clearly presented as fiction. Dark Forest theory is kind of an interesting intellectual exercise but I don't think Liu was trying to make some kind of declarative statement that this is how civilizations in the universe necessarily actually interact. and I don't think that trilogy was intended to be particularly "realistic" in the first place, there's all kinds of weird and impossible poo poo going on before the Dark Forest even comes up. like the whole "Wallfacer" story in and of itself. not to mention sophons etc. or really trisolaran civilization itself. Earwicker fucked around with this message at 20:01 on Jul 23, 2022 |
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Jul 23, 2022 19:53
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Earwicker posted:my understanding of Dark Forest Theory is that it's part of the plot of a rather fantastical science fiction novel, not a serious cosmological claim.
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Jul 23, 2022 20:17
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Nessus posted:Is it not? That may just be a thing around here, goons being sad and so forth. I mean, it makes sense that as an idea in a fairly recent work of science fiction, it would be seriously considered, and science fiction can raise very important concerns, even if sometimes they don't pan out (ask Larry Niven about the transplant shortage). since we don't have confirmation of alien civilizations even existing in the first place, we have absolutely no historical record of how spacefaring civilizations interact with one another. every element of Dark Forest theory is based entirely on human behavior and how humans civilizations have interacted with one another and with other species' on Earth. it's a compelling idea for a science fiction novel that is ultimately making a statement about humanity, but as a theory for how how actual alien civilizations might behave or interact with one another, i don't think it's a particularly useful model because it's based on nothing other than human mentality. in the beginning of Three Body Problem, Liu makes our own incredibly limited perspective very clear when he brings up the "shooter/farmer" hypotheses. these apply to Dark Forest Theory as much as any other human idea. it's based only on the very small amount we see which, in terms of how civilizations interact, is only our own history. but on top of that, the world portrayed in the books contains so many other fantasy type ideas that it's hard to even say it applies to our history, but rather the history of the fictional human civilization in the books. Earwicker fucked around with this message at 20:33 on Jul 23, 2022 |
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Jul 23, 2022 20:27
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Earwicker posted:since we don't have confirmation of alien civilizations even existing in the first place, we have absolutely no historical record of how spacefaring civilizations interact with one another. every element of Dark Forest theory is based entirely on human behavior and how humans civilizations have interacted with one another and with other species' on Earth. I agree and would like to elaborate with one more assumption of DFT: that the mechanisms of terrestrial empire also work like that in space. What if it turns out that projecting power to other solar systems simply is not economical, let alone economical on the timeframe required to pursue as a matter of policy?
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Jul 23, 2022 20:40
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Ohtori Akio posted:I agree and would like to elaborate with one more assumption of DFT: that the mechanisms of terrestrial empire also work like that in space. What if it turns out that projecting power to other solar systems simply is not economical, let alone economical on the timeframe required to pursue as a matter of policy? At that point, why be a douchebag? At worst, don't answer the phone, and if some helpful alien neighbor is sending you transmissions full of encouraging technical data, just read it and steal the ideas to further your eternal jihad against your posting enemies.
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Jul 23, 2022 20:44
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Thirteen Orphans posted:Apparently this order also excludes people with a bipolar disorder out of hand, I kinda wish he had told me that last time we met when I revealed it instead of waiting five days and getting me up early on a Saturday to tell me. That is upsetting and disappointing to hear. May you wipe the dust off your feet and continue on your way. TOOT BOOT posted:Raises the question of who the flawed, or competent, messengers are though, because there's a good deal of shouting and finger-pointing. It raises this question for me as well. I don't expect that anyone I meet, clergy or lay, to be flawless, nor do I think that having flaws makes one not competent to spread the message of Christ. In fact, it's because I expect that we are all flawed that I think it's important for the messengers to acknowledge our imperfect individual nature and respond by diversifying those who take up that responsibility. I believe there are qualities that would make one almost certainly unfit for priestly responsibilities, but I cannot equate bipolar disorder (especially when it is acknowledged and treated) on the same level as a compulsion to abuse children. quote:Even if the pastor is dumping the collection plate into a white bag marked $$$ and running out the back door, someone will probably defend him. That does remind me that in the Catholic Church since the Second Vatican Council, parishes have pastoral councils made up of lay and clergy to make the day-to-day decisions of the parish. However, this obviously did not prevent the widespread clerical abuse and coverups that happened for decades after the pastoral councils, so more unrooting of the corruption needs to be done, which I believe is a catastrophe that happens because of failures both personal and systemic. Gaius Marius posted:I never really understood the idea that alien challenge the bible at all. Biblical literalness has never really made much sense. To me, it is part of a desire in certain believers for a kind of orderliness and straight-forwardness in approaching sacred text that is related to parochialism and chauvinism. I think for some people, to study scriptures critically is important, meaningful, and feels more-or-less natural to do. For others, it's a deeply upsetting and threatening idea to even attempt, and a dogmatic attitude is vastly preferable. I see this tendency in some acquaintances who to this day demand to believe that the Earth is only several thousand years old as opposed to many million years old, and I saw it as well in a university class that delved into biblical authorship.
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Jul 23, 2022 22:10
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HopperUK posted:I mean - I studied physics and right now our understanding says that the lightspeed barrier is uncrossable, it can't be exceeded. People who say that aren't killjoys or being unkind. This isn't an arbitrary thing people are saying to be dismissive. You're right about the boat, but boats in this context are 'ways of folding space somehow' or 'hoping we are just wrong about phenomena that have been directly observed'. I hope you're right. I hope there's a way round it. But you don't need to characterise those who've accepted relativity as somehow cruel. You're misunderstanding the point. If there's a brick wall in your way you find a way to get around the wall. Go under it, over it, around it, you don't keep trying to walk into it. Nessus posted:While I hope that there will be something found, the speed of light does seem to be holding up. It is quite possible we have just chosen to collectively focus on other matters for a while and that there is a solution, but we cannot assume one will be found in real life. That said, I have actually reasoned out a possible explanation for UFO phenomena which would allow us to be encountering 'real, physical aliens' without violating the speed of light barrier: People get hung up on the idea of having to have men in spacesuits actually riding all the way to Alpha Centauri. Sending Clones, or Robots is just as sufficient as long as they have a human soul.
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Jul 23, 2022 22:25
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Digitizing human brains seems like a big ask. I'm not sure what you'd get out of that. I'd be inclined to say you're essentially creating an identical twin of the original, although you would be doing so from the moment of dupe recording rather than from the moment of embryonic fissure. On the other hand, if your brain-clone is going to 581 Gliese and you will be dead in the ground by the time you hear from them -- or if you are yourself a digital brain copy to begin with -- well, you know. While I'm scampering in Klono's realm, I'll add that I never got the psychological horror of cloning because of the analogy I made above: You're duplicating a human being, just at age 35 (or whatever) rather than at near-birth. Objections to human cloning would to me mostly be on the grounds of waste and the potential issues you're inflicting on the clone, rather than some sort of human Xerox machine idea.
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Jul 23, 2022 22:48
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The unfortunate truth about any kind of clear mental illness-related filter (be it bipolar, any harmful compulsion at all, or something else entirely) is that, as typically implemented, they select for people in denial about their issues and people lying about their issues. Granted, the third-party screenings are intended to help with this - and they are always quite fallible. There's no substitute for caring for your own. Re:cloning: what are the takes of the thread (or your institution, if they've mentioned a stance) on its moral permissibility? I have idly fancied the idea of pursuing that as a path to parenthood some day (if the technology matures), but it'd be kind of an awkward conversation to have with the kid and make clear that I don't expect them to Be Like Me in any way. I assume that human cloning in the general sense would need to become socially acceptable before we could entertain sending clone-laden spacecraft out in to the cold expanse.
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Jul 24, 2022 01:21
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Ohtori Akio posted:Re:cloning: what are the takes of the thread (or your institution, if they've mentioned a stance) on its moral permissibility? I have idly fancied the idea of pursuing that as a path to parenthood some day (if the technology matures), but it'd be kind of an awkward conversation to have with the kid and make clear that I don't expect them to Be Like Me in any way. I assume that human cloning in the general sense would need to become socially acceptable before we could entertain sending clone-laden spacecraft out in to the cold expanse. The Catholic Church considers it completely, unavoidably impermissible; it's a violation of the rights of the resulting embryo, not to mention any embryos destroyed in the process. I'm not sure it's any worse than IVF, though, and that's also always completely unacceptable.
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Jul 24, 2022 01:54
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I have no idea what to think about cloning, it's not something I consider the Bible to have addressed except in a very indirect manner. I would worry about creating a class of human beings with less rights since it seems like decades before it was even possible people were already thinking of morally questionable ways to use human clones.
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Jul 24, 2022 02:31
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TOOT BOOT posted:I have no idea what to think about cloning, it's not something I consider the Bible to have addressed except in a very indirect manner. I would worry about creating a class of human beings with less rights since it seems like decades before it was even possible people were already thinking of morally questionable ways to use human clones. Clones are just people. They are as unique and important as anyone else. They aren't mindless robots. Environmental factors in utero and cultural factors in youth will render them markedly different people than their temporally displaced genetic twin. I don't really understand what the fuss is about.
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Jul 24, 2022 02:52
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Also, if we're talking about this from an explicitly religious perspective, wouldn't clones get souls? The soul is the true essence of a human being is a pretty consistent idea in Christianity from The Bible to now. Although I suppose you might run into some folks who would deny clones even have souls from God given how they are created. I never gave much thought to cloning humans. The only science-religion debate I've thought about lately is the inevitable future of lab grown meat and how this can hopefully kill the evils of the meat industry but it also seems unavoidable that some religious types might oppose it for reasons I can't think of beyond "it's unnatural."
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Jul 24, 2022 03:01
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Deteriorata posted:Clones are just people. They are as unique and important as anyone else. They aren't mindless robots. Environmental factors in utero and cultural factors in youth will render them markedly different people than their temporally displaced genetic twin. Black people and gay people and <xyz> people are also just people and look how that turned out...
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Jul 24, 2022 03:02
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Nessus posted:Digitizing human brains seems like a big ask. I'm not sure what you'd get out of that. I'd be inclined to say you're essentially creating an identical twin of the original, although you would be doing so from the moment of dupe recording rather than from the moment of embryonic fissure. On the other hand, if your brain-clone is going to 581 Gliese and you will be dead in the ground by the time you hear from them -- or if you are yourself a digital brain copy to begin with -- well, you know. Mostly that transporting a Human in the form of Data would be easier than keeping a brain, or worse a whole body on ice for what could be a couple billion years. Deteriorata posted:Clones are just people. They are as unique and important as anyone else. They aren't mindless robots. Environmental factors in utero and cultural factors in youth will render them markedly different people than their temporally displaced genetic twin. The problem if you ignore the Religious questions is that the resulting clone's would be incredibly easy to abuse. If partial organ cloning didn't work, but full cloning would it would not be unlikely to see billionaires growing clones of themselves just for the organs and keeping them in cold storage, under sedation, or lobotomized full time. From there you can easily move into a situation similar to Capek's play. Where we've created a subservient set of biological robots, whose only goal is to serve humanity. Sooner rather than later we need establishment of full rights for cloned humanity before someone gets ahead of it and starts taking advantage.
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Jul 24, 2022 03:11
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Once you're talking about digitising a mind and letting it take centuries to get anywhere I think we're talking about something far removed from the kind of interstellar travel and communication people think of. I love science fiction too, you know? My point was that you characterised people who believe that the barriers are insurmountable as gleeful killjoys smacking dreams down and it's not so. I mean come down to it I believe in God. I'm not out here all Ms Rationality. I don't think we need to be unkind about other people's answers to the original question.
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Jul 24, 2022 03:12
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Gaius Marius posted:Mostly that transporting a Human in the form of Data would be easier than keeping a brain, or worse a whole body on ice for what could be a couple billion years. I suspect the legal default would be personhood for all full clones. Legal wrangling would probably have to take place before anything remotely similar to a full body is allowed to be industrialized, and frankly the institutional churches are already on top of this legal conversation.
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Jul 24, 2022 03:14
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