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I still think that the Fermi Paradox "solution" is simply that everything is so insanely far away + we haven't been looking for all that long yet. There may not be any hyperadvanced type 3 civilizations out there, but the sheer scale of the universe means that life intelligent enough to make a civilization has almost certainly happened more than one time.
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Jul 28, 2022 21:33
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mediaphage posted:i think you’re correct. we often see discussion of kessler syndrome as trapping us on the planet and i think that’s largely a myth Kessler syndrome came from a time were we had an incomplete picture of the density in the thermo- and exosphere Things in higher orbits can last a long time without significant drag but by the inverse square law there is insignificant chance of contact between objects there
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Jul 28, 2022 21:41
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America Inc. posted:Everyone here knows about the Fermi Paradox right? The creator of the concept of the Great Filter, Robin Hanson, turned that paradox on its head with the idea of "Grabby Aliens": Robin Hanson, huh?
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Jul 28, 2022 21:45
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Queering Wheel posted:I still think that the Fermi Paradox "solution" is simply that everything is so insanely far away + we haven't been looking for all that long yet. There may not be any hyperadvanced type 3 civilizations out there, but the sheer scale of the universe means that life intelligent enough to make a civilization has almost certainly happened more than one time. There's a paper linked earlier in the thread that presents a very intriguing solution. Basically there can be thousands of civilizations and successor civilizations out there, but due to the time between colonization or re-colonization and the distances between stars its possible for large gaps to form between waves of civilizational migration. So its possible we exist in a "dead space" of such a civilizational gap where the density of civilizations is small enough that we aren't able to interact or detect signs of any. It's a twist on the assertion that a civilization that spreads across the galaxy might not stay as a consistent polity the entire way and balkanizes and splits as offshoots have their own offshoots and that a civilization that spreads von neumann probe style across the galaxy might not retain every such colony at all times but many may in fact die out and take time to be re-settled by another offshoot.
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Jul 28, 2022 22:00
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drat wtf  . I admit that these discussions speculating about big concepts like AI or space colonization have a built-in assumption about the stability and continued functioning of capitalism.As well as that people who spend a lot of time thinking about these far-off things are likely to be weird, although that doesn't excuse his actions in the slightest.
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Jul 28, 2022 22:20
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Libertarian stemlord turns out to be racist and sexist edgelord is a tale so old that we can't possibly be one of the early civilizations.
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Jul 28, 2022 23:36
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Generally I'm wary of studies that seem primarily grounded on statistics and imagination
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Jul 28, 2022 23:49
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It's a fun thought experiment, but it's limited in its predictive power and ultimately unfalsifiable with current technology.
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Jul 28, 2022 23:50
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America Inc. posted:built-in assumption about the stability and continued functioning of capitalism. I assert that this is actually pretty reasonable. Because capitalism fundamentally doesn't care about efficiency. It cares about profit and exploitation; and acts as a sort of self-replicating virus, a sort of cellular automata following basic rules. From the Communist Manifesto: quote:The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the entire surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connexions everywhere. quote:The bourgeoisie, by the rapid improvement of all instruments of production, by the immensely facilitated means of communication, draws all, even the most barbarian, nations into civilisation. The cheap prices of commodities are the heavy artillery with which it batters down all Chinese walls, with which it forces the barbarians’ intensely obstinate hatred of foreigners to capitulate. It compels all nations, on pain of extinction, to adopt the bourgeois mode of production; it compels them to introduce what it calls civilisation into their midst, i.e., to become bourgeois themselves. In one word, it creates a world after its own image. quote:The bourgeoisie keeps more and more doing away with the scattered state of the population, of the means of production, and of property. It has agglomerated population, centralised the means of production, and has concentrated property in a few hands. The necessary consequence of this was political centralisation. Independent, or but loosely connected provinces, with separate interests, laws, governments, and systems of taxation, became lumped together into one nation, with one government, one code of laws, one national class-interest, one frontier, and one customs-tariff. quote:A similar movement is going on before our own eyes. Modern bourgeois society, with its relations of production, of exchange and of property, a society that has conjured up such gigantic means of production and of exchange, is like the sorcerer who is no longer able to control the powers of the nether world whom he has called up by his spells. For many a decade past the history of industry and commerce is but the history of the revolt of modern productive forces against modern conditions of production, against the property relations that are the conditions for the existence of the bourgeois and of its rule. It is enough to mention the commercial crises that by their periodical return put the existence of the entire bourgeois society on its trial, each time more threateningly. In these crises, a great part not only of the existing products, but also of the previously created productive forces, are periodically destroyed. In these crises, there breaks out an epidemic that, in all earlier epochs, would have seemed an absurdity — the epidemic of over-production. Society suddenly finds itself put back into a state of momentary barbarism; it appears as if a famine, a universal war of devastation, had cut off the supply of every means of subsistence; industry and commerce seem to be destroyed; and why? Because there is too much civilisation, too much means of subsistence, too much industry, too much commerce. The productive forces at the disposal of society no longer tend to further the development of the conditions of bourgeois property; on the contrary, they have become too powerful for these conditions, by which they are fettered, and so soon as they overcome these fetters, they bring disorder into the whole of bourgeois society, endanger the existence of bourgeois property. The conditions of bourgeois society are too narrow to comprise the wealth created by them. And how does the bourgeoisie get over these crises? On the one hand by enforced destruction of a mass of productive forces; on the other, by the conquest of new markets, and by the more thorough exploitation of the old ones. That is to say, by paving the way for more extensive and more destructive crises, and by diminishing the means whereby crises are prevented. It is thus, not only likely, but inevitable that capitalism will seek to find new markets and new sources of resources to create new modes of production to destroy past modes of production on Earth for new modes of production in hypothetical space colonies; regardless of its economic sense; because the bourgeoisie must do so in order to get over the crisis of overproduction by creating for itself new markets for their surplus production. An example of this is companies like Sony trying to force the creation of a market for NFT's despite it making zero sense to do so; because it allows them to create a new mode of production for reach to exploit.
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Jul 29, 2022 00:09
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Queering Wheel posted:I still think that the Fermi Paradox "solution" is simply that everything is so insanely far away + we haven't been looking for all that long yet. There may not be any hyperadvanced type 3 civilizations out there, but the sheer scale of the universe means that life intelligent enough to make a civilization has almost certainly happened more than one time. It's fundamentally flawed to base the Fermi Paradox on the totality of the universe since the fraction of the universe we can observe let alone can reasonably expect to be able to communicate with is tiny in relative terms. The question is if there's other technological civilizations in the Milky Way, at this time, with enough resources to have developed space programs and who tried to make contact in a way we can detect. That's not quite as certain. .
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Jul 29, 2022 00:16
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Queering Wheel posted:I still think that the Fermi Paradox "solution" is simply that everything is so insanely far away + we haven't been looking for all that long yet. There may not be any hyperadvanced type 3 civilizations out there, but the sheer scale of the universe means that life intelligent enough to make a civilization has almost certainly happened more than one time. We don’t even know what we’re looking for, really. Likely we won’t know how to really search for civilizations until we find one. Then we might even realize we had already detected some but misunderstood what we were looking at. We look for radio messages sent between stars because that’s what we’re able to detect right now, but there’s no reason to expect that civilizations do that, or do it regularly enough to be overheard by us when we happen to pass in front of one. We don’t do it, except sometimes for demonstration purposes for ourselves.
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Jul 29, 2022 14:52
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Re: the grabby aliens theory - had never heard of this Robert Miles guy; I had heard a similar thesis put forward by Isaac Arthur on YT also, spread out over several of his videos. There's a significant problem that's recently come up with it, which I'll get to in the next paragraph. The underlying logic here is basically that the reason we don't see any aliens is because if aliens ever appeared, we wouldn't have; they would, inevitably, spread out and use up all the available matter and energy around them, including other planets. While this would take tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, or even millions of years, that isn't actually that much time compared to how long evolution takes to produce intelligent life. They would spread out and 'grab' every planet that would have eventually produced intelligent life natively. That theory rests on what was, until recently, taken as a pretty firm assertion - that Earth wasn't so much the best type of planet to produce intelligent life, or even the best to produce life as we know it; it's only that Earth is in a category that can produce it earliest. (The better candidate planets are one mass category higher, orbiting stars one mass category lower. Earth's life-friendly time window runs about 4-5 billion years. A planet matching the earlier two criteria could have 50-100 billion years to harbor life, and may not need the carefully orchestrated setup of Earth's magnetic field, the Moon, and Jupiter to protect it from radiation and meteor impacts, respectfully. It's just those planets take a lot longer to cool off.) The issue is that more recent surveys of the Sun-like stars in the habitable zone of our galaxy show that the average age of Sun-like stars in the life zone is actually one billion years older than the Sun - meaning Earth is almost certainly not, in fact, among the earliest candidate among life-friendly worlds. Re: 'we don't know what we're looking for' life-wise; we kind of do. We don't have to know what life looks like or what the chemical and biological processes involved are, to know that they're going to want to use and store energy, and they're going to want to move around. If they're not doing those things, they're not going to last over astronomical timescales. We don't have to look for the specific signs of living things, rather we can look for technosignatures - signs of technology used at scale. Any means of propulsion that gets you moving to even 20% of lightspeed is going to be utterly impossible to hide, particularly if you're doing it at scale and lots of ships are coming and going. Similarly, if you want to harness and store stupidly large amounts of energy, you're going to need to build very large structures to do it - things that would be similarly impossible to hide. Their biology and chemistry may be unique and alien to us, but there's only so many tools physics allows for in space. If there were a single another civilization that wasn't gigantic and obvious even within 500 light-years of us, then think about that statistically. How many 500-light year bubbles can you fit in the galactic habitable zone of just our galaxy? Then scale that our over the few billion years before now that life was possible in our universe. Factor in about 10-100 million years for any given single group of actors to spread out over the whole galaxy. (100 million years is an incredibly conservative estimate; it assumes they only ever get to 5-10% lightspeed, that each colony will be a completely separate civilization from the parent civilization, that only ~10% of them will ever go on to create their own colonies, and it takes tens of thousands of years before each one reaches the point where they begin spreading out themselves.) When you look at the amount of space and time involved, even if intelligent species have a spectacularly low survival rate - say, only 1% make it to interstellar expansion, and of those, only 1% ever get to the point that they build the hyper-obvious stuff like Dyson swarms or propulsion laser relay networks, stuff we could detect from half the galaxy away - that not only would the evidence be everywhere, but we ourselves wouldn't be here to see it. The Earth long ago would have been either colonized, repurposed, or disassembled by one wave or another of aliens. Only one group of them, at a single point in their history, would have had to have the idea to do that for us to never exist at all. The only real conclusion we can draw based on available facts is that there's almost certainly no intelligent aliens in our galaxy, or probably in our light cone - and that by our existence now, we're the likely reason that no other aliens will ever look up and wonder where the aliens are. We'll bulldoze all their planets and turn them into VR hentai casinos a billion years before they evolve. Coldbird fucked around with this message at 04:28 on Jul 30, 2022 |
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Jul 30, 2022 04:24
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I think the "solution" to the fermi paradox is either: 1) We are lacking crucial information for coming up with a sensible answer. Physics has not yet reconciled relativity and quantum field theory, we don't know what dark matter is, we don't know what dark energy is. Our models of the universe are likely incomplete. We also don't have a theory of abiogenesis, or any data points aside from Earth to look at when answering biosphere sized questions. Once we reconcile all of these things; the answer will be clearer. 2) It's hideously unlikely for a technological civilization to develop. If a meteor hit the chimpanzee-human last common ancestor population and wiped them all out, there's no reason to think a species would evolve on Earth later and develop civilization. It could be a planet full of vibrant, but not technological life up until the Sun snuffs it out a billion years from now. but I'd lean towards #1 unwantedplatypus fucked around with this message at 04:53 on Jul 30, 2022 |
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Jul 30, 2022 04:50
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That’s just the question though: what makes you so sure that aliens will build megastructures or travel at 20% of C? We just assume that because we don’t know what else to look for and we think we’ll want to do those things, but maybe it never becomes feasible, or it’s never necessary, or they have some perfect way of capturing and using the heat their mega-engineering. There’s a lot we don’t know about what’s possible or efficient for a civilization, partially because there are some fundamental things about physics and the nature of the universe that we don’t yet understand that, if we did understand them, might inform our assumptions about what civilizations will do.
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Jul 30, 2022 05:04
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I AM GRANDO posted:That’s just the question though: what makes you so sure that aliens will build megastructures or travel at 20% of C? We just assume that because we don’t know what else to look for and we think we’ll want to do those things, but maybe it never becomes feasible, or it’s never necessary, or they have some perfect way of capturing and using the heat their mega-engineering. There’s a lot we don’t know about what’s possible or efficient for a civilization, partially because there are some fundamental things about physics and the nature of the universe that we don’t yet understand that, if we did understand them, might inform our assumptions about what civilizations will do. As in, plural - many, many, multiple distinct alien civilizations, over untold millions and billions of years, across utterly enormous numbers of stars, planets, galaxies. If there's even one other civilization in our galaxy - and we think only 5-10% of galaxies ever even have a 'life zone' that will produce rocky planets like Earth - then that still means that among the stars and galaxies we can see, there would still have to be millions and millions of them, and at any given point in the last 1 to 5 billion years, there would be a roughly equal number. All of them working with the same physics, roughly the same matter and energy tools available to them - and all of them making the same exact choice, to never do anything obvious. I'm not denying that there may be technologies and incentives for spaceborne civilizations that we do not yet understood and can't account for, which would cause advanced civilizations to behave differently than our expectations. There almost certainly are! Even when you suppose that there's some unknown factors which incentivize behavior different than our expectations - maybe they're entirely focused on instead building relatively small habitats in deep space, which we'd be unlikely to see. Or maybe there's some technology as yet undiscovered that lets you generate unlimited energy trivially, so there's no need to try and harness as much energy as possible from stars. The problem is that you have to assume that every single one of these alien civilizations behaved this way. All of them. Over the entire history of the cosmos. Every planet, star, and even other galaxies - if they grew to sufficient scale, then yes, we'd be able to detect a civilization that Dyson'ed up their entire galaxy, and we could see it from a billion light-years away. None of them ever decided to make a nearby black hole do pirouettes because of some kind of inside joke, or relocate a star from here to there. And you have to assume this of not only each and every civilization, but every single group or subculture or breakaway faction among them also followed the same script. If the incentive to do things low-key was so strong than 99.9% of alien civilizations that depart their planet, or home gas cluster or whatever the hell, all stay low-key, then that still leaves billions of civilizations that would decide to do the Big Obvious stuff - and unless they are all yet to come, most of those events would have occurred a billion years ago or more.
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Jul 30, 2022 05:29
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A major problem with the idea that we are in a temporary dead zone is that it relies on us being entirely unable to detect any kind of fossil or archeological evidence of prior civilisations. Considering that we are able to gather evidence of even microscopic life from billions of years ago, plus any mineralogical changes are evidenced in the geological strata, it seems pretty implausible to me that any kind of wide ranging technological civilisation would be entirely invisible. The whole thing smacks of someone fiddling with numbers and not bothering to check with people who would know how to check your answers.
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Jul 30, 2022 08:25
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Has our species in general lost it's understanding of what "looking at the night sky" meant for people 400 years ago With light pollution you never can see much. Im taking a trip to a big sur because I want to see the loving galaxy.
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Jul 30, 2022 15:51
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To play devil's advocate there's a bit of begging the question to the idea that if such alien civilizations existed signs of their civilization would be obvious because they would build megastructures; because the idea that it would be obvious to build megastructures that would be obvious to see is something we've come up with. Maybe it turns out to not be necessary for a interstellar civilization to make dyson swarms because fusion complexes provide enough power and mining the crust of worlds as opposed to Nick Land-esque ideas of completely Galactus'ing/Uniceron'ing a world going ON NOM NOM as being inevitable. Space structures for both colonization and commerce and habitation don't have to be noticable huge; a O'Neill Cylinder the size of New Jersey is probably not going to be very visible to us 500 LY away. "Megastructures" as we imagine them to be might not be the case, and instead be massively scaled down or turn out to not be something we can easily distinguish from other space stuff that we assume is space stuff because what's our frame of reference to distinguish a sun being blanketed with mirrors from a sun being covered by a dust cloud? Additionally a civilization doesn't need to reach some appreciable fraction of C; there's many "hard" scifi ways of spreading out. Biological spores drifting through deep space probably would look very cold. Using an asteroid as a big rock and then flinging it out of the solar system is something we can kinda imagine what with that recent ice asteroid with the weird trajectory. I could imagine over a million years being able to grab basically every free rock in a system, coating it with ice, placing a von neumann probe in the middle and then give it a push towards the sun where gravity does the rest. I can think of ways of which to "on a energy budget" try to colonize the galaxy that is probably vastly slower, slow enough to maybe not result in Earth being stripped bare a million years ago; and wouldn't burn out our telescopes like someone slid the contrast bar to max in photoshop. And in some subsets it isn't obvious to me that we could dismiss the possibility that life as we know it on Earth is thanks to some alien civilization flinging rocks with proteins frozen in ice over millions of years yeeting them in every direction hoping at least one lands on a random world in the habitable zone and just independently evolve life; we might not look at all like those original aliens but from their point of view, if their ways of thinking are alien enough maybe it makes sense to them to do so. A lesser version of that certain makes sense to me and isn't unprecedented in works like All Tomorrow's. How could we distinguish primitive proteins as being native to Earth's chemistry and arriving there via comet? It would be fairly less destructive and play into the ancient astronaughts idea. Bug Squash posted:A major problem with the idea that we are in a temporary dead zone is that it relies on us being entirely unable to detect any kind of fossil or archeological evidence of prior civilisations. Considering that we are able to gather evidence of even microscopic life from billions of years ago, plus any mineralogical changes are evidenced in the geological strata, it seems pretty implausible to me that any kind of wide ranging technological civilisation would be entirely invisible. The whole thing smacks of someone fiddling with numbers and not bothering to check with people who would know how to check your answers. The dead zone idea I don't think insists on the idea of a precoursor ancient alien civilization pre-existing on Earth; only that Earth somehow was missed or never got into range of a colonizing species; within 500 LY of us if it is some kind of dead zone then an alien species that used to exist near us but died out we wouldn't be able to figure out from just our telescopes; and any signs might looks like things we've internalized as how things are. For example suppose Earth was once some kind of barren rock and Venus was a vibrant life supporting planet; the aliens settled Venus and were working on terraforming Earth with self replicating pond scum and then whoops they destroyed themselves while for a hundred million years the terraforming of Earth continued without oversight and thus was able to vary wildly from original initial spec. How sure are we really basically of how Earth was formed; maybe they were the ones that crashed two worlds together to make a moon and we'd never know. e: and I forgot as well but at least in the Kurzgesagt video on the topic, they claim we probably wouldn't be able to know for sure if a alien civilization existed on Earth millions of years ago as long as it probably never got to the industrial level of civilization. So an alien civilization that colonized by sending slow von neumann probes with DNA stored onboard that simply cloned new colonists who otherwise had to reinvent everything could have maybe gotten to a certain level of development but then completely died out during one of the big extinction events. If they were mainly congregated somewhere that's now say at the bottom of the ocean its possible we wouldn't see any signs today if it was millions of years ago. Raenir Salazar fucked around with this message at 16:16 on Jul 30, 2022 |
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Jul 30, 2022 16:11
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I think the assumption is that an alien civilization would undergo exponential growth in resource usage, if not population; and thus would change their home systems in such a way as to extract the resources they need as an inevitable result of that. Yes perhaps we in the future or a hypothetical independent alien civilization would not undergo exponential growth; but this would be in contrast to all of nature and human history so far. I realize population growth is slowing, but even a stagnant or shrinking population can be growing the amount of resources it consumes and the outputs it produces. I'm going to indulge in some fun but baseless speculation: Perhaps there's a resource bottleneck that arises much sooner than any sort of energy bottleneck. If a space-faring civilization is limited in its growth, it might not grow to the size and productive power necessary to make the sort of large-scale changes that would be observable to us. Like let's say the carrying capacity of the solar system at FALGSC standards is 100 billion humans because there's only enough unobtanium for that. A civilization that large probably wouldn't be making a dyson sphere. Nor would any daughter colonies since they would have the same limitation. Perhaps a certain concentration of heavier elements are important to the development of technological civilization. Since heavier elements are formed from events like supernovae or star collisions, and because non-radioactive heavier elements are conserved over time; the concentration of heavier elements rises with the age of the universe. Therefore, the further back in time you look, the even less likely a civilization is to have developed. There may also be an uneven distribution because of this, with the denser regions of the universe being better ground for such civilizations to arise.
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Jul 30, 2022 16:53
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Coldbird posted:If there's even one other civilization in our galaxy - and we think only 5-10% of galaxies ever even have a 'life zone' that will produce rocky planets like Earth Huh? Where did you get this idea from?
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Jul 30, 2022 18:12
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They're probably mistaking metaliicity of a given star in certain regions with the ability to form rocky planets. Rocky planets exist throughout the galaxy, and while there is probably some variety to their distribution, they are not uncommon in any region of the galaxy.
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Jul 30, 2022 18:16
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Raenir Salazar posted:I can think of ways of which to "on a energy budget" try to colonize the galaxy that is probably vastly slower, slow enough to maybe not result in Earth being stripped bare a million years ago; and wouldn't burn out our telescopes like someone slid the contrast bar to max in photoshop. That you can think of other ways it might be done is missing Coldbird's point entirely. Their point is that you have to assume that none of the potentially billions of civilizations in the entire history of the universe ever even once produced something detectable. Not once, ever. The very notion that there should be other technological life in the universe is based on the idea that the universe is so big that even things that barely ever happen should happen all the time. So take that same notion and apply it to how the civilizations may have developed, and even if it's exceedingly rare for them to develop megastructures that would be clearly visible, in a universe this vast it still should have happened all the time. Otherwise, you're accepting a premise only to immediately reject the very same premise just for the purposes of coming to the conclusion you prefer.
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Jul 31, 2022 04:26
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eXXon posted:Huh? Where did you get this idea from? I could have sworn it was quoted as from the PhD thesis a few months ago, but now I can't seem to rustle up the article anywhere. The basic argument was that many galaxies are little irregular ones orbiting much bigger galaxies; they're often in the process of getting disrupted, causing all kinds of bad things like supernova waves, life-zone stars flying near the core and getting planets yanked off or fried, or their irregular and disrupted shapes mean a much higher percentage of stars form in the disrupted outskirts where terrestrial planets wouldn't likely show up at all because the hydrogen/helium/metal ratios are wrong.
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Jul 31, 2022 05:09
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You folks might enjoy Niven's A World of Ptavvs given recent topics, although it comes with the usual caveats of "Larry Niven, a horny sci fi author working in the 60s and 70s mostly, wrote it." I don't recall any major grotesqueries in it that aren't part of the actual story, though.
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Jul 31, 2022 05:19
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ashpanash posted:That you can think of other ways it might be done is missing Coldbird's point entirely. Their point is that you have to assume that none of the potentially billions of civilizations in the entire history of the universe ever even once produced something detectable. Not once, ever. The very notion that there should be other technological life in the universe is based on the idea that the universe is so big that even things that barely ever happen should happen all the time. So take that same notion and apply it to how the civilizations may have developed, and even if it's exceedingly rare for them to develop megastructures that would be clearly visible, in a universe this vast it still should have happened all the time. Otherwise, you're accepting a premise only to immediately reject the very same premise just for the purposes of coming to the conclusion you prefer. Except we haven't surveyed enough of the universe in enough detail to have anything remotely like a representative sample so there's no data to draw any conclusions from.
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Jul 31, 2022 06:39
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Owling Howl posted:Except we haven't surveyed enough of the universe in enough detail to have anything remotely like a representative sample so there's no data to draw any conclusions from. I disagree. We've done more than enough large-scale mapping and full-sky surveys that if anything truly odd were to appear, we'd know about it. When something even looks a little funky, we notice very quickly. Look at all of the excitement around Tabby's star, as an example. And also, again, with the numbers we're talking about, it should only take a fraction of a fraction of our observations to see obvious evidence, and we should see it everywhere, in all directions, regularly.
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Jul 31, 2022 06:53
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ashpanash posted:I disagree. We've done more than enough large-scale mapping and full-sky surveys that if anything truly odd were to appear, we'd know about it. When something even looks a little funky, we notice very quickly. Look at all of the excitement around Tabby's star, as an example. And also, again, with the numbers we're talking about, it should only take a fraction of a fraction of our observations to see obvious evidence, and we should see it everywhere, in all directions, regularly. Tabby's Star is in the Milky Way and not particularly far away. The argument is that the Universe is so vast that even rare events can happen many times. Sure - we know of at least 100 billion galaxies so if detectable megastructures occur in 1 in a million galaxies that would qualify as "many". We have not in any way looked closely enough at 1 million galaxies to conclude with certainty that there are no megastructures in any of them. We do not even have the tools to do it even if we have had the time. What would it even require to observe ie Dyson spheres in a galaxy a mere 1 million ly away?
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Jul 31, 2022 08:25
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Owling Howl posted:Tabby's Star is in the Milky Way and not particularly far away. The argument is that the Universe is so vast that even rare events can happen many times. Sure - we know of at least 100 billion galaxies so if detectable megastructures occur in 1 in a million galaxies that would qualify as "many". We have not in any way looked closely enough at 1 million galaxies to conclude with certainty that there are no megastructures in any of them. We do not even have the tools to do it even if we have had the time. What would it even require to observe ie Dyson spheres in a galaxy a mere 1 million ly away? Well, it's not my field, but I'm sure the answer wouldn't be "it should look indistinguishable from natural processes." Regardless, if the argument is such that we shouldn't expect to see anything for potentially millions of lightyears then I think we should reexamine some assumptions, because that shoots the original premise all to hell.
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Jul 31, 2022 09:23
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ashpanash posted:Well, it's not my field, but I'm sure the answer wouldn't be "it should look indistinguishable from natural processes." I hope I haven't lost the gist of this conversation, but if we're talking about stereotypical megastructures like a Dyson sphere, I'm not sure how detectable those would be, or differentiable from a natural process to a degree of any certainty. First of all, making a "solid" Dyson sphere seems like a stupidly weird exercise in materials science and engineering for little extra gain. (Also a lot of sci-fi Dyson sphere ideas seem to involve gravity generators somehow which are sci-fi as far as I know, but I'm not a GR dude) So if a civilization sufficiently far away just made a network of power collector thingamabobs, how reliably could we deduce that this is different from a star inside a dust cloud? Presumably the alien engineers would also try to collimate their power transfer beams since the point of the exercise is to, well, collect power!, so the leakage might not even look like an abnormally active star in the radio frequencies.  (I guess someone could make half a Dyson sphere, but a) why 2) how would you keep it from escaping due to radiation pressure and a host of other things, it sounds like a nightmare [moreso than a 'whole' Dyson sphere]!)And ringworlds require extremely sci-fi poo poo, scrith's tensile strength is supposed to be around the strong nuclear interaction and good luck with making an object out of stuff like that. But let's suppose the magic stuff exists, how would you see a ringworld on a light curve? It's not periodically eclipsing the star, it's a ring around it. Oumuamua turned out to (most likely) be a shard of a big Pluto variant, but detecting a Rama-like thing is excepting a whole lot more out of an alien civ than "just" trying to collect as much energy and material from their own solar system. I'm probably missing some other "obvious" things somealien would conceivably build that we could detect, but given how faint humanity's paw-print on the galaxy has been so far, it doesn't seem immediately obvious to me that absence of evidence is therefore immediately evidence of absence. I am willing to entertain the idea that FTL is ruled out by the (apparent) lack of travelers in time and space, but things like generation ships for some vague ideas of colonization and "spreading our fate to the stars" seem like cultural artefacts more than some grand biological imperatives.
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Jul 31, 2022 11:07
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Rappaport posted:I hope I haven't lost the gist of this conversation, but if we're talking about stereotypical megastructures like a Dyson sphere, I'm not sure how detectable those would be, or differentiable from a natural process to a degree of any certainty. Sure. My point is, if we look out and everything is indistinguishable from natural processes, the immediate conclusion shouldn’t be that there’s almost certainly artificial stuff there but it’s too well hidden. It seems to me that it’s better to lean into the idea that what we’re seeing is indicative of what’s actually there, instead of assuming that our instruments are just never good enough to see that which we’d prefer to see.
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Jul 31, 2022 11:30
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ashpanash posted:Sure. My point is, if we look out and everything is indistinguishable from natural processes, the immediate conclusion shouldn’t be that there’s almost certainly artificial stuff there but it’s too well hidden. It seems to me that it’s better to lean into the idea that what we’re seeing is indicative of what’s actually there, instead of assuming that our instruments are just never good enough to see that which we’d prefer to see. Yeah, that's fine. And either way, one is basically reduced to just tweaking the variables in their Drake equation (or whatever else weirdness they're using) to simulate the optimal size of observational spheres for likelyhood of observation or contact. While the new space telescope is cool and all, I don't think we have enough time series data from a large enough Sol-centric sphere to really tweak our models in one way or the other. If we're assuming billion-year-old civilizations with some undeterminable/unimaginable motivation for signalling their presence to the cosmos at large, I still think their best bet would be trying to just send a clearly artificial signal on several different modalities, but as noted upstream in the thread, our civilization at the moment considers even the relatively cheap means at our technological disposal as silly, frivolous and/or hopeless. Do we need a Horatio variable for our Drake equation? 
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Jul 31, 2022 11:42
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ashpanash posted:Sure. My point is, if we look out and everything is indistinguishable from natural processes, the immediate conclusion shouldn’t be that there’s almost certainly artificial stuff there but it’s too well hidden. It seems to me that it’s better to lean into the idea that what we’re seeing is indicative of what’s actually there, instead of assuming that our instruments are just never good enough to see that which we’d prefer to see.
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Jul 31, 2022 13:19
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ashpanash posted:Sure. My point is, if we look out and everything is indistinguishable from natural processes, the immediate conclusion shouldn’t be that there’s almost certainly artificial stuff there but it’s too well hidden. It seems to me that it’s better to lean into the idea that what we’re seeing is indicative of what’s actually there, instead of assuming that our instruments are just never good enough to see that which we’d prefer to see. I think we're losing track of the dark forest for the trees here a little; which is "can there be some compromise solutions to the Fermi Paradox, that work counter intuitively to what the math and probability space implies?" So I'm not sure what point there is to lean into some idea or more into another idea; I'm a little confused by that, it seems more likely to me that we (humanity) should think about many possibilities as possible to be more likely to be right as we collect more data. I think its more along the lines of acknowledging that maybe there is something we yet don't know, and see where that takes us. ashpanash posted:That you can think of other ways it might be done is missing Coldbird's point entirely. Their point is that you have to assume that none of the potentially billions of civilizations in the entire history of the universe ever even once produced something detectable. Not once, ever. The very notion that there should be other technological life in the universe is based on the idea that the universe is so big that even things that barely ever happen should happen all the time. So take that same notion and apply it to how the civilizations may have developed, and even if it's exceedingly rare for them to develop megastructures that would be clearly visible, in a universe this vast it still should have happened all the time. Otherwise, you're accepting a premise only to immediately reject the very same premise just for the purposes of coming to the conclusion you prefer. So to go back to this, first usually when I think when people present this aspect of the Fermi Paradox/Great Filter/Apes or Angels Hypothesis, its usually just the one civilization. At least in the context of our galaxy, but given 100 million years before us as the full range of time in which a civilization could have come to exist; just one civilization would have had enough to spread to every corner of the galaxy. Or to be precise, accounting for the fact that most civilizations seem probably likely to fail at various stages i.e nuclear war, climate change, nanomachines, never evolving intelligence in the first place, etc that 100 million years is plenty of time for at least one civilization to successfully begin the process of colonizing other planets, and from there no matter how slow this process, is enough time to cover the whole galaxy. Maybe you mean across the whole universe but I feel like between stuff outside of our "light cone" that we can never see or interact with, and stuff being just so far away that I'm not really sure how we can be confident we're seeing anything artificial, I think the conclusions we (this thread) can attempt to draw would be more informed by limiting our scope to just the milky way. But anyways we find this maybe wraps back around to your premise because assuming our Great Old First Ones Civilization splits into successor civilization with each colonized world due to light speed communication delay/lag, over a million years we probably end up with hundreds of thousands to millions of civilizations; with considering cultural and linguistic drift and perhaps even genetic drift ala All Tomorrows as this civilization spreads out and finds new niches on new worlds. At this point we have some points to raise and look at. (1) Are they completely alien to us such that they maintain a consistency across the galaxy where we almost certainly couldn't without FTL communication? In which case it may be possible if they are a low-emitting "civilization" that they stay low emitting. Because it's just "one" civilization that's spread out but maintaining an impossible level of cohesion and decision making across the cosmos. (2) Are they similar enough to us that we can be certain of genetic and cultural drift? In which case they will disintegrate into distinct entities within centuries of colonization of new worlds and we wrap back around to the idea of millions or maybe even billions of civilizations as you wrote originally. (2a): Here we explore the idea that do we assume they would make the same choices with the same physics and same chemistry as all the other successors and if it turns out that the physics, material sciences and chemistry is such that there is actually no sane way to build a megastructure that's particularly detectable none of them do? Basically how can we be sure that at least 1 will do something silly enough to be noticable? What if doing so gets them ganged up on? If there's so many civilizations that there's a rival competitor civilization within 100 to 500 LY that isn't too long to chuck some hyperrelativistic rocks at you and maybe completely disappear from our ability, a million years later on, to look back and see them? (2B best girl): Alright so we're looking at a very large number of distinct entities in the Milky Way, they due to linguistic, cultural, and genetic drift are as alien to each other as a crab is alien to an ant. They might be operating on the same physics as each other but will make different technological decisions as they enter into the interplanetary phase. Here is where it gets harder to imagine not a single one over 200 million years being detectable but I do have some ideas keeping in mind the "wax and wane migratory civilization" model. First, looking at stars and how bright they are and using them as our measuring stick, why do we suppose that any of the many civilizations throughout our galaxy would be emitting as much heat and energy as a single star? I feel that stars are detectable because of their size, mass, in addition to their brightness, they're essentially a single (large) and very bright point no? Once long ago I saw a video I think of someone explaining that they felt it was impossible for us to reach Level 2 on the Kardeschev scale because we'd be generating so much heat we'd boil our oceans. And I was like "Well that's silly, obviously we'd be more spread out than just one world, so the heat wouldn't be at just one spot." Which leads me to consider a couple of possible possibilities about how these civilizations develop: (3): None of them barely ever go above Kardeschev 1. They might be colonizing other worlds in nearby star systems but by the time those systems are able to start sending probes depending on the distances involved the civilization basically splits; putting a sort of soft cap on the energy that civilization can produce. I find this a little unlikely as I think a solar system probably has enough resources to reach Kardeschev 2 and to consider putting a dyson swarm around the sun but if the resources for nuclear fission and fusion reactors is plentiful enough maybe they never consider it practical enough to consider but I don't think this is too likely. (4) Some of them Reach Kardeschev 2, but basically no further; okay so they've gathering all of the energy of their sun. But energy isn't being created or destroyed here right? There's no net increase in heat? So their sun wouldn't be brighter right? If anything it might be dimmer from the dyson swarm but it isn't like we could see that the wider solar system is any brighter or more obvious to us? So between Kardesechev 1 civilizations who even if they are actively broadcasting radio waves, unless they're literally right next to us we're not able to make sense of these signals as anything other than noise (because of the inverse square Law?); and their energy production I'm not sure is going to be at all distinguishable from what is already being produced by their sun. See this Kurzgesagt video. If they're at Kardaschev 2, so you got a few star systems harnessing most of the power of at least 1 solar equivalent; but its all spread out between their worlds, moons, and space stations; will that actually reach our telescopes? (5) Lets assuming something like 2.2 to 2.5 on the Kardeschev scale and we got civilizations that have relativistic travel; they can travel 0.1 to 0.2 of c; now I have no idea what this actually looks like; and I'm not sure if anyone's looked. My guess is a long exposed streak? But we're looking at an object where it was millions of years ago. Presumably there's more than one, but how many of these civilizations would actually reach that point as we currently yet don't have a good theoretical framework as to how to get a ship to travel that fast? While we can imagine how to build a 10 by 10 meter mirror satellite and launch it towards the sun. If these streaks have always been around since we started taking pictures of the sky, how would we know they weren't just stray stars? Factoring in some of the possibilities discussed above, I'm not sure how sure we can be what fraction of the posited civilizations can get to the point of making hyperrelativistic spacecraft; and that is if they would somehow be bright enough to be detectable 1000+ LY away (inverse square law?). But I think Project Rho has some formulas maybe the math is something that can be computed. On Project Rho I found a formula for "How far can you detect something" and got this formula: R_d = (17.8E6 * sqrt(M_s * A_s * I_sp * (1 - N_d) * (1 - N_s))) http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/spacewardetect.php I plugged in with arbitrary values: 17.8E6 * sqrt(250000 * 1 * 100000 * (1 - 0.95) (1 - 0) ) So a 250,000 ton spacecraft, at 1g of acceleration times 100,000 specific impulse (random googling brings this up for hypothetical fusion drives capable of traveling up to 0.2c but I have no idea what I'm looking for here or if that's right for the 250,000 ton figure I choose for the mass of the craft), with a 95% efficient engine and 0% efficient stealth. I get that this would be visible from 600,000,000,000km away; unless I'm misreading wolfram this is 600 billion km, and unless I'm getting the math wrong Proxima Centauri is 40,208,000,000,000km away which is uh...? Turns out maybe we actually can't detect hyperrelativistic craft if they're far enough away? Maybe they aren't bright enough compared to a star? Maybe there's something I'm missing about the differences between taking high res images of stars vs comets but K2 is apparently the furthest comet we've seen via Hubble and that's still technically in the solar system? As far as I'm aware we can detect the probable existence of planets in other star systems by the wobble or occasional dimming they subject their sun to. Which implies to me we can't yet (Maybe the JWST makes this different now?) any planets directly; which implies that their sun is too bright or such planets are too dim. So this goes back to what I was saying before, that K1 and K2 civilizations if they aren't going to be as bright as their sun, are simply not going to be detectable; and we're simply not going to see their radiowaves (if any) if they're beyond 100 LY from us before it distorts into background noise.
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Jul 31, 2022 18:39
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Raenir Salazar posted:Turns out maybe we actually can't detect hyperrelativistic craft if they're far enough away? Maybe they aren't bright enough compared to a star? You're not accounting at all for interactions with the interstellar/intergalactic medium, which would look like a bunch of transient relativistic jets, which we absolutely should see at distance and we definitely don't. quote:I think its more along the lines of acknowledging that maybe there is something we yet don't know, and see where that takes us. See, this sounds very much to me like 'I have a conclusion I want to reach, but there's no evidence for it. However, I can imagine all sorts of ways to justify my conclusion without actual evidence.' And I'm sure you can. But again, the premise is "there are so many stars and planets, even just in the milky way, over such a long a period of time, that even rare events should be widespread." And following that premise, there are too many instances of events for us to see absolutely no evidence for them, no matter how many ways you can imagine they would not leave any evidence. So again, your wanting to justify your conclusion leads you to come into conflict with the very premise you are using to come to your initial conclusion. So, you know, maybe don't start with your conclusion and then try to justify it post hoc despite the lack of evidence?
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Jul 31, 2022 21:17
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ashpanash posted:See, this sounds very much to me like 'I have a conclusion I want to reach, but there's no evidence for it. However, I can imagine all sorts of ways to justify my conclusion without actual evidence.' It's rather fallacious to dismiss the particulars and substance of an argument on a technicality; at a minimum I think it does a disservice to the goals of facilitating an interesting discussion to do so. Additionally there's no real actual fallacy that goes by "justifying the conclusion" (and I would argue that this is simply known as "making an argument"), and it's a bit of a stretch to say that there's a lack of evidence to support my argument, that seems like a rather uncharitable reading. I have made my argument, I think it is at least an interesting argument, and I'll point you to my post which still stands in response to you reiterating your argument.
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Jul 31, 2022 22:30
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Raenir Salazar posted:It's rather fallacious to dismiss the particulars and substance of an argument on a technicality; at a minimum I think it does a disservice to the goals of facilitating an interesting discussion to do so. 'There's no evidence' isn't a 'technicality.' quote:Additionally there's no real actual fallacy that goes by "justifying the conclusion" (and I would argue that this is simply known as "making an argument"), and it's a bit of a stretch to say that there's a lack of evidence to support my argument, that seems like a rather uncharitable reading. "Assuming the conclusion" is indeed a fallacy. All that said, I have monopolized the thread enough. I'm sure everyone's sick of me.
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Jul 31, 2022 23:33
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That's not how "assuming the conclusion" works. All I did was disagree and present my argument for why I disagree, I'm not sure how that became a fallacy? That's just how humans normally have arguments, especially (for example) political arguments. People usually have a pre-existing idea as to what is truth, and then will look for evidence to support it with some level of knowledge to which to discuss it; and then maybe they learn something new discussing those ideas with other people. There's a reason why I very clearly wrote "there's no such thing as justifying the conclusion" because (a) that's what you wrote, and what I am responding to; and (b) what you actually described more closely matches just normal regular human arguments and discussion and not the fallacy in question. "Stating the premise and then arguing to support the premise by assuming/taking the premise for granted" does not really at all match "I think there might be plausible alternate explanations to what you cite as evidence and here's what I think they could be." It isn't a fallacy to disagree or to inquire into your premises as long as they're willing to substantiate an argument which is what I did. ashpanash posted:'There's no evidence' isn't a 'technicality.' I think this is a silly thing in context when we don't actually have evidence one way or another. We do not know if there is a paradox, we do not know if aliens exist, we do not know if we haven't seen any signals; absence of evidence isn't evidence of absence; we're just discussing various thought experiments and popular science concepts and basically comes down to deciding which arguments seem more logical or probable based off of what are mostly just thought experiments; whose outcomes (and this has been my main point) vary wildly according to your initial premises and other "hyperparameters". Which of course isn't to suppose I think my arguments are at all likely, I never said they were! But I think they're still interesting and novel to bring up. Because it challenges you to think about the premises you are subscribing to when you make your argument and should lead to a more thorough conclusion by accounting for them. e to add: But also to remark, a large portion of my post was discussing the things you considered evidence and to question them as to how definitive are they really, and considers plausible alternative explanations I think that's a valid form of argument even if it isn't as simple or straightfoward as "There's no dyson spheres" -> "Yes there is, here's two in my pants!"  Because I'm not disputing that we don't seem to see any evidence for dyson spheres, but it's still reasonable and valid to question why that might be the case; and consider the possibility the answer is more complex than "there aren't any". Because 500 years ago someone could've claimed "I don't think its possible for humans to fly because I don't see any" and you're currently would be dismissing the suggestion of "Maybe we haven't yet figured out how to fly" as "not presenting evidence."
Raenir Salazar fucked around with this message at 00:58 on Aug 1, 2022 |
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Aug 1, 2022 00:42
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You got discussion of potential evidence banned from the thread, of course you don't see any. 
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Aug 1, 2022 00:49
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Ratios and Tendency posted:You got discussion of potential evidence banned from the thread, of course you don't see any. Do you mean UFO stuff?
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Aug 1, 2022 00:52
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We’ve talked about the wow signal and Przybylski's star and other stuff like that, but there’s not much to say about them unless further evidence is found.
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Aug 1, 2022 00:52
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