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Raenir Salazar
Nov 5, 2010

College Slice
Related but kuezgesagt has a video on the ultra massive black holes that's super interesting because supposedly they're forming much earlier cosmologically than they "should".

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Rappaport
Oct 2, 2013

Nessus posted:

Is that decay cycle with iron/helium producing enormous burps of bullshit in the guts of a star, where all that advanced material which gets emitted in supernovas comes from? I gather anything in the Sun won't be coming out any time soon, barring something like an interaction with a high speed object or collision with another star, though.

Some of the heavier stuff is created in the actual supernova itself, when there's enough pressure and heat to enable fusion of heavier elements, and poo poo like neutron capture and the like.

Our Sun does expel stuff right now in the form of solar wind, but that's pretty much just protons (hydrogen) and electrons and stuff like that. There's some heavier stuff like carbon and oxygen in the mix, but you get the idea. There's a goofy scene in For All Mankind where there's a really powerful "solar storm" and the surface of the Moon is visibly disrupted by a "rain" of protons and the like, I don't think that's super realistic but it looked cool. But like you say, our Sun will die a few billion years, expel its outer surface (more or less) frying stuff like the Earth, and then the star will settle into a white dwarf orbited by dead planets.

Technically I don't think our Sun will supernova, it'll just turn into a red giant which sort of blows up near the end, and the white dwarf remains.

Bug Squash
Mar 18, 2009

Slightly unrelated, but so cool I like to bring it up, is that a significant proportion (some estimate a majority) of elements heavier than iron are actually mostly produced by neutron star collisions rather than supernovae.

Libluini
May 18, 2012

I gravitated towards the Greens, eventually even joining the party itself.

The Linke is a party I grudgingly accept exists, but I've learned enough about DDR-history I can't bring myself to trust a party that was once the SED, a party leading the corrupt state apparatus ...
Grimey Drawer

Raenir Salazar posted:

Related but kuezgesagt has a video on the ultra massive black holes that's super interesting because supposedly they're forming much earlier cosmologically than they "should".

A lot of things are. Recently there was some noise because JWST has started finding galaxies that should not exist, according to current knowledge. They have formed far too early.

Brawnfire
Jul 13, 2004

🎧Listen to Cylindricule!🎵
https://linktr.ee/Cylindricule

Could just be rough drafts

Uglycat
Dec 4, 2000
MORE INDISPUTABLE PROOF I AM BAD AT POSTING
---------------->
What generation is the sun? 2nd or 3rd, yeah? Def not 5th or 7th?

How do we know?

Rappaport
Oct 2, 2013

Uglycat posted:

What generation is the sun? 2nd or 3rd, yeah? Def not 5th or 7th?

How do we know?

Our Sun is a new star, and it's classified "population I".

The short answer is that the classification is based on the chemical content of the star. The idea is that in the early Universe, there was hydrogen, helium and that was more or less it, so the earliest, i.e. oldest stars, would not show any "metals" (in astronomy, "metal" just means elements heavier than helium), and the "metallicity" of the stars formed in subsequent star "generations" would be higher and higher, since well there's more "metal" floating around in space. We can infer the "metallicity" of a star by looking at its spectra, which indicates what elements are present.

mdemone
Mar 14, 2001

Uglycat posted:

What generation is the sun? 2nd or 3rd, yeah? Def not 5th or 7th?

How do we know?

We don't know, and we can't know. The first generation of stars (known curiously enough as Population III) lived and died within the first billion years of the universe's history, and several generations have since passed.

Generations are shorter in regions with higher star-formation rates, so it's not a clearly definable thing.

If I had to guess, I would say the material inside the Sun has been in at least five other stars, not all of them necessarily supernovae that produce heavy elements, but at least one of them clearly had to have been. Probably more like two or three supernovae and ten total stars before the "present-day" solar enrichment.

Libluini
May 18, 2012

I gravitated towards the Greens, eventually even joining the party itself.

The Linke is a party I grudgingly accept exists, but I've learned enough about DDR-history I can't bring myself to trust a party that was once the SED, a party leading the corrupt state apparatus ...
Grimey Drawer

mdemone posted:

We don't know, and we can't know. The first generation of stars (known curiously enough as Population III) lived and died within the first billion years of the universe's history, and several generations have since passed.

Generations are shorter in regions with higher star-formation rates, so it's not a clearly definable thing.

If I had to guess, I would say the material inside the Sun has been in at least five other stars, not all of them necessarily supernovae that produce heavy elements, but at least one of them clearly had to have been. Probably more like two or three supernovae and ten total stars before the "present-day" solar enrichment.

This is not strictly true. Due to the differences in star lifespans with diverging mass, a large percentage of the red dwarves making up most of each galaxy's star population are still first gen, and will still be long after our sun is dead.

And the blue giants at a galaxy's center have had dozens of generations, since you can ridiculous short lifespans down there (like, for a sun, it's still millions of years even in the worst cases)


Edit:

:lol:. I looked this up on Wikipedia, turns your sun generation guess was close to the truth

Wikipedia posted:

The Sun is a Population I, or heavy-element-rich,[b] star.[32] The formation of the Sun may have been triggered by shockwaves from one or more nearby supernovae.[33] This is suggested by a high abundance of heavy elements in the Solar System, such as gold and uranium, relative to the abundances of these elements in so-called Population II, heavy-element-poor, stars.

mdemone
Mar 14, 2001

Libluini posted:

This is not strictly true. Due to the differences in star lifespans with diverging mass, a large percentage of the red dwarves making up most of each galaxy's star population are still first gen, and will still be long after our sun is dead.

This was possibly not true for the actual Pop III stars but I take your point.

(We also have only basic ideas about the real IMF for the Pop III epoch.)

Raenir Salazar
Nov 5, 2010

College Slice
Kurzgesagt saying What I've been sayin'

Conspiratiorist
Nov 12, 2015

17th Separate Kryvyi Rih Tank Brigade named after Konstantin Pestushko
Look to my coming on the first light of the fifth sixth some day
I find myself nauseated by the notion of spreading late-stage capitalism across the stars.

How about we hold off on this interstellar expansionism idea for a few thousand years?

DrSunshine
Mar 23, 2009

Did I just say that out loud~~?!!!

Conspiratiorist posted:

I find myself nauseated by the notion of spreading late-stage capitalism across the stars.

How about we hold off on this interstellar expansionism idea for a few thousand years?

How about we spread socialism instead? :unsmigghh:

GhostofJohnMuir
Aug 14, 2014

anime is not good

Conspiratiorist posted:

I find myself nauseated by the notion of spreading late-stage capitalism across the stars.

How about we hold off on this interstellar expansionism idea for a few thousand years?

i have some good news about the timeline for feasible interstellar travel for you

Rappaport
Oct 2, 2013

DrSunshine posted:

How about we spread socialism instead? :unsmigghh:

I know this is a slightly different tack, but Stanislaw Lem's Eden resonates with me. SPOILERS, to a novel written quite a while back, but the natives of the alien planet said "zero zero" to what our supposed heroes could do for them.

Raenir Salazar
Nov 5, 2010

College Slice

Conspiratiorist posted:

I find myself nauseated by the notion of spreading late-stage capitalism across the stars.

How about we hold off on this interstellar expansionism idea for a few thousand years?

IIRC its the best way to get socialism though. Its through capitalism's process of ruthless expansionism and exploitation that contradictions arise that lead to class consciousness and ultimately the overthrow of capitalist society with socialism.

Capitalism also isn't even the worst mode of production, it's actually arguably the best mode of production we currently have by Marx's own writings! It's certainly better than the feudalism that came before it! The idea that capitalism is so inherently bad that we should somehow strangle the growth of human civilization until we "figure things out" is honestly reactionary and counterproductive. All societies must pass through capitalism to get to socialism; and logically you cannot get to socialism without giving capitalism the room to grow to the point it implodes.

Logically if we as a society even had the means to stop our (inevitable BECAUSE of capitalism) expansion to the stars we would also likewise have the sociological capability to embrace socialism without the messy transition period.

GhostofJohnMuir posted:

i have some good news about the timeline for feasible interstellar travel for you

It's been discussed before but we could in theory start interstellar colonization with just like a hundred years if we bent global human society to the task.

DrSunshine posted:

How about we spread socialism instead? :unsmigghh:

Now that's thinking with portals!

Raenir Salazar fucked around with this message at 22:29 on Apr 11, 2023

Kesper North
Nov 3, 2011

EMERGENCY POWER TO PARTY
the rocket equation is accelerationist

Blind Duke
Nov 8, 2013
Very important to send out starships to spread capitalism now, so after the revolution the newly developed faster engines get socialist starships to planetary destinations first to build socialist societies before those initial capitalist colony ships arrive

Really give them a jumpscare on arrival

DrSunshine
Mar 23, 2009

Did I just say that out loud~~?!!!

Blind Duke posted:

Very important to send out starships to spread capitalism now, so after the revolution the newly developed faster engines get socialist starships to planetary destinations first to build socialist societies before those initial capitalist colony ships arrive

Really give them a jumpscare on arrival

It’s like that episode of TNG where the capitalist wakes up after being frozen and eagerly asks for the balance of his stock portfolio and his brain melts down after they tell him they’re a post scarcity society where money doesn’t exist.

I AM GRANDO
Aug 20, 2006

I don’t know—space is so utterly empty. I’m putting my money on there being some fundamental aspect of the nature of the universe that we haven’t hit upon yet and can’t guess about that has something to do with the probability of detectable civilizations arising in the Milky Way. It’s a little disturbing that we don’t even have ambiguous evidence to argue about. That usually means there’s something key that we’re not getting.

Certainly, I don’t think that we as a species are particularly suited to maintaining the planetary conditions that allowed us to create global civilization. Global warming might not keep us from going to space, but the bad habits that caused global warming aren’t really slowing down.

Raenir Salazar
Nov 5, 2010

College Slice

Blind Duke posted:

Very important to send out starships to spread capitalism now, so after the revolution the newly developed faster engines get socialist starships to planetary destinations first to build socialist societies before those initial capitalist colony ships arrive

Really give them a jumpscare on arrival

Unironically yes; the more developed as a society we become, the greater the fruits of the labours of labour that can be handed back to the workers.


I AM GRANDO posted:

I don’t know—space is so utterly empty. I’m putting my money on there being some fundamental aspect of the nature of the universe that we haven’t hit upon yet and can’t guess about that has something to do with the probability of detectable civilizations arising in the Milky Way. It’s a little disturbing that we don’t even have ambiguous evidence to argue about. That usually means there’s something key that we’re not getting.

Certainly, I don’t think that we as a species are particularly suited to maintaining the planetary conditions that allowed us to create global civilization. Global warming might not keep us from going to space, but the bad habits that caused global warming aren’t really slowing down.

To put this in perspective though the same thing has been arguably true from a Marxist viewpoint regarding previous modes of development; the bad habits of feudalism didn't "slow down" either until it was all of a sudden essentially swept aside.

Haystack
Jan 23, 2005





I AM GRANDO posted:

I don’t know—space is so utterly empty. I’m putting my money on there being some fundamental aspect of the nature of the universe that we haven’t hit upon yet and can’t guess about that has something to do with the probability of detectable civilizations arising in the Milky Way. It’s a little disturbing that we don’t even have ambiguous evidence to argue about. That usually means there’s something key that we’re not getting.

Certainly, I don’t think that we as a species are particularly suited to maintaining the planetary conditions that allowed us to create global civilization. Global warming might not keep us from going to space, but the bad habits that caused global warming aren’t really slowing down.

I mean, it's not a huge mystery: space is too big. Subluminal space travel is too slow and expensive to be practical, and FTL is impossible*. Hell, even radio signals can only go so far before they attenuate to nothing. Every island of life is just too damned far apart.

*Short of general relativity being really, really wrong in basic, unexpected ways.

Wafflecopper
Nov 27, 2004

I am a mouth, and I must scream

Raenir Salazar posted:

It's been discussed before but we could in theory start interstellar colonization with just like a hundred years if we bent global human society to the task.

lol yeah humanity is great at uniting to work on common goals, i’m sure we’ll be colonising space right after we solve global warming, war, disease, famine etc

Raenir Salazar
Nov 5, 2010

College Slice

Wafflecopper posted:

lol yeah humanity is great at uniting to work on common goals, i’m sure we’ll be colonising space right after we solve global warming, war, disease, famine etc

I mean there's two separate arguments here; humanity doesn't need to solve war etc, to colonize space, because the incentives of capitalist modes of production cannot help but find new untapped frontiers to exploit when they have too thoroughly exploited the hinterlands of the imperial center.

Unrelated as a hypothetical if humanity bent itself to the task, it could achieve a "Great Leap Forward" in any field of endeavour imaginable, whether it be limitless clean energy, climate change etc. That humanity is yet unwilling to make this effort doesn't really say anything about it; this is the Space thread so the focus tends to be more about space. The energy thread is similar but for widespread nuclear power. Like everything we're talking about is a hypothetical, that's kinda the point of the thread is discussing hypotheticals because it's interesting.

Conspiratiorist
Nov 12, 2015

17th Separate Kryvyi Rih Tank Brigade named after Konstantin Pestushko
Look to my coming on the first light of the fifth sixth some day

I AM GRANDO posted:

I don’t know—space is so utterly empty. I’m putting my money on there being some fundamental aspect of the nature of the universe that we haven’t hit upon yet and can’t guess about that has something to do with the probability of detectable civilizations arising in the Milky Way. It’s a little disturbing that we don’t even have ambiguous evidence to argue about. That usually means there’s something key that we’re not getting.

Certainly, I don’t think that we as a species are particularly suited to maintaining the planetary conditions that allowed us to create global civilization. Global warming might not keep us from going to space, but the bad habits that caused global warming aren’t really slowing down.

There's a bunch of stuff possible because we only have Earth (or more broadly, the Solar System) as the sole life/civilization data point, and the more we learn about our place in the universe the more we realize the Copernican principle falls quite short in this particular matter.

Life might just be really hard, nevermind intelligent life. And if you look at the grand scheme of things, we're not just early in the lifetime of the galaxy as the kurzgesagt video is presuming, rather we're exceptionally early in the age of the universe. Plus if life is uncommon, it's statistically more likely to be so not in the order of a handful per galaxy, but of only one per any arbitrary number of galaxies - that's a natural consequence of the universe being so unimaginably huge in space and time.

Another I like bringing up from time to time is the possible limits of material sciences within the constraints of physical laws and cosmic environmental conditions. We all grew up consuming enough sci-fi media to easily conceptualize interstellar travel as some sort of upscaled version of interplanetary travel (which we know to be possible), and all potential scalability problems in that regard as simply being some obscure scientific breakthrough away from a solution, but truth is we don't know if machines can survive interstellar distances - and meat sure as hell can't without them. We really don't know what the interstellar medium is like, we don't even know if the Oort Cloud is real, and have no way to accurately predict the robustness of our most cutting edge electronics (or foreseeable alternatives) for centennial/millennial journeys past the confines of the Solar System.

What does that mean? Maybe interstellar travel is so difficult that, if not altogether impossible, it effectively limits the expansion of technological civilizations to only their nearest (and most promising) stellar neighbors as their star moves across the galaxy over the course of millions of years. And we have no idea either about the life expectancy distribution of technological civilizations, so if we don't assume they're permanent perhaps most of them flicker in and out never leaving their own systems or existing only in little ephemeral clusters of common-origin civilizations coursing through the void. Again, we just don't know, so I believe a combination of these possible explanations to be as valid as one where self-perpetuating civilizations suddenly appear and expand in a bubble, avoiding border gore, over a map of the galaxy as if life was some videogame.

I AM GRANDO
Aug 20, 2006

There’s definitely something atypical about the rate of technological development we’re currently living through vs the last 300,000 years. I can’t imagine it’s possible to just keep going at the same pace for the next 100,000 or even 10,000 years. We’re either careening toward extinction or collapse into a pre-tech species or going to reach some kind of plateau, whether because innovation delivers some kind of optimum solution or because we run out of something we need as we make due.

Finding another civilization would tell us a lot about the boundaries between life, civilization, and technology and how we might best understand them as related or distinct from each other. I have to admit that I have a hard time imagining the human species has much of a future on a geologic time scale given what we’ve been up to in the last 10,000 years.

Conspiratiorist
Nov 12, 2015

17th Separate Kryvyi Rih Tank Brigade named after Konstantin Pestushko
Look to my coming on the first light of the fifth sixth some day
It's just the result of sudden significant jumps in our available energy. The first was the planet entering a period of propitious climate stability 12,000 years ago, leading to the simultaneous and independent development of agriculture by homo sapiens groups across the globe, and the second was when homo sapiens learned to "metabolize" hydrocarbon deposits inaccessible to the biosphere since the carboniferous.

Both of these energy sources are unsustainable so we're hoping for a third energy revolution to, if not further accelerate, at least maintain our development rate for some time longer. Will we get it? :shrug:

Rappaport
Oct 2, 2013

We're sort of early in the age of the universe, but we're also not very exceptionally early. The early-early universe only contained hydrogen and helium, so "we" needed a couple of star generations to "seed" the universe with elements like oxygen and carbon. And maybe even iron. But anyway, the elements that make organic life as we understand it tick.

This thread revolves around the Fermi paradox, and one way of interpreting it is that we haven't seen anyone else take over the galaxy, or have the galaxy over-run by someone's grey goo science experiment, so are we early in that sense? Has no one else had the time to do the crazy stuff yet? As much as a fan as I am of For All Mankind the television show, our current technological development seems to suggest it is more economical to engage in navel-gazing exercises like having chat robots than mounting serious expeditions to, say, colonize Mars, which would be absolutely miserable for the people involved in actually going there.

The point about life being hard is a good one. Earth was a good place for life to evolve, but Earthly life also caused a lot of it to die off when some life forms evolved photo-synthesis. The satirical view of humans as apes who had to figure out intelligence when their local eco-system changed may or may not be true, but there is no "reason" for why intelligence as we understand it should evolve.

Haystack
Jan 23, 2005





I AM GRANDO posted:

There’s definitely something atypical about the rate of technological development we’re currently living through vs the last 300,000 years. I can’t imagine it’s possible to just keep going at the same pace for the next 100,000 or even 10,000 years. We’re either careening toward extinction or collapse into a pre-tech species or going to reach some kind of plateau, whether because innovation delivers some kind of optimum solution or because we run out of something we need as we make due.

Finding another civilization would tell us a lot about the boundaries between life, civilization, and technology and how we might best understand them as related or distinct from each other. I have to admit that I have a hard time imagining the human species has much of a future on a geologic time scale given what we’ve been up to in the last 10,000 years.

What helped me was getting it in my head that science is a process of discovery, rather than a process of creation. It sounds a bit obvious to say, but science is very sharply limited to only finding out things that actually exist. There are plenty of creative processes in the world that science can study (evolution, geology, etc), but the laws of physics are notable for being more or less immutable. There is never going to be a discovery that broadly violates the observations that underpin relativity or quantum mechanics, any more that we could discover that South America never existed.

Many, if not most, people seem to be in the mindset that science is some sort of unbounded, exponential process that will continue on the way it did the last 100 years, but I think they're deluding themselves. Science will always have a place, refining itself and studying aforementioned creative processes, but I think we've more or less got the basics down.

And the basics paint an utterly dismal picture of interstellar travel.

Nessus
Dec 22, 2003

After a Speaker vote, you may be entitled to a valuable coupon or voucher!



There is the possibility that humans are just the first or at least the first on this side of our galaxy. Someone has to be the Precursors and as Al Franken said, why not us?

Nessus
Dec 22, 2003

After a Speaker vote, you may be entitled to a valuable coupon or voucher!



Another possibility that comes to mind: how element rich are other star systems? This one might have gotten tons of funky elements early and in five or six billion years there will be many more such.

Gravitas Shortfall
Jul 17, 2007

Utility is seven-eighths Proximity.


Haystack posted:

Science will always have a place, refining itself and studying aforementioned creative processes, but I think we've more or less got the basics down.

I don't think you're wrong re: interstellar travel, but also we don't have a way to reconcile general relativity and quantum mechanics, which suggests there's a shitload we don't know.

Raenir Salazar
Nov 5, 2010

College Slice
Economical doesn't equal profitable and doesn't equal productive and so on.

Developing software is easier and cheaper than ever before, but that doesn't mean our society is only capable or only interested in software development. Chatgpt and crypto are easy ventures for rent seeking corporations, but not every corporation or state actor seeks it out. Heavy industry is still doing heavy industry despite the high capital costs and low profit margins. Governments and private enterprise are still putting hundreds of millions of dollars into nuclear fusion research. And some companies are looking into asteroid mining because late stage capitalism is desperate for new ventures, even if it technically won't return a profit for decades, capitalists don't need to care about "profit" as long as they profit.

The global economy consists of trillions and trillions of dollars of economic activity. Space exploration is taking up something invisibly tiny amount of that, like 0.0000000001% of that economic activity.

And of course to be clear it would be productive to have space colonies because it raises the capacity for our total population. And more people means more economic activity, which means more people able to specialize into fields like software engineers, biologists, engineers, etc, opening up the possibility of new discoveries and applications hitherto unknown. Economic activity has basically globally always grown exponentially and further exploration of outer space is essential to maintain number go up.

Anyways, as for interstellar travel let's not overstate the extent it is unknown, "we don't know" things very often because very little effort or research has went into studying it. While a decent amount of research has gone into traveling to the moon. We've only sent like one probe to try to leave our solar system and that alone seems to have helped revise our understanding of the void multiple times? Imagine if we send more probes out, with updated sensors and propulsion!

The JWST has been outstanding as well, if we put even just a little more funding into space exploration the dividends can be even greater.

The obvious answer to "well we don't know a whole lot" is "well let's gently caress around and find out!" Dare that Abyss to blink first.

Gravitas Shortfall posted:

I don't think you're wrong re: interstellar travel, but also we don't have a way to reconcile general relativity and quantum mechanics, which suggests there's a shitload we don't know.

On my phone so I dunno the full context of ops point, but for science research in general IIRC you have governments around the world investing billions of dollars into research into many fields as this research results in dividends of gdp growth, and aren't there like tens of thousands of research papers across all fields? I also feel that how we define the basics might be a bit premature. I think there's many things, like in biology where we have maybe a general understanding but the actual basics are still illusive. Like, how does dead matter turn into multicellular life? We still don't know how hard this is IIRC.

Raenir Salazar fucked around with this message at 15:54 on Apr 12, 2023

Rappaport
Oct 2, 2013

We sent two Voyagers.

And it's not "clear" that it would be profitable to have space colonies, the entire idea behind The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress was that shooting stuff back down to Earth was viable. That's not the same with, say, the Jovian moons. You'd have to ship people and equipment there, and they'd do their best to simply survive, not producing something that could be sent back to Earth.

And unless you have a faster than light engine in your back pocket, we can fairly certainly say that traveling to other star systems with humans on board is a generational boat thing. Which the Mormons might like, to be fair!

mdemone
Mar 14, 2001

Gravitas Shortfall posted:

I don't think you're wrong re: interstellar travel, but also we don't have a way to reconcile general relativity and quantum mechanics, which suggests there's a shitload we don't know.

The single thing that both theories agree on is that FTL is impossible. It's probably the only thing we can say with any confidence will remain true in a theory of quantum gravity.

Gravitas Shortfall
Jul 17, 2007

Utility is seven-eighths Proximity.


mdemone posted:

The single thing that both theories agree on is that FTL is impossible. It's probably the only thing we can say with any confidence will remain true in a theory of quantum gravity.

Which is why I said I agreed with the OP re: FTL. My point was that to assume we "more or less have the basics down" is a weird thing to say when there's fundamental poo poo we don't know, for example:

Raenir Salazar posted:

Like, how does dead matter turn into multicellular life? We still don't know how hard this is IIRC.

EDIT: My personal view on the Fermi Paradox is that multiple steps along the path of life are hard, far harder than we think. So there's not just one "Great Filter", but several. Plus, space is really, really big, FTL is impossible, and species (even intelligent ones) die out on timeframes that are tiny on a galactic scale.

Gravitas Shortfall fucked around with this message at 16:13 on Apr 12, 2023

DrSunshine
Mar 23, 2009

Did I just say that out loud~~?!!!
Honestly, I think that a lot of the basic fundamental research is pretty much done, save for the tiny tiny part that we can't yet prove because we don't have big enough particle accelerators and so on. We can see the past few decades of basic "paradigm-breaking" (cf Kuhn) research slow to a crawl, even as the physical costs of new discoveries becomes higher and higher. Scientific teams nowadays are larger than ever, because it takes more people than ever with more specialization. There is a palpable, and I believe very real sense, that we are getting into the area of "diminishing returns" with respect to fundamental research in physics, among other "hard sciences".

Just so you know I'm not just shooting from the hip here, my source for this thought is this article from Nature: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-022-05543-x, among others.

That being said, my guess is that the next paradigm-breaking discoveries are not going to come from the hard sciences, but from fundamental new discoveries in the social sciences.

It's been said before that until we have a testable, quantifiable theory of the development of civilizations, we won't have a clear grasp of the last terms in the Drake Equation - the ones that talk about the rate of formation of intelligent civilizations and the length of time at which they remain detectable. Nowadays we have huge datasets that are growing ever larger, a bigger and bigger pool of quantifiable information about the social behavior of civilization-building agents. To me that says that we ought to be pouring a lot of time and effort into sociology, data science, human social psychology, behavioral economics, and so on. And we are, to a point, but it's being wasted in getting clicks, eyeballs, social engagements, and advertising tricks, rather than discovering fundamental insights into the dynamics of civilizations.

Another source: https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/11/diminishing-returns-science/575665/

mdemone
Mar 14, 2001

Gravitas Shortfall posted:

EDIT: My personal view on the Fermi Paradox is that multiple steps along the path of life are hard, far harder than we think. So there's not just one "Great Filter", but several. Plus, space is really, really big, FTL is impossible, and species (even intelligent ones) die out on timeframes that are tiny on a galactic scale.

Agreed. I think it's likely that sentient life is exceedingly rare, and even then it's not obvious why a sentient species would even want to go to space. If there's intelligent life in the subsurface ocean of Europa, it will never even be aware of the outside universe (unless they can make a radio from scratch in a liquid environment, which I don't even think is physically possible).

We want to go to space, because we're more than a bit nutty and overly curious, but those are both qualities that you'd think would exert negative selection pressure.

DrSunshine
Mar 23, 2009

Did I just say that out loud~~?!!!
Not to open up the can of worms that is UFO chat, but I guess it's worth mentioning that there's another track which would claim that we already have evidence that extraterrestrial intelligence exists and has indeed visited the Earth on multiple occasions, so the Fermi Paradox is moot.

Which I mean, if you take it seriously, then it leads to some rather interesting questions as to why intelligent alien civilizations would behave the way they supposedly do if UAPs are extraterrestrial probes.

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Nessus
Dec 22, 2003

After a Speaker vote, you may be entitled to a valuable coupon or voucher!



Until you find the aliens you will always think they’re a reflection of you. Not sure how you could correct for that on a rigorous basis.

E: also if UAPs are alien in origin, robotic probes doing some autonomous deployment of some kind of aerospace probes seems to be totally compatible with no FTL travel. It does imply VERY patient and curious originators of course.

Nessus fucked around with this message at 16:33 on Apr 12, 2023

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