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This feels really anti-intellectual, but if there’s no way to travel faster than light then there’s no real reason to colonize an entire galaxy or ever spread out much beyond what you need to survive, as you’d basically never know what happened to the colonies outside contact range. It would be like achieving immortality by making an immortal digital copy of yourself who says hello and then goes off to live inside a mainframe somewhere: technically what you set out to do but without meaningful benefit to you.
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Nov 24, 2019 15:56
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DrSunshine posted:Well, I mean... you'd know eventually, probably. It might take a few thousand years (about 100k, for the Milky Way) to find out whatever happened to those folks on the other side of the galaxy, but you'd find out. And really, it never really stopped people from spreading. The Polynesians may as well have been separated from each other by interstellar gulfs for how isolated some places were from others, and the expanse of the Pacific Ocean didn't seem to stop them from colonizing almost every habitable island there. They of course splintered into hundreds of separate sub-civilizations, but I don't think any of them would've thought it was pointless. Yeah, that’s definitely true. I guess I was thinking in terms of the development of a galaxy-spanning civilization likely to be detected because of its scale as a unified phenomenon. Successive scattershot waves of outward expansion over hundreds of millions of years without a clear long-term goal make sense, and we wouldn’t know what to look for to find it, either.
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Nov 25, 2019 01:19
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Is there a pretty good chance that the predicted super-earth-mass object out in our solar system is really a thing and not an error in reading the data?
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Dec 14, 2019 23:41
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D-Pad posted:I have an old 80s book called Texas Truimphant that has Texas as an independent country that fights the soviet union. A massive soviet tank formation rolls up on Texas soil, and the tanks are having a hard time in muddy ground so the commander gets out. He realizes the ground is soaked in oil as he looks up and sees a guy on horseback dressed as the lone ranger on top of a hill. Lone ranger shoots a flaming arrow and blows them all up. It also features space battles between Texas astronauts and cosmonauts and a bunch of other ridiculous Texas fanfiction. It's amazing and part of a trilogy although I haven't been able to find the rest. Legitimately shocked the archer guy wasn’t dressed in klan robes.
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Dec 15, 2019 21:45
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I bet that’s the one where Texans dress in klan robes.
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Dec 15, 2019 23:38
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Kesper North posted:wow Utah joins the fray when the 13th tribe turns on the other 12.
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Dec 16, 2019 01:05
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Slowpoke! posted:I learned about “Island of Stability” literally this morning and now I see a long post about it. I feel like there is a term for this phenomenon. Coincidence.
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Jan 2, 2020 01:19
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Raenir Salazar posted:IIRC the term is Synchronicity. Emilio’s greatest role https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k4nvmyMU9is
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Jan 2, 2020 01:45
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Klob going full Tom Joad. EDIT: Wrong thread, but I stand by what I posted.
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Feb 8, 2020 04:25
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Heard a depressing argument that the WOW! signal has the profile of the very end of a fast radio burst. Is that true or should I ignore it to continue my sense of wonder?
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Feb 28, 2020 14:58
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D-Pad posted:This gave me an interesting thought. If Mars was habitable, like walk off the ship and breath the air and temp is fine, even if it had no life how much further do you think our space program would be today? If we had an entire extra planet we could live on with the only obstacle being getting there I think the space program would have only continued to ramp up after the moon landing. A weird thing about Mars and Earth history is that for a good 20 years at the turn of the 20th century, people thought there might be a civilization on Mars and that didn’t really affect human culture at all. It wasn’t even a particularly big pop culture thing, exactly, whereas I feel like now if we thought we had evidence of a civilization around a nearby star, people would at least seriously try to follow up on detection. We’d probably be obsessed with the idea of finding out. I guess in 1900 there was no real way to try radioing Mars or signaling it, so the whole idea was completely hypocritical even though Mars is so close to the Earth?
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Mar 7, 2020 00:25
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:I think as you go back in time the idea that there are people "out there" in some inaccessible far off place seems more and more normal an idea. Like you can read in a book there is people in china and see a racist drawing and some kooky 1800s description then never actually go there or know anyone that would ever go there or even see like photos or videos or anything that make it seem like a real place. You just get to read "there is mysterious tribes in the darkest jungles" and you can say "lol, okay" and that is it. Like now we know personally all the places dudes are now, finding out there was dudes in a new place would seem so crazy, but as you go back more places on earth were basically lands of mystery to most people. Like 1800s were way past the era parts of the map literally said "here be dragons" or anything, people did travel around plenty, and the world was well explored, but there was just way more idea that there was way more stuff still out there to be found on earth and everything was farther away for most people. Like even in the 1950s the BBC was pranking british people because they didn't know what pasta was. The idea there was people in space is only a little step when the people on earth already seem infinitely distant anyway. This makes an astounding amount of sense. Thank you.
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Mar 10, 2020 04:47
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We're at about the point in humanity's decline where we're done sending things into space, aside from maybe another few decades of probes. Maybe China will keep it up for a while.
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Apr 10, 2020 22:42
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Why do so many people talk about the great filter like it’s particularly likely or that it answers the question it was designed to solve? We haven’t been looking at space very long and don’t have a very good idea of what we’re looking for, and there’s no evidence that a sufficiently advanced technological civilization gains any particular benefit from spreading out across an entire galaxy. It seems like it would be a lot of effort for almost nothing in return, unless you were robots that could live in space. Without instantaneous communication or travel faster than light, what’s the point? Your home system or one nearby would have enough resources for many times the number habitable worlds there. It is fun to think about, I’ll admit.
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Apr 12, 2020 04:55
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:Humans lived nearly all of history without fast travel or instant communication and did not seem to mind overly much. A year would be pretty fast communication for people in space.
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Apr 12, 2020 05:24
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What proportion of the galaxy have we listened to with any degree of rigor? And wouldn’t we need to keep monitoring places we’ve already looked, just in case we’ve missed something?
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Apr 12, 2020 16:44
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To ask a dumb question about the Fermi paradox again, wouldn’t we only be able to detect radio leakage from a civilization like ours to a distance of 100 light years or something? That doesn’t seem like a fair sampling of the galaxy: couldn’t there be all kinds of civilizations using radio that we’d just never be able to detect via their radio noise?
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Apr 15, 2020 03:18
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:We don’t even scan the sky for radio like that. SETI is almost entirely scanning for one frequency of radio we don’t even use ourself. There is always this claim we looked everywhere for aliens and didn’t find them, but we really just don’t even look. The funding for that stuff is very minimum Then what is the presumption behind scanning that band? That there’s no local noise to filter out? I don’t know how else I would look, but it seems like a not-great strat for finding civilizations. The whole Fermi paradox seems silly unless you have some kind of criteria. How would you detect a bunch of Von Neumann probes? I guess the claim is that we don’t see galaxy-spanning civilizations, but even then, what would they look like? How do we know the galaxy hasn’t been colonized? There could be ancient junk in our own system that we haven’t seen yet.
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Apr 15, 2020 03:38
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Wafflecopper posted:I'm sure that must be it, too bad you weren't hanging out with Fermi to tell him it's that simple, we could have avoided this whole conversation. I would appreciate an earnest answer instead of a dig there. How would we know we were looking at a galaxy-spanning civilization, active or ancient?
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Apr 15, 2020 04:56
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Raenir Salazar posted:
But we don’t know conclusively that there aren’t fossils of multicellular life on mars or that it doesn’t have bacteria right now, to say nothing of Titan or all those ice-shell moons. It seems premature to make claims like this for the same reason it seems premature to say there’s no evidence of interstellar civilizations. We can say that it would be unmistakable or not what physics would predict, but there are plenty of aspects of our galaxy that we don’t understand well enough to do more than guess at, like that star with transuranic elements inside of it. And then there’s all the stuff we haven’t seen yet, to which you could respond “but it should be unmistakable based on what we’ve seen already,” but we could just have an unfortunate sample size. Jupiter could have collected a dozen derelict probes, but we just haven’t seen them yet in the course of our exploration. I guess the fermi paradox just seems like a solution in search of a problem, and maybe the question of alien detection has to wait until we as a species have a firmer grasp on the nature of the universe and what predictions we can make about what undisturbed space ought to look like.
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Apr 15, 2020 13:56
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Yeah I don't mean to sound like I'm keeping hope alive by saying that it doesn't seem like we have enough knowledge to know for sure that there don't seem to be other civilizations in the galaxy, but just to say that there's no reason to start coming up with explanations for why the galaxy seems empty of civilizations when we're not at a state of knowledge to really look closely enough to know that it even seems empty. All that great filter theorizing rests on a really weak foundation and we haven't yet determined the truth value of any of its premises to any real degree.
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Apr 15, 2020 19:56
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If we cut up Mercury for parts to make a dyson swarm and it failed and fell into the sun after we went extinct, would there be any clues that Mercury had ever been there?
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Apr 15, 2020 23:55
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DrSunshine posted:So the poster earlier in the thread made a salient point - or rather question - in asking "Well what would be a reasonable thing to detect that's uncontrovertible alien activity?" But wouldn’t there be a natural explanation for each of these things that doesn’t involve engineering from a civilization? There are all kinds of hosed-up or weird stars, but the likelier explanation for a lot of these things would involve physics and chemistry. Like, we found what looked like a dyson swarm, but it’s more easily explained by weird dust clouds we haven’t seen before and that explanation is equally good at explaining things. That’s not to say that a civilization loving around couldn’t be the actual explanation (plenty of plausible explanations turn out to be wrong in favor of weirder ones), but wouldn’t we have to know the nature of the universe a lot better before we could tell the difference? People like to mock the ptolemaic model of the solar system as naive, but it seemed about as plausible as the copernican one for a while, until better data were available and people understood the universe better. It just seems like we have to wait a little while to make sense of what we’re seeing, even if it really looks like a bunch of stars have been deliberately placed somewhere by an intelligence, because we can’t exclude other causes yet. It’s worth thinking about and theorizing, though.
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Apr 16, 2020 01:17
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eXXon posted:On a related note, you may have missed the single most cringe-worthy moment in Star Trek if you haven't watched Discovery yet: Proof the show is set in the mirror universe.
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Apr 17, 2020 16:50
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Civilized Fishbot posted:I think you're joking but you happen to be totally correct - the character referencing Musk is literally from the mirror universe This is extremely funny. Maybe that show is better than it looked.
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Apr 22, 2020 01:12
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Wouldn’t we see weird gravity effects somewhere, or is the sphere so perfect that it can fake the gravity of things it simulates while neutralizing its own gravity? If so, it’s just another variation on “but what if you’re dreaming all this, dude?”
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Apr 24, 2020 19:39
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Aliens love flying drones around over the ocean. They’re all smurf-sized.
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Apr 28, 2020 23:15
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The NYT series on investigation of those videos is that the senate and maybe the military have gotten concerned that the strong culture of silence over professional pilots seeing weird airplanes has led to the US having much worse information about unknown aircraft flying around their country as compared to lots of other countries, so they're trying to create a more open atmosphere for people to talk about weird things they've seen. I guess the subtext is that the same weird things are seen in a lot of countries and it's something to be concerned about involving non-state actors. But there's nothing to suggest that it's aliens or not from Earth.
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Apr 29, 2020 19:00
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D-Pad posted:It's almost certain that the US (and other) military has things way advanced that only a few know about. These craft, however, exhibited behavior that isn't just a decade or two down the road. They did stuff that break our understanding of what is physically possible. For example, they exhibited ZERO heat signature/exhaust plume. Just the technology to do that alone would break our understanding of physics and be a HUGE leap in tech that could be applied to every area of society. Those videos show some kind of drone flying over the ocean. There’s nothing indicating that it produces no heat and no indication of how fast it’s going or that it’s doing crazy turns or acceleration vs just seeming to because of the angle of observation.
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May 1, 2020 22:23
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Zesty posted:Anyone watch that Bob Lazar thing on Netflix? I don't take it seriously, but it's fun to think about. He's a transparent fraud but he's probably like the second or third biggest influence on the X-Files and thus 90s conspiracism.
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May 2, 2020 03:19
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WAR CRIME GIGOLO posted:One thing that makes bobs story interesting is he idea of how we got the crafts (if we actually have them) is through archaeological digging and not a Roswell type scenario. Which I think is more likely than th US Shooting down a craft then harvesting it It is a very creative story that taps into the post-Watergate/Church Commission zeitgeist as filtered through Reagan. The guy's very creative and yeah, that's a pretty sublime detail to put into a story about UFOs. Kind of a Lovecraft element.
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May 2, 2020 04:39
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The genius of Bob Lazar's grift is that his appearance and demeanor fit with incredible precision what you'd think a 1980s physicist or engineer would be like. All he really does is try to act and sound like what you'd imagine a guy like that would be like, and to play the part of how a person like that would respond to having had the job of reverse-engineering ancient spaceships from Zeta Reticuli.
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May 2, 2020 20:36
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PBS Spacetime delivers the deepest understanding of physics that an ignoramus like me can comfortably comprehend, presented with maximum efficiency. Event Horizon and Isaac Arthur are a little too fixated on stuff being aliens but have good guests when they have guests. PBS had an excellent math channel too that I liked even more than Spacetime, but it got shut down because too few people watched it and the mathematicians they got to host it were all on the tenure clock and couldn’t do it full-time without losing their careers.
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May 5, 2020 05:26
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WAR CRIME GIGOLO posted:I am not a physicist, we have many in here who can correct me if im wrong, but these types of materials mature over millions of years and billions of Gs of atmosphere, whereas a supernova is a shorter burst of superheated matter that cools into larger than FE elements, Metallic hydrogen. I feel like the public narrative on alien abduction took a hard turn toward mysticism around the turn of the 21st century and lost the pseudoscientific veneer that attached it to things like speculation about civilizations elsewhere in the universe. Do people even talk about the greys any more? It seems like forever since I've heard about that poo poo without it being tied into talk about demons and ancient magic. Have there even been any fresh abduction "researchers" since Bud Hopkins and John Mack died? The whole phenomenon might have run its course.
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May 7, 2020 20:26
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It’s far more likely that we haven’t detected whatever clues to other civilizations are there because we don’t know how to look or what to look for, and that we’ll get much better at it once we have a first detection to learn from. That’s how it’s been with virtually everything we’ve ever learned observationally. Look at the timeline for extrasolar planet detection, for example. For all we know, there are derelict probes or spent fuel compartments or something from 10 million years ago captured in Jupiter’s orbit. It’s statistically improbable that we’d detect something in the ~60 years we’ve been looking, given that we have a poor ability to detect anything but deliberate attempts at communication which we have no reason to think would ever be sent to us in the first place.
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May 11, 2020 18:21
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Classon Ave. Robot posted:Malevolent gods are better than none. All the sense of security that you know exactly what's going on and none of the burden of having to do anything about it.
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May 16, 2020 18:13
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Space debris is not boring.
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May 16, 2020 18:23
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There could be evidence to suggest we’re living in a simulation, like if particles below a certain size were just fuzzy blobs without properties or something, but in the absence of any evidence, it’s a silly argument. Probabilistically speaking, it’s much more likely that I wouldn’t have been born than it is that I would have been, but I was and so that’s not grounds for arguing that I don’t exist. Really, if it makes no difference for how we perceive and move through the universe, it doesn’t really make any difference. How would you test this theory, and what difference would it make if it were true?
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May 19, 2020 21:47
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Kaal posted:Simulation theory misses the greater truth, which is that our brains are already organic experiential simulators. What? Preposterous! Now excuse me while I take a big sip of water and go look at this photo of a woman wearing what I have been told is a blue and black dress.
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May 20, 2020 17:37
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So does anyone know about this claim that because NASA detected neutrinos coming out of the ground in Antarctica(?), we’ve found evidence of another universe where time runs backwards? It seems like a few steps in that deduction have been left out of accounts by the lay press: https://www.cnet.com/news/nasa-did-not-find-evidence-of-a-parallel-universe-where-time-runs-backwards/
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May 22, 2020 03:01
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