|
Owlofcreamcheese posted:There is radiation in space but like, you are wildly overstating things, there is less radiation in interstellar space than in the solar system. It's a thing you'd have to design for but it's not some mystical force that would reduce all physical objects to ruin. You can just put a wall in front of something and it stops radiation too, and our solar system and most others have very convenient giant collections of free rocks you can take in any size you need for the trip right at the exits. With sufficient technology you could just send frozen sperm and eggs and inseminate / incubate upon landing. Maybe do some shifts - start with the anerobic bacteria, then once the atmosphere is good in a few thousand years move on to other bacteria and fungi, then plants and animals etc with a goal of launching your first batch of humans 5,000 - 10,000 years after landing. Maybe you have a master ship that sits in orbit and launches poo poo down to the planet as needed. As technology increases it opens new avenues for colonization. Technological advance also makes old avenues that were deemed too costly or inappropriate more accessible for smaller groups of people. Maybe 10,000 years from now Earth could come together to create the USS Inseminator and send her to the stars, but in 11,000 years a single country could do it, and in 13,000 years it could be a school time capsule type project. I guess the same goes for world ending technology. Today the world could probably unite and create a disease that wipes us all out. In the year 2218 maybe Canada can do it alone. In 2518 maybe a small group of incels can do it. Maybe that’s the solution - as tech advances it just gets too easy for a handful of idiots to kill everyone.
|
#
¿
Nov 30, 2018 19:50
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 13, 2024 20:10 |
|
|
Kerning Chameleon posted:Here's an idea: how about we don't further infect the galaxy with our brand of disgusting bio spooge. Maybe Earth-originated life isn't a very good thing in the cosmic view of things, and we should endeavor to contain it instead of spewing it everywhere out of some bullshit lizard-brain directive to "GROW, EXPAND, EXPLODE". Congrats on missing the point that as technology advances it takes less people and a smaller share of resources to do something like this, which means eventually you'll reach a point where a small group with a moderate resource budget can do it, and they won't care about your morality or mine or anyone's besides their own. Also the first few hundred million years on earth were single celled life figuring poo poo out, and whoever cornered GROW/EXPAND/EXPLODE seems to have ran away with that game - I'm not sure how you imagine single celled life dominating with a different strategy? I know it probably feels great to sit there and declare your galaxy brain view that the history of life on earth and all of the creatures contained within are a disgusting cancer that should be exterminated from the pure and noble cosmos, but what I don't understand is how you picture single celled life evolving without some drive to grow or expand itself in some capacity. I guess I should just be surprised that it took more than 2 pages to reach "earth life is a cancer that should be exterminated".
|
|
#
¿
Dec 1, 2018 01:52
|
|
|
This planet will never, ever be rid of us. We will be scurrying around on its surface from now until the sun swallows us whole.
|
|
#
¿
May 31, 2019 22:10
|
|
|
Owlofcreamcheese posted:It's always weird how much people treat medieval europe as like, the true base state of man that we will all return to technology wise. Like once mankind falls we will get crossbows but not Chu-ko-nu, we can have compasses but not AM radios, germ theory is definitely getting forgotten somehow, we can invent metal but no movable type printing. Like people always talk like it's time travel, not any sort of reasoned out list of what would or wouldn't be likely to be lost if things go bad. (and it also is always seemingly based on like, there being brain and book erasers and everyone losing every single thing and material that is currently around) Agreed. People will live, knowledge will survive, and plants will exist. The question is how many people will live, how much knowledge will survive, and how many plants that are edible or useful will exist. For better or worse, we're either gonna die with this planet when the sun engulfs us, or we'll successfully leave this planet and die in the heat death of our universe. If you think Humanity is gonna get a pass by easily dying off once the coastal cities flood, you are so loving wrong.
|
|
#
¿
Jun 1, 2019 03:19
|
|
|
You can burn wood or even dry bushes to run a steam engine. You can make low efficiency solar panels in a factory powered by low efficiency solar panels. Only having electricity when it’s sunny outside is way better than never having electricity. A ton of things are possible - they just aren’t done today because there’s more efficient alternatives. Take those alternatives away and you have a ton of options left.
|
|
#
¿
Jun 1, 2019 14:04
|
|
|
There’s also enough uranium and thorium to power us for thousands of years. The economics may not work today and the public support might not be there, but drain our fossil fuel sources and give people a summer without air conditioning and that’ll change real fast.
|
|
#
¿
Jun 1, 2019 17:12
|
|
|
Well a quick glance shows that we have vehicles that combust hydrocarbons, we send radio signals into space, and we build structures that are hundreds of stories tall, so I think they already know we understand how triangles work.
|
|
#
¿
Jun 2, 2019 00:55
|
|
|
Yeah I’m sure the average forums user who takes the advice to draw a triangle in the dirt for first contact will be able to use underlying mathematical relationships to create a common language with an entirely alien species. In all honesty a society making first contact has probably been monitoring our communications and media for a while, so your best bet is to act like a generic human who is kind and friendly.
|
|
#
¿
Jun 2, 2019 01:30
|
|
|
We have satellites in space - they know we know how to count to 20.
|
|
#
¿
Jun 2, 2019 01:31
|
|
|
Drawing things in the dirt also assumes the aliens you’re trying to communicate with use sight in our visual range as a primary sensory input. If their main sense is acoustic or touch or smell you’re not going to get very far by drawing in the dirt. Do you think you’d be able to pick out the Pythagorean theorem expressed as a series of smells?
|
|
#
¿
Jun 2, 2019 02:46
|
|
|
Owlofcreamcheese posted:Given enough time I wonder how far a species could get just through practical engineering with no real understanding of the math or science theory of anything. You would need some level of mathematics to do even the most basic trial and error. Even if you blindly toss things together you need a concept of counting to know the size of the thing you want to recreate and a concept of measurement to recreate it.
|
|
#
¿
Jun 2, 2019 16:55
|
|
|
1glitch0 posted:I feel like I have to put a thousand disclaimers before I make a post like this so I disavow myself from flat-earthers or anti-science people, etc. I accept the science as is. But I have a very hard time wrapping my mind around the concept of existence in general. Like, it just happened? There was a big explosion for some reason and here we are? When I think about it I almost get vertigo. Why does anything exist and not nothing? What existed a second before the big bang? And if the answer is nothing, isn't that a bit of a cop out? How did that happen? It seems to be a giant thing no one talks about. You can dive down rabbit holes with things like m theory - basically what we consider “the universe” is one of many objects in a 11 dimensional realm and the Big Bang was our object crashing into another object. We have zero evidence for this but it’s possible things could exist outside of our universe. In hand with this, the question “what happened before the Big Bang” doesn’t make any sense. You go backwards in time to reach the Big Bang. It’s where time starts. It’s similar to there being nothing north of the North Pole. That doesn’t mean things can’t exist outside of time. You can’t reach Saturn by going north, south, east, or west - you need a new coordinate system to get there. The same thing may apply here - there may be things that exist outside of our universe that we need a new coordinate system to discuss.
|
|
#
¿
Jun 2, 2019 20:03
|
|
|
Owlofcreamcheese posted:Humans invented lots of physical processes empirically and then worked out the math or basic theory on it much much later. Yes but they had at least a simple level of math and measure for any kind of construction. You don’t need to understand the reason behind a certain ratio working for a bridge, but you do need to be able to measure a bridge that works and use those ratios on your next bridge.
|
|
#
¿
Jun 2, 2019 20:23
|
|
|
Owlofcreamcheese posted:Only if you are a species that cares about that sort of thing. The "never thought too much about science or math" species could just brute force it forever, only build absurdly expensive and hard to make continuous span beam bridges that they eyeballed the dimensions on and just count that as good enough, and never get too ambitious about improving bridge making and just labeling any feature that a beam bridge wouldn't work on as being unbridgeable. They would probably come to our planet and be really wowed that we have more than seven bridges and that a ton of them use 1% the material theirs do, but if they wanted to cross a river and had resources to spend they could do it, even if they never did a single bit of math and just kept trying and just never used anything but the most simple and straightforward bridge design. They’re not coming to our planet because space is really, really, really big and they’ll be floating in empty space forever if they launch without math to set a course.
|
|
#
¿
Jun 2, 2019 20:55
|
|
|
Owlofcreamcheese posted:I feel like I wouldn’t bet money that every single human astronaut even knows trigonometry Wow congratulations you've discovered that education levels vary among individuals within an organization.
|
|
#
¿
Jun 4, 2019 04:29
|
|
|
Owlofcreamcheese posted:The point is we might not need to even find an alien astronaut to find a space man that said “I don’t know the Pythagorean theorem” I agree, and I don’t believe drawing a triangle in the dirt is going to do much anyway. If you come across an alien I think you should act like a normal friendly human, because if they’re peaceful they either already know what that looks like through monitoring our media and will appreciate the fact that you are a normal friendly human, or you’re the example they’ll use as generic human going forward. If they’re not peaceful your dirt triangle isn’t going to help you.
|
|
#
¿
Jun 4, 2019 15:36
|
|
|
Is there any reason why you couldn’t go wood - biofuel - solar/wind - nuclear?
|
|
#
¿
Jan 6, 2020 14:28
|
|
|
To generate power you just need to turn a turbine. Humans have found heating water to create steam works well, especially when you heat that water with fossil fuels or nuclear reactors. But you could heat that water with concentrated sunlight or volcanoes or anything that burns. You could also turn that turbine with animals or wind or flowing water or anything else that can move it.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 6, 2020 16:21
|
|
|
1glitch0 posted:This is what people don't seem to get. It reminds me of one of my favorite parts of a Hitchhiker' Guide to the Galaxy book. Where Authur finds himself on a desolate planet and realizes he only knows how to make sandwiches. Doesn't know how to make electricity or build a house or make medicine or successfully farm, or make a space ship. You’d be able to make a water wheel or windmill to process grain, and later generations could build a dam or wind generator off of that, and even later generations could build batteries and solar/nuclear generators off of the power from the dams or wind generators. Hell you could even solve the battery issue by just using pumped hydro everywhere - it’s terribly destructive on the environment, but so is the coal and plastic based society we’ve built. I understand that coal and oil might make things easier but there are absolutely pathways from rocks to nuclear generators without them. This idea that coal and oil make us special and no one could possibly have our technology level without them just seems like another self congratulatory homosapien circle jerk. Given the size of the universe there are surely a massive number of species that have advanced way more than we have with way less resources.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 30, 2020 19:31
|
|
|
ErIog posted:The thing you're missing is that the process by which all modern poo poo got developed has resulted in incredibly optimized versions of everything that require massive industrial processes to reproduce. I think time is a fair point. But even if we assume it'll take 10 times as long to develop technology without coal and oil and we go from arrowheads to nuclear reactors in 3 million years instead of 300,000, that's still a flash in the pan on the scale of the universe. Also sure an LED artifact might not be useful to someone from 1920 but for someone from 500 BC the glass, metal, and plastic in a landfill would probably find a lot of use.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 31, 2020 02:43
|
|
|
Conspiratiorist posted:Sure. You searched the whole thread and the quote you came up with doesn’t even have the poster saying they believe FTL is real?
|
|
#
¿
Jan 31, 2020 19:04
|
|
|
Conspiratiorist posted:No I went back to the last FTL discussion the thread had which was like 10 pages ago, where notions of "FTL violating causality doesn't mean it can't real" started getting thrown about. You said people were yelling at you that FTL was real. Someone asked you to quote anyone yelling at you that FTL was real. You quoted a post that didn’t claim FTL was real.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 31, 2020 19:31
|
|
|
eXXon posted:Living in space loving sucks and it is so tedious to listen to space fetishists wax poetic about how amazing it would be to live somewhere other than a planet that is ideally suited for human life. Why not obsess over colonizing Antarctica instead of Mars? A rotating space habitat might be okay, if we can ever create an artificial biosphere that doesn't result explosive ant populations.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 1, 2020 18:38
|
|
|
So let’s just turn the universe into a singularity and then we can all travel faster than light and sideways in time.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 24, 2020 19:34
|
|
|
dex_sda posted:that said I doubt the second planet wouldn't have life, I think a big asteroid collision would carry enough life on it to seed the other world if conditions were close enough. who could say Also isn’t O2 highly reactive and only in our atmosphere in useful quantities because of life?
|
|
#
¿
Mar 6, 2020 20:15
|
|
|
Arglebargle III posted:[citation impossible] If you have liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen you can launch a rocket. You can create those with electricity and water. You can create electricity from moving water.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 12, 2020 05:43
|
|
|
StratGoatCom posted:What about the rocket itself, or the chemical practicality of making some parts? Petrochemicals are a scaffold that allow systems to be grown in ways that would be very difficult or impracticable without them. Its doable, but an utter bastard to do without. Let’s assume you need petrochemicals to create a rocket. You know that petrochemicals were not created at the time of the Big Bang, right? Every drop of oil or whiff of natural gas was created by subjecting organic matter to heat and pressure. Organic matter isn’t going away and if you have electricity you can make heat and pressure. This is also assuming it is impossible to create a rocket without petrochemicals - something I have not seen proven. I understand that trying to run a modern 2020 style industrial system seems impossible without petrochemicals, but that’s because our current system was designed around them. If you are starting from scratch and do not have them, you will develop differently. Electricity is the key, and I see no reason why a civilization couldn’t go from water wheels to dams to some mix of wind/solar/fission.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 12, 2020 16:00
|
|
|
Most of the world thinks we’re living in god’s simulation anyway. The only difference here is a more technologically rooted origin story.
|
|
#
¿
May 20, 2020 14:12
|
|
|
Yeah being able to say "the world is a simulation and we can use it to our advantage in the following ways:" would be different but right now you're just ripping out the abrahamic god's 7 days and tossing in a thousand entry level alien coders making poo poo wages. Fundamentally it's no different from any other origin story - it's mildly entertaining the first time you hear it but without predictive power it's just another folktale.
|
|
#
¿
May 20, 2020 18:54
|
|
|
Raenir Salazar posted:Don't think so. First, I am not positing FTL. That isn't what my post is doing. I am asking why the thought experiment I am asking wouldn't work. I think the most obvious issue is that the relationship of your speed vs your energy input is asymptotic to the speed of light, so you'd have to plug "infinity" energy into your propulsion to reach the point where your thought experiment could happen.
|
|
#
¿
Jun 6, 2020 14:05
|
|
|
D-Pad posted:He can clarify, but I don't think he is proposing coming back the original universe. I think he is saying now you live in the new universe. Since it is identical who cares, it's all the same to you. You didn't violate causality in your new universe because your starting point wasn't within the new universe, but you are at your intended destination at faster than the speed of light from your frame of reference. I think some people would take issue with the concept of dooming your spouse/friends/family to a lifetime without you, even if you personally get to spend your life with exact duplicates of them.
|
|
#
¿
Jun 6, 2020 16:56
|
|
|
D-Pad posted:The whole "now we have awesome cell phone cameras and the videos are still poo poo" argument gets brought up a lot, but cell phone cameras are not made to have the ability to focus correctly on lit objects far away in the sky. They don't have telephoto lenses, the sensors are too small for great low light performance (without long exposures), etc. Seriously, go out tonight and try to take a video of a plane that is clearly a plane when looking at it and then compare your eyesight with the video. Hell, do it during the day. They just aren't designed for it. Okay what has happened to the price point and availability of cameras capable of capturing this? What has happened to the number and quality of professional grade telescopes worldwide? What has happened to military radar systems in countries around the world? What has happened to the instruments and tools available to pilots and air traffic controllers worldwide? Additionally the quality of personal cell phone cameras may be less than you deem worthy, but the quantity has gone through the roof. Where are the events where thousands of people capture something strange on their phones at the same time? A GIANT PARSNIP fucked around with this message at 03:15 on Jul 31, 2020 |
|
#
¿
Jul 31, 2020 03:12
|
|
|
Aliens aren’t visiting earth, and no one here has any proof to the contrary. I don’t really know what there is to debate or discuss beyond that.
|
|
#
¿
Jul 31, 2020 14:45
|
|
|
Antifa Turkeesian posted:It's kind of depressing to think that there are likely technological civilizations all across the universe but that we're not in range of their transmissions and that in all likelihood if we ever hear those transmissions, it will be at a time when they will have already been extinct for thousands or millions of years. Even if we can watch a technosignature through a telescope from 47,000 light years away, we can never know very much about the species we're watching. It depends on what we receive. If it’s just a quick blip I think people will freak out but it will be forgotten. I think it will hold more attention if it’s either a steady stream of information or different bursts sent intermittently, as that brings the prospect of new knowledge. My understanding is that we’ve searched a comically small number of stars and frequencies in depth, so we might be getting bathed in signals filled with the secrets of the universe and have no idea.
|
|
#
¿
Jul 31, 2020 15:34
|
|
|
I guess I am imagining a civilization much more advanced than ours who is sending out targeted signals to other star systems. Our current understanding of physics does not allow for FTL travel, but it does allow a civilization to capture most of the energy output by their star and to use some of that immense energy to build giant gently caress off transmitters and send targeted signals around the galaxy as a vanity project. Having even a basic understanding of how a civilization a million years ahead of ours functions would shed some massive light on technological paths filled with ripe and unpicked fruit, not to mention the societal impact of seeing a more advanced future and knowing we can achieve that too through research.
|
|
#
¿
Jul 31, 2020 16:18
|
|
|
Would the detection of cfcs or really anything else in an atmosphere be a slam dunk for intelligent life? Or would it just launch a century long discussion on if those molecules could be created naturally?
|
|
#
¿
Jul 31, 2020 20:44
|
|
|
Owlofcreamcheese posted:Seems like once you had a few satellites and some receivers you would have functionally infinite fuel/energy for putting up more. I could see raw material being a problem. Sure you can use the asteroid belt and the oort cloud and maybe the moons of Mars, but if you need more material after that you're dealing with gravity wells and the equation may turn net energy negative.
|
|
#
¿
Aug 1, 2020 02:01
|
|
|
Owlofcreamcheese posted:Seems like it’d be break even, it would cost a lot to put up one solar satellite and a receiver, but at some point you’d be launching the 500th one using the power you get from the first 499, then the rest are all functionally free Thinking a bit more theoretically they could just turn the matter directly into energy in the gravity well using one of those fancy black hole reactors or something else we can barely comprehend. The basic physics of E=MC^2 make converting matter to energy at least theoretically possible, so it's above FTL travel on the list of things we can dream about.
|
|
#
¿
Aug 1, 2020 02:15
|
|
|
Rappaport posted:Tilting at windmills here, but: There's no way (that we know of) to get there, but it would be possible to communicate once we knew exactly where they were. It would be hilariously expensive to build the kind of, I dunno, laser system perhaps? to do it with, but theoretically you could beam something at them. Of course there's no guarantee they'd respond, and since the potential back-and-forth would take centuries or more, it wouldn't be much more than saying 'hello, we exist, how are you people doing?'. But it's the same logic as with those gold plates on the Voyagers, just taken to an extreme. And this way there'd be more of a chance of a response, at least. We could send 200 year blinks at each other, until one of the two blinks stopped.
|
|
#
¿
Aug 1, 2020 04:06
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 13, 2024 20:10 |
|
|
There could be hundreds of sapient species in our galaxy right now - there just may be no solution to FTL travel, so even the most advanced of them inhabit their own star system and maybe have some automated research stations in the star systems around them. The least advanced are all sitting around a fire in animal skins pondering about the four humors and the basic building blocks of earth/fire/wind/water/aether. Even if we had orbital habitats around Earth and lunar/martian research colonies and a huge gently caress off solar array to capture massive amounts of energy from our sun we would still be pretty much undetectable to another civilization of our current state of technology.
|
|
#
¿
Aug 3, 2020 14:54
|
|