Space, the Final Frontier: It Gazed Into My Open Refractor

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Kerning Chameleon: Apr 8, 2015; by Cyrano4747

Intelligent aliens exist, but like us, are constrained to their own solar systems because you cannot innovate away the laws of physics no matter what Star Trek may have led you to believe. Relativity and radiation are a bitch, yo.

This is also a good thing, because it prevents horrible space empires from ever being a thing.

# ¿ Nov 29, 2018 15:58

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# ¿ May 11, 2024 05:33

Kerning Chameleon: Apr 8, 2015; by Cyrano4747

MSDOS KAPITAL posted:

Here's what I wrote about this in the other thread:

We're at the point in our technological development where we can reason about harnessing the energy of entire stars and colonizing an entire galaxy. The sort of stuff that is really easy to notice if anyone's done it, or has ever done it. Moreover we don't need a lot more technological advancement to get there: the biggest hurdle in fact is probably modifying our own bodies both to survive the trips between stars and to live long enough to make making the trip worthwhile for a single individual (and the second part is optional, strictly speaking, though we'd probably want to do it and almost certainly could do it provided we've already solved the first bit). Our actual space travel technology is pretty rudimentary but suitable for purpose, or nearly so, if we had more rugged bodies.

Point being that even if we do destroy ourselves, we can conceive of another species similar to ourselves but a little less self-destructive and tribal, and consequently a little bit better at global civilization, which doesn't destroy itself. Instead, they build themselves better bodies and use space travel technology not much better than our own, to travel to other stars and within a few million years or so colonize an entire galaxy. And they build up their industry to the point that they can feasibly build Dyson spheres or Dyson swarms or what-have-you over the course of a few hundred thousand years or something, which is peanuts to an immortal species of intelligent life which has adapted itself to living in space.

If we were to look at such a galaxy with a telescope, it would be immediately apparent to us that that galaxy was populated with intelligent life. We have found no such galaxy, in spite of a lot of looking. My guess is that if there is intelligent life like us in the universe it must occur only once in every several hundred thousand galaxies or so. Or maybe it's never occurred and we're the first.

It doesn't mean that there will never be other intelligent life. There are a lot of red dwarf stars in the universe, and the planets orbiting them in their habitable zones have hundreds of billions or even in some cases a few trillion years to develop intelligent life. There may come an age of the universe where it is teeming with intelligent life all growing up and discovering one another, but it seems like that age is far off. Like "several multiples of the current age of the universe" far off.

Could be. My post is my thinking on it currently but it's not like I'm super certain of it. Another thing I'll point out though, since you mention the human perspective on things: the universe is very, very young. It has been around for 13 billion years yet trillions of years lie ahead during which conditions will remain roughly as favorable to the formation of intelligent life as they are now. The present age of our star is about 40% of the age of the universe itself. Meanwhile, as I already mentioned, there are planets orbiting red dwarfs right now which have many, many multiples of the current age of the universe on which to develop life at an entirely leisurely pace, compared to our own history. In light of that I would say that even if we are not the only life in the universe, we are certainly among the first, and furthermore we probably have a home star system that will eventually be considered atypical as a host of intelligent life.

Honestly I think part of the insistence that there must be other intelligent life out there is borne of a desire not to be human-centric just for the sake of not being human-centric. But unless we have a really, really flawed understanding of physics, we really are at essentially the very beginning of the history of life in the universe. Even if intelligent life formed immediately after the Big Bang, in the grand scheme of things humans arose not too long after that. The other consequence of this desire to not be human-centric is the idea that, well intelligent life exists it's just so advanced that it's really all around us and we can't possibly comprehend it. But it seems unlikely that all intelligent life would evolve technologically in such a way that they would be utterly imperceptible to us. That's a sort of hubris on it's own kinda, IMO

I guess the point I'm driving at is this: I can step outside my front door, and see all around me incontrovertible evidence of the existence of life on Earth. If I stepped outside my front door and saw nothing but land devoid of any evidence of life no matter where I looked, I might start to guess that I was alone. Why would the universe be any different in this regard?

e: also lmao get a load of this dickhead:

You mean you're a narcissist.

I love how your post can literally be boiled down to "Okay, BUT WHAT IF everything physicists have observed about our universe so far is 100% wrong and my favorite pulp fiction comic is right? What then, smartie pants?!?"

Some people really don't like the idea that intelligent life in general, and humanity in particular, have far, far shorter shelf lives than they want to believe.

We are not special, we will never be special, and we will all die out without having amounted to even the equivalent of a gnat's fart in terms of impact as far as the universe is concerned. Get over it, and yourself.

Outer space is where everything goes to die, including and especially your hopes and dreams.

Kerning Chameleon fucked around with this message at 18:13 on Nov 29, 2018

# ¿ Nov 29, 2018 18:08

Kerning Chameleon: Apr 8, 2015; by Cyrano4747

MSDOS KAPITAL posted:

That's... not really what I said at all, and since your post isn't really worth bothering with a cogent reply I'll just quote the OP instead:

LK clearly doesn't comprehend what will happen as more posters realize just how imminent the Great Filter is in regards to our own civilization. :colbert:

# ¿ Nov 29, 2018 19:23

Kerning Chameleon: Apr 8, 2015; by Cyrano4747

thegalagakid posted:

On the general timespan of the universe, I think once humans go beyond this solar system, we're going to find a lot of ruins and monuments scattered out there.

That's adorable, you still believe in Asimovian fairy tales of human existence extended beyond the Oort Cloud. Don't worry, dear, one day I'm sure you'll realize the situation you described in that post is exactly as realistic as the literal events of Lord of the Rings.

# ¿ Nov 29, 2018 19:29

Kerning Chameleon: Apr 8, 2015; by Cyrano4747

Owlofcreamcheese posted:

What are you doing with your life that "gonna call this woman dear and dismiss her" is a normal reaction for this (is the poster a woman? or are you also trying to call someone a woman as an insult?)

It was meant more in the "an adult addressing an adorably wrong child" sort of way, I apologise if any misogyny was inferred by my statements.

# ¿ Nov 29, 2018 19:52

Kerning Chameleon: Apr 8, 2015; by Cyrano4747

Lightning Knight posted:

Be nice, Kerning. This thread is fun! Don’t ruin it for everyone else.

Nothing about space is "fun": it is silent, it is dark, and it is completely hostile to anything we can identify as life. I'm sick of the romanticization of the fundamentally horrifying and humiliating situation we find ourselves in, and I'll fight it here as well. If that means I have to be the ice-cold water dumped on your rocket boners, so be it.

# ¿ Nov 29, 2018 20:25

Kerning Chameleon: Apr 8, 2015; by Cyrano4747

zoux posted:

It's not a serious theory. ....I hope....

This is why discussions about the Fermi Paradox that don't end with "we simply can't detect them with our lovely instruments" get real facile real fast.

Like, we have people itt that seriously think we actually live in a Lovecraft story, I mean come on.

# ¿ Nov 29, 2018 22:31

Kerning Chameleon: Apr 8, 2015; by Cyrano4747

Lightning Knight posted:

I don't seriously think we live in a Lovecraft story but I also think the fact that you think it's implausible there are things in the universe far more consequential and dangerous than humanity is silly. We are but small fish in a big, big ocean, an ocean that is ancient and that we can only see a small slice of.

Every single intelligent species clings for dear life to its slowly dying mother sun(s). The luckier and more canny ones might be able to ride out the star's expansion by island hopping planetary orbits until it settles into brown dwarfhood, but the idea any of us in the Big Brain Club could personally visit even a single extrasolar planet (given what we now know about physics and the realities of existing in space) is the real laughable idea.

Kerning Chameleon fucked around with this message at 22:50 on Nov 29, 2018

# ¿ Nov 29, 2018 22:47

Kerning Chameleon: Apr 8, 2015; by Cyrano4747

Lightning Knight posted:

None of us personally will go to space, no, but that doesn't mean that no one could ever make it to space.

And if they can't, then perhaps that is the great filter. I think that assuming the great filter is nuclear weapons or even global warming is human-centric tho, assuming similar evolution and social development as us.

Yes, my choice for Great Filter is "laws of physics makes interstellar travel en mass impractical if not impossible", I consider that the most reasonable stance to take on the matter.

We're in a cage, but so is everyone else. We are effectively if not literally alone in the universe, just like everyone else.

Kerning Chameleon fucked around with this message at 22:55 on Nov 29, 2018

# ¿ Nov 29, 2018 22:53

Kerning Chameleon: Apr 8, 2015; by Cyrano4747

Lightning Knight posted:

Isn't the problem with this that even not going faster than light, one could still colonize other planets given a sufficiently large time scale (i.e. millions of years), and given the age of the universe (i.e. billions of years) this implies we fundamentally misunderstand something about the galaxy or that somehow there has not been intelligent life before us?

The big question is... Why would anyone do that? My island hopping idea would be plenty for a species to survive a longass time on, if they live sustainably and accept limits and periodic culls in population. Trying to send colony ships you'll never hear from again gets you nothing but inaccurate warm fuzzies about your species specialtude, and it's so unlikely they'd survive the journey, much less the destination...

It's just a huge buy-in for enormous risk with basically no payoff. I can't imagine anyone but the Alien Elon Musks of the universe seriously considering it at that stage.

# ¿ Nov 29, 2018 23:02

Kerning Chameleon: Apr 8, 2015; by Cyrano4747

Lightning Knight posted:

I don't follow. Could you elaborate?

Ok Thanos.

I think you're assuming aliens would think the same way we do, however.

^ fair!

Let me know when you can design a space station in orbit around Io capable of comfortably housing all of Earth's current population to escape Creeping Red Giant Sun.

And we kind of have to assume aliens think like us, because otherwise we have to assume Star Trek energy cloud alien morality, which isn't very useful for discussions.

# ¿ Nov 29, 2018 23:12

Kerning Chameleon: Apr 8, 2015; by Cyrano4747

Lightning Knight posted:

Who says it has to be all of humanity?

Also I don't think I agree with that, that seems rather uncreative and unscientific to me to assume that aliens will think anything like us. They could, but they also could very well not.

Okay, so you're fine with abandoning some humans to a sun-baked hellscape to save the rest. That's culling.

Yes, but at that point, I can make my theoretical aliens believe anything I want to to make my case, no matter how absurd that may be, and then expect you to disprove my angel aliens or Stay-Puft Gozer Aliens, or whatever. It's rhetorically useless.

# ¿ Nov 29, 2018 23:18

Kerning Chameleon: Apr 8, 2015; by Cyrano4747

DrSunshine posted:

I don't know about this claim, considering that all life on earth is made of self-repairing nanobots.

Self repairing nanobots that do not survive well beyond the ionosphere at all.

# ¿ Nov 30, 2018 00:13

Kerning Chameleon: Apr 8, 2015; by Cyrano4747

Owlofcreamcheese posted:

Also a dude not being able to go isn't really a barrier to a species spreading to a whole galaxy like if it's a million years from now and we are really sure we absolutely can't send any dudes we could still just send bunches and bunches of those bacteria that live 6 miles deep in rocks in little sealed up ecosystems and spray them in every direction nonstop and make sure to include plenty of very sturdy bibles and ayn rand books or whatever it is we feel will be important for our weird kids to find in a hundred million years to pass on to them. we could still colonize the galaxy with earth life even if we don't get to come personally

holy loving poo poo is the the single most horrendous thing i've seen posted in a long time

like what the actual gently caress is wrong with you to even think something this horrific

(USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST)

# ¿ Nov 30, 2018 00:45

Kerning Chameleon: Apr 8, 2015; by Cyrano4747

A GIANT PARSNIP posted:

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.

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".

Like, anyone who makes that argument always sounds like a cancer cell learned how to talk, it's really gross.

(USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST)

# ¿ Nov 30, 2018 22:26

Kerning Chameleon: Apr 8, 2015; by Cyrano4747

This is kind of tangential, but I still think relevant to the whole Fermi Paradox point: Could Mars have ever been home to a present-day human equivalent of intelligent life?

This isn't me being facetious, we've literally only barely scratched the surface of Mars' secrets. How do we know for sure there wasn't once civilization there? It was forged of the same debris as the rest of the terrestrial planets, so obviously it could have the same ingredients needed for complex life to eventually form in its long history. Sure, we can say "oh, there are no obviously artificial artifacts or monuments, to say nothing of satellites." But, pop science though it may have been, stuff like The World Without People and Life After Us did a decent job of illustrating how even the seemingly most resilient human landmarks crumble to dust and get grown and eroded over on (geologically speaking) an extremely short timespan. Satellite orbits decay, and even plastic layer remnants would get buried far beneath what we've excavated so far on the red planet.

Could there have been an intelligent species on Mars that just couldn't cut the Great Filter mustard before their planetary time limit was up, then simply erased by the relentless march of time?

# ¿ Dec 2, 2018 07:54

Kerning Chameleon: Apr 8, 2015; by Cyrano4747

I know, I know, the argument for the practical benefits of space research get thrown around a lot. I admit it, GPS is pretty kickin' rad, although I find velcro and Tang of all things rather vapid developments that certainly weren't worth the sheer amount of R&D dollars put into them.

But I must ask, what has space done for us lately? I'm serious, please tell me how space exploration developments in the past decade are going to improve me, my life, personally, going forward? Or the rest of society? Climate change monitoring is the only thing I can thing of, and that's space exploitation, not exploration. Cold hard truth is, we've hit the Law of Diminishing Returns when it comes to getting the bang for our bucks in space.

I'm just gonna say it: we need to defund space research and reallocate the funds toward public works and reparations. Yes, I know, military budget. And I agree, cut that too. But ALSO redirect space funding, because every dollar counts in averting a racially charged nuclear climate apocalypse. As Eisenhower so eloquently put it when he vetoed the Apollo project the first go round: "Every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed." Those words echo with resounding, inescapable truth even today.

Yes, some scientific studies have proven societally important in the past. But personally, I think some sciences, including space research, aren't pulling their practical weight these days in the cause of creating a more equitable and prosperous society as much as they used to. And if a science isn't aiding in the progressive cause, they need to shut up, cut the panhandling and get on board with the folks producing real, tangible benefits for the common people. Because if you're not actively help progress society in a real, applied, tangible manner, you're an active detriment by siphoning off direly needed funds and personnel.

# ¿ Dec 5, 2018 09:01

Kerning Chameleon: Apr 8, 2015; by Cyrano4747

DrSunshine posted:

In that respect, and assuming based on our present knowledge of the world, it is our moral duty to ensure that terrestrial life continues, and to establish as many habitats for terrestrial life as possible, as backups. As long as thermodynamic potential gradients exist in the universe, we civilization-building life forms should ensure that they are taken advantage of to foster habitats for life forms. I think that we should make every effort to convert every single speck of matter in the universe into places for Earthly life to exist.

See, when I rail against space colonialism, this is the exact sort of poo poo I'm talking about. This is unbelievably narrow-minded, selfish, and geocentric thinking, believing our variety of life is the only valid kind and thus inherently special and deserving of expansion beyond its natural boundries.

but no, tell me again how introducing cane toads to australia was actually cool and good

# ¿ Dec 5, 2018 17:17

Kerning Chameleon: Apr 8, 2015; by Cyrano4747

DrSunshine posted:

B-But we don't know that any other life out there exists right now.

So that gives us the right to just blast bacteria out blindly, and assume nobody on some distant world will be harmed?

Privilege. Privilege never changes.

# ¿ Dec 5, 2018 17:24

Kerning Chameleon: Apr 8, 2015; by Cyrano4747

AGGGGH BEES posted:

Considering the natural boundaries of humanity before tools and fire involved living to age 30 and then being eaten by a jaguar or dying to a tiny cut that got infected I think I can safely say that you're full of poo poo.

Yes, and look how well that turned out for the greater biosphere a few dozen thousand years later.

# ¿ Dec 5, 2018 17:31

Kerning Chameleon: Apr 8, 2015; by Cyrano4747

LeoMarr posted:

Hasnt this alredy happened with numerous micro life discoveries or "high propabilities of life "?never flashy enough for anyone to care about

---

The main thing with reusable rockets is automated supply chains. We can automate a car. A train a bus a plane to carry cargo from x to z. The less human interaction with getting poo poo from x to z means more focus spent on production of things. if we could have robotic mining facilities that shoot rockets full of materials back to earth autonomously we can eliminate scarcity much quicker. Even getting a semi truck to run 24/7 semi autonomously would bolster our flow. We rely on car and trains for transport of goods,but even then there is a ton of idle time. Your car sits in a lot for 95% of its life. Semi trucks arent quite 95% but 40 or 50 roughly? I mean methed up humans can run trucks for 24 hrs + but there is obviously a diminishing return.

if you think the exorbitant cost will ever allow asteroid mining with back-to-earth export to actually happen

Even in the extremely unlikely event we start mining asteroids, that poo poo would just stay up there for further space poo poo development. Easier to just keep strip mining Eden, and render unto Luna that which is Luna's.

# ¿ Dec 6, 2018 00:30

Kerning Chameleon: Apr 8, 2015; by Cyrano4747

khwarezm posted:

I'm a little bit disappointed that so much talk around the Fermi parodox in this thread so far has been fixated on corny sci-fi concepts like a super advanced race of implacable predators that manage to get advanced enough to destroy every other species (for seemingly no reason) effortlessly despite the inevitably massive gaps in time and distance they'd have to deal with under our current understanding of physics. Or the federation from Star Trek enacting the Prime Directive on us even though their giant star spanning empire should be nearly impossible to hide under our current understanding of physics and all it would take is one bad actor among their giant star empire to completely ruin their whole plan.

I want to posit a few more grounded ideas, one I was thinking about recently revolves around the fact that we know that Super Earths are extremely common in the galaxy, and it seems that our Solar System is quite aberrant in not having one (though I've heard that Planet 9 could be a Super Earth, but it's so insanely far away that it doesn't count). Super Earths commonly occupy positions around the parent star similar to our own rocky planets including actual Earth, some scientists have suggested that their greater mass could make them overall much more conductive towards the evolution of life compared to smaller planets like our own, the size will help keep a molten, dynamic core around for a lot longer with the magnetic field to protect the planet (compare against Mars), as well promote the process of plate tectonics which might be critical in maintaining a healthy carbon cycle and continent formation (compare against Venus!) and finally hold on and keep a thick atmosphere (compare against Mercury!). With assumptions like this Super-Earths might actually be the site of the vast majority of life in the universe and perhaps Earth is on the very lowest end of planetary size to keep stable conditions long enough for life like we know it to flourish.

The catch comes with the fact that Super Earths are, well, super, their significantly larger mass makes it far more difficult for any civilization to escape the gravitational pull of the planet using only technology they manage to develop with terrestrial methods and resources. We can already see the gigantic amounts of fuel that needs to be invested on Earth to get even small amounts of material into orbit (and things like Kessler syndrome could make things far worse in the future). If Earth really is on the lowest end of planetary habitability it could mean that it is so ridiculously difficult or simply impossible to create a space faring civilization due to the hard realities of the energy expenditure to get off the vast majority of life supporting planets in existence that it just doesn't happen with any kind of frequency. The universe could be teeming with tens of millions of technological civilizations, but biases in planet suitability mean that the planets most likely to develop stable life end up locking them into a planetary prison permanently as a cruelly ironic twist, stuck waiting out the days until their planet becomes uninhabitable either due to natural processes like their sun brightening or if they ruin things themselves like we seem set to do.

A flip on this could be that planets that are smaller could develop life fine, but somewhere like earth has been blessed with just enough critical resources of things like rare metals that planets with less simply cannot build the technological civilization needed to get into space, even if they wanted, or maybe smaller planets are just naturally more barren which prevents the creation of a big enough critical mass of their local intelligent creature to kick-start civilization (sorry I know that's a bit of a loaded term in this context, but creating high density mass-agricultural societies around fertile areas could well be crucial to end up building rocket ships) and especially industrialization.

I like the more grounded view of things, but any variant of the Rare Earth Hypothesis always makes me roll my eyes because it implies a specialness and uniqueness to our planet and species that, quite frankly, flies in the face of everything we're learned about both so far over the last few thousand years.

The absence of evidence is not necessarily evidence of absence, it's just evidence that our current data sets and scientific instrumentation are both woefully inadequate to understanding the situation, and the hard limits imposed upon us by the fundamental laws of physics and the less fundamental laws of sociology makes it likely we never will have adequate instruments or data.

# ¿ Dec 7, 2018 00:17

Kerning Chameleon: Apr 8, 2015; by Cyrano4747

I think I've got a pitch for Netflix's next sci-fi miniseries: we follow a bunch of people who woke up in various different relativistic colony ships as they arrive at their target planets. Each planet was chosen because it was determined they had the highest probability for either Earth-life colonization or existing intelligent life. Every episode, a different planet and different crew.

Except the twist is every single planet is actually uninhabitable or the aliens are all long dead. This one actually turned out to just be Venus, that one the aliens trapped themselves by Kessler Syndrome and nuked themselves in resource wars, this one the star expanded just enough while we were traveling and baked the surface, etc.

You could advertise it as "Star Trek, but hard sci-fi, really!" but it would turn out to actually be "Threads/Black Mirror for space nerds."

Kerning Chameleon fucked around with this message at 01:02 on Dec 7, 2018

# ¿ Dec 7, 2018 00:59

Kerning Chameleon: Apr 8, 2015; by Cyrano4747

Adar posted:

-the Goldilocks zone doesn't necessarily matter, since life doesn't need to be water based (and if it's silicon or some other weirder thing it should be able to build space stuff orders of magnitude easier and faster)

Just to take this issue with this, silicon-based life would mostly be varieties of rock anemones. Carbon-based life was able to eat the Earth and evolve and poo poo because Carbon is super-flexible, chemically-speaking, and can do all sorts of fun tricks that silicon just can't.

Not saying it can't exist, I'm just saying it'd be stuck to the bottom of oceans or whatever, not being a spacefaring species or even that mobile lava mama thing from Star Trek: TOS.

Citing The Disappearing Spoon for this one.

# ¿ Dec 7, 2018 21:28

Kerning Chameleon: Apr 8, 2015; by Cyrano4747

BardoTheConsumer posted:

My problem with this is that by this logic Russia or the US should have nuked the other immediately upon discovering the technology to do so. It doesnt make sense to fire a KKV at every random civilization you see just because they could theoretically do the same to you, and for proof of that look no further than the idea that our particular species (mostly) finds that idea repugnant.

You do realize that is literally what the policy makers at the time lamented, both when the soviets got nukes and much later when the north koreans got their nuclear icbms? "Yeah, in hindsight, we should've struck while we had the chance, that was real dumb of us."

Current nuclear arms r&d is focused on being able to do this, which is why we had to sign (soon to be defunct) treaties to curtail it because one side or the other was getting to far along in their "bomb you without worrying about getting bombed back" tech, right?

just because we've been dancing in this endgame for decades now doesn't mean we ever stopped working towards finally checkmating the other guy

# ¿ Dec 10, 2018 21:44

Kerning Chameleon: Apr 8, 2015; by Cyrano4747

Lightning Knight posted:

If an alien race did aim radio waves at us, would we even be able to comprehend any meaning from it?

I know a lot of the projects about sending stuff into space translate into binary, but would aliens even be able to understand that?

How hard would it be for you to go to Pluto, then build a receiver to pick up your old local news broadcast stations, with the stipulations that you have to build the decoder for the digital signal from scratch with absolutely zero documentation about it and your degree in communications is from the 1940s?

We'll assume getting you to Pluto, making so you don't immediately die, and giving you the semi-raw materials for the equipment are the freebies in this experiment.

# ¿ Jan 10, 2019 19:20

Kerning Chameleon: Apr 8, 2015; by Cyrano4747

Lightning Knight posted:

I'm not sure I understand the analogy here.

The analogy is that the absurd scenario I posited still has a much better chance of success than of us

Successfully intercepting an alien transmission artificial in nature AND
Having the signal quality be decent enough we don't lose too much data so as to make decoding impossible AND
We can successfully decode the signal from whatever analog or digital format aliens use into something comprehensible to us humans and our technology AND
We can make heads or tails of whatever the content is of that alien signal (text, audio, video, misc data format, in escalating order of difficulty to decipher)

We'd pretty much have to have aliens parked right next to Earth with a giant cartoony bullhorn to be able to have a realistic chance of figuring what, if anything, they're trying to say.

# ¿ Jan 10, 2019 20:20

Kerning Chameleon: Apr 8, 2015; by Cyrano4747

The Great Filter could just be the fact that interstellar space is fundamentally physically impractical. That means you could have some star system-wide civilizations, but physics hems them in their home star systems. That seems like it would kill a lot of sci-fi wet dreams pretty stone dead.

Also, why can't there be more than one Great Filter? Maybe multicellular life is hard AND you can't travel between stars.

# ¿ Jan 11, 2019 22:34

Kerning Chameleon: Apr 8, 2015; by Cyrano4747

Lightning Knight posted:

I would like to discuss the China probe on the moon.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.bbc.com/news/amp/world-asia-china-46873526

They’re growing cotton on the moon.

https://www.cnet.com/news/chinas-moon-lander-sprouted-a-plant-but-now-its-dead/

quote:

Xinhua announced the sprout Tuesday and posted a series of progress images covering the course of nine days and showing a seedling reaching up inside the habitat. The experiment didn't last long. The same day, China's state-run Xinhua News declared that it's already ended.

...

A team from Chongqing University in China developed a sealed biosphere habitat stocked with seeds, fruit fly eggs and yeast that it hoped would create a mini-ecosystem. The cotton seed was the only one to sprout. The experiment also contained potato and oilseed rape seeds.

Of several seeds sent, only one had actually sprouted, and then promptly died afterward.

Yet more evidence organic life has no business ever being in space, and a rather poetic one at that

Kerning Chameleon fucked around with this message at 18:15 on Jan 16, 2019

# ¿ Jan 16, 2019 18:12

Kerning Chameleon: Apr 8, 2015; by Cyrano4747

Owlofcreamcheese posted:

Next time someone talks about any biology research or animal study ask "is the mouse okay"?

lol if you think animal testing is in any way, shape, or form ethical or moral

science worship really has rotted the internet's brains, goddamn

# ¿ Jan 16, 2019 18:48

Kerning Chameleon: Apr 8, 2015; by Cyrano4747

Bug Squash posted:

Can we cut down on the black pill cynicism stuff overall. If you think space exploration isn't awesome, you're wrong. They did a gently caress ton of science on the Apollo missions, and even if they could have done it cheaper with robots we absolutely need to have engineering experience of human spaceflight in order to do it better.

Every new thing we learn about space just further contextualizes how puny and irrelevant we are. I would argue persisting in this vain endeavor is actually increasing overall pessimism in our species, and in fact continuing to explore space is the most cynical decision we could make.

If you care about the future of humanity at all, you should be demanding an immediate end to all space scientific research.

# ¿ Jan 18, 2019 00:42

Kerning Chameleon: Apr 8, 2015; by Cyrano4747

DrSunshine posted:

Why not demand an immediate end to all weapons programs instead? The world spends a tiny fraction of its budget on space scientific research, while wasting billions or trillions on private kickbacks and tax breaks to the wealthy class.

The government can ban more than one thing at a time, you know. There are already plenty of anti-weapons people in the world, and not nearly enough anti-spacers.

# ¿ Jan 18, 2019 01:26

Kerning Chameleon: Apr 8, 2015; by Cyrano4747

The ISS has become a giant orbital petri dish:

quote:

NASA scientists have found that the International Space Station (ISS), home to six astronauts, is infested with disease-inducing bacteria. Many of the organisms breeding on the craft's surfaces are known to form both bacterial and fungal biofilms that promote resistance to antibiotics. The NASA team published their findings in a new study -- the first comprehensive catalog of germs in closed space systems -- in the journal Microbiome. The biofilms ability to cause microbial-induced corrosion on Earth could also play havoc with the ISS' infrastructure by causing mechanical blockages, claim the researchers.

The microbes come from humans and are similar to the ones in gyms, offices, and hospitals on Earth. They include so-called opportunistic pathogens such as Staphylococcus aureus (commonly found on the skin and in the nasal passage) and Enterobacter (associated with the human gastrointestinal tract). Though they can cause diseases back on Earth, it's unclear what, if any, affect they'd have on the ISS' inhabitants.

"Specific microbes in indoor spaces on Earth have been shown to impact human health," Dr Kasthuri Venkateswaran, a senior research scientist at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the study's co-author, said. "This is even more important for astronauts during spaceflight, as they have altered immunity and do not have access to the sophisticated medical interventions available on Earth."

Oh look, turns out dangerous microbes sealed in an artificial environment designed to be human habitable are effectively impossible to control over a prolonged time period, who could have guessed. :rolleyes:

# ¿ Apr 8, 2019 14:41

Kerning Chameleon: Apr 8, 2015; by Cyrano4747

A GIANT PARSNIP posted:

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.

The question is if we'll still be building skyscrapers, or salvaging from them to help sustain our millions-global-population mideval-level hell existence.

# ¿ May 31, 2019 22:21

Kerning Chameleon: Apr 8, 2015; by Cyrano4747

Owlofcreamcheese posted:

What force bans those two things?

The expenditure of easy-to-extract fossil fuels and widespread deforestation (which had occurred in Europe right before they caught on to using coal for the new steam engine tech).

We say "medieval" level to refer more broadly to "pre-Industrial Revolution" levels of technology. There are things that, even if the collective memory manages to endure, you simply cannot do in a post-apocalyptic society because you literally cannot access the basic resources and manpower (raw or machine multiplied) needed to reproduce them anymore. You might not forget how to ferment alcohol to disinfect wounds and instruments, but if you lose or use up all your penicillin stocks in a world where fast global trade doesn't really exist anymore and advanced pharmaceutical manufacturing plants are crumbling buildings, well good loving luck finding another one-in-a-million magic fungus cure for all those bacterial infections you have to deal with again.

It cannot be overstated how important logistics and hyperspecialization are to the modern world, and how turbofucked your society becomes when those suddenly disappear. We stand in awe of the mystery of the Bronze Age Collapse for a reason.

# ¿ Jun 1, 2019 06:06

Kerning Chameleon: Apr 8, 2015; by Cyrano4747

We're inside an opaque fishbowl, and unless we ever gain the power to leave the fishbowl (which as far as we know is literally physically impossible; hell, as far as we can tell, just leaving the Local Group for any other galactic group would be impossible), anything outside or before the fishbowl is "here be dragons" territory that is impossible for us to ever perceive, so there's no sense in worrying about it.

The rules may well and truly be rigged against us on this one, and we'll have to learn to accept and live with that fact should that day come.

# ¿ Jun 2, 2019 19:37

Kerning Chameleon: Apr 8, 2015; by Cyrano4747

Saw that special on PBS about the moon landings, and while most of it was rather appalling blowjobs to MURICA, SCIENCE, AND gently caress DA RUSSKIES and ended on a naked propaganda note to supprt landing on Mars, I was struck by the civil rights leaders of the day bravely denouncing the endeavor. Dr King himself equated the Apollo Project to the horror of the Vietnam War. Got me thinking, and so I went and found a good article about the immorality of space exploration: The racist language of space exploration:

quote:

Presidents have also used frontierism and colonialism to get white citizens behind their agenda. When President John F. Kennedy announced his intention to bring Americans to the Moon in 1962, he paraphrased one of the earliest colonists on the North American continent.

“William Bradford, speaking in 1630 of the founding of the Plymouth Bay Colony, said that all great and honorable actions are accompanied with great difficulties, and both must be enterprised and overcome with answerable courage,” Kennedy said.

Bradford was the governor of the Plymouth Bay Colony at the time of the Pequot War. In an overnight attack, British colonizers massacred four hundred soldiers, non-soldiers, and children. Bradford later described the act of genocide as a Christian victory. “...victory seemed a sweet sacrifice, and they gave the prays therof to God,” Bradford wrote, “who had wrought so wonderfully for them, thus to inclose their enemies in their hands, and give them so speedy a victory over so proud and insulting an enemy.”

Although Kennedy did not characterize his vision for the Moon as creating a “colony” specifically, the association he wanted to create is clear: The Moon is the next version of the New World, the next frontier for American conquest.

In his speech, Kennedy continues that men like Bradford teach us that “man, in his quest for knowledge and progress, is determined and cannot be deterred.” However, if “man” is a stand-in for “white colonizers,” “knowledge and progress” unabashedly brushes over the lives of indigenous persons and people of color that were lost in their quest to “explore.” It’s a profusely sanitized version of reality.

“It’s fascinating that a term like ‘colonizing’ can be seen in neutral terms when it can’t exist without violence and dispossession,” Ralph said. It can’t exist without violence to establish a political hierarchy. Every colonial project is about managing populations, subjugating people, extracting resources.”

But no, tell me again about how space colonialism is only upsides. :rolleyes:

# ¿ Jul 12, 2019 23:30

Kerning Chameleon: Apr 8, 2015; by Cyrano4747

DrSunshine posted:

In my belief, we should focus on surviving and repairing from the climate crisis in order to explore and colonize space. Absolutely we should be making some investments into robot probes and SETI and stuff - basic science is very important, but the overarching focus of society should be to making sure that we and as many life forms as possible survive the abrupt climate change. My basic belief is that all the good things that leftists advocate for - UBI, socialism, anti-racism, anti-discrimination, environmental protection, fully automated luxury communism, etc. - are prerequisites to a society that can peacefully explore the universe. Therefore, if we want to ensure that we're not annihilated by a random space catastrophe, or simply obliterated by the natural evolution of the sun, it's incumbent upon us to work towards all those goals.

Hard disagree. I feel we as a species should learn to outgrow our primitive need to grow and spread our seed at any cost. When I compare it to the mentality of a cancer cell, I mean it: a cancer cell seeks to consume resources and grow and spread at any costs, even if it means the ultimate death of its host and itself. Everything you just said sounds like that to me.

We learn to be content with our boundaries here on Eden, we can end the unsustainable drive to consume ever more resources. We can learn to find equilibrium. But if we get out into space, especially with the explicit goal of spreading ourselves as much as possible? Then we're essentially dooming our species to who knows how long of an existence spent seeking more resources to consume. That sounds horrible to me.

And if an asteroid or nuclear war or whatever does end our civilization here on Earth? Then it was just our time to go. All that has a beginning must have an end, the laws of thermodynamics dictate it. Earth is our cradle; I believe it should also be our tomb. I'm at peace with that idea. I hope you someday can be, too.

# ¿ Jul 14, 2019 07:00

Kerning Chameleon: Apr 8, 2015; by Cyrano4747

Raenir Salazar posted:

The Mars Direct gives a pretty good framework using existing technologies and well understood engineering ideas to allow basically anyone to think, "Yeah in 100 years we could have 50,000 people living on Mars" and actually understand and think through the steps to get to that point.

I like to remind people that to "grow colonies" in space, you can't just shuttle warm bodies out. They have to also be willing to breed. A lot. With a much smaller selection pool of candidates than they're used while earthbound.

Even if you make it a priority to establish in vitro fertilization facilities on your Mars/Space base, unless you also want to research full anime test tube womb factories, you still need most if not all of your female population willing to be handmaids for the foreseeable future.

Sounds like a great societal model to adopt just to plant our feet in space to me! :jerkbag:

# ¿ Jul 19, 2019 16:03

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# ¿ May 11, 2024 05:33

Kerning Chameleon: Apr 8, 2015; by Cyrano4747

Not to mention that, extrapolating from all our research results from the ISS, you really don't want to gestate human fetuses in lower-gravity environments. That's just asking for Cronenberg levels of hosed up horror show poo poo, right there.

# ¿ Jul 19, 2019 16:24

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Debate & Discussion > Space, the Final Frontier: It Gazed Into My Open Refractor

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