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OtherworldlyInvader posted:On a related note, I think its fair to question the assumption intelligence will inevitably spread out into some sort of interstellar empire. If you're something like the encoded memories of an entire civilization of people uploaded into a hyper computer unified into a galaxy brain super intelligence, why would you want to introduce years long ping times between elements of yourself? Granted, you are immortal, but there's no getting around the math that you could fit a LOT more thinking time into those years if you didn't spread yourself out like that. Even a distance as short as the Earth to the moon is like a 5 second response time, which can be a long time even for us slow thinking meat brains, a Dyson sphere would have even longer times. Even if they send minor elements of themselves to other stars for whatever reason, technologically advanced civilizations/intelligences may be characterized by building their most important elements smaller and more compactly, in order to share more information within themselves. A civilization developing in a dense enough star cluster could conceivably spread fairly easily without FTL over a long enough timescale. They'd have to get lucky to avoid being wiped out by nearby supernovae early on and wait for just the right kind of close encounters to provide small delta v without being too close to disrupt the orbits of either system's planets.
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Dec 10, 2019 07:40
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Sure, dark matter could be discarded alien space stations all cooled to nearly 0K, as long as you throw away all of modern cosmology and galaxy formation and ignore the absence of evidence for MACHOs.
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Dec 10, 2019 16:17
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Raenir Salazar posted:We have like an even better camera being put up at one of the Lagrange points right?  Yes it's definitely launching in 20
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Dec 11, 2019 17:25
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Instead of bullshit warp drives that fold space, why not bullshit warp drives that increase the speed of light locally?
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Dec 12, 2019 07:50
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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?
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Feb 1, 2020 17:55
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A GIANT PARSNIP posted:A rotating space habitat might be okay, if we can ever create an artificial biosphere that doesn't result explosive ant populations. It might be in a very distant future post-scarcity society, but some visionaries (overlapping with Musk/SpaceX stans) seem to believe that we can go straight to Culture-style luxury orbitals and skip right past the slightly more plausible reality of a small population of Expanse-style Belters living in relative conditions equivalent to 19th century coal miners. Arglebargle III posted:I'm just pointing out, if you can build a generation ship that works, you might as well leave off the engines. The point of a working generation ship would presumably be to go somewhere interesting, like a system with habitable and/or life-harboring planet(s).
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Feb 2, 2020 07:07
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DrSunshine posted:Um, colonizing Mars is not living in space, though?? I mean Mars is clearly a planet. Did you finish reading the first sentence you quoted, specifically the part about "other than a planet that is ideally suited for human life" i.e. anywhere that isn't Earth? Wafflecopper posted:have you considered not reading the thread for discussing aliens and other space poo poo D&D is definitely the place to not read threads about things you are interested in because they might contain posts that you disagree with.
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Feb 2, 2020 19:24
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Raenir Salazar posted:I'd say colonizing space is very a much possible within a forseeable future. Insofar as we're talking about "Five Year Plans" style generational thinking, so 30 to 50 years optimistically, to 50 to 75 years out conservatively. If giant piles of money went into basic research and materials science and most of it was spent on addressing climate change here on Earth first, sure. But giving NASA funding for specific space missions is not going to help now. Raenir Salazar posted:Again, beginning the process for just Mars is generally estimated by NASA experts to be a decade long process; thus it isn't true at all that it needs to be a "very distant" and "post scarcity society" to achieve comfortable living conditions in space; whether it be Mars or space stations. Much of the tech to make something livable already exists either in practice or conceptually. Where are you getting this from? Sending a few astronauts to Mars a la the Martian is vastly different from building an entire colony with living conditions comparable to major cities today. That's just laughable. How is this colony going to sustain itself? It would be a massive money pit for probably half a century. There's a much better argument to be made for mining asteroids. Raenir Salazar posted:Also as for "why not Antarctica", well for one thing there's competing claims by like 20 nations, for the most part it is home to an extremely fragile ecosystem (while Mars is not), and you probably couldn't geoengineer Antarctica without affecting other parts of the planet people already live on. My point was that the inhospitable wastes of Antarctica are vastly more conducive to human life than anywhere we know of outside of Earth, not that people should actually live there. There is more than enough land to house the human population and enough water and arable farmland too if it's managed properly. Raenir Salazar posted:In general we want *less* emissions on Earth, and more of them elsewhere; our overall goal is probably to actually *scale back* human settlement on Earth and consolidate the human populace to a few arcologies dotting the planet while leaving the majority of the planet to be reclaimed by nature. Ok? Smashing capitalism and distributing Earth's resources more equitably would accomplish some of that. Sending people to Mars will do absolutely gently caress all. If anything it would be counterproductive. I can understand the interest of landing people on Mars from a scientific perspective but if crewed space missions had to compete for funding against virtually any other kind of applied or basic research, they would lose out every time. There are plenty of un- and under-employed PhDs right now; we don't need Apollo redux just to get people interested in STEM. There's an argument to be made for tilting public opinion, sure, but the risks are enormous for any Mars mission, especially the first one. Imagine if something goes wrong with JWST during/after launch? It's already viewed as a boondoggle and laughing stock the way Hubble was until its first servicing mission. A mission failure halfway to Mars would be at least as damaging as Challenger was.
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Feb 7, 2020 05:05
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Raenir Salazar posted:Where are you getting this from? I didn't say it was. Only that 21st century level comforts are relatively speaking within reach in probably 1 generation of sustained effort. The children or grandchildren of the first true space colonists will have comparable living standards to anyone posting on the SA forums today. Also you can mine asteroids at the sametime as colonizing Mars, in fact a big reason to colonize Mars is to make it easier to mine asteroids. I quoted you! You didn't specify a time frame originally, and your current guess of one generation to reach current living conditions is pure fantasy. Exactly how many people are you imagining living on this Mars colony? How are they getting food/water/air/energy? What, if anything are they producing? A Mars colony is not in any way necessary to mine asteroids. The easiest targets for asteroid mining are near-Earth objects. If you can actually build zero-g industry then you could choose to mine/refine them in situ or in Earth orbit. For that matter, if you get to the stage of being able to build zero-g factories and refineries, the whole asteroid belt could be exploited by just sending refined products/manufactured goods back to Earth. There's little or no reason to stop by the surface of Mars in any of these scenarios. Raenir Salazar posted:It's not a relevant point, because there's good reasons to not colonized more places on Earth, which don't apply to Mars or Ceres. It's relevant because there are loving great reasons not to colonize Mars, such as the fact that it's an inhospitable wasteland that requires non-existent technology to house a significant number of people in anything resembling decent living conditions. Raenir Salazar posted:Also there frankly isn't enough land; because (a) the population will increase to about 12 bn people (b) the current capitalistic frameworks we operate under insists they all have the same standard of living, or will seek the standard of living, of the average American. Thus, the more land we consume to sustain that population the worst we damage our planet. Practically every nation with Western-level living standards has below-replacement level birth rates. Lifting people out of poverty actually solves the population growth "problem". We don't need more farmland to sustain our current population. Raenir Salazar posted:1. There is no evidence you are smashing capitalism anytime soon. And unless your advocating reducing peoples living standards to reduce peoples consumption the need for rare earths and industry won't change. 1. No poo poo? That's partly why I'm not opposed to space mining in principle. 2. NASA's carbon footprint is small right now. Make them send ??? million people ??? to Mars like you're fantasizing about and it sure as hell wouldn't be. Raenir Salazar posted:All of this is super irrelevant and largely misses the point of the thread. "Money" is virtually infinite and space exploration is actually relatively cheap compared to virtually anything else gov'ts waste money on. No one said anything about employing phds or getting people interested in stem, this is all just pointless contrarianism. You don't seem to have an actual point. Actual scientists spend a great deal of time deciding what is worth spending time and energy on. A crewed Mars mission is barely justifiable on its scientific merits now. A giant Mars colony in the near future would just be a pointless vanity project for petulant presidents and deluded oligarchs.
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Feb 7, 2020 15:28
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There is a vast difference between a small scientific Mars mission with a permanent presence, and building habitats to house enough people to make even the tiniest dent in Earth's overpopulation 'problem'. Even the crankiest Mars advocate like Zubrin can come up with plausible plans for the former. The latter is just a loving terrible idea. The Mars you are describing with underground habitats and handwaved agriculture would be a godawful place to live. Even space/asteroids habitats with artificial gravity would be better. I'm not asking for a detailed timeline. Just answer two things: 1. At what point do you envision enough people living on Mars to meaningfully impact Earth's overpopulation? 2. Are the colonists all going to be volunteers or Martian descendents thereof? Note that if most of the Mars colony is Martian-born then you're not actually helping Earth!
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Feb 7, 2020 18:51
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:I feel like the assertion that living in an asteroid is good and on mars is bad is baffling and sounds like a personal preference thing. One could conceivably spin up a small asteroid to generate artificial Earth gravity under its surface. Mars is stuck with its surface gravity. This whole debate started because I said colonizing Mars is both undesirable and infeasible. I can understand why someone would personally consider living on a hypothetical Mars colony interesting, or envisioning a distant future where technology has advanced enough to support a sizeable human population there, but I absolutely cannot understand Mars cranks who want that to happen right now and are willing to accept the massive risks and very modest payoff. Now if it turns out that Mars is an optimal waypoint for space mining, fine. I don't think there are many scenarios where it would make sense to send much of anything up from/down to the surface.
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Feb 7, 2020 19:24
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1. Wait for a reasonably massive interstellar body like Borisov, only with an excess velocity > 100 km/s and headed vaguely towards a nearby star. 2. Launch a spacecraft that attaches itself to it via implausible grappling hooks (otherwise you'd have to match velocities and would gain nothing until the next steps). 3. Mine it for fissile/combustible/construction materials while using it as a radiation shield (a spaceship-sized cave or depression would be very convenient). 4. Build a giant laser on the body for propelling the solar sail you remembered to attach to your spacecraft. 5. I'm sure some clever engineers can come up with similar bullshit in the vein of 4, like re-using those grappling hooks from earlier to rob the body of more precious momentum, without spinning it up so quickly that you can't point the laser from step 4. 6. Hope you've done enough bullshit to reach a percent or two of c and also invented cryostasis or solved the social problems in generation ships and engineered century+ MTBF components. 7. Did you remember to start your civilization in a reasonably dense star cluster, avoiding the first few hundred million years of constant supernovae killing off all life? That would help a lot with getting occasional close encounters of stars and some might even have conveniently low delta v, but hopefully not low enough that it perturbs the orbit of your homeworld.
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Mar 7, 2020 07:35
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Hold up for a second. What if everything was just tiny, vibrating multidimensional strings?Nurge posted:Dark matter is something else we can't really figure out, but leading theory there is simply intergalactic plasma/hydrogen.  no, that is absolutely not the leading theory.
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Mar 16, 2020 00:33
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Everyone who is capable of doing so must immediately begin mining the moon. There, done. What was so hard about that?
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Apr 10, 2020 22:24
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Wafflecopper posted:It's been discussed itt ad nauseum already, pull up Raenir's post history for example. I'm just sick of people coming in with these hot takes like they know better than the scientific community that's been discussing this poo poo for years. This is kind of funny because it's hard to argue that SETI is limited by data availability even now and it certainly won't be 5 years from now. More than anything it's limited by a lack of compelling search methodologies and/or predictions for template signals. More funding and effort is going into radio astronomy for detecting reionization and in optical/IR for exoplanet direct imaging/transmission spectroscopy - all of which are incredibly difficult problems that require multi-billion experiments - because they have reasonable expectations for successful detections and/or an interesting null result. Many of these experiments will be useful for SETI (and other serendipitous science) but they're largely not being built primarily for SETI because nobody has a great idea what to look for and how to look for it efficiently.
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Apr 15, 2020 22:32
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quote:It’s unexpected, surprising—and for me incredibly exciting. To be fair, at some level I’ve been working towards this for nearly 50 years. It's a little telling to start your treatise on a fundamental theory of everything with insufferable humblebragging. quote:By the early 1990s I had a definite idea about how the rules might work, and by the end of the 1990s I had figured out quite a bit about their implications for space, time, gravity and other things in physics—and, basically as an example of what one might be able to do with science based on studying the computational universe, I devoted nearly 100 pages to this in my book A New Kind of Science. Your warning bells should start ringing whenever someone self-cites and quotes the number of pages they've written before anything else. quote:I always wanted to mount a big project to take my ideas further. I tried to start around 2004. But pretty soon I got swept up in building Wolfram|Alpha, and the Wolfram Language and everything around it. From time to time I would see physicist friends of mine, and I’d talk about my physics project. There’d be polite interest, but basically the feeling was that finding a fundamental theory of physics was just too hard, and only kooks would attempt it. This is complete nonsense but also a pre-emptive counterstrike at the fools who don't recognize his genius. quote:But then, at our annual Summer School in 2019, there were two young physicists (Jonathan Gorard and Max Piskunov) who were like, “You just have to pursue this!” Physics had been my great passion when I was young, and in August 2019 I had a big birthday and realized that, yes, after all these years I really should see if I can make something work. Finally, the first two scientists who are worth of mentioning are those who are brilliant enough to recognize his own genius and beg him to show them the light. quote:We found an outline derivation of my late friend and mentor Richard Feynman’s path integral. Finally after 12 paragraphs, he actually refers to someone else's work on a specific subject quote:(We’ll also soon be releasing more than 400 hours of video that we’ve already accumulated.) quote:OK, so how does it all work? I’ve written a 448-page technical exposition (yes, I’ve been busy the past few months!). Another member of our team (Jonathan Gorard) has written two 60-page technical papers. And there’s other material available at the project website. But here I’m going to give a fairly non-technical summary of some of the high points. Yet more references to the jaw-dropping volumes of material behind his theory. The two draft papers seem to be real, although it's not clear if they're to be submitted to any journal. The co-author seems to be a (recently graduated?) student of no particular distinction who has been in Wolfram's orbit for a few years now. There's a link to pre-order Wolfram's next 800-page book, which doesn't seem to have any co-authors. Note also that Wolfram made similar but slightly less grandiose claims of solving computational science when he announced Wolfram Alpha some years ago. Anyway, that doesn't mean that Wolfram's work is necessarily wrong or not useful. Mathematica definitely is and so is the Wolfram Alpha interface to it, especially the integral calculator. Just be wary of this: human garbage bag posted:Wolfram is a legit hyper genius, but I think he's getting to that age where male academics begin their transition into cranks. On the other hand: WOWEE ZOWEE posted:He's being pretty thorough and transparent with his explanations from what I'm reading, so scientists who know their stuff will rip into it gladly if it's wrong. There's a pretty long history of scientists who made seminal contributions in a field or two and then tarnished their careers by spending decades writing reams of stubbornly cranky messes in other fields, wasting actual experts' time responding to them. Case in point: Margaret Burbidge died a few days ago and didn't go down this route, but two of her coauthors on her stellar nucleosynthesis paper (husband Geoffrey and Fred Hoyle) absolutely did. Freeman Dyson also died a few weeks ago and his contributions to climate change will not be remembered as fondly as the rest of his work. Precambrian Video Games fucked around with this message at 16:15 on Apr 17, 2020 |
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Apr 17, 2020 16:10
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On a related note, you may have missed the single most cringe-worthy moment in Star Trek if you haven't watched Discovery yet: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4bgMCNXzNtE
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Apr 17, 2020 16:17
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Elon Musk ruined ground-based optical and radio astronomy in the 21st century, forcing the world to invest in more space missions that eventually discovered the truth about dark matter and dark energy, in turn paving the way for Zefram Cochrane's warp drive invention.
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Apr 24, 2020 04:42
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It's common knowledge that the CIA lies about UFO sightings, bit less well known that those very same experimental aircraft are built using technology developed by the NSA and derived from USAF-recovered UFO parts in the 1950s. Very little of this work is still done in Area 51; in fact, it's mostly hidden in secret FEMA death camps run by the Illuminati, who are - unbeknownst even to themselves - all actually aliens. This is all detailed in Spector+00, building on earlier work by Denton & Denton 52.
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Apr 29, 2020 07:34
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Nitrousoxide posted:Why would the habitable zone not extend to the edge of the galaxy? Frequent Tyrannid invasions? Wikipedia's astronomy articles are not very good, to say the least. That figure doesn't even show what it claims to - it looks more like an annulus of 3-10 kpc than 7-9. But basically: skooma512 posted:It's less dense so there's less going on so there's less heavy elements? See Fig. 4 in this in this recent paper.
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May 2, 2020 05:38
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Communist Thoughts posted:I found the stuff about the impossibility of intergalactic travel posted itt really interesting. Is there any more of that? Intergalactic travel is easy. Don't be a fool and try to travel to nearby galaxies; just wait for them to merge with you. Communist Thoughts posted:Same with any stuff about the speed of light, even an interstellar empire would be completely hosed temporally. What? Why? An interstellar civilization in a star cluster is entirely plausible. Sure, they'd face communication delays an order of magnitude or more greater than empires in the age of sail, but that's not an existential problem. Communist Thoughts posted:It did make me think a good way to terraform a planet would be to send a probe ahead to spray primordial ooze at any habitable planet in the system then in the millions or billions of years it takes to travel to the system you get some nice ferns and an atmosphere and oh poo poo ape infestation! This is basically directed panspermia and as a hypothesis for the origin of life it is a crank-filled rabbit warren (and also along the same lines as a terrible Star Trek episode).
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Aug 11, 2020 23:48
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I think there's plenty of interesting territory for speculative sociology and fiction of non-FTL interstellar civilizations. Communication between colonies* ~tens of light years apart is technically trivial but has fascinating consequences for how societies are structured. Even an intermediate stage where relativistic interstellar travel is possible but realistically expensive and difficult has a lot of potential. The Forever War explored cultural evolution over hundreds of years with time dilation and cryogenics with, uh, not a great deal of nuance or sensitivity, but not many other novels since then even tried. *make them orbital if you're unhappy with the idea of contaminating planetary surfaces. Precambrian Video Games fucked around with this message at 00:28 on Aug 12, 2020 |
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Aug 12, 2020 00:25
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DrSunshine posted:If we consider the acceleration in the expansion of the universe, it's very likely to be the case that in the very far future, the rest of the universe will be so far away from an observer that all they will observe is black nothingness, as light that has been emitted from other galaxies will never be able to reach them anymore. Our 'universe' will shrink down over trillions of years, to be just the size of our local galactic supercluster, then to only our galaxy. Observers in the future will think that theirs is the only galaxy that exists. It's a common misconception that galaxies are dropping out of our observable universe* (because cosmology is confusing) but the opposite is true; there are distant galaxies that are not visible to us now that will be in the future, even if what's visible is light emitted in the distant past. It is true that every galaxy outside of the local supercluster will get redshifted more and more, so distant future astronomers will have to beg and cajole their funding agencies to build ever-larger radio telescopes (also to observe the cooler and fainter cosmic radio-by-then background). Our local supercluster will take some time to collapse and I suppose there will be some lucky galaxies hurled at almost exactly escape velocity that would be observable for a very long time. If you mean the very very distant future where everything is redshifted to infinity, well, fine. Wikipedia (which is largely a mess as far as cosmology and astrophysics go) claims 100–150 billion years to be the time when "The Universe's expansion causes all galaxies beyond the former Milky Way's Local Group to disappear beyond the cosmic light horizon, removing them from the observable universe.", which I think is wrong, and not exactly what the cited paper actually says, which is that "at that time, not only external galaxies but also the nearest extragalactic protons will be pushed out of our [event] horizon and not be available for tracing the cosmic expansion". Pushed out of the event horizon doesn't mean unobservable*, though I grant that the second part about not being able to trace cosmic expansion may be true. But given that the paper argues for using hypervelocity stars (i.e. stars escaping our merged supergalaxy) for cosmology, those aforementioned hypervelocity galaxies could conceivably serve the same purpose until there aren't enough left to infer cosmological parameters with. Also, you may be interested in this paper that deals with the anthropic principle part of the argument. *unless your definition of observable universe is something other than the volume within the particle horizon, I suppose?
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Aug 12, 2020 06:00
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DrSunshine posted:Alright, it seems that I was mistaken about the accelerating expansion of the universe eventually making it impossible to observe anything farther than our galaxy. That's a comforting notion. The paper I linked to addresses that, but I mostly agree with the the summary that anthropic arguments centered around our N=1 sample just aren't that interesting. DrSunshine posted:Still, there's something I'm not quite understanding about how this works. For example, say star A and star B are 1 light year apart. The expansion of the universe is 1 ly/y. The acceleration of the expansion is 1 ly/y/y. If a photon is emitted from star A at time 0, and travels for 1 year, by the time the light gets 1 light year out, the universe will have expanded by 1 more light year. By year 2, after the photon travels another year, the universe will have increased in size by two more light years. How could light from Star A ever reach Star B? The signals from distant galaxies were emitted in the past and appear to undergo time dilation when observed here. So galaxies that are currently outside our event horizon are observable in the sense that we can receive signals from their past, but we will never receive the signals that they are emitting today. Likewise, galaxies that are not yet observable but will enter our particle horizon in the future will only offer a glimpse of their history from the early universe. I suspect that the difference between observable meaning detecting signals from the past versus those emitted today is the main source of misunderstanding. Disclaimer: I am not a cosmologist and don't grok relativity.
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Aug 13, 2020 04:49
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At any rate, let's pretend I said "Why don't we observe a redder universe?" or something of that nature.
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Antifa Turkeesian posted:Where are they going to go? They're just going to stay on the ship and study the planets they find? You're not going to be able to colonize other planets without long periods of geoengineering on each one, and they'll seldom be very nice even after that. Based on what? We still don't have a good grasp of how common Earth-like planets in habitable zones are, let alone whether they're actually habitable or not, or whether exomoons are common, etc. Precambrian Video Games fucked around with this message at 15:33 on Aug 13, 2020 |
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Aug 13, 2020 15:30
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Antifa Turkeesian posted:We evolved to live on the Earth. We’d need a planet identical to the Earth, which has an atmosphere that was caused by a bunch of random events involving different specific organisms making oxygen and carbon dioxide. Those events are unlikely to happen somewhere else in exactly the same way. There wasn’t even enough oxygen in the atmosphere of the Earth during the Triassic for humans to breathe without risking passing out from strenuous activity. It would have been like living on a mountain peak 24/7. We absolutely don't need a planet identical to Earth. Humans can tolerate reasonable ranges in temperatures, oxygen concentration, atmospheric pressure and (probably) surface gravity, though not so much radiation exposure. We know basically nothing about terrestial/rocky exoplanet atmospheres and won't until JWST/30-meter telescopes come online so it's far too early to guess at how rare oxygen-rich atmospheres and/or water-rich exoplanets are.
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Aug 13, 2020 18:11
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I sure hope Mars is not analogous to 1788 Australia because I'd rather skip the part with penal colonies and the slaughter of a large fraction of the indigenous life.
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Aug 15, 2020 00:06
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Give me a book to read about an interstellar communications relay that achieves sentience and uses its powers to skillfully modify transmissions so as to avert/create disasters; failing that, please write it (and make it good).
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Aug 18, 2020 21:55
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Man if I see one more person conflating machine learning and artificial intelligence on the internet I'm going to be real mad, also on the internet.
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Aug 27, 2020 03:51
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Well many working definitions of machine learning seem to deem it a subset of AI, but some definitions of ML include slightly nonlinear regression or even just plain linear regression, stretching the definition of 'intelligence' to a ridiculous extreme.
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Aug 27, 2020 05:23
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Achieving equity and a passable standard of living for all humans on Earth is too politically and technically challenging which is why I've decided to do it on Mars.
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Sep 11, 2020 16:47
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My specific objection is against Mars colonization, not space mining or orbital industries or any of that. I don't think the whole debate needs to be rehashed but most of the evidence I've seen for why Mars colonization is a great idea comes from Robert Zubrin and his Mars Society group. I can't say anything about the engineering aspects but they certainly seem to lean towards the optimistic and he clearly has an axe to grind against NASA for not supporting his brilliant plans when he worked there. If there were a less Musk-cult-like organization with compelling risk-mitigated plans and less of a vested interested in selling books I'd be more convinced.
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Sep 11, 2020 18:15
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Based on my years of experience playing Outpost I can tell you that underground red light districts and chia pets are prereqs on the tech tree.
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Sep 11, 2020 19:37
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Tighclops posted:Did it occur to anybody that learning to produce comfortable environments out of raw material in the most inhospitable places we know of might have utility here on Earth as well if we're seriously worried about climate change Do you have specific examples of geoengineering experiments that would best be done on Mars or what?
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Sep 11, 2020 21:12
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Libluini posted:Radio: Enemy of First Contact There are actually fewer details than that in the article! The paper it references barely discusses the mechanics of different SETI/communication methods; all it does is parameterize them by a maximum detection distance. The journalist's writing is sloppy in that it makes it difficult to tell how much of what he's saying outside of direct quotes is paraphrasing the original authors or just his own speculation. First off, optical SETI is already a thing. Many of the reasons why radio SETI is preferred are from human-centric biases. The galactic plane is basically completely opaque to visible light thanks to pesky dust, so any civilization deliberately attempting to communicate across the entire galaxy would avoid it. It gets better in the infrared but the further you go the greater the need to cryogenically cool detectors to avoid detecting emission from literally anything above a few Kelvin in the vicinity (again just physics and not a human bias). SETI based around the hydrogen 21cm line makes sense too since it's practically the defining feature of the most common element in the universe. Of course there is a galactic 21cm background but there are sensible suggestions like looking at 21cm * pi or an integer multiple thereof. These are all methods of looking for deliberate signals from a civilization that wants to be found, of course. I'd argue that most studies of terrestrial exoplanet atmospheres qualify too, even if SETI is not necessarily their main purpose. As for gravity wave SETI, uhhh well let's just say that new gravity wave detectors are going to be built regardless but SETI will not be the primary science driver any time soon.
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Sep 14, 2020 00:01
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Uh wouldn't it make more sense to have the return rocket orbit well above the atmosphere and detach a balloon or whatever to retrieve a sample and return? Not that any of that sounds easy or inexpensive, mind you
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Sep 19, 2020 16:23
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This is far from the most clickbait speculation Nature has ever published. It sounds like your objection is really about the lean towards the biological vs unknown chemical process origin hypothesis. It's kind of hard to weigh the two without being an expert in chemical biophysics. mediaphage posted:All of this stuff is 100% feasible it’s just about convincing government to spend the cash on it. This inane comment gets repeated every other page and adds nothing to the discussion. Hell, some of the things discussed in this thread (not necessarily about Venus/Mars) aren't at all feasible. There is a reasonable argument for funding some fraction of long-shot projects to limit risk aversion, but committing to every half-baked multi-billion dollar dream mission will just erode public confidence when some of them inevitably fail. It's already bad enough when good plans go awry (RIP Hitomi and my condolences to X-ray astronomers for their cursed preferred wavelength range). I'm sure there will be plenty of debate and someone will eventually come up with a feasible mission plan but until then healthy skepticism is warranted.
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Sep 20, 2020 20:30
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mediaphage posted:This inane comment doesn’t get repeated constantly, or hasn’t much lately, and it’s completely valid to being brought up in a discussion about what’s technically possible. It’s not like I’m suggesting we launch people to Venus even though it would also be technically possible. A sample return mission (which is not the same as sending return probes to every layer of the Venusian atmosphere that gets discussed in the paper) is 100% feasible at current technology, just expensive. You seemed to feel the need to jump down my throat for no real reason despite the fact that I don’t tend to spout off nonsense and argue in this thread. Do you feel better now? I mean please, let’s go back to pages about arguing how we can break the speed of light. You weren't exactly specific about what you meant when you said "all of this stuff" so it read much the same as any other post arguing that everything is feasible and then dismissing any criticism of specific future tech as being infeasible or expensive by saying we can literally do anything if we just cut all military budgets by 50% (i.e. the post below VVV). Had you written out the rest of what you said here I probably wouldn't have responded. If the powers that be determine that this result really is interesting enough to prioritize, fine, but if the price tag to retrieve living samples of putative Venusian bacteria is $20 billion or more then it's perfectly reasonable to decide that there are better priorities until there's more compelling evidence for biogenesis. Raenir Salazar posted:Can you specify what you mean as to what isn't "feasible" we get lots of suggestions in this thread from things that are certainly feasible but obviously long term and in the grey area of speculative fiction, like colonizing O'neill cylinders or other star systems on generation ships or Van Neumann probes given enough time and then we get things like people talking about ancient astronauts and UFO's are totally real space aliens visiting us. I think in general anything that could be given funding and looking into in the immediately future suggested in this thread makes up a very narrow slice in terms of venn diagrams and it's a little unfair to gesture vaguely at people suggesting "infeasible" things as a sort of strawman to make your point. A lot of what is discussed here is probably feasible on long time scales with heaps of investment, but much like you're doing here some of the debates about prioritization immediately get shut down by comments that we can and should just do everything all at once. Pick a random page and chances are someone said that you can easily solve climate change and colonize the solar system by dumping the world's military budgets into R&D. Maybe that's true (I doubt it), but it's not a particularly interesting take. Mining the solar system sounds great but it's certainly not feasible right now and it's unclear to me how much of a money/resource investment it would take to make it practical and/or economical in the next, say, 30 years. Like you keep saying that building industry on Mars would be trivial with a skyhook. What's the most optimistic time frame/budget for building one around Earth, let alone Mars? I've seen back-of-the-envelope calculations suggesting that it's *possible* with current technology in the sense that it doesn't require a currently-impossibly-strong tether like a full space elevator, but not much more than that. Then every scenario where space mining provides a substantial fraction of humanity's resource requirements involves tremendous technological breakthroughs and/or societal change, depending on exactly where exactly the mining/refinement/manufacturing happens. Either you need some level of zero-G industry (or at least <0.4G on the moon/Mars) or efficient transport of manufactured goods/people to/from Earth, setting aside the question of whether people would actually want to live on the moon/Mars/habitats. Don't get me wrong, it's a no brainer for the developed world to quadruple its spending on research or more, but it's certainly not clear to me that space exploration/development would be the beneficiary in such a scenario, or even the optimal choice if we significantly changed our long-term planning processes to value multi-decade returns. I also don't agree with your assertion that space exploration is risky due to the lack of funding and the increased scrutiny. It's risky because it's inherently difficult and dangerous. NASA & co. design mission scopes to minimize risk and nonetheless poo poo happens and sometimes things explode and people die. There is an argument to be made that it would be more efficient to make two otherwise uncrewed missions with a 10% chance of catastrophic failure at the same cost as one with a <1% chance, for example, but the fault tolerance for something with catastrophic failure modes like a space elevator/skyhook, asteroid capture, or anything else capable of spreading debris on Earth and/or in LEO has to be close to nil.
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Sep 21, 2020 23:47
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Raenir Salazar posted:I'm not sure what you say really follows or follows historical precedent. In 1950 someone could say, "It isn't feasible to land a man on the moon" until suddenly it was with focused investment and effort into achieving that goal. I'm really not sure what definition for feasible you're working with or how it matters if stating entirely factual true statements in context as "interesting". Can you actually address what I said instead of throwing contradictory predictions at me and then accusing me of constructing strawmen for probably the tenth time in this thread? You said in the same post that asteroid mining is feasible within 12 years but that the first commercially viable infrastructure for it (presumably you mean specifically on Mars here) wouldn't be available around 2060, and that it's not feasible now. If the 'feasible now' mission that you're envisioning is a chemical rocket sample retrieval directly from and back to Earth (crewed or robotic/automated), then yeah sure it's feasible within a decade but is unlikely to be profitable/scaleable. That's along the same lines as a crewed mission to Mars 10 years from now - it's feasible and scientifically interesting (probably more so than a random asteroid given the tiny but non-zero chance of finding Martian life) but there's a big gap between that and a profitable industry or self-sustaining colony, which Zubrin himself pegged as requiring around a million inhabitants. This puts space development missions much closer to the category of basic research with potentially great long-term benefits than an actual shorter-term (i.e. next 30 years) solution for climate change or the continually growing demand for resources that is causing it. That doesn't mean that Mars missions aren't worth doing, but there's a big leap from sample return missions to permanent settlements to self-sufficient colonies exporting valuable commodities or goods to Earth, the latter of which really might not be feasible in 50 years or more. I asked you specifically about the skyhook and you didn't respond so let's phrase it another way. Some sources claim that a space elevator could be built for $10-20 billion with a carbon nanotube/graphene tether, which isn't feasible now because nobody can produce the required quantities. How do you go about making this a reality? Do you dump billions into trying to produce vast quantities of graphene, no matter the cost? How high of a risk of catastrophic failure would be acceptable? Even in a world with much larger public and private R&D expenditures, I don't think the answers to such questions are clear. There could be a bottleneck in materials science or in engineering for safety requirements that makes it take 50 years to develop a safe and cost-effective space elevator instead of 20, which in turn could drastically change the math and timeline for profitable space mining. Raenir Salazar posted:When talking about risk, it is in context to how you described risk, which is context of: "If this project fails or doesn't produce results our funding might get cut." The desire to reduce risk especially in relation to lives lost also relates to that. If operating under a hypothetically infinite budget and 100% commitment regardless of results, then the risk equation is just different. What is your point here? Yes, if you have infinite resources and don't about human lives then sure, the only risks relevant to space development are accidentally causing Kessler syndrome or dropping an asteroid on some valuable part of a planet. Raenir Salazar posted:Particularly in response to this frankly silly statement: Are you asking me to defend military procurement and testing or arguing for lower safety standards for space development? Either way, this is remarkably callous! Risk still isn't just about wasting money or killing people, it's also about potentially wasting time and skilled labour. Part of the criticism for something like JWST (which is highly unlikely to kill anyone) is that it is overly complex and ambitious - not just by NASA standards! - which has made its development take longer than a simpler mission would have (politics contributed too). Nonetheless, it may end up being a stunning success if none of its many points of failure do so; we'll see. Would a larger initial budget have changed any of this? That's not clear. There isn't necessarily a simple linear relationship between money/effort and outcomes. Smaller, consecutive and incrementally advancing missions could have gotten us further faster in the same time frame. You can argue for parallel approaches, of course, but then a proposal for two different telescopes-like-JWST would have competed against one for a single, bigger and better JWST. The latter usually wins out over the former. Raenir Salazar posted:Second, it's been thoroughly discussed across multiple pages how there could be clear cut benefits for humanity as a whole to do space exploration, it's not convincing just to blanketly dismiss those past discussions as "not beneficial" without grounds and a solid argument especially in context of the real problems on the horizon for humanity and how space neatly helps solve those issues. Now this is a strawman that has nothing to do with anything I've said.
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Sep 22, 2020 07:39
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Now to simultaneously avoid and contribute to rehashing the same topics discussed ad nauseam earlier in the thread, consider this prescient post from last year:Infinite Karma posted:So forgetting Mars and the Moon for a second...
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Sep 22, 2020 07:41
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