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There was neat world building thread at stack exchange I liked, where I think people were discussing how large you could get a "living" "organism" to be and I thought about it and wondered if that way you could get some truly Lovecraftian poo poo. Like a giant weblike lattice of cancer cells that are solar sailing their way across the universe leaving "pods" that consume the world they get laid on to form more cancer webs to sail through space like dandelions.
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Apr 23, 2024 14:42
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Raenir Salazar posted:There was neat world building thread at stack exchange I liked, where I think people were discussing how large you could get a "living" "organism" to be and I thought about it and wondered if that way you could get some truly Lovecraftian poo poo. Like a giant weblike lattice of cancer cells that are solar sailing their way across the universe leaving "pods" that consume the world they get laid on to form more cancer webs to sail through space like dandelions. Isn't this, like, the plot of Dead Space?
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Apr 23, 2024 14:45
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DrSunshine posted:I've only read Ringworld and stopped after that. Too much 1970s sci-fi guy horny for me, I'm afraid, despite the novel concept. This is the line you draw? In the first novel, the only people who have sex are Louis and Teela! This may be a loaded question, but have you heard of Robert Heinlein?
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Apr 23, 2024 14:52
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DrSunshine posted:Isn't this, like, the plot of Dead Space? Well no, Dead Space is cosmic horror in the soft scifi sense in that the Brethren Moons are like, literally evil and direct the evolution and development of species just to be hosts for new Brethren Moons, and are like, all smaller sized Unicrons in that they can move at FTL speeds? Plus Convergence is like a Psychic Neo-Physics thing like Mass Effect's psionics or the Warp from Warhammer 40,000. My thing was more like, at actual galactic timescales where you got this lattice drifting through space propelled by photons or cosmic rays until it finds a random world, it doesn't have to be one with life, just as long as it has the chemistry to support the growth of more cancer cells. It might be deadspace like where it can be fun to imagine the cancer derived parasitic lifeforms that evolve to form a symbiotic relationship with the cancer web/world it settles on; but the idea here is the thought experiment of "How large for a given definition of 'large' can something evolve if given the energy and nutrients?" And I think I remember seeing something about if you think about it if a forest is an organism or some kinds of mushroom colonies, then why not like some kind of huge planet wide lattice? And once it gets into space and catches like, space rocks that might have water and whatever on it, maybe it can grow even larger?
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Apr 23, 2024 14:52
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Raenir Salazar posted:And I think I remember seeing something about if you think about it if a forest is an organism or some kinds of mushroom colonies, then why not like some kind of huge planet wide lattice? We're going on an adventure
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Apr 23, 2024 14:58
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Raenir Salazar posted:There was neat world building thread at stack exchange I liked, where I think people were discussing how large you could get a "living" "organism" to be and I thought about it and wondered if that way you could get some truly Lovecraftian poo poo. Like a giant weblike lattice of cancer cells that are solar sailing their way across the universe leaving "pods" that consume the world they get laid on to form more cancer webs to sail through space like dandelions. Games Workshop's legal team will be in contact with you shortly. I'm no scientist, but I vaguely recall reading something years ago about the limits of organism size, and a large part of it being that beyond a certain point the energy needs become, if not exponential, at least scaling more quickly than can reasonably be supported. I mostly came in to shitpost about a cool theory I recently encountered: Our universe is actually the other side of a black hole in another universe. There's no evidence that this absolutely is or must be the case, but a CERN physicist made a very good (to my non-expert understanding) case for why the math says this is absolutely possible. The best part being that there's no way to prove this by testing black holes in our own universe given the whole one-way trip thing.
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Apr 23, 2024 15:21
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Vorenus posted:Games Workshop's legal team will be in contact with you shortly. Does the theory account for hawking radiation and how this interior universe would experience the slow evaporation and eventual demise of the black hole? I skimmed through the video, but couldn't find any mention of it.
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Apr 23, 2024 15:52
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It's a definitional question about whether something like a mycorrhizal network or one of the big clonal colony tree's is a single organism. A bit on one side of colony may well be so distant from another part there is no exchange between them, even if they're technically connected. In practice it's sitting on a fuzzy boundary between being a single organism or multiple organisms, but humans have an inherit need to categorise even if it's inappropriate. Vorenus posted:I'm no scientist, but I vaguely recall reading something years ago about the limits of organism size, and a large part of it being that beyond a certain point the energy needs become, if not exponential, at least scaling more quickly than can reasonably be supported. This was likely something about the cube law of scaling volume vs. surface area, or else some misapplied simplistic model. There's not really a solid upper limit on something that grows as a network. If the nutrients are there it can just keep growing (although it can face some really interesting scaling challenges, like the interconnected cytoplasm of fungi being a haven for prion spread). Bug Squash fucked around with this message at 16:05 on Apr 23, 2024 |
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Apr 23, 2024 15:56
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Vorenus posted:I mostly came in to shitpost about a cool theory I recently encountered: Our universe is actually the other side of a black hole in another universe. There's no evidence that this absolutely is or must be the case, but a CERN physicist made a very good (to my non-expert understanding) case for why the math says this is absolutely possible. The best part being that there's no way to prove this by testing black holes in our own universe given the whole one-way trip thing. Isn't it kinda a thing in theoretical physics where you can construct any internally consistent thought experiment by playing around with the numbers but often are untestable? Like sure, don't get me wrong, it sounds cool. But isn't this a widespread thing with a lot of proposals?
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Apr 23, 2024 15:57
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Vorenus posted:I mostly came in to shitpost about a cool theory I recently encountered: Our universe is actually the other side of a black hole in another universe. There's no evidence that this absolutely is or must be the case, but a CERN physicist made a very good (to my non-expert understanding) case for why the math says this is absolutely possible. The best part being that there's no way to prove this by testing black holes in our own universe given the whole one-way trip thing. I don't really have anything cool to contribute, but I love that Lucius Vorenus is pondering about CERN poo poo. Pullo would tell him right off, though.
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Apr 23, 2024 16:01
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Raenir Salazar posted:There was neat world building thread at stack exchange I liked, where I think people were discussing how large you could get a "living" "organism" to be and I thought about it and wondered if that way you could get some truly Lovecraftian poo poo. Like a giant weblike lattice of cancer cells that are solar sailing their way across the universe leaving "pods" that consume the world they get laid on to form more cancer webs to sail through space like dandelions. Tyranids are real.
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Apr 23, 2024 16:16
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ashpanash posted:Once we have definitive, demonstrative evidence that people can move objects with their minds, it makes total sense to develop a set of initiatives, both military and public, to study it. If there was a part of the pentagon that sucessfully wished to prevent definitive proof from coming to light, how do you think your approach would fare in determining the truth? As for the already available evidence; what would valid testimony sound like to you? is there any level of testimony that would not merit dismissal by labelling it "anecdotal"? Have you considered informing the legal world of this breakthrough in epistemology?
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Apr 24, 2024 20:02
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a pwn cocktail posted:If there was a part of the pentagon that sucessfully wished to prevent definitive proof from coming to light, how do you think your approach would fare in determining the truth? Pretty well. The Pentagon leaks like a sieve; if this were a truly global conspiracy, as it would have to be, what the Pentagon wants should matter very little. quote:As for the already available evidence I guess it's too much to ask for an actual physical example of a spacecraft? Open it up to journalists like the US does when they present their newest stealth bomber? And maybe extend open access to materials to a few legitimate scientific sources. Like, I dunno, send pieces of the exotic material to Fermilab, NSF, CERN, ESA, NASA, JAXA, the Chinese Space Agency, Roscosmos? Let their scientists come and examine the craft? Pick any three. If you've got literally nothing, then I understand this is asking a lot. If you've actually got a hold of alien spacecraft and materials and bodies this should be trivially easy. quote:what would valid testimony sound like to you? is there any level of testimony that would not merit dismissal by labelling it "anecdotal"? Have you considered informing the legal world of this breakthrough in epistemology? Have I "considered informing the legal world" about hearsay? Seriously? I guess I haven't. I'll get to it eventually.
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Apr 25, 2024 00:09
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How could all the nations of the Earth work in concert together keep a secret? Those loving guys all hate each other. Plus you got dumbass guys with superclearance-ultra posting state secrets to win arguments on twitter, from their own phone on their own wifi, with a static ip.
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Apr 25, 2024 00:12
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Putting the confidence level for alien sightings to at least the number of significant figures as the Higgs Boson would be a pretty good start, but what do I know, I'm not a scientist. 
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Apr 25, 2024 01:22
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I AM GRANDO posted:How could all the nations of the Earth work in concert together keep a secret? Those loving guys all hate each other. Plus you got dumbass guys with superclearance-ultra posting state secrets to win arguments on twitter, from their own phone on their own wifi, with a static ip. Like seriously, how many people would even have to be involved in that sort of cover up. From what I can tell of what the conspiracy theorists believe it sounds like at least 10'000. No way they're all keeping something like "holy poo poo aliens are real and I study an alien space craft at my work every day, how awesome is that!!!". It's like the flat earth conspiracy in which every loving professional pilot in the world is somehow in on it. What when you're getting your aviation license, at the end of class one day do they go, "oh by the by, words actually flat, please don't tell people. K Thanks!!!!"
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Apr 25, 2024 01:39
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You have to wonder if alien visitors to earth would really be that big of a deal that all the nations on earth collaborate to suppress the secret that strongly. Like, how would that upend our current establishment, societal structure, material conditions, etc? It'd be pretty cool to know about, I'm sure, and it'd be reassuring to know that we're being watched by intelligences greater than our own, but for all the good these intelligences do for our lived material reality under capitalism, it seems like it'd be a wash to the average person. Certainly not so earth-shattering/reality-breaking that it'd cause the world's governments to collapse overnight or anything. You mean to say that billions would throng into the streets and overthrow everything because "Hey, Aliens are here!"? Doubtful.
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Apr 25, 2024 01:45
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I’m surprised like Putin hasn’t tried to troll the Earth by faking ufos. I feel like the fsb could do a halfway decent job of buzzing Versailles or downtown Sydney in broad daylight with something otherworldly.
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Apr 25, 2024 01:52
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dr_rat posted:Like seriously, how many people would even have to be involved in that sort of cover up. From what I can tell of what the conspiracy theorists believe it sounds like at least 10'000. No way they're all keeping something like "holy poo poo aliens are real and I study an alien space craft at my work every day, how awesome is that!!!". But isn't massive part of UFO lore that people are constantly leaking this info from within the conspiracy? So people like Bob Lazar going 'holy poo poo aliens are real, i've studied alien space craft at work every day' might be an obvious con to us, but for true believers he's exactly the proof they need. So yeah, it's impossible to keep something like that a secret, and true believers will agree. Because it's the reason this lore and supposed details from UFO conspiracies exist in the first place! Mirage Men was a fun book!
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Apr 25, 2024 03:57
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I have an absolute surefire bullet proof way of confirming if the governments of the world are hiding secret alien crafts/technology. Make a video game about alien craft combat focused on realistically modeling all the craft. In absolutely no time we'll have all of the classified manuals and armament specs leaked to the game's web forum.
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Apr 25, 2024 04:10
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DrSunshine posted:You have to wonder if alien visitors to earth would really be that big of a deal that all the nations on earth collaborate to suppress the secret that strongly. Doesn't the Alien, uh, no pun intended, franchise answer this? You have Burke trying to monetize it all, and it unsurprisingly turns into poop. On a slightly more serious note, I would find it somewhat alarming if a Pierson's puppeteer walked out of a transfer booth. Or a Kzin, those guys are bad news all around. I would love to talk with an alien intelligence, because they'd have a fundamentally different perspective.
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Apr 25, 2024 06:00
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Funding for NASA would go through the roof though
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Apr 25, 2024 10:47
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ashpanash posted:Pretty well. The Pentagon leaks like a sieve; if this were a truly global conspiracy, as it would have to be, what the Pentagon wants should matter very little. The pentagon leaks like a sieve when it wants to. This ranges from factions briefing against each other to the flat out corruption of national secruity reporters whose entire careers are built around receiving "leaks" from insiders who are pushing a desired narrative. This was the same argument used against people who believed the intelligence community were engaging in mass surveiallance, until it eventually did leak (a program that involved a huge amount of people). Imagine if instead of disclosure just being illegal, you were in fact told that you and your family would be killed - the kinds of things Grush and others have testified as being the case. How many people do you think would enthusiastically leak the info knowing that you and your family are going to die, all so that you could release important information to people who will almost certainly respond with: "thanks for the hearsay buddy, cya!" ashpanash posted:I guess it's too much to ask for an actual physical example of a spacecraft? Open it up to journalists like the US does when they present their newest stealth bomber? And maybe extend open access to materials to a few legitimate scientific sources. Like, I dunno, send pieces of the exotic material to Fermilab, NSF, CERN, ESA, NASA, JAXA, the Chinese Space Agency, Roscosmos? Let their scientists come and examine the craft? Pick any three. You're saying the evidential requirement to confirm a coverup is for those in charge of the coverup to show you the evidence that confirms it.. lol ashpanash posted:Have I "considered informing the legal world" about hearsay? Seriously? This would require a definition of hearsay so broad as to literally break science. How many pieces of scientific knowledge do you have that don't fundamentally rest on believing what someone's told you? Have you personally run all the experiments? Did you personally read all the measurements? Confirm all the equations?
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Apr 25, 2024 13:47
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DrSunshine posted:You have to wonder if alien visitors to earth would really be that big of a deal that all the nations on earth collaborate to suppress the secret that strongly. I AM GRANDO posted:How could all the nations of the Earth work in concert together keep a secret? Those loving guys all hate each other. Plus you got dumbass guys with superclearance-ultra posting state secrets to win arguments on twitter, from their own phone on their own wifi, with a static ip. dr_rat posted:Like seriously, how many people would even have to be involved in that sort of cover up. From what I can tell of what the conspiracy theorists believe it sounds like at least 10'000. No way they're all keeping something like "holy poo poo aliens are real and I study an alien space craft at my work every day, how awesome is that!!!". The obvious problem for this position is that a large number of people have in fact come forward. But you dismiss them because they haven't done so whilst parking one the ships on your frontlawn. "ItS JuSt HeArSAy" But let's presume you just mean why haven't the governments of the world come forward: Here's an interesting question, why is it that nations who you wouldn't consider under the influence of the US choose not to call out the rampant corruption amongst elites in the US? The reason why is because they're all corrupted in the same way, and it doesn't pay to throw stones in glass houses.. But let's pretend that's not the case, and let's pretend the worlds goverments aren't a collection of authoritarian groups who have very little interest in any idealised citizens' "right to know the truth". The possibility of massive destabilisation of society due to the ramifications on religion/the economy/everything means that even a paragon of virtue has some very large baked in excuses to keep this secret. The supposed leading lights of openness, the Anglosphere, has been rushing headlong into censorship for reasons ranging from people worried about a new type of vaccine, to people disagreeing that there are more than two genders. Compare those topics in scale to the potential fallout from disclosure.. The idea that they'd just immediately disclose out of an ironclad dedication to openness is just so laughable I don't really know what else to say /o\
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Apr 25, 2024 13:51
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To be fair, a lot of people have come forward about ghosts, too. Doesn't mean ghosts exist, though.
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Apr 25, 2024 14:01
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Libluini posted:To be fair, a lot of people have come forward about ghosts, too. Ghosts are absolutely real though. 
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Apr 25, 2024 14:13
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Raenir Salazar posted:Ghosts are absolutely real though. This isn't GBS, stop it with the shitposting
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Apr 25, 2024 14:39
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Believe whatever you like re:aliens, but thinking that whistleblower protection will protect someone from extra-judicial execution is just stupidity. News flash - that was already illegal. If they were going to shoot you before they're not going to stop now.
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Apr 25, 2024 15:38
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Libluini posted:To be fair, a lot of people have come forward about ghosts, too. Can you post the strongest examples of this kind of testimony please, so that we can better discern how useful this analogy is, thanks in advance!
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Apr 25, 2024 15:48
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a pwn cocktail posted:This was the same argument used against people who believed the intelligence community were engaging in mass surveiallance, until it eventually did leak (a program that involved a huge amount of people). So you would expect a large secret program involving a lot of people to eventually have leaks with the same level of evidentiary support as something like what Snowden did? The timeline for Snowden was like ten years after TIA started. How long should it take for ufo stuff to leak to a comparable level of evidence (ie irrefutable)?
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Apr 25, 2024 16:14
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a pwn cocktail posted:The supposed leading lights of openness, the Anglosphere, has been rushing headlong into censorship for reasons ranging from people worried about a new type of vaccine, to people disagreeing that there are more than two genders. Compare those topics in scale to the potential fallout from disclosure.. The idea that they'd just immediately disclose out of an ironclad dedication to openness is just so laughable I don't really know what else to say /o\ I think you should clarify exactly what you mean by this, because I'm really intensely curious about your framing and how you're using the word "censorship" here.
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Apr 25, 2024 16:22
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Quorum posted:I think you should clarify exactly what you mean by this, because I'm really intensely curious about your framing and how you're using the word "censorship" here. I’m going to be generous and assume they mean that reactionaries are getting more powerful in western liberal democracies in part because they foment resentment toward minorities and politicize vaccines/public health strategies.
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Apr 25, 2024 16:27
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I AM GRANDO posted:So you would expect a large secret program involving a lot of people to eventually have leaks with the same level of evidentiary support as something like what Snowden did? The timeline for Snowden was like ten years after TIA started. How long should it take for ufo stuff to leak to a comparable level of evidence (ie irrefutable)? No, because: 1: The numbers of people who were aware of at least parts of the programs he divulged was absolutely enormous and the fact that one person eventually did come forward would obviously be pretty firm evidence that the idea of "this stuff leaks like a sieve" is absolutely ridiculous 2: There's no reason to think that the files Snowden had access to have an analogue for this issue. The testimony we have paints a picture of secrecy way beyond what existed for those programs, with enormous resources put into stovepiping the issue. 3: As far as I know, no one involved in the surveillance programs had their and their family's lives threatened in the event of disclosure.
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Apr 25, 2024 16:36
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a pwn cocktail posted:The obvious problem for this position is that a large number of people have in fact come forward. But you dismiss them because they haven't done so whilst parking one the ships on your frontlawn. "ItS JuSt HeArSAy" You seem to be reading words into what I've said that aren't there. 1) The world's governments absolutely are a collection of authoritarian groups who have little interest in citizens' right to know the truth. I'm not disputing that. Buried within this statement is the assumption that extraterrestrial visitors is the truth. That's not been proven by anything other than eyewitness testimony, which is unreliable. 1a) My question is how would that massive destabilization of society occur? The assertion here is "Concept X is revealed to be true" -> "Society is destabilized". This presumes that society is resting upon a lynchpin that Concept X is not revealed. In other words, Not Concept X is a major pillar of society continuing to function. Demonstrate, then, that Not-Concept X is a fundamental pillar of how modern society operates. My assertion is that the existence or non-existence of extraterrestrial visitors is completely orthogonal to how our society is currently structured. 2) Let us presume that your point about "the Anglosphere" is true. I'm not disagreeing with you here at all, I'm hardly one to think that the Anglosphere is some supposed paragon of freedom and democracy. Even agreeing this, though, this should mean that the rest of the world outside of the Anglosphere should not have any particular reason to cooperate with the West. What material incentive is there among the enemies of the West, or countries of the world that aren't aligned with the Anglosphere, to cooperate on suppressing the supposed truth of extraterrestrial intelligence? If it would cause the West to tumble (somehow), wouldn't it be in their interest to reveal the truth? Shouldn't there be televised footage of Xi Jinping receiving alien emissaries at the Tiangong station?
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Apr 25, 2024 16:36
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Quorum posted:I think you should clarify exactly what you mean by this, because I'm really intensely curious about your framing and how you're using the word "censorship" here. I'm really glad to hear of your INTENSE curiosity. I'm basically referring to the kinds of issues surrounding the twitterfiles disclosures. Those are recent examples, although unlike as insinuated here: I AM GRANDO posted:I’m going to be generous and assume they mean that reactionaries are getting more powerful in western liberal democracies in part because they foment resentment toward minorities and politicize vaccines/public health strategies. there are many examples of more traditionally left wing positions being censored. Or perhaps you can call it maligned or some other term that best fits the particular branch of propaganda that we're dealing with on a case by case basis. Exactly what term you use is largely irrelevant, the point is that the desire to just report/discluse the truth as being of paramount concern to those in power is essentially a fairytale.
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Apr 25, 2024 16:45
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UFO thread is over here https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3907642
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Apr 25, 2024 18:07
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I think it's a false conflation to group "UFO Conspiracy" with "All other left-wing positions". You can support Palestine and oppose capitalism without believing that the government is suppressing evidence of alien visitations.
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Apr 25, 2024 18:15
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Rappaport posted:Doesn't the Alien, uh, no pun intended, franchise answer this? You have Burke trying to monetize it all, and it unsurprisingly turns into poop. DrSunshine posted:I think it's a false conflation to group "UFO Conspiracy" with "All other left-wing positions". You can support Palestine and oppose capitalism without believing that the government is suppressing evidence of alien visitations. I feel like APC's working from a thesis that SINCE alien existence would be hugely destabilizing, AND governments are all a pack of gangsters, that obviously they would suppress alien existence if they knew about it, AND ALSO (implicitly) they are doing so already. I think this runs aground, not on governments being moral, but because it would require a lot of legwork to actually hide something like this, especially if the aliens were actually still showing up. If the aliens want to make contact with humans, the government can shoot at them with all those guns, but presumably the aliens are outside of the government's reach. To a certain extent this seems like the usual thing with aliens, where the idea of the alien lifeform just becomes a reflection of what you already think about humans. e: like 'one craft crash in the pre-satellite era' or 'we found a really loving weird thing in the ground and the CIA or someone comparable seized it' is potentially plausible, but most of these stories definitely do not stop at that.
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Apr 25, 2024 18:30
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There’s a strain of right-wing thought that’s extremely into esotericism and syncretic mysticism where ufos would fit right in. There’s no inherent link between counterculture and left politics—plenty of leftists are materialist monists and plenty of nazis (including the original ones) are way into magic and the supernatural.
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Apr 25, 2024 18:35
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Nessus posted:I feel like APC's working from a thesis that SINCE alien existence would be hugely destabilizing, Yeah, see this is where I get hung up. I still haven't seen anyone advance a credible sociological/economic/political theory as to why that would be the case. To wit: "Scientists prove that God exists." "Well, fuckin-a, but I still have to pay the bills and work 3 part-time jobs or I'll starve to death."
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Apr 25, 2024 18:40
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