41–50 of 72 posts
http://www.amazon.com/Rare-Earth-Complex-Uncommon-Universe/d...
People always talk about how vast space is, but rarely about how vast time is. We've been looking for life for the last what, 60 years or so? It seems like not only is space so vast which makes finding evidence of life hard, but this is made even harder by the small volume of time we are likely to be around to try and observe in the grand scheme of things. Alien life has to be relatively close in terms of distance as…
> Would we be around to see it? And how long does an average civilization broadcast radio? On the "life is safe" end of the spectrum, maybe there's much better technology to be discovered. On the "life is dangerous" end, maybe you learn pretty fast not to broadcast your location to the galaxy.
Industrial civilization may not last very long. Industrial civilization on Earth is only about 200 years old. A useful starting point is the first time a railroad train carried paying passengers. There were earlier demos and prototypes, but think of that as the moment the Industrial Revolution got out of beta. Progress up to then was very slow. Progress after that was very fast. About 75 years ago, progress reached t…
Controversial assertion. There's a lot of evidence that we've been able to rank on the level of forces of nature for quite a while now. The disappearance of megafauna, the desertification of Western China and Saharan Africa. There's even evidence that the Amazon rainforest may have been a massive human silviculture project that had been going on for 10,000 years.
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All problems [in philosophy] can be solved by another level of indirection...
Ha! But it does solve the 'this rare event happened here on Earth but it is very unlikely to happen anywhere' because those little single cells came here from somewhere else. That source infected millions of planets. It moves the problem of starting everywhere to starting in one place (more likely)
Imagine how easily we can also become extict and even our most powerful technology isn't powerful enough to save us. Imagine a big explosion in our galaxy , like that supernova that happend recently. We could die out like ants. We should be progressing faster...
We're already progressing at breakneck speed. The last 10,000 years saw us go from stone tools to the Samsung S6.
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"How long do you say the sun had left?" "...5 billion years." "Whew, that's OK, I though you said 5 million!"
> 5 billion years The Sun will get significantly hotter over the next 1 billion years. Life on Earth will become impossible (unless artificially maintained) quite a while before the end of that 1 billion year interval.
People always talk about how vast space is, but rarely about how vast time is. We've been looking for life for the last what, 60 years or so? It seems like not only is space so vast which makes finding evidence of life hard, but this is made even harder by the small volume of time we are likely to be around to try and observe in the grand scheme of things. Alien life has to be relatively close in terms of distance as…
> Would we be around to see it? And how long does an average civilization broadcast radio? On the "life is safe" end of the spectrum, maybe there's much better technology to be discovered. On the "life is dangerous" end, maybe you learn pretty fast not to broadcast your location to the galaxy.
Obviously we don't have much to draw on, but it seems like our technological growth looks a bit exponential. I'd imagine a civilization that has been around for a million years would have discovered a hell of a lot of technology - but a million years is a blip in 13.82 billion years, the age of the Universe. It's like 0.001% if I've got my maths right.
No answer to the Fermi Paradox works if it requires all aliens to uniformly come to the same end state or satisfy some boundary condition without exception. All it takes is the one exception, one small group in one suitably advanced civilization, and you have self-replicating probes building an expanding wave of computronium, dismantling even the stars themselves as soon as the economics favor a better use for that m…
What tells us this is the case?
How do we know there isn't an upper limit on the amount of computing resources a civilization desires, even if it's an absurdly high limit like "disassemble all the inner planets"? How do we know there is an incentive to build interstellar civilizations, versus independent civilizations? Is computronium even worth spreading?
Analogous to r/K selection, is there more incentive to replicate a particular way of life (eg civilizations uploaded to a particular computronium implementation), or is it more beneficial to simply shotgun probs with very primitive seeds capable of bootstrapping new implementations of life? Is the interstellar competition between civilizations, or is the competition between different fundamental forms of life where civilizations simply mark a system developing to the point it can reproduce?
Given the distances between solar systems, why would a civilization span multiple systems? Wouldn't each system become culturally and economically isolated, evolving independent from the parent civilization? If that's the case, why invest in cloning the parent civilization when they could bootstrap native life from-scratch?
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This gets my vote. My hunch is that intelligent life like the kind we would love to meet happens either on the order of once or twice per galaxy during the galaxy's entire lifetime, or it happens SO rarely that, if the universe is infinite in extent, then any intelligent observer looking out from the "center" of their observable universe will most likely be in the only intelligent civilization in that visible radius.…
Then why the fuck do we keep killing ourselves? Seriously, if we taught this level of intelligent-life appreciation to every born soul... the world would be a better place. Rather than starting with the teachings we do for youngsters; why not just teach them how freaking rare and lucky they are to be a consciousness present to hear that fact and then know that they can then expand the known universe... but do this in…
It doesn't really answer why we commit suicide. But it does give an answer to why we aren't happy.
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I think its more likely the government was testing military equipment.
> Witnesses claim to have observed a huge V-shaped (several football field sized), coherently-moving dark UFO (stars would disappear behind the object and reappear as it passed by), producing no sound, and containing five spherical lights or possibly light-emitting engines Do you really think the military has this kind of technology?