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Mysterious Martian “Cauliflower” May Be the Latest Hint of Alien Life

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Re: Mysterious Martian “Cauliflower” May Be the Latest Hint of Alien Life

#61

Post by DonHopkins »

pluma wrote: post #48
DonHopkins wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is a digital numeric approximation of a real number called "floating comma" in those countries? Or "floating full stop" in the UK?

"Floating point numbers" are called "Fließkommazahlen" in German, which is a word-for-word translation of "Floating comma numbers". So at least for German I would say yes.

Yes, German is so precise! (More precise than floating point.) I'd be surprised if there weren't long German words for different kinds of floating point numbers, that spell out the unabbreviated name of the IEEE standard and the exact number of bits used for mantissa and exponent.

Re: Mysterious Martian “Cauliflower” May Be the Latest Hint of Alien Life

#62

Post by Razengan »

etangent wrote: post #31
stcredzero wrote: post #2

Sci-fi scenario: We find evidence of microbial life from billions of years ago, when Mars was briefly a warm, wet place. Decades hence, a researcher realizes that Mars still has microbial life, but that it has evolved as its environment has, so it's as arid and rarefied as its present atmosphere, wispy and almost not there. Sadly, she realizes that human activity has already doomed it to extinction.

Alternative dystopian scenario: we eventually find evidence of (sometimes extinct) life on all planets and moons that had encountered specific chemical conditions for a long enough period of time. We realize en masse (more than we realize now) that life isn't a unique snowflake, but simply a geological process, not that far removed from rocks and volcanoes. The realization causes a broad spiritual/existential crisis…

What if we end up discovering that Mars not only had abundant life, but it _was our original home_ before we came to Earth?

Re: Mysterious Martian “Cauliflower” May Be the Latest Hint of Alien Life

#63

Post by narag »

etangent wrote: post #58
mds wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think you'd have to assume that's a dystopian scenario. The Copernican Revolution and associated existential crises -- that we're not in a privileged location at the center of the universe -- changed human culture mostly for the good.

My question was "what if we realize that life isn't special?" -- not "what if we realize that humans aren't special?". The fact that three commenters misinterpreted the former for the latter is only a proof of our anthropic bias. We are not at all post-Copernican, strictly speaking. We value living things like we never did before. You occasionally hear discussion about granting rights to non-human animals: dolphins,…

For me that's a totally alien way of looking at things. It's like projecting caste prejudices to all living thing, that BTW seems much more anthropic biased.

Re: Mysterious Martian “Cauliflower” May Be the Latest Hint of Alien Life

#64

Post by jarmitage »

SeanDav wrote: post #55
jarmitage wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd be interested to know what you think those themes are, and which details were unnecessary. To me the overload/tangential style felt essential.

Far too detailed character development on non mainstream characters. Far too detailed descriptions of landscapes and environment. The first couple of times they are great to read, after that, very boring. Far too detailed description of politics. The books could have been half the size and probably would have been better for it.

Fair enough, but honestly I think he was trying to tell a different kind of story than the one you had hoped for. And I think it was better for it.

Re: Mysterious Martian “Cauliflower” May Be the Latest Hint of Alien Life

#65

Post by stcredzero »

dredmorbius wrote: post #12
stcredzero wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From what I recall, she keeps on going on about the beauty of the empty landscape, and the possibility of martian life is mentioned less often.

Kim Stanley Robinson is male.

The relevant character is female.

Re: Mysterious Martian “Cauliflower” May Be the Latest Hint of Alien Life

#66

Post by stcredzero »

13thLetter wrote: post #19
stcredzero wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But most likely, economic forces will start to dominate our actions in space, as they have always done on Earth. Perhaps most advanced intelligence comes in the form of distributed hive minds, and something like a "civilization" is regarded by most sentients as something akin to a pack of wolves or an uncontrolled mob? Maybe we're the ultimate ethical dilemma: All of the bad qualities of a cancer, but you can't eth…

How could aliens have the ability to destroy us if they didn't have their own technological civilization? Manufacturing spacecraft capable of traveling between the stars in any reasonable amount of time, if possible at all, would be an immense industrial undertaking, the pinnacle of not just scientific knowledge but societal complexity in order to coordinate the resources involved. Any alien race capable of doing the…

> How could aliens have the ability to destroy us if they didn't have their own technological civilization?

Note that my comment specifically mentioned hive minds. A civilization has many cooperating/competing individuals. Most of civilization's problems are epiphenomena arising from this fact. What if most galactic factions aren't composed of many individuals, but are effectively one distributed mind? What if they regard our social pathologies as pestilential?

Re: Mysterious Martian “Cauliflower” May Be the Latest Hint of Alien Life

#67

Post by stcredzero »

13thLetter wrote: post #23
XJOKOLAT wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not necessarily.

Yes necessarily. You can't build an interstellar spaceship without an industrial base, and creating an industrial base is going to have the same effect on the local ecosystems that humanity is being damned for. At best, our alien hive mind is a giant hypocrite.

> You can't build an interstellar spaceship without an industrial base, and creating an industrial base is going to have the same effect on the local ecosystems that humanity is being damned for.

This only happens because a human being's short lifespan, limited mind, and constricted point of view mans that a human's perceived self-interest is very limited in scope. A planetary scale hive mind could have a much longer lifespan and a (literally) inherently more global view.

Externalities arise because of a limited scope of knowledge, and persist because of self-interests of tiny scope. We think markets are so wonderful, because the distributed computational power of many individuals can keep up with global complexity. What if a single hive mind could command the same number of neurons, without the disparate competing self interests getting in the way?

Re: Mysterious Martian “Cauliflower” May Be the Latest Hint of Alien Life

#68

Post by stcredzero »

SeanDav wrote: post #52
jarmitage wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Look no further than The Mars Trilogy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_trilogy

Very tedious trilogy. It had great potential but just drowned the reader in unnecessary detail on subjects that had nothing to do with the theme of the books(s). As the subject matter is very interesting to me, I started the series with great expectations and positive anticipation. I ended up very disappointed.

drowned the reader in unnecessary detail

That wealth of detail was the best part for me. If one wants to be immersed in such a world/scenario, then it is a pleasure. It's much the same as savoring the paeans to nature in the Lord of the Rings trilogy books. There's more to some books than the plot and characterizations.

Re: Mysterious Martian “Cauliflower” May Be the Latest Hint of Alien Life

#69

Post by dogma1138 »

stcredzero wrote: post #2

Sci-fi scenario: We find evidence of microbial life from billions of years ago, when Mars was briefly a warm, wet place. Decades hence, a researcher realizes that Mars still has microbial life, but that it has evolved as its environment has, so it's as arid and rarefied as its present atmosphere, wispy and almost not there. Sadly, she realizes that human activity has already doomed it to extinction.

And what's wrong with that? Martian life vs colonization is nothing more than an anecdote once we find signs of it it's nice and all but no one is going to go out of their way to preserve it long term if it means that colonization will be affected.

Eventually there will be life on mars whether it evolved "naturally" there or evolved just as "naturally" some where else and was brought there doesn't matter if it's a rocket or a comet on the cosmological scale both of those processes are just as "natural".

Heck if we find a planet inhabited by self replicating robots they would pretty much automatically count as life, the fact that they aren't made out of some arrangement of self arranging molecules doesn't make it any less "natural" in the grand cosmic scheme.

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