For those without intuition on Fahrenheit degrees; (-13,113)°F = (-25,45)°C.
Your use of commas confuses me more than the conversion did. :)
LOL, I too was like, wait a minute, there is no minus 13 thousand degrees
Mysterious Martian “Cauliflower” May Be the Latest Hint of Alien Life
71–80 of 84 posts
Re: Mysterious Martian “Cauliflower” May Be the Latest Hint of Alien Life
#72Sci-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.
Well if it was good science fiction she would discover that the microbial life on mars made it to earth after a meteor impact and by virtue of acting as a virus, infecting pregnant apes who gave birth to what would be recognized as humans. And that human activity on Mars doomed it to extinction, and human activity on Earth doomed humans to extinction, and so we not only killed off ourselves, we kill of our chance to evolve again on earth.
Of course that would be a real downer of a story.
Re: Mysterious Martian “Cauliflower” May Be the Latest Hint of Alien Life
#73Earlier quoted context omitted.
A variant on this features prominently (through one of the main characters/factions) in Kim Stanley Robinson's excellent Red Mars trilogy.
What's the point of preserving a lifeless environment or even one with bacteria and no intelligent animals, over giving humanity a second planet to survive on in case something happens on Earth? After all, even here on Earth we haven't had such a concern for species that are not us. We drove many to extinction even without it being an existential matter for us. I think the human sense of morality is largely dependent…
I wonder about this; are NASA afraid that we are being monitored by a higher power of some kind that will judge us for polluting Mars. What is the evolutionary value of intelligence if a species choose to confines itself to its home world.
Re: Mysterious Martian “Cauliflower” May Be the Latest Hint of Alien Life
#74Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 r…
Maybe the individual galactic factions are hive minds, but what guarantees that those hive minds are in turn going to get along with each other and not just recreate individual human disagreements and pathologies on an interstellar scale? Perhaps the reason we've never picked up any transmissions from aliens is that all the hive minds have blocked each other on Interstellar Twitter for publicly thinking something offensive fifty million years ago.
Re: Mysterious Martian “Cauliflower” May Be the Latest Hint of Alien Life
#75Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
It could presumably accomplish great tasks more efficiently without the waste of individual human beings skimming kickbacks from the interstellar spaceship budget or arguing about what color the ships should be painted, but building them is still going to require a massive industrial effort that will have a significant effect on ecosystems, no getting around that.
Re: Mysterious Martian “Cauliflower” May Be the Latest Hint of Alien Life
#76Earlier quoted context omitted.
"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.
Actually the only difference with German is that a) some simple words are longer and b) compound words are always chained together in writing.
"Floating point number" is a compound word in English too but there are very few compound words which are chained together as in German (e.g. hardware, blackbird).
Re: Mysterious Martian “Cauliflower” May Be the Latest Hint of Alien Life
#77Earlier 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,…
I think I can speak from experience, you mostly describe may way of looking at life. It's not without respect though. Even if life is nothing special in the grand scheme of things, it can still be very special from a subjective perspective.
For me the respect, and awe, for life comes from how each individual is the proverbial snowflake, as an instance of life, and an incredibly complex, emergent and dynamic one at that.
Take something completely lifeless like a stalactite as a reference. Tehy can take millenniums to form, but the process really isn't very special, just water dripping from the ceiling. Which most people realize, yet most people still feel a certain amount of awe when presented with one, and would be appalled if someone just decided to take it down for no reason. That would be disrespectful.
It's the same thing when we talk about species going extinct. Most of us has no particular connection to most species, and shouldn't be bothered. But still, every species has its own unique character and beauty, which will leave an emptiness behind of possibilities lost, so is a sad thing to loose for that reason alone.
So I think discovering more instance of living things would not make life less valued, on the contrary, more uniqeness would only bring more things to be in awe of.
Re: Mysterious Martian “Cauliflower” May Be the Latest Hint of Alien Life
#78Earlier quoted context omitted.
"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.
"siebenhundertsiebenundsiebzigtausendsiebenhundertsiebenundsiebzig". In German, whole numbers can be expressed as single words...[0]
Re: Mysterious Martian “Cauliflower” May Be the Latest Hint of Alien Life
#79Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Couldn't agree more, and well put
Re: Mysterious Martian “Cauliflower” May Be the Latest Hint of Alien Life
#80Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
"siebenhundertsiebenundsiebzigtausendsiebenhundertsiebenundsiebzig". In German, whole numbers can be expressed as single words...[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Longest_words#German
Seven hundred seventy-seven thousand seven hundred and seventy-seven.
Whether it is written with spaces or dashes or neither is nothing more than an artefact of orthography. Extreme compound words can be created in English, too, they just look less like compounds (and they violate cultural aesthetics more than in German).