101–110 of 268 posts
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No, because they are maintained for tourist and historical value.
But said maintenance is relatively recent (~100 years?) compared to their age.
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How do you know it's a completely different category? We used to think all animals are incapable of intelligence and everything they do is "instinct". Now we know they can think, organize, have complex social structures, even imagine and form plans. Many show evidence of being self aware. So we're not special enough anymore and we have to come up with a new word? I don't buy it. It's likely that humans' extraordinary…
We used to think all animals are incapable of intelligence and everything they do is "instinct". Whenever I see this written I like to point out that the "we" in this case was only a vocal minority of people throughout history. Anyone who's ever lived or worked with animals, at the very least mammals and birds, would have observed them being intelligent . I'm sure this idea that people used to think animals weren't i…
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I've thought about this and my conclusion is that we will likely leave behind a very strange pattern of certain natural resources. "Oh, look, here's a vein of copper! It's getting better, and better, and, that's weird, it's gone now and there's a complete break in the strata for some reason." Over time new mountains may form some new deposits, but it may be noticeable in the older mountains (that are today the younge…
If there were any high-intelligence species before they must have exited in a time predating current coal and oil formation, or were not technologically capable, or found some other way of harvesting energy. The fact that we found massive amounts of planet-killing coal and immediately started exploiting it with abandon means that that did not happen before, ergo no technologically capable species on this planet for a…
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> If life is there, completely disconnected from earth life, IIRC (I can't find the reference now), the "dinosaur killer" asteroid would put rocks from Earth into space. With sufficient velocity that they could reach nearby solar systems within 100M years. So from a strictly physical point of view, I would argue that the odds of Earth "infecting" Europa with life in the past 3 billion years are pretty much 100%.
Europa is an extremely tiny target to hit randomly from Earth, probably made smaller by the fact that, in order to hit Europa, the object has to pass near Jupiter without getting pulled into it. On the other hand, there are billions of years of random attempts, as you said.
ALL THESE WORLDS ARE YOURS - EXCEPT EUROPA.
ATTEMPT NO LANDINGS THERE.
USE THEM TOGETHER. USE THEM IN PEACE.If life is there, completely disconnected from earth life, it would be dramatic. That would mean that our solar system, has life on at least two, out of nine planets. That would seem to indicate that life is a fairly common things on planets. It would allow to adjust the drake equation, to easily predict millions of planets with life. And that would mean a high probability of many advanced, intelligent civilizations…
Based on the developments in exo-planet research along with discoveries like this over the past couple of years, I would conjecture that life is ridiculously common. But by life, I mean microbial life. I would imagine that multi-cellular life is much rarer, and life capable of reaching human-level intelligence and beyond is probably absurdly rare, on the level of something like one species per galaxy. It's all worthl…
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spontaneous_generation [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropic_principle
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I'm kinda curious if there's any evidence that would support or rule out intelligent life having existed on earth before. I mean, if humanity goes extinct and it's another 65 million years before another intelligent species evolves, what evidence would they have of our existence? All our buildings would've long since crumbled into dust or been crushed by plate tectonics. Metal will corrode and rust away after a few t…
Largest stone monuments gone after 10,000 years? Are you sure? The pyramids are already approaching 5,000 years old. Do they show any signs of disappearing?
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How do we know that 65 million years is long enough for a species with a human-like intelligence to evolve? What if our evolution was merely a biological fluke that took much less time than usual?
I think this is a particularly salient point. Earth is already well on the backside of how much longer it will be hospitable to life. First life was ~4 billion years ago. First multicellular life, 1.5. And now here we are, the first intelligence of our kind, clearly closely related to the animals we descended from, but just as clearly different in how our minds work. That's one example in 4 billion years, and the Ear…
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I think this is a particularly salient point. Earth is already well on the backside of how much longer it will be hospitable to life. First life was ~4 billion years ago. First multicellular life, 1.5. And now here we are, the first intelligence of our kind, clearly closely related to the animals we descended from, but just as clearly different in how our minds work. That's one example in 4 billion years, and the Ear…
My understanding from Astrophysics class back at uni was that sun-like stars spent 5-10b years on the main sequence, so I thought we may well have another 5b years of quality sunshine to enjoy. Or not.
To give you an idea of the timescales involved, at the very birth of the solar system, right after the Earth coalesced, solar output was approximately 70% of what it is today.
It's not quite as bad as it sounds- if there is technological, intelligent life on Earth a billion years from now, simple diffraction gratings at the Sun::Earth L1 point could stretch the remaining time for hundreds of millions of years. Not something we can currently achieve, but it is within the realm of possibility. Beyond that is pure speculation.
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We used to think all animals are incapable of intelligence and everything they do is "instinct". Whenever I see this written I like to point out that the "we" in this case was only a vocal minority of people throughout history. Anyone who's ever lived or worked with animals, at the very least mammals and birds, would have observed them being intelligent . I'm sure this idea that people used to think animals weren't i…
Animals not being intelligent is also very convenient if the bible teaches that they're made for our use. There are fewer ethical problems if they're soulless automatons without consciousness or intelligent.