161–170 of 268 posts
So here's an orthogonal question. In a field like space navigation, where your findings come back after an expedition planned 5-10+ years ago how do you be "agile"? What is the go to project management style? Can we learn from these disciplines for alternative practices to building software?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Your answer is as simple as it is unsatisfactory and arbitrary. Humans have turing machines, sure. But we have yet to truly translate an animal language (though we do know they exist) so your point is rather moot. My point isn't that humans aren't amazing, it's that we perhaps think too highly of ourselves in relation to our incredible relatives.
I don't think you can 'translate' animal languages. There is nothing to translate, basically. We can get a good grip of the meaning of their sounds though, if we spend some time listening, but there is no deeper meaning hidden that we can not access.
The fact that Cassini is still out there doing groundbreaking science is just mind blowing to me. That thing launched when I was in middle school.
I feel the same way about the Voyagers... Launched when I was in early primary school. Incredible to think that it will still be out there long after I am not around. I've always been fascinated by that project, and follow all news on it that I can, and was blown away recently to actually have a Twitter conversation with someone who did one of the voices on the 'Golden Record'.
“able to support life“ ... as we know it. The universe being so vast and so diverse, most life forms will probably escape our comprehension: completely different chemistry, environments (pressures, temperatures), time scales, state of matter (plasma based life forms?), or even energy based ones. We are not even looking for such different life forms, since we have already concluded that: - life must be water based - l…
“able to support life“ ... as we know it. The universe being so vast and so diverse, most life forms will probably escape our comprehension: completely different chemistry, environments (pressures, temperatures), time scales, state of matter (plasma based life forms?), or even energy based ones. We are not even looking for such different life forms, since we have already concluded that: - life must be water based - l…
How do you imagine we would be begin to look for the things you're describing?
But I would not pretend to know that life must be water based, as if this was an obvious fact. There are lots of things we do not know.
I would still be excited when finding water in other planets, though.
In general, approaches such as SETI seem to me much less biased by our own nature and much more likely to show results.
A comparable aproach for simple life forms, looking for effects instead of causes, seems more sensible to me.
“able to support life“ ... as we know it. The universe being so vast and so diverse, most life forms will probably escape our comprehension: completely different chemistry, environments (pressures, temperatures), time scales, state of matter (plasma based life forms?), or even energy based ones. We are not even looking for such different life forms, since we have already concluded that: - life must be water based - l…
I'd be curious to see what elements (not chemical elements conceptual building blocks) are required for natural selection to take hold, irrespective of the physical form taken. Surely someone has looked at this on a more abstract level? Once you have natural selection, intelligence is a conceivable adaptation.
I do not even think that reproduction is a necessary property.
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…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Curious if anyone's ever observed something similar to this? It'd be super easy to detect if you're looking for it, but most miners aren't thinking "Hmm, I wonder if a previous intelligent species existed on earth millions of years before us."
Similarly, maybe there's something missing from the Earth that we're just not thinking of because, well, you can't miss something if you never had it.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
What intuition makes you believe that once you have microbial live + some kind of stability (low levels of ionizing radiation + a decent level of chemical stability, so not too hot), evolution to advanced multicellular organisms is not pretty much the default? I'd be more or less inclined to believe that once you have the first microbes advanced enough to support cell2cell signaling, and some kind of "condensed bluep…
Here's the paper mentioned in the article ... Cassini finds molecular hydrogen in the Enceladus plume: Evidence for hydrothermal processes > Saturn's moon Enceladus has a subsurface ocean covered by a layer of ice. Some liquid escapes into space through cracks in the ice, which is the source of one of Saturn's rings. In October 2015, the Cassini spacecraft flew directly through the plume of escaping material and samp…
A way to remember it is that Enceladus is the snowball with the blue "tiger stripes" on the south pole (grooved vents through which shoot streams of ice crystals [driven by tidal heating along its orbit around Saturn]).