81–90 of 106 posts
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I suppose if the anthropic principle is correct that would mean there are many examples, it's just our problem that we are only familiar with one.
Our universe is "fine-tuned" to make it difficult for life on different planets, on different star systems, to find out about and communicate with each other.
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Not until CGI aliens with non-humanoid body plans become cheaper than masks on human actors.
It's the relatability to the audience that mandates they have human faces. ... because humans can only interpret the facial expressions and emotions of other human faces. Star Trek was never meant to be Sci-fi so much as soap opera in space.
So it's not entirely.. human. My point being that we can have the expressions of a human face on a non-human face
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Through the atoms of progenitor stars long since gone supernova. Probably neutron stars too! Or also by chance?
I know tidal curves have increase the moons orbit, I’m struggling to think of anything (outside massive collisions) that would cause planets to move closer to their stars, or move to new ones.
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It's the relatability to the audience that mandates they have human faces. ... because humans can only interpret the facial expressions and emotions of other human faces. Star Trek was never meant to be Sci-fi so much as soap opera in space.
Maybe, but in animated things (like rick and morty) they, occasionally, have aliens that are vaguely essentially anthropomorphic animals and give those expressions. So it's not entirely.. human. My point being that we can have the expressions of a human face on a non-human face
To bring up the example of the octopus again, you can still get some sense of "expression" like anger etc. when they change their skin colors, without having a relatable face at all.
Or something more common: Dogs wagging their tails, cats pointing their ears, and so on.
NO. If solar wind caused a gas layer to evaporate, Earth shouldn't have the atmosphere it does. This planet should be like those surrounding it. Those same solar winds/radiation would have made sure of that. The issue I have with this is the same issue I have with evolution. If conditions were not created to favor life why are we the only planet with any known life & which is perfectly suited to a variety of life? Do…
not knowing another is not the same as knowing there's no other.
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It's the relatability to the audience that mandates they have human faces. ... because humans can only interpret the facial expressions and emotions of other human faces. Star Trek was never meant to be Sci-fi so much as soap opera in space.
Farscape did pretty well with having relatable characters played by puppets.
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I think you may be mixing up the causation. How probable our universe is, we'll never know (until we can see other universes). We do know that in this universe, life exists. Thus our universe has to be "fine-tuned" for us to exist because we do. As for the universe "favor"ing life, that doesn't really make sense either. I think it's safe to say the universe favors stars, gas giants, black holes but it's pretty hard t…
> Thus our universe has to be "fine-tuned" for us to exist because we do. Because we of course do not exist in this universe because we're fine tuned to exist in it. I can't think of a better way to describe it than the late Douglas Adams did : “This is rather as if you imagine a puddle waking up one morning and thinking, 'This is an interesting world I find myself in — an interesting hole I find myself in — fits me…
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> Is there a succinct explanation of why some terrestial bodies in the solar system (Earth, Titan, Triton, Pluto) have mostly nitrogen atmospheres, but others (Mars, Venus) are mostly carbon dioxide instead? For Earth, the answer is simple: life. In the absence of life, a nitrogen-oxygen atmosphere is thermodynamically unstable. Our best current understanding is that the atmosphere of the early Earth, before life dev…
When solar system planets formed from stellar dust, do we assume that said dust was uniform in composition and merely position, solar dynamics and interplanetary dynamics such as collisions (formation of Moon) led to the differences in chemical composition? For example, it's the outer planets that are gas giants. Venus composition doesn't seem too different from Earth but it's much closer to Sol, so it's more exposed…
That's the simplest assumption.
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I love how terse Latin is
That’s mostly because the “to be” gets a folded into the verb.
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I’m pretty sure we still have plants, though I admittedly haven’t been out of the house much. A lot of carbon was also captured during the aptly-named Carboniferous Period 360-300 million years ago. Woody plants had just evolved, but microbes that could break them down had not. Thus, coal. An earlier drop in sea levels also caused carbonate (as in limestone, dolomite, and iron ores) to precipitate out. The combinatio…
> Woody plants had just evolved, but microbes that could break them down had not. Thus, coal. Does this mean we’ll never have coal again?
Interestingly, this has happened once before. There's a "coal gap" from about 250-230 million years ago during which little-to-no coal was formed in most places. I'm not sure if anyone is sure why; this is right at the time of the P-Tr extinction, so a lot was happening. One theory is that the ligninaceous plants went extinct or other conditions were much less conductive to coal formation.
(FYI: Not a paleontologist or anything like--just a scientist who liked dinos as a kid and remembered some keywords!)