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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planck%27s_principle
From the article > A study of when different geologists accepted plate tectonics found that older scientists actually adopted it sooner than younger scientists. But the paper cited refers, instead, to the relative safety of the tenured professors to speak out in favor of plate tectonics, vs. the younger researchers who knew that would be, as we say, career-limiting.
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https://archive.org/details/OnBeingTheRightSize-J.B.S.Haldan...
I'm sorry, you dropped a 130 page book with no other comment. Is there anything specific you want to say?
Some portion of this chapter is occasionally excerpted to deflate claims about extraordinarily large or small purported alien creatures, though Haldane was setting up an argument for dynamically limited systems in general.
I thought it might be an interesting skim given the similarities to your comment above.
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The phrases "a long time", "some time", and "at least a bit" are doing a lot of heavy lifting there. Oxygen has been in the Earth's atmosphere for over 2 billion years. How long, roughly, is "some time"?
How big, roughly is the planet in question? How thick, roughly, is the atmosphere? What, roughly, is the composition of the atmosphere? What is the median temperature of the planet? List all species capable of metabolizing pollution back into harmless compounds. What are their lifespans? How do they reproduce? ...hopefully my point is made, now. I can't give details because they don't exist. If a species produces suf…
Right. And if the argument depends on those details, then it's not a very convincing argument.
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Happens all the time. People's ideas get ignored even when they have evidence backing them up. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ignaz_Semmelweis > Despite various publications of results where hand washing reduced mortality to below 1%, Semmelweis's observations conflicted with the established scientific and medical opinions of the time and his ideas were rejected by the medical community. > He could offer no acceptable…
Medical doctors and surgeons are not scientists. They don't do research, they don't publish papers. Medical research is an entirely different field which overlaps in skills sometimes. But MDs are more like mechanics for the human body.
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This is a comparison that really doesn’t work. It takes month in a sailing ship to cross the ocean. It would take thousands of years at the very least to cross space.
So this wouldn't be an issue if you solved the ageing problem - a problem which we are presently working on solving ourselves. I don't see why it's out of the question that a civilization that's hypothetically a hundred thousand years ahead of us wouldn't have worked out how to suspend themselves, preserve themselves or negate their ageing. Or for that matter, work out how to sidestep the distance argument though som…
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A probe of the sophistication of a Von Newman machine, that can reproduce, would be the alien in itself. A network of such probes would be a civilization.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_of_the_Lifemaker http://www.baen.com/chapters/W200203/0743435265___0.htm :-)
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Cantor proved that R, the set of all reals, cannot be countable. That was never controversial. What's controversial is claiming that R (or any uncountable set) exists, as no one has rigorously proved without adding an axiom.
What axiom do you have to add, are you talking about the axiom of infinity, defining the set of natural numbers? Because you do need that, but without that wouldn't even be able to define uncountability. After that, you can define the reals using Dedekind cuts or Cauchy sequences, which was known at the time (I believe Cantor actually worked on the Cauchy sequence construction). But there's an even simpler uncountabl…
I just started to watch the 1993 series Star Trek new generation. The show has some interesting ideas regarding advanced civilizations vs the primitive ones. One of which is called the prime directive prohibiting any star fleet from intervening with the evolution of primitive people. In one of the episodes “who watches the watcher” the USS enterprise travels to planet Minkita 2 for a rescue mission and encounters a p…
That's one of the biggest problems I have with Star Trek. If we were literally gods by comparison to some fledgling species, the only ethical approach would be to elevate them and cure their diseases and advance their knowledge as quickly as humanly possible.
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I'm sorry, you dropped a 130 page book with no other comment. Is there anything specific you want to say?
sorry, the relevant part of the book is in the first few pages of the first chapter, where JBS Haldane discusses the physical limits of mammalian anatomy due to load bearing constraints on bone cross sections and hydraulic implications for a heart that must circulate blood/lymph through a gigantic body, and how all of these and other separate systemic envelopes merge to form what we understand as the "right" sizes fo…
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This is very common in science. New theories are usually rejected and ridiculed until/if they develop enough evidence behind them to sway people. Some careers are destroyed. Some scientists are only vindicated posthumously. The process can take many decades. Scientists, like most humans, are not that open-minded and are subject to the same group-think blind spots. I think if we could get better at being open-minded a…
The most recent event that comes to my mind is the lead up to the discovery of H. pylori causing gastric ulcers.
https://www.wired.co.uk/article/mrna-coronavirus-vaccine-pfi...