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Dissolving the Fermi Paradox

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Re: Dissolving the Fermi Paradox

#61

Post by tom_mellior »

marcus_holmes wrote: post #46
V-2 wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Believing we're the only intelligent life in the universe is an epic violation of the Copernican Principle." Not necessarily, because the principle collides with observer bias in this case. I don't think it's valid in this context. "There are so many other explanations for Fermi Silence" Of course. I'm not concerned about the explanations themselves though - more about the emotional dimension; the attachment to the…

I find the theological aspects fascinating. If there are alien races, do they get their own Jesuses (Jesii?), or did we get the only Son of God? If there are multiple Jesii, are they considered to be the same person (to make the Trinity) or is the Trinity a little larger than 3? Did all the Jesii occur at the same time? Or at the same developmental point of the alien race (assuming a standard civilisational progressi…

> Jesuses (Jesii?)

Pet peeve, honed by endless discussions on Slashdot in the late 1990s: -ii is not a Latin plural marker. -i is a Latin plural marker which can correspond to a singular -us. Plurals can look like -ii, but only if the singular word ends in -ius. That's simply because you replace -us by -i, and if there was an i before the -us, then there will be an i before the -i. (Example: the gladiator's sword, gladius, becomes gladii. But one of those i-s is part of the stem already.)

Neither Jesus nor virus end in -ius, so their plurals can definitely, certainly, 100% never be Jesii and virii. They also happen to be words that end in -us but belong to declensions that don't use -i for the plural at all. (So no Jesi and viri either. "Viri" is a Latin word but means something else.) And on top of that IIRC virus is uncountable in Latin and Jesus is irregular even for the declension it sort of belongs to, and are proper names even countable?

Thank you for coming to my TED talk.

Re: Dissolving the Fermi Paradox

#62

Post by tom_mellior »

MauranKilom wrote: post #15
V-2 wrote: post #5

"When we update this prior in light of the Fermi observation, we find a substantial probability that we are alone in our galaxy, and perhaps even in our observable universe (53%–99.6% and 39%–85% respectively). ’Where are they?’ — probably extremely far away, and quite possibly beyond the cosmological horizon and forever unreachable." Opinions like these (I stop one step short of calling them findings, as this is spe…

Man, this is exactly why I dislike this paper. Somebody reads abstract and conclusion section, sees those probabilities, and then runs with them, possibly forming an entire world view around that. But there are such massive asterisks that should be attached to these numbers which are completely absent in that kind of presentation. The ~50% probabilities from the paper are not fundamentally more founded in reality tha…

> In other words, I'm convinced they could have easily arrived at probabilities like 0.1% or 99.9% by reasonably varying their prior distribution for that parameter alone.

In other other words, this reading of the paper also confirms the general point it makes: The Drake equation is garbage-in garbage-out. There is no way to determine what numbers to plug into it. So let's just drop the whole unscientific nonsense.

Re: Dissolving the Fermi Paradox

#63

Post by tom_mellior »

thinkingemote wrote: post #11
tom_mellior wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do not understand why we would only be seeing UFOs at convenient airplane altitudes inside our atmosphere, but not detect them while they approach Earth, despite the fact that space is constantly being scanned for all kinds of stuff. I also don't understand why the daily UFOs would choose to just confuse us by flying around in a sorta-hidden but also sorta-not-hidden way. Why don't they interact with us if they go…

A UFO literally means "we don't know what we saw" however the parent used UAP which gives the meaning of alien to something unknown. This contextualises the issue and brings up the questions you mention. Without this imposed meaning the questions go away. People like giving meaning to the unknown.

> A UFO literally means "we don't know what we saw"

In common parlance UFO also means "spacecraft of extraterrestrial origin", and I very obviously used it in that sense.

Re: Dissolving the Fermi Paradox

#64

Post by mrkramer »

V-2 wrote: post #5

"When we update this prior in light of the Fermi observation, we find a substantial probability that we are alone in our galaxy, and perhaps even in our observable universe (53%–99.6% and 39%–85% respectively). ’Where are they?’ — probably extremely far away, and quite possibly beyond the cosmological horizon and forever unreachable." Opinions like these (I stop one step short of calling them findings, as this is spe…

Also this from abstract: "we find a substantial ex ante probability of there being no other intelligent life in our observable universe"

The keyword is "observable" universe what about probability of life in unobservable universe. When we discovered microscope and telescope only then you could say that we started "observing" something. Modern science is only 100 years old and we can not even imagine what would be invented and discovered for 50 or 100 years.

Re: Dissolving the Fermi Paradox

#65

Post by matheusd »

plutonorm wrote: post #58
taneq wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In what way is a von Neumann machine not alive? Wouldn’t this just change the chemistry?

Exactly, I think life is probably a von Neumann probe. What is the easiest way to spread yourself through the galaxy? Throw bacteria and parcels of your genetics out into the void. Easy and low cost. What about radiation you say? I'm sure there are ways to engineer a survival rate > 0. It also follows: If it is possible that one civilisation spreads itself in this manner, it is likely that we are decedents of that ci…

Bacterial life as we know it here on earth is too low fidelity for an honest-to-$deity, affectable-universe-spanning civ (just look at the temporal distance between a possible paspermia event in these terms in our solar system and replicating into the next couple of star systems).

An _actual_ replicating Von Neumann probe, that we can imagine working within the laws of physics today (even if we don't yet have the engineering capacity to build) can actually clone not just a couple of DNA strands, but can bootstrap an entire new sapient civilization, including technological progress, likely all the way down to the civ's culture.

Re: Dissolving the Fermi Paradox

#66

Post by mrkramer »

bloak wrote: post #10
JohnJamesRambo wrote: post #3

> we find a substantial {\em ex ante} probability of there being no other intelligent life in our observable universe This is very sobering to read if true. It’s all on us. Life is even more precious than we thought and every human life extinguished even more of a loss to the universe. If we could only band together and see this.

Except that human life is causing many other species to be extinguished here on Earth so perhaps it would be better for the universe if humans would go extinct, in a gradual and humane way: see vhemt.org.

No specie on this planet can go extinct voluntarily that's not how Biology works. Life on Earth is exactly opposite meaning survival, reproduction and evolution as core rules.

Re: Dissolving the Fermi Paradox

#67

Post by marcus_holmes »

tom_mellior wrote: post #61
marcus_holmes wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find the theological aspects fascinating. If there are alien races, do they get their own Jesuses (Jesii?), or did we get the only Son of God? If there are multiple Jesii, are they considered to be the same person (to make the Trinity) or is the Trinity a little larger than 3? Did all the Jesii occur at the same time? Or at the same developmental point of the alien race (assuming a standard civilisational progressi…

> Jesuses (Jesii?) Pet peeve, honed by endless discussions on Slashdot in the late 1990s: -ii is not a Latin plural marker. -i is a Latin plural marker which can correspond to a singular -us. Plurals can look like -ii, but only if the singular word ends in -ius. That's simply because you replace -us by -i, and if there was an i before the -us, then there will be an i before the -i. (Example: the gladiator's sword, gl…

thank you for the informational pedantry :)

So what would the plural of Jesus be?

My name is Marcus, and I whenever I meet another Marcus, I wedge the "Marcii" joke in there somewhere. I would like to be able to refine this. What would two Marcuses (which sounds so wrong) be called?

Re: Dissolving the Fermi Paradox

#68

Post by lolsal »

bloak wrote: post #10
JohnJamesRambo wrote: post #3

> we find a substantial {\em ex ante} probability of there being no other intelligent life in our observable universe This is very sobering to read if true. It’s all on us. Life is even more precious than we thought and every human life extinguished even more of a loss to the universe. If we could only band together and see this.

Except that human life is causing many other species to be extinguished here on Earth so perhaps it would be better for the universe if humans would go extinct, in a gradual and humane way: see vhemt.org.

I would argue that a species going extinct is neither good nor bad, so neither better nor worse. This applies to the human species, as well as others.

Re: Dissolving the Fermi Paradox

#69

Post by tom_mellior »

marcus_holmes wrote: post #67
tom_mellior wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Jesuses (Jesii?) Pet peeve, honed by endless discussions on Slashdot in the late 1990s: -ii is not a Latin plural marker. -i is a Latin plural marker which can correspond to a singular -us. Plurals can look like -ii, but only if the singular word ends in -ius. That's simply because you replace -us by -i, and if there was an i before the -us, then there will be an i before the -i. (Example: the gladiator's sword, gl…

thank you for the informational pedantry :) So what would the plural of Jesus be? My name is Marcus, and I whenever I meet another Marcus, I wedge the "Marcii" joke in there somewhere. I would like to be able to refine this. What would two Marcuses (which sounds so wrong) be called?

Wiktionary says "Marci", or "Mārcī" to be pedantic (I'm not sure how strict this is; when I was learning Latin in high school we weren't taught to care much about diacritics on vowels), for Latin: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Marcus#Latin and doesn't give an English plural: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Marcus#English

Note that Marcus is a second-declension (https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Appendix:Latin_second_declens...) noun, which is the class where a singular -us turns into plural -i (again, only a single one).

But Jesus is fourth declension (https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Appendix:Latin_fourth_declens...), so if it has a plural, then in Latin it's something more like Jesūs (or, again, Jesus without the diacritic; I believe it only marks lengthening of the vowel, no change of the quality of the sound). But https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Jesus#Latin says that while it's fourth declension, it's also "highly irregular", and "singular only". It would seem plausible to me that the question never arose in Latin practice, because multiple people called Jesus could always be described as "multiple people called Jesus", and multiple instances of the Jesus would be an unspeakable heresy.

As for English, well. Though I was pedantic above, I should also note that I know that language is what people make it. If the vast majority of English speakers decide that the plural of Jesus is "Jesuseseses", then that's what it is, in English. Even if "just" a certain community decides on a certain usage, then that usage is what the plural is -- at least in that community's variant of English.

Having established that, https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Jesus#English lists "Jesuses or Jesi" for the given name and "Jesuses or Jesusses or Jesi or Jesii" for the noun denoting the Christian savior. The variants with i-s hurt my eyes (pun not intended, but I'll take it), and as I explained above, have no roots in Latin (or the Ancient Greek that Latin got it from) but try to look Latin while showing deep misunderstandings of how Latin works, so I would advise against them -- they don't make you look smart or learned. "Marci" seems fine in this regard, but again "Marcii" is not. (Interestingly, a bunch of the Wiktionary quotations for "Jesi" are of the form "Jesuses (Jesi?)", i.e., cases where the author was questioning themselves on this point, which is kind of weak for a dictionary.)

I would say that since -s is the dominant way of forming plurals in English, "Jesuses" and "Marcuses" are the most natural choices, inasmuch as forming plurals of given names can ever sound natural. But I'm not the English police (nor even a native speaker). Only the don't-randomly-double-i-because-you-think-that's-Latin police :-)

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