141–150 of 231 posts
I think the current age is no different than any previous age. Sure we have a different set of problems to cope with, but in the end we will advance and get over them. There's really nothing extraordinary. There will be humans in 100 years time and they will more developed than us.
Some people will retreat into virtual realities and be entertainment junkies. Some won't and will make the world go forward. Just like some people took drugs in the 60s and got high all day, and some people didn't.
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As another example: China is now starting to clean up. They won't be able to displace the mess to poorer places, because the country is just so big that there just aren't enough poorer places left to take all the mess. I am confident the Chinese will be able to clean up their country.
I think they will as well. India will shortly have to address this seriously and probably will. That covers the types of pollution and over-consumption that are a visible and immediate threat, like dumping toxic waste in rivers and highly toxic air pollution. There has been no serious willingness to address the issues of the increase in per-captia consumption of finite resources. I was really taking issue with the st…
I think it is because the Drake equation[1] over-estimates the chances of intelligent life forming. A common average result for the Drake equation is 10,000 habitable planets capable of sending signals in our universe. But if you look at the equation and estimates they are a bit optimistic. If you take fℓ from the equation, I don't think simply being of the right composition in the habitable zone is enough. The Earth…
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But by having people click on those ads, the companies that are advertising (which could be and are companies actively engaged in "physical" products) are acquiring paying customers and thus have greater ability to fund their products. SpaceX, Boeing, GM, and Victoria Secret need revenue sources to create their 'non-virtual-reality' products, and marketing/advertising creates a revenue source. If they had a net loss…
You are right, in theory. But I get this feeling, more and more, that big, world changing companies, don't need ads revenue. The number of visits on the internet is less relevant for them. You picked some companies randomly, but out of them SpaceX and Boeing are not selling stuff over the internet. There is this hunch, that what we do, doesn't matter. It's mostly self congratulatory friend/social app. Yes, you might…
Sounds like a plan: make a lot of money and then spend it to turn us into a real spacefaring civilization.
That's, apparently, what Elon Musk is trying to do.
Anyone wants to join in?
Let's imagine there are billions of planets out there (a true Sagan-esque billions) which have spawned intelligences that have achieved interstellar travel - ie. they have the ability to actively seek out and communicate with others of similar ability. Perhaps like the United Federation of Planets in Star Trek, except many, many of these, separated from others by various degrees of intelligence or ability. Let's imag…
True, but if these super-advanced aliens are populating many planets, then we'd presumably be able to detect them somehow, irrespective of whether they care about us. It may be electromagnetic leakage or Dyson spheres or any of a number of other signs of artifice.
My theory is that we haven't met aliens yet because the aliens have been to earth sereptitiously, have taken some DNA samples, and have decided there's nothing to be gained from making contact with us. They've told everyone else in the universe that the planet is hostile and not particularly technologically developed. They have also noted that it is not a threat just as long as they don't get advanced space travel te…
http://www.terrybisson.com/page6/page6.html
First, the contradiction: Fermi's paradox says that intelligent species are common, and that some fraction of intelligent species will engage in interstellar colonization. By some simple reasoning, this implies that the galaxy filled up with intelligent life a billion years ago. But the skies look empty.
Using Fermi's paradox, we could "prove" that the universe is filled with hostile, silent aliens that exterminate any species that discovers radio (as in Saberhagen's "Berserker" novels), or that interstellar colonization is impossible, or that intelligence is a self-defeating adaptation and we're doomed to wipe ourselves out. This makes for fun science fiction, but you can't use it to prove anything.
The conclusion is a fun bit of Puritan moralizing (entertainment bad, real life good). And because we want to agree with the conclusion, we're tempted to overlook the sloppy reasoning.
(And I'd love to say something about Miller's use of evolutionary psychology to present plausible hypotheses without supporting evidence, but that's a whole other can of worms.)
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Possible answer: First nearly every civilization that mastered, say, radio, did it millions of years ago. Second, nearly every such civilization long ago found much better means of communications than we know about. Third, they realize that trying to communicate via radio is silly and use much better means we don't know about. Net, they are out there and communicating, but we don't hear them and they don't hear us or…
But if they're so advanced, they probably still have radio receivers somewhere though. They should be able to receive our signals and reply with some sort of super advanced method that appears as radio waves so that we can receive them, but that travel much faster so it doesn't take a thousand years to reach us.
Do you still have a working analog TV set? A shortwave radio?
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Yeah kind of like how bacteria don't know they're under a microscope.
Consider your analogy stolen for future use! They're all down there thinking "why aren't there any alien bacteria sending us some chemical messages already? It's clearly the best way to communicate"