281–290 of 329 posts
Maybe we are about to discover that we came to Earth after messing up Mars.
The idea of which makes it even more bizarre that we're trying to leave a literally perfect planet for us for a dead one.
Your point still stands.
This is scary on two fronts. One, whatever happened to Mars could happen to Earth, and two, it puts the Great Filter probably in our future. If our solar system had two hospitable planets then there should be plenty of Earth like planets around in our galaxy. In which case we end up with the Fermi Paradox. If life is so abundant in the Universe how come we haven’t been in contact with aliens?
I don't understand Fermi Paradox. Why couldn't the chance of life be extremely miniscule, e.g. given all billions of stars and planets, why couldn't there have been even 10% or 0.0001% odds of it happening at all one any given stars or planets? E.g. maybe even it happening on one was such a lucky occurrence? Maybe given even 1,000,000 of observable universes the odds were just 1 out of 1,000,000. How can people confi…
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I don't see him saying that, so probably not. But being a rocket scientist during a war isn't a war crime either. Looking at Wikipedia there seems to be something going on with Braun's involvement in forced labour and war prisoners. I don't see an outline of what the problem is; maybe there is something serious but if there is a problem Wikipedia doesn't seem to detail it. If building horrible weapons is a war crime…
>But being a rocket scientist during a war isn't a war crime either. How familiar are you with jus ad bellum and jus en bello? Most legal scholars conclude German use of force against the UK was a violation of jus ad bellum and the indiscriminate nature of V-1 and V-2 rockets including their use against civilians was a violation of jus en bello. The Nuremberg Trials were primarily focused on prosecuting individuals w…
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How do we know the probability of chained events required to start life in any given planet with potentially suitable environment? How do we know that the probability isn't something like 0.01 to the power of some very large number, far higher than amount of total planets etc? If we don't know the exact mechanism for all we know the odds could be infinitely low, even so low that even after billions of big bangs only…
What you're describing is one possible resolution and part of what's interesting. A very big open question is "which, if any, of the known factors are wildly rarer than we think?". Another possible resolution is that most of our estimates are actually ok and there's some other variable that's going to whack us on the head at some point.
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But how did Star Trek creators come up with this? And how did people come up with things before the sci fi was available like it is now. I just really think influence of sci fi is really overestimated here. In fact people bruteforcing ideas for sci fi before the tech was available proves that you can think of those ideas even if you don't have the tech available. And if you do, it is much easier to come up with all o…
I really think we're talking circles, as you've now just stated what we've said in the first place. SciFi authors thought of something that would be cool to have. Now, we have the tech that makes those scifi things real things. The people making the real things admit they were inspired by the scifi thing rather than it being an original idea to them. What's your point?
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What does that have to do with the comment you're replying to? Edit: This is an honest question, I'm not familiar with the extent of his crimes, if any. It certainly doesn't seem like a clear-cut "he was an objectively evil man but we looked the other way" based on the Wikipedia article. It could very well be his account, which from a brief skim seems reasonable, is accurate?
A lot of people feel a strong need to participate in a conversation whether or not they have anything to contribute. So they bring up Von Braun when the topic of space stuff comes up because they don't really know much about space but they want to participate in the conversation so they think of the closest pop culture thing that they can think of. It's one of my biggest pet peeves when talking about space stuff beca…
This is scary on two fronts. One, whatever happened to Mars could happen to Earth, and two, it puts the Great Filter probably in our future. If our solar system had two hospitable planets then there should be plenty of Earth like planets around in our galaxy. In which case we end up with the Fermi Paradox. If life is so abundant in the Universe how come we haven’t been in contact with aliens?
The Fermi paradox calculations consider that life started on an earth like planet. But have we confirmed that life can appear on an earth like planet?
Sometimes I wonder if Sci-fi has done more harm than good. It provides conclusions that people so badly want to prove true that they will look for any evidence, however meager, to bolster their arguments. Maybe there was life on Mars, but the main motivation to believe that right now is that many people have read about it in fantasy books. Much more devastatingly, Sci-fi has driven what technology people develop, and…
> Maybe there was life on Mars, but the main motivation to believe that right now is that many people have read about it in fantasy books. Life effectively began on Earth around 400 million years after it formed, and that's about the time that Mars' core cooled off and atmosphere got blown away. It seems that there was just enough time for life to start on Mars before it got snuffed out by the planetary geology of Ma…
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do asteroids even have all the elements / compounds necessary to support the building blocks of life?
They have the chemical elements, but they do not have a source of energy that could create life. For the appearance of life, a planet with a hot interior and volcanism is necessary, so that minerals that are stable only at high temperatures in the interior are ejected to the surface, where after cooling down they are no longer in chemical equilibrium, providing the energy necessary to drive the synthesis of organic m…
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>But being a rocket scientist during a war isn't a war crime either. How familiar are you with jus ad bellum and jus en bello? Most legal scholars conclude German use of force against the UK was a violation of jus ad bellum and the indiscriminate nature of V-1 and V-2 rockets including their use against civilians was a violation of jus en bello. The Nuremberg Trials were primarily focused on prosecuting individuals w…
> How familiar are you with jus ad bellum and jus en bello? Yeah they're terms of art. When US or British people use them they mean that aggression by English speakers is appropriate (really we should characterise any aggression as fundamentally defensive in nature) but aggression by people using barbarian tongues is inappropriate (if it damages the commercial interests of English speakers it might be better termed a…
Neither is being a chancellor. von Braun was much more than the super-selective characterization of "rocket scientist". His were the actions of a war criminal to anyone except his supporters and the people who benefited greatly from him not being considered as such.
Eye witness testimonies say that von Braun personally picked slave laborers from concentration camps to work and eventually be tortured and killed in the factories he personally supervised. These facts are undisputed by any historical account. The only reason he got away with these crimes is that he was useful to the US space program.
Saying "but being a rocket scientist during a war isn't a war crime" sounds willfully ignorant or just apologetic and that's not the kind of thing you want to excuse. Nobody's blaming him for being a brilliant rocket scientist, only for willingly killing thousands of unwilling prisoners in just a few short years.
If you want an analogy that doesn't involve a history book, imagine hearing that Amazon's or Tesla's CEOs pretended they had no idea that thousands of warehouse or factory workers they had hand picked from prisons were killed or raped every year at work according to rules and procedures signed off by those very same CEOs who routinely patrol the floors to see those rules are enforced. Would you still be here saying "but being a CEO isn't a crime"?