141–150 of 268 posts
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> they will freak out knowing that we are all doomed, including all our offspring Um, sorry to break it to you but the horse has left the barn in regards to future prospects.
Things may get pretty shitty for them, but if I could wager on such a thing, I'd wager on the species surviving.
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> or a single "mother" creature How did the "mother" creature come to be? By what mechanism did its complexity emerge? There is no known or plausible mechanism by which complex life can arise without evolution, and technology which does not change its design is (very appropriately) by the definition above, not life.
> How did the "mother" creature come to be? It could be a human "mad scientist" creating hordes of Pikachus. Suppose the scientist has also attained biological immortality for himself, and the Pikachus have spread to multiple planets over thousands of years. You come upon such a colony planet, but you have no knowledge of their creator. They display no clues that hint at the scientist's role in their civilization (fo…
Can they mutate? If so, then they satisfy all four boxes and they count as life.
If the Pikachus are made of cells, they'll certainly mutate/vary, since their heritable material is DNA, which is quite fragile.
Really, it's hard to imagine having "reproduction" without "mutation" in the imperfect physical world where errors are possible— I can't imagine any copying process, even a technological one, which succeeds with perfect fidelity and 100% probability. So if you have #1, #3 is basically going to be a given, because the universe is imperfect.
I don't think "what material they're made of" matters much, except that by definition flesh has to be alive, since it's made of things (cells) that tick all four boxes.
If the Pikachus don't reproduce themselves, and/or are created with perfect fidelity every time, then yes, I would call them technology and not life. We certainly wouldn't say that iPads (Pikachus) coming from a factory ("mother creature") are alive.
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Which seems kinda silly to this layman because there are no shortage of potential robotic missions.
I don’t support the conspiracy theory, but the shortage isn’t potential robotic missions, it’s money for missions.
Excuse the cliche question, but what is Life? If we make an AI whose thoughts and communication are practically indistinguishable from humans, and it controls a bunch of things that affect the physical world, is it alive? If there's a disembodied mind somewhere that can think and imagine but never communicate or interact with anything, is it dead? What about a human in a coma or permanent dreaming state? What about w…
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In the "swapping spit" scenario, we the aliens and they are us. If genetic material did travel in either direction, it would be easily verified.
There is life on Mars -- JPL just doesn't want to tell us. Follow this logic: 1) two planets in habitable zone - both spontaneously cause life; 2) then many or most habitable zone planets have life; 3) Of the trillions of stars in our galaxy, there must be multitudes that have hosted intelligent life; 4) we don't hear SETI signals; 5) that means SETI must have snuffed themselves out with some super-technology; 6) erg…
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There is life on Mars -- JPL just doesn't want to tell us. Follow this logic: 1) two planets in habitable zone - both spontaneously cause life; 2) then many or most habitable zone planets have life; 3) Of the trillions of stars in our galaxy, there must be multitudes that have hosted intelligent life; 4) we don't hear SETI signals; 5) that means SETI must have snuffed themselves out with some super-technology; 6) erg…
We already know we’re all doomed. The sun bakes us in somewhere around 5 billion years.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_far_future
is thought provoking.
I often wonder why these are always auxiliary conversations. Ever since I was young, like most kids (I have 4), I also had this deep yearning for knowledge on life external to earth. Wonder why this never has gone mainstream.
Thus many scientists try hard to dismiss evidence of alien life, because that is fashionable. Or at least, the alternative is very kitschy.
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This argument can be flipped, though. If life were found on Mars, that might lead to a ban on manned Mars missions, because there's absolutely no chance that a manned mission will not contaminate Mars with microbes from Earth. So to protect a Martian ecosystem, we might have to use only robots to explore Mars.
or rather to protect us from what is coming back; I remember that the Apollo astronauts were kept in quarantine due to that fear. I think it's sort of funny that the effort to make us a multi planetary species might as well doom us if we catch something unusual while on Mars.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
In the "swapping spit" scenario, we the aliens and they are us. If genetic material did travel in either direction, it would be easily verified.
There is life on Mars -- JPL just doesn't want to tell us. Follow this logic: 1) two planets in habitable zone - both spontaneously cause life; 2) then many or most habitable zone planets have life; 3) Of the trillions of stars in our galaxy, there must be multitudes that have hosted intelligent life; 4) we don't hear SETI signals; 5) that means SETI must have snuffed themselves out with some super-technology; 6) erg…