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First images from Euclid are in

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Re: First images from Euclid are in

#281

Post by kranner »

bbor wrote: post #251
kranner wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That we can know anything at all is a miracle in itself. It could have been just fine evolutionarily for us Earth creatures to be no more than Large Action Models with no inner experience, but somehow we ended up as these perceiving, cogitating, apprehending beings.

How could you possibly be an affective agent without knowledge? And how could anything ever use knowledge without perceiving it? Whenever anyone talks about philosophical zombies, I say “show me one, then” — until then I’m sticking with (what I see as) the scientific consensus, which is that we’re material like literally everything else is in the Actual, perceivable world. What would it be like to not be like anythin…

I'm also a materialist, and the lack of p-zombies here cannot preclude their existence elsewhere.

Re: First images from Euclid are in

#282

Post by sourcepluck »

shiroiushi wrote: post #166
conductr wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s happened before, life will prevail and eventually thrive again in some other format. I think fully eradicating life from earth will be quite difficult even if we tried. Perhaps when we get swallowed by our sun or some similar event.

Climate change, even in the worst case, won't come remotely close to eradicating all life. It won't even eradicate humans (though it'll suck for people living on the coasts or in Florida). Even the very worst imaginable catastrophe wouldn't eliminate the various single-celled organisms and extremophiles. But there are a lot of larger species that are at risk. Maybe I'm just species-ist, but I'm more concerned about t…

> Climate change, even in the worst case, won't come remotely close to eradicating all life. It won't even eradicate humans (though it'll suck for people living on the coasts or in Florida). Even the very worst imaginable catastrophe wouldn't eliminate the various single-celled organisms and extremophiles.

I have heard intelligent people claim a good few times now, and feel like it's obviously unscientific. It seems faith-based. Sure, life on Earth has proven to be resilient and adaptable, but we've no way to be sure how the planet will develop in the coming thousands and millions of years.

Climates and ecosystems and geology change. Life on Earth has persisted through some wild misadventures and atmospheric changes, but it's a very complex system. Surely it's theoretically feasible that some surprising thing could set us off on a course towards ending up with an atmosphere similar to Venus or Mars one day? How can we know with certainty this won't happen?

To me it seems like "life-ism" rather than species-ism at that point. The idea that "life will go on, no matter what" seems so obviously intuitive to a member of the Life class. I fear it is a misguided - though romantic, and somewhat touching - sentiment.

Re: First images from Euclid are in

#283

Post by alok-g »

dwayne_dibley wrote: post #232
alok-g wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> No proof but no doubt. There's still doubt: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drake_equation#Range_of_result...

ISn't the doubt simply the 'when' rather than the 'if'?

If you read through the link, the estimation for.probability of finding life elsewhere ranges from practically none to very high. When the former is also a.part of that range, could it not be that we actually do not have life anywhere else? I think it's not a question of when or a 'no doubt' case. We simply do not know enough.

If the calculations were to say there's very high chances of the universe teeming with life at many places, but life is not 'found' yet, then I would say it like 'no proof but no doubt'.

Re: First images from Euclid are in

#284

Post by AlecSchueler »

layer8 wrote: post #215
wayoverthecloud wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that too. That it's surely meant to be something. But sometimes I think what does "meaning" even mean? Does universe really have any "meaning", the term that humans invented and that even they are unsure of? Then, I think it's a big randomness, a random accident, a big joke, just happening with nothing to make sense of.

Or it might be the necessary logical consequence of having anything at all.

I've always thought of it more as the logical consequence of having nothing, the need for there to be a something to oppose it.

Re: First images from Euclid are in

#285

Post by AlecSchueler »

phito wrote: post #233
shiroiushi wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"The planet" is really just a ball of mostly iron and silicates. Of course it'll be fine no matter what. What's important is what's on the surface, namely lifeforms and the biosphere. They're what make this orb so special. Climate change will harm humans, sure, but not just us: it'll harm many other species too, ones which can't adapt fast enough.

Sure but you know very well that when people say "the planet" they mean "the ecosystem". It doesn't change what I meant. There's been mass extinctions before, way worse than what will happen with human-made climate change. Life has proven to be very resilient and ecosystems re-emerge. I think people are attached to the current state of life on earth, not realizing that it is transient. Life itself and the many forms…

I take it you're also a smoker?

Re: First images from Euclid are in

#286

Post by kjkjadksj »

colordrops wrote: post #103
kjkjadksj wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s hardly proof considering these examples all share a common ancestor. I ask you, can you communicate with a slime mold? Even the slime mold is more similar to ourselves than any potential life we’d find elsewhere, as we share a common ancestor.

What's so important about "sharing a common ancestor"? It doesn't say anything about the spread of different types of life that could evolve, considering we have a sample size of one, and it also says nothing about how difficult it is for any particular form to evolve intelligence.

Because there are probably an uncountable number of different turns life could have made instead to lead to dramatically different outcomes. Life iterates on itself. Mutations on top of mutations. Mitochondria could have just as easily never been enveloped by our eukaryotic ancestors and life would look a hell of a lot different today.

Re: First images from Euclid are in

#287

Post by glimshe »

ratedgene wrote: post #255

This is the most beautiful thing I've ever seen in my whole life. I'm just over here worried about small nothings and now I'm filled with an overwhelming feeling that I should be a part of something much larger. Truly inspiring, and a little bitter sweet. :)

When I look to the heavens in awe, thinking about humanity's future and our place in the Universe, I remember that we still have JavaScript and thus very far from space exploration.

Re: First images from Euclid are in

#288

Post by dreamcompiler »

seanw444 wrote: post #275
mr_mitm wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These distances are well outside the scope of exploration. Getting to the next solar system is already a seemingly insurmountable challenge. Getting to the next galaxy? Forget it. Getting to these galaxies we see in the picture? Absolutely no way. I know people like to be optimistic about these things but it's honestly pure wishful thinking.

This is short-sighted. Maybe not in our lifetimes. If it were 1902, you'd probably be mocking the Wright brothers.

There are three levels of difficulty in innovation: New Engineering, New Science, and New Fundamentals.

What the Wright Brothers did was the easiest of the three: New engineering. It didn't contradict anything then known in accepted science.

Fusion energy is being studied now, and it's substantially more difficult than what the Wright brothers did because it requires New Science. But it doesn't violate any of the accepted fundamentals of the universe, so it will probably happen eventually.

Now we come to the most difficult of the three: New Fundamentals. Traveling to other galaxies falls in this category. For it to work we would have to discover some brand new principle that makes the universe work, and that principle would need to be so radical that it makes what we now know about the laws of physics wrong.

That's not likely to happen. By comparison, the Wright brothers' invention was for all practical purposes inevitable; people had been flying heavier-than-air craft like gliders and kites for hundreds of years. All that was needed was an energy-dense power plant.

Re: First images from Euclid are in

#289

Post by dnate »

ffwd wrote: post #105
__turbobrew__ wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The more I learn about physics the more I am convinced this is a simulation. In a way our universe is very lazy, at large scales where consciousness exists the universe is coherent, predictable. The smaller you get the lazier and fuzzier the universe gets to save computational work. The actual state of things is only computed on small scales when you measure them. The speed of light puts limits on how far humanity ca…

This is an interesting idea but personally I think the opposite - the universe is not lazy and all details matter at all levels. Like imagine making a complete account of all world views of all people in all of history - all perspectives, and all the physical events of that history. There is almost infinite detail there. In a way, in the universe all the details of all the things matter, including at the physical lev…

There are a lot of ways the illusion of more detail than there actually is is given. Simulation cost saving measures so to say.

E.g.: Detail in memory fades quite quickly. Vision is not as detailed as we think.

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