61–70 of 70 posts
One wonders if we ourselves are not a step along the way of a genetic algorithm that began with a meteor-riding virus crashing on our fertile primordial world. Sent from?
We are the only known species to propagate out of balance within our local environment. Our brain has this concept of "infinity", which shows up everywhere in our society. Unconstrained growth is in our DNA.
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Any technical solutions to the global issues we face will be thwarted by sociological factors due to our immaturity as a species. Climate, for example, requires cooperation on a global level and all populous industrialised countries must participate. China, for example, may decide to not participate for any number of economic or political reasons. What then? They would be further destroying the planet. Should we forc…
Solutions don't necessarily need everybody to be on board. Somebody could come up with something tomorrow. Maybe a bacteria that can populate the ocean, which precipitates carbon from CO2 in the air, and drops little pellets to the bottom. Probably not a real practical solution, or even a good idea, but it shows how things could rapidly change if the right tech comes along. They wouldn't need to get everyone together…
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Yeah, I'd care about that octopus. I would want to study it and see what else it does. Sure, I mean intelligent life is interesting to us because it's novel. If there is other intelligent life in the galaxy (universe), it probably implies that intelligent life is relatively common. So, more (less) intelligent life would be extremely inconsequential to them. Why waste resources studying something already well understo…
That seems remarkably incurious. There are like, tens of thousands of species of bee on earth, and there are tons of people who are out there looking into cataloguing them, studying their behavior, etc. I suspect that if life is common enough that we're boring to most other forms of intelligent life, we'd probably find at least one or two other species that are interested in us, and if it's rare enough that there's o…
Obviously I think there's a point to us trying to communicate with whatever is out there, I just think we shouldn't be surprised by the lack of response.
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Or, as Terry Bison put it in "They're Made of Meat" - http://www.terrybisson.com/page6/page6.html : > ... "They use the radio waves to talk, but the signals don't come from them. The signals come from machines." > "So who made the machines? That's who we want to contact." > "They made the machines. That's what I'm trying to tell you. Meat made the machines." > "That's ridiculous. How can meat make a machine? You're a…
They're made out of meat. Don't butcher the title/refrain.
I think emergence of life is a start of a ticking time bomb. If someone would look at earth from afar and observe the changes on a compressed time scale, one would see the earth 'lighting' up a bit as soon as intelligent life emerges. Life emerging on a planet is like a bomb's fuse getting lit. The bomb in this case being earth itself with its unique chemical composition. It is only a question of time when this bomb…
> Maybe the purpose of life is to accelerate and magnify that explosion to achieve the highest possible cosmic reduction of entropy. What mechanism would define that purpose? Earth harboring life for a few billion years, and then snuffing itself out, seems completely irrelevant on the scale of cosmic entropy. Your argument might have merit if intelligent life tends to perform crazy Physics experiments that spawn new…
In that sense it is perhaps similar to a volcano that erupt. Both are emergent from the same forces of entropy, but life just takes a non obvious path. Life seeks to burn itself out, the same way a volcano seeks to cool itself.
I think emergence of life is a start of a ticking time bomb. If someone would look at earth from afar and observe the changes on a compressed time scale, one would see the earth 'lighting' up a bit as soon as intelligent life emerges. Life emerging on a planet is like a bomb's fuse getting lit. The bomb in this case being earth itself with its unique chemical composition. It is only a question of time when this bomb…
It may not be that hard for us to make the Earth unfit for our society, or even for humans as a life form. However, I think it would be significantly harder for us to wipe out all life on the planet earth. I'm hard pressed to think of anything besides blowing up the planet, or grey goo (and arguably grey goo would just be another form of life).
This war will be fundamentally a pursuit of energy and resources, as it has always been. And this pursuit of energy and resources has always been detrimental at an exponentially increasing scale to other life forms which depend on the same.
As an example, if there is a nuclear war in the Indian subcontinent, the countries there will only be acting out of their need to guarantee their survival. However, the resulting fallout will have extinguished life forms at a pace that doesnt have any bearing in history.
One wonders if we ourselves are not a step along the way of a genetic algorithm that began with a meteor-riding virus crashing on our fertile primordial world. Sent from?
I've considered that possibility as well. We are the only known species to propagate out of balance within our local environment. Our brain has this concept of "infinity", which shows up everywhere in our society. Unconstrained growth is in our DNA.
That animal is eating it's environment and we might consider that irrational and unsustainable -- right up until the moment where it emerges from a cocoon and flies away to a new world.
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> It is only a question of time when this bomb goes off and destroys all life in the process. Or it only affects the planet enough to destroy civilization, and not all life. Or only all high-order life, leaving insects and fish behind. Etc, etc.
The emergence of man has been disastrous for every other life form. We delude ourselves by saving some of them in national parks, but at any point of time they intrude into our living spaces we don't hesitate to wipe them off. When man dropped the bomb on another city, there was no consideration given for the other life forms which died as a result. This consideration has never been given in any wars man has fought t…
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Traditionally, no human considers an octopus intelligent unless it can predict soccer results. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_the_Octopus Paul aside, we've been ignoring evidence that animals are sentient for centuries now. So yes - as a general principle, there's a term missing from the Drake equation to cover recognisable similarity, technological equivalence, and mutual interest. Two civs probably need to be w…
Ant 1: "Man, how do we get all these strange food deposits without plants?" Ant 2: "Who knows? That's just the way the universe is." Man 1: "Man, how do we have all these strange gravity deposits without matter?"