81–90 of 99 posts
Is there a protocol for looking for life in an environment like Enceladus that would sufficiently guarantee sterility of the probe? It seems that guaranteeing sterility would be sufficiently impossible to render Enceladus permanently unapproachable.
You can make it likely though.
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I always loved this portion of The Ellimist Chronicles, one of the companion books to the Animorph Series. If I remember correctly, these god-like beings play simulated games where they develop species over eons and during one game, the catalyst the main character needed to advance his civilization was parting the perpetual clouds so his species could witness the stars and for the first time, look up.
I remember that one. The game is that you can make one single change to species/environment, and he parts the clouds. His opponent ups aggression, and his opponent's species wipes his out. They send their game out into space, and another species gets the game, thinks the game is altering real species causing drama.
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I sighed. "What was your move?"
"Oh, a very small one," Inidar said. "I increased their rate of reproduction by a very small percentage. This heightened their natural aggression. And guessed that your move would be to open the Pangaban skies. Population growth pressures, a limited food supply, and the ability to see the Pangaban surface very clearly ... my Gunja Wave wanted to eat your species."
"Yes, and they did," I said. "I call the game."
"You have to learn to avoid naïveté, Ellimist. It's not the good and worthy who prosper. It's just the motivated."
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Octopuses have been observed using tools, and we're very quickly determining that they are extremely intelligent. If they had longer lifespans and weren't solitary, who knows what they may have become.
Given that they breed fast, I'm a bit surprised nobody has tried to breed sociable octopuses.
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Octopuses have been observed using tools, and we're very quickly determining that they are extremely intelligent. If they had longer lifespans and weren't solitary, who knows what they may have become.
Given that they breed fast, I'm a bit surprised nobody has tried to breed sociable octopuses.
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Well one factor would go up (planets with life 1>2) and another would go down (planets with life developing intelligence 1>0.5), resulting in a wash. It does move towards giving additional degrees of freedom on those terms though, making the equation as a whole slightly less pseudo-science.
The known probabilities will go down, but that evidence is very weak with a sample size of Personally, I've always assumed less than 100% of life-bearing planets will have intelligent life. Earth would have failed less than 1M years ago, and our species may not be around for long. The interesting question, to me, is how often does life arise? If we find two origins in our solar system... that would change everything.
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"I'm particularly skeptical of the claim that you could not develop chemistry underwater; it seems equally as implausible as saying that you could not develop chemistry in air for exactly the same reasons." what? you think its possible to develop fire under water? chemistry? have you done any chemistry? what about electricity? (a huge but impossible one to do under water)? I am trying really hard not to say something…
Thermite or alkaline metals will burn just fine under water. As long as you have an oxidizer, some combustible and a source of energy to kickstart the reaction, it will burn. Also, I don't see why fire is so important. It was important for us to better digest food, that's a concidence, nothing else. And so does electricity. If the water isn't saline (why would it be), then it is as good as air from an isolation PoV.…
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Given that they breed fast, I'm a bit surprised nobody has tried to breed sociable octopuses.
I think there have been a few instances where they found enough octopi clustered that they were shown to be sociable. This article is about the Octopi cities https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/octopus-city-obser...
> Octlantis is not in any sense a city. It is not a cooperatively built and maintained structure, designed to allow many individuals to live in close quarters. It is an unusually dense collection of individual dens, most of them dug into a bed of scallop shells.
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"I'm particularly skeptical of the claim that you could not develop chemistry underwater; it seems equally as implausible as saying that you could not develop chemistry in air for exactly the same reasons." what? you think its possible to develop fire under water? chemistry? have you done any chemistry? what about electricity? (a huge but impossible one to do under water)? I am trying really hard not to say something…
There is literally no reason to believe that developing chemistry is impossible underwater. Interesting and useful chemical reactions happen underwater every second of every day; it is irrational to assume that there is no path by which an intelligent but not technological entity would observe this, utilize those reactions, and refine them. Electricity is far from impossible either to develop or use underwater, and i…
sure, you can play lawyerball and say its possible.
yes, AFTER 40 THOUSAND YEARS, we humans have figured a lot of this stuff out in an easy environment. Sure, we can take the knowledge we have gained over the last 40k years, and do some stuff under water, because we have already figured it out.
i also hate your type of person. your the type of person that says: give me evidence, you are wrong until you give me evidence. but you provide none of your own.
Imagine that there's an intelligent civilization living down there. One day, they develop the technology to drill through the ice, and emerge to discover... an entire universe on the other side.