# Do you believe we are alone in the universe?



## Morrus (Nov 25, 2018)

Our tabletop RPGs are full of sci-fi universes - *Star Wars *and *Star Trek*, to* Warhammer 40K* and and *Starfinder* and more. From *Drake’s Equation* to *Fermi’s Paradox*, from the sheer number of extrasolar planets to the lack of evidence of other life, what say you? Are we alone? If not why have we seen no convincing evidence of alien life?







(I’m firmly in the not alone camp, but believe FTL travel will never happen, meaning that most civilisations don’t travel very far behind their own system).


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## Umbran (Nov 22, 2018)

Given infinite space, and a non-zero chance for life to develop, being the *only* intelligent species is statistically impossible.  Heck, it then becomes statistically impossible that there's only one Morrus!  

Being the only intelligent species within signalling distance?  That's far more likely.  We may well be alone, insofar as there may not be another intelligent species near enough to ever know they exist.


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## Blue (Nov 22, 2018)

I do believe that over the life of the universe there will be countless (but finite) sentient races.

But ones that coexist at this time that we can currently sense, or existed before us and we have not yet found/understood that we have four artifacts and signs of them - that I think is a very small number.  On that's increasing at a dramatic rate based on what our technology has done in the at 50 years.

Also, the Sol system is in a particularly lousy place in the Milky Way for density of potential life-bearing systems.


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## trappedslider (Nov 22, 2018)

View attachment 103260


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## Dannyalcatraz (Nov 22, 2018)

I’d say humans are not alone, but isolated.  It’s kind of like being someone native to a tiny Pacific island: there are other humans out there, but entire cultures on the island could rise and fall- or even be wiped out completely- without ever becoming aware of humanity in another part of the ocean.

We’re separated by oceans of time AND space from any other planet we know of that could support intelligent life in a form we would expect with our current understanding of biology.

But as Fox Mulder would say, “Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.”


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## Tonguez (Nov 22, 2018)

Dannyalcatraz said:


> I’d say humans are not alone, but isolated.  It’s kind of like being someone native to a tiny Pacific island: there are other humans out there, but entire cultures on the island could rise and fall- or even be wiped out completely- without ever becoming aware of humanity in another part of the ocean.
> 
> We’re separated by oceans of time AND space from any other planet we know of that could support intelligent life in a form we would expect with our current understanding of biology.
> 
> But as Fox Mulder would say, “Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.”




As a descendant of one of those Pacific Island peoples can I just say that your analogy is a bit patronising and entirely wrong since Pacific people’s had complex inter island trade and communication.

Secondly I think Humanity is the most advanced species that we are ever going to encounter AND comprehend as intelligent. Of course it’s quite possible that we have been dealing with vast incomprehensible intelligences since our hairy ancestors first contemplated the Storm clouds
.


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## Jhaelen (Nov 22, 2018)

Clearly, the question is already wrong. There's no "we". I'm the only real being in existence. Everything else is just fabrications of my mind.


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## Dannyalcatraz (Nov 22, 2018)

> As a descendant of one of those Pacific Island peoples can I just say that your analogy is a bit patronising and entirely wrong since Pacific people’s had complex inter island trade and communication.




Apologies.  I understand where you’re coming from, but no offense was meant.  I specifically avoided naming any particular island to avoid that.  

I was trying to find an area on the earth isolated enough that belief that your local area was _everything_ was conceivable.  Land masses don’t give you that kind of isolation very often.  Despite the well-known trade in the Pacific, it is so vast that it is _possible_ that an island existed on which the inhabitants eventually lost the knowledge that they came from somewhere else.

Because, if we’re honest, there probably haven’t been many cultures unaware of “others” since the Paleolithic era.  (Though whether or not they regard the others as human or not is a different question.)


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## delericho (Nov 22, 2018)

I don't think we're alone. But I doubt whether we'll ever make contact with alien life.

The vast majority of the life that is out there won't be intelligent life; the vast majority of the intelligent life that's out there will be completely incomprehensible to us; the vast majority of what remains will still be confined to their own planets and/or systems; and the vast majority of the rest will be impossibly far away.

So there's only a tiny tiny fraction of the life that's out there that we _might_ make contact with. Given that, I think we're more likely to wipe ourselves out than to make that contact... unless and asteroid hit or other disaster does that for us first.


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## Morrus (Nov 22, 2018)

Umbran said:


> Given infinite space, and a non-zero chance for life to develop, being the *only* intelligent species is statistically impossible.  Heck, it then becomes statistically impossible that there's only one Morrus!




While in an infinite universe anything possible is certain, I am well known for being quite impossible.


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## Janx (Nov 22, 2018)

Every intelligent species has its own version of swedish meatballs.

Fermi and his paradox is the larger problem.  It's not just does Alpha Centauri (or whatever its called this week) have intelligent life, but when.  1000 years ago or now or in the future.  right now may be the wrong time to try signalling them.

Then, how are we going to signal them?  It's only 4 LY away.  Do we really have a technology to get the job done AND hope they happen to have technology to detect, record and analyze it?

If we go there and they do exist, they might be easy enough to translate, but our microbes kill them, theirs kill us on first contact.  Bummer.

We may not be the only intelligent life in the universe, but we are functionally alone.


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## Ryujin (Nov 22, 2018)

Vastness of the universe, probabilities, and all of that. “The universe is a pretty big place. If it's just us, seems like an awful waste of space.” ― Carl Sagan

What I'm not convinced of is that we've ever been visited, or that we ever will be. What's the life expectancy of an intelligent species? Could they just randomly come across us in the few tens of thousands of years that we've been around? Is there anyone who could have heard us inside of the lousy little less than 250 light year sphere where you could possibly hear us whispering?


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## Dannyalcatraz (Nov 22, 2018)

> Then, how are we going to signal them? It's only 4 LY away. Do we really have a technology to get the job done AND hope they happen to have technology to detect, record and analyze it?



With current tech, once we figure out how to understand each other, you’re still talking about the worst text messaging convo EVER.

Them: “Greetings from what you call Alpha Cofefe“

_4 years later_ 

Us: “What?”

_4 years later_ 

Them: “Sorry- Alpha Centauri.  Damn you AutoCorrect!”


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## Nagol (Nov 22, 2018)

Jhaelen said:


> Clearly, the question is already wrong. There's no "we". I'm the only real being in existence. Everything else is just fabrications of my mind.




So... You are accepting all blame then? *shakes head* You have a very unpleasant mind.


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## Aeson (Nov 22, 2018)

Dannyalcatraz said:


> With current tech, once we figure out how to understand each other, you’re still talking about the worst text messaging convo EVER.
> 
> Them: “Greetings from what you call Alpha Cofefe“
> 
> ...




Unlimited texting may have limits. I'd hate to see that bill come due.


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## Eltab (Nov 23, 2018)

At this time, I am the only poll-ee who holds my opinion.   

Granted a sample size of 1 is tough to predict from.

As we discover more extrasolar planets and extrasolar systems, we keep finding out how unusual Terra / Sol is.  For instance, eccentric orbits are more common than near-circular.  The zone around Star X where water can stay liquid on an Earth-like planet has gravitational interference from a gas giant.  Or is in a gas giant's path.  The rocky planets we do find have the wrong atmospheric composition.  Or are so close to a dim star that they would be tidally-locked.  A 'hot Jupiter', as we understand its formation, wipes out the Earth-like worlds in a system as it moves to where we find it.  Warm yellow stars are rare compared to dim cool red dwarves.

We know of only one biochemistry set that produces intelligent life, so it is hard to estimate what other chemistry sets would (a) function as life; (b) support intelligent life.  We can speculate, and we can write off a few proposed biochemistries based on the chemistry or physics.

The book _Rare Earth_ may have overstated the case, but I think it headed is in the right direction: intelligent life requires some unlikely background events / conditions, which did not happen often.  They did happen here in this physically oddball system.  We do not yet know how tightly the astronomy constrains the biology.

In effect we want to roll all 20's on many dice sequentially.  Yes it will be cool if it happens, but do not hold your breath for it.


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## Mad_Jack (Nov 23, 2018)

Jhaelen said:


> Clearly, the question is already wrong. There's no "we". I'm the only real being in existence. Everything else is just fabrications of my mind.




And since Jhaelan is just one of the voices in _my _head, and I'm just a figment of my own imagination... 


Actually, I do believe there is intelligent life out there...

And that humanity and our planet is actually just some SIMS-type game being played by one of their bored  pre-pubescent kids on their parents' cell phone.


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## Mustrum_Ridcully (Nov 23, 2018)

Given the vast size of the universe, it seems unlikely that there is really only one time life developed, and that only one time "intelligent" life developed.
However, it might be incredibly far away so we never take notice of each other.
So even if technically we aren't alone, we might still feel very alone.

As I grew older, I became more and more skeptical that FTL travel is possible, and I am also becoming more and more skeptical that something like a generation ship that could travel for hundreds or thousands of years becomes possible, or that we could send detectable signals for communication across interstellar distances. So it might be that we'll never get to meet or speak with anyone. 



Umbran said:


> Given infinite space, and a non-zero chance for life to develop, being the *only* intelligent species is statistically impossible.  Heck, it then becomes statistically impossible that there's only one Morrus!
> 
> Being the only intelligent species within signaling distance?  That's far more likely.  We may well be alone, insofar as there may not be another intelligent species near enough to ever know they exist.




But what if space is finite? 

Because I seem to remember that space is finite, but expands over time, and if time is infinite - there isn't anything stopping the expansion, it will never stop expanding. But space will also never be finite. 
And with infinite time but finite space, there is a lot of time frames that life could form and die out again - without it ever happening at the same time. So maybe there will be thousands of Morrus - but they will also be separated in time across trillions of years.

So maybe there was or there will be life out there. And we'll never notice, because we existed either before or after it. We'd still be alone.


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## Umbran (Nov 23, 2018)

Mustrum_Ridcully said:


> Because I seem to remember that space is finite, but expands over time




It is at best indeterminate.  There is exactly zero evidence that the universe is finite.  What evidence we do have points to it being infinite.  Note that the universe can quite easily be infinite, and expanding.

The basic way to have a finite universe is to have it be curved back around on itself (what we call "positive curvature") - the basic analogy is that an ant walking on a basketball is walking on a surface of positive curvature.  30+ years ago, this is what we kind of expected to see - a universe that had enough mater in it that its gravitation pulls the universe shut.  What we measure across the entire universe that we can see (the "visible universe" is about 90 billion light years across) is not that positive curvature, but is flat as a pancake.  flatter than the flattest thing you can imagine.  Or possibly a slight _negative_ curvature.  

So, for the basic way to have a finite universe, it must be far, far bigger than the universe that we can see, so that the positive curvature is so amazingly tiny that we cannot detect it.  The fact that the universe is not just expanding, but its expansion is accelerating, speaks even more to it not being closed off by mass...

If you don't have the universe curve around and close in on itself, then it must have a boundary.  Boundaries are *very* messy, mathematically speaking.

There's nothing in current accepted theories that require the universe be finite.   Overall, that stacks up to be a bit on the side of being infinite.


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## jonesy (Nov 23, 2018)

I hear that this space thing is large, or something. Like there's multiple places to go to. More than three, at least.

And we've been here for a couple of hundred thousand years now, and we've only been to the one rock that's already married to ours.

For longer than I've been alive there's been talk of getting to that rust coloured place over yonder. Still nothing.

And the radio and television stuff that we've been broadcasting out there, they've reached something like 0.05% of our own galaxy. If that. There's this thing called the inverse square law which suggests that we might not even have enough broadcasting power to reach any significant distance.

On top of all the incredible vastness the farthest reaches of space expanding away from us faster than the speed of light. So even in an infinite amount of time an infinite human species would not be able to explore everything.

FTL is the magic acronym which could flip things around. Perhaps. Depending on how F it would be, if it were possible. Lots of if's. Very much space. So many places.


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## Umbran (Nov 23, 2018)

delericho said:


> the vast majority of the intelligent life that's out there will be completely incomprehensible to us;




People say that, but I'm not sure it has a good basis.  If it has a physical form, and can master technology of the form that can cross interstellar distances, that implies a vast array of experiences similar to our own.  Shared experiences are the basis for communication.

Our fiction is loaded with cases where communication is difficult or impossible, and if we manage to communicate, that's distinctly not the interesting part of the story, so it gets glossed over.  But, these are fictions, which by nature focuses challenges, because challenges are interesting, and create drama, which sells books.


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## Morrus (Nov 23, 2018)

Yeah. We can comprehend a lot of stuff. We’re cavemen who went from rubbing two sticks together to figuring out that black holes exist, all by ourselves! We’re really quite clever. I’m sure we can comprehend the existence of an alien race just fine, and vice versa, and we’ll figure out how to talk.


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## Aeson (Nov 23, 2018)

I hate to think other mes could be roaming the universe. One me is more than enough. 

If all is relative. As we travel 4 light years away, if we were to travel faster than light or even near light speed, we would be different from those we left behind. Would we be a representative of what humans are at that point or what humans once were?


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## Dannyalcatraz (Nov 24, 2018)

Aeson said:


> I hate to think other mes could be roaming the universe. One me is more than enough.
> 
> If all is relative. As we travel 4 light years away, if we were to travel faster than light or even near light speed, we would be different from those we left behind. Would we be a representative of what humans are at that point or what humans once were?




There’s a short story- whose name escapes me at the moment- that _I think_ was done by Larry Niven.  If not him, then one of the other great old ones.*  In it, as humanity is spreading through the galaxy over a great deal of time, they finally encounter an alien species.  The two races start trying to communicate, and when they succeed?

...they find that they’re each just the other side of humanity’s space empire, and they’ve completed the circle.






* not the Great Old Ones, just one of the writers from the dawn of sci-fi


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## trappedslider (Nov 24, 2018)

A good movie about the communication problem is Arrive, it's also slightly confusing until you get to the end.  At least it was for me.


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## Umbran (Nov 24, 2018)

trappedslider said:


> A good movie about the communication problem is Arrive, it's also slightly confusing until you get to the end.  At least it was for me.




Well, no, Arrival is not a good movie about the communication problem, insofar as it basis its communication problem in ...

[sblock]...exotic, highly speculative physics.  The whole, "learn their language and you can then see through time," isn't a good example of the basic communication problem.  This communication problem is, in effect, "learn to use magic".[/sblock]


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## Orius (Nov 24, 2018)

I don't think we have enough data to even come close to answering this question yet.


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## Kramodlog (Nov 24, 2018)

It isn't just about _where_ are aliens, but also about _when _ intelligent life evolved. The universe is billions of years old. Intelligent life might have existeded somewhere in the universe before dinosaures walked on Terra and it might happen again after the human race is extinct.

We might be alone in the universe right now (might), but de might not be the only intelligent the universe knows.


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## TrippyHippy (Nov 25, 2018)

"Belief" is a difficult term to use. There isn't any evidence we have currently, to prove the existance of extra-terrestial life, but we have a lot of limitations both in terms of our own physical perception and also in terms of the means, technologically, to investigate further. 

The universe is vast, and the argument goes that it would be improbable that there isn't intelligent life somewhere else in it, but people sometimes forget just how improbable intelligent life is, with a similar level of self awareness and existance as we do, on Earth itself. Most species on Earth aren't like humanity, and haven't evolved the same cognitive ability as humanity has - the odds of humanity existing on Earth alone are billions to one. 

The other factor is that the same limitations that stop us from exploring the universe are the same factors that suggest it is also physically difficult for other species to visit here. The universe is so vast that actually transversing it is well nigh impossible. Following on, if our own limitations are on a perceptual level - ie we just lack the awareness to sense extra-terrestial things around us, as in some scifi literature - then the question arises as to whether we will ever be able to perceive them anyway. Something would have to dramatically change in our current technological and perceptual paradigm, in order for us to encounter intelligent extra terrestial life.


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## D1Tremere (Nov 25, 2018)

As I understand it (and this is not my area of expertise so forgive me if I am wrong), the currently accepted model is that the universe is finite. We have evidence that it is expanding and at an increasing rate. The current model predicts that it will eventually dissipate and lose atomic cohesion. The speed of light is the universal constant, and cannot be exceeded except in some non-mass instances. This model could be wrong, but the alternatives are not much better.
This means, given the amount of time our planet has existed, the tiny amount of time organic life, let alone human life, has existed, and the probability that our runaway cognitive evolution will destroy us all in a relatively short time span, that our chances of other beings with human like cognitive abilities existing in the same time span as us is very low.
The next problem, given the rarity of planets with elements and conditions conducive to organic life, let alone ones with disproportionately expensive organs such as human brains, is that it is extremely unlikely that any such beings would be close enough to our solar system that we could interact in any way within the probably short time span of human like life.
This means that we are either alone in the universe, or so far away in time and space from anything like us that we may as well be. And given our difficulties existing with ourselves, that is likely best for all beings involved. That said, chances of contact are much higher if you count microorganisms. Then we get into the question of "are they truly alien, or do we share the same point of origin?"


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## jmucchiello (Nov 25, 2018)

We are functionally alone. So far there's really no way to span interstellar distances meaningfully. The odds that two scientifically advanced civilizations existing in the same time frame equal to how far they can travel are seemingly low.

Likewise, would we even find extraterrestrial life that we could communicate with? We can barely talk to apes and dolphins. Imagine a species who sees a range of light frequencies that doesn't coincide with ours. One of us might be invisible to the other. There's a sci-fi story where the aliens are butterfly like and use wing flaps, faster than human perception, to communicate. Would we even notice they are intelligent? Would they notice we are?

It's both depressing and relieving. The Earth is dangerous enough without having aliens with advanced tech stopping by for conquest.

Oh and as for Mars. We have a planet that is slowly losing its ability to maintain life. But it should be far cheaper to fix this planet than to make Mars inhabitable.


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## Legatus Legionis (Nov 25, 2018)

.


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## Ratskinner (Nov 25, 2018)

My guess, we are not alone, but we'll never find out for sure.

I think the Fermi paradox isn't really a paradox. I just think that interstellar colonization, perhaps even interplanetary colonization is far harder than we usually estimate. There's the obvious factor of different suns or even insolation from your home sun, but then there's surface gravity. I suspect that complex life just can't really deal with very drastic changes in either in a manner that would allow colonization. (I suspect cosmic radiation makes cryosleep next to useless, as well.) I suppose that puts the Great Filter ahead of us, at the last step. (If you can't colonize, then eventually _something_ gets you.)

Given humanity's all but complete unwillingness to seriously deal with Anthropogenic Climate Change, I suspect Hanson's argument about technological societies being inherently self destructive is a little too close to the truth. Even without ACC, our waste heat will boil us off the planet in a few hundred years (As Larry Niven foresaw for the puppeteers in Known Space). Although I doubt we'll last that long, at this point. See Under a Green Sky. The Anthropocene extinction is increasingly looking like a second "Great Dying" to me.

I we are very lucky, we might encounter another species' Dyson Probe, but otherwise, we are effectively alone.


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## LuisCarlos17f (Nov 25, 2018)

After buying and reading my core book of Eclipse Phase RPG I understand the reason to want avoid the rest of alien civilizations like a quarantine. Let's imagine Skynet, the supercomputer of Terminator saga hacking files of Umbrella Corporation (Resident Evil) to create virus to infect machines and living beings. 

Maybe we aren't alone, but we are the "valley of the lepers". for the rest.

Seer Maria Valtorta wrote:

  "_I would be a very small and limited God the Creator if I had created only the Earth as an inhabited world! With a beat of my will I have brought forth worlds upon worlds from nothing and cast them as luminous fine dust into the immensity of the firmament._

_The Earth, about which you are so proud and fierce, is nothing but one of the bits of fine dust rotating in unboundedness, and not the biggest one. It is certainly the most corrupt one, though. Lives upon lives are teeming in the millions of worlds which are the joy of your gaze on peaceful nights, and the perfection of God will appear to you when, with the intellectual sight of your spirits rejoined to God, you are able to see the wonders of those worlds".
_


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## TarionzCousin (Nov 25, 2018)

Morrus said:


> Are we alone?



Morrus, I can't believe this thread wasn't about ENWorld's Santiago: A Myth of the Far Future game.


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## Stacie GmrGrl (Nov 25, 2018)

No. Other intelligent life does exist, even on our own planet. There is enough weirdness in earth's past, too many strange ancient structures built with such incredible precision constructed in ways we still don't understand today.

Evidence is everywhere. The massive increase in Sightings all over the world in the last few years is extremely high. 

Then there is the newest discoveries in quantum science, the fact that modern day humans did not evolve here on earth as was once assumed (read Human by Design by Gregg Braden where he shows the science behind this along with all the different experiments by different scientists that show this), and the holographic nature of our relative reality... 

Other Intelligences much greater than ours do exist.


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## Imaculata (Nov 25, 2018)

I think it's not only possible, but highly likely that we are not alone in the galaxy. Given the fact that life was almost exterminated on this planet several times in history, and yet bounced back, shows that life is (or can be) very resilient. No one can slap a number on the chance of encountering intelligent life, since our sample size is so small. We can see not even a tenth or a hundreth of the universe. It would be like looking at one inch of a cookie jar, and concluding that it must be empty. We simply have too little information. But it seems to me that if intelligent life developed here, it must have happened somewhere else as well, given the immense size of the universe.

Additionally, we only know the conditions that were required for earth-based life as we know it. But there is no guarantee that these are the only conditions that can support life. Even on our own planet, we find life in the most impossible and hostile environments. It seems highly probable to me that there are many different kinds of life out there, that we can't possibly imagine.

Will we ever meet intelligent life? I hope so, but it is impossible to say. The universe is gigantic, and while this increases the chance for other intelligent life out there, it also increases the chance that we might be a very long distance apart. But perhaps by some fluke we happen to be close enough to another life form to encounter it. Stranger things have happened.



Stacie GmrGrl said:


> There is enough weirdness in earth's past, too many strange ancient structures built with such incredible precision constructed in ways we still don't understand today.




I don't think this is true. Can you provide an example?


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## Koloth (Nov 25, 2018)

Dannyalcatraz said:


> Apologies.  I understand where you’re coming from, but no offense was meant.  I specifically avoided naming any particular island to avoid that.
> 
> I was trying to find an area on the earth isolated enough that belief that your local area was _everything_ was conceivable.  Land masses don’t give you that kind of isolation very often.  Despite the well-known trade in the Pacific, it is so vast that it is _possible_ that an island existed on which the inhabitants eventually lost the knowledge that they came from somewhere else.
> 
> Because, if we’re honest, there probably haven’t been many cultures unaware of “others” since the Paleolithic era.  (Though whether or not they regard the others as human or not is a different question.)




Easter Island probably comes close. 

Timing is probably a big issue.  We are here now and have had the tech to begin looking for other for about a hundred years.  In that time, we have faced loss of civilization via nukes, bio-warfare, ecological issues and just plain getting hit by a really big rock.  Likely that other civilizations have/will face similar problems.  Could be that most don't keep a level of tech able to develop interstellar travel long enough to overlap some nearby civilization's existence.


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## Philature (Nov 25, 2018)

I strongly believe in the zoo theory to explain the Fermi Paradox.

It is possible that over the last few billion years a smarter species (and really we shouldn't consider ourselves that smart as a specie) have colonized our entire galaxy.

Their civilization and technology would be so advance to be fully incomprehensible to us. Litteraly akin only to magic to our little caveman eyeballs develop to see underwater. It would also explain why we don't really see them - we are looking for radio-wave and mega structure while they could have, summoning techno-babble here, sub-space communication, cold fusion and 4th dimensional structure.

Our technological development is just but a blinked compared to a billion year old civilizations, we tend to look too much at our navel and think we would meet equal but really we are just ant. Those aliens would be incomprehensible to us akin to uncaring eldritch horror more than friendly alien like in Star Trek.


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## mips42 (Nov 25, 2018)

I do not believe that we are alone, that does not mean that I think there is intelligent life anywhere (including here).


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## Maxperson (Nov 25, 2018)

jmucchiello said:


> There's a sci-fi story where the aliens are butterfly like and use wing flaps, faster than human perception, to communicate. Would we even notice they are intelligent? Would they notice we are?




Yes, they would notice that we are intelligent, and we would notice that they are.  How?  Technology.  We know for the most part what is natural and what isn't, so when these butterflies show up in something unnatural, we will know that it's unnatural and they are intelligent, regardless of whether or not we can communicate, or comprehend HOW they are intelligent.  And they will be able to look at us and do the same.


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## Umbran (Nov 25, 2018)

D1Tremere said:


> As I understand it (and this is not my area of expertise so forgive me if I am wrong), the currently accepted model is that the universe is finite.




As noted earlier, no, it isn't.  Current theory recognizes that we do not know, and does not require it to be finite.  Also, current measures of curvature and expansion suggest it is apt to be infinite, as the major way to have it be finite calls for curvature we do not observe.

What is finite is the *visible* universe, but that's merely a lightspeed limitation on what we can image with telescopes, not a limit on the space.  Though, as the current expansion goes, we will never see or communicate with anything outside the current visible universe unless FTL travel is involved, for the same lightspeed barrier reasons.


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## Jester David (Nov 25, 2018)

Both.

Aliens exist. The universe is too vast for there not to be.
But the distances between systems are so unbelievably vast we might as well be alone.


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## Yaarel (Nov 25, 2018)

We are alone in the universe. Someone has to be first − and we are them.

I assume there is life on other planets, but no intelligent life. Look at all of the species of life on this planet − millions − and our species alone is intelligent. The probability of intelligent life is extremely unlikely.

Moreover, we humans are ancients of this universe. The universe itself is roughly 14 billion years old − and our own planet is roughly 10 billion years old. Our home is among the first to evolve life anywhere.

We humans are the ancient race of this universe.


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## Imaculata (Nov 25, 2018)

Yaarel said:


> Look at all of the species of life on this planet − millions − and our species alone is intelligent.




I have looked and concluded that there are plenty of other life forms on this planet that are intelligent to some degree. 

[video=youtube;cbSu2PXOTOc]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cbSu2PXOTOc[/video]


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## Yaarel (Nov 25, 2018)

Imaculata said:


> I have looked and concluded that there are plenty of other life forms on this planet that are intelligent to some degree.




Language as mode of cognition, as well as math and technology, remain less than sufficient in the nonhuman species.


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## Yaarel (Nov 25, 2018)

Also consider how technology escalates exponentially − on an upwards ‘curve’.

Even if an intelligent species was merely a thousand years older than us humans, that species would already be many magnitudes more technologically advanced than we are. Nevermind millions of years early than us. Presumably such a hypothetical species would already have overcome any technological challenges for communication and transportation.

We would already have met them.

We humans are alone − the first intelligent life in this universe.


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## Yaarel (Nov 25, 2018)

Believing in aliens today is identical to believing in elves and trolls during medieval times.

It is a human thing to do, to project the archetypes of our own brain onto our interpretations of our experiences of the universe around us.


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## Dannyalcatraz (Nov 25, 2018)

Yaarel said:


> We are alone in the universe. Someone has to be first − and we are them.
> 
> I assume there is life on other planets, but no intelligent life. Look at all of the species of life on this planet − millions − and our species alone is intelligent. The probability of intelligent life is extremely unlikely.
> 
> ...



Actually, Earth is @4.5B years old, not 10.



Yaarel said:


> Also consider how technology escalates exponentially − on an upwards ‘curve’.
> 
> Even if an intelligent species was merely a thousand years older than us humans, that species would already be many magnitudes more technologically advanced than we are. Nevermind millions of years early than us. Presumably such a hypothetical species would already have overcome any technological challenges for communication and transportation.
> 
> ...




That presumes the technological challenges of spanning the gulf of light years is solvable.  AND that they’re close enough that if they did, they would come here.  If they’re not even in our galaxy, then fuggedaboutit.


----------



## Hussar (Nov 25, 2018)

Barring any evidence to the contrary, any theory is as good as another.


----------



## Shiroiken (Nov 25, 2018)

This pretty much sums up my view:

http://theoatmeal.com/comics/oracle


----------



## Yaarel (Nov 25, 2018)

[MENTION=19675]Dannyalcatraz[/MENTION]

The age of the Earth depends on conflicting dating methods. The 4.5 billion estimate depends on the analysis of meteorite rock. It seems to be a decent method, so I will be more cautious about arguing the antiquity of the earth.


----------



## Umbran (Nov 25, 2018)

Yaarel said:


> Language as mode of cognition, as well as math and technology, remain less than sufficient in the nonhuman species.




Yep.  But any of the great apes are a small jump to these things.  Several avians are in the neighborhood of a human child.  Cetaceans, alas, are limited by their inability to create technology.  But still, getting close seems pretty common on our world.


----------



## Yaarel (Nov 25, 2018)

Dannyalcatraz said:


> That presumes the technological challenges of spanning the gulf of light years is solvable.  AND that they’re close enough that if they did, they would come here.  If they’re not even in our galaxy, then fuggedaboutit.




I suspect, the human species will even be able to overcome the limitations of time − nevermind the limitations of space.

Even now, we have seen the limitations of gravity, observing the distortion of gravity waves from planetary objects. There is a relativistic nexus linking time and gravity.

In other words.

If technological communication is possible at all, then it would have already happened.

Especially if the hypothetical species is over a billion years older − with its own exponentially accelerating technology!


----------



## Yaarel (Nov 25, 2018)

Umbran said:


> Yep.  But any of the great apes are a small jump to these things.  Several avians are in the neighborhood of a human child.  Cetaceans, alas, are limited by their inability to create technology.  But still, getting close seems pretty common on our world.




The other apes have been around as long as we have − and all of them failed to make the ‘jump’.

The human proves to be unique.


----------



## Umbran (Nov 25, 2018)

Yaarel said:


> The age of the Earth depends on conflicting dating methods. The 4.5 billion estimate depends on the analysis of meteorite rock.




No, the age of the Earth does not depend on conflicting dating methods - our *understanding* of it may.

But, let us be clear - there's not a lot of controversy here.  The current age was established back in 1956, and while it has been refined over time, I don't think there have been any other serious contenders.


----------



## Imaculata (Nov 25, 2018)

Yaarel said:


> Language as mode of cognition, as well as math and technology, remain less than sufficient in the nonhuman species.




But I don't find any of those a requirement for intelligence. Not to mention that there are plenty of creatures on this planet that can communicate with each other quite well. Perhaps not in a language as we know it, but effective enough to communicate the things necessary for survival to one another.

[video=youtube;y1kXCh496U0]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y1kXCh496U0[/video]



Yaarel said:


> Believing in aliens today is identical to believing in elves and trolls during medieval times.
> 
> It is a human thing to do, to project the archetypes of our own brain onto our interpretations of our experiences of the universe around us.




Elves and trolls are human fabrications, where as alien life is a concept that is entirely possible. I don't think this is a valid comparison. Life appeared on our planet because the conditions on our planet made it possible. So, given another planet with similar circumstances, it should be possible to happen again. All you need is enough time, and enough potential planets... and the universe is large enough and old enough for that.

That is not even getting into the possibilitity of other forms of life that are unknown to us. It is impossible to speculate on that.

However, if you are referring to the belief of aliens visiting our planet and kidnapping people, then your comparison makes more sense.


----------



## Yaarel (Nov 25, 2018)

Umbran said:


> No, the age of the Earth does not depend on conflicting dating methods - our *understanding* of it may.
> 
> But, let us be clear - there's not a lot of controversy here.  The current date was established back in 1956, and while it has been refined over time, I don't think there have been any other serious contenders.




‘Methods’ means methodologies. The results are as useful as the methods are. There are conflicting methods that scientists apply to estimating the age of the earth.


----------



## Yaarel (Nov 25, 2018)

Imaculata said:


> Elves and trolls are human fabrications, where as alien life is a concept that is entirely possible. I don't think this is a valid comparison.
> 
> However, if you are referring to the belief of aliens visiting our planet and kidnapping people, then your comparison makes more sense.




All ‘aliens’ are 100% human fabrications.

We never met any alien, there is zero evidence of any alien, and our discussing them results 100% from our active human imaginations.

People in our century speculate that aliens might be possible, based on our contemporary worldview mythology.

In the exact same way, one thousand years ago, people speculated that elves and trolls might be possible, based on their contemporary worldview mythology.


----------



## Shasarak (Nov 25, 2018)

Are we alone?

If the Fermi paradox is correct then we must be alone.  Otherwise given the age and size of the Universe it should be teeming with life.

Although to be honest the Alien Zoo idea is hilarious.


----------



## Imaculata (Nov 25, 2018)

Yaarel said:


> All ‘aliens’ are 100% human fabrications.




When we talk about aliens, we are talking about "life outside our planet".

I would not call that fabrication. I would call it speculation.



Yaarel said:


> We never met any alien, there is zero evidence of any alien, and our discussing them results 100% from our active human imaginations.




Just because we speculate about the existence of life on other worlds, does not mean that they are complete fabrications, or equal to creatures on our own planet that are clearly made up.

You do not need to have witnessed a life form, to speculate about its existence elsewhere. For example, can you say with 100% certainty that there is no microbial life on any other planet than our own?



Yaarel said:


> People in our century speculate that aliens might be possible, based on our contemporary worldview mythology.




No, we speculate on the existence of alien life based on our understanding of biology, evolution, and the universe, not mythology.


----------



## Umbran (Nov 25, 2018)

Yaarel said:


> The other apes have been around as long as we have − and all of them failed to make the ‘jump’.




You seem to be missing the point - you can't go from having the brain of a sea cucumber to doing calculus in one fell swoop.  The rate of production of technological species will be dependent on the rate of production of *nearly* technological species.



> The human proves to be unique.




At the moment.  But do remember that to start with, Modern Humans had other tool-using competition.  The Neanderthal or the Denisovans could well have been the ones who made it, instead of us.  It is quite possible that Earth produces several hominid species that fit the bill, but only one survived intact to the present day.

Oh, and here's one for you - the signs of civilization on the surface of a tectonically active planet should last about 3 million years, after which, they will have either been eroded or buried away.  If there were species of dinosaurs that made it up to stone-age tech, we likely would never know.  Speculative, but a point worth making - our window for recognizing when there has been intelligence is large on human terms, but limited in geological ones.


----------



## Yaarel (Nov 25, 2018)

Umbran said:


> You seem to be missing the point - you can't go from having the brain of a sea cucumber to doing calculus in one fell swoop.  The rate of production of technological species will be dependent on the rate of production of *nearly* technological species.
> 
> 
> 
> ...




Chimpanzees, bonobos, and humans all descend from the same ancestor.

Only humans became accidentally intelligent.

The evidence is overwhelming. To become an intelligent species is extremely improbable.


----------



## Shasarak (Nov 25, 2018)

Yaarel said:


> The human proves to be unique.




Are we including Neanderthals and Denisovans as different species to (modern) humans?  I mean are we just looking at survivor bias?


----------



## Yaarel (Nov 25, 2018)

Imaculata said:


> When we talk about aliens, we are talking about "life outside our planet".
> 
> I would not call that fabrication. I would call it speculation.
> 
> ...




Our *understanding* of biology, evolution, and the universe − is our mythology − the paradigms by which we organize, interpret, and experience our universe.

If tomorrow there is a paradigm shift, it can easily be, a consensus emerges saying aliens are strictly impossible.


----------



## Yaarel (Nov 25, 2018)

Shasarak said:


> Are we including Neanderthals and Denisovans as different species to (modern) humans?  I mean are we just looking at survivor bias?




All of these species descend from Australopithecus. Whether taxonomy should classify Australopithecus as human is currently a hot topic. But whatever the future consensus, any intelligent species in this particular branch of species happens to also be part of our own ‘human’ family.


----------



## Dannyalcatraz (Nov 25, 2018)

> If technological communication is possible at all, then it would have already happened.




Non necessarily.  The means required to transmit information that can bridge the gap in space and time may not be able to be received y our current technology.  Imagine, if you will, beaming the celebrations from New Year’s Eve 2018 to one of the Paleolithic societies in Earth’s more isolated regions.

Absent their own version of The Professor making a digital receiver & flat screen tv from coconuts, they simply won’t be able to get the message.


----------



## Yaarel (Nov 26, 2018)

Dannyalcatraz said:


> Non necessarily.  The means required to transmit information that can bridge the gap in space and time may not be able to be received y our current technology.  Imagine, if you will, beaming the celebrations from New Year’s Eve 2018 to one of the Paleolithic societies in Earth’s more isolated regions.
> 
> Absent their own version of The Professor making a digital receiver & flat screen tv from coconuts, they simply won’t be able to get the message.




I am saying this hypothetical alien species must be extremely technologically advanced − even if only a thousand years older than us. This technology probably includes updating their own brain to become superhumanly intelligent, since otherwise their own technology would outmode them and replace them as the intelligent species.

If possible at all, this hypothetical alien species would already have the capability to detect us and know how to communicate with us.


----------



## Dannyalcatraz (Nov 26, 2018)

Yaarel said:


> I am saying this hypothetical alien species must be extremely technologically advanced − even if only a thousand years older than us. This technology probably includes updating their own brain to become superhumanly intelligent, since otherwise their own technology would outmode them and replace them as the intelligent species.
> 
> If possible at all, this hypothetical alien species would already have the capability to detect us and know how to communicate with us.




The problem remains: the methods by which they can communicate with us may not be capable of bridging the gap; the technology that can bridge the gap may not yet be perceiveable by us.

Further, you’re assuming they recognize us as being intelligent enough* worth talking to.  When was the last time someone discussed Proust with a parrot?





* or safe enough.  If they perceive us as a threat, they may take the Greg Bear approach, and simply be quiet in the bandwidths we monitor.


----------



## Aeson (Nov 26, 2018)

*popcorn*


----------



## Yaarel (Nov 26, 2018)

Dannyalcatraz said:


> The problem remains: the methods by which they can communicate with us may not be capable of bridging the gap; the technology that can bridge the gap may not yet be perceiveable by us.
> 
> Further, you’re assuming they recognize us as being intelligent enough* worth talking to.  When was the last time someone discussed Proust with a parrot?
> 
> ...




The hypothetical alien species must be of such technological advancement, the human species cannot be a threat to them. And, they must already know about our existence and deeply understand our form of life. This hypothetical species can communicate with humans at the human level, similarly to how we can communicate at the level of cats and dogs − and parrots.



Your line of debate appears to be: perhaps speed-of-light is an insurmountable obstacle. Thus it is IMPOSSIBLE for the humans species to EVER communicate with aliens EVEN IF they hypothetically existed.

At this point, the debate suggests.

Either there is no such thing as aliens (in agreement with my position), or it is impossible to ever observe evidence for the existence of an alien (in agreement with your position).


----------



## R_Chance (Nov 26, 2018)

Aeson said:


> *popcorn*




That makes two of us. This could go on forever. Barring first contact


----------



## Morrus (Nov 26, 2018)

Yaarel said:


> Chimpanzees, bonobos, and humans all descend from the same ancestor.
> 
> Only humans became accidentally intelligent.
> 
> The evidence is overwhelming. To become an intelligent species is extremely improbable.




It has occurred on 100% of all planets that we know of that contain life. So right now, it’s looking very probable!


----------



## Yaarel (Nov 26, 2018)

Star Trek is an important artwork within the fantasy genre, in the same fantasy genre as Lord of the Rings.

Vulcans and Klingons are Elves and Orcs.

They are imaginary lifeforms who coexist with the human lifeform in fictitious universes.

In our reallife universe, these imaginary intelligent species are impossible. Because if they existed at all they would be many magnitudes more intelligent than humans.



Because of the acceleration of technology, if and when we humans develop the technology to obviate speed-of-light, by that time, we humans too will be many magnitudes more intelligent than we currently are now.


----------



## Aeson (Nov 26, 2018)

R_Chance said:


> That makes two of us. This could go on forever. Barring first contact




I find it all fascinating. I admit I don't have the education some of these guys have. It doesn't stop me from wanting to learn more. This conversation is a learning experience. :-D


----------



## D1Tremere (Nov 26, 2018)

Umbran said:


> As noted earlier, no, it isn't.  Current theory recognizes that we do not know, and does not require it to be finite.  Also, current measures of curvature and expansion suggest it is apt to be infinite, as the major way to have it be finite calls for curvature we do not observe.
> 
> What is finite is the *visible* universe, but that's merely a lightspeed limitation on what we can image with telescopes, not a limit on the space.  Though, as the current expansion goes, we will never see or communicate with anything outside the current visible universe unless FTL travel is involved, for the same lightspeed barrier reasons.




Thank you for the correction. As I said, this isn't my area, and in this case I was definitely wrong.


----------



## D1Tremere (Nov 26, 2018)

Morrus said:


> It has occurred on 100% of all planets that we know of that contain life. So right now, it’s looking very probable!




It has occurred on 100% of the planets that we know of which contain life, but that unfortunately makes for a sample size of 1, which isn't very useful for predicting anything. Also, it has only happened here once that we are aware of, and only in a small window of time. We could be an unstable evolutionary track. 

One thing that makes the conversation more difficult is the complexity of the definition of intelligence. What is often referred to as one thing has become increasingly a matter of multiple constructs. What we usually seem to be talking about is abstract thought, coupled with impulse control and object permanence. Creatures that can recognize themselves as distinct beings, relate a concept in their mind with real world counterparts, and delay gratification based on such internal processes.


----------



## D1Tremere (Nov 26, 2018)

Yaarel said:


> All of these species descend from Australopithecus. Whether taxonomy should classify Australopithecus as human is currently a hot topic. But whatever the future consensus, any intelligent species in this particular branch of species happens to also be part of our own ‘human’ family.




We do not know that all of these species originate from Australopithecus. There are a couple of other known contenders in that mix, and there may be others we do not know about yet, but may discover as we advance archaeology further in central Africa.


----------



## D1Tremere (Nov 26, 2018)

Yaarel said:


> Star Trek is an important artwork within the fantasy genre, in the same fantasy genre as Lord of the Rings.
> 
> Vulcans and Klingons are Elves and Orcs.
> 
> ...




This greatly depends on how you are defining intelligence.


----------



## Eltab (Nov 26, 2018)

Yaarel said:


> Also consider how technology escalates exponentially − on an upwards ‘curve’.
> 
> Even if an intelligent species was merely a thousand years older than us humans, that species would already be many magnitudes more technologically advanced than we are. Nevermind millions of years early than us. Presumably such a hypothetical species would already have overcome any technological challenges for communication and transportation.



Western Civilization, certainly, values invention and technological progress.  Not all other civilizations have.  
Chinese invented gunpowder and the printing press, but never looked at what the limit of those gadgets' use might be.

An alien civilization like _Traveller_'s Vilani, who value stability and shun change, could be perfectly content to stay in their corner of the universe for millennia.  The effect would be the same as if they deliberately camouflaged themselves and hid away.

(I am using Toynbee's definition of 'civilization': a web of cultural values.)


----------



## Dannyalcatraz (Nov 26, 2018)

Yaarel said:


> The hypothetical alien species must be of such technological advancement, the human species cannot be a threat to them.




A recent missionary excursion to a certain island suggests differently.  By analogy, while their SPECIES may be safe from harm from us, by no means might individuals be similarly immune.  Depending on their nature, ethics, risk aversion- and hypothetical exposure to still other sentient species- they may be loathe to contact us until after we cure ourselves of our fascination with instruments of war.



> This hypothetical species can communicate with humans at the human level, similarly to how we can communicate at the level of cats and dogs − and parrots.



So far, most such communication with cats, dogs and parrots has either been one way or relatively shallow.  Not to much discussion of literature or theoretical physics.

Now, imagine if you will, taking the time and effort to make a Transatlantic video call to a random dog and telling it to “Come here, good boy.”  I’m thinking that happens close to never.




> Your line of debate appears to be: perhaps speed-of-light is an insurmountable obstacle. Thus it is IMPOSSIBLE for the humans species to EVER communicate with aliens EVEN IF they hypothetically existed.




No, I’m countering your assertion, “If technological communication is possible at all, then it would have already happened.” (Post #55, this thread.)  Your attempt to reframe my line of debate is completely inaccurate.


In fact, my point has been technological communication over interstellar distances may be possible, but we probably cannot currently access/understand such transmission because we lack the requisite technology.  Why?  Because, AFAIK, most of our theoreticians doubt FTL communication is possible based on what tech we currently have and what we believe we understand.

And the flip side is that communication we CAN currently grasp may not be used by a more advanced species simply because it is insufficient for the task.

Imagine, if you will, teaching someone to code in C++ by sending them messages in smoke signals or semaphores.


----------



## Shasarak (Nov 26, 2018)

Dannyalcatraz said:


> Further, you’re assuming they recognize us as being intelligent enough* worth talking to.  When was the last time someone discussed Proust with a parrot?




Even if we were an equivalent to a parrot, it would be sad to think that we were not interesting enough for them to even try.


----------



## Umbran (Nov 26, 2018)

Yaarel said:


> ‘Methods’ means methodologies. The results are as useful as the methods are. There are conflicting methods that scientists apply to estimating the age of the earth.




If you know of an estimate other than the standard that has some claim to accuracy, then cite it.  Heck, just give us a wikipedia entry.  

Here's the one for the standard measure for the age of the Earth, including discussion of the currently accepted radiometric dating:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Age_of_the_Earth

This vague hinting is not an appropriate approach to a science thread.  Give us some evidence, not unsubstantiated claims.


----------



## Yaarel (Nov 26, 2018)

D1Tremere said:


> We do not know that all of these species originate from Australopithecus. There are a couple of other known contenders in that mix, and there may be others we do not know about yet, but may discover as we advance archaeology further in central Africa.




All humans descend from Australopithecus. Note, there are several species of Genus Australopithecus, and our Genus Homo descends from one of them, via the species Homo habilis.


----------



## practicalm (Nov 26, 2018)

I think there is intelligent life out there but the is a Great Filter that is doing something to make it either harder to communicate or removing civilizations.  David Brin's novels _Earth_ and _Existence_ had some suggestions that alien civilizations do not want the competition.

I think self-replicating probes may show up at Sol sometime and if we are lucky they won't destroy us building more of them.

I agree that FTL is unlikely but that once we get to the point of putting conscience into computer hardware, we can send that instead of meat.  Space and meat is not a healthy combo for the meat.


----------



## Maxperson (Nov 26, 2018)

Yaarel said:


> Also consider how technology escalates exponentially − on an upwards ‘curve’.
> 
> Even if an intelligent species was merely a thousand years older than us humans, that species would already be many magnitudes more technologically advanced than we are. Nevermind millions of years early than us. Presumably such a hypothetical species would already have overcome any technological challenges for communication and transportation.
> *
> ...




The bold is a bit presumptuous.  The universe is mind boggling big.  Even if they were 100,000 years ahead of us and spent every waking moment of that 100,000 years investigating every star in their galaxy, they wouldn't even finish that task in that 100,000 years, let alone every star in every galaxy in the universe, which is what you are claiming can be done in a mere 1000 more years than us.  And that's assuming that we're only 1000 years away from faster than light travel.  And you are assuming that they even want to travel and find new races.


----------



## Umbran (Nov 26, 2018)

Yaarel said:


> Our *understanding* of biology, evolution, and the universe − is our mythology




Um, no.  

Our understanding of biology, evolution, other sciences - these things can be replicated by experiment, in a way that no "mythology" ever can.  We create new, objective events on the basis of our science, so it isn't just a matter of how we organize our understanding.  It is how we impact the universe around it.

You are typing away at a computer.  No "paradigm shift" that says that computer doesn't work is going to happen, because, in the end, the computer still demonstrably works, and we already know how, because we built it.  



> If tomorrow there is a paradigm shift, it can easily be, a consensus emerges saying aliens are strictly impossible.




Since science, as a practice, took hold, our paradigm shifts have all been in areas of new observation - we have paradigm shifts when we can see bigger and smaller things, gain precision and scope.  But, that means that all the stuff we have previously been able to observe, theorize about, and test are still true.  Einstein's relativity reduces to Newtonian mechanics down in the areas that Newton was able to measure in - because Newton was basically correct.  The paradigm shift was about things bigger and faster than we could generally see before.

But the development of life is about things on the scales we already see - life is, in the end, about chemistry and self-organizing systems.


----------



## Maxperson (Nov 26, 2018)

Yaarel said:


> Especially if the hypothetical species is over a billion years older − with its own exponentially accelerating technology!




You are also assuming that technology doesn't have a cap.


----------



## Maxperson (Nov 26, 2018)

Dannyalcatraz said:


> So far, most such communication with cats, dogs and parrots has either been one way or relatively shallow.  Not to much discussion of literature or theoretical physics.
> 
> Now, imagine if you will, taking the time and effort to make a Transatlantic video call to a random dog and telling it to “Come here, good boy.”  I’m thinking that happens close to never.




He's also assuming that any given alien race are dog people and would want to try to talk to the dog they are passing, or that they don't have a Prime Directive, or...   

Just because they might be capable of talking to us, doesn't mean that they will even make the effort.


----------



## TheZigZagist (Nov 26, 2018)

Jhaelen said:


> Clearly, the question is already wrong. There's no "we". I'm the only real being in existence. Everything else is just fabrications of my mind.




A fellow solipsist I see. How ironic. lol


----------



## Dannyalcatraz (Nov 26, 2018)

TheZigZagist said:


> A fellow solipsist...




If true, both must be wrong!


----------



## TheZigZagist (Nov 26, 2018)

I rather like the analogy of examining a teaspoon of ocean water to conclude whether or not life exists in an ocean. Pair that with our linear experience of the flow of time and it gets even dicier. Has life existed elsewhere? Does it now? Will it ever? Sentience is also a factor that evolution (on this planet at least) rarely sources forth, and it's benefit to an ecosystem is argueably still very much in question.


----------



## TheZigZagist (Nov 26, 2018)

Dannyalcatraz said:


> If true, both must be wrong!




Um, that's why it's ironic. ‍


----------



## Shasarak (Nov 26, 2018)

Maxperson said:


> The bold is a bit presumptuous.  The universe is mind boggling big.  Even if they were 100,000 years ahead of us and spent every waking moment of that 100,000 years investigating every star in their galaxy, they wouldn't even finish that task in that 100,000 years, let alone every star in every galaxy in the universe, which is what you are claiming can be done in a mere 1000 more years than us.  And that's assuming that we're only 1000 years away from faster than light travel.  And you are assuming that they even want to travel and find new races.




I saw an interesting statistic that it would only take around 1 million years for a self replicating space ship with an average travel speed of 0.1 c to spread from one side of the Milky Way to the other.

With the galactic time frame you dont even need to have FTL travel.


----------



## D1Tremere (Nov 26, 2018)

Yaarel said:


> All humans descend from Australopithecus. Note, there are several species of Genus Australopithecus, and our Genus Homo descends from one of them, via the species Homo habilis.




It isn't as straight forward as that unfortunately. We are not even sure h. habilis should be considered the first homo in reality.

"Opinions differ as to whether the species A. aethiopicus, A. boisei, and A. robustus should be included within the genus Australopithecus, and no current consensus exists as to whether they should be placed in a distinct genus, Paranthropus, which is suggested to have developed from the ancestral Australopithecus line."

Not to mention the Ardipithecus Genus. The debates between lumpers and splitters will never end.  And again, that may be upended with new discoveries due to the lack of deep archaeological work in central Africa for so long. We have always understood Homo evolution from the perspective of the east of the lake, but that may well be because the interior has been so difficult to get good archaeology from.


----------



## Hussar (Nov 26, 2018)

I think there's another issue that people tend to forget.  At least, it hasn't really been brought up.  

Ok, let's posit another intelligent race.  Let's also posit that it's close enough to our neck of the galaxy that contact would actually be feasible.  Sorry, even if they have some sort of FTL communication system, we don't, so, we're limited to light speed here.  And, so far, we've been transmitting for less than a hundred years.  The odds that a technological species capable of talking to us, also being near enough to us spatially and ALSO concurrent to our time frame is unbelievably small.  If we're off by even a couple of hundred thousand years, an mere eyeblink of time when we're talking about the millions or billions of years available, we won't ever meet.

To me, this is the answer to Fermi's paradox.  It's not so much that we never see aliens, it's that the odds of an intelligent, technologically advanced species being in our neighbourhood, RIGHT NOW, are so vanishingly small that of course we're not seeing anything.  

So long as the Speed of Light holds up, there will be no alien visitations.  Million year projects are cool for SF and all, but, again, the odds of a species being able to see that far ahead are virtually impossible.  Heck, we're bad enough at looking ten years down the line.  It's why things like terraforming Mars will continue to be a pipe dream.  There's just no way that our society will ever commit to a project that will take centuries to complete.


----------



## Maxperson (Nov 26, 2018)

Shasarak said:


> I saw an interesting statistic that it would only take around 1 million years for a self replicating space ship with an average travel speed of 0.1 c to spread from one side of the Milky Way to the other.
> 
> With the galactic time frame you dont even need to have FTL travel.




The galaxy is around 200,000 light years from end to end.  At 0.1 it would take 2 million years just to cross the galaxy, let alone visit every planet in the entire place.


----------



## Ratskinner (Nov 26, 2018)

Umbran said:


> People say that, but I'm not sure it has a good basis.  If it has a physical form, and can master technology of the form that can cross interstellar distances, that implies a vast array of experiences similar to our own.  Shared experiences are the basis for communication.




I'll go you one better. I actually don't think the hominid-animal or "rubber forehead" aliens are all that unrealistic (at least in a broad sense of vaguely humanoid). (Although I would expect to see some other forms as well.)

I mean, yes, there are a lot of evolutionary steps that get from chemically active hotspring slime to our humanoid lifeform...but! Each of those steps broke the way it did for good reasons (even if we don't know or understand them all), and I don't see any reason to suspect that those reasons wouldn't hold on another world similar enough to earth to produce aliens we would expect to be able to engage in technological shenanigans like ours.

OTOH, barring something weird like a precursor species seeding worlds with early human ancestors...the idea that any of these two species could mate and produce hybrids just flies in the face of reason and biology. (Sorry Behlanna, Spock, Jothi, and heaven knows who else.)


----------



## Yaarel (Nov 26, 2018)

I hope humans today understand how disruptive technological acceleration is.

It is pointless to use the current technology that we are familiar with today, to talk about hypothetical alien species that can be thousands, millions, or billions of years more advanced than us.

Many scientists (including the prominent Kurzweil at MIT) predict that a home computer will be about as intelligent as a human in roughly year 2025. (Just seven years away.) Computers that are more intelligent than us, will be creating their own computers, whose technology we are literally not intelligent enough to be able to understand, in roughly year 2045. The equivalent of a home computer is expected to be more intelligent than the entire human species put together. We humans will either artificially ‘upgrade’ our own brains via implants or genetic engineering, or else be left behind − uncomprehending and noncontributing to the ongoing discourse.

This curve of technological acceleration relates to Moores Law but extends to other technologies as well. The current technologies, including the processing power of supercomputers, are still on track and continue to plot out according this predictive curve.



More than technology being more powerful, the intelligent species oneself will be vastly, vastly, more intelligent.

Unless, we humans are the first.


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## Ratskinner (Nov 26, 2018)

Yaarel said:


> The other apes have been around as long as we have − and all of them failed to make the ‘jump’.
> 
> The human proves to be unique.




While humans are unique as a matter of observation, that doesn't prove that we are _necessarily_ unique in this sense. That's one of the problems with sample of one. What we do know is that it seems relatively common on Earth for other species to bump up against whatever it is that the 'jump' is jumping over. (I suspect it is related to language, given things like how well FOXP2 mutations of modern humans were preserved against the neanderthal and denisovan introgressions.)

However, I suspect that there is definitely a "first in" effect here. If several already-diverse primates on Earth made "the jump" in a relatively short timeframe....one of them would make the developments that gives them the edge on their competitors. And soon, there would be only one. (I'm just imagining how medieval European explorers and merchants would have reacted to spear-chucking chimps, orangutans, or phanatons.)


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## Yaarel (Nov 26, 2018)

Ratskinner said:


> While humans are unique as a matter of observation, that doesn't prove that we are _necessarily_ unique in this sense. That's one of the problems with sample of one. What we do know is that it seems relatively common on Earth for other species to bump up against whatever it is that the 'jump' is jumping over. (I suspect it is related to language, given things like how well FOXP2 mutations of modern humans were preserved against the neanderthal and denisovan introgressions.)
> 
> However, I suspect that there is definitely a "first in" effect here. If several already-diverse primates on Earth made "the jump" in a relatively short timeframe....one of them would make the developments that gives them the edge on their competitors. And soon, there would be only one. (I'm just imagining how medieval European explorers and merchants would have reacted to spear-chucking chimps, orangutans, or phanatons.)




At the same time. The evidence of only ONE intelligent species on planet earth − when there are roughly 8 million species. Suggests the odds of an intelligent species on a planet is apparently, 1 in 8 million. Yes we would like other planets for comparison, but evidently intelligent species are extremely unlikely.



Regarding the ‘jump’ to become an intelligent species, it seems to be all about the capacity of language, where linguistic constructs can relativize the ‘meaning’ of biological instincts, thus override biological instincts. (Heh, of course, the capacity of language itself is a biological instinct, albeit an especially potent one that can override other instincts.)



On the other hand, I agree with the ‘first in’ effect here. Where humans entering the intelligent species ‘niche’ might prevent other species from entering it.

But that too can also have cosmological implications. It may be, we humans are the first intelligent species in this universe. Otherwise, an other extraterrestrial species before us may have already arrived and edged us apes out before we even evolved into humans.


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## Shasarak (Nov 26, 2018)

Maxperson said:


> The galaxy is around 200,000 light years from end to end.  At 0.1 it would take 2 million years just to cross the galaxy, let alone visit every planet in the entire place.




Sure, lets use your figure.  So the Milky Way is around 13 billion years old and at 0.1c it takes 2 million years to spread across it which gives aliens (or at least their machines) plenty of time to come here.



Hussar said:


> Ok, let's posit another intelligent race.  Let's also posit that it's close enough to our neck of the galaxy that contact would actually be feasible.  Sorry, even if they have some sort of FTL communication system, we don't, so, we're limited to light speed here.  And, so far, we've been transmitting for less than a hundred years.  The odds that a technological species capable of talking to us, also being near enough to us spatially and ALSO concurrent to our time frame is unbelievably small.  If we're off by even a couple of hundred thousand years, an mere eyeblink of time when we're talking about the millions or billions of years available, we won't ever meet.
> 
> To me, this is the answer to Fermi's paradox.  It's not so much that we never see aliens, it's that the odds of an intelligent, technologically advanced species being in our neighbourhood, RIGHT NOW, are so vanishingly small that of course we're not seeing anything.




Well that is the thing, we would not have to transmit (or travel) light years to different solar systems.  There should be aliens here right now because they have had enough time.



> So long as the Speed of Light holds up, there will be no alien visitations.  Million year projects are cool for SF and all, but, again, the odds of a species being able to see that far ahead are virtually impossible.  Heck, we're bad enough at looking ten years down the line.  It's why things like terraforming Mars will continue to be a pipe dream.  There's just no way that our society will ever commit to a project that will take centuries to complete.




I would not agree with that.  There are plenty of mega projects around the world that took more then 10 years to build like the Pyramid and the Great Wall.  Some estimates put the Great Wall at 200 years.    If thats a bit too fantasy for you then we can go Sci-Fi with the Large Hadron Collider which took 10 years to build and the International Space Station has just been finished recently (also 10 years)

If we just stick to Space exploration the Voyager 1 satellite is 41 years old now and left the solar system about 6 years ago.  Imagine if we did the same thing with a 3d printer on board that could build more satellites as it goes.  I dont know that the scientists that designed Voyager imagined that they could do that but it does not seem impossible to do now.


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## Dannyalcatraz (Nov 26, 2018)

> Imagine if we did the same thing with a 3d printer on board that could build more satellites as it goes.




...if it had enough raw materials to do so, of course.


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## Maxperson (Nov 26, 2018)

Shasarak said:


> Sure, lets use your figure.  So the Milky Way is around 13 billion years old and at 0.1c it takes 2 million years to spread across it which gives aliens (or at least their machines) plenty of time to come here.




And?  You're assuming that 1) they have been around for more than 2 million years, 2) they have interest in exploring, 3) that they would explore in the manner you suggest, 4) that they would bother to stop and try to communicate with us, 5) that a race that advanced couldn't keep their visits a secret from us, 6-a whole lot) other reasons why they wouldn't have stopped here or we wouldn't know about it.  Intelligent alien life would probably have alien thought processes, so what we might do isn't necessarily what they would do.


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## Dannyalcatraz (Nov 26, 2018)

Ratskinner said:


> However, I suspect that there is definitely a "first in" effect here. If several already-diverse primates on Earth made "the jump" in a relatively short timeframe....one of them would make the developments that gives them the edge on their competitors. And soon, there would be only one. (I'm just imagining how medieval European explorers and merchants would have reacted to spear-chucking chimps, orangutans, or phanatons.)



Uh-oh...
*BONOBOS WITH CROSSBOWS!!!**







* RPG, copyright me, game due in Fall 2019.  Expansions_ MACAQUE ATTACKS_, _BABOON DRAGOONS_ and _MASTERS OF FLUNG-POO_, with _GORILLAS IN MANILA_ AP in Spring 2020**


** not a chance in Hades.


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## Imaculata (Nov 26, 2018)

We basically have a sample size of 1. It is indeed like taking a spoon full of water from the ocean, finding life, and then concluding that there for the rest of the ocean must not have any life in it. Only the ocean in this example is far bigger than we could ever comprehend. In my opinion, this actually makes it likely that the universe is full of life. But the distances are so vast that we may never make contact with one another.


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## Hussar (Nov 26, 2018)

Shasarak said:


> Sure, lets use your figure.  So the Milky Way is around 13 billion years old and at 0.1c it takes 2 million years to spread across it which gives aliens (or at least their machines) plenty of time to come here.
> 
> 
> 
> ...




The Great Wall was built in fits and starts over centuries, from local walls that were joined up later on down the line.  But, even at 200 years, so what?  You're talking about a million years.  Again, it's an eyeblink.  And the only reason the Great Wall was continuously built was because of the outside threats to China.  AND, even after a relatively short span of time, they saw the effects of having the Wall.  You really think that human society will continuously expend the resources necessary to terraform, say, Mars, for centuries?  Not happening.  There's just no way that any society is going to expend that level of resources for something that will have no benefit for centuries.  

Even something like Von Neumann self replicating machines don't work.  They run up against Newton.  You cannot have perfect replication.  There will always be breakdowns.  And, once you go into deep time - such as a million years, the machines will simply not be able to replicate themselves fast enough to overcome failures.  Heck, some species can't do it and they have a LOT easier time than trying to travel interstellar distances through all sorts of radiation, and whatnot.  

Sorry, but, between Newton and Einstein, interstellar travel is pretty much off the board.  You're talking FAR too many resources being allocated for virtually no gain.


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## Morrus (Nov 26, 2018)

D1Tremere said:


> It has occurred on 100% of the planets that we know of which contain life, but that unfortunately makes for a sample size of 1, which isn't very useful for predicting anything.




That was the joke, yeah.


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## Morrus (Nov 26, 2018)

Shasarak said:


> I saw an interesting statistic that it would only take around 1 million years for a self replicating space ship with an average travel speed of 0.1 c to spread from one side of the Milky Way to the other.
> 
> With the galactic time frame you dont even need to have FTL travel.




It's a common one. Assumes Von Neumann probes that move at 10% of light speed, and extract resources and replicate themselves on each planet, spreading like a virus across the galaxy. Most recent models put it at about 10M years, though.


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## Maxperson (Nov 26, 2018)

Hussar said:


> The Great Wall was built in fits and starts over centuries, from local walls that were joined up later on down the line.  But, even at 200 years, so what?  You're talking about a million years.  Again, it's an eyeblink.  And the only reason the Great Wall was continuously built was because of the outside threats to China.  AND, even after a relatively short span of time, they saw the effects of having the Wall.  You really think that human society will continuously expend the resources necessary to terraform, say, Mars, for centuries?  Not happening.  There's just no way that any society is going to expend that level of resources for something that will have no benefit for centuries.




Perhaps no earth society is going to expend that level of resources.  Are you assuming aliens will be and/or act like humans for some reason?



> Even something like Von Neumann self replicating machines don't work.  They run up against Newton.  You cannot have perfect replication.  There will always be breakdowns.  And, once you go into deep time - such as a million years, the machines will simply not be able to replicate themselves fast enough to overcome failures.  Heck, some species can't do it and they have a LOT easier time than trying to travel interstellar distances through all sorts of radiation, and whatnot.




At our current level of technology you cannot have perfect replication.  I see no good reason why a sufficiently advanced civilization would be forced to use our level of replication, though.



> Sorry, but, between Newton and Einstein, interstellar travel is pretty much off the board.  You're talking FAR too many resources being allocated for virtually no gain.




Unless of course there are things we don't know about, which there are.  Lots of them.  I don't know why you take this position based off of our highly limited understanding of the universe.  Heck, we even know our understanding is highly limited.


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## Umbran (Nov 26, 2018)

Shasarak said:


> I saw an interesting statistic that it would only take around 1 million years for a self replicating space ship with an average travel speed of 0.1 c to spread from one side of the Milky Way to the other.




That's not a "statisctic".  It is an estimate. And it pretty much assumes no time is spent in the self-replicating.  The Milky Way is about 105,000 light years across.  So, it takes a million years to cross it at 0.1c, if traveling in a straight line, non-stop.  If you have to zig and sage to reach stars with reasonable resources, and take time to build new probes, it would take longer.

Note that this assumes the existence of a *self-replicating* machine, that can fly across interstellar distances.  And, that machine self-replicates with no notable change, *for a million years*.  

With respect, that's not a great assumption.  Over those timescales, any self-replicating system will be subject to selective forces - leading to evolution or extinction.


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## Maxperson (Nov 26, 2018)

Umbran said:


> That's not a "statisctic".  It is an estimate. And it pretty much assumes no time is spent in the self-replicating.  The Milky Way is about 105,000 light years across.  So, it takes a million years to cross it at 0.1c, if traveling in a straight line, non-stop.  If you have to zig and sage to reach stars with reasonable resources, and take time to build new probes, it would take longer.
> 
> Note that this assumes the existence of a *self-replicating* machine, that can fly across interstellar distances.  And, that machine self-replicates with no notable change, *for a million years*.
> 
> With respect, that's not a great assumption.  Over those timescales, any self-replicating system will be subject to selective forces - leading to evolution or extinction.




The new estimates are that is is larger than that.

https://www.nbcnews.com/mach/science/milky-way-galaxy-may-be-much-bigger-we-thought-ncna876966


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## Umbran (Nov 26, 2018)

Imaculata said:


> We basically have a sample size of 1. It is indeed like taking a spoon full of water from the ocean, finding life, and then concluding that there for the rest of the ocean must not have any life in it.




Yes it is.  Now, consider, if you took a spoonful of water from the ocean, and found life in it - what are the chances that you *just happened* to take the *only* spoonful with life in it?  How many spoonfuls are there?  And you got the *only one*?  That's extremely unlikely, statistically.  

Over the course of human discovery, one common thread has been that Earth isn't particularly special.  We aren't the center of the Universe, or the Solar System.  Ours isn't a particularly uncommon type of star.  The galaxy has a bazillion of them.  And the Universe looks pretty much the same in every direction, with a bazillion more galaxies each with its bazillion stars.  We are also not particularly separate from other animals - with other species on the planet sharing 90% and more of our DNA.  We have a couple of small differences that lead to stunning differences in behaviors, is all.  We used to think we were special, even anointed, but it turns out... not.

So, when we pose the question of whether we are special in the Universe, which way should we lean?


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## Caliburn101 (Nov 26, 2018)

The Drake Equation shows increasing likelihood of life elsewhere due to the unpredicted number of planets popping up wherever they look now.

Even if you say the equation is out by 99.99%, that is still many civilisations in the Universe, never mind life.

If you believe we are alone based on the evidence, then you are relying on a 'representative sample' of the universe so small (i.e. that which humanity has seen so far) you probably couldn't express it as a sensible decimal fraction anyone could comprehend as it would be so small.

That doesn't even take into account the vanishingly small window of time in which we have been looking either...

Even if you cannot give the slightest credence to the Drake Equation, you cannot deny the vastness of the universe, or that human experience can in any way reliably estimate what is out there, so applying the precautionary principle it would be illogical to assume there is no life anywhere else.

You can guess there isn't, but you cannot on balance support a 'there isn't any' conclusion with the application of logic.


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## Umbran (Nov 26, 2018)

Yaarel said:


> At the same time. The evidence of only ONE intelligent species on planet earth − when there are roughly 8 million species. Suggests the odds of an intelligent species on a planet is apparently, 1 in 8 million. Yes we would like other planets for comparison, but evidently intelligent species are extremely unlikely.
> ...
> On the other hand, I agree with the ‘first in’ effect here. Where humans entering the intelligent species ‘niche’ might prevent other species from entering it.




This is an important element - the presence of one such species likely suppresses others from developing.  Historically, when tool-using humans enter an area, extinctions of larger fauna follows.  So, the probability of producing one intelligent species could be high, but the probability of producing a second while the first is around may be very low.  This makes the 1-in-8-million to be a bit simplistic.  




> (Heh, of course, the capacity of language itself is a biological instinct, albeit an especially potent one that can override other instincts.)




You are misusing the term "instinct".  An instinct is a fixed behavior that does not need to be learned.  Humans are born with the capacity to use language, but actual language use is a learned behavior.  Some of our language capacity is developmental - exposure to language impacts how our brains grow and develop early in life, and a human who is not so exposed to language until after the brain is mostly developed seems to have a hard time picking up the trick.  We have blessedly few examples of this, but a few children growing up in isolation have displayed the problem.




> Otherwise, an other extraterrestrial species before us may have already arrived and edged us apes out before we even evolved into humans.




If FTL is denied us by physics, this is unlikely, as moving viable colony-sized groups across interstellar distances may not be tractable for any species.


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## Doctor Futurity (Nov 26, 2018)

This poll is missing the scientific answer #3 which is that "We're still looking, and I'd hate to say yes without direct and compelling evidence, and I'd hate to say no when it's hard to prove a negative like this."

But by the mere fact that we are on a world teeming with life, and the poll does not ask "are we the only sentient life in the universe," I'd have to vote for aliens being out there. They just may not be sentient, technological aliens.


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## Umbran (Nov 26, 2018)

Maxperson said:


> The new estimates are that is is larger than that.




Yes and no.  Stars with chemical composition similar to those in the rest of the galactic plane are found at great distances, but there's some question as to their density.  It may be that there are some outliers, but the main disk could still be 100 - 150 thousand light years.

But, either way, that only makes the job of getting across the galaxy harder.  Folks often talk as if self-replicating machines are somehow static, never-changing entities, as if they can last 10,000 years without alteration, and would replicate perfectly, and that's a naive position to take.  It would be more reasonable to consider such a probe to be a living thing, with an electro-mechanical (or whatever) basis rather than a biological one.


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## Doctor Futurity (Nov 26, 2018)

Umbran said:


> So, when we pose the question of whether we are special in the Universe, which way should we lean?




Well, it's worth noting that Earth had meaningful life on it for 500 million years before it had sentient life that could ask this sort of question (and I believe it took 3 billion years to get to that point in total!) So any consideration of life on other planets has from the one model at hand the following points to consider:

1. Life on a world like ours can easily take 500 million years to go from early bacteria to sentient civilization.
2. We had the potential for sentience only within the last 2.5 million years, basic sapient behavior with language within the last 200,000 years or so, and the ability to conduct civilization within the last 10-15 thousand years; and that only reached fruition in a manner allowing us to study the sky meaningfully for other signs of life within the last century. 
3. We can't know whether we are special in the universe, but we can state that we are the only representative sample we have to study. As such, it's not unreasonable to assume that the length of time it took life on Earth and eventual sentient civilization to develop wouldn't take at least as long on other planets of the same composition/placement in the Goldilocks zone of other star systems. 
4. We can say with certainty that assuming the circumstances are right, and the potential for life is realized, it will happen at different times in different systems. The question then becomes: how many of these circumstances happened long before us, and how many long after us, or around the same time? How many are happening right now, but are millions or billions of light years away, impossible for us to detect or interact with? 

I think the answer to whether we are special or not boils down, at least for now, to the notion that we can consider ourselves special in the sense that we are a "sample of one," and the only sample we have unless something interesting rears its head in the frozen oceans of Enceladus or elsewhere. But we are by all probabilities not "special" in the sense that there is a vanishinghly small likelihood that our circumstances have not repeated to some degree elsewhere in the universe, probably many times.....but unfortunately not nearby, or necessarily in the same timeframe we have developed.


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## Umbran (Nov 26, 2018)

Ratskinner said:


> OTOH, barring something weird like a precursor species seeding worlds with early human ancestors...the idea that any of these two species could mate and produce hybrids just flies in the face of reason and biology. (Sorry Behlanna, Spock, Jothi, and heaven knows who else.)




Yes.  Which is why Trek introduced the Progenitors into its canon.  B'elanna and Spock are covered.


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## Ryujin (Nov 26, 2018)

Doctor Futurity said:


> This poll is missing the scientific answer #3 which is that "We're still looking, and I'd hate to say yes without direct and compelling evidence, and I'd hate to say no when it's hard to prove a negative like this."
> 
> But by the mere fact that we are on a world teeming with life, and the poll does not ask "are we the only sentient life in the universe," I'd have to vote for aliens being out there. They just may not be sentient, technological aliens.




Sentience may, in fact, turn out to be a disease that is its own cure.


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## Morrus (Nov 26, 2018)

Maxperson said:


> The galaxy is around 200,000 light years from end to end.  At 0.1 it would take 2 million years just to cross the galaxy, let alone visit every planet in the entire place.




100,000 light years. 

And if it took a million years to cross the sister, if you’re radiating out like a virus in every direction at that speed (assuming no stops) it takes only half that to cover the galaxy completely, on average, assuming you start from near the centre. 

The current estimates are closer to 10M, though, as it assumed that each probe takes a long time to acquire local resources and replicate itself multiple times over.


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## Dannyalcatraz (Nov 26, 2018)

> This is an important element - the presence of one such species likely suppresses others from developing. Historically, when tool-using humans enter an area, extinctions of larger fauna follows. So, the probability of producing one intelligent species could be high, but the probability of producing a second while the first is around may be very low. This makes the 1-in-8-million to be a bit simplistic.




Technically, aren’t Neanderthals considered a separate species from us?  If so, our planed was home for 2 sentient species simultaneously and in close proximity at least once, briefly, in the past.


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## Umbran (Nov 26, 2018)

Dannyalcatraz said:


> Technically, aren’t Neanderthals considered a separate species from us?




Yes.  Neanderthals are one of those examples that tell you that the definition of "species" isn't too simple.  In one way, yes, different species - loads of clearly evident different anatomical traits.  In another sense there was some interbreeding with early modern humans - it is expected that if you aren't of African stock, 5% or so of your DNA is either Neanderthal or Densiovan.



> If so, our planed was home for 2 sentient species simultaneously and in close proximity at least once, briefly, in the past.




And by "briefly" we are talking from 200,000 to 350,000 years or so that Neanderthals and _Homo sapiens_ overlapped on the Earth.  We might also include the Denisovans and _Homo floresiensis_, which might bring the number up to 4.  We co-existed with other intelligent species for something like 20 times longer than we have been civilized.


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## Celebrim (Nov 26, 2018)

@Morrus;The observable universe is of finite size.  The observable universe is also of finite age, and thus finite size is the reasonable estimation of the size of the universe from known facts.   It's possible that there exists an unobservable universe but anything outside our light cone might as well not be in this universe, so lets assume the universe is finite.  We can estimate the number of atoms, galaxies, planets and so forth in the universe.   We come up with very large numbers, so 10 to the 60th power or 80th power or whatever.  The exact number doesn't matter for the next reason.

However, these seemingly large cosmological numbers for the breadth of time and space are trivial compared to the complexity of the information contained in the most primitive life forms we are aware of.  Indeed, they are trivial compared to simplified DNA structures which we know are insufficient to support life.   For example, the number of possible combinations of mitochondrial DNA in a typical vertebrate species is something on the scale of 10 to the 1000th power.   Worse, the number of combinations that fold into any sort of protein, much less ones helpful for promoting homeostasis, energy consumption, and all the other things necessary for life to function is known to be very much smaller than the scale of possible combinations.  Add to that the complexity of the surrounding hardware necessary to process that information, and it becomes incredibly unlikely that life will spontaneously generate from non-life.  It is so incredibly unlikely that there is no reason to believe that it has happened more than once in the universe, and at the least there is no reason to believe that it has happened so often that any two planets in the universe support life at the same time.  The frequency of spontaneous generation is probably so low, that it is lower than average life span of a living world before it gets wiped out by some cosmological catastrophe.   Barring the discovery of some previously unknown self-organizing principle that causes life to appear at rates faster than random chance, we are almost certainly alone - the first technologically advanced species in the history of the universe.   It's likely that not only is nothing else out there that can hear us, but that every other world is sterile.

There are various objections you can make to this line of argument, but they all prove to be very weak upon inspection.   The most common to come up is to say that I'm only speaking of "life as we know it".   But the more we know about how life works, and the more we realize life is actually nothing more than very complex machinery that processes information, the fewer alternative possibilities for arranging life exist.  If you start looking at variant chemistries that might support life at other temperatures and pressures, they all turn out to have immense problems for sustaining life compared to the carbon/water based sort we do know about.   It's not at all clear that any other sort of life can evolve in this universe, and if it could it's equally clear that the possibility of it evolving is even lower than the sort we do know about.  Hence, "life as we know it" likely to be the only sort that exists.


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## Dannyalcatraz (Nov 26, 2018)

Umbran said:


> Yes.  Neanderthals are one of those examples that tell you that the definition of "species" isn't too simple.  In one way, yes, different species - loads of clearly evident different anatomical traits.  In another sense there was some interbreeding with early modern humans - it is expected that if you aren't of African stock, 5% or so of your DNA is either Neanderthal or Densiovan.
> 
> 
> 
> And by "briefly" we are talking from 200,000 to 350,000 years or so that Neanderthals and _Homo sapiens_ overlapped on the Earth.  We might also include the Denisovans and _Homo floresiensis_, which might bring the number up to 4.  We co-existed with other intelligent species for something like 20 times longer than we have been civilized.




Yep.  And if past is prologue, I might just get my Bonobos with crossbows. 

Or, more seriously, if we can have multiple sentient species on a planet simultaneously, the question of the odds of sentient life being present elsewhere/elsewhen in the universe gets a new wrinkle.


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## Eltab (Nov 26, 2018)

If you can build a probe that takes 40 years to get to Alpha Centauri and still successfully operate a 3-D printer programmed to make a copy of the probe, you probably also had an asteroid-based industrial capacity.  That is where in the system to tell the probe to stop moving and turn on the printer.  It probably loses a lot of time finding the needed resources before it can build its first copy.

But nothing says it cannot stay put and build more copies, launch them in different directions, thereby saving time in the long run.


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## Umbran (Nov 26, 2018)

Dannyalcatraz said:


> Or, more seriously, if we can have multiple sentient species on a planet simultaneously, the question of the odds of sentient life being present elsewhere/elsewhen in the universe gets a new wrinkle.




There's also the question of uplift (in the David Brin sense).  We are starting to get into genetic editing.  That gives us the option of helping other species over the hump.  Gorillas don't use language in the wild, but can be taught basic sign language and express themselves.  How much would it take to bring a gorilla or chimpanzee or bonobo to full language use?


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## Yaarel (Nov 26, 2018)

Umbran said:


> This is an important element - the presence of one such species likely suppresses others from developing.  Historically, when tool-using humans enter an area, extinctions of larger fauna follows.  So, the probability of producing one intelligent species could be high, but the probability of producing a second while the first is around may be very low.  This makes the 1-in-8-million to be a bit simplistic.
> 
> 
> 
> ...




I meant instinct when saying instinct. It seems to me, our ‘unconscious’ continues to operate by means of biologically preprogrammed instincts. The capacity to learn a language is an instinct and makes language possible in the first place. The way you describe it − the difficulty of learning a language if without exposure while young − would suggest an example of imprinting.


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## Yaarel (Nov 26, 2018)

Umbran said:


> If FTL is denied us by physics, this is unlikely, as moving viable colony-sized groups across interstellar distances may not be tractable for any species.




Actually, to travel *faster* than the speed of light seems theoretically possible. Some scientists suggest ‘tunneling’ thru the lightspeed barrier. There have been some quantum experiments along these lines, but nothing promising yet.

I suspect, at some point in the future, humans will figure out how to do this.


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## Dannyalcatraz (Nov 26, 2018)

Umbran said:


> There's also the question of uplift (in the David Brin sense).  We are starting to get into genetic editing.  That gives us the option of helping other species over the hump.  Gorillas don't use language in the wild, but can be taught basic sign language and express themselves.  How much would it take to bring a gorilla or chimpanzee or bonobo to full language use?



(Love me some Brin.)

Even with uplifting, they may still need signing and written/typed communications if their physiology remains incapable of producing speech.  

I worry what the Bonobos will post in online forums, if things get to that point.

Also, M:tG players will have to stop using the phrase “monkeys flinging cards” to describe playing mechanically simple decks as “speciesist”.


----------



## Hussar (Nov 27, 2018)

Maxperson said:


> Perhaps no earth society is going to expend that level of resources.  Are you assuming aliens will be and/or act like humans for some reason?




Well, math is still math.  The notion that an alien society will expend massive resources for no real gain isn't really a compelling argument.[/quote]



> At our current level of technology you cannot have perfect replication.  I see no good reason why a sufficiently advanced civilization would be forced to use our level of replication, though.




Newton still applies.  That whole pesky third law where entropy increases over time.  It's not a technological issue, it's an issue with the universe.  Unless our basic underpinnings of understanding of the universe are wrong, you cannot ever have perfect replication.



> Unless of course there are things we don't know about, which there are.  Lots of them.  I don't know why you take this position based off of our highly limited understanding of the universe.  Heck, we even know our understanding is highly limited.




Again, unless our basic understanding of the universe is totally wrong, then, sorry, nope, not going to happen.  Look, I'd love to be wrong.  But, again, we're slapping up against actual science here.


----------



## Mortus (Nov 27, 2018)

I recently read an article on bbc.com about the origin of life. Basically, there are five main theories, but each requires that they be the first (i.e metabolism, reproduction, DNA/RNA, etc.). This bolstered my belief that we are alone. It is possible that the origin of life here on Earth was a one-off event. We've been looking for decades and we haven't found one shred of proof. If we crack the mystery of origin of life that should help shed more light on this big question.


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## Shasarak (Nov 27, 2018)

Hussar said:


> The Great Wall was built in fits and starts over centuries, from local walls that were joined up later on down the line.  But, even at 200 years, so what?  You're talking about a million years.  Again, it's an eyeblink.  And the only reason the Great Wall was continuously built was because of the outside threats to China.  AND, even after a relatively short span of time, they saw the effects of having the Wall.  You really think that human society will continuously expend the resources necessary to terraform, say, Mars, for centuries?  Not happening.  There's just no way that any society is going to expend that level of resources for something that will have no benefit for centuries.




Luckily we can rely on the sunk cost fallacy to work in our advantage in this case.  Once we get started then the emphasis is on continuing.  For example if you have settlers there who have children then you have a self replicating terraforming system.



> Even something like Von Neumann self replicating machines don't work.  They run up against Newton.  You cannot have perfect replication.  There will always be breakdowns.  And, once you go into deep time - such as a million years, the machines will simply not be able to replicate themselves fast enough to overcome failures.  Heck, some species can't do it and they have a LOT easier time than trying to travel interstellar distances through all sorts of radiation, and whatnot.




If replication is impossible then how did life manage to get by until now?  How do rabbits breed like rabbits if they can not replicate themselves fast enough to overcome failures?  I dont really understand the point you are trying to make.



> Sorry, but, between Newton and Einstein, interstellar travel is pretty much off the board.  You're talking FAR too many resources being allocated for virtually no gain.




Once you start being able to harvest the whole resources of the solar system and then the resources of the next system then you dont have a scarcity of resources.


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## Maxperson (Nov 27, 2018)

Doctor Futurity said:


> Well, it's worth noting that Earth had meaningful life on it for 500 million years before it had sentient life that could ask this sort of question (and I believe it took 3 billion years to get to that point in total!) So any consideration of life on other planets has from the one model at hand the following points to consider:




You don't know that, though.  You have no idea if a sentient dinosaur clan evolved and was destroyed by a volcano or meteor strike.  Sentience may well have appeared and vanished dozens of times before it finally took off.



> 3. We can't know whether we are special in the universe, but we can state that we are the only representative sample we have to study. As such, it's not unreasonable to assume that the length of time it took life on Earth and eventual sentient civilization to develop wouldn't take at least as long on other planets of the same composition/placement in the Goldilocks zone of other star systems.




Assuming we know how long it takes with any certainty, and we don't.  We can only assume we are the first and look at how long it took.  You also had multiple resents in evolution with the great extinction events.  The time we assume it took for sentience to appear might have been greatly reduced had those events not happened.  


I think the answer to whether we are special or not boils down, at least for now, to the notion that we can consider ourselves special in the sense that we are a "sample of one," and the only sample we have unless something interesting rears its head in the frozen oceans of Enceladus or elsewhere. But we are by all probabilities not "special" in the sense that there is a vanishinghly small likelihood that our circumstances have not repeated to some degree elsewhere in the universe, probably many times.....but unfortunately not nearby, or necessarily in the same timeframe we have developed.[/QUOTE]


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## Maxperson (Nov 27, 2018)

Hussar said:


> Well, math is still math.  The notion that an alien society will expend massive resources for no real gain isn't really a compelling argument.




To us.  You have no idea whether it would or would not be compelling to an alien culture.



> Newton still applies.  That whole pesky third law where entropy increases over time.  It's not a technological issue, it's an issue with the universe.  Unless our basic underpinnings of understanding of the universe are wrong, you cannot ever have perfect replication.




We don't understand a great deal about how the universe works.  It's hubris to think we know for certain whether or not it's possible to have perfect replication.  



> Again, unless our basic understanding of the universe is totally wrong, then, sorry, nope, not going to happen.  Look, I'd love to be wrong.  But, again, we're slapping up against actual science here.




Science of the universe which changes annually as we discover new things and find out we were wrong about old things, oh and find out we were wrong about the new things we thought we were right about.


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## Dannyalcatraz (Nov 27, 2018)

> Once you start being able to harvest the whole resources of the solar system and then the resources of the next system then you dont have a scarcity of resources.



To us. You have no idea what scarcity would look like to a species with that capacity.

For example, if you can harvest whole systems, what happens when you’re one system short of your immediate requirements?  What if the system you just started harvesting is unusually short of “Unobtanium”?  Or if only certain systems have the characteristics that make harvesting economically feasible- such as no red giants or anything approaching going nova in N many years?

Bringing things around a bit, what if they only harvest systems devoid of life above a certain level of development?  (Think of it like an interstellar version of the Endangered Species Act.)



> We don't understand a great deal about how the universe works. It's hubris to think we know for certain whether or not it's possible to have perfect replication.




Ehhh...entropy looks pretty robust.


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## Hussar (Nov 27, 2018)

Shasarak said:


> Luckily we can rely on the sunk cost fallacy to work in our advantage in this case.  Once we get started then the emphasis is on continuing.  For example if you have settlers there who have children then you have a self replicating terraforming system.




But the cost to get to the point where you can actually realistically send settlers is so high and takes so long that it likely is never going to happen.  No government is ever going to start a program that is going to take a thousand years to complete.  And that's what terraforming is.  A thousand year or more project.  There's simply no way that any group of people is going to invest in something that will only benefit their many times great grandchildren.  Never minding keeping that investment going for that long.



> If replication is impossible then how did life manage to get by until now?  How do rabbits breed like rabbits if they can not replicate themselves fast enough to overcome failures?  I dont really understand the point you are trying to make.




Perfect replication is impossible.  That's why we have evolution.  Breed rabbits long enough and you don't have rabbits anymore.  If that happens with your machines, then they don't explore anymore.  



> Once you start being able to harvest the whole resources of the solar system and then the resources of the next system then you dont have a scarcity of resources.




Again, the sunk costs of something like that are so great that it's never going to happen.  And, frankly, why?  What's the goal here?  To send physical probes?  Terraforming?  You can't send people, they'll never survive the trip.


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## Dannyalcatraz (Nov 27, 2018)

> If that happens with your machines, then they don't explore anymore.




Yup- they come back home and try to destroy everything.


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## Maxperson (Nov 27, 2018)

Hussar said:


> Again, the sunk costs of something like that are so great that it's never going to happen.  And, frankly, why?  What's the goal here?  To send physical probes?  Terraforming?  You can't send people, they'll never survive the trip.




Our resources are finite.  Sooner or later we will have to start harvesting large meteors and other planets, regardless of the cost.


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## Hussar (Nov 27, 2018)

Maxperson said:


> To us.  You have no idea whether it would or would not be compelling to an alien culture.




Math is still math, no matter what.  In order to actually travel to another star, let alone multiple stars, requires a huge expenditure of resources.  Even unmanned probes still require a  massive undertaking.  And for what?  So you can plant a flag on some rock that is so unimaginably distant that communication is vitually impossible?




> We don't understand a great deal about how the universe works.  It's hubris to think we know for certain whether or not it's possible to have perfect replication.




Unless everything we do understand is 100% wrong, then we DO know that perfect replication is impossible.  Perpetual motion machines are a physical impossibility.  Third Law of Thermodynamics isn't a suggestion.



> Science of the universe which changes annually as we discover new things and find out we were wrong about old things, oh and find out we were wrong about the new things we thought we were right about.




Not really.  The basic underpinnings haven't changed in thousands of years.  Pythagoras and Pi aren't really up for debate.  Sure, we're finding new stuff.  But, most of that is quantum level stuff that doesn't really apply on the macro level.  We might as well wish for magic faeries.  Granted, sure, we _could_ be wrong.  That's possible.  Just really, really unlikely at this point.  And more and more unlikely every year that goes by.


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## Doctor Futurity (Nov 27, 2018)

Maxperson said:


> You don't know that, though.  You have no idea if a sentient dinosaur clan evolved and was destroyed by a volcano or meteor strike.  Sentience may well have appeared and vanished dozens of times before it finally took off.




Of course not. I don't know such information any more than you could assert otherwise. We can safely say that we have yet to find any evidence of prior sentient beings on Earth....and yes, we are also aware that it is possible something sentient arose ten or a hundred million years ago and failed the Pass Go evolutionary test for any number of reasons. It does not disprove my point that the only certainty we have is that we're the ones who showed up and are asking this question right now, and we are self evidently real. We can't realistically hypothesize prior sentient beings with any accuracy on Earth any more than we could do so for life on other planets; the main difference is that Earth is finite in scope, we can study its geologic and biologic history, and we have two centuries of paleontology to help us out in this regard. Everything about everywhere else is conjecture.

Occam's Razor is a very simple deductive tool in scientific reasoning. I don't think you and I are disagreeing on anything, other than that I think it's prudent to assume there have been no true sentient species prior to modern upright-walking, tool using hominids without some evidence, and you seem to be taking the stance that absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. Which is fine, but not really a useful contribution to the conversation from a scientific perspective.


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## Hussar (Nov 27, 2018)

Maxperson said:


> Our resources are finite.  Sooner or later we will have to start harvesting large meteors and other planets, regardless of the cost.




Sure.  But, by the same token, if we're positing things like perfect replication, then we no longer need to start harvesting anything.  We have the technology to make the planet a perfect paradise for everyone.  So, again, why are we suddenly deciding, "Hey, yeah, we've got everything we could possibly need or want at our fingertips, let's dump all try to send probes to other solar systems for fun"?

And, again, if we have the technology to harvest meteors and whatnot, now we have the resources to keep the Earth going for the lifespan of the species.


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## Umbran (Nov 27, 2018)

Hussar said:


> Newton still applies.  That whole pesky third law where entropy increases over time.  It's not a technological issue, it's an issue with the universe.  Unless our basic underpinnings of understanding of the universe are wrong, you cannot ever have perfect replication.




Well, technically, you could have perfect a perfect replication.  But, we aren't talking about replicating things once.  We are talking about doing it millions of times.  And having them progress across a million years, maintaining that perfection in systems?  Then, entropy gets you, and those devices either die, or evolve....

Basically, it is a living species.  Those don't stay the same over geological time periods.


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## Shasarak (Nov 27, 2018)

Umbran said:


> That's not a "statisctic".  It is an estimate. And it pretty much assumes no time is spent in the self-replicating.  The Milky Way is about 105,000 light years across.  So, it takes a million years to cross it at 0.1c, if traveling in a straight line, non-stop.  If you have to zig and sage to reach stars with reasonable resources, and take time to build new probes, it would take longer.




I dont really mind if you want to disagree on the amount of time required.  If you want we can increase the time needed by an order of magnitude, so 10 million years because we want to  take our time to spread out properly, do some sight seeing and really check out all the planets we find for life.  Compared to the amount of time to get to our present day, 10 million years is nothing compared to 13 billion years.  Even 100 million years is nothing.



> Note that this assumes the existence of a *self-replicating* machine, that can fly across interstellar distances.  And, that machine self-replicates with no notable change, *for a million years*.
> 
> With respect, that's not a great assumption.  Over those timescales, any self-replicating system will be subject to selective forces - leading to evolution or extinction.




That is a good point.  Imagine if the machine was improving itself as it went.  Probably you would not want it to because who knows what it would evolve into but it is possible.  There is a lot of time to think between systems.

But in any case a quick google search showed the top ten Oldest Animal Species On Earth: the youngest is Martialis Huereka-120 million years old and the oldest is Cyanobacteria – 2.8 billion years old.  So are Cyanobacteria breaking Newtons laws of Thermodynamics?


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## Shasarak (Nov 27, 2018)

Umbran said:


> Over the course of human discovery, one common thread has been that Earth isn't particularly special.  We aren't the center of the Universe, or the Solar System.  Ours isn't a particularly uncommon type of star.  The galaxy has a bazillion of them.  And the Universe looks pretty much the same in every direction, with a bazillion more galaxies each with its bazillion stars.  We are also not particularly separate from other animals - with other species on the planet sharing 90% and more of our DNA.  We have a couple of small differences that lead to stunning differences in behaviors, is all.  We used to think we were special, even anointed, but it turns out... not.
> 
> So, when we pose the question of whether we are special in the Universe, which way should we lean?




Except that it turns out that yes Earth is particularly special.

Earth is the right distance from the Sun (not too hot, not too cold)
Earth has a large neighbouring planet (Jupiter) that helps to shield it from asteroid strikes etc
Earth has a relatively large moon that helps to stabilise its rotation
Earth has plate tectonics which drives the carbon cycle helping to regulate the temperature.
As you say Earth is positioned out in the suburbs of the Milky Way which protects us from being sterilised by a nearby gamma burst.

I am sure there are others that I can not remember off the top of my head (like the magnetosphere protecting the earths atmosphere), but each of those factors is critical for maintaining a stable environment suitable for the development of life.


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## Yaarel (Nov 27, 2018)

An important feature of planet Earth, is our unique Moon.

The Moon stabilizes the Earths tilted axis and makes day-and-night and seasons consistent and regular. It turns out the Moon is extraordinarily important for life.

Without the Moon, most of the lifeforms as we know them are impossible.


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## Shasarak (Nov 27, 2018)

Hussar said:


> But the cost to get to the point where you can actually realistically send settlers is so high and takes so long that it likely is never going to happen.  No government is ever going to start a program that is going to take a thousand years to complete.  And that's what terraforming is.  A thousand year or more project.  There's simply no way that any group of people is going to invest in something that will only benefit their many times great grandchildren.  Never minding keeping that investment going for that long.




Of course they wont start a project that will take a thousand years to complete.  There is going to be a ten year plan, which will naturally lead to another ten year plan and so on and so on.  The city of London has been around for two thousand years and do you think that the people who first lived there imagined what would happen over the next hundred, five hundred or two thousand years?  Of course not.



> Perfect replication is impossible.  That's why we have evolution.  Breed rabbits long enough and you don't have rabbits anymore.  If that happens with your machines, then they don't explore anymore.




There are creatures who have existed for hundreds of millions of years.  How is that even possible if what you say is correct?



> Again, the sunk costs of something like that are so great that it's never going to happen.  And, frankly, why?  What's the goal here?  To send physical probes?  Terraforming?  You can't send people, they'll never survive the trip.




What was the point of sending Voyager out into the void between solar systems?  What was the point of spending 12 billion for a 3.5 mile railway track in New York?  Did Khufu really need such a big Pyramid, I mean who is going to pay for that sucker?

I think Neil deGrasse Tyson said it best when he pointed out that all the money spent on space programs is spent on Earth, so it is not as if we are losing money to do it.


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## Shasarak (Nov 27, 2018)

Yaarel said:


> An important feature of planet Earth, is our unique Moon.
> 
> The Moon stabilizes the Earths tilted axis and makes day-and-night and seasons consistent and regular. It turns out the Moon is extraordinarily important for life.
> 
> Without the Moon, most of the lifeforms as we know them are impossible.




The other thing to note about the Moon is that the impact that caused the Moon also helped to spread metals close to the surface of the Earth where we could find and use them more easily.

Because pretty hard to have a Bronze age without Bronze.


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## Maxperson (Nov 27, 2018)

Hussar said:


> Math is still math, no matter what.  In order to actually travel to another star, let alone multiple stars, requires a huge expenditure of resources.  Even unmanned probes still require a  massive undertaking.  And for what?  So you can plant a flag on some rock that is so unimaginably distant that communication is vitually impossible?




Or maybe just to see if you can do it.  Or maybe to see if it's really as cold as you thought it was.  Or maybe...  Who knows what would motivate an alien species?  Not you.  Not me.



> Unless everything we do understand is 100% wrong, then we DO know that perfect replication is impossible.  Perpetual motion machines are a physical impossibility.  Third Law of Thermodynamics isn't a suggestion.
> 
> Not really.  The basic underpinnings haven't changed in thousands of years.  Pythagoras and Pi aren't really up for debate.  Sure, we're finding new stuff.  But, most of that is quantum level stuff that doesn't really apply on the macro level.  We might as well wish for magic faeries.  Granted, sure, we _could_ be wrong.  That's possible.  Just really, really unlikely at this point.  And more and more unlikely every year that goes by.




You're overlooking Mork's Law of Telelportinamics and Alf's Skizzblix.  Those get around our issues.

Seriously man, there's a ton that we don't know and there could be work-arounds those issues that we haven't discovered yet.


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## Maxperson (Nov 27, 2018)

Hussar said:


> Sure.  But, by the same token, if we're positing things like perfect replication, then we no longer need to start harvesting anything.  We have the technology to make the planet a perfect paradise for everyone.




Not unless we stop replicating humans.  We're running out of space and no amount of perfect replication is going to fix that problem all by itself.  We're going to need Mars and other planets to live on.  We're going to need to harvest planets and asteroids to furnish the needs of our expanding race.



> So, again, why are we suddenly deciding, "Hey, yeah, we've got everything we could possibly need or want at our fingertips, let's dump all try to send probes to other solar systems for fun"?




We aren't, but we're not talking about us.  We're talking about aliens and what THEY might do.  You can't ascribe human motivations to them, as those motivations will almost certainly be at best flawed, and at worst useless.


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## Hussar (Nov 27, 2018)

Maxperson said:


> Or maybe just to see if you can do it.  Or maybe to see if it's really as cold as you thought it was.  Or maybe...  Who knows what would motivate an alien species?  Not you.  Not me.
> 
> 
> 
> ...




True.  And I might win the lottery tomorrow.  But, we're talking about what is, not what we wish things to be.  And, as far as we know, right now, there's no "get out of physics free" cards in the offing.  The speed of light (in a vacuum) is absolute.  The third law of thermodynamics applies.  Even Shasharak's example of bacteria isn't really valid because those bacteria now are not the same as the bacteria then - they have evolved.  There is NO perfect replication.  It just cannot happen.  Not over the long term anyway.



Maxperson said:


> Not unless we stop replicating humans.  We're running out of space and no amount of perfect replication is going to fix that problem all by itself.  We're going to need Mars and other planets to live on.  We're going to need to harvest planets and asteroids to furnish the needs of our expanding race.
> 
> 
> 
> We aren't, but we're not talking about us.  We're talking about aliens and what THEY might do.  You can't ascribe human motivations to them, as those motivations will almost certainly be at best flawed, and at worst useless.




Again, this is a myth.  We cannot possibly fix our population problems by colonization.  You cannot possibly move enough people off planet faster than reproduction will replace them.  It isn't possible.  The energy required to get those people to an off world colony is so great that you simply can't do it.  

Look, if colonization was possible to relieve population pressures, we would have done it on Earth.  Yet, funnily enough, despite having these huge land masses in North and South America, and a couple of centuries of exporting our people out of countries, country populations have never declined.  It's not like England ran out of people.  It just doesn't work.  You can't do it fast enough.

Put it this way.  The world population today is growing at about 83 million people per year.  Give or take.  How much energy would it take to move even 10% of that off world and keep them alive on Mars?  And, remember, you haven't even scratched the surface of population growth at this point.  10% reduction?  Whoopee.  You could ship nearly 10 MILLION people a year to Mars and it would make basically no difference in world population growth.  

It's just not possible.  

Which means that populations will have to reduce on their own.  If we cannot control that, we are not going to resolve it with a thousand year plan to terraform Mars.  

Look, I want to be wrong.  I really do.  I'm a GIANT SF nerd. I love SF.  Far more than I like fantasy.  But, if we're going to talk about actual reality, we can't start positing impossibilities.


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## Maxperson (Nov 27, 2018)

Hussar said:


> True.  And I might win the lottery tomorrow.  But, we're talking about what is, not what we wish things to be.  And, as far as we know, right now, there's no "get out of physics free" cards in the offing.  The speed of light (in a vacuum) is absolute.  The third law of thermodynamics applies.  Even Shasharak's example of bacteria isn't really valid because those bacteria now are not the same as the bacteria then - they have evolved.  There is NO perfect replication.  It just cannot happen.  Not over the long term anyway.




See, if you just added an "At our level of understanding" your claims there wouldn't be a problem.  However, since you are declaring an absolute without the foggiest idea of whether or not it really is an absolute, there is an issue going on.  

At our level of understanding, perfect replication cannot happen.  That's far different from it actually being unable to happen.  Until we know everything or pretty close to it, we won't be able to be 100% certain like you are claiming.



> Again, this is a myth.  We cannot possibly fix our population problems by colonization.  You cannot possibly move enough people off planet faster than reproduction will replace them.  It isn't possible.  The energy required to get those people to an off world colony is so great that you simply can't do it.




We don't have to.  Moving some off to populate other places increases our survival chances and allows us to keep expanding, even if we cease to expand on the home world.  Regardless, we will have to move one day.  It's inevitable.  If for no other reason than the Earth will one day be engulfed by the Sun, and long before that happens we will fry to a crisp.  The lack of resources will drive us outward long before then, though.


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## Shasarak (Nov 27, 2018)

Hussar said:


> True.  And I might win the lottery tomorrow.  But, we're talking about what is, not what we wish things to be.  And, as far as we know, right now, there's no "get out of physics free" cards in the offing.  The speed of light (in a vacuum) is absolute.  The third law of thermodynamics applies.  Even Shasharak's example of bacteria isn't really valid because those bacteria now are not the same as the bacteria then - they have evolved.  There is NO perfect replication.  It just cannot happen.  Not over the long term anyway.




There is no perfect replication.  There is just an organism that has existed for over a billion years.  Billion.

So, yeah Newton.



> Look, if colonization was possible to relieve population pressures, we would have done it on Earth.  Yet, funnily enough, despite having these huge land masses in North and South America, and a couple of centuries of exporting our people out of countries, country populations have never declined.  It's not like England ran out of people.  It just doesn't work.  You can't do it fast enough.




I thought you lived in Japan?


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## Hussar (Nov 27, 2018)

Maxperson said:


> See, if you just added an "At our level of understanding" your claims there wouldn't be a problem.  However, since you are declaring an absolute without the foggiest idea of whether or not it really is an absolute, there is an issue going on.
> 
> At our level of understanding, perfect replication cannot happen.  That's far different from it actually being unable to happen.  Until we know everything or pretty close to it, we won't be able to be 100% certain like you are claiming.




And, again, I might win the lottery tomorrow.  But, that's also pretty unlikely.  Unless we are completely and utterly wrong about our understanding of the universe, I'm going stand by what I said.  




> We don't have to.  Moving some off to populate other places increases our survival chances and allows us to keep expanding, even if we cease to expand on the home world.  Regardless, we will have to move one day.  It's inevitable.  If for no other reason than the Earth will one day be engulfed by the Sun, and long before that happens we will fry to a crisp.  The lack of resources will drive us outward long before then, though.




Again, nope.  Those moved offworld will be dependent on resources from Earth for generations.  If Earth's population continues to expand and we bugger the Earth, then a Mars colony or any other colony for that matter, will die within a generation at the most.  Heck, the Andromeda galaxy will rip apart our galaxy before the sun goes into expansion.  Which will very likely kill all life bigger than a single cell long before we have to worry about it.  

It simply isn't feasible.  Unfortunately.  We've got about 300(ish) milliion years and that's about it.  That's about as long as any species gets before it goes extinct.  



Shasarak said:


> There is no perfect replication.  There is just an organism that has existed for over a billion years.  Billion.
> 
> So, yeah Newton.




Sigh.  Cyanobacteria that exists today is NOT the same as the cyanobacteria that existed a billion years ago.  Good grief, read a book.




> I thought you lived in Japan?




Oh, I get it now.  Took me a second to see what you were talking about.  Sorry, I thought we were talking about colonization.  You, instead, want to play silly buggers semantic games in order to win.  Yes, it's true.  Japan's population is decreasing.  That's very true.  Heck, most of Europe is in the same boat.  Take away immigration and so is North America.  Yet, funnily enough, as we were talking about colonization, populations do actually decrease naturally in some circumstances.  You are technically correct, and that's the absolutest bestest kind of correct.

Here's your cookie.

Now, go and actually do a bit of research about biology and thermodynamics and come back and let's have an adult conversation.


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## Shasarak (Nov 27, 2018)

Hussar said:


> Sigh.  Cyanobacteria that exists today is NOT the same as the cyanobacteria that existed a billion years ago.  Good grief, read a book.




I can understand if you dont like it but facts are facts.



> Oh, I get it now.  Took me a second to see what you were talking about.  Sorry, I thought we were talking about colonization.  You, instead, want to play silly buggers semantic games in order to win.  Yes, it's true.  Japan's population is decreasing.  That's very true.  Heck, most of Europe is in the same boat.  Take away immigration and so is North America.  Yet, funnily enough, as we were talking about colonization, populations do actually decrease naturally in some circumstances.  You are technically correct, and that's the absolutest bestest kind of correct.
> 
> Here's your cookie.




I dont want to get in the way of your rant about population control by way of colonisation.  I have never seen anyone make that argument.

I just thought you said that a countries population always goes up which was odd coming from someone living in a country with a decreasing population.  I just assume it must be because they are sending 10% of their population into space.



> Now, go and actually do a bit of research about biology and thermodynamics and come back and let's have an adult conversation.




Ha, nice.


----------



## Maxperson (Nov 27, 2018)

Hussar said:


> And, again, I might win the lottery tomorrow.  But, that's also pretty unlikely.  Unless we are completely and utterly wrong about our understanding of the universe, I'm going stand by what I said.




We are very wrong about our understanding of the universe.  It shows every year, multiple times as things change for us, then change some more, and then we mix it up and it changes again.  We understand(or think we do) a little bit, but there's a lot more that we don't know about than we do.



> Again, nope.  Those moved offworld will be dependent on resources from Earth for generations.  If Earth's population continues to expand and we bugger the Earth, then a Mars colony or any other colony for that matter, will die within a generation at the most.




Because you say so?  



> Heck, the Andromeda galaxy will rip apart our galaxy before the sun goes into expansion.  Which will very likely kill all life bigger than a single cell long before we have to worry about it.




"In fact, our solar system is going to outlive our galaxy. At that point, the sun will not yet be a red giant star – *but it will have grown bright enough to roast Earth’s surface*. Any life forms still there, though, will be treated to some pretty spectacular cosmic choreography."

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/...4/03/24/scientists-predict-our-galaxys-death/

We will be gone before the collision happens.  Gone from Earth anyway.


----------



## Hussar (Nov 27, 2018)

Maxperson said:


> We are very wrong about our understanding of the universe.  It shows every year, multiple times as things change for us, then change some more, and then we mix it up and it changes again.  We understand(or think we do) a little bit, but there's a lot more that we don't know about than we do.




Really?  E no longer equals MC squared?  Force no longer equals mass times acceleration?  Entropy is reversed?  Objects in motion don't stay in motion?  

There's a reason that a TOE is actually a reasonably attainable goal within our lifetime.




> Because you say so?




Sigh.  No.  Because I've actually spent a bit of time getting a tiny bit of education in this sort of thing and know just enough to know that it won't work.  Good grief.  You would need to recreate a billion years of evolution in a hostile environment with little to no atmosphere in a couple of generations.  Good luck with that.  All the way down to the biota in the soil in order to grow anything.  Never minding the centuries it will take to thicken the atmosphere of Mars to anything approaching breathable, you're looking at several more centuries and thousands of tons of soil just to feed the people that are traveling there.  

Cut off that supply before you have a positive feedback loop, which will take several centuries to create, and the entire thing dies in a generation.



> "In fact, our solar system is going to outlive our galaxy. At that point, the sun will not yet be a red giant star – *but it will have grown bright enough to roast Earth’s surface*. Any life forms still there, though, will be treated to some pretty spectacular cosmic choreography."
> 
> https://www.nationalgeographic.com/...4/03/24/scientists-predict-our-galaxys-death/
> 
> We will be gone before the collision happens.  Gone from Earth anyway.




That I agree with.  We will be gone.


----------



## Umbran (Nov 27, 2018)

Yaarel said:


> Without the Moon, most of the lifeforms as we know them are impossible.




And, with a sample size of one, how could you possibly know that?

Yes, the Moon has a stabilizing effect on the tilt of Earth's axis.  But, without it, current models show the variation in tilt would only be about 10 degrees.  We are currently at 23.5 degrees, so, call it a variation from 18.5 to 28.5, and that variation taking place over tens of thousands of years.  This is not catastrophic, and there's no reason to think it would prevent the development of life.  The patterns of life on such a planet might be different, but we expect that anyway.


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## Morrus (Nov 27, 2018)

Maxperson said:


> We don't understand a great deal about how the universe works.  It's hubris to think we know for certain whether or not it's possible to have perfect replication.




The “our knowledge of the universe is incomplete, therefore you may not assert anything” is pretty much a conversation ender. If we can’t assert anything, what’s the point of even talking? 

I feel like it must be a logical fallacy, too, but I’m not familiar enough with all the common fallacies to say for sure. 

Closely followed by “scientists sometimes revise their hypotheses, so scientists can’t assert anything”. Which you also used. 

They’re both largely nothing-statements.


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## Maxperson (Nov 27, 2018)

Morrus said:


> The “our knowledge of the universe is incomplete, therefore you may not assert anything” is pretty much a conversation ender. If we can’t assert anything, what’s the point of even talking?
> 
> I feel like it must be a logical fallacy, too, but I’m not familiar enough with all the common fallacies to say for sure.
> 
> ...




I'm not saying we can't assert anything.  I'm just saying that we should be qualifying our assertions with at least a "At our current level of understanding X is/isn't possible.", rather than just declaring something impossible.


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## Mustrum_Ridcully (Nov 27, 2018)

Umbran said:


> Yes and no.  Stars with chemical composition similar to those in the rest of the galactic plane are found at great distances, but there's some question as to their density.  It may be that there are some outliers, but the main disk could still be 100 - 150 thousand light years.
> 
> But, either way, that only makes the job of getting across the galaxy harder.  Folks often talk as if self-replicating machines are somehow static, never-changing entities, as if they can last 10,000 years without alteration, and would replicate perfectly, and that's a naive position to take.  It would be more reasonable to consider such a probe to be a living thing, with an electro-mechanical (or whatever) basis rather than a biological one.



Maybe it would actually be better to rely on something biological, though. Carbon, Hydrogen and Oxygen are fairly common in the universe, and if you, say, need to build your drones to a large part from iron and copper, it might become impractical to self-replicate. 

But maybe the truth is you can't do it with small machines at all. The only way to support anything self-replicating is to have a star and a planet in its orbit at the right distance for the right temperatures with the right planetary compistion. Only then you have enough base materials and the right conditions to support the type of catastrophic failures that can happen over millions or billions of years.
The only way to explore the universe and reach out is to "fly" a star system. We're already doing that, but we can't steer it...


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## Umbran (Nov 27, 2018)

Mustrum_Ridcully said:


> Maybe it would actually be better to rely on something biological, though. Carbon, Hydrogen and Oxygen are fairly common in the universe, and if you, say, need to build your drones to a large part from iron and copper, it might become impractical to self-replicate.




It doesn't really matter what you make it out of.  The radiation out in interstellar space is powerful stuff, because much of it originates in the most powerful events in the universe - cosmic rays will damage DNA or flip/destroy computer memory bits with equal ease.


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## Umbran (Nov 27, 2018)

Maxperson said:


> It's hubris to think we know for certain whether or not it's possible to have perfect replication.




With respect, we are talking about the Laws of Thermodynamics here.  Being able to outdo the Laws of Thermodynamics is, in all cases, equivalent to creating a perpetual motion machine, and that's a source of infinite energy*.  

And, if you have access to infinite energy, you don't need any bloody self-replicating probe.  You have *INFINITE ENERGY*.  Even with the lightspeed barrier, infinite energy means you can send living people at arbitrarily large fractions of the speed of light, which means arbitrarily large time dilation effects.  From Earth's perspective a trip may take 100K years, but from the point of view of the travelers, reaching another star is pretty much instantaneous with enough time dilation.




* If I recall correctly, infinite energy is also equivalent to a violation of causality, which leads to silliness like you being born before you are conceived.  And I am pretty sure nobody wants that.


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## Umbran (Nov 27, 2018)

Maxperson said:


> Not unless we stop replicating humans.




You don't need to stop.  You just need to limit it.  Remember, people will still die, even if only by accident.


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## Umbran (Nov 27, 2018)

Shasarak said:


> But in any case a quick google search showed the top ten Oldest Animal Species On Earth: the youngest is Martialis Huereka-120 million years old and the oldest is Cyanobacteria – 2.8 billion years old.  So are Cyanobacteria breaking Newtons laws of Thermodynamics?




No, they aren't.  What we have today is basically the same kind of organism, but it isn't *completely unchanged* over 2.8 billion years.

Which is to say, you are mistaking "oldest known distinct lineage" for "oldest species".  _Martialis huerka_ it the only still living twig on the branch that came off closest to the trunk of all other ants.  But, that ant of today is not the same as when it branched away from the common ancestor of other ants - it has been evolving along during that time.


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## MoonSong (Nov 27, 2018)

I'm a bit late to this, just let me begin with saying I truly believe -If I'm not certain- that we are truly alone in the universe, at least by a given definition of universe. And by that I mean I believe there's nobody else in our Hubble Bubble which by all means and purposes is the practical limit of our universe.  Lightspeed is the hard limit, and will be until we find a way to manipulate mass/gravity, but that is unlikely. Even warp engines -which are actually possible under the laws of physics should we find an energy source big enough to produce and store enough antimatter - wouldn't be practical, as the effect of bending the space actually destroys whatever is in your way. 

When people look at the Drake Equation they automatically jump and think  "Well whatever the actual numbers, given the age of the universe is in the billions there's got to be a ton of other advanced civilizations out there". But there's something we are forgetting, the values of the drake equation aren't necessarily constant, and the whole thing is indeed not uniform (I.e. The rate of birth of new stars is slowing down) . Which means the actual solution can't be found by simple substitution but by integration, of a seven variable function, which means that no matter how high the values are, since they all are less than one, their integral will be even smaller so we are talking about a number below 1*10^-10, and the age of the universe is in the order of 1*10^10, so the solution is actually closer to one or even less than one-and that means us.


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## MoonSong (Nov 27, 2018)

Umbran said:


> No, they aren't.  What we have today is basically the same kind of organism, but it isn't *completely unchanged* over 2.8 billion years.
> 
> Which is to say, you are mistaking "oldest known distinct lineage" for "oldest species".  _Martialis huerka_ it the only still living twig on the branch that came off closest to the trunk of all other ants.  But, that ant of today is not the same as when it branched away from the common ancestor of other ants - it has been evolving along during that time.




Even more recent living fossils aren't exactly the same as they were millions of years ago.


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## Shasarak (Nov 27, 2018)

Umbran said:


> No, they aren't.  What we have today is basically the same kind of organism, but it isn't *completely unchanged* over 2.8 billion years.
> 
> Which is to say, you are mistaking "oldest known distinct lineage" for "oldest species".  _Martialis huerka_ it the only still living twig on the branch that came off closest to the trunk of all other ants.  But, that ant of today is not the same as when it branched away from the common ancestor of other ants - it has been evolving along during that time.




So then what exactly is your point?  If imperfect replication can last for a Billion years then do you need perfect replication.

Or in other words, why would we care if the aliens we meet are actually evolved from what they were originally?


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## Umbran (Nov 27, 2018)

MoonSong said:


> I
> But there's something we are forgetting, the values of the drake equation aren't necessarily constant, and the whole thing is indeed not uniform (I.e. The rate of birth of new stars is slowing down) . Which means the actual solution can't be found by simple substitution but by integration, of a seven variable function..




I'm sorry, but that's not correct, for two reasons:

1) There is a term in the equation (L - the average lifetime of a civilization) that effectively maintains a window - unless L is on the order of the lifetime of a star, we don't have to worry about changes in the terms over cosmological timescales - like changing the rate of star formation.  Unless L is on the order of geologic timescales, we don't have to worry about the ecosystem of the planet collapsing out from under the civilization (except by their own action, which is encapsulated in L), and so on.

2) The terms in the equation are *averages*, implicitly over the period L.  

So, no multi-variable integration is required.  Drake knew what he was doing.


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## Umbran (Nov 27, 2018)

Doctor Futurity said:


> Of course not. I don't know such information any more than you could assert otherwise. We can safely say that we have yet to find any evidence of prior sentient beings on Earth....and yes, we are also aware that it is possible something sentient arose ten or a hundred million years ago and failed the Pass Go evolutionary test for any number of reasons.




For the curious... I don't have the paper handy, but it is estimated that the remains of an abandoned civilization would persist for about 3 or 3.5 million years, after which point current human technology would be unlikely to detect that it ever existed.


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## Umbran (Nov 27, 2018)

Shasarak said:


> Of course they wont start a project that will take a thousand years to complete.  There is going to be a ten year plan, which will naturally lead to another ten year plan and so on and so on.  The city of London has been around for two thousand years and do you think that the people who first lived there imagined what would happen over the next hundred, five hundred or two thousand years?  Of course not.




The city of London was not built with a unified goal of doing anything in particular, much less crossing the void between stars.  London was built in reaction to needs of the moment, with unified intent.  Now, while it is possible that such random-walk development would spontaneously create a city that plies the star lanes... I wouldn't bet any money on it.  It is not like in another century or two, anyone is going to say, "Hey, wait a minute!  London can FLY!!!1!"

In effect, London pseudo-evolved over time - and evolution is *NOT* directed to a goal.  Evolution optimizes for current needs, not a future desire.


----------



## Shasarak (Nov 27, 2018)

Umbran said:


> The city of London was not built with a unified goal of doing anything in particular, much less crossing the void between stars.  London was built in reaction to needs of the moment, with unified intent.  Now, while it is possible that such random-walk development would spontaneously create a city that plies the star lanes... I wouldn't bet any money on it.  It is not like in another century or two, anyone is going to say, "Hey, wait a minute!  London can FLY!!!1!"
> 
> In effect, London pseudo-evolved over time - and evolution is *NOT* directed to a goal.  Evolution optimizes for current needs, not a future desire.




And terraforming Mars is not going to be some kind of unified goal.  That is just a particularly stupid idea to start with, how can anyone on Earth develop a plan that will survive contact with an alien planet when they can not even build a subway line on time and within budget? 

Any colonisation of Mars is going to start with a single base.  Which will probably get bigger over time.  And then at some stage there is going to have a second base which will get bigger.  And then a thousand years have passed and who knows what it is going to look like then?

Even building the International Space Station was not some kind of unified goal, it was just some kind of "random walk" development and yet I am supposed to beleive that the colonisation of Mars is going to be somekind of unified goal.  Please, just no.


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## Umbran (Nov 27, 2018)

Shasarak said:


> If replication is impossible then how did life manage to get by until now?  How do rabbits breed like rabbits if they can not replicate themselves fast enough to overcome failures?  I dont really understand the point you are trying to make.




Someone may have covered this, but just in case...

*Perfect* replication is impossible.  So, rabbits evolve over time - the rabbit of today is not the same as a rabbit of a million years ago.  Go back 40 or 55 million years, and things you'd call a rabbit didn't exist at all.  And it is okay if rabbits change over time, as there is nobody who is expecting them to not do so, with a goal that requires they stay exactly the same over a million years....

The issue is that to complete their task of spreading through the galaxy, the self-replicating machines must remain on task, and behave pretty much exactly as they were designed, with no notable alterations.  We are probably talking about the most complex machine ever conceived: able to enter a solar system, locate various resources, travel to those resources, gather and refine them (likely pulling them out of gravity wells in the process), and build new machines that can repeat that process tens to hundreds of light years away.  Our *entire civilization* cannot do that yet, but we imagine making a single package that can do it. 

A small alteration - say, it refines some modestly important element to too low a level of purity - is apt to mean the next generation breaks down before it reaches the next stars, or cannot replicate.  Too many cosmic rays through its memory, and it forgets something mission critical.  Remember, this thing is getting no operating system updates.

Hell, this thing needs some level of what we might call "intelligence" to operate.  We build an intelligence, and send it out alone, not practically capable of communicating with anyone, thinking to itself for decades to centuries.  What are the chances that it just goes mad?  Or makes decisions in its isolation that doom it's mission?  You and I can't stand more than a few hours in sensory deprivation, but you want this thing to handle it for decades?

Someone mentioned the idea that if you can manage this feat, you have probably solved all humanity's problems first - and that seems a reasonable point given all this.


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## Umbran (Nov 27, 2018)

Shasarak said:


> And terraforming Mars is not going to be some kind of unified goal.




Yes it is.  It is right in the name, "_terraforming_" - forming it into Terra!  



> That is just a particularly stupid idea to start with, how can anyone on Earth develop a plan that will survive contact with an alien planet when they can not even build a subway line on time and within budget?




Whether the plan has to change, and whether the goal is set are not at all the same thing.

We all play role playing games.  You walk into a big battle with a plan.  It quickly falls apart.  But _the goal_ is still to make the BBEG kick the bucket.



> Any colonisation of Mars is going to start with a single base.  Which will probably get bigger over time.  And then at some stage there is going to have a second base which will get bigger.  And then a thousand years have passed and who knows what it is going to look like then?




We have slid from "terraforming" to "colonization".  Those are *NOT* the same thing - you can colonize without terraforming, but all your colonists have to stay inside or in space suits.  Which one do you want to discuss?



> Even building the International Space Station was not some kind of unified goal, it was just some kind of "random walk" development




Hardly.  There's nothing "random" about the development of the ISS.  If nothing else, NASA is far too risk averse to be part of the most massive construction project in space, the vast majority of which was done using NASA's Space Shuttle, the most expensive and complex machine built by humankind at the time, if it were "random".  

Good gosh, do I have to go into the differences between Waterfall and Agile management, and show how neither one of them is random?  I don't think anyone wants that.  Let me try to keep it to saying - just because plans change over time, does not make the changes "random".


----------



## Doctor Futurity (Nov 27, 2018)

Umbran said:


> For the curious... I don't have the paper handy, but it is estimated that the remains of an abandoned civilization would persist for about 3 or 3.5 million years, after which point current human technology would be unlikely to detect that it ever existed.




There are a couple good books on the subject, too. Alan Weisman stands out (The World Without Us) in analyzing the way a modern civilization would decay, and how long it would leave evidence behind of our passing. There was also a TV show along these lines as well IIRC.

I think in terms of millions of years we'd find that the evidence left in our wake would include fossil remains and some really strange concentrations of specific types of deposits....but on a scale of geologic time that stuff could indeed be difficult to identify, or be erased entirely. The fossil evidence I think is the most compelling argument for why we don't see this, though. No evidence of dinosaurs with gunshot wounds, for example! 

As I once said to a person taking an archaeology course who was obsessed with this idea that there were ancient civilizations in Antarctica*, though: sure, it's not entirely impossible, but I wouldn't stake my career on it.



*_Thanks_ Youtube.


----------



## Shasarak (Nov 27, 2018)

Umbran said:


> Someone may have covered this, but just in case...
> 
> *Perfect* replication is impossible.  So, rabbits evolve over time - the rabbit of today is not the same as a rabbit of a million years ago.  Go back 40 or 55 million years, and things you'd call a rabbit didn't exist at all.  And it is okay if rabbits change over time, as there is nobody who is expecting them to not do so, with a goal that requires they stay exactly the same over a million years....
> 
> ...




The main problem with this idea is that there would be a single point of failure that would ruin everything.  To be honest for someone smart enough to create such a machine it seems odd to think that they would send one.  Even Christopher Columbus did not discover America by sailing in one ship so why would we expect an even more advanced species to make such a stupid decision?



> Hell, this thing needs some level of what we might call "intelligence" to operate.  We build an intelligence, and send it out alone, not practically capable of communicating with anyone, thinking to itself for decades to centuries.  What are the chances that it just goes mad?  Or makes decisions in its isolation that doom it's mission?  You and I can't stand more than a few hours in sensory deprivation, but you want this thing to handle it for decades?
> 
> Someone mentioned the idea that if you can manage this feat, you have probably solved all humanity's problems first - and that seems a reasonable point given all this.




Could you include a 'sleep' mode.  I dont know thats just an idea off the top of my head why would that even be a problem for someone smart enough to create such a machine in the first place?  If it was me then I would have separate guidance, detection, maintenance systems with the "real" intelligence protected until it was actually needed.


----------



## Shasarak (Nov 27, 2018)

Umbran said:


> Yes it is.  It is right in the name, "_terraforming_" - forming it into Terra!
> 
> Whether the plan has to change, and whether the goal is set are not at all the same thing.
> 
> We all play role playing games.  You walk into a big battle with a plan.  It quickly falls apart.  But _the goal_ is still to make the BBEG kick the bucket.




If we use your roleplaying game analogy then how can we fight the BBEG when it was not even part of our unified plan for completing the campaign.  And how can our party even act without considering all the possible permutations that might happen; without consulting with everyone else first to make sure that we have a consensus?

Or what if we consider how many Astral Diamonds that our 1st level characters will have to pay for costs over the campaign?  Who would even spend that kind of money or use that many resources?



> We have slid from "terraforming" to "colonization".  Those are *NOT* the same thing - you can colonize without terraforming, but all your colonists have to stay inside or in space suits.  Which one do you want to discuss?




What are you going to do fire a 'Genesis Device' at the planet and let it magically terraform the planet?  Meh, chances are you are going to need boots of the ground and unless one of them is Arnold Schwarzenegger and his alien terraforming machine, the whole process is going to take a while.



> Hardly.  There's nothing "random" about the development of the ISS.  If nothing else, NASA is far too risk averse to be part of the most massive construction project in space, the vast majority of which was done using NASA's Space Shuttle, the most expensive and complex machine built by humankind at the time, if it were "random".




So there is a USA section, a Soviet section and a European section that were all built off the same plans, the same 'unified' plan?  No of course not.  There is no such unified plan.



> Good gosh, do I have to go into the differences between Waterfall and Agile management, and show how neither one of them is random?  I don't think anyone wants that.  Let me try to keep it to saying - just because plans change over time, does not make the changes "random".




Maybe you can explain to me the differences between Waterfall and Agile management and how they relate to the development of say Google following the unified business plan that ‎Larry Page‎ and ‎Sergey Brin had from 1998?  I am sure that the goals from 1998 are exactly the same as the goals from 2018 as nothing much has changed in the last 20 years.


----------



## Hussar (Nov 27, 2018)

Shasarak said:


> The main problem with this idea is that there would be a single point of failure that would ruin everything.  To be honest for someone smart enough to create such a machine it seems odd to think that they would send one.  Even Christopher Columbus did not discover America by sailing in one ship so why would we expect an even more advanced species to make such a stupid decision?




Now, you are expecting Columbus to travel for a million years without suffering a single change.  It doesn't matter if you send a million Columbus' out, the odds of catastrophic failure over a long enough time become 1.  Because, no matter how many you send out, they need to replicate themselves every time the jump to a new star system right?  That's the plan.  Go to star A, create a bunch of new probes and head to stars B, C and D.  Every replication will introduce errors.  It has to.  Perfect replication is impossible.  

And, over enough generations, you wind up with catastrophic failures.  




> Could you include a 'sleep' mode.  I dont know thats just an idea off the top of my head why would that even be a problem for someone smart enough to create such a machine in the first place?  If it was me then I would have separate guidance, detection, maintenance systems with the "real" intelligence protected until it was actually needed.




How much time is this mind going to spend "sleeping"?  After all, it needs to be awake _sometime_.  And, again, over the millions of years that you're talking about, even if it's only spending 1 hour a year "awake", it's still going to go stark raving mad.


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## Maxperson (Nov 28, 2018)

Hussar said:


> Now, you are expecting Columbus to travel for a million years without suffering a single change.  It doesn't matter if you send a million Columbus' out, the odds of catastrophic failure over a long enough time become 1.  Because, no matter how many you send out, they need to replicate themselves every time the jump to a new star system right?  That's the plan.  Go to star A, create a bunch of new probes and head to stars B, C and D.  Every replication will introduce errors.  It has to.  Perfect replication is impossible.




Why is replication even necessary.  The race could just make a bunch of probes that go from system to system to system.  A race that advanced can shield the probes sufficiently and collisions and cosmic radiation won't be an issue.


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## Stormbow (Nov 28, 2018)

I'm in a weird place on this subject.

I don't believe in Heaven or Hell _at all_, but I believe in spirits, ghosts, and the like because I've had experiences that I attribute to them— whether or not they have someplace to live seems irrelevant and unprovable to me.  (I have tons of ghost stories.)

And then I _do_ believe in the possibility of aliens— even though I've never truly had an experience I could attribute to them —because it seems preposterous to me that aliens _would not_ exist.  (There was that time in the California desert, but I could not verify an actual alien experience there...)


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## Morrus (Nov 28, 2018)

Maxperson said:


> Why is replication even necessary.  The race could just make a bunch of probes that go from system to system to system.




The replication is what makes it spread like a virus, making the coverage get exponentially faster. Like that doubling the grains of rice on a chessboard thing — but even more so, because each makes a few dozen copies rather than just one.


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## Maxperson (Nov 28, 2018)

Morrus said:


> The replication is what makes it spread like a virus, making the coverage get exponentially faster. Like that doubling the grains of rice on a chessboard thing — but even more so, because each makes a few dozen copies rather than just one.




Oh, I understand that.  However, if you're a race that is that advanced, aging if it was ever a problem to begin with, has probably been conquered.  If imperfect replication is going to be an issue, slow it down a bit.  Time is on your side.


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## Umbran (Nov 28, 2018)

Maxperson said:


> Oh, I understand that.  However, if you're a race that is that advanced, aging if it was ever a problem to begin with, has probably been conquered.  If imperfect replication is going to be an issue, slow it down a bit.  Time is on your side.




No, it isn't.   Remember that even if the aliens are immortal, the stars aren't!  There are at least 100 billion stars in the Milky Way (possibly up to 400 billion).  And the lifespan of a star like the Sun is about 10 billion years. 

Let us say that you only want to visit 10% of the stars in the galaxy - that's 10 to 40 billion stars.  Even if you visit one every single year, most of the stars will burn out long before you can reach them!  Oh, and in only 4 billion years, the Milky Way is going to collide with Andromeda, and what do you figure that's going to do with your 10-billion-year exploration plan?


----------



## Umbran (Nov 28, 2018)

Shasarak said:


> If we use your roleplaying game analogy then how can we fight the BBEG when it was not even part of our unified plan for completing the campaign.  And how can our party even act without considering all the possible permutations that might happen; without consulting with everyone else first to make sure that we have a consensus?




Um, like you are supposed to do with a campaign, you *gasp* _talk about it_!

You speak as if collaboration among spacefaring nations is somehow new.  We've been doing it for decades.



> ... the whole process is going to take a while.




Yes, it is.  However, the return on the investment is... *AN ENTIRE FRIGGIN' PLANET*.  Let us not pretend this investment wouldn't have a payoff.

Overall, such a project will likely take centuries before someone could walk on the surface of Mars without protection.  But if you are thoughtful about it, there are milestones, points along the way - when you need to worry less about abrasive dust, when you have to worry less about explosive loss of pressure, when you can grow crops with less protection, and so on - where you get a return on your work.

This is all why unplanned random action toward the end won't work.  Yes, this is all larger than anything humanity has tried before.  So has been each and every development in space... *ever*.  



> So there is a USA section, a Soviet section and a European section that were all built off the same plans, the same 'unified' plan?  No of course not.  There is no such unified plan.




As if everything is All-Or-Nothing?

Those modules join together, you know.   They share systems - power, air, environmental sensors, computers, and so forth.  There were only two ways to get them up there - in a Space SHuttle cargo bay, or on the top of a Russian rocket.  You couldn't have a nation build a module, just hope it fits in the Shuttle payload bay, and then figure out how to connect them together once it is up there!  Even if the nation has a significant amount of design freedom within a given module, you can bet your gold fillings that those designs were vetted by others to make entirely sure everything was up to snuff.

Simply put - the ISS cost on the order of _$150 billion_ to build.  And you think they didn't plan the frak out of each bit?  Really?  They just made it up as they went along, that's what you think?


----------



## Umbran (Nov 28, 2018)

Shasarak said:


> The main problem with this idea is that there would be a single point of failure that would ruin everything.




It doesn't have to be.  As I already noted, on Earth, on the surface, with the protection of Earths' atmosphere and magnetic field, and the Sun's magnetic field, we still see one error per 256 MB of memory per month due to cosmic rays.  My work laptop, then, experiences nearly 770 such errors in a year.  

Now, imagine the data storage such a machine needs.  Traveling at 0.1c, it will take that machine ~40 years to reach the nearest star.  How many errors do we expect?  If it were just ten of my laptop, it'd be on the order of 10,000 errors.  We are talking about needing at least a couple orders of magnitude more for this machine, yeah?  So... millions or tens of millions of errors?  We are no longer talking about having a single point of failure, we are talking about having an accumulated burden of errors.  How many of these can the thing tolerate before it stops working, or works oddly, in some way?  



> To be honest for someone smart enough to create such a machine it seems odd to think that they would send one.  Even Christopher Columbus did not discover America by sailing in one ship so why would we expect an even more advanced species to make such a stupid decision?




Um... that's why they are self-replicating.  You send out one, or a handful, and they reproduce.  But, that's the point - if you have a living creature that reproduces, over tens and hundreds of thousands of years, you get changes!  Species _are not stable_ on million-year timescales. Consider that the species we think of as modern humans is not 500,000 years old - we have gone from stone knives and bearskins to the Space Shuttle in that time.  You figure the species that is these machines will go blithely along following its original directives for a million?


----------



## Ryujin (Nov 28, 2018)

you want V'ger? 'Cause that's how you get V'ger.


----------



## Shasarak (Nov 28, 2018)

Umbran said:


> It doesn't have to be.  As I already noted, on Earth, on the surface, with the protection of Earths' atmosphere and magnetic field, and the Sun's magnetic field, we still see one error per 256 MB of memory per month due to cosmic rays.  My work laptop, then, experiences nearly 770 such errors in a year.
> 
> Now, imagine the data storage such a machine needs.  Traveling at 0.1c, it will take that machine ~40 years to reach the nearest star.  How many errors do we expect?  If it were just ten of my laptop, it'd be on the order of 10,000 errors.  We are talking about needing at least a couple orders of magnitude more for this machine, yeah?  So... millions or tens of millions of errors?  We are no longer talking about having a single point of failure, we are talking about having an accumulated burden of errors.  How many of these can the thing tolerate before it stops working, or works oddly, in some way?
> 
> Um... that's why they are self-replicating.  You send out one, or a handful, and they reproduce.  But, that's the point - if you have a living creature that reproduces, over tens and hundreds of thousands of years, you get changes!  Species _are not stable_ on million-year timescales. Consider that the species we think of as modern humans is not 500,000 years old - we have gone from stone knives and bearskins to the Space Shuttle in that time.  You figure the species that is these machines will go blithely along following its original directives for a million?




If you are worried about data corruption then you could try including a physical blueprint with every copy of the self replicating machine.  That way every machine is built off the same plan which means that you dont have to worry about them evolving into some kind of new creature spontaneously halfway through the exploration cycle or changing their directives because they got bored.

Because, to be completely honest, your arguments of evolutionary drift are not very convincing given that a) there are already creatures on Earth that have existed for millions of years and b) we are talking about machines built from a set of plans rather then an assortment of chemicals growing in solution.


----------



## Dannyalcatraz (Nov 28, 2018)

> Maxperson said:
> 
> 
> > Why is replication even necessary.  The race could just make a bunch of probes that go from system to system to system.  A race that advanced can shield the probes sufficiently and collisions and cosmic radiation won't be an issue.



To put a different spin on things than those who have replied before me...

Even if you assume the building of a single probe, it is still going to need the functional equivalen of perfect replication to perform explorations over millions of years just to keep itself functioning.  Never mind unexpected collisions or cosmic events- parts wear out and need replacing, even when operating entirely within design parameters.  Materials deteriorate.


----------



## Dannyalcatraz (Nov 28, 2018)

Shasarak said:


> If you are worried about data corruption then you could try including a physical blueprint with every copy of the self replicating machine.



We already do this with current technology for assembly-line robots, and STILL errors creep in over time.  Software errors happen (either due to coding errors or what radiation does to computer systems); manufacturing dies erode and fall ouside of QC tolerances; moving parts degrade; material fatigue destroys parts.


> Because, to be completely honest, your arguments of evolutionary drift are not very convincing given that a) there are already creatures on Earth that have existed for millions of years and b) we are talking about machines built from a set of plans rather then an assortment of chemicals growing in solution.




I would be supremely suprised if any biologist asserted that there is a terrestrial species that has remained unchanged at the genetic level for a million years.


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## Shasarak (Nov 28, 2018)

Dannyalcatraz said:


> We already do this with current technology for assembly-line robots, and STILL errors creep in over time.  Software errors happen (either due to coding errors or what radiation does to computer systems); manufacturing dies erode and fall ouside of QC tolerances; moving parts degrade; material fatigue destroys parts.




So we know this already and we already have ways to deal with it now.  Right now.  And yet in the future replication is going to be so complicated that we will not be able to deal with a simple quality control issue?  How exactly does that work?

Are we suddenly going to run out of Iphones because someone loses the plans?  Is the 1,001 copy going to spontaneously develop an AI?  Does the existance of an Iphone X suddenly mean that an Iphone 4 does not work anymore?

We seem to have achieved a lot in our existence without "perfect" replication.



> I would be supremely suprised if any biologist asserted that there is a terrestrial species that has remained unchanged at the genetic level for a million years.




I am guessing that there were a lot of surprised people when scientists finally proved that the Earth was round.


----------



## Shasarak (Nov 29, 2018)

I was listening to Avi Loeb talking about his interstellar project to get a 1g probe to Alpha Centuri at 0.2c.  So 20 years to get there and then 4 years to get a signal back to Earth the future really is now.


----------



## Maxperson (Nov 29, 2018)

Umbran said:


> No, it isn't.   Remember that even if the aliens are immortal, the stars aren't!  There are at least 100 billion stars in the Milky Way (possibly up to 400 billion).  And the lifespan of a star like the Sun is about 10 billion years.
> 
> Let us say that you only want to visit 10% of the stars in the galaxy - that's 10 to 40 billion stars.  Even if you visit one every single year, most of the stars will burn out long before you can reach them!  Oh, and in only 4 billion years, the Milky Way is going to collide with Andromeda, and what do you figure that's going to do with your 10-billion-year exploration plan?




Nah.  It wouldn't take anywhere near that long.  This is a race that is highly advanced, so it has the capabilities to farm their other planets, asteroids, comets, etc. for resources.  They would be capable of making trillions of these probes to send to the various stars.  There are an estimated 100-400 billion stars.  They could send enough probes to send multiples to each star to investigate, so we're still looking at about 10 million years to search the whole galaxy, and much less time to reach the majority of stars.


----------



## Maxperson (Nov 29, 2018)

Dannyalcatraz said:


> To put a different spin on things than those who have replied before me...
> 
> Even if you assume the building of a single probe, it is still going to need the functional equivalen of perfect replication to perform explorations over millions of years just to keep itself functioning.  Never mind unexpected collisions or cosmic events- parts wear out and need replacing, even when operating entirely within design parameters.  Materials deteriorate.




We are still finding/inventing more and more durable materials.  It is very reasonable to think that an alien civilization that advanced could have come up with a material that will take longer than 10 million years to break down to the point where the probes lose the ability to function properly.

https://futurism.com/mit-unveils-new-material-thats-strongest-and-lightest-on-earth


----------



## Dannyalcatraz (Nov 29, 2018)

Shasarak said:


> So we know this already and we already have ways to deal with it now.  Right now.  And yet in the future replication is going to be so complicated that we will not be able to deal with a simple quality control issue?  How exactly does that work?




We deal with it by making new parts with new tools; by installing new software; by creating and revising blueprints- IOW, by the expenditure of more energy and resources in imperfect replication.

A probe on a million year mission will not have that option.  When its blueprints go bad, there won’t be someone there to reload them.



> Are we suddenly going to run out of Iphones because someone loses the plans?  Is the 1,001 copy going to spontaneously develop an AI?  Does the existance of an Iphone X suddenly mean that an Iphone 4 does not work anymore?




No.  But look at any mass produced good and you’ll see the effects of entropy.   A certain % of iPhones are never released from the factory every year due to their failing QC tests.  And _STILL_ defective phones hit the market.  The iPhone 5 had a period when they had to recall a fairly sizeable number of phones they sold somehow passed QC despite being visibly damaged.


> We seem to have achieved a lot in our existence without "perfect" replication.




Yes, by expending more resources and correcting the inevitable errors.  We’re still subject to the laws of thermodynamics.  



> I am guessing that there were a lot of surprised people when scientists finally proved that the Earth was round.




Hellenistic astronomers considered the spherical nature of the earth as a given by 3rd century BC.  So really, not as many as you seem to imply.


----------



## Umbran (Nov 29, 2018)

Dannyalcatraz said:


> Yes, by expending more resources and correcting the inevitable errors.




More important - we don't have a rather specific mission we are intended to complete over a million years.  With no particular goal, we are free to wander around, and not be the same generation to generation.

Or, to put it another way, imagine that we had been created to be a specific way, and do a specific thing... back when we were, oh, _Homo erectus_.  How far off script are we now?


----------



## Dannyalcatraz (Nov 29, 2018)

Maxperson said:


> We are still finding/inventing more and more durable materials.  It is very reasonable to think that an alien civilization that advanced could have come up with a material that will take longer than 10 million years to break down to the point where the probes lose the ability to function properly.
> 
> https://futurism.com/mit-unveils-new-material-thats-strongest-and-lightest-on-earth



Possible?  Perhaps.  Probable?  Mmmmmmmmmm.  Color me skeptical.

It is highly improbable that any one kind of “Unobtanium” will have all of the necessary properties to make a million year probe.

Think about the properties of materials that would be required to make a million year probe.  You need electrical conductivity.  You need electrical insulators.  You need thermal conductors.  You need thermal insulators.  You need things that are hard but not brittle.  You need materials that are ductile but not weak.

If you only have a shell of Unobtanium, but you’re still reliant on things like silicon, palladium, and the like for internal parts, you’re still going to have a probe that fails well short of mission’s end.

While there are (as I recall) materials whose physical properties can change radically or even diametrically under certain circumstances, they probably do so only in different physical states- something may conceivably be an insulator as a solid but a conductor as a plasma.

Furthermore radiation- from internal and external sources- can radically affect any and all of a given material’s physical properties.
https://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/19710015558.pdf

So asking for materials to make immutable million year probes to get around entropy at that time scale probably raises as many practical problems than it solves.


----------



## Hussar (Nov 29, 2018)

Shasarak said:


> I was listening to Avi Loeb talking about his interstellar project to get a 1g probe to Alpha Centuri at 0.2c.  So 20 years to get there and then 4 years to get a signal back to Earth the future really is now.




I think you linked the wrong article in that second link.  That's an article about a comet that there are some questions about how it's accelerating.  

But, I did a bit of googling and found this article:



			
				https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/100-million-plan-will-send-probes-to-the-nearest-star1/ said:
			
		

> Lubin’s roadmap laid out myriad obstacles that any laser-propelled interstellar mission would have to overcome, such as linking many smaller lasers into a kilometer-scale array and engineering lightweight, gossamer-thin sails strong enough to endure the array’s gigawatt-scale pulses as well as persuading policy makers to allow the construction of a laser system that could in principle be used as a weapon. The probes will also need to transmit observations back to Earth using onboard lasers with just a few watts of power—a problem potentially solvable by using the giant Earthbound laser array as a receiver. But the biggest obstacle of all was simply a matter of cost: At an estimated present-day price of approximately $10 per watt of laser power, building and operating Breakthrough Starshot’s 100-gigawatt array today could cost as much as $1 trillion.




Yeah, good luck with that.  A trillion dollars to send a 1 gram probe.  That's somewhere near 1% of the WORLD's GDP.


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## Umbran (Nov 29, 2018)

Dannyalcatraz said:


> Possible?  Perhaps.  Probable?  Mmmmmmmmmm.  Color me skeptical.
> 
> It is highly improbable that any one kind of “Unobtanium” will have all of the necessary properties to make a million year probe.




To be fair - you don't need an individual probe to last a million years.  You need the *species* to last that long.

Each probe has to last the journey from one star system to the next.  At that point, it probably unpacks itself, does its harvesting and replication.  It probably does *not* pack itself up to then go on to another star system - its children do that. 

I think people underestimate how harsh the interstellar environment is, but we dont' need each individual probe to last to the end of the project.


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## Dannyalcatraz (Nov 29, 2018)

Umbran said:


> To be fair - you don't need an individual probe to last a million years.  You need the *species* to last that long.
> 
> Each probe has to last the journey from one star system to the next.  At that point, it probably unpacks itself, does its harvesting and replication.  It probably does *not* pack itself up to then go on to another star system - its children do that.
> 
> I think people underestimate how harsh the interstellar environment is, but we dont' need each individual probe to last to the end of the project.



I’m pretty sure some in this thread were postulating super-high tech materials to get around the requirement of a replication process, which is what I was responding to.  I mean, take a look at Maxperson’s post I quoted and correct me if I’m wrong.


----------



## Umbran (Nov 29, 2018)

Dannyalcatraz said:


> I’m pretty sure some in this thread were postulating super-high tech materials to get around the requirement of a replication process, which is what I was responding to.  I mean, take a look at Maxperson’s post I quoted and correct me if I’m wrong.




Ah.  Well, if you don't have a replication process, we aren't talking a million years.  We are talking times that exceed the lifetime of the stars you'd like to visit...


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## Shasarak (Nov 29, 2018)

Dannyalcatraz said:


> We deal with it by making new parts with new tools; by installing new software; by creating and revising blueprints- IOW, by the expenditure of more energy and resources in imperfect replication.
> 
> A probe on a million year mission will not have that option.  When its blueprints go bad, there won’t be someone there to reload them.




You dont have a probe on a million year mission.  You have a probe on a how ever long it takes to get to the next system mission.  

And if you have a self replicating self-repairing probe then it creates new tools, reloads software, runs debugging software.



> No.  But look at any mass produced good and you’ll see the effects of entropy.   A certain % of iPhones are never released from the factory every year due to their failing QC tests.  And _STILL_ defective phones hit the market.  The iPhone 5 had a period when they had to recall a fairly sizeable number of phones they sold somehow passed QC despite being visibly damaged.




And even with those defective units Apple still managed to sell over 70 million units.  If we could do that with old Earth technology then why would an even more advanced species not be able to improve on that



> Yes, by expending more resources and correcting the inevitable errors.  We’re still subject to the laws of thermodynamics.




Why would a self replicating probe not be able to collect more resources?  That seems like an odd flaw to build into a self replicating exploration probe.



> Hellenistic astronomers considered the spherical nature of the earth as a given by 3rd century BC.  So really, not as many as you seem to imply.




Actually my point is that your statement is a tautology; surprising discoveries make you feel surprised.


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## Hussar (Nov 29, 2018)

Shasarak said:


> You dont have a probe on a million year mission.  You have a probe on a how ever long it takes to get to the next system mission.
> 
> And if you have a self replicating self-repairing probe then it creates new tools, reloads software, runs debugging software.
> 
> ...




You seem to be missing the point though.  How does it create new tools?  Where does it reload software from?  Where does that debugging software reside?  When we're talking about crossing interstellar distances, in that harsh of an environment, the odds of errors creeping in are very high.  And any error will cascade over generations because there's no actual way to fix the error.  You need a machine that can operate constantly for decades (at least) in the most hostile environment imaginable, while completing incredibly complex tasks (finding resources, refining those resources, building a factory of some sort that can then utilize those resources, all from scratch without any outside input).  All without introducing any errors into the system, not a single flaw or imperfection, over hundreds or perhaps thousands of generations lasting millions of years.

Look, it makes for fantastic SF, but, it's just not very feasible.


----------



## Dannyalcatraz (Nov 29, 2018)

> And if you have a self replicating self-repairing probe then it creates new tools, reloads software, runs debugging software.




All you’re doing is highlighting points of failure.  To make new tools, all of the processes for making those tools must be perfect; the software must remain uncorrupted.  And the fact of the matter is, because of entropy, they won’t.  

Assuming the probe needs something as simple as a cog, that cog must be cast and polished to the necessary tolerances, for our purposes, on an autoCAD machine of some kind.  But dies wear out; polishing surfaces abrade.  Even at losing just a few molecules per use, over great spans of time, they become unusable.  That’s why flowing water forms canyons (and super-pure water dissolves metals), why centuries of walking formed dips in the marble stairs to the Akropolis.  Or why he merest pushing of human fingertips have obliterated the features of the feet of finely crafted statues in churches around the world.

At some point they’ll have to be replaced.  Errors in the OS _and_ debugging _and_ autoCAD software will creep in...even in the downloadable backups.



> Why would a self replicating probe not be able to collect more resources? That seems like an odd flaw to build into a self replicating exploration probe.




It would have to, by definition.  But, absent perfect replication, it will eventually fail to perfectly self-replicate/repair.  A crucial cog will fail; a software error will cause a malfunction.  Then it will need- and probably be unable to get- an outside actor to repair it.


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## Shasarak (Nov 29, 2018)

> All you’re doing is highlighting points of failure.  To make new tools, all of the processes for making those tools must be perfect; the software must remain uncorrupted.  And the fact of the matter is, because of entropy, they won’t.




Its not increasing points of failure, it is overlapping security features.  If your first response fails, you got your second response, then your third response.  There is no single thing which can fail and take down the whole system.

If you want a comparison just look at the bodies immune system, multiple overlapping redundancies.




> Assuming the probe needs something as simple as a cog, that cog must be cast and polished to the necessary tolerances, for our purposes, on an autoCAD machine of some kind.  But dies wear out; polishing surfaces abrade.  Even at losing just a few molecules per use, over great spans of time, they become unusable.  That’s why flowing water forms canyons (and super-pure water dissolves metals), why centuries of walking formed dips in the marble stairs to the Akropolis.  Or why he merest pushing of human fingertips have obliterated the features of the feet of finely crafted statues in churches around the world.




Which is why most manufacturing plants dont rely on a human to jam a microchip into your computer with their thumb.



> At some point they’ll have to be replaced.  Errors in the OS _and_ debugging _and_ autoCAD software will creep in...even in the downloadable backups.




And as errors creep in they get fixed or replaced. 



> It would have to, by definition.  But, absent perfect replication, it will eventually fail to perfectly self-replicate/repair.  A crucial cog will fail; a software error will cause a malfunction.  Then it will need- and probably be unable to get- an outside actor to repair it.




It has never been my argument that you can make something that will last forever.  Hundreds of years is probably all that you would need to explore the Milky Way completely.


----------



## Hussar (Nov 29, 2018)

Shasarak said:


> Its not increasing points of failure, it is overlapping security features.  If your first response fails, you got your second response, then your third response.  There is no single thing which can fail and take down the whole system.
> 
> If you want a comparison just look at the bodies immune system, multiple overlapping redundancies.




And, barring the intervention of modern medicine, the human body lasts a handful of decades.  Even WITH the best care and healthiest lifestyle, your multiple overlapping redundancies last a century (maybe a smidgeon more) at best.




> Which is why most manufacturing plants dont rely on a human to jam a microchip into your computer with their thumb.
> 
> 
> 
> And as errors creep in they get fixed or replaced.




How?  There's no outside fixes.  You're too far away for any reasonable chance of communication, so, all errors must be fixed by the thing that is malfunctioning.  That presumes that the programming is good enough to actually recognize an error and that the programming that recognizes errors remains uncorrupted for centuries or millennia.



> It has never been my argument that you can make something that will last forever.  Hundreds of years is probably all that you would need to explore the Milky Way completely.




See, that's the problem.  You flat out cannot explore the Milky Way in centuries.  Not without faster than light travel anyway.  We're not talking centuries, or even millennia.  We're talking truly deep time - megayears.  Again, unless our understanding of the universe is really, really flawed, and there's no current evidence that it is, that's just not possible.  There are just too many things that can go wrong, and, given the timespans we're talking about, the chances of failure are pretty much guaranteed. 

Heck, entire species don't last a million years sometimes.  The universe is a very hostile place.  

At best, we might make the nearest star or two with probes, but, that's about it.  Actually establishing colonies?  Not without some serious changes in our understanding of the universe.  

Even something like colonizing Mars, in the long run, isn't feasible.  It took billions of years to make Earth as habitable as it is.  Domed cities?  Great.  But, over the long term - as in hundreds of thousands or millions of years - that won't work because eventually you won't be able to replace lost resources in your dome from Earth.   Even if you do manage to turn Mars into a "living" planet with a functioning ecosystem, gravity will eventually get you.  Mars can't support life indefinitely.  The lack of gravity means that the atmosphere will eventually bleed off.  Lose the Earth and Mars dies.


----------



## Maxperson (Nov 30, 2018)

Umbran said:


> Ah.  Well, if you don't have a replication process, we aren't talking a million years.  We are talking times that exceed the lifetime of the stars you'd like to visit...




Not if the materials takes millions of years to deteriorate to the point where they fail.  Such a super advanced civilization will have materials to match.


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## Maxperson (Nov 30, 2018)

Hussar said:


> You seem to be missing the point though.  How does it create new tools?  Where does it reload software from?  Where does that debugging software reside?  When we're talking about crossing interstellar distances, in that harsh of an environment, the odds of errors creeping in are very high.




Why are you assuming that this highly advanced civilization is only as advanced as we are?  The interstellar environment is harsh to us, because we don't have the advanced materials to handle it.  It would be child's play to a civilization as advanced as we are talking about.


----------



## Maxperson (Nov 30, 2018)

Hussar said:


> Even something like colonizing Mars, in the long run, isn't feasible.  It took billions of years to make Earth as habitable as it is.  Domed cities?  Great.  But, over the long term - as in hundreds of thousands or millions of years - that won't work because eventually you won't be able to replace lost resources in your dome from Earth.   Even if you do manage to turn Mars into a "living" planet with a functioning ecosystem, gravity will eventually get you.  Mars can't support life indefinitely.  The lack of gravity means that the atmosphere will eventually bleed off.  Lose the Earth and Mars dies.




Mars has metals, water, minerals, etc.  The resources are already there to replace resources for the dome.


----------



## Shasarak (Nov 30, 2018)

Maxperson said:


> Why are you assuming that this highly advanced civilization is only as advanced as we are?  The interstellar environment is harsh to us, because we don't have the advanced materials to handle it.  It would be child's play to a civilization as advanced as we are talking about.




If a culture is able to develop Nano-tech then they would be able to create materials on the atomic level.  So a nano-tech probe could land on an ice asteroid and essentially transform it into Unobtainium or Handwavium or what ever else was needed.

Good old Replicators, they will never let us down or turn on us.


----------



## Umbran (Nov 30, 2018)

Hussar said:


> See, that's the problem.  You flat out cannot explore the Milky Way in centuries.  Not without faster than light travel anyway.  We're not talking centuries, or even millennia.  We're talking truly deep time - megayears.




No, on this he is correct - you need a probe to last hundreds of years, maybe a couple thousand.  The entire exploration project takes a million or two years, all told.

I will say... again... _you don't need a single probe to last forever_.  One probe makes one trip to one star, then reproduces itself a dozen times over, and the *children* do the further exploring, and the parent can then fail.  You don't need individuals to survive megayears - only the species.  And that's hard enough.  

And no, this is not about colonization.  This is sending machines out to explore the galaxy for us, but we aren't along for the trip.



> Even something like colonizing Mars, in the long run, isn't feasible.  It took billions of years to make Earth as habitable as it is.  Domed cities?  Great.  But, over the long term - as in hundreds of thousands or millions of years - that won't work because eventually you won't be able to replace lost resources in your dome from Earth.   Even if you do manage to turn Mars into a "living" planet with a functioning ecosystem, gravity will eventually get you.  Mars can't support life indefinitely.  The lack of gravity means that the atmosphere will eventually bleed off.  Lose the Earth and Mars dies.




Well, if you reset the biome of Mars, and then ignore it, yes, you'll lose the atmosphere in the end.

But, we are in the middle of proving that *accidentally* we can impact an atmosphere enough in just a century to impact the climate of a planet, are we not?  Presumably, then, *intentionally* doing so is not out of reach.  It would forever be a thing of active management - you can't just set it up and let it go.


----------



## Maxperson (Nov 30, 2018)

Shasarak said:


> If a culture is able to develop Nano-tech then they would be able to create materials on the atomic level.  So a nano-tech probe could land on an ice asteroid and essentially transform it into Unobtainium or Handwavium or what ever else was needed.
> 
> Good old Replicators, they will never let us down or turn on us.




If we can already do things like this, a race thousands or millions of years more advanced...


https://qz.com/872050/thinnest-wire-ever-diamond-coating/


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## Hussar (Nov 30, 2018)

Maxperson said:


> Mars has metals, water, minerals, etc.  The resources are already there to replace resources for the dome.




Really?  Mars has bees?  And worms?  And arable land?  Remember, you aren't just creating structures, but, a complete biosphere.



Umbran said:


> No, on this he is correct - you need a probe to last hundreds of years, maybe a couple thousand.  The entire exploration project takes a million or two years, all told.
> 
> I will say... again... _you don't need a single probe to last forever_.  One probe makes one trip to one star, then reproduces itself a dozen times over, and the *children* do the further exploring, and the parent can then fail.  You don't need individuals to survive megayears - only the species.  And that's hard enough.
> 
> And no, this is not about colonization.  This is sending machines out to explore the galaxy for us, but we aren't along for the trip.




Fair enough.  But, now you're talking about thousands and thousands of generations.  All replicating flawlessly, without a single error, down through the generations.  Every replication multiplies the number of flaws that can enter the system.



> Well, if you reset the biome of Mars, and then ignore it, yes, you'll lose the atmosphere in the end.
> 
> But, we are in the middle of proving that *accidentally* we can impact an atmosphere enough in just a century to impact the climate of a planet, are we not?  Presumably, then, *intentionally* doing so is not out of reach.  It would forever be a thing of active management - you can't just set it up and let it go.




Again, as you say, it's forever a thing of active management.  Without constant support from Earth, which we're positing since the Earth has become unlivable, Mars has a half life of a few million years, at best.  You cannot actively manage when you don't have the raw materials you need.  What happens when your imported, genetically modified bees die?  A terraformed planet will always be impoverished when it comes to biodiversity.  It can't not be.  There's just no practical way to get that much biodiversity out of the Earth's gravity well.


----------



## Nom (Nov 30, 2018)

Imaculata said:


> It is indeed like taking a spoon full of water from the ocean, finding life, and then concluding that there for the rest of the ocean must not have any life in it.



I'm not sure this is a good analogy.  On the evidence we have, the ocean is inherently life-bearing.

Imagine instead that you found a small rock in the ocean, and investigating it you discover that it is actually hollow and there is a colony of some small creature living inside.  You can discern no mechanism by which the creatures got there, and the raw ocean environment is highly hostile to them.  Surveying the nearby ocean, you discover no further colonies, nor for that matter rocks that might be potential sites for such colonies.  Expanding your search to the limits of how far you can go, you find a few candidate rocks, but no evidence of colonies.  But there's a lot, lot more ocean out there.

How long would you have to search to find a similar occupied rock?  (I avoid the term "colonised" because that implies that the creatures were transported from an external place).

To useful answer that question, you need a workable hypothesis for how the creatures got there.  All the evidence suggests that there is no external biological interaction for a very long time, if ever.  If you think they came from some sort of proto-lifeform that was transported to the rock, then perhaps its likely that the same happened elsewhere.  If you think it was spontaneously generated, then you need a model for how this might have happened and how rare those circumstances are.  If you think a superior intelligence was involved, then you need some sort of model of that superior intelligence's actions and purposes.

PS: you're doing all this as one of the creatures in the colony


----------



## Vishal Gupta (Nov 30, 2018)

A few years ago we didn't even know that our earth spins and not the sun.
So yeah.. we can't be sure that we're alone. Lets wait and see what comes next.


----------



## Dannyalcatraz (Nov 30, 2018)

Shasarak said:


> Its not increasing points of failure, it is overlapping security features.  If your first response fails, you got your second response, then your third response.  There is no single thing which can fail and take down the whole system.




It may seem paradoxical, but the more complexity a system has- including overlapping security/redundant subsystems- the more points of failure it has.  Compare a 1957 Chevy to a 2018 Caddy: one can be repaired by a shade-tree mechanic, the other requires computers just to figure out what went wrong.

In the case of the probe, failure of the repair tools, the operating software, debugging software, the backup software, etc. could EACH cause a failure requiring outside correction.

If the repair tools fail, it cannot repair itself until THEY are repaired or replaced, which may not happen before systemic failure.

If the operating system fails, the probe becomes a high-tech asteroid.

If the debugging software fails, errors accumulate until it malfunctions catastrophically.

If the backup software is corrupted, there won’t be anything for the systems to reboot from.



> If you want a comparison just look at the bodies immune system, multiple overlapping redundancies.




And they still fail...more quickly if we take excessive risks, don’t eat properly, go for annual checkups, take our meds, etc. because our cells are not capable of perfect replication.

Name a system within your body, and odds are, failure of any one will be fatal.



> Which is why most manufacturing plants dont rely on a human to jam a microchip into your computer with their thumb.




Even the most sophisticated machine we have today eventually requires a human repair or maintenance visit.  But that wasn’t my point.

It doesn’t matter what is contacting what, there is still wear.  The metal blades that cut leather for jackets, boots, furniture, etc. become blunted by act of cutting the leather.  Casting molds may last months or years, but they all eventually fail, becoming progressively less accurate with each use.



> And as errors creep in they get fixed or replaced.




But not by themselves, especially if the debugging or backup software is itself damaged.



> It has never been my argument that you can make something that will last forever.  Hundreds of years is probably all that you would need to explore the Milky Way completely.



That is fantastically optimistic.


----------



## Imaculata (Nov 30, 2018)

Nom said:


> I'm not sure this is a good analogy.  On the evidence we have, the ocean is inherently life-bearing.
> 
> Imagine instead that you found a small rock in the ocean, and investigating it you discover that it is actually hollow and there is a colony of some small creature living inside.  You can discern no mechanism by which the creatures got there, and the raw ocean environment is highly hostile to them.  Surveying the nearby ocean, you discover no further colonies, nor for that matter rocks that might be potential sites for such colonies.  Expanding your search to the limits of how far you can go, you find a few candidate rocks, but no evidence of colonies.  But there's a lot, lot more ocean out there.




This is not a good analogy either. You have changed it purposefully to make it seem as if our entire universe is hostile to all life, as if to say, isn't it a miracle that life some how developed on our planet? Which is a position I do not agree with. Life developed on this planet, and in doing so, adapted to it's environment, just as a puddle of water assumes the shape of a dip in the road. It is not extraordinary that the puddle is then perfectly attuned to the shape of that dip in the road. 

There is no reason to presume that life (like the puddle) could not adapt to a different environment. It is not even a given that life can't develop in the void of space itself. We simply do not know. Right on our planet, life exists in some of the most hostile places; sometimes right on the edge of underwater volcanoes. Which shows that life (as we know it) seems extremely resilient to hostile environments.

Also, we didn't even remotely "Survey the nearby ocean". We hardly looked at anything nearby at all. We looked at one grain of sand in a sandbox so huge, that we can't even assert that we searched nearby... we hardly searched at all, because we lack the means to do so, given the huge distances. We didn't examine a single other planet with life on it. In our own solar system we are not done with examining all of the objects in it either.

So, instead of comparing our planet to a rock in an ocean, it would be more accurate to compare our entire solar system to a rock, which we've only examined a small area of. And of the area of this rock that we examined, we found life.


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## Maxperson (Nov 30, 2018)

Hussar said:


> Really?  Mars has bees?  And worms?  And arable land?  Remember, you aren't just creating structures, but, a complete biosphere.




Once the initial transplant of those creatures is done, the rest is just maintaining the equipment to sustain them.  That can all be done locally.



> Fair enough.  But, now you're talking about thousands and thousands of generations.  All replicating flawlessly, without a single error, down through the generations.  Every replication multiplies the number of flaws that can enter the system.




That's simply not true.  Your body replicates cell constantly and errors happen all the time without any ill effect.  It's only when a cell replication botches itself into a disease like cancer or leukemia that things go to hell in a hand basket.  The same would apply to the probes.  Lots of errors would simply have no effect, depending on what the error was.  There also wouldn't always be an error on a replication, and if the materials last a very, very long time(and they would with a species that advanced), you'd only need a handful(if any, depending on material quality) replications.


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## Umbran (Nov 30, 2018)

Hussar said:


> Fair enough.  But, now you're talking about thousands and thousands of generations.  All replicating flawlessly, without a single error, down through the generations.  Every replication multiplies the number of flaws that can enter the system.




Yep.  I made that point several pages back.




> Without constant support from Earth, which we're positing since the Earth has become unlivable, Mars has a half life of a few million years, at best.




So, a few _hundreds of times_ longer than we have had civilization?  This is supposed to be a criticism?



> You cannot actively manage when you don't have the raw materials you need.  What happens when your imported, genetically modified bees die?




Why do they die?  

Up to the point that you know their wild population is stable, you're keeping breeding populations in captivity on the side, to repopulate the species.  You've been working out their needs in enclosed spaces (which you need to support the people until terraforming is done anyway) gradually moving them over to Mars surface conditions over the generations.



> A terraformed planet will always be impoverished when it comes to biodiversity.  It can't not be.  There's just no practical way to get that much biodiversity out of the Earth's gravity well.




Dude, bugs and seeds are lightweight - way lighter than humans!  We can transport enough seeds to comprise a viable breeding population of pretty much any plant you can name in a sack that weighs less than a single human.  Bees are hardly big compared to, say, you.  Add whatever technology comes along after CRISPR, and biodiversity won't really be the issue.

There are big questions around terraforming, but getting the plants and bugs isn't the hard part.  The hard part is understanding medium and long term atmosphere and climate dynamics.


----------



## Dannyalcatraz (Nov 30, 2018)

> Dude, bugs and seeds are lightweight - way lighter than humans! We can transport enough seeds to comprise a viable breeding population of pretty much any plant you can name in a sack that weighs less than a single human. Bees are hardly big compared to, say, you. Add whatever technology comes along after CRISPR, and biodiversity won't really be the issue.
> 
> There are big questions around terraforming, but getting the plants and bugs isn't the hard part. The hard part is understanding medium and long term atmosphere and climate dynamics.




Tangentially, sci-fi writer James Blish was aware of things along those lines many decades ago when he penned the sci-fantasy short story,“Surface Tension”.

In it, a human colonization ship crash-lands on a distant planet which is Earth-like but whose only landmass is completely covered in shallow puddles of water and mostly microscopic life forms. Normal humans could not survive on this planet, so the crew must genetically engineer their descendants into something that can survive. (Blish coined the term pantropy to refer to this concept.) They create a race of microscopic aquatic humanoids to complete their mission and colonize the planet.


----------



## Shasarak (Nov 30, 2018)

Dannyalcatraz said:


> If the operating system fails, the probe becomes a high-tech asteroid.
> 
> If the debugging software fails, errors accumulate until it malfunctions catastrophically.
> 
> If the backup software is corrupted, there won’t be anything for the systems to reboot from.




And if the operating system fails then the debugging system reinstalls it.

And if the debugging system fails then the backup software reinstalls it.

And if the backup system fails then the operating system reinstalls it.

This is stuff that happens all the time right now.



> And they still fail...more quickly if we take excessive risks, don’t eat properly, go for annual checkups, take our meds, etc. because our cells are not capable of perfect replication.
> 
> Name a system within your body, and odds are, failure of any one will be fatal.




Ok, so lets say that your skin integrity fails.  Your claim is that odds are that will be fatal.  But that is not the case, your skin fails you all the time and you dont die.  And not only do you not die but your body automatically without your assistance can repair that damage.  You dont need medicine, or eating properly or an annual check up for it to happen.



> Even the most sophisticated machine we have today eventually requires a human repair or maintenance visit.  But that wasn’t my point.
> 
> It doesn’t matter what is contacting what, there is still wear.  The metal blades that cut leather for jackets, boots, furniture, etc. become blunted by act of cutting the leather.  Casting molds may last months or years, but they all eventually fail, becoming progressively less accurate with each use.




Yes thing wear out and get fixed.  That is the whole point of a self replicating machine.

Maybe the term is not as self explanatory as I imagine.



> That is fantastically optimistic.




There is a project to try and send a probe to Alpha Centuri at 0.2c.  At that speed you would not even need the probe to operate for much more then 20 years.

Its not even fantastic, its just an Engineering problem now.


----------



## Hussar (Dec 1, 2018)

Maxperson said:


> Once the initial transplant of those creatures is done, the rest is just maintaining the equipment to sustain them.  That can all be done locally.
> 
> 
> 
> That's simply not true.  Your body replicates cell constantly and errors happen all the time without any ill effect.  It's only when a cell replication botches itself into a disease like cancer or leukemia that things go to hell in a hand basket.  The same would apply to the probes.  Lots of errors would simply have no effect, depending on what the error was.  There also wouldn't always be an error on a replication, and if the materials last a very, very long time(and they would with a species that advanced), you'd only need a handful(if any, depending on material quality) replications.




Your body dies in a handful of decades, with all that replication.  If those errors were so trivial, why do natural humans (i.e. humans without advanced medicines) die in about 40 years and even with the best of care, only live about 80 years for the most part?



Umbran said:


> Yep.  I made that point several pages back.
> 
> 
> 
> ...




Because you don't have a broad enough biodiversity.  Because you cannot bring enough different species out of the gravity well of Earth, then modify them all enough to live on Mars.  So the first bacterial mutation wipes out your entire species.

All you have to do to see that happening now is look at bananas.  We've already wiped out one species of bananas and it looks like our current crops will be gone within a few decades.



> Up to the point that you know their wild population is stable, you're keeping breeding populations in captivity on the side, to repopulate the species.  You've been working out their needs in enclosed spaces (which you need to support the people until terraforming is done anyway) gradually moving them over to Mars surface conditions over the generations.




Because you only have so few strains of bees (as well as EVERY other living thing on the planet), your massively impoverished biosphere will not survive on the long term.



> Dude, bugs and seeds are lightweight - way lighter than humans!  We can transport enough seeds to comprise a viable breeding population of pretty much any plant you can name in a sack that weighs less than a single human.  Bees are hardly big compared to, say, you.  Add whatever technology comes along after CRISPR, and biodiversity won't really be the issue.




So, now we're positing that our putative colonists will have the ability to genetically manipulate entire species on a global scale every time a new blight shows up?  Every new disease, blight, whatever will just get magically resolved by the power of genetic manipulation?  



> There are big questions around terraforming, but getting the plants and bugs isn't the hard part.  The hard part is understanding medium and long term atmosphere and climate dynamics.




Well, yes, those are big problems too.  But the fact that you have to manufacture arable soil for an entire planet is a HUGE issue.  We're not talking about soil here.  Mars has no biosphere at all.  Every ton of soil you need to grow food will have to be manufactured, on site, using various species that will need to be brought from Earth, as well as means to control those species and keep them in balance, in the wild, without constant intervention from people.

Because if you don't do that, you're stuck living in domes forever.


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## Maxperson (Dec 1, 2018)

Hussar said:


> Your body dies in a handful of decades, with all that replication.  If those errors were so trivial, why do natural humans (i.e. humans without advanced medicines) die in about 40 years and even with the best of care, only live about 80 years for the most part?




You do realize that there are about 10,000 trillion cell replications in a human lifetime, right?  10,000 trillion before something catastrophic happens.

https://www.quora.com/How-many-cell-divisions-occur-during-an-average-human-lifetime


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## Umbran (Dec 1, 2018)

Maxperson said:


> You do realize that there are about 10,000 trillion cell replications in a human lifetime, right?  10,000 trillion before something catastrophic happens.




Yep. And cancer.

And you figure that we will be as good as Mother Nature at correcting things?


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## Maxperson (Dec 1, 2018)

Umbran said:


> Yep. And cancer.
> 
> And you figure that we will be as good as Mother Nature at correcting things?




Nope!  But I do figure a civilization that is thousands or millions of years more advanced than we are would be as good or better.  But heck, let's only make them half as good and give those probes 5000 trillion replications.


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## Umbran (Dec 1, 2018)

Shasarak said:


> And if the operating system fails then the debugging system reinstalls it.
> 
> And if the debugging system fails then the backup software reinstalls it.
> 
> ...




It happens all the time right now, but no system we've made has lasted *for centuries in high-radiation environments*.  



> But that is not the case, your skin fails you all the time and you dont die.




You aren't in space.  You aren't in hard vacuum and high radiation, with micrometeorites impacting you at 0.1c.  



> Maybe the term is not as self explanatory as I imagine.




Self-replication and self-repair are not the same thing.

The machine self-replicates in a resource rich environment of a solar system.  It has to self-repair in the second most resource poor environment available - the void of interstellar space.



> There is a project to try and send a probe to Alpha Centuri at 0.2c.  At that speed you would not even need the probe to operate for much more then 20 years.
> 
> Its not even fantastic, its just an Engineering problem now.




"just an engineering problem"  How wonderfully dismissive of how hard engineering is!  

The Romans knew that steam could produce motion.  From there, it was "just an engineerign problem" to build a steam engine.  But it took 1700 years or so to come up with a 10-horsepower engine.

And that probe doesn't have to do the complicated work of hunting down raw materials, reaching them, refining them, machining them, and replicating itself.  Getting there is easy.  Duplicatign the work dy an entire civilization to build you is another.


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## MoonSong (Dec 1, 2018)

Umbran said:


> "just an engineering problem"  How wonderfully dismissive of how hard engineering is!
> 
> The Romans knew that steam could produce motion.  From there, it was "just an engineerign problem" to build a steam engine.  But it took 1700 years or so to come up with a 10-horsepower engine.



Well, part of it was the lack of economic incentives, you know slavery and stuff, and these ten centuries of constant warring... 




Hussar said:


> Well, yes, those are big problems too.  But the fact that you have to manufacture arable soil for an entire planet is a HUGE issue.  We're not talking about soil here.  Mars has no biosphere at all.  Every ton of soil you need to grow food will have to be manufactured, on site, using various species that will need to be brought from Earth, as well as means to control those species and keep them in balance, in the wild, without constant intervention from people.
> 
> Because if you don't do that, you're stuck living in domes forever.




It's harder than that, Biosphere 2 was a total failure, and the team behind it had plenty of access to plants, animals and microorganisms. All of it in a quite small space relative to a planet. If we can't do a simulation in "easy mode", what hope do we stand to do it for reals?


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## Maxperson (Dec 1, 2018)

MoonSong said:


> It's harder than that, Biosphere 2 was a total failure, and the team behind it had plenty of access to plants, animals and microorganisms. All of it in a quite small space relative to a planet. If we can't do a simulation in "easy mode", what hope do we stand to do it for reals?




The first attempt failed due to Earth.  They didn't compensate for things from Earth, including internal vs. external politics.  It also failed due to the small number of animals and insect brought with them, which would not happen on a trip to Mars.  They would bring more.

The second attempt achieved self-sufficiency with regard to food.  It failed due to Steve Bannon and others getting into arguments and then those people compromising the mission.  People kept entering and leaving the biosphere. That could not have happened on Mars.

I guess both failed due to Earth.


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## Kaodi (Dec 1, 2018)

Two questions (for now): How much extra mass would Mars need in order to hold onto an atmosphere properly? And why are we so sure that all life on Earth came from a literal single event and not multiple identical events?


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## MoonSong (Dec 1, 2018)

Maxperson said:


> The first attempt failed due to Earth.  They didn't compensate for things from Earth, including internal vs. external politics.  It also failed due to the small number of animals and insect brought with them, which would not happen on a trip to Mars.  They would bring more.




Obviously they should take more, but don't forget that they had extinctions overnight due to problems with the atmosphere, they had a lot of problems with oxygen levels. If something like that happens again in Mars it will kill all of the pollinators again it doesn't matter if they are few or a plenty. 



> The second attempt achieved self-sufficiency with regard to food.  It failed due to Steve Bannon and others getting into arguments and then those people compromising the mission.  People kept entering and leaving the biosphere. That could not have happened on Mars.
> 
> I guess both failed due to Earth.



I wonder if the self-sufficiency and the constant influxes of fresh air are somehow connected.



Kaodi said:


> Two questions (for now): How much extra mass would Mars need in order to hold onto an atmosphere properly? And why are we so sure that all life on Earth came from a literal single event and not multiple identical events?




I'm not sure about the first one, the bigger problem with Mars' atmosphere is not the mass of the planet, it is the lack of a magnetosphere. Without one the solar wind just chips away at the atmosphere with impunity. 

And the second one, from what I understand is simply because all living things so far on Earth share the same biological mechanisms, the same codon sizes, the same codon-to-aminoacid sequences -I'm not a biologist or a chemist, but from what I understand there's no chemical reason these should be unique-, the same kind and number of nucelotids. If we all come from two or more different sources, them being identical would be quite a long shot. The system of gene transcription that we use was but one possibility, there would also be other systems on living beings somewhere on Earth.


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## Maxperson (Dec 1, 2018)

MoonSong said:


> Obviously they should take more, but don't forget that they had extinctions overnight due to problems with the atmosphere, they had a lot of problems with oxygen levels. If something like that happens again in Mars it will kill all of the pollinators again it doesn't matter if they are few or a plenty.




True, but the problems were in large part due to Earth factors.  The failure of the first attempt doesn't show that there would be failure on mars, even with the same set-up.  It was an extremely flawed attempt. 



> I wonder if the self-sufficiency and the constant influxes of fresh air are somehow connected.




We don't know one way or the other.


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## Shasarak (Dec 1, 2018)

MoonSong said:


> It's harder than that, Biosphere 2 was a total failure, and the team behind it had plenty of access to plants, animals and microorganisms. All of it in a quite small space relative to a planet. If we can't do a simulation in "easy mode", what hope do we stand to do it for reals?




Is that not a good reason to keep doing it in easy mode until we can get it right?

I always love the Thomas Edison quote about developing the light bulb  “I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work.”


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## Shasarak (Dec 1, 2018)

Umbran said:


> "just an engineering problem"  How wonderfully dismissive of how hard engineering is!




Please "wonderfully dismissive".

1700 years to go from steam power to a 10-horsepower engine and then how many years after that to get a rocket so powerful that we could launch ourselves into space with it?

This is not asking Engineers to break the laws of physics and come up with a teleportation machine, the theory work has been done and now it is an Engineering problem.


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## Terry Mullins (Dec 2, 2018)

I think that life will be relatively common, but intelligent, technological life is rare. Also, space is really big. An intelligent race could be 500LY from us, and they wouldn't even have noticed us yet, if they are of comparable Tech. Light speed is a nasty limiter in this.


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## Zardnaar (Dec 2, 2018)

I think time and distance s the problem. For example the universe is 1 billion years old (roughly) and the Earht is arounf 4.5 billion years old. Thats means assuming a similar rate of evolution a potentially intelligent race evolved 9 billion years ago. 

 We have had radio for less than 100 years, radio telescopes for half that (?). We would need intelligent life to have a similar level of evolution and technology and be reasonably close to Earth (less than 25 light years) to detect them. 

 Also leaning towards no FTL travel which basically excludes interstellar travel.


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## Aeson (Dec 2, 2018)

Since we have only searched a small portion of space. I think it's funny aliens could be standing in our blind spot doing bunny ears. We wouldn't even notice. I know the odds are low but I'm easily amused.


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## dragoner (Dec 2, 2018)

I just read an astronomy paper on arvix that has the chance of Earth type planets around Sol type stars at 20-30%, which is very high, and means there are a lot of Earths out there. For the 'where are they' question about aliens, time and distance is the answer, the universe is big and old; though my pet answer is that we are an academic wildlife study, so they do watch us, and keep others from interfering.


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## MoonSong (Dec 2, 2018)

Zardnaar said:


> I think time and distance s the problem. For example the universe is 1 billion years old (roughly) and the Earht is arounf 4.5 billion years old. Thats means assuming a similar rate of evolution a potentially intelligent race evolved 9 billion years ago.
> 
> We have had radio for less than 100 years, radio telescopes for half that (?). We would need intelligent life to have a similar level of evolution and technology and be reasonably close to Earth (less than 25 light years) to detect them.
> 
> Also leaning towards no FTL travel which basically excludes interstellar travel.




Not likely. The universe is indeed old. But it hasn't always been as it is now. The early universe had only hidrogen and it takes a few generations of stars for heavier elements like carbon and oxygen to form. Even if we accept that more exotic bichemistries exist, all of them require a variety of elements to form. The  we need a few billion years for a host planet or moon to propperly form and cool Then it takes time for life to go from micro to macro and eventually into something with intelligence. (Which can actually never happen at all, since evolution is all about adaptation and survival not based upon a goal like intelligence)


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## trappedslider (Dec 2, 2018)

View attachment 103427


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## Zardnaar (Dec 3, 2018)

MoonSong said:


> Not likely. The universe is indeed old. But it hasn't always been as it is now. The early universe had only hidrogen and it takes a few generations of stars for heavier elements like carbon and oxygen to form. Even if we accept that more exotic bichemistries exist, all of them require a variety of elements to form. The  we need a few billion years for a host planet or moon to propperly form and cool Then it takes time for life to go from micro to macro and eventually into something with intelligence. (Which can actually never happen at all, since evolution is all about adaptation and survival not based upon a goal like intelligence)





IDK would conditions have been right say 4 billion years ago?

 I have seen theories saying we are the 1st.


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## Hussar (Dec 3, 2018)

Thing is, again, we're talking such enormous time scales.  Even two intelligent, tool using species could miss each other by a few hundred thousand years quite easily.  The odds of an intelligent, technological species existing at the same time as us, in the same neighbourhood as us, becomes very, very small.  Off by even 1% either way and we never see each other.  

Will we find life?  I'm fairly sure that we will.  I certainly believe that it is entirely plausible.  Will we find technological life?  That's a much more dubious proposition.


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## Zardnaar (Dec 3, 2018)

Hussar said:


> Thing is, again, we're talking such enormous time scales.  Even two intelligent, tool using species could miss each other by a few hundred thousand years quite easily.  The odds of an intelligent, technological species existing at the same time as us, in the same neighbourhood as us, becomes very, very small.  Off by even 1% either way and we never see each other.
> 
> Will we find life?  I'm fairly sure that we will.  I certainly believe that it is entirely plausible.  Will we find technological life?  That's a much more dubious proposition.




1% is about 130 milion years. 0.1% is 13 million years, 0.001% is 1.3 million years, 0.0001 is 130 000 years, 0.00001 is 13 0000 years., 0.000001% is 1300 years, 0.0000001% is 130 years so at that percentage Alien civilisation would be 1880's tech or 130 years ahead of us. Either way they may not be able to communicate or notice us (maybe they no longer use radio IDK). 

 And that assumes they are within  20-30 light years of us. Could Earth/Seti detect a mirror image civilisation using equivalent tech to scan space? 

 This is basically what I meant about time and space having to match up. Could the Dinosaurs have evolved a sentient reptile race had the asteroid not got them?


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## Maxperson (Dec 3, 2018)

MoonSong said:


> (Which can actually never happen at all, since evolution is all about adaptation and survival not based upon a goal like intelligence)




Except that intelligence IS an adaption for survival, which is why so many different creatures have some degree of it here on Earth.  The smarter you are, the more likely you are to survive and adapt.


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## Maxperson (Dec 3, 2018)

Zardnaar said:


> This is basically what I meant about time and space having to match up. Could the Dinosaurs have evolved a sentient reptile race had the asteroid not got them?



They may very well have, and more than once.  It was a much rougher world back then.  There would be no trace left of a sentient dinosaur race after all this time, even if there were some that made it to some tech use.


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## Hussar (Dec 3, 2018)

Maxperson said:


> Except that intelligence IS an adaption for survival, which is why so many different creatures have some degree of it here on Earth.  The smarter you are, the more likely you are to survive and adapt.




That’s not true. Bacteria as a species, heck most plants as a species are far far more successful than any vertebrate.


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## Morrus (Dec 3, 2018)

Maxperson said:


> Except that intelligence IS an adaption for survival, which is why so many different creatures have some degree of it here on Earth.  The smarter you are, the more likely you are to survive and adapt.




If that were true there would be plenty more intelligent species on Earth. The truth is, intelligence is definitely not needed for survival. There are species on this planet which predate us and will likely outlast us. When it comes to evolutionary survivability, we are not the top of the pyramid.


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## Ryujin (Dec 3, 2018)

Morrus said:


> If that were true there would be plenty more intelligent species on Earth. The truth is, intelligence is definitely not needed for survival. There are species on this planet which predate us and will likely outlast us. When it comes to evolutionary survivability, we are not the top of the pyramid.




Maxperson might be considering intelligence to start at a level much less than what humans possess. From the standpoint of tool using intelligence, evolution may ultimately decide it was a bad idea and we'll be gone. When you get to a tool using level that allows you to screw with the environment that keeps you alive you either get smarter, in a different sense, or go extinct.

I've read some compelling theories that postulate the rise of multiple sentient species is suppressed by the competition between them. That, ultimately, one wins out and the other(s) disappear. If there isn't significant geological isolation, you can't really have more than one (in theory).


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## Morrus (Dec 3, 2018)

Ryujin said:


> Maxperson might be considering intelligence to start at a level much less than what humans possess.




I'm not thinking dogs and monkeys, though - I'm thinking cockroaches and jellyfish. Crocodiles, although they have changed, have been around for about 85M years. Lice, some crabs, and a ton of sea-creatures. Heck, there's a reasonable possibility is that it's our intelligence which will wipe us out, and leave us with a pretty short footprint compared to many unintelligent species, making intelligence a misstep in the evolutionary chain, not the apex of it.


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## Ryujin (Dec 3, 2018)

Morrus said:


> I'm not thinking dogs and monkeys, though - I'm thinking cockroaches and jellyfish. Crocodiles, although they have changed, have been around for about 85M years. Lice, some crabs, and a ton of sea-creatures. Heck, there's a reasonable possibility is that it's our intelligence which will wipe us out, and leave us with a pretty short footprint compared to many unintelligent species, making intelligence a misstep in the evolutionary chain, not the apex of it.




As I said


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## Zardnaar (Dec 3, 2018)

Morrus said:


> I'm not thinking dogs and monkeys, though - I'm thinking cockroaches and jellyfish. Crocodiles, although they have changed, have been around for about 85M years. Lice, some crabs, and a ton of sea-creatures. Heck, there's a reasonable possibility is that it's our intelligence which will wipe us out, and leave us with a pretty short footprint compared to many unintelligent species, making intelligence a misstep in the evolutionary chain, not the apex of it.




 This. We can adapt to the environment though so short of poisoning the atmosphere or the ocean we on't wipe ourselves out even if global warming go up by 2 or 3 degrees. I'm not sure we even have enough nukes to cause an extinction level event. That being said if we have 10 billion+ people and the resources to support 2 billion its fairly obvious what will happen. We won't sent colonists to Mars, bullets are much cheaper. Also gonna suck for anyone who is in semi tropical or warmer areas of the Earth.


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## Zardnaar (Dec 3, 2018)

Maxperson said:


> They may very well have, and more than once.  It was a much rougher world back then.  There would be no trace left of a sentient dinosaur race after all this time, even if there were some that made it to some tech use.




 Fossils maybe, without digits though even if they were sentient their tool use would be limited to things like parrots using sticks to get grubs and things like that. I did read a fiction book about one of the last smaller species of Dinosaurs was going down that path, which was the intro and then boom no more Dinosaurs. 

 We may have evolved because of that asteroid though (or anything else that got/contributed to the Dinosaurs). Just wonder if any of our p[ets might evolve sentience due to things like diets, genetic tampering and/or selective breeding to speed evolution along.

 Is there any somewhat viable theories when life could have evolved assuming we are not the 1st. COuld the conditions on Earth be replicated somewhere else a billion or more years somewhere else?


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## Ryujin (Dec 3, 2018)

Zardnaar said:


> Just wonder if any of our pets might evolve sentience due to things like diets, genetic tampering and/or selective breeding to speed evolution along.




You just stated the plot of the original "Planet of the Apes" movies (1968-1973).


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## Zardnaar (Dec 3, 2018)

Ryujin said:


> You just stated the plot of the original "Planet of the Apes" movies (1968-1973).




I'm thinking more like cats and dogs. Sentient cat with nukes. Meow.


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## Maxperson (Dec 3, 2018)

Hussar said:


> That’s not true. Bacteria as a species, heck most plants as a species are far far more successful than any vertebrate.




Except yes it is.  I didn't claim most had intelligence.  I pointed out how many did.  Just because intelligence is an adaption for survival, doesn't mean that every type of life will evolve it.


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## Maxperson (Dec 3, 2018)

Morrus said:


> If that were true there would be plenty more intelligent species on Earth. The truth is, intelligence is definitely not needed for survival. There are species on this planet which predate us and will likely outlast us. When it comes to evolutionary survivability, we are not the top of the pyramid.




If it wasn't true, we wouldn't have intelligence.  Traits are selected for survival and intelligence aids in that.  It also doesn't have to be the absolute best survival trait in order to be a survival trait.   Intelligence also doesn't have to work in order to be a superior trait.  Underdogs win all the time.  The species you suggest will survive us do not have a chance at diverting an asteroid that will destroy them, or even detecting it in the first place.  We do, because intelligence.  We may not succeed, but we have that chance to survive because of our brains.  

Intelligence being a survival trait is all over the place. 

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/...st/201003/how-did-general-intelligence-evolve

http://meti.org/may-2016-workshop/a...lligent-not-sentient-what-evolution-cognition


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## Umbran (Dec 3, 2018)

Maxperson said:


> If it wasn't true, we wouldn't have intelligence.




Gentlemen, if I may.

First, make darned sure that you are talking about the same thing when you say, "intelligence".  

Second, *ALL* "survival traits" are context dependent.  Gills are a survival trait if you live under water.  Not so much for a terrestrial species.  This means that sometimes, being smart will be good for a species, and sometimes it won't be.

Specifically, big brains are *expensive*.  They require huge amounts of time to develop (compare how long it takes a newborn horse to walk, as compared to a human), during which time the young is mostly helpless, and the adults are tied up in care.  In addition, really intelligent brains are energy-intensive.  A human brain takes up about 2% of our mass, but burns about 20% of our body's energy.  If you don't need and use the smarts, reducing brain size can save you a lot of energy.  A dumb species may win over a smart one just on the basis of energy efficiency.

Third, let us note that evolution is neither directed, no comprehensive.  Development of any given trait is largely a matter of random accidents lining up over millions of years.  But, even over those millions of years, nature is not guaranteed to try everything. Development of intelligence, therefore, is by no means *assured*, even if it would be a useful adaptive trait.


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## Roland Bradford (Dec 3, 2018)

Our universe is immense, so it is quite possible


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## Ryujin (Dec 3, 2018)

Zardnaar said:


> I'm thinking more like cats and dogs. Sentient cat with nukes. Meow.




I don't think that they'd make it out of the basic explosives stage of development. They couldn't resist knocking them off the workbench.


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## Hussar (Dec 4, 2018)

Maxperson said:


> Except yes it is.  I didn't claim most had intelligence.  I pointed out how many did.  Just because intelligence is an adaption for survival, doesn't mean that every type of life will evolve it.




Thing is, in comparison, intelligence is definitely in the minority of species.  Plants, anything single celled, and most insect species combined vastly outnumber the number of intelligent species.  Sure, intelligence is one survival trait, but, hardly the most successful from the point of view of a species.  From a numbers game, the number of intelligent species, and even if we just posit the intelligence of a dog, is a tiny, tiny fraction of the species on the planet currently and we live in a virtual desert of biodiversity compared to previous eras.


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## Maxperson (Dec 4, 2018)

Hussar said:


> Thing is, in comparison, intelligence is definitely in the minority of species.  Plants, anything single celled, and most insect species combined vastly outnumber the number of intelligent species.  Sure, intelligence is one survival trait, but, hardly the most successful from the point of view of a species.  From a numbers game, the number of intelligent species, and even if we just posit the intelligence of a dog, is a tiny, tiny fraction of the species on the planet currently and we live in a virtual desert of biodiversity compared to previous eras.




That doesn't matter, though.  Intelligence IS a survival trait just as I claimed it was.  Nature does select for it, even if not in most species.  The same can be said for the ability to camouflage like a chameleon or octopus.  It's a great, handy dandy survival trait that is only in a few species.  Being in a few species doesn't mean that it isn't an elite ability.  For intelligence at least, it's also very hard to reach, which limits how many species have such a great survival trait.


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## Hussar (Dec 4, 2018)

Maxperson said:


> That doesn't matter, though.  Intelligence IS a survival trait just as I claimed it was.  Nature does select for it, even if not in most species.  The same can be said for the ability to camouflage like a chameleon or octopus.  It's a great, handy dandy survival trait that is only in a few species.  Being in a few species doesn't mean that it isn't an elite ability.  For intelligence at least, it's also very hard to reach, which limits how many species have such a great survival trait.




There are easily as many species out there that can camouflage (as in change color or pigmentation) as there are intelligent ones.

But, "great survival trait"?  What's the proof of that?  Vitually every other intelligent species, chimps, whales and dolphins, etc. are endangered.  Hardly seems like a great survival trait.  And, again, the only species we've seen with tool using intelligence is us.  One.  One species.  And, we've only been around for an eyeblink compared to a multitude of other species.  

Get back to me in ten or fifteen million years and let's see how great intelligence is as a survival trait.


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## Jhaelen (Dec 4, 2018)

Hussar said:


> And, again, the only species we've seen with tool using intelligence is us.  One.  One species.



???
That's completely wrong. Tools are used by plenty of animals: apes, otters, birds, even fish.


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## Maxperson (Dec 4, 2018)

Hussar said:


> There are easily as many species out there that can camouflage (as in change color or pigmentation) as there are intelligent ones.




Again, so what.  This is a Red Herring.



> But, "great survival trait"?  What's the proof of that?  Vitually every other intelligent species, chimps, whales and dolphins, etc. are endangered.  Hardly seems like a great survival trait.




They were doing great until a greater intelligence came along.  



> And, again, the only species we've seen with tool using intelligence is us.  One.  One species.




This is false.  

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tool_use_by_animals



> And, we've only been around for an eyeblink compared to a multitude of other species.




And we are dominating the world, driving many other species to extinction because they can't cope with our survival trait.


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## Morrus (Dec 4, 2018)

Maxperson said:


> And we are dominating the world, driving many other species to extinction because they can't cope with our survival trait.




Briefly.

The cockroaches will outlast us when our “survival” trait kills us.


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## Maxperson (Dec 4, 2018)

Morrus said:


> Briefly.
> 
> The cockroaches will outlast us when our “survival” trait kills us.




That's a possibility, but it's not assured.  I can tell you this, though.  Intelligence might get us off our plane in the future to somewhere else or multiple somewhere elses, where we can survive, enabling us to survive the expansion of the sun, planet killing asteroids, comets, etc.  Cockroaches and every other non-intelligent species will all ultimately die when the planet does.


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## Morrus (Dec 4, 2018)

Maxperson said:


> That's a possibility, but it's not assured.  I can tell you this, though.  Intelligence might get us off our plane in the future to somewhere else or multiple somewhere elses, where we can survive, enabling us to survive the expansion of the sun, planet killing asteroids, comets, etc.




That’s a possibility, but it’s not assured. *shrug*

None of us know. We’re all just offering at-best semi-informed guesses. 

Climate change, AI, more advanced weapons of mass destruction... our intelligence could prove to be the exact opposite of a survival trait. It might even be the answer to Fermi’s Paradox.


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## Janx (Dec 4, 2018)

Maxperson said:


> Cockroaches and every other non-intelligent species will all ultimately die when the planet does.




side bar:
There's a decent chance that if we get off the planet, cockroaches, rats and germs will also get off the planet.  They have a habit of finding their way into our cargo and luggage, despite not knowing where we're going.


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## Maxperson (Dec 4, 2018)

Janx said:


> side bar:
> There's a decent chance that if we get off the planet, cockroaches, rats and germs will also get off the planet.  They have a habit of finding their way into our cargo and luggage, despite not knowing where we're going.




That's true!  They will be relying on our intelligence, though, not theirs.


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## Maxperson (Dec 4, 2018)

Morrus said:


> That’s a possibility, but it’s not assured. *shrug*
> 
> None of us know. We’re all just offering at-best semi-informed guesses.
> 
> Climate change, AI, more advanced weapons of mass destruction... our intelligence could prove to be the exact opposite of a survival trait. It might even be the answer to Fermi’s Paradox.




I agree.  On the other hand, scientific advances might enable us to scrub the pollutants out of the atmosphere in 10 or 20 years.  Science is like a snowball rolling downhill.  It keeps progressing bigger and faster.  Maybe it smashes us.  Maybe it smashes our problems.  As you say, none of us know.


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## MoonSong (Dec 4, 2018)

Maxperson said:


> I agree.  On the other hand, scientific advances might enable us to scrub the pollutants out of the atmosphere in 10 or 20 years.  Science is like a snowball rolling downhill.  It keeps progressing bigger and faster.  Maybe it smashes us.  Maybe it smashes our problems.  As you say, none of us know.




With the replicability crisis and the politicization of science we are going through right now? I wish I was as optimistic.


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## Morrus (Dec 4, 2018)

MoonSong said:


> With the replicability crisis and the politicization of science we are going through right now? I wish I was as optimistic.




Just means the Chinese will do it instead.


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## Umbran (Dec 4, 2018)

Hussar said:


> But, "great survival trait"?  What's the proof of that?  Vitually every other intelligent species, chimps, whales and dolphins, etc. are endangered.  Hardly seems like a great survival trait.




There are over 1400+ animals on the Endangered Species List in the US (kept under the auspices of the Endangered Species Act of 1973).  That's only the animals, and only within the US territory - so not the open seas, or other countries.  

There's a strong scientific argument that we are in the midst of an extinction level event, caused by humans.  Evolution optimizes a species for "normal conditions" in its area.  It does not prepare any species for extinction level events, which entail extreme conditions, rather than the norm.  So, being endangered really doesn't speak to the value of the traits animals have in their normal context.



> And, again, the only species we've seen with tool using intelligence is us.  One.  One species.




Um... no.  That's factually incorrect.

All the great apes (chimps, bonobos, gorillas, orangutans) and several monkey species use tools.  Ravens and crows use tools.  Otters use tools.  Elephants use tools.  There has been tool use seen in octopi and dolphins.


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## Istbor (Dec 4, 2018)

Umbran said:


> There are over 1400+ animals on the Endangered Species List in the US (kept under the auspices of the Endangered Species Act of 1973).  That's only the animals, and only within the US territory - so not the open seas, or other countries.
> 
> There's a strong scientific argument that we are in the midst of an extinction level event, caused by humans.  Evolution optimizes a species for "normal conditions" in its area.  It does not prepare any species for extinction level events, which entail extreme conditions, rather than the norm.  So, being endangered really doesn't speak to the value of the traits animals have in their normal context.
> 
> ...




Oh top of those each using tools, some exhibit the ability to make their own tools. Showing even greater capacity for cognitive thought, when problem solving.  We are not the lone intelligence on this planet.  We may be the most wide-spread and destructive however. 

Being intelligent does not mean the tendencies that we have to ever try and expand our knowledge is shared. We could be looking for other peoples out there, and find that a simple life with nature is more to their liking than shaping their planet as we have. 

I don't know whether we will meet other inhabitants of our galaxy or universe or not.  However, I am pretty certain just given the expanse that we cannot even observe, there are other minds out there wondering the same as us. Are we alone?


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## Umbran (Dec 4, 2018)

Morrus said:


> Climate change, AI, more advanced weapons of mass destruction... our intelligence could prove to be the exact opposite of a survival trait.




With respect, the thing that is currently endangering us is not our intelligence, but our lack thereof.  Our current predicament is based in emotional responses, not reasoned and intelligent responses.


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## Morrus (Dec 4, 2018)

Umbran said:


> With respect, the thing that is currently endangering us is not our intelligence, but our lack thereof.  Our current predicament is based in emotional responses, not reasoned and intelligent responses.




Agreed - but the emotional responses wouldn't matter if we didn't have the ability to make the tools of our own destruction.


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## Umbran (Dec 4, 2018)

Morrus said:


> Agreed - but the emotional responses wouldn't matter if we didn't have the ability to make the tools of our own destruction.




That's tautological, in that *any* ability of an animal can be the cause of its destruction.  You can walk?  Well, then you can walk off a cliff, fall, and die.  Do you blame your legs for walking off the cliff?  Silly legs!  I should never have had legs!  Should have stuck with fins, because fins couldn't have had me walk off a cliff!  Moving onto dry land was my problem.  Nobody ever dies in the water, right?


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## Morrus (Dec 4, 2018)

Umbran said:


> That's tautological, in that *any* ability of an animal can be the cause of its destruction.  You can walk?  Well, then you can walk off a cliff, fall, and die.  Do you blame your legs for walking off the cliff?  Silly legs!  I should never have had legs!  Should have stuck with fins, because fins couldn't have had me walk off a cliff!  Moving onto dry land was my problem.  Nobody ever dies in the water, right?




Sure. I agree.


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## Ryujin (Dec 4, 2018)

Umbran said:


> That's tautological, in that *any* ability of an animal can be the cause of its destruction.  You can walk?  Well, then you can walk off a cliff, fall, and die.  Do you blame your legs for walking off the cliff?  Silly legs!  I should never have had legs!  Should have stuck with fins, because fins couldn't have had me walk off a cliff!  Moving onto dry land was my problem.  Nobody ever dies in the water, right?




That would only really be applicable if legs developed to the point that there was a very real danger of kicking the species into extinction.


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## MoonSong (Dec 4, 2018)

Morrus said:


> Just means the Chinese will do it instead.




And their demographic timebomb?


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## Shasarak (Dec 4, 2018)

Umbran said:


> There's a strong scientific argument that we are in the midst of an extinction level event, caused by humans.




I thought that science already debunked that claim.


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## megamania (Dec 4, 2018)

A lot of believing it exists but that we will never encounter.     I have seen strange things in the sky.   I wouldn't disclaim too quickly.


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## MoonSong (Dec 4, 2018)

Umbran said:


> With respect, the thing that is currently endangering us is not our intelligence, but our lack thereof.  Our current predicament is based in emotional responses, not reasoned and intelligent responses.




Granted, but some of it is lack of empathy and excessive pride borne out of overestimating one's own intelligence...



Istbor said:


> Oh top of those each using tools, some exhibit the ability to make their own tools. Showing even greater capacity for cognitive thought, when problem solving.  We are not the lone intelligence on this planet.  We may be the most wide-spread and destructive however.
> 
> Being intelligent does not mean the tendencies that we have to ever try and expand our knowledge is shared. We could be looking for other peoples out there, and find that a simple life with nature is more to their liking than shaping their planet as we have.
> 
> I don't know whether we will meet other inhabitants of our galaxy or universe or not.  However, I am pretty certain just given the expanse that we cannot even observe, there are other minds out there wondering the same as us. Are we alone?




Maybe they are out there, because we don't even know the size of the cosmos beyond our local bubble. But as far as our bubble goes -for all purposes the whole universe as anything outside might as well not be there- I believe we are indeed alone.




megamania said:


> A lot of believing it exists but that we will never encounter.     I have seen strange things in the sky.   I wouldn't disclaim too quickly.




These are easy, whatever isn't a misunderstood natural phenomenon or a human-made object is a witch, a spirit or a witch fighting a spirit...


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## Morrus (Dec 4, 2018)

MoonSong said:


> These are easy, whatever isn't a misunderstood natural phenomenon or a human-made object is a witch, a spirit or a witch fighting a spirit...




It’s a common fallacy known as “god of the gaps”.  Better explained as “if I can’t explain it, it must be magic”.


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## megamania (Dec 4, 2018)

This aspect of "Are we alone" can be a slippery slope much like religion and politics.


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## Morrus (Dec 4, 2018)

megamania said:


> This aspect of "Are we alone" can be a slippery slope much like religion and politics.




"Slippery Slope" is also a logical fallacy, just like the God of the Gaps.


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## MoonSong (Dec 5, 2018)

Morrus said:


> It’s a common fallacy known as “god of the gaps”.  Better explained as “if I can’t explain it, it must be magic”.




I'm coming more from "this 'rational' explanation needs the violation of so many fundamental physical laws and common sense that is no different from the emotional and irrational one." Anyway I don't think of myself as rational anyway so it makes more sense to me. There's no practical way for alien visitors to exist, not without violating the lightspeed limit and reversing entropy. Nothing short of actual magic can change that, and in real life magic is too pathetic, dangerous and difficult to allow it. So whatever it is that we see in the skies is anything but alien in nature.


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## Maxperson (Dec 5, 2018)

Morrus said:


> Just means the Chinese will do it instead.




Or Europe.  Really, most of the political crap is denial of science, not squashing or preventing it from happening.  Science is marching on.


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## Aeson (Dec 5, 2018)

A man of straw pushed me down a slippery slope into the gap of the gods At the bottom I landed on Occam's razor where I met a single Scotsmen named Godwin.


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## Ovinomancer (Dec 5, 2018)

Morrus said:


> "Slippery Slope" is also a logical fallacy, just like the God of the Gaps.




Sigh.  It's an informal fallacy, which means it's not automatically wrong, but is instead an argument that doesn't support the conclusion.  A true fallacy is an argument that invalidates the conclusion while an informal fallacy doesn't say whether or not the conclusion is wrong, just that the argument used doesn't support it.

And slippery slope is one of those 'maybe' informal fallacies.  It really depends on the form of the argument.  If I say that if A happens, and then explore a solid causal chain that leads to B possibly happening, that's not an informal fallacy.  If I instead say that if A happens then this tangentially related and more extreme event B will happen, that's a slippery slope fallacy (informal).

I really do wish people would stop name checking the informal fallacies as if doing so was actually an argument.  If you can't articulate the weakness of another's argument without reference to a named fallacy, you shouldn't be using the fallacy.

Further, the God of the Gaps is actually a theological argument that dismisses the argument that God requires gaps to exist, not an argument that God exists in the gaps, which it's widely mistaken for.  As you seem to have, given your usage above.

Again, if people would actually articulate where they see flaws in other's arguments rather than throw out buzzword fallacies, discussions would be better.  And I say this as a recovering named fallacy-thrower.


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## Ovinomancer (Dec 5, 2018)

On topic, there's another theory of why we haven't seen evidence of aliens, and it's been lurking around the edges of this discussion a couple of times.

Life is competitive, and, at any given level of technology, the universe is finite to the user of that technology.  Hence, available resources are finite for any given level of technology (effectively speaking).  Why, then, do we assume that any other intelligent life is willing to share, especially if the rate of technology progress is not uniform of doesn't have discontinuities.  Let me explain that last -- our technological expansion from muscle power to atomic power was, at first, extremely slow (we used muscle power for the vast history of our species, with slow progress in technological improvement).  The Chinese developed technologies that were crucial to the technological boom (gunpowder and the printing press) but did nothing with them for centuries.  Then, suddenly, we exploded.  We may stall again, possibly soon.  There may be points ahead where we cannot see past where we are (light as an unbreachable speed limit could be reality or just a roadblock we're not seeing around -- we can't say).  A different species may have a different experience with technology altogether, and realizing this we cannot assume that any alien species we find will not suddenly leapfrog past us in technology.

So, to recap, other species are direct competitors for a finite resource pool.  They may also realize that technological capability can be in fits and starts, and a given alien race may rapidly surpass their ability to compete.  Finally, intelligence is, by far, most commonly developed in predator species (or omnivore species) here on Earth.  That may hold elsewhere.  All of this means that the best survival tactic for aliens is to not advertise their position to possibly more powerful competitors.

Add to the above the lack of communication that is likely.  Completely different anatomies along with different cultural and social structures means that communication with an alien species is likely to be very difficult.  Misunderstandings are likely.  But, most importantly, there's a trust factor.  Can you trust the alien, who may suddenly and quickly surpass your ability to defend yourself?  See any number of uncontacted tribes on Earth for examples of this.  In this low trust environment, staying quiet and striking first and hard are rational approaches.  We may actually be in a reasonably populated region of the galaxy, but all of our neighbors are survivalist loners who plan to shoot claimjumpers and never ask questions.

Now, I'm not sure I buy the above.  But, I can't discount the possibility, either.  Nor can I claim credit for it -- that goes to Liu Cixen and his novels Three Body Problem and The Dark Forest.  The above is developed and fleshed out in the latter.  It's an interesting possibility.  I do think it does a better job than usual at attempting an original solve to the Drake equation with a reasonable set of inferences.  I also like that it addresses the unfounded optimism many display at the idea of friendly aliens.  Basic interaction among humans should depose that idea.  Also, the stark statements that technological advancement isn't guaranteed and can stagnate despite best efforts.  If there's a key understanding that we lack, we will not be able to move past it.  Nor may other intelligences.


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## Ovinomancer (Dec 5, 2018)

MoonSong said:


> I'm coming more from "this 'rational' explanation needs the violation of so many fundamental physical laws and common sense that is no different from the emotional and irrational one." Anyway I don't think of myself as rational anyway so it makes more sense to me. There's no practical way for alien visitors to exist, not without violating the lightspeed limit and reversing entropy. Nothing short of actual magic can change that, and in real life magic is too pathetic, dangerous and difficult to allow it. So whatever it is that we see in the skies is anything but alien in nature.




The hubris here that says we fully understand the limits of our existence is pretty big.  I'll agree that it appears we cannot ever surpass lightspeed given what we currently know, but it's foolish to assume that what we know won't change.  Of course, it's also foolish to believe that we'll discover FTL at all.  Neither are supported.


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## MoonSong (Dec 5, 2018)

Ovinomancer said:


> The hubris here that says we fully understand the limits of our existence is pretty big.  I'll agree that it appears we cannot ever surpass lightspeed given what we currently know, but it's foolish to assume that what we know won't change.  Of course, it's also foolish to believe that we'll discover FTL at all.  Neither are supported.




It's not hubris, lightspeed as a hard limit is fundamental to our understanding of the universe, if it is wrong, then everything's we know is wrong.


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## Zardnaar (Dec 5, 2018)

MoonSong said:


> It's not hubris, lightspeed as a hard limit is fundamental to our understanding of the universe, if it is wrong, then everything's we know is wrong.




 That is possible though. Alot of this stuff is only theory as we understand it although I have doubts about things like fold space, wormholes and other ways of non FTL  that let you get around faster in sci fi (warp, hyperspace etc).

 The problem is energy required to to go faster than light. SO we need a new energy source (Darkmatter?), or a new way to go from A to B which is basically magic/sci fi when it comes to things like dimensions, zeropoint power, folding space, etc.


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## Maxperson (Dec 5, 2018)

MoonSong said:


> It's not hubris, lightspeed as a hard limit is fundamental to our understanding of the universe, if it is wrong, then everything's we know is wrong.




We are already starting to understand more.  Who's to say that there aren't other ways around that law that we don't yet know of?

https://cosmosmagazine.com/physics/...lain-dark-matter-dark-energy-and-the-big-bang

https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-40594387


----------



## Morrus (Dec 5, 2018)

Zardnaar said:


> That is possible though. Alot of this stuff is only theory as we understand it




It’s not “only” theory. We use relativity in all sorts of things. Your GPS depends on it; GPS satellites are subject to relativistic effects due to the speed they move and their altitude in Earth’s gravity well. The word “theory” in science doesn’t mean “hypothesis”.


----------



## Ovinomancer (Dec 5, 2018)

MoonSong said:


> It's not hubris, lightspeed as a hard limit is fundamental to our understanding of the universe, if it is wrong, then everything's we know is wrong.




And how many times has that happened in just the last 100 years?  Look, I'm not saying that it's not most likely true, but it's actual hubris to think that we really know that right now.  It may change on the next step up of colliders.  It may not.  The assumption that we're absolutely right with what we know right now is not scientific.

What we know right now is hella useful and has good predictive power (well, most things we think we know).  But Newtonian physics did a great job until we found out that it was an approximation only.  We still haven't a theory that adequately combines special relativity with general relativity.  Assuming that we know that light is absolutely as fast as you can go is hubristic belief we know everything about that already.


----------



## Ovinomancer (Dec 5, 2018)

Morrus said:


> It’s not “only” theory. We use relativity in all sorts of things. Your GPS depends on it; GPS satellites are subject to relativistic effects due to the speed they move and their altitude in Earth’s gravity well. The word “theory” in science doesn’t mean “hypothesis”.



Yes, please tell the electrical engineer 5hat actually does GPS systems how important relativity is to technology.  I'm not ignorant of how useful relativity is, or what it's theoretical underpinnings are.  But, Newtonian mechanics were absolutely critical to a lot of technological advancements and we now know them to be wrong but useful.  Assuming we're at the end of science is wrong -- we do not know.


----------



## Morrus (Dec 5, 2018)

Ovinomancer said:


> Yes, please tell the electrical engineer 5hat actually does GPS systems how important relativity is to technology.  I'm not ignorant of how useful relativity is, or what it's theoretical underpinnings are.




I was talking to Zardnaar about the phrase “only a theory”. Calm down.


----------



## Janx (Dec 5, 2018)

the important thing, is at this moment, I am alone.  Watching entities real or imagined, argue because the don't know who they're talking to.


----------



## Zardnaar (Dec 5, 2018)

Morrus said:


> It’s not “only” theory. We use relativity in all sorts of things. Your GPS depends on it; GPS satellites are subject to relativistic effects due to the speed they move and their altitude in Earth’s gravity well. The word “theory” in science doesn’t mean “hypothesis”.




I know but say 150 year ago science as it understood it probably could not conceive of an atomic weapon. In 100 years who knows, there are quantum physics theories that might pan out, someone might invent a fusion reactor (not that it will produce enough energy for FTL). There is anti matter and tachyons and things like that and some combination of genetic engineering, AI, generations ships, gene seed ships, and a new power source could enable something. It might take years to get there but interstellar travel might be possible one day (slowly barring some sort of massive breakthrough).

 The could invent a fusion reactor, stick it in a problem send said probes towards some close stars, they broadcast back any habitable planets, they sen s gene seed ship there where the humans are created via AI and are educated via AI and they colonise it generations later. As we understand it though FTL is impossible but there may be other ways to get from A to B (unlikely I'll admit).


----------



## Kaodi (Dec 5, 2018)

For aliens to be survivalist loners interstellar travel has to be possible. Otherwise there is no material downside to communicating other than the energy used. 

I am not sure about scarcity either. If life itself is scarce then most mineral resources are effectively abundant. Looks at how incredibly shallow our mines are compared to the width of the planet. With decent propulsion and effectively unlimited energy over time you really do a number on asteroids and other planets.

As an aside if we ever to establish intermittent communications with aliens I suggest that when we are waiting for replies our communications arrays repeat to us the Internet dialtone sound for years at a time,  .


----------



## Ovinomancer (Dec 6, 2018)

Kaodi said:


> For aliens to be survivalist loners interstellar travel has to be possible. Otherwise there is no material downside to communicating other than the energy used.



Exceot you cannot say that other aliens aren't capable of interstellar travel because of the technology advancement curve.  It's unlikely we can ever conclusively rule out FTL travel.  If we can't, why should they?



> I am not sure about scarcity either. If life itself is scarce then most mineral resources are effectively abundant. Looks at how incredibly shallow our mines are compared to the width of the planet. With decent propulsion and effectively unlimited energy over time you really do a number on asteroids and other planets.



Life spreads to consume available resources.  If we progess to occupy the whole solar system, we will eventually consume available resources.  Fir any given level of technology, resources are finite even in an infinite universe.  Frex, as you mention, are current technology affords access to only the barest sliver of crust one this one planet.  The available resources at our disposal are finite without technological improvement, at which point the limit moves.  It never disappears.


----------



## Ovinomancer (Dec 6, 2018)

Morrus said:


> I was talking to Zardnaar about the phrase “only a theory”. Calm down.



Yeah, my bad.  I followed a quote and it  opened that post, didn't double check the name.


----------



## MoonSong (Dec 6, 2018)

Maxperson said:


> Or Europe.  Really, most of the political crap is denial of science, not squashing or preventing it from happening.  Science is marching on.




Politics get in the way of proper funding and access to peer reviewed publication -some fields of study get more or less of either depending on what is popular in the government and academia, but the itty gritty details are best left off this site-. Those are key to have the scienting done. 



Maxperson said:


> We are already starting to understand more.  Who's to say that there aren't other ways around that law that we don't yet know of?
> 
> https://cosmosmagazine.com/physics/...lain-dark-matter-dark-energy-and-the-big-bang
> 
> https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-40594387




^o^ wiii!! someone found a practical use for quantum entanglement. We truly are living in the future. 

Just note that neither of these truly meant FTL is possible. Quantum entanglement can transmit information quite fast, but it's just data, you cannot do it with people and things that already exist. And these Tachyons -if they truly exist- are in the realm of exotic particles, so nothing you can built a spaceship with -and since an antimatter collision could mean the death of this universe, I would say they are out of the question as a power source-.  




Ovinomancer said:


> And how many times has that happened in just the last 100 years?  Look, I'm not saying that it's not most likely true, but it's actual hubris to think that we really know that right now.  It may change on the next step up of colliders.  It may not.  The assumption that we're absolutely right with what we know right now is not scientific.
> 
> What we know right now is hella useful and has good predictive power (well, most things we think we know).  But Newtonian physics did a great job until we found out that it was an approximation only.  We still haven't a theory that adequately combines special relativity with general relativity.  Assuming that we know that light is absolutely as fast as you can go is hubristic belief we know everything about that already.




I'm not saying we know everything, but if you can truly accelerate stuff with actual mass beyond the speed of light using finite energy, then everything we know is wrong and only works out of sheer dumb luck. Also notice that the last 50 years have been less revolutionary in our understanding of physics than the 50 years before that.

(But of course I've only had a couple of undergrad courses in physics, so I'm far from an expert) 

And back to the topic, in order for the stuff in the sky to be alien devices we need that at least one other planet out there has had the conditions for life, that it has actually developed life, that one of these lifeforms actually got complex and intelligent enough to be considered sentient, that that species has managed to build a way more advanced technological society than us before us, that the have found us out of the millions and millions of planets out there, and that everything we know about physics is essentially wrong. Somehow I find the outright supernatural explanation more likely, or at least more honest. I mean I find the alien explanation no less of a fantasy.


----------



## Ovinomancer (Dec 6, 2018)

MoonSong said:


> I'm not saying we know everything, but if you can truly accelerate stuff with actual mass beyond the speed of light using finite energy, then everything we know is wrong and only works out of sheer dumb luck. Also notice that the last 50 years have been less revolutionary in our understanding of physics than the 50 years before that.



Not necessarily. There's a few possibilities.  We may not need to accelerate to lightspeed normally, bypassing what appears to be a hard limit.  Wormholes may suffice.  Higher dimensional space exploitation may provide a way.  Directly manipulating quantum effects as well. 

This is what I mean about technology stagnation, though.  If we truly believe we've found everything possible but haven't, we will not progress except by accident.  Accident is a poorly predictable circumstance.


----------



## Maxperson (Dec 6, 2018)

MoonSong said:


> ^o^ wiii!! someone found a practical use for quantum entanglement. We truly are living in the future.
> 
> Just note that neither of these truly meant FTL is possible. Quantum entanglement can transmit information quite fast, but it's just data, you cannot do it with people and things that already exist. And these Tachyons -if they truly exist- are in the realm of exotic particles, so nothing you can built a spaceship with -and since an antimatter collision could mean the death of this universe, I would say they are out of the question as a power source-.




The point is that we are progressing very quickly and learning new things.  Things which alter how we understand the universe.  Things which seem impossible to us now, might seem easy to accomplish 100 years from now.  The laws that we know might be incomplete and there may be aspects we haven't discovered about them that allow us to create a work-around.  There may be other laws not yet discovered that allow work-arounds.


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## Zardnaar (Dec 6, 2018)

Morrus said:


> I was talking to Zardnaar about the phrase “only a theory”. Calm down.




I also did not reference the theory of relativity. I meant things that turn up in sci fi/quantum physics. Zero point energy, anti matter, fusion power, tachyon whatever things like that.


----------



## Hussar (Dec 6, 2018)

Ovinomancer said:


> Exceot you cannot say that other aliens aren't capable of interstellar travel because of the technology advancement curve.  It's unlikely we can ever conclusively rule out FTL travel.  If we can't, why should they?[\quote]
> 
> Well, at the moment we can conclusively rule out FTL travel.
> 
> ...


----------



## Zardnaar (Dec 6, 2018)

Hussar said:


> Ovinomancer said:
> 
> 
> > Exceot you cannot say that other aliens aren't capable of interstellar travel because of the technology advancement curve.  It's unlikely we can ever conclusively rule out FTL travel.  If we can't, why should they?[\quote]
> ...


----------



## Ovinomancer (Dec 6, 2018)

Hussar said:


> Well, at the moment we can conclusively rule out FTL travel.



No, we cannot.


> Again, we have to be completley wrong in our understanding of physics for that to be true.



No, we wouldn't.  Take Newtonian physics, for example.  It's not right -- it doesn't do relatively -- but it's still extremely useful and oft used.  You still learn it in school and in college (most of Phys I and II are Newtonian).  But, it is still wrong.  It's just so minorly wrong at non-relativistic speeds that it usually doesn't matter.  Sometimes, though, that wrongness is critical.  Take GPS, for example, as it's already mentioned in thread.  You can do satelittes without relativity, and we had and still mostly do.  But the extremely precise timing of GPS failed, even at relatively (heh) low orbital speeds, due to the very small error in Newtonian physics caused by lack of relativity.  That was corrected for, and niw you get ads on your phone when you're near Starbucks.  Ain't technology grand?

We can be almost entirely right and still allow FTL travel.  I grant that, with our current understanding, it's highly unlikely.  The only absolute in science is "this is wrong," though.




> IOW, magic.



"Any sufficiently advanced technology...."


----------



## Maxperson (Dec 6, 2018)

Hussar said:


> Well, at the moment we can conclusively rule out FTL travel.




Just as we once conclusively ruled that the Sun revolved around the Earth, sure. 



> Again, we have to be completley wrong in our understanding of physics for that to be true.




This is false.  We just have to have an incomplete understanding is all.  And we do have an incomplete understanding.



> IOW, magic.




Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.  So sure, I guess you can call tech magic if you like.


----------



## Umbran (Dec 6, 2018)

Ovinomancer said:


> Why, then, do we assume that any other intelligent life is willing to share, especially if the rate of technology progress is not uniform of doesn't have discontinuities.




Is *everything* you do about money?  No?  In fact, lots of things you do are about things other than your personal resources, right?  

Doesn't that answer the question?  Intelligence implies the ability to do things that aren't all about resource allocation.


----------



## Umbran (Dec 6, 2018)

Ovinomancer said:


> And how many times has that happened in just the last 100 years?




Rarely.  

No, hear me out - since the general acceptance of the scientific method, rare indeed has been the discovery that *invalidates* what we previously knew.  New science generally applies in areas we could not previously see or experiment in, and thereby doesn't actually break our understanding of the universe - it adds to it.

Einstein does not *invalidate* Newton.  Einstein applies when things are moving fast, or have great mass.  For other things, Einstein _reduces to Newton_.  Quantum mechanics does not *invalidate* classical mechanics - quantum mechanics applies in the realm of the very small, while classical applies in the realms of human-sized things, and if you apply QM to everyday objects, they continue to behave like everyday objects.

FTL travel has a major problem.  FTL travel enables time travel.  That breaks causality.  And, aside from silliness like allowing you to be born before you are conceived, a break in causality allows for the creation of perpetual motion machines - infinite energy output from finite energy input.  And that that breaks the laws of thermodynamics.  FTL looks to *invalidate* the laws of thermodynamics - unless there's some limitation to FTL that means it doesn't apply on the time, mass, or distance scales we currently observe.  

I won't claim it is impossible.  But, while the race doesn't *always* go to the swift, nor the fight to the strong, that's the way to bet.


----------



## Morrus (Dec 7, 2018)

Maxperson said:


> Just as we once conclusively ruled that the Sun revolved around the Earth, sure.




As I said earlier, this is just a conversation/ending nothing statement.

Sure. By definition, we can’t know anything for certain ever. 

So what? We talk using what we know, or we all just stop talking about anything ever. What’s the fun in that?


----------



## Maxperson (Dec 7, 2018)

Morrus said:


> As I said earlier, this is just a conversation/ending nothing statement.
> 
> Sure. By definition, we can’t know anything for certain ever.
> 
> So what? We talk using what we know, or we all just stop talking about anything ever. What’s the fun in that?




It's fine to talk using what we know, but when we are using it to stop reasonable speculation about the future tech in a thread that's about speculation about future tech, that's not very fun, either.


----------



## Ovinomancer (Dec 7, 2018)

Umbran said:


> Rarely.
> 
> No, hear me out - since the general acceptance of the scientific method, rare indeed has been the discovery that *invalidates* what we previously knew.  New science generally applies in areas we could not previously see or experiment in, and thereby doesn't actually break our understanding of the universe - it adds to it.
> 
> ...



That's an interesting downplay of the revolution enabled by relativity.  Heck, this conversation is made possible by relativity.  Newtonian mechanics remain a good approximation of many low speed effects, but come on, relativety was a massive ganechanger.

And yet, relativity still has problems, much like Newtonian physics did -- we can't align everything.   This isn't to say that we don't have C as a very strong limit with excellent predictive and useful value, but G does a lot of good work, too, but relativity shows that's variable on things we didn't understand when it was first derived.

Do I think FTL is likely? No, because we do have a good set of observations that show C is insurpassible.  But, then, in 1900 we didn't really think about nuclear power, either.  It's hubris to believe we really know that much.


----------



## Umbran (Dec 7, 2018)

Ovinomancer said:


> That's an interesting downplay of the revolution enabled by relativity.  Heck, this conversation is made possible by relativity.  Newtonian mechanics remain a good approximation of many low speed effects




Note that "low speed effects" means "every speed generated by humankind outside of a particle accelerator".  



> but come on, relativety was a massive ganechanger.




You were referring to new science of the form, "everything we know is wrong".  My point is that that doesn't really happen.  In modern science, the things we know... we know.  We observe them up, down, and crossways.  We measure and remeasure and confirm.  New science can't change what we have already seen! Any new understanding of the universe _must be consistent_ with old understanding.  F'rex: We have observed gravity's scaling with the square of distance on the scale of mountains to the scale of galactic clusters.  Any new idea of gravity must be consistent with those observations, or the new idea of gravity is clearly wrong.

New things in science don't say, "You were wrong."  They say, "Oh, and also this..."  New science adds to old, it does not replace the old.  

So, any form of FTL that we get must still be consistent with everything else we have ever observed.  And that puts some very restrictive boundaries on it if it does exist.



> ... but G does a lot of good work, too, but relativity shows that's variable on things we didn't understand when it was first derived.




You are being way too vague here.  In general, determining a value for G with greater than 0.1% precision has proven difficult.  But that *IS NOT* the same as saying it is variable on things we didn't understand.  Claims that G varies are, as yet, _entirely speculative_.  G has been hard to nail down, and ego tends to make us speculate that this is the fault of G, rather than a fault with our experiments to measure it.  



> It's hubris to believe we really know that much.




"that much" isn't really all that much, though.  We don't need to know much to make FTL travel a highly questionable proposition.


----------



## Ovinomancer (Dec 7, 2018)

Umbran said:


> Note that "low speed effects" means "every speed generated by humankind outside of a particle accelerator".



I'll let the GPS guys they can stop with the relativistic corrects, yeah?

Then there's refraction across different media, theory directly derived from relativity concepts.  Or that transistor width is constrained by quantim tunneling effects, which are also based in relativity and not Newtonian physics.




> You were referring to new science of the form, "everything we know is wrong".  My point is that that doesn't really happen.  In modern science, the things we know... we know.  We observe them up, down, and crossways.  We measure and remeasure and confirm.  New science can't change what we have already seen! Any new understanding of the universe _must be consistent_ with old understanding.  F'rex: We have observed gravity's scaling with the square of distance on the scale of mountains to the scale of galactic clusters.  Any new idea of gravity must be consistent with those observations, or the new idea of gravity is clearly wrong.
> 
> New things in science don't say, "You were wrong."  They say, "Oh, and also this..."  New science adds to old, it does not replace the old.
> 
> So, any form of FTL that we get must still be consistent with everything else we have ever observed.  And that puts some very restrictive boundaries on it if it does exist.



This is a subtle misrepresentation.  Firstly, I'm discussing theory and models, not observations.  The switch to pretend I'm talking about observations is a bit disappointing.  Of course a new theory has to continue to explain our observations.  This is trivial, and frankly insulting that you'd even attempt to lecture that obsevations already made don't change.

Secondly, you slyly elide the fact that observations are by no means comprehensive.  Just like Newton observed falling apples (apocryphally) but could not detect relativistic effects on falling apples doesn't mean that this missed bit didn't lead to nuclear bombs.  What we observe is incomplete.

Finally, restrictive boundaries have always existed.  A bomb that creates short-lived minature suns wasn't contemplated during Newton's time -- there were some restrictve boundaries in place.  But a new theory leading to new observations, consistent with old, led to a moving of boundaries.

The characteristic of believing you're at the end of history, scientific or otherwise, is evergreen.  Ironically.



> You are being way too vague here.  In general, determining a value for G with greater than 0.1% precision has proven difficult.  But that *IS NOT* the same as saying it is variable on things we didn't understand.  Claims that G varies are, as yet, _entirely speculative_.  G has been hard to nail down, and ego tends to make us speculate that this is the fault of G, rather than a fault with our experiments to measure it.



We have to experiment to determine the value of G, which is not directly measurable but instead is the constant we've invented to make our math balance, because we have no theory to explain it.  G usn't a theoretical value we're confirming, it's a value we have to experiment to find out how big it should be (and what units we need to assign it)  to balance an equation.  Same with any other constant we use to balance our maths.  The habit is to forget these represent failures of understanding because they're so damn useful.

[Quite]
"that much" isn't really all that much, though.  We don't need to know much to make FTL travel a highly questionable proposition.[/QUOTE]

Of course it's questionable.  I've said that multiple times, including in the post you just quoted.  (You elected to snip that bit, I suppose so you could chastise me?)  Questionable is what science is about.  I just don't believe we're at the end of history for science.  I rationally accept we could be, but it seems we've been too oft proven wrong on that account to have faith.


----------



## dragoner (Dec 7, 2018)

https://phys.org/news/2018-12-universe-theory-percent-cosmos.html

This does change the understanding of physics.


----------



## Shasarak (Dec 8, 2018)

dragoner said:


> This does change the understanding of physics.




I do find it ironic that there is a claim that we can not travel faster then light when we also do not understand why there is so much gravity around to hold everything together and why there is so much energy around that it is expanding space instead of that same gravity crunching it.

So if gravity can pull faster then light and space can expand faster then light but at the same time nothing can move faster then light.


----------



## dragoner (Dec 8, 2018)

Shasarak said:


> ... at the same time nothing can move faster then light.




While C does seem a "hard limit" due to relativity, causality, it is not 100% sure that nothing _could_ move at C+, eg the math of the Alcubierre Warp, does appear to work with the negative mass of the article above, as well as wormholes posited by Thorne and Ellis (and Einstein and Rosen) can be created using the same principles, except that wormholes do not violate causality, because the +C movement is non-local. Nevertheless, we know less than 5% of how the universe works, well within the margin of error. With the sad truth being that we will never know because we will have brought on another biological collapse like "The Great Dying" or Permian-Triassic Extinction Event that killed 90% of life on Earth in a very short time, and will drag us under too with it. We got close, that's cool, I guess. Hope dies last.


----------



## Morrus (Dec 8, 2018)

Shasarak said:


> I do find it ironic that there is a claim that we can not travel faster then light when we also do not understand why there is so much gravity around to hold everything together and why there is so much energy around that it is expanding space instead of that same gravity crunching it.
> 
> So if gravity can pull faster then light and space can expand faster then light but at the same time nothing can move faster then light.




If you want to point out the flaws in physics, you need to show where the equations are wrong.

I mean, yeah, sure go up to a particle physicist and tell them how “ironic” you find their “claims”. But be prepared to explain their “claims” (read: their life’s work) first.


----------



## Shasarak (Dec 8, 2018)

Morrus said:


> You are confusing media sound bytes and analogies with physics and wondering why it doesn’t work in your head.
> 
> Physicists use equations and stuff. If you want to point out the flaws in physics, you need to show where the equations are wrong. Not where you heard some “ironic claim” about something.
> 
> I mean, yeah, sure go up to a particle physicist and tell them how “ironic” you find their “claims”. But be prepared to explain their “claims” (read: their life’s work) first.




But that is not true though.  What is Dark Matter and Dark Energy?  Do you have a particle physicist prepared to put their "lifes work" up as a scientific Theory.

No, I think I will stick to what real particle physicists say which is, forgive my paraphrasing, that they dont know.


----------



## dragoner (Dec 8, 2018)

It's good to keep dreaming, that's what sci-fi is all about.


----------



## RivCA (Dec 8, 2018)

I'll take the Oracle's stance from this fantastic comic by The Oatmeal.

The Oracle


----------



## Morrus (Dec 8, 2018)

Shasarak said:


> But that is not true though.  What is Dark Matter and Dark Energy?  Do you have a particle physicist prepared to put their "lifes work" up as a scientific Theory.
> 
> No, I think I will stick to what real particle physicists say which is, forgive my paraphrasing, that they dont know.




Why is this suddenly only about dark energy? We were talking about the speed of light a minute ago .

So ignoring the random subject change, real physicists in this thread haven’t just thrown their hands up and said “I don’t know”. Pretty much the opposite. 

And yes, many physicists have put their life’s work up as scientific theory. That’s how it works. What a peculiar thing to say! 

This thread is getting a bit Flat-Earthy! People telling physicists they understand relativity better than the physicists do.


----------



## Umbran (Dec 8, 2018)

Ovinomancer said:


> I'll let the GPS guys they can stop with the relativistic corrects, yeah?




The gravitational effect on GPS systems (from the ground being deeper in the gravity well than the satellite is about 7x greater than the effect from the satellite's speed.  And the impact is on the order of a clock losing 45 microseconds per day.  The issue is not that the effect is large, but that in order to operate a GPS, the level of precision is high.  

So, yes, it gives us GPS systems.  Hooray.  Last time I checked, the fact that Google Maps works on my phone did not make everything else I knew wrong, which is what I was reacting to.  The statement was simply hyperbole.  This would go easier if you just accepted that and moved on.



> Then there's refraction across different media, theory directly derived from relativity concepts.  Or that transistor width is constrained by quantim tunneling effects, which are also based in relativity and not Newtonian physics.




Nether refraction across different media nor quantum tunneling effects have anything with to do with relativity.  Sorry.  You're just factually inaccurate there.  

Now, quantum mechanics was originally informed by the Photoelectric Effect, given mathematical description by Einstein in 1905, for which he got the Nobel Prize.  But, that paper contains no discussion of relativity at all.  



> This is a subtle misrepresentation.  Firstly, I'm discussing theory and models, not observations.




You do realize the entire point is to find models and theories that accurately describe reality, right?

Theory and models that do not match observations are discarded.  This is the *CENTRAL POINT* of the scientific method - you come up with a hypothesis, and you observe reality to see if it matches the hypothesis.  If your hypothesis survives enough encounters with reality, we start calling it a theory.  If your model doesn't match reality, we toss it out as a bad idea, and try something else.  



> Secondly, you slyly elide the fact that observations are by no means comprehensive.




There is nothing "sly" about it, nor is it eliding.  I have mentioned it several times now, and quite openly and directly.  If you are trying to make it sound like there's something underhanded or indirect in my writing, well, sorry.  You're just wrong.  



> Just like Newton observed falling apples (apocryphally) but could not detect relativistic effects on falling apples doesn't mean that this missed bit didn't lead to nuclear bombs.




Um... that's a bit ahistorical.

Marie and Pierre Curie observed radiation in 1898.  Frederick Soddy and Ernest Rutherford first observed nuclear transformation in 1901 - years before Einstein's first paper on relativity.  It is this observation, and not E=mc^2, that was the basis for the concept of nuclear weapons.  



> The characteristic of believing you're at the end of history, scientific or otherwise, is evergreen.  Ironically.




You know, I am rather tired of this.

I ALREADY SAID that the possibility of FTL was not eliminated.  Pages ago.  In my very first discussion of it, I believe, I allowed that we cannot rule out the possibility, and a few times since.  

Yet you keep speaking as if I have said otherwise.  

Strawman.  I am done with it.  Don't continue holding it up.


----------



## Ovinomancer (Dec 8, 2018)

Umbran said:


> The gravitational effect on GPS systems (from the ground being deeper in the gravity well than the satellite is about 7x greater than the effect from the satellite's speed.  And the impact is on the order of a clock losing 45 microseconds per day.  The issue is not that the effect is large, but that in order to operate a GPS, the level of precision is high.
> 
> So, yes, it gives us GPS systems.  Hooray.  Last time I checked, the fact that Google Maps works on my phone did not make everything else I knew wrong, which is what I was reacting to.  The statement was simply hyperbole.  This would go easier if you just accepted that and moved on.



Right.  You were wrong, but I was supposed to understand that you meant it hyperbolically while you treat me as if I don't understand anything at all.  Cool, I'll accept your apology.





> Nether refraction across different media nor quantum tunneling effects have anything with to do with relativity.  Sorry.  You're just factually inaccurate there.



It relies on the fixed speed of C in a medium, which is a core part of the theory of relativity.  



> Now, quantum mechanics was originally informed by the Photoelectric Effect, given mathematical description by Einstein in 1905, for which he got the Nobel Prize.  But, that paper contains no discussion of relativity at all.



You're saying that the photoelectric effect is possible without first accepting relativity, or is this another bit of hiding the pea?




> You do realize the entire point is to find models and theories that accurately describe reality, right?
> 
> Theory and models that do not match observations are discarded.  This is the *CENTRAL POINT* of the scientific method - you come up with a hypothesis, and you observe reality to see if it matches the hypothesis.  If your hypothesis survives enough encounters with reality, we start calling it a theory.  If your model doesn't match reality, we toss it out as a bad idea, and try something else.



Yes.  However, if you lecture me on new theory having to explain previous observations, then it's fair to point out that I'm talking about the theories being incomplete, not that observations change, which is what you were telling me.  Please, let's not further insult everyone's intelligence, here.



> There is nothing "sly" about it, nor is it eliding.  I have mentioned it several times now, and quite openly and directly.  If you are trying to make it sound like there's something underhanded or indirect in my writing, well, sorry.  You're just wrong.



Really? Then what was the point you were making?



> Um... that's a bit ahistorical.
> 
> Marie and Pierre Curie observed radiation in 1898.  Frederick Soddy and Ernest Rutherford first observed nuclear transformation in 1901 - years before Einstein's first paper on relativity.  It is this observation, and not E=mc^2, that was the basis for the concept of nuclear weapons.



Einstein's theories were critical to understanding those observations to the point of actualizing a nuclear bomb.  You like to point out half of something as if the rest doesn't exist.




> You know, I am rather tired of this.
> 
> I ALREADY SAID that the possibility of FTL was not eliminated.  Pages ago.  In my very first discussion of it, I believe, I allowed that we cannot rule out the possibility, and a few times since.
> 
> ...




You first?


----------



## Morrus (Dec 8, 2018)

Jeez, guys, what’s with all the hostility? It’s nearly Christmas! It’s a thread about aliens!


----------



## MoonSong (Dec 8, 2018)

Morrus said:


> Jeez, guys, what’s with all the hostility? It’s nearly Christmas! It’s a thread about aliens!




Wizard aliens.


----------



## Zardnaar (Dec 8, 2018)

Morrus said:


> Jeez, guys, what’s with all the hostility? It’s nearly Christmas! It’s a thread about aliens!




 It started to go downhill when people started declaring absolutes around FTL travel. Came across as hostile as in "you're wrong nya nya nya" IMHO.


----------



## Maxperson (Dec 8, 2018)

Umbran said:


> You were referring to new science of the form, "everything we know is wrong".  My point is that that doesn't really happen.  In modern science, the things we know... we know.  We observe them up, down, and crossways.  We measure and remeasure and confirm.  New science can't change what we have already seen! Any new understanding of the universe _must be consistent_ with old understanding.  F'rex: We have observed gravity's scaling with the square of distance on the scale of mountains to the scale of galactic clusters.  Any new idea of gravity must be consistent with those observations, or the new idea of gravity is clearly wrong.




Imagine you live on the island that just killed that missionary.  You have virtually no contact with the outside world, but you see airplanes flying all the time.  Your theory is that the gods keep these sky canoes aloft and so that they never fall from the sky.  Now say they end the restrictions on contact with this tribe and you learn a few years from now what gravity is, what airplanes are, and how planes are kept aloft.  The new information is consistent with what you knew, but what you knew would still be completely wrong. 

We could be completely wrong about what gravity is and how it truly works, even though the new knowledge is consistent with what you observed.  Hell, we don't actually know how it works.  We just know it does.  We also don't know if there are conditions under which it might not work at all, or work completely differently that we just haven't observed yet.



> So, any form of FTL that we get must still be consistent with everything else we have ever observed.  And that puts some very restrictive boundaries on it if it does exist.




Possibly.  Just because we haven't observed something, doesn't mean that there aren't rare conditions under which those boundaries aren't as restrictive or even restrictive at all.  Or for that matter, if the restrictions we observe apply to everything that happens naturally, but don't apply to X, Y and Z unnatural applications that intelligent beings could come up with.

Just look at what we've done so far.  Natural restrictions kept mankind on the planet and would continue to keep mankind on the planet until we or the planet ended.  However, we invented an unnatural method to propel us off the planet and visit the moon.  We went around the restrictions on us by applying other things in a way that doesn't occur naturally.  We could wait from the beginning of the universe until the end and nature wouldn't provide us with rockets and space suits to make the trip.  There could be work-arounds on the limit against traveling faster than the speed of light.  We don't know yet.


----------



## Maxperson (Dec 8, 2018)

dragoner said:


> https://phys.org/news/2018-12-universe-theory-percent-cosmos.html
> 
> This does change the understanding of physics.




Man.  That article would have been so much better if the physicist was named Dr. Farnsworth.


----------



## dragoner (Dec 8, 2018)

Maxperson said:


> Man.  That article would have been so much better if the physicist was named Dr. Farnsworth.




Though it's from Oxford University, not New New York. 

The comments below it are great.


----------



## Umbran (Dec 8, 2018)

dragoner said:


> https://phys.org/news/2018-12-universe-theory-percent-cosmos.html
> 
> This does change the understanding of physics.




It changes nothing, yet.  It is an hypothesis.  

And not a new one.  This is an interpretation of the cosmological constant in Einstein's General Relativity.  Anyone who has studied Einstein's work in detail knows about it, and how with varying values it leads to a universe that eventually collapses in on itself, is static (never expanding or contracting) or ever-expanding. 

The real issue with it (that they do mention) is simple - used in this way, it calls for a continuous and eternal (and, depending on your choices, ever-increasing) creation of negative mass _out of nothing_.  

And that... seems kind of a hack.  It looks tidy, until you realize that an eternal fire hose of negative mass that supports it is just _assumed to exist_.


----------



## Maxperson (Dec 8, 2018)

Umbran said:


> It changes nothing, yet.  It is an hypothesis.
> 
> And not a new one.  This is an interpretation of the cosmological constant in Einstein's General Relativity.  Anyone who has studied Einstein's work in detail knows about it, and how with varying values it leads to a universe that eventually collapses in on itself, is static (never expanding or contracting) or ever-expanding.
> 
> ...




That's how I view dark energy and dark matter as well.


----------



## dragoner (Dec 9, 2018)

Umbran said:


> It changes nothing, yet.  It is an hypothesis.
> 
> And not a new one.  This is an interpretation of the cosmological constant in Einstein's General Relativity.  Anyone who has studied Einstein's work in detail knows about it, and how with varying values it leads to a universe that eventually collapses in on itself, is static (never expanding or contracting) or ever-expanding.
> 
> ...




I agree with you 100%.

Mostly it just something happy to dream about while dealing with relatives over Christmas.


----------



## Umbran (Dec 9, 2018)

Maxperson said:


> That's how I view dark energy and dark matter as well.




If we look at pretty much any galaxy, we can see (via doppler shift of light from stars) how fast the stars in it are orbiting the galaxy's center.  They are pretty much all orbiting too fast.  When you do the math, they are moving too fast in the exact way you'd expect if the galaxy was far heavier than the sum of all mass of all the stars we can see.  

In this situation, is it "a hack" to guess that, when it moves as if there's matter you don't see, that there probably *is* some matter we don't see?

And, in case you are thinking this, no, the physics community didn't just say, "Hey, there's dark matter there," and move on.  They hypothesized that it is there, and have been looking for exactly what it was ever since.  As well as looking at other explanations, like modifications to gravity that still fit what we observe in, say, the movements of planets in our Solar System - but none of those other options have worked out yet.  So, we have a leading (and simplest) hypothesis.

That's all "dark matter" is - a leading hypothesis.


----------



## dragoner (Dec 9, 2018)

Umbran said:


> It looks tidy...




The article was a little more glib than the pdf from arxiv, and it being Oxford, one hopes with a little more rigor than a random pop sci article. Just saying it's only a sign change, is too glib in that plugging a sign change into equations can change everything, so it's not "just a sign change". I also found the creation of negative mass curious; and ultimately this looks to be grant writing, more than a complete theory.


----------



## Maxperson (Dec 9, 2018)

Umbran said:


> If we look at pretty much any galaxy, we can see (via doppler shift of light from stars) how fast the stars in it are orbiting the galaxy's center.  They are pretty much all orbiting too fast.  When you do the math, they are moving too fast in the exact way you'd expect if the galaxy was far heavier than the sum of all mass of all the stars we can see.
> 
> In this situation, is it "a hack" to guess that, when it moves as if there's matter you don't see, that there probably *is* some matter we don't see?




Yes, it's still a hack.  There could be other forces other than gravity or matter that play into the acceleration.  Or maybe there is enough mass in the universe that we can see that accounts for it, but there are aspects of gravity that we just don't know about yet.



> And, in case you are thinking this, no, the physics community didn't just say, "Hey, there's dark matter there," and move on.  They hypothesized that it is there, and have been looking for exactly what it was ever since.  As well as looking at other explanations, like modifications to gravity that still fit what we observe in, say, the movements of planets in our Solar System - but none of those other options have worked out yet.  So, we have a leading (and simplest) hypothesis.
> 
> That's all "dark matter" is - a leading hypothesis.




No, I wasn't think they just put dark matter/energy forth and then move on.  It is, however, just something unseen and undetectable that they stuck in to explain something we are observing.  We could just as easily sub in God and look for his existence as the reason for this.  That's why it feels like a hack to me.


----------



## Umbran (Dec 9, 2018)

Maxperson said:


> Yes, it's still a hack.  There could be other forces other than gravity or matter that play into the acceleration.  Or maybe there is enough mass in the universe that we can see that accounts for it, but there are aspects of gravity that we just don't know about yet.




What part of the fact that folks *are* looking for modifications to gravity, and that so far none have worked out, did not register on your eyeballs?  



> It is, however, just something unseen and undetectable that they stuck in to explain something we are observing.




Well, I will grant that you probably don't have the math for part of this - the motion is *EXACTLY* like there's a halo of matter around and through each galaxy we just can't see with telescopes.  *EXACTLY*.  It is kind of like noticing that the cake is missing, and the dog has icing all over it's snoot.  It does not give you a 100% surety, but is certainly a valid path to investigate....

You do realize that this is how science works, right?  You take a guess, and you start looking for evidence to figure out if you are correct or not?  This is *exactly* how science operates.


----------



## Maxperson (Dec 9, 2018)

Umbran said:


> What part of the fact that folks *are* looking for modifications to gravity, and that so far none have worked out, did not register on your eyeballs?
> 
> Well, I will grant that you probably don't have the math for part of this - the motion is *EXACTLY* like there's a halo of matter around and through each galaxy we just can't see with telescopes.  *EXACTLY*.  It is kind of like noticing that the cake is missing, and the dog has icing all over it's snoot.  It does not give you a 100% surety, but is certainly a valid path to investigate....
> 
> You do realize that this is how science works, right?  You take a guess, and you start looking for evidence to figure out if you are correct or not?  This is *exactly* how science operates.




I see no real difference between scientists assuming dark matter/energy exists, and then looking for it, and scientists assuming a bunch of negative matter is being created, and then going looking for it.  Both seem like hacks that assume things in order to fill a gap that we have.  Both are science. 

Why do you view one as a hack, and the other not?


----------



## Shasarak (Dec 9, 2018)

Maxperson said:


> I see no real difference between scientists assuming dark matter/energy exists, and then looking for it, and scientists assuming a bunch of negative matter is being created, and then going looking for it.  Both seem like hacks that assume things in order to fill a gap that we have.  Both are science.
> 
> Why do you view one as a hack, and the other not?




Science that you like is science.


----------



## Hussar (Dec 9, 2018)

Heh, I've always kinda wondered why astronomers get to create magic forms of matter just to balance their equations.    They get a whole lot more leeway than everyone else it seems.


----------



## Morrus (Dec 9, 2018)

Hussar said:


> Heh, I've always kinda wondered why astronomers get to create magic forms of matter just to balance their equations.    They get a whole lot more leeway than everyone else it seems.




Leeway by whom? For what?


----------



## dragoner (Dec 9, 2018)

Hussar said:


> Heh, I've always kinda wondered why astronomers get to create magic forms of matter just to balance their equations.    They get a whole lot more leeway than everyone else it seems.




They don't. Math is the language of the unseen universe. Even something that is incorrect adds to the body of knowledge, knowledge that is valuable in and of itself. Everything gets put through the same rigor eventually, and it either stands or falls upon it's own merit. Some fields, such as astrophysics, is going to be more theoretical due to the lack of empirical evidence, that is just the way it is going to be.


----------



## Umbran (Dec 10, 2018)

Maxperson said:


> Why do you view one as a hack, and the other not?




Oh, that's simple.  It isn't the stuff that's the issue.  It is the *constant creation of more stuff for eternity* that is the issue.

I mean, really, "there is stuff that doesn't glow really bright, so you don't see it from afar," isn't exactly a strange concept, now is it?  There's no infinities or anything - just stuff that we didn't see before.  

Meanwhile the other is, "Wait a minute, let me hook up this infinite supply of something from nothing, and *then* the math works out fine!" is a bit hinkey.


----------



## Umbran (Dec 10, 2018)

Hussar said:


> Heh, I've always kinda wondered why astronomers get to create magic forms of matter just to balance their equations.




They don't create it.  They merely figure out that it is there.  

Astrophysicists and high-energy physicists get to do it because they are the ones with the expertise to make educated guesses, and will get to the bottom of it faster than a random Joe on the street.

Anyone who was, a short while ago, noting that "we don't know everything" should not have an issue with the idea that, every once in a while, we do find a new thing!


----------



## Maxperson (Dec 10, 2018)

Umbran said:


> Oh, that's simple.  It isn't the stuff that's the issue.  It is the *constant creation of more stuff for eternity* that is the issue.
> 
> I mean, really, "there is stuff that doesn't glow really bright, so you don't see it from afar," isn't exactly a strange concept, now is it?  There's no infinities or anything - just stuff that we didn't see before.
> 
> Meanwhile the other is, "Wait a minute, let me hook up this infinite supply of something from nothing, and *then* the math works out fine!" is a bit hinkey.




It's not just something "that doesn't glow really bright."  It's freaking invisible.  We have matter, so it's solid, but it doesn't obstruct light or other emitted energy in any way.  It and dark energy make up 95+% of the entire universe and have a direct tangible impact on everything we can see, yet we can't detect them directly at all.  The Earth should be impacting with it on a regular basis, but we don't seem to be.  It's as magic mushrooms as creating an infinite supply of negative matter.


----------



## MoonSong (Dec 10, 2018)

Shasarak said:


> Are we including Neanderthals and Denisovans as different species to (modern) humans?  I mean are we just looking at survivor bias?




We as a whole have a few Neanderthal genes, specially all gingers and redheads. They were our same species at least.




Umbran said:


> If we look at pretty much any galaxy, we can see (via doppler shift of light from stars) how fast the stars in it are orbiting the galaxy's center.  They are pretty much all orbiting too fast.  When you do the math, they are moving too fast in the exact way you'd expect if the galaxy was far heavier than the sum of all mass of all the stars we can see.
> 
> In this situation, is it "a hack" to guess that, when it moves as if there's matter you don't see, that there probably *is* some matter we don't see?
> 
> ...




Yeah that is about the most curious thing about Gravity, we don't know if it is even a true force instead of some kind of weird effect.



Zardnaar said:


> It started to go downhill when people started declaring absolutes around FTL travel. Came across as hostile as in "you're wrong nya nya nya" IMHO.




Sorry about that, I didn't notice I was opening a can of worms. T-T (And really really sorry if I came up as hostile.)



Maxperson said:


> Why do you view one as a hack, and the other not?




mmm, like thermodynamics?  



Maxperson said:


> It's not just something "that doesn't glow really bright."  It's freaking invisible.  We have matter, so it's solid, but it doesn't obstruct light or other emitted energy in any way.  It and dark energy make up 95+% of the entire universe and have a direct tangible impact on everything we can see, yet we can't detect them directly at all.  The Earth should be impacting with it on a regular basis, but we don't seem to be.  It's as magic mushrooms as creating an infinite supply of negative matter.




My pet nonsensical theory is that Dark Matter is what souls are made of. That way what gives us sentience is the same thing keeping the cosmos together.  n_n.


----------



## Umbran (Dec 10, 2018)

Maxperson said:


> It's not just something "that doesn't glow really bright."  It's freaking invisible.  We have matter, so it's solid




That word - solid.  No.  I mean, not any more solid than hard vacuum.

Out in interstellar space, you can get densities of normal matter about 1 atom per cubic centimeter.  Somewhat lower out between the spiral arms of the galaxy.  This is "hard vacuum" - not "solid".

The density of dark matter in our region of space is calculated to be roughly 1 proton mass per three cubic centimeters.  So, the density of dark matter is less than a third of that of normal matter in the void.  What it misses in density around us, it makes up for in sheer volume.



> The Earth should be impacting with it on a regular basis, but we don't seem to be.




The exact same things were said about neutrinos.  They don't obstruct light or other emitted energy in any way.  They are very light, but there's *lots* of them.  Like 500 million per cubic meter around us.  They are sleeting through the Earth, through your very flesh.  They were first detected in the wild in 1965, a decade after one had been created and detected in the lab.

Patience, dude.  This stuff doesn't just come, fully formed from the forehead of Zeus, or something.  Science takes *time*.


----------



## Hussar (Dec 10, 2018)

I think you folks are largely proving my point.

Astronomers say that the mass of the universe is made up of dark matter.  Ok.  But, since you can't (at least at the moment) test for dark matter, nor can you even indirectly test for dark matter, it's basically the same as making stuff up.  Until it's falsifiable, it's not really true science.  Like I said, astronomers get a LOT more leeway in this stuff.  Imagine if chemists tried the same thing - "Um, well, stuff burns because it's got Inflamium, this unseeable, undetectable, and completely unknowable substance.  Yeah, that's it, Inflamium" 

Dark Matter is basically a really cool way of saying, "Well, we have these equations that don't  actually work, so, if we add this, whatever this is, to the equation, then they work out.  So, we'll call this Dark Matter and everyone will pat us on the back for it. "

So, yeah, astronomers and astrophysicists get a LOT more leeway when it comes to making stuff up.


----------



## R_Chance (Dec 10, 2018)

Have to love Inflamium. It answers so much...


----------



## Maxperson (Dec 10, 2018)

Umbran said:


> That word - solid.  No.  I mean, not any more solid than hard vacuum.
> 
> Out in interstellar space, you can get densities of normal matter about 1 atom per cubic centimeter.  Somewhat lower out between the spiral arms of the galaxy.  This is "hard vacuum" - not "solid".
> 
> ...




Dark matter and energy were invented to explain why galaxies don't fly apart.  Massive black holes are at the center of each galaxy, so it seems far more likely that something we don't understand about gravity and/or black holes is keeping galaxies together and spinning, not some magic particles.  Hell, the gravity from black holes would extend out in a sphere to create the "halo" they say dark matter/energy creates.

Science does take time, but hacks are still hacks.  Magic matter/energy and magic creation of negative matter are both hacks in my opinion.  I could be wrong on one or both counts, but I'm not going to hold my breath.


----------



## Maxperson (Dec 10, 2018)

R_Chance said:


> Have to love Inflamium. It answers so much...




For proof of Inflamium, just look at online threads.  It exists in great amounts on the internet.


----------



## Morrus (Dec 10, 2018)

Maxperson said:


> Dark matter and energy were invented to explain why galaxies don't fly apart.  Massive black holes are at the center of each galaxy, so it seems far more likely that something we don't understand about gravity and/or black holes is keeping galaxies together and spinning, not some magic particles.  Hell, the gravity from black holes would extend out in a sphere to create the "halo" they say dark matter/energy creates.
> 
> Science does take time, but hacks are still hacks.  Magic matter/energy and magic creation of negative matter are both hacks in my opinion.  I could be wrong on one or both counts, but I'm not going to hold my breath.




I think the issue here is a fundamental misunderstanding of the amount of work that goes into serious science, and a frankly insulting trivialization of that work into  soundbytes like "magic particles" and implications that scientists just “make stuff up”. It's the traditional weapons of the psuedoscientist and the anti-science campaigners.


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## Shasarak (Dec 10, 2018)

Of course you dont call it "magic particles" that would be dumb.

You call it "negative mass fluid"


----------



## Zardnaar (Dec 10, 2018)

I don't know if this is a sad though but if its 1 light year or 100 right now functionally its the same thing in terms of interstellar travel. Its to far for us. 

 Morrus theres a lot of things that scientists are still fuzzy on. For example is space infinite. Another one is the Big Bang Theory. OK there is a big ball of mass, energy or whatever and it explodes 13 billion years ago. Who or what created it?  How did it get their to explode in the 1st place? Would that who or what in effect be God? Note I am not religious was just wondering.


----------



## Morrus (Dec 10, 2018)

Zardnaar said:


> Morrus theres a lot of things that scientists are still fuzzy on. For example is space infinite. Another one is the Big Bang Theory. OK there is a big ball of mass, energy or whatever and it explodes 13 billion years ago. Who or what created it?  How did it get their to explode in the 1st place? Would that who or what in effect be God? Note I am not religious was just wondering.




You utterly misunderstood my point. Utterly.


----------



## Hussar (Dec 10, 2018)

Zardnaar said:


> I don't know if this is a sad though but if its 1 light year or 100 right now functionally its the same thing in terms of interstellar travel. Its to far for us.
> 
> Morrus theres a lot of things that scientists are still fuzzy on. For example is space infinite. Another one is the Big Bang Theory. OK there is a big ball of mass, energy or whatever and it explodes 13 billion years ago. Who or what created it?  How did it get their to explode in the 1st place? Would that who or what in effect be God? Note I am not religious was just wondering.




I thought the "is space infinite" question was largely resolved.  If space was truly infinite, then the night sky would be solid white with stars.  In an infinite universe, you would have infinite stars, therefore, from our point of view, there would be almost no space between the stars in the night sky.  At least, that's the way it was explained to me.  

But, [MENTION=1]Morrus[/MENTION], I'm certainly no anti-scientist campaigner.  Just pointing out that in one branch of science, the rules get... err... relaxed somewhat.


----------



## Istbor (Dec 10, 2018)

I believe the point is, Math shows there is something at work there.  As stated, things don't match up with our best projected mass of the galaxy. There is still a large amount of mass out there causing what we are seeing. 

Sure, we could pretend there is something not right with our understanding of gravity, but that would probably be far more complicated, than a material that we fail to observe currently. 

All of our Math and current understanding of the universe tells us there is something missing. I don't think it is a stretch to name whatever that unknown thing is, and then search out for answers to the equations we understand to be correct. 

I don't see that as magic at all.  

However...

View attachment 103604


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## Morrus (Dec 10, 2018)

Hussar said:


> I thought the "is space infinite" question was largely resolved.  If space was truly infinite, then the night sky would be solid white with stars.  In an infinite universe, you would have infinite stars, therefore, from our point of view, there would be almost no space between the stars in the night sky.  At least, that's the way it was explained to me.




Nope. The universe is 14B years old. Space is more than 14B light years in diameter. If light moved at infinite speed, then yes, it would all reach us at the same time and it would all be white. But it doesn't - the light further than 14B light years away from us hasn't reached us yet. If space was *infinite* then the light from stars an infinite distance away would take an infinite amount of time to reach us, so we'd never see it.



> But, @_*Morrus*_, I'm certainly no anti-scientist campaigner.  Just pointing out that in one branch of science, the rules get... err... relaxed somewhat.




What rules? And again, I ask, what is this "leeway" they're being granted, and by whom? They're just people doing science and publishing their findings.

They produce solid mathematics-filled peer-reviewed papers. What one reads in the popular press isn't scientific papers, and when one argues against what one read in the popular press, one isn't arguing against anything other than journalist's poor explanations and simplistic interpretations of 40 pages of equations and bad analogies.


----------



## Hussar (Dec 10, 2018)

Morrus said:


> Nope. The universe is 14B years old. Space is more than 14B light years in diameter. If light moved at infinite speed, then yes, it would all reach us at the same time and it would all be white. But it doesn't - the light further than 14B light years away from us hasn't reached us yet. If space was *infinite* then the light from stars an infinite distance away would take an infinite amount of time to reach us, so we'd never see it.
> 
> 
> 
> ...




But, the thing is, because of the Big Bang, all the stars in the universe existed in a much smaller space at the beginning of the universe.  While I realize more stars are being created, it doesn't really matter.  All the light from every star in the universe has already reached us.  Again, that's the way it was explained to me.  Seems to make sense to me.  But, hey, I'm flexible.  

But, as far as rules go, the basic, fundamental rule of science is things must be falsifiable.  If it's not falsifiable, then it isn't really science.  Since we cannot actually falsify dark matter in any way, it remains entirely theoretical and will remain so until such time as we can figure out a way to actually test for dark matter.  IOW, how can you be doing science when nothing you do can actually be tested?

We can test for, say, relativity.  We can test for climate change.  We cannot test for dark matter.  We just have to take it on faith because it balances our own equations.  Thus, as I said, astronomers tend to get a lot more wiggle room than other sciences.


----------



## Morrus (Dec 10, 2018)

Hussar said:


> But, the thing is, because of the Big Bang, all the stars in the universe existed in a much smaller space at the beginning of the universe.  While I realize more stars are being created, it doesn't really matter.  All the light from every star in the universe has already reached us.  Again, that's the way it was explained to me.  Seems to make sense to me.  But, hey, I'm flexible.




Somebody explained it wrong. The universe expands faster than the speed of light. Remember, the speed of light relates to movement _within_ space-time, not the expansion _of_ space-time.



> But, as far as rules go, the basic, fundamental rule of science is things must be falsifiable.  If it's not falsifiable, then it isn't really science.  Since we cannot actually falsify dark matter in any way, it remains entirely theoretical and will remain so until such time as we can figure out a way to actually test for dark matter.  IOW, how can you be doing science when nothing you do can actually be tested?
> 
> We can test for, say, relativity.  We can test for climate change.  We cannot test for dark matter.  We just have to take it on faith because it balances our own equations.




Theoretical physics is a thing. You can choose to disbelieve in it, I guess, but as Neil deGrass Tyson once said (unfortunate choice of scientist at the present time, sadly, but the quote is relevant) -- "The universe is under no obligation to make sense to you."

I mean, sure. Say theoretical physics "isn't really science".  Say Stephen Hawking (RIP) and Einstein and Newton, three of many great theoretical physicists, weren't really "doing science". Say all those scientists working on dark matter aren't really doing science. But that doesn't make you look good. 



> Thus, as I said, astronomers tend to get a lot more wiggle room than other sciences.




Yes, it's the third time you've said it. It still doesn't mean anything. It won't when you say it for a fourth time, either - repeating it won't make it mean anything.


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## dragoner (Dec 11, 2018)

Hussar said:


> We cannot test for dark matter.  We just have to take it on faith because it balances our own equations.




No, we can see the effect of dark matter through gravitational lensing, even if we can't see it.


----------



## Ovinomancer (Dec 11, 2018)

dragoner said:


> No, we can see the effect of dark matter through gravitational lensing, even if we can't see it.



No, we see gravitational lensing greater than explained by matter we can see and current theory and so use dark matter as a stand in to make our maths work.

Order matters.  We're not observing dark matter, we're postulating dark matter as an explanation for what we observe.


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## dragoner (Dec 11, 2018)

Ovinomancer said:


> We're not observing dark matter, we're postulating dark matter as an explanation for what we observe.




Here you are restating what I stated. 

Observable phenomena is observable phenomena, and dark matter is the theory among many other competing theories that has held up. It is the theory that best fits the data we have.


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## Ovinomancer (Dec 11, 2018)

dragoner said:


> Here you are restating what I stated.



Not really.  The distinction matters.


> Observable phenomena is observable phenomena, and dark matter is the theory among many other competing theories that has held up. It is the theory that best fits the data we have.



Which theory of dark matter is that, then?  There are a few, none proven.  Yes, assuming invisible and undetected mass balances our equations nicely, but there's no single theory of dark matter.  And, there could be another reason we just haven't discovered yet.


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## dragoner (Dec 11, 2018)

Ovinomancer said:


> And, there could be another reason we just haven't discovered yet.




Yes really, the distinction is meaningless; what counts is that the numbers work, and it explains observable phenomena. It is not "take it on faith" or "just making stuff up"; that is incorrect.


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## Ovinomancer (Dec 11, 2018)

dragoner said:


> Yes really, the distinction is meaningless; what counts is that the numbers work, and it explains observable phenomena. It is not "take it on faith" or "just making stuff up"; that is incorrect.



So, then, we're done at "dark matter?"


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## Maxperson (Dec 11, 2018)

Morrus said:


> I think the issue here is a fundamental misunderstanding of the amount of work that goes into serious science, and a frankly insulting trivialization of that work into  soundbytes like "magic particles" and implications that scientists just “make stuff up”. It's the traditional weapons of the psuedoscientist and the anti-science campaigners.




I understand that a lot of work and match goes into these theories.  And I'm certainly not an anti-science person.  However, at the root of these theories are ideas that are put forth to explain things that we don't understand, and even with all that work, are often wrong.  I love reading about science.  Especially astronomy.  Dark matter/energy just doesn't seem to me to be any less of a "hack"(To use [MENTION=177]Umbran[/MENTION]'s term) than the theory that negative matter is being created.  I'm sure work went into that theory as well.


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## Hussar (Dec 11, 2018)

Morrus said:


> Somebody explained it wrong. The universe expands faster than the speed of light. Remember, the speed of light relates to movement _within_ space-time, not the expansion _of_ space-time.
> 
> 
> 
> ...




There's a difference though.  EVERYTHING Einstein, Hawking and Newton have done have been falsifiable.  Every single thing.  So, no, they are doing very real science.

Postulating completely unverifiable elements to make your equations work is not good science.  

Now, at the moment, it's the best we've got, so, there's that.  

In any case, I was trying to be a bit tongue in cheek and poking a bit of fun at astronomers.  But, I would point out, "isn't really science" is not what I said.  What I said was that astronomy gets a bit more latitude than other sciences when it comes time to actually prove their hypotheses.  Being able to make up stuff just so your equations work doesn't work in other sciences.  

And, unfortunately, people who get into sciences can be just as dogmatic as anyone else.  I mean, you're apparently absolutely sure that your model of the universe is correct despite the fact that it hasn't actually been proven and remains largely theoretical.  I mean, heck, NASA says you're wrong:  https://spaceplace.nasa.gov/review/dr-marc-space/dark-sky.html 

I'm a little more comfortable believing NASA than you,  [MENTION=1]Morrus[/MENTION].


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## Maxperson (Dec 11, 2018)

Morrus said:


> Theoretical physics is a thing. You can choose to disbelieve in it, I guess, but as Neil deGrass Tyson once said (unfortunate choice of scientist at the present time, sadly, but the quote is relevant) -- "The universe is under no obligation to make sense to you."




One of my favorite things that doesn't make sense to us right now is the zombie star.

https://www.cnn.com/2017/11/08/us/zombie-star-survives-supernova/index.html


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## Umbran (Dec 11, 2018)

Hussar said:


> There's a difference though.  EVERYTHING Einstein, Hawking and Newton have done have been falsifiable.  Every single thing.  So, no, they are doing very real science.
> 
> Postulating completely unverifiable elements to make your equations work is not good science.




Well, postulating things that are not verifiable, even in theory, is not good science.  

Postulating stuff that you just haven't figured out how to verify *yet* is fine.  A whole lot of chemistry, atomic, and particle physics went or currently goes this way.


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## Umbran (Dec 11, 2018)

Maxperson said:


> Dark matter/energy just doesn't seem to me to be any less of a "hack"(To use [MENTION=177]Umbran[/MENTION]'s term) than the theory that negative matter is being created.  I'm sure work went into that theory as well.




The theory that there's matter out there we cannot see has been knocking around since the 1920s.  More serious support for its existence using galaxy rotation speeds came along in the 1970s.  This has been around for decades, slowing gaining support in the data.

The paper for this new thing, however, was published this year.  It is *far less* worked through.

And, reading the paper, I don't feel he goes into the thermodynamic issue well enough at all.   I follow his math well enough, but there are things buried in, "Such speculations can be considered more rigorously in future works."  So, I am not convinced.


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## Maxperson (Dec 11, 2018)

dragoner said:


> Yes really, the distinction is meaningless; what counts is that the numbers work, and it explains observable phenomena. It is not "take it on faith" or "just making stuff up"; that is incorrect.




Here's the thing, though.  We're observing 16 and plugging in 8+8(Dark matter/energy).  Sure the math works and explains the observable 16, but so could 4x4, 12+4, 18-2, and so on.  Just because the math works out and explains things, doesn't mean that it's correct.  It doesn't even mean that it's probably correct.  We have no idea.  All we really know is that we've stuck in math that works.


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## dragoner (Dec 11, 2018)

Maxperson said:


> Just because the math works out and explains things, doesn't mean that it's correct.  It doesn't even mean that it's probably correct.  We have no idea.  All we really know is that we've stuck in math that works.




The equations are much more complex, as is the observable data. So the theory _does_ represent the best solution; and general parsimony says the most direct solution is likely to be true.

It's not "taking it on faith", for example, you know baby pigeons exist because you see adult pigeons, so the knowledge that the baby pigeons exist even if you don't see them is informed by seeing the adult. Thus similar to seeing gravitational lensing, we might not see that mass there, except the informed assumption (scientific parsimony) would be that it exists.

Edit:

Statements such as:

_"Just because the math works out and explains things, (it) doesn't mean that it's correct."

_Can be falsified as:

_"Just because the math works out and explains things, (it) does mean that it's correct."
_
Are simultaneously correct until one is disproved, so essentially they are null until that occurs.


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## Maxperson (Dec 11, 2018)

dragoner said:


> The equations are much more complex, as is the observable data. So the theory _does_ represent the best solution; and general parsimony says the most direct solution is likely to be true.




I think it's hubris to assume that it's the best solution.  There could literally be millions of better solutions that we haven't thought up yet.  Just because it might be the best solution that we've thought up so far, doesn't meant that it is the best solution, or that it's even in the running for the best 100 solutions.  



> It's not "taking it on faith", for example, you know baby pigeons exist because you see adult pigeons, so the knowledge that the baby pigeons exist even if you don't see them is informed by seeing the adult. Thus similar to seeing gravitational lensing, we might not see that mass there, except the informed assumption (scientific parsimony) would be that it exists.




Or is causes by something completely different.  We're assuming that it's caused by mass, and further assuming that it's caused by invisible mass rather than say an unknown property of the mass that we can see.


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## Morrus (Dec 11, 2018)

Hussar said:


> And, unfortunately, people who get into sciences can be just as dogmatic as anyone else.  I mean, you're apparently absolutely sure that your model of the universe is correct despite the fact that it hasn't actually been proven and remains largely theoretical.  I mean, heck, NASA says you're wrong:  https://spaceplace.nasa.gov/review/dr-marc-space/dark-sky.html




That does not contradict anything I said. 



> I'm a little more comfortable believing NASA than you, @_*Morrus*_.




What a weirdly aggressive thing to say.


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## dragoner (Dec 11, 2018)

Maxperson said:


> I think it's hubris to assume that it's the best solution.  There could literally be millions of better solutions that we haven't thought up yet.  *Just because it might be the best solution that we've thought up so far, doesn't meant that it is the best solution*, or that it's even in the running for the best 100 solutions.




It's not hubris at all, as a matter of fact, the negative mass paper from Oxford is a perfect example of other ideas being entertained. Best solution is best solution, it's the piece of the puzzle with the least gaps. Not entertaining, or giving equal weight to crank theories, is not hubris, nor is disregarding people who do not know what they are talking about. 





> Or is causes by something completely different.  We're assuming that it's caused by mass, and further assuming that it's caused by invisible mass rather than say an unknown property of the mass that we can see.




The most simple solution being true (sometimes called Occam's Razor, or Scientific Parsimony); gravitational lensing by mass is the safest bet, rather than an "unknown property" of mass we can see. Because, that (unknown properties) doesn't even fit any theory.


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## Umbran (Dec 11, 2018)

Maxperson said:


> Here's the thing, though.  We're observing 16 and plugging in 8+8(Dark matter/energy).




Okay, first off, this is incorrect.  Very incorrect.  I mean, we are on the edge of "not even wrong" territory.

We are observing anomalous motion of stars in galaxies, and we are observing acceleration of expansion of space as a whole - these two things happen on two different scales.  Different like, "your left leg," and, "the continent," different scales.  We observe these things separately, and do not have a specific reason to believe they are related.  

I do have to ask - are you a licensed electrician or plumber?  Pick one that you are not.  When you need some of this work done, you hire the best one you can, right?  The one with the most experience and understanding?  When you do hire one of these trained professionals to do their job, do you look over their shoulders and nitpick the way they do things?  Do you hang over then and tell them how to do their job? Do you question the entire approach of home plumbing or electrical work, despite having only small amounts of understanding and experience in the field? 

When it comes down to it, can you actually do better than the professional?  Are you willing to bet your house burning down or sewage backing up into your sink on that assessment?

Why do you, who cannot seem to differentiate between phenomena on a galactic scale and a universal scale, feel that somehow you have appropriate understanding to critique how these phenomena are investigated and explained by people who have made it their life's work and study?    

And you are accusing *others* of hubris?  

Please, please, someone call this an appeal to authority.  I'm ready for you.


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## Istbor (Dec 11, 2018)

Umbran said:


> Please, please, someone call this an appeal to authority.  I'm ready for you.




I'll oblige. 

*Ahem*... argumentum ad verecundiam!!!!!


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## Zardnaar (Dec 11, 2018)

Revenge, all of you suffer.

 I think we're alone now.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w6Q3mHyzn78


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## Hussar (Dec 11, 2018)

Morrus said:


> That does not contradict anything I said.
> 
> 
> 
> What a weirdly aggressive thing to say.




Huh?

You just got through telling me that the universe is infinite.  That link directly contradicts that.  

I'm confused.


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## Shasarak (Dec 11, 2018)

Umbran said:


> Please, please, someone call this an appeal to authority.  I'm ready for you.




Heh, come at me Bro!  Which is how scientists should really discuss their work, two scientists enter and one scientist leaves.

I read a story about Darwin which said that he delayed the printing of On the Origin of Species because he wanted to include the counter to any argument against it.


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## Istbor (Dec 11, 2018)

Hussar said:


> Huh?
> 
> You just got through telling me that the universe is infinite.  That link directly contradicts that.
> 
> I'm confused.




I don't see where Morrus said anything about the Universe being infinite. He mentioned what that might mean, if it were, but he was certainly not saying it is infinite. 

Maybe you are confused, just as you say.


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## Morrus (Dec 11, 2018)

Hussar said:


> Huh?
> 
> You just got through telling me that the universe is infinite.  That link directly contradicts that.
> 
> I'm confused.




No I didn’t. Read it again.


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## Umbran (Dec 11, 2018)

Hussar said:


> You just got through telling me that the universe is infinite.  That link directly contradicts that.
> 
> I'm confused.




Let us enlighten...

The *observable* universe is finite - limited by the speed of light, the distances involved, and the age and expansion of the universe.  And that's sufficient for this particular question.

We touched upon this elsewhere (earlier in this thread?  I can't recall).  Whether the universe is actually finite is an open question - that page is oversimplifying, perhaps for sake of its younger intended audience.  There's not much indicating it is finite.  There are a few things that kind of lean to infinite, but not definitively so.


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## Umbran (Dec 11, 2018)

Istbor said:


> I'll oblige.
> 
> *Ahem*... argumentum ad verecundiam!!!!!




Sure... so, applying this to the situation comes from a misunderstanding of the fallacy, in a couple of ways.  I will demonstrate it this way:

You are feeling chest pain.  There are two people near you.  One is a renowned cardiac surgeon, who listens to your chest with a stethoscope, and says that you may be in trouble, because he hears an irregularity, and you should go straight to a hospital.  The other is some guy named Frank.  He's in marketing, but he totally stayed at a Holiday Inn Express last night, and he says what you are feeling is the result of eating an aggressive chili dog, and that you should take an antacid and wait half an hour.  Not that he asked what you had for lunch.

Who do you listen to?


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## Shasarak (Dec 11, 2018)

Umbran said:


> Sure... so, applying this to the situation comes from a misunderstanding of the fallacy, in a couple of ways.  I will demonstrate it this way:
> 
> You are feeling chest pain.  There are two people near you.  One is a renowned cardiac surgeon, who listens to your chest with a stethoscope, and says that you may be in trouble, because he hears an irregularity, and you should go straight to a hospital.  The other is some guy named Frank.  He's in marketing, but he totally stayed at a Holiday Inn Express last night, and he says what you are feeling is the result of eating an aggressive chili dog, and that you should take an antacid and wait half an hour.  Not that he asked what you had for lunch.
> 
> Who do you listen to?




Lets say the Cardiac Surgeon was right and you did have a heart attack.  Now he advises you to have a stent put in to open the blocked arteries.

Do you still listen to him?


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## Istbor (Dec 11, 2018)

Shasarak said:


> Lets say the Cardiac Surgeon was right and you did have a heart attack.  Now he advises you to have a stent put in to open the blocked arteries.
> 
> Do you still listen to him?




Well what does Frank have to say on the issue?


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## Maxperson (Dec 12, 2018)

dragoner said:


> It's not hubris at all, as a matter of fact, the negative mass paper from Oxford is a perfect example of other ideas being entertained. Best solution is best solution, it's the piece of the puzzle with the least gaps. Not entertaining, or giving equal weight to crank theories, is not hubris, nor is disregarding people who do not know what they are talking about.




You don't have to give equal weight to other theories.  Here's a fact for you.  The one and only way you can know that it's the best solution is if you are God.  You literally have to know everything so that you can be sure this one is the best.  Otherwise, it's just the best of what we know, which may or may not be the best.  The hubris is in acting as you are omniscient and making the absolute claim that this is THE BEST.



> The most simple solution being true (sometimes called Occam's Razor, or Scientific Parsimony); gravitational lensing by mass is the safest bet, rather than an "unknown property" of mass we can see. Because, that (unknown properties) doesn't even fit any theory.




That's not Occam's Razor.  Occam's Razor says that the simplest solution is usually correct.  That leaves lots of room for it not to be correct.


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## Umbran (Dec 12, 2018)

Maxperson said:


> Here's a fact for you.  The one and only way you can know that it's the best solution is if you are God.




Uh, huh.  And, if you yourself are not God, how do you have that "fact"?  Beware that you not slip into solipsism.



> Otherwise, it's just the best of what we know, which may or may not be the best.




Oh, please.  Have you not ever heard of "colloquial use" before?  

Everyone who studies enough science gets that point drilled in there - that what we know is the best we know at the time, and that science is always learning new things, and that we must be prepared to accept new information when it comes.  It gets tiresome when you have to say, "....the best we know at the moment, which may not be the Eternal Truth" over and over.  Every. Gorram. Other. Sentence.  So, we tend to shorten it.

Just like in science, "Theory" means "something really well tested," and "hypothesis" means what most other people call "theory".  The use is irregular, but getting on a high-horse about it does not make you some purveyor of amazing insight that nobody else is admitting to.



> The hubris is in acting as you are omniscient and making the absolute claim that this is THE BEST.




Interesting - more hubris allegations.  Is that a common approach for you, in general?


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## dragoner (Dec 12, 2018)

Maxperson said:


> You don't have to give equal weight to other theories.  Here's a fact for you.  The one and only way you can know that it's the best solution is if you are God.  You literally have to know everything so that you can be sure this one is the best.  Otherwise, it's just the best of what we know, which may or may not be the best.  The hubris is in acting as you are omniscient and making the absolute claim that this is THE BEST.
> 
> 
> 
> That's not Occam's Razor.  Occam's Razor says that the simplest solution is usually correct.  That leaves lots of room for it not to be correct.




Semantics, not surprised it has devolved to this; however, being born in the Soviet Union, English is not my first language. /shrug

Let's look at your fact though, now having been raised a godless communist, I find little of import to the idea of "god"; nevertheless, your fact is in fact, non-factual. Because if all human knowledge is limited, that would include your knowledge of god's ability to know everything, thus recursively nullifying your own argument.

In science, we necessarily assume that nothing is known beyond 99%, so the argument of not know something to 100% certainty, is a pointless argument. New data can always change outcomes, that is an accepted fact. In writing "best" as a shortening of "most likely to be true", best is the best word there.


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## Maxperson (Dec 12, 2018)

Umbran said:


> Uh, huh.  And, if you yourself are not God, how do you have that "fact"?




We know that there are many things we don't know about the universe.  



> Oh, please.  Have you not ever heard of "colloquial use" before?
> 
> Everyone who studies enough science gets that point drilled in there - that what we know is the best we know at the time, and that science is always learning new things, and that we must be prepared to accept new information when it comes.  It gets tiresome when you have to say, "....the best we know at the moment, which may not be the Eternal Truth" over and over.  Every. Gorram. Other. Sentence.  So, we tend to shorten it.




He had the opportunity when I challenged him on that to say something along the lines of, "I'm shortening it, because I repeat it a lot." or "You're right, it is only the best based on or limited knowledge."  Instead,  he doubled down on it being the absolute best possible solution, eliminating "colloquial use" as an option for him.



> Interesting - more hubris allegations.  Is that a common approach for you, in general?




Mostly when people insist that what we "know" is absolutely correct, like [MENTION=6943731]dragoner[/MENTION] with the dark matter theory, and the guy that insisted that there was absolutely no possibility of aliens existing.


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## Maxperson (Dec 12, 2018)

dragoner said:


> Semantics, not surprised it has devolved to this; however, being born in the Soviet Union, English is not my first language. /shrug




Er, it's not semantics to say that "always correct" is different from "Correct most of the time."  The difference between the two is rather profound.


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## dragoner (Dec 12, 2018)

Maxperson said:


> Er, it's not semantics to say that "always correct" is different from "Correct most of the time."  The difference between the two is rather profound.




Good, because I never said such. Now maybe you should get back to disputing dark matter, yes?


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## Umbran (Dec 12, 2018)

Shasarak said:


> Lets say the Cardiac Surgeon was right and you did have a heart attack.  Now he advises you to have a stent put in to open the blocked arteries.
> 
> Do you still listen to him?




Thank you for asking that.  It allows me the proper context to point things out.

The logical fallacy points out to us that being or having authority, _in and of itself_ does not make one technically correct.  Stephen Hawking could not go to a conference and say, "You are incorrect.  I am Stephen Hawking, and therefore I you know this to be true."  Even Hawking had to explain himself to his fellow physicists.  

But *something* gives us technical correctness, doesn't it?  It isn't like technical correctness is randomly assigned, and we are all just as likely as each other to blunder onto it.  No, technical correctness is gained through application of knowledge and expertise.  It is not *guaranteed* by those, but it does stem from them.  

Now, note that in my example, the surgeon does not *actually* speak from authority.  He speaks from knowledge.  He has the learning to listen to heart, and assess the risk that you are having a heart attack.  Even if you gave the stethoscope to Frank, and he listened to your heart, he doesn't have the expertise to interpret what he hears.  

This is the point - this wasn't about authority.  It was about having enough expertise and understanding to have an informed opinion.  Having expertise does not mean you are correct, but *NOT* having expertise pretty much assures you are correct only by accident, or by parroting someone else who does have expertise.

***

So, this brings us to the stent question.  In my example, the surgeon had a particular reason for recommending a course of action.  Yours does not have one stated.

Also, there's another piece of information implicit in the stent example - in the real world, *other doctors* have noted that use of stents is not without risk.  We presume that is also the case in our hypothetical.  So, instead of a cardiac surgeon and Frank, we have cardiac surgeons and other doctors.  They all have expertise to have informed opinion.  When we have conflicting thoughts from multiple people who know enough to have an informed opinion, accepted authority or not, then we have a different kind of conversation.


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## Maxperson (Dec 12, 2018)

dragoner said:


> Good, because I never said such.




This is you saying "Always correct.":  "The most simple solution being true (sometimes called Occam's Razor..."

Me correcting you by saying "Correct most of the time.":   "That's not Occam's Razor. Occam's Razor says that the simplest solution is usually correct."

You calling it semantics: "Semantics, not surprised it has devolved to this"

And the quote above is you denying what you said.


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## Ovinomancer (Dec 12, 2018)

Umbran said:


> Okay, first off, this is incorrect.  Very incorrect.  I mean, we are on the edge of "not even wrong" territory.
> 
> We are observing anomalous motion of stars in galaxies, and we are observing acceleration of expansion of space as a whole - these two things happen on two different scales.  Different like, "your left leg," and, "the continent," different scales.  We observe these things separately, and do not have a specific reason to believe they are related.
> 
> ...



Einstein was a patent clerk.  Sure, he had a degree, barely eked out through copying notes, but couldn't get a job even teaching physics.  Certainly not the best, right?

The idea of the highly trained being immune to the critique of the lesser, or even untrained is badly misplaced, most especially in science.  Science should care about the argument, not the source.  The veneration of scientists is something we, as Western society, do too much.  You see this in uncritical science reporting, or on the replication crisis in fields that have too long resisted common sense.  In the growth of citizen science in blogs that is questioning long standing beliefs.

So, yeah, I'll call your argument out, as a scientist (small s) myself.  Not that Max's argument wasn't valid -- it isn't, at all -- but that Scientists should had some immunity from criticism from the hoi polloi.  Saying that while the social science and nutrition fields are having major collapses is a bit tone deaf.


----------



## Caliburn101 (Dec 12, 2018)

Umbran said:


> No, it isn't.   Remember that even if the aliens are immortal, the stars aren't!  There are at least 100 billion stars in the Milky Way (possibly up to 400 billion).  And the lifespan of a star like the Sun is about 10 billion years.
> 
> Let us say that you only want to visit 10% of the stars in the galaxy - that's 10 to 40 billion stars.  Even if you visit one every single year, most of the stars will burn out long before you can reach them!  Oh, and in only 4 billion years, the Milky Way is going to collide with Andromeda, and what do you figure that's going to do with your 10-billion-year exploration plan?




No plan survives first contact with another galaxy...


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## dragoner (Dec 12, 2018)

Maxperson said:


> And the quote above is you denying what you said.




Because you are wrong? You have been terrible with logic here.


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## Maxperson (Dec 13, 2018)

dragoner said:


> Because you are wrong? You have been terrible with logic here.




What you said = the simplest answer is always correct.  It's not logic at all, it's just the English language.  You said English wasn't your main language, so I'll chalk it up to that.  However, that also means that you likely don't fully understand what I'm trying to say, so I'm going to bow out of the discussion with you.


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## dragoner (Dec 13, 2018)

Maxperson said:


> Er, it's not semantics...






Maxperson said:


> It's not logic at all...




Your entire argument was pointless semantics, I suggest you look up the definition, and based upon bad logic/faulty assumptions about what you think I might have said.


----------

