Diche Bach

Excuse the additional tangent on the main theme of the thread . . . @Green Baron You're too cynical! Earth life IS wondrous!

C++ documentation. Its like a tradition to be as obscure as possible.

Well . . . to his credit Mr. Joe Scott (Dr. Joe Scott? not sure . . .) ALSO has another video that offers up the tacitly opposite viewpoint (I do love a fine rhetoritician!)

I look at it like this: humans are an incredible mixed bag, but life itself is pretty wondrous. As such, we are morally obligated to strive to insure the perpetuity of Earth life, by transporting it wholesale to new locales where it will persist eternal. Since we are the only capable steward of Earth life, we have to save ourselves too. Sort of an evolutionary biologists reversed analogy of the Abrahamic Great Chain of Being! Given we have hundreds of millions of years to get our crap together and make it happen (and it does not require any technology that is literally impossible, just lots of money, time, energy and persistence) and we are already on the cusp of most of the technologies to allow it to happen, I think we will pull it off. Even if we go full retard and unleash a thermonuclear WWIII, I still think we will ultimately get it together and live up to our "The Precursors destiny." Nuclear war of maximum extent would ravage Earth and spool humanity (and most of Earth life) through a rather small bottleneck. Even so, my gut intuition the damage wouldn't be so drastic as to literally exterminate humanity nor life. As far as we know the Cambrian explosion itself maybe only took a million years (maybe less!) to get underway, and there is more than one "adaptive radiation" event in the geological record which appears to have ocurred relatively rapidly. What I infer from that is: we humans could literally kill off most life on Earth and reduce our own numbers to miniscule levels (perhaps even as low as the Toba Catastrophe bottleneck of ~60,000 people!), but (a) we would likely hang in there, adapt and even rebuild from the wreckage of the past. (b) life would hang in there too. Project a few million years beyond that and we might even be right back to where we stand today, albeit perhaps with a lot of our persistent Imperial Ape foibles bred/trained/expunged out of our ontogenies? Unless a bolide literally turns Earth into a molten slag heap, I suspect we will eventually save ourselves and our Earth family of lifeforms from extinction and go on to establish the first interstellar ecological networks.

Has this video been linked up in heayah already?

I seem to recall the window of future habitability for Earth is only around 1 or 1.5 billion years. The rate at which the sun swells up as it transitions into a red giant will be slow and will not culminate until considerably later (3 or 5 billion years hence or whatever the number is) but its increased energy output will have rendered the Earth uninhabitable and all life on Earth extinct well before that. Still, would seem to be plenty of time for humanity to get its act together and found new homeworlds in various places around the galaxy. Even if only enormous O'Neill cylinder type of spacecraft with millions of people, animals and plants inside.

That actually has promise . . .

You guys are saying that "Quantum gravity" and/or "String theory" are hypotheses that are not falsifiable? Don't know enough about the topics to know if I dislike that or not.

but . . . but What about the curvature of space-time continuum or some shiz!? Surely!? . . . Physics is a harsh mistress . . . Doesn't the Alcubierre drive essentially require either (a) a ~Nanogram of dark energy, i.e., infinitely more than we can be 99.99% confident even exists, else (b) infinite baryonic energy? Harsh realities like this lead me to entertain the idea that there really is a supreme being responsible for it all, including the evolution of our consciousness . . . butinstead of it being a benevolent Northern Euro Beardy guy or a Flying Pasta creature, it is really . . .

Well, speeds of say . . . 30% c are 'tenable' no? VERY costly, and "out of reach" in being stuck at the conception stage, but tenable it seems. I don't have the knowledge to say just how fast one might go with actual existing technology (but assuming things like: a One World Government, no corruption, graft, waste or profiteering and a citizenry who are almost uniformly devotees of science and eager to devote 50% of their earnings to fund Humanities interstellar endeavors). Perhaps with enough money and time speeds even on the order of 90% c are possible!? So now let us imagine we have such a space craft traveling along in a specific trajectory (somewhere between Neptune and the Oort Cloud and effectively "in orbit" of the galactic center and just slightly prograde of the orbit of the Sol System itself. The ship is reflecting light from the various luminous objects in the universe and (depending on albedo, shape, etc.) reflecting in pretty much every direction (including prograde and the full cone we might consider "forward" around prograde). Even though it is traveling at 90% c it is still not fast enough to "catchup to" the image of itself which it is projecting forward (nor in any other direction). Light is moving faster than it is so it cannot catch up to its own projection by simply going forward. But what if it makes a turn at point t along its original trajectory? The light it was reflecting at point t will go spreading through the cosmos more or less eternally, but it will always move in straight lines from point t (omitting the fact that it could be blocked, reflected, refracted or whatever). I suppose what you are all telling me is: without exceeding the speed of light it is not possible for the space craft to catch up to the light it projected at point t. You are probably correct, but this was the "thought experiment" I had in mind. "What would it take" for the space craft to catch up with its own image and see itself as it looked at point t?

I have profound confidence in the scientific merits of evolutionary theory, particularly when it is considered in its "fully accessorized" post-New Synthesis, post- Stephen J. Gould, post sociobiology, post-Richard Dawkins, etc., contemporary form. I own a Dachshund after all, so how I could be so blind as to fail to see how well it explains the variety of life we see on Earth. That word "believe" is not one I like to use in discussions of scientific topics. It carries too much baggage with it. Maybe I'm being silly to make such a distinction, but that's me. On the topic of "Are we alone?" Fun "article" about Omuamua Strange tumbling motion of cigar-shaped interstellar 'comet' Oumuamua suggests it’s an alien probe with BROKEN engines, says leading astronomer As a scientist, I think any hypothesis (even the most absurd) are worth assessing: what are the assumptions (do they need to be assessed) what are the predictions?, can they be tested? how do we test them? Okay. So, now test them and share your findings. It is unfortunate that we as a species have yet to extend this ritual thought process to more of the viewing audience, because often one has to track down the primary sources of articles like the above to even have a clue whether the "expert" being referenced is proposing a scientific question or is a crank/troll/hack, or has been very badly misquoted/taken out of context by journalists with quite limited scientific training. If the professor is intrigued by the hypothesis that Omuamua is not in fact a natural object, but a spacecraft, then frankly he should have nothing to say about it, UNLESS he has an well-formed hypothesis and can propose how it could be tested. Intuition, hunches even fetishes and "beliefs" may play a crucial role in keeping a scientist from boring him or herself to death but they really have no place in the language a scientist uses to communicate with others.

So given the speed of light, what trajectory would an object have to achieve (arc and velocity I reckon) in order to "catch up to" light it reflected at some point in its past, i.e., to "see itself in the past."

The fact that humans dominate Earth does not mean we are "the only intelligent" species. We should not be so arrogant or myopic as to imagine that. It puts us in jeopardy in terms of stewarding the Earth and it diminishes our ability to think outside the box in terms of plausible evolutions of xenobiology. That said, of course humans are completely unique and orders of magnitude more powerful than any other species known. Any 12 year old can see that, it doesn't really need to be belabored does it? I agree with Green Baron. I do NOT _believe_ in xeno-biology, nor (and more so) intelligent xeno-biology. I've spent too many years striving to be a scientist to "believe" in anything for which I am not presented with good evidence. I suspect that eventually we will find xeno-biology. It might even be fairly common. We might even be a mere few decades or years from having the remote sensing capacity to detect signals that would provide sufficient evidence to shift a few notches from "suspect" (or else "open to the possibility") toward "accept the evidence as prima facie valid." But even there, "belief" is still quite a few notches away. ADDIT: Hell! I've been studying evolutionary theory since 1986 and I know it well enough to know it is one of the most powerful, compelling and well-supported theories in the natural sciences. I taught evolutionary psychology and have written papers in evolutionary behavior journals. Even so, I'm hesitant to say I "believe" in evolution. I conclude that the evidence in favor of the model is so overwhelmingly supportive it is simply not possible to reject any of the core constituent hypotheses that serve the theory, nor the theory as a whole. It works to explain the reality we see, and while the model itself is merely a human representation of reality, and thus likely deficient in being imprecise, inaccurate, or incomplete, it is nonetheless one of the best human representations of reality ever conceived . . . at least in terms of scientific standards of "best."

Well indulge me just a bit more on this . . . Let us project where (relative to our current position in the cosmos) the Sol system was 1 billion years ago, and then point our telescopes there. As you have pointed out, We will not see Sol there because our trajectory from there to here is not of the proper shape and velocity. Consider that for a moment. I would imagine it should be possible for an object moving through space time to travel on an arc of sufficient curvature and speed that it arrives at a point in its future sufficient to look at itself in the past no? I suppose that is really the question I'm getting at: What sort of trajectory and speed would be required for an observer to be able to look back at themselves at an earlier point in time? ADDIT: and no I haven't been dipping into the Magic Mushroom Egg Nog prematurely. Perhaps a bit too much C++ on the brain, but nothing pharmacological

I wanted to respond to that bit I put in bold and italic. I would propose an alternative perspective, not as an authoritative final word or necessarily as a rebuttal to the idea, but as food for thought. First let me change the sentence to reflect a message that I think is less . . . controversial ""The fact that there are so many intelligent species who lack the special types of human psychological abilities . . ." There. That probably conveys at least some of the idea. But just to toss out a few more tidbits (as I'm not in a mind to produce a dissertation like PB666 is gifted at doing! ) Chimpanzees HAVE CULTURE Honey Bees can communicate navigational data to one another. Bats have the most sophisticated sonic analysis software imaginable between their ears. Dogs are better at detecting trace scents than any machine that can compare in terms of cost, size, and versatility. Sharks can smell prey miles away. Whales can communicate across thousands of miles of ocean Migratory species somehow manage to find their way . . . on and on we could list scores if not hundreds of examples of the other animals of Earth doing things that no human can do and in many cases which our machines cannot even do as well as the animals. Yes, we humans are exceptionally gifted at symbolic association, symbolic creativity, productivity and displacement and derived from these unique imaginative abilities, we (unlike apparently all other animals of Earth aside from MAYBE [though unlikely] some of the cetaceans) have full-blown theory of mind. You know who among humans really excel at all of these abilities!? Psychopaths! Difficult to accept I reckon, but there it is: in terms of high levels of mastery at the core abilities that arguably define human intelligence, it is those among us whom we would wish were NOT among us who seem to consistently excel the most! Quite a few other animals have some degrees of capability in one or more of these abilities, but none seem to come anywhere near we humans. We are imaginative symbol makers and I would argue that, most of our native notions of "intelligence" center on these abilities, but at the expense of failing to acknowledge that many other animals have similarly largely innate, though facultatively learned abilities at which we suck. Try to learn to distinguish the thousands of other bats signals from your own so that you can navigate without light; you will fail. You lack the brains and other organs to even compete on that index of "intelligence" just as all of us humans do. The other things we humans have which are not so much related to our central nervous system abilities as to overall bauplan and physiology: upright posture-> hands-free locomotion->more fully opposable thumbs->precision grip-> incredible hand-eye coordination-> amazing shoulder mobility = tool making and missile throwing forelimbs. And all of this is to say nothing of the myriad dimensions "intelligence" can take even within humans.

@Zeiss Ikon, @ARS, @TheSaint Neat! Good posts Got a new one . . . Was watching a YT about James Webb and of course the issue that looking far away = looking back in time arose. Had a crazy thought occur to me but I'm sure one of you will be able to clear it up. Would it be possible to look at the same astronomical object at TWO (or perhaps) more different times by pointing a telescope in two distinct directions? The microwave background radiation seems in a way to be reflecting this principle. What if we could literally look back at the Earth a couple billion years ago by some black magic of astronomy!?

Sounds like an "arms race" to me. He with the biggest check book wins.

The more people take tests, the better they get at passing them. We have no idea what "intelligence" is. I say this as Ph.D. in psychological anthropology. Is there such a thing? Absolutely, in fact probably thousands, perhaps even hundreds of thousands of "things." But when we compare the "intelligence" construct to other constructs in psychology or psychobiology, it is clear that "inteligence" is one of the least agreed on. There are dozens of models and none of them can be considered to be predominant. Another topic brought up recently: education. The value of that particular endeavour is currently in dispute. Presently in the U.S. something like 60% of all college graduates are performing occupational roles with minimum educational requirements below those they have attained. It seems to me that an education system whose core design is based on medieval religious scholarly societies MIGHT be a bit overdue for some major revolutions in a world that is now decidedly secular, computer-based and networked. Someone else in a recent post mentioned that "we can see inside the brain." Yes, but our resolution (when I was last up-to-date, so there may be cutting edge developments underway of which I'm unaware) and synthetic analytic abilities remain insufficient to truly "see" the mind in action. We are probably within a couple decades of major breakthroughs in functional brain scanning, but complete fruition of the methods to the point where the psychobiologists have something truly useful to offer to the psychometricians might be 50 years away. ADDIT: and one last comment to my fellow old foagies: I suspect that "Millenials" are not nearly so homogeneous and ADD as some of you allude. Based on some 15 years of teaching experience, I developed a seat of the pants model of students: a "Rule of Thirds." In most classes, students will all belong in one of three thirds: 1. Exceptionally engaged, exceptionally focused, bright, promising and exhilarating; 2. Varying, though with solid performance enough of the time to warrant B and even A level performance; 3. Largely disengaged and failing to realize their potential. A few manage to apply themselves enough to get into the B range, but most wind up with final performance assessments distributed across C, D F letter grades.

VERY cool!

Watched a video recently on project Azorian on Amazon video and it was quite good. Definitely the type that you engineers and scientists might enjoy. Anyway, I ALSO watched "Ghost Armies" recently, and that one was about an American deception unit in WWII European theatre. It made mention of a technology I had never even heard of: Wire recording. And so, my absurd question: what would be the practical implications if all the worlds recordings were transferred to wire recordings? If that one doesn't have any traction then how about one from Azorian: what if every metal hulled vessel which sank and remains capsized in the last 150 years were recovered from the ocean floor? How much would it cost? How much scrap/science/benefit would it garner?

So what you guys are saying . . . is that we big-brained apes, have already, unwittingly, created a multi-verse in which we are likely lost

Here is one I came up with on the C++ fun times Discord I hang out on. Since the first electronic computer were fired up in the 1940s, how many instructions have been processed? Is it even possible to come up with such an estimate? What is the rate of acceleration in the increase in number of instructions processed by time? At what point will more instructions be processed during one discrete and relatively short time span (say one year or maybe even one month or less) than during the entire preceding history of computing? At what point will the number of instructions exceed the estimated number of fermions in the universe? (I suppose one could consider the fire-control types of machines that existed since the 1910s, or even the mechanical arithmetic machines that go back to the late 18th century to be "computers" but I'm not sure if they fit the question, so lets just limit it to the ones that used general purpose encoding schemes and electrical states, i.e., the 1930s or 1940s and onwards). When I initially posed this question on the board, I had just been dazzled with some of the inner workings of 3d graphics, the sheer numbers of putPixel calls involved in a mere few seconds of a typical 3d graphical animation, and I opined something like "I bet the total number of instructions that have occurred since the first computers were fired up in the 1940s already exceeds the number of particles in the universe. The master programmer of the board said "not even close" and came up with an estimate that he thinks was probably even still an overestimate of the total number of instructions so far, and that was still many orders of magnitude less than the 10^80 number of fermions he quoted.

I see people say this and while I of course do not disbelieve the claim it certainly doesn't make any sense to me. Gravity is what holds everything "down" on Earth and to escape that gravity one has to exert force in a limited array of directions. The same seems to be true for the relationship between virtually all objects between which gravitational interactions can be observed: they are not "flat" they are curvilinear. So yeah, if we look at some massive signal like the cosmic microwave background maybe that suggests "flat?" But given that all the baryons seem to be subject to curved gravitational dynamics, how is it actually edifying to refer to "the universe" as being gravitationally flat? Even the filiament structures of superclusters are thought of as long term emergent patterns of the very same sorts of gravitational dynamics that cause rocks and stars and balls of gas and galaxies to swirl around one another in curves, eh? Oh dear, that double negative I imagine was a mere typo, but what now the mystery is killing me! Are you saying the exouniverse (great term by the way, did you come up with those distinction!? ) IS infinite or IS NOT infinite. Much like Clarke's quote on exobiologicals, whether they exist or do not . . . “Two possibilities exist: either we are alone in the Universe or we are not. Both are equally terrifying.”

That actually sounds fairly digestible!

This thread is driving me to consider conversion to pastafarianism and becoming a missionary . . . The idea the everything observable originated from a single "point" seems to me to breach so many terms of internal validity right from the outset that I suspect the average Joe and Sally just sort of stare blankly but are satisfied that it sounds sufficiently mysterious that it seems a fitting alternative to a benevolent elder beardy guy pointing and say "Let their be light." I have complete faith . . . no no, I mean uhm . . . BELIEF that the empirical observations which have led the hundreds or perhaps even thousands of brilliant minds who make up the modern day cosmologists to develop the models they have developed are as accurate as they can be for a "large-brained" bipedal ape with fairly limited perceptual and cognitive abilities. The fact that there are apparently enormously important and powerful forces that we cannot observe but whose effects are unmistakable in creating discrepancies in what we CAN observe and what we have modeled with our symbolic logical languages for characterizing reality (physics math and the rest) seems fitting somehow. Okay, right, gotcha, your tellin' me the universe seems to have "inflated" from a single point about 14 billion years ago and that matter as we know it didn't even really exist for quite some time and the laws of physics and chemistry also didn't really exist for quite a while . . . and oh yeah, there also seems to be this mysterious force (well maybe two of them that are opposing or maybe one of them that functions differently in different contexts) "dark matter/gravity" and "dark energy" which are pretty much completely inexplicable but pretty obviously real and important to how the universe hangs together / flies apart, etc. I certainly don't have answers and I'm also no supernaturalist or "anti-science" type. The fact that we've been led to these paradoxes by empirical observation is precisely why I find the whole thing believable if still a bit 'unfinished' or 'unclear;' but that to me is the exciting part of it! Mystery! The Unknown! Perhaps we are on the cusp of discoveries about the nature of the universe which are so mindbogglingly wondrous and will seem so obvious and edifying once they are made clear in the descriptions of a discoverery that we will undergo a watershed that could only be compared to that of the Copernican transformation. I relish such notions and I find it a shame that so few "scientists" seem to.