Green Baron

The above ape: You cannot compare behaviour of tamed animals or animals with ongoing contact to humans (Edit "artificial") with those of wild populations (Edit "natural"). This is a common error, an observer effect. Work has been done on that, it's published (mostly in biology and medicine journals). The pose above is that of a guy in it's lunchbreak, not an apes pose. It's copied from humans. Edit: I don't want to fight with you and i am a reasonable guy. You can convince me, just not with youtube videos ;-) I'm sure you can find reasonably researched and published work on behaviour, together with proper definitions, in the journals :-)

[have no youtube connection here, can't watch the links and don't have the time for this] Also, the above was about ants and humans and cultivation, not culture like art and so on. If you want to talk about cultural apes that's a different thing. Plus, there is an inflation of the defintion of "culture", a few decades ago neandertals were denied a "culture", right now there shall not be a difference between ants, apes, birds and humans. Ridiculous. Yes, i am quite knowingly exaggerating here and not taking into account for a different definitions of "culture", depending on time and even the author's intention. Again and concerning cultivation and maybe to get back to fermi: i am not questioning the underlying principles, they are the same for ants and humans. I just won't call them "good" and "bad". Could be misunderstood ... But the application of these principles with a goal in mind make a difference. Let's move on. Would a civilization that is left to a quiet development without war, impact, worldwide epidemics, shortage of ressources, whatever quite automatically learn the techniques to apply evolutionary principles in a way to steer the own evolution, plus the biossphere/environment ?

Sorry, missed that one. You guys have is a very convenient definition of "cultivation", including symbiosis and co-evolution ;-)

Well, yeah, in a strict sense, selecting all is a valid selection as well. An asteroid impact, if big enough, is not biological evolution because evolution is more than selection. Evolutoion has the outcome of being "successfull" in filling niches, if time, energy and other constraints permit. No niches, no evolution. Which hopefully brings us back to fermi and his paradox :-)

Today yes. Ice age hunter gatherers no. They lived in the cold steppe where the hunting animals were. And the eastern part of the mediterranean has depth of >4000m. Pls. do take a look at a chart. Ice age hunter / gatherer where not restricted by food. Such restriction arises in developed neolithic societies. The processes at the end of the last glaciation are well understood, the advance of flora and changes in fauna documented. I do not have to time to describe everything i know because the subject is HUGE, climate, flora, fauna, inventions, sites .... if you're really interested, read a book or three, different views on the shadings of neolithisation and then we speak again ;-) That is a primitive view ("Neotony or die") but the basics may be correct. Every mammal baby looks cute, evolution has arranged for it that babies aren't killed as easy as grown-ups (modern psychopaths and cultural achievements like distant killing with automatic bombs excluded). But for the ancients it was only the first step. Then the new acquistions needed to be seperated from the wild population, procreation under human control for several generations, in order to become "domesticated", smaller and less dangerous and of different color than the wild ones. One single intermixture with the original genes in that process and the effects of domestication are corrected. For generations they were a burden, something extra to feed. So these h/g groups must have lived in an abundance to afford keeping these animals. Again: that was not an active plan like "we'll have a companion in 50 years". The h/g groups did not. Maybe a single individual at times but i know of no such site. In the neolithic yes. Pop. pressure, shortage, you know ;-)

Morning :-) The last glacial maximum was long over. And id didn't have that impact in Palestina / Kurdistan where the early neolithic emerges first (besides many other places) as in central europe or north america. It's not directly connected, maybe indirectly. And the global sea level rise didn't cover almost all "population places", only those at the sea. And at that time there existed no settelements yet, only "kjöckenmöddinger" hills. What you mean could be the breaking of the natural dam in the marmara strait and the filling of the black sea which was a catastrophic event that destroyed a lot of late neolithic settlements in the basin. (If it took place). Nope, humans kill actively from bacteria to top predator. And passively by destroying habitats. This will look like a catastrophic extinction event. Population above was connected to humans, not animals. Settlers have no such limitations as mobile groups for the amount of children they can have. Pressure comes when it's too much work to keep them fed or it was a bad year of farming. Dogs weren't eaten, we'd find the bones with specific marks at fire places. They were hunting companions. Dog "domestication" could have been an incident or a self domestication. Incident version: a pack of wolves comes too close to a human camp. They are killed. Whelps survive, daddy let them live, the daughter "Daddy, they are so cute and will die, let me keep them !". Daddy hesitates cause there will be more mouths to feed, but it's been a good hunting season and the shaman says next season will be better. So they keep them. They are not allowed to mix up with the wild ones not far away for a few generations, otherwise we wouldn't recognize them as house- (read yurt-)hold dogs. The larger ones are chased off or killed (too dangerous at night), the smaller ones allowed as companions. Edit: these domestications probably happened every now and then, it's not like there was a fair every year where dog breeders met to exchange their creations :-)

"Settling down" was not an act, it was a process of a few (not many) 1000s of years. The conditions had to be right. The people in the process didn't realize that they were actually about to change their lifestyle. Childe's "neolithic revolution" was influenced by a communist's view that man has to be master of his work and fate. Hunger most surely became an obvious problem after settling down, with the buildup of population-pressure. In every generation grandma and grandpa didn't live that different than the young folks, the process wasn't obvious. Hunter/gatherers know no population pressure, to natural reasons. A mobile life forbids for a woman to have the next child before the other one is self-reliant. They probably had rather a problem with too few than many ... Yes. Dog was domesticated long before a domus existed. See the site "Bonn-Oberkassel" :-) Edit ... Fermi-Paradox, we strayed from the path :-)

Actually the elements are not rare. So that's not such a big surprise. Furthermore: population pressure and warfare is an outcome of domestication, not a reason that drove it. In the neolithic the process of building the "neolithic package" had already ended. And, i never heard of a "desire" not to roam around, a hunter/gatherers life is by far easier than a farmer's. It is not attractive to live "domesticated". The causes why that was developed at that time in that area is unknown, speculation futile. It is only observable that once it had begun it didn't stop. The steps and timeframes from pure hunter gatherer over mixed states to fully developed package are quite clear. I'd rather ask myself why didn't it happen 115.000 years earlier, in OIS-5e ?

The early domestications where not intended, how could they have been. There was no imagination of a life with household plants and animals, it happened over the course of a few thousand years that the whole package of storage, animals, plants and rigid buildings developed. And all the time hunting was still a large part in nutrition. The complete package then spread out. For the mesolithic population in central europe it wasn't even attractive to lead a life in work, dirt and sicknesses. Much has been written and is actually published, just don't read Wikipedia, you are sure to miss the big picture :-) I don't even see an "interference" in these early active uses like i do not see an "interference" of insects with evolutionary processes because they have no plan. I see it there where a goal, an intention comes into play and where the foremost natural species are replaced by the artificial ones. Which is, by the way, a great concern these days, a legal and a technical/biological one. The main difference between @Sigma88and me was the view whether the artificial processes inside the natural ones were natural or not. Sure, an asteroid is natural selection, just in a very drastic way. Is it large enough then biological evolution is reset to a basic state or completely eliminated. Thanks to the configuration of our solar system that only happened in an early phase of the earth (but see the nasa page of neos, an impact cannot be totally ruled out). Adaptation needs time, a few generations at least, depending on which attributes are adapted to which conditions and whether the variations in the code allow for that adaptation. If not -> extinction. Speciation needs a long time and a free niche in which the new species can evolve without intermixing with the ancestors. Human interference does not grant the time for that adaptation, which is the reason for an actual extinction event. I do not question evolutionary principles, i only call that interference. The other view is that it is not interference because we cannot escape the natural constraints.

No, you got me wrong, i don't know (idk). I would be astonished if not but i don't know. It was a product of a time when everybody talked about space and aliens haunted the household am radios :-)

Yummy :-)

Personally i don't see biologic evolution as a universal principle. It needs too much energy and the constraints for an ongoing evolution of "higher" life are too narrow. The first steps to microbes may be easier. I wouldn't be too surprised if one day fossil microbial life will be found on mars if that planet really once had an ocean and there was enough energy, probably geothermal like on earth. Judging from photography some formations are seen as being sedimentary and deposited by flow of water. First semester geology: *never* judge a formation only from eyesight, i have seen geophysicists actually standing in front of an outcrop being unable to correctly tell between sedimentary and volcanic (a very basic distinction). So as long as they don't show us a proper thin-section analysis from mars i stay cool. Can one of the rovers do that ? Another question, concerning fermy: It might be necessary for an intelligent species to develop means of keeping the genome from decaying / evolving (SciFy - not my idea) in order to keep their abilities. Or the "window of communication", the time between the invention of radio-technology until the disappearance, might be open too short. Though i have not the slightest doubt that such a technique would not be used to best on earth. But then again, it doesn't really matter because the distances are much too large.

That would mean that the orbital heights of moons and their soi will be taboo for comm's satellites. Or the comm's / relay satellites best be set in high polar orbits around the moons. For the least shadow lobe by the moon and the planet ... ?

Yes, @Tex_NL, Iron Sky ! The most brilliant SciFi-Nonsense ever !

Old stuff just for historic completeness: Space 1999 (series, early afternoon entertainment) for the germans: Raumpatroullie Orion. Cute low cost black and white series with funny requisites, like toilet-paper rolls als ceiling covering or flat iron handle as throttle :-) Would be a shame if this hadn't been translated into english ... idk. Solaris (though the novel by Stanislaw Lem is better) yeah, Dune (sure, my avatar), a version from 1984 and another from the early 2000s

May is actually astrophysicist. Naming asteroids after real persons (f.e. Leonhard Nimoy) instead of mythical figures is a good thing to attract peoples attention. While i agree for a band like Queen i fear a little about inflation of naming, asteroids with the names of "parishilton" or "hulkhogan" would surely attract some attention but also tear the thing down into the banal (in my eyes) ... I hope the company stays somewhat exclusive :-)

There are more than enough definitions of life out there :-) In the meantime the universe keeps expanding at accelerated speed. So ... even in the "early" stages there'll be more space between each particle than todays observable universe is large. Doesn't sound that thrilling ... :-)

That sounds like she fell over a lump of Radium. She died age 66 of transformations in the bone marrow (too lazy to look up the english expression), probably due to long radiation exposure. But i like the phrase. "Nunc est bibendum !" (Now is the time to drink) -Horace also: Jeb, just before splashdown ...

Without implying anything, but i would ask for information from outside if i couldn't exclude an outside cause, even if the chance to get additional info is low. With outside i mean a cause that wasn't covered by sensors and cameras. Or if parts of information was lost during the "anomaly".

I think the tenor is clear: the atomic level is too complicated and uncertain to model in a program and the step towards a chemical process has it's own uncertainties and complifications. The higher the abstraction, the more possibilities to model. Population genetics have cute algorithms, but that's not what was asked :-)

Edit: nevermind, i misunderstood, you want to simulate an individual cell, yeah, that's more complex than a population ... :-) Well, i'm not a biologist nor a chemist, what's your plan of modelling the steps from a herd of atoms to a cell ? Is it something like atoms - molecules - complex molecules - basic chemical processes - metabolism - organelles - cell and all the interfaces / interdependencies /reactions ? That would be very fine grained, heat, pressure, permeabiltiy, flow of things, ... i am not sure whether all these processes are understood irl. On the other hand, if you don't do it that fine-grained your atoms might well form something different than a cell ... Am not sure whether it's possible, but if you have the knowledge of how a cell works at the level of atoms then let's ry to model it :-)

Hello, step by step, maybe you could try on a high level, without going too much into programming and computation. If you don't know yet (I haven't read through the whole thread so the following is maybe just obsolete blabla), these tools might help to abstract from the low level and get going faster: Blender for 3D-modelling. Others have said it before. It has a basic game-engine and physics built in after you managed the design part. I'd suggest version 2.7. And books for learning. There is a huge community with a lot of knowledge, many tutorials and examples. With Blender you avoid the math and programming thing. Godot for game engine concepts. It's huge, free and open source. Forget Unity/Unreal blabla. Only problem, it lacks documentation, but it gets better. So you get the basic game concepts fast, and the scripting language is easy to learn, even for non-programmers. Scripting language for Blender and Godot is comparable. Set yourself small goals, you won't program an orbiter or ksp without 5 years of programming experience and a team of programmers. Modell a part of an idea in Blender and animate it. So it'll be a little more difficult to fail :-) These tools are free and open source and of higher quality than many programs you have to pay for. With the examples/tutorials/communities on the internet you could be able to write a little platformer or a dungeon crawler in Godot. And they don't need a big pc.

Very aesthetic design !

Combobulations ! And a day before mine ;-) "I like Jazz"

Landing Sites: http://www.esa.int/Our_Activities/Space_Science/Rosetta/Highlights/Where_will_Philae_land Site J was picked if i remember right ...