Why I hope the search for extraterrestrial life finds nothing
simple_...@yahoo.com
People got very excited in 2004 when NASA's rover Opportunity
discovered evidence that Mars had once been wet. Where there is water,
there may be life. After more than 40 years of human exploration,
culminating in the ongoing Mars Exploration Rover mission, scientists
are planning still more missions to study the planet. The Phoenix, an
interagency scientific probe led by the Lunar and Planetary Laboratory
at the University of Arizona, is scheduled to land in late May on
Mars's frigid northern arctic, where it will search for soils and ice
that might be suitable for microbial life (see "Mission to Mars,"
November/December 2007). The next decade might see a Mars Sample
Return mission, which would use robotic systems to collect samples of
Martian rocks, soils, and atmosphere and return them to Earth. We
could then analyze the samples to see if they contain any traces of
life, whether extinct or still active.
Such a discovery would be of tremendous scientific significance. What
could be more fascinating than discovering life that had evolved
entirely independently of life here on Earth? Many people would also
find it heartening to learn that we are not entirely alone in this
vast, cold cosmos.
But I hope that our Mars probes discover nothing. It would be good
news if we find Mars to be sterile. Dead rocks and lifeless sands
would lift my spirit.
Conversely, if we discovered traces of some simple, extinct life-form--
some bacteria, some algae--it would be bad news. If we found fossils
of something more advanced, perhaps something that looked like the
remnants of a trilobite or even the skeleton of a small mammal, it
would be very bad news. The more complex the life-form we found, the
more depressing the news would be. I would find it interesting,
certainly--but a bad omen for the future of the human race.
How do I arrive at this conclusion? I begin by reflecting on a well-
known fact. UFO spotters, Raëlian cultists, and self-certified alien
abductees notwithstanding, humans have, to date, seen no sign of any
extraterrestrial civilization. We have not received any visitors from
space, nor have our radio telescopes detected any signals transmitted
by any extraterrestrial civilization. The Search for Extra-Terrestrial
Intelligence (SETI) has been going for nearly half a century,
employing increasingly powerful telescopes and data-mining
techniques; so far, it has consistently corroborated the null
hypothesis. As best we have been able to determine, the night sky is
empty and silent. The question "Where are they?" is thus at least as
pertinent today as it was when the physicist Enrico Fermi first posed
it during a lunch discussion with some of his colleagues at the Los
Alamos National Laboratory back in 1950.
Here is another fact: the observable universe contains on the order of
100 billion galaxies, and there are on the order of 100 billion stars
in our galaxy alone. In the last couple of decades, we have learned
that many of these stars have planets circling them; several hundred
such "exoplanets" have been discovered to date. Most of these are
gigantic, since it is very difficult to detect smaller exoplanets
using current methods. (In most cases, the planets cannot be directly
observed. Their existence is inferred from their gravitational
influence on their parent suns, which wobble slightly when pulled
toward large orbiting planets, or from slight fluctuations in
luminosity when the planets partially eclipse their suns.) We have
every reason to believe that the observable universe contains vast
numbers of solar systems, including many with planets that are Earth-
like, at least in the sense of having masses and temperatures similar
to those of our own orb. We also know that many of these solar systems
are older than ours.
From these two facts it follows that the evolutionary path to life-
forms capable of space colonization leads through a "Great Filter,"
which can be thought of as a probability barrier. (I borrow this term
from Robin Hanson, an economist at George Mason University.) The
filter consists of one or more evolutionary transitions or steps that
must be traversed at great odds in order for an Earth-like planet to
produce a civilization capable of exploring distant solar systems. You
start with billions and billions of potential germination points for
life, and you end up with a sum total of zero extraterrestrial
civilizations that we can observe. The Great Filter must therefore be
sufficiently powerful--which is to say, passing the critical points
must be sufficiently improbable--that even with many billions of rolls
of the dice, one ends up with nothing: no aliens, no spacecraft, no
signals. At least, none that we can detect in our neck of the woods.
Now, just where might this Great Filter be located? There are two
possibilities: It might be behind us, somewhere in our distant past.
Or it might be ahead of us, somewhere in the decades, centuries, or
millennia to come. Let us ponder these possibilities in turn.
If the filter is in our past, there must be some extremely improbable
step in the sequence of events whereby an Earth-like planet gives rise
to an intelligent species comparable in its technological
sophistication to our contemporary human civilization. Some people
seem to take the evolution of intelligent life on Earth for granted: a
lengthy process, yes; complicated, sure; yet ultimately inevitable,
or nearly so. But this view might well be completely mistaken. There
is, at any rate, hardly any evidence to support it. Evolutionary
biology, at the moment, does not enable us to calculate from first
principles how probable or improbable the emergence of intelligent
life on Earth was. Moreover, if we look back at our evolutionary
history, we can identify a number of transitions any one of which
could plausibly be the Great Filter.
For example, perhaps it is very improbable that even simple self-
replicators should emerge on any Earth-like planet. Attempts to create
life in the laboratory by mixing water with gases believed to have
been present in the Earth's early atmosphere have failed to get much
beyond the synthesis of a few simple amino acids. No instance of
abiogenesis (the spontaneous emergence of life from nonlife) has ever
been observed.
The oldest confirmed microfossils date from approximately 3.5 billion
years ago, and there is tentative evidence that life might have
existed a few hundred million years before that; but there is no
evidence of life before 3.8 billion years ago. Life might have arisen
considerably earlier than that without leaving any traces: there are
very few preserved rock formations that old, and such as have survived
have undergone major remolding over the eons. Nevertheless, several
hundred million years elapsed between the formation of Earth and the
appearance of the first known life-forms. The evidence is thus
consistent with the hypothesis that the emergence of life required an
extremely improbable set of coincidences, and that it took hundreds of
millions of years of trial and error, of molecules and surface
structures randomly interacting, before something capable of self-
replication happened to appear by a stroke of astronomical luck. For
aught we know, this first critical step could be a Great Filter.
Conclusively determining the probability of any given evolutionary
development is difficult, since we cannot rerun the history of life
multiple times. What we can do, however, is attempt to identify
evolutionary transitions that are at least good candidates for being a
Great Filter--transitions that are both extremely improbable and
practically necessary for the emergence of intelligent technological
civilization. One criterion for any likely candidate is that it should
have occurred only once. Flight, sight, photosynthesis, and limbs have
all evolved several times here on Earth and are thus ruled out.
Another indication that an evolutionary step was very improbable is
that it took a very long time to occur even after its prerequisites
were in place. A long delay suggests that vastly many random
recombinations occurred before one worked. Perhaps several improbable
mutations had to occur all at once in order for an organism to leap
from one local fitness peak to another: individually deleterious
mutations might be fitness enhancing only when they occur together.
(The evolution of Homo sapiens from our recent hominid ancestors, such
as Homo erectus, happened rather quickly on the geological timescale,
so these steps would be relatively weak candidates for a Great
Filter.)
The original emergence of life appears to meet these two criteria. As
far as we know, it might have occurred only once, and it might have
taken hundreds of millions of years for it to happen even after the
planet had cooled down enough for a wide range of organic molecules to
be stable. Later evolutionary history offers additional possible Great
Filters. For example, it took some 1.8 billion years for prokaryotes
(the most basic type of single-celled organism) to evolve into
eukaryotes (a more complex kind of cell with a membrane-enclosed
nucleus). That is a long time, making this transition an excellent
candidate. Others include the emergence of multicellular organisms and
of sexual reproduction.
If the Great Filter is indeed behind us, meaning that the rise of
intelligent life on any one planet is extremely improbable, then it
follows that we are most likely the only technologically advanced
civilization in our galaxy, or even in the entire observable universe.
(The observable universe contains approximately 1022 stars. The
universe might well extend infinitely far beyond the part that is
observable by us, and it may contain infinitely many stars. If so,
then it is virtually certain that an infinite number of intelligent
extraterrestrial species exist, no matter how improbable their
evolution on any given planet. However, cosmological theory implies
that because the universe is expanding, any living creatures outside
the observable universe are and will forever remain causally
disconnected from us: they can never visit us, communicate with us, or
be seen by us or our descendants.)
The other possibility is that the Great Filter is still ahead of us.
This would mean that some great improbability prevents almost all
civilizations at our current stage of technological development from
progressing to the point where they engage in large-scale space
colonization. For example, it might be that any sufficiently advanced
civilization discovers some technology--perhaps some very powerful
weapons technology--that causes its extinction.
I will return to this scenario shortly, but first I shall say a few
words about another theoretical possibility: that extraterrestrials
are out there in abundance but hidden from our view. I think that this
is unlikely, because if extraterrestrials do exist in any numbers, at
least one species would have already expanded throughout the galaxy,
or beyond. Yet we have met no one.
Various schemes have been proposed for how intelligent species might
colonize space. They might send out "manned" spaceships, which would
establish colonies and "terraform" new planets, beginning with worlds
in their own solar systems before moving on to more distant
destinations. But much more likely, in my view, would be colonization
by means of so-called von Neumann probes, named after the Hungarian-
born prodigy John von Neumann, among whose many mathematical and
scientific achievements was the concept of a "universal constructor,"
or a self-replicating machine. A von Neumann probe would be an
unmanned self-replicating spacecraft, controlled by artificial
intelligence and capable of interstellar travel. A probe would land on
a planet (or a moon or asteroid), where it would mine raw materials to
create multiple replicas of itself, perhaps using advanced forms of
nanotechnology. In a scenario proposed by Frank Tipler in 1981,
replicas would then be launched in various directions, setting in
motion a multiplying colonization wave. Our galaxy is about 100,000
light-years across. If a probe were capable of traveling at one-tenth
the speed of light, every planet in the galaxy could thus be colonized
within a couple of million years (allowing some time for each probe
that lands on a resource site to set up the necessary infrastructure
and produce daughter probes). If travel speed were limited to 1
percent of light speed, colonization might take 20 million years
instead. The exact numbers do not matter much, because the timescales
are at any rate very short compared with the astronomical ones on
which the evolution of intelligent life occurs.
If building a von Neumann probe seems very difficult--well, surely it
is, but we are not talking about something we should begin work on
today. Rather, we are considering what would be accomplished with some
very advanced technology of the future. We might build von Neumann
probes in centuries or millennia--intervals that are mere blips
compared with the life span of a planet. Considering that space travel
was science fiction a mere half-century ago, we should, I think, be
extremely reluctant to proclaim something forever technologically
infeasible unless it conflicts with some hard physical constraint. Our
early space probes are already out there: Voyager 1, for example, is
now at the edge of our solar system.
Even if an advanced technological civilization could spread throughout
the galaxy in a relatively short period of time (and thereafter spread
to neighboring galaxies), one might still wonder whether it would
choose to do so. Perhaps it would prefer to stay at home and live in
harmony with nature. However, a number of considerations make this
explanation of the great silence less than plausible. First, we
observe that life has here on Earth manifested a very strong tendency
to spread wherever it can. It has populated every nook and cranny that
can sustain it: east, west, north, and south; land, water, and air;
desert, tropic, and arctic ice; underground rocks, hydrothermal vents,
and radioactive-waste dumps; there are even living beings inside the
bodies of other living beings. This empirical finding is of course
entirely consonant with what one would expect on the basis of
elementary evolutionary theory. Second, if we consider our own species
in particular, we find that it has spread to every part of the planet,
and we have even established a presence in space, at vast expense,
with the International Space Station. Third, if an advanced
civilization has the technology to go into space relatively cheaply,
it has an obvious reason to do so: namely, that's where most of the
resources are. Land, minerals, energy: all are abundant out there yet
limited on any one home planet. These resources could be used to
support a growing population and to construct giant temples or
supercomputers or whatever structures a civilization values. Fourth,
even if most advanced civilizations chose to remain nonexpansionist
forever, it wouldn't make any difference as long as there was one
other civilization that opted to launch the colonization process: that
expansionary civilization would be the one whose probes, colonies, or
descendants would fill the galaxy. It takes but one match to start a
fire, only one expansionist civilization to begin colonizing the
universe.
For all these reasons, it seems unlikely that the galaxy is teeming
with intelligent beings that voluntarily confine themselves to their
home planets. Now, it is possible to concoct scenarios in which the
universe is swarming with advanced civilizations every one of which
chooses to keep itself well hidden from our view. Maybe there is a
secret society of advanced civilizations that know about us but have
decided not to contact us until we're mature enough to be admitted
into their club. Perhaps they're observing us as if we were animals in
a zoo. I don't see how we can conclusively rule out this possibility.
But I will set it aside in order to concentrate on what to me appear
more plausible answers to Fermi's question.
The more disconcerting hypothesis is that the Great Filter consists in
some destructive tendency common to virtually all sufficiently
advanced technological civilizations. Throughout history, great
civilizations on Earth have imploded--the Roman Empire, the Mayan
civilization that once flourished in Central America, and many others.
However, the kind of societal collapse that merely delays the eventual
emergence of a space-colonizing civilization by a few hundred or a few
thousand years would not explain why no such civilization has visited
us from another planet. A thousand years may seem a long time to an
individual, but in this context it's a sneeze. There are probably
planets that are billions of years older than Earth. Any intelligent
species on those planets would have had ample time to recover from
repeated social or ecological collapses. Even if they failed a
thousand times before they succeeded, they still could have arrived
here hundreds of millions of years ago.
The Great Filter, then, would have to be something more dramatic than
run-of-the mill societal collapse: it would have to be a terminal
global cataclysm, an existential catastrophe. An existential risk is
one that threatens to annihilate intelligent life or permanently and
drastically curtail its potential for future development. In our own
case, we can identify a number of potential existential risks: a
nuclear war fought with arms stockpiles much larger than today's
(perhaps resulting from future arms races); a genetically engineered
superbug; environmental disaster; an asteroid impact; wars or
terrorist acts committed with powerful future weapons; super
intelligent general artificial intelligence with destructive goals; or
high-energy physics experiments. These are just some of the
existential risks that have been discussed in the literature, and
considering that many of these have been proposed only in recent
decades, it is plausible to assume that there are further existential
risks we have not yet thought of.
The study of existential risks is an extremely important, albeit
rather neglected, field of inquiry. But in order for an existential
risk to constitute a plausible Great Filter, it must be of a kind that
could destroy virtually any sufficiently advanced civilization. For
instance, random natural disasters such as asteroid hits and
supervolcanic eruptions are poor Great Filter candidates, because even
if they destroyed a significant number of civilizations, we would
expect some civilizations to get lucky; and some of these
civilizations could then go on to colonize the universe. Perhaps the
existential risks that are most likely to constitute a Great Filter
are those that arise from technological discovery. It is not far-
fetched to imagine some possible technology such that, first,
virtually all sufficiently advanced civilizations eventually discover
it, and second, its discovery leads almost universally to existential
disaster.
So where is the Great Filter? Behind us, or not behind us?
If the Great Filter is ahead of us, we have still to confront it. If
it is true that almost all intelligent species go extinct before they
master the technology for space colonization, then we must expect that
our own species will, too, since we have no reason to think that we
will be any luckier than other species. If the Great Filter is ahead
of us, we must relinquish all hope of ever colonizing the galaxy, and
we must fear that our adventure will end soon--or, at any rate,
prematurely. Therefore, we had better hope that the Great Filter is
behind us.
What has all this got to do with finding life on Mars? Consider the
implications of discovering that life had evolved independently on
Mars (or some other planet in our solar system). That discovery would
suggest that the emergence of life is not very improbable. If it
happened independently twice here in our own backyard, it must surely
have happened millions of times across the galaxy. This would mean
that the Great Filter is less likely to be confronted during the early
life of planets and therefore, for us, more likely still to come.
If we discovered some very simple life-forms on Mars, in its soil or
under the ice at the polar caps, it would show that the Great Filter
must come somewhere after that period in evolution. This would be
disturbing, but we might still hope that the Great Filter was located
in our past. If we discovered a more advanced life-form, such as some
kind of multicellular organism, that would eliminate a much larger set
of evolutionary transitions from consideration as the Great Filter.
The effect would be to shift the probability more strongly against the
hypothesis that the Great Filter is behind us. And if we discovered
the fossils of some very complex life-form, such as a vertebrate-
like creature, we would have to conclude that this hypothesis is very
improbable indeed. It would be by far the worst news ever printed.
Yet most people reading about the discovery would be thrilled. They
would not understand the implications. For if the Great Filter is not
behind us, it is ahead of us. And that's a terrifying prospect.
So this is why I'm hoping that our space probes will discover dead
rocks and lifeless sands on Mars, on Jupiter's moon Europa, and
everywhere else our astronomers look. It would keep alive the hope of
a great future for humanity.
Now, it might be thought an amazing coincidence if Earth were the only
planet in the galaxy on which intelligent life evolved. If it happened
here, the one planet we have studied closely, surely one would expect
it to have happened on a lot of other planets in the galaxy--planets
we have not yet had the chance to examine. This objection, however,
rests on a fallacy: it overlooks what is known as an "observation
selection effect." Whether intelligent life is common or rare, every
observer is guaranteed to originate from a place where intelligent
life did, in fact, arise. Since only the successes give rise to
observers who can wonder about their existence, it would be a mistake
to regard our planet as a randomly selected sample from all planets.
(It would be closer to the mark to regard our planet as a random
sample from the subset of planets that did engender intelligent life,
this being a crude formulation of one of the saner ideas extractable
from the motley ore referred to as the "anthropic principle.")
Since this point confuses many, it is worth expanding on it slightly.
Consider two different hypotheses. One says that the evolution of
intelligent life is a fairly straightforward process that happens on a
significant fraction of all suitable planets. The other hypothesis
says that the evolution of intelligent life is extremely complicated
and happens perhaps on only one out of a million billion planets. To
evaluate their plausibility in light of your evidence, you must ask
yourself, "What do these hypotheses predict I should observe?" If you
think about it, both hypotheses clearly predict that you should
observe that your civilization originated in places where intelligent
life evolved. All observers will share that observation, whether the
evolution of intelligent life happened on a large or a small fraction
of all planets. An observation-selection effect guarantees that
whatever planet we call "ours" was a success story. And as long as the
total number of planets in the universe is large enough to compensate
for the low probability of any given one of them giving rise to
intelligent life, it is not a surprise that a few success stories
exist.
If--as I hope is the case--we are the only intelligent species that
has ever evolved in our galaxy, and perhaps in the entire observable
universe, it does not follow that our survival is not in danger.
Nothing in the preceding reasoning precludes there being steps in the
Great Filter both behind us and ahead of us. It might be extremely
improbable both that intelligent life should arise on any given planet
and that intelligent life, once evolved, should succeed in becoming
advanced enough to colonize space.
But we would have some grounds for hope that all or most of the Great
Filter is in our past if Mars is found to be barren. In that case, we
may have a significant chance of one day growing into something
greater than we are now.
In this scenario, the entire history of humankind to date is a mere
instant compared with the eons that still lie before us. All the
triumphs and tribulations of the millions of people who have walked
the Earth since the ancient civilization of Mesopotamia would be like
mere birth pangs in the delivery of a kind of life that hasn't yet
begun. For surely it would be the height of naïveté to think that with
the transformative technologies already in sight--genetics, nano
technology, and so on--and with thousands of millennia still ahead of
us in which to perfect and apply these technologies and others of
which we haven't yet conceived, human nature and the human condition
will remain unchanged. Instead, if we survive and prosper, we will
presumably develop some kind of posthuman existence.
None of this means that we ought to cancel our plans to have a closer
look at Mars. If the Red Planet ever harbored life, we might as well
find out about it. It might be bad news, but it would tell us
something about our place in the universe, our future technological
prospects, the existential risks confronting us, and the possibilities
for human transformation--issues of considerable importance.
But in the absence of any such evidence, I conclude that the silence
of the night sky is golden, and that in the search for
extraterrestrial life, no news is good news.
Rob Dekker
Thank you for the first post with substance in a long time on this news group !
Up till last year, this group was alive with discussions ranging widely from the pure technical aspects of the current SETI projects
until the Fermi paradox and the meaning of 'intelligence' and an amazing spectrum of other subjects. However, in the past 12 months
it seems that bots, spam and morons are dominating the messages.
I was starting to wonder.."Where are they ?" all these SETI enthousiasts that used to make this one of the most interesting news
groups around.
Regarding your post, I read it with interest, and would like to make a few notes.
I like your introduction of the Great Filter but I do not share your conclusion that finding life on Mars (unless we find remnants
of a technological civilisation) would in any way change our prospects of our own future. Like Niels Bohr once said "Predictions are
hard to make, especially when pertaining to the future".
We do not know where the bottlenecks are were in the Great Filter in the past.
But if the current view of the evolution of life on Earth is any indication, and the timing of the various evolutionary steps, the
we can speculate at least with some knowledge.
First off, let me note that it is surprising how quickly life originated on planet Earth. Single cell organisms like cyanobacteria
filled the oceans almost as soon as these formed from the cooling planet. These microorganisms were already pretty complex : they
contain simple forms of chlorophyl that engage in photosynthesis. Talking about making progress !
This early rise of life should be a strong indication that either it is very easy to create life from anorganic sources, or (more
likely in my opinion) hardy microorganisms are abundant in the galaxy, traveling with comets and/or by themselves, seeding life
wherever there is water.
Another indication that primitive microbal life is abundant in the galaxy is that the second step took a long time :
It took 2-3 billion years to get to from single-cell to multi-cell organisms. If time is any indication, then apparently the
probability of life becoming more complex that a single cell is very small. If it had taken another 2 billion years, we would not
have been here (yet).
Second, it seems that after that complexity problem was solved, life exploded in diversity, but apparently it took the remainer of
time to develop intelligence for tool-making and eventually a technological civilisation. Why did tool-making and technological
intelligence not develop earlier, say during the 200 million years that the dinosaurs ruled ? If even one of the sub-species of
dinosaurs would have been smarter than the others, it could have made tools, eradicate it's predators, and build a technological
civilisation.. Why did that not happen ? Maybe the step from complex life to (tool-making) intelligence is again one with very low
probability. Maybe that is because intelligence (or a big brain) is not so 'smart' for most species' survival ?
So then here we are. Survivers of the Great Filter of the past. We do not know how many others there were (or are) in the Galaxy
that got to the point where we are.
But what we DO know is that we are not even close to expanding through the Galaxy. Technological civilisation in progress for a bit
over 150 years. 150 years out of 4.5 billion years, and we already face the first major problems : depleting fossil fuels,
overpopulation, cimate change etc etc. If the past 150 years is any indication, I see no reason why we would ever make it to become
a true interstellar space-faring civilisation. Unless we find dirt-cheap super-fast interstellar spacecraft technology very quickly,
we would need to find a way to live in 'harmony' with planet. Stabilize our population and recycle all resources. Else we will run
out of something very quickly. If we don't, then the ones that depend on these resources the most will be the ones parisching.
The point that I am making is that technological civilisation is not necessarily a 'smart' thing for the survival of the species. It
might be good for a while, but when the resources run out, or wars break out over resources, then we cannot invest in the 'progress'
path to interstellar colonisation. And the winner of the wars might not be the smartest one. It might simply be the strongest of our
own species. If that happens, there does not need to be a 'cataclismic' event, we could simply slowly parish, and use less
technology along the way. It's survival of the fittest. Not survival of the smartest that rules evolution. You cannot eat a
computer, so to say.
Even if we manage to stabilize our existence on Earth, and start with space colonisation of our own solar system, and even venture
out to colonize other solar systems, there is still no guarantee that we will colonize the Galaxy. Unless there is something as
'warp drive', Colonists will be pretty much on their own in their new solar system. So they each will again face the same challenges
that we face here today : Expand too fast, and you will deplete your resources and perish before you can move on. Expand too slow
and colonisation stops because fail rate is higher than expansion rate.
Here is the bottomline : If colonists don't multiply then there is no expansion through the Galaxy. If they do multiply too fast
then they deplete their resources, endangering their civilisation. If they multiply just right, then their may be a window of
opportunity for interstellar expansion, but we do not know how big this window is or can be.
If the probability of successfull interstellar expansion (the window) is lower than the multiplication factor for a successful
expansion, then the colonisation effort will cease after a few successfull 'hops'.
To succesfully colonize the Galaxy, any civilisation (and it's subsequent species) need consistently executing the correct expansion
rate over millions of hubs and millions of years.
That effort is not done before, or we would have noticed it very clearly. There would be massive astro projects in the Galaxy like
Dyson-sphers blocking most starlight from most stars, and surely we would have have been not just visited, but there would have been
some astro-projects in our own solar system. Why leave such a beautiful star with so many resources alone for crawling creatures on
the third planet ?
So, it seems that all ET civilisations (if there) have a limited 'lifetime'. Now it's up to us to determine upper and lower bounds
for this lifetime.
And for all that matter, we need to work on facing our own challenges towars our own lifetime as a technology civilisation, if we
ever want to fly to the stars...
We have our future in our own hands, and it does not depend on us finding remnants of life on Mars or anywhere else for that matter.
More later
Rob
BradGuth
. - BG
> known fact. UFO spotters, Ra�lian cultists, and self-�certified alien
> begun. For surely it would be the height of na�vet� to think that with
Matt Giwer
> source: http://www.technologyreview.com/printer_friendly_article.aspx?id=20569
> People got very excited in 2004 when NASA's rover Opportunity
> discovered evidence that Mars had once been wet. Where there is water,
> there may be life.
There is at present liquid water on Mars. A few years ago I gave a link to a
rover image of it. Your hope is in vain.
The amusing point about the image was that it is water until shown to be some
other liquid yet NASA never even drew attention to the image.
--
You can always trust a Zionist to be a Zionist.
-- The Iron Webmaster, 3988
http://www.haaretz.com What is Israel really like? http://www.jpost.com a7
Matt Giwer
> Got any ecxcuse, why not Venus ?
> . - BG
Because big, evil, ugly Guthians live there.
--
Is it legitimate to ask why the only country friendly to Mugabe's government
is Israel or is that an antisemitic question?
-- The Iron Webmaster, 3977
http://www.giwersworld.org/environment/aehb.phtml a2
Ian Parker
There is one other scenario we have considered, the "race" situation.
The civilization that develops first will colonize the galaxy. You
either ask "where are the aliens?" or alien colonization is a matter
of historical fact. I seem to recall that we have indeed discussed
this and come to the conclusion that if the Earth is to colonize the
galaxy, the nearest civilization will differ by about 50 million
years. This is the result of the tail of the Gaussian.
Our future is indeed in our hands and the next 100 years will probably
be the critical period. If we survive 100 years we will probably
colonize the galaxy. 100 years is the real danger period for the human
race.
I am going to say one thing which is perhaps a little antscientific
and slighly comtroversial. It might perhaps be better not to
investigate Martian life. Let me expain the logic. We can psych
ourselves into a crisis. If you look for example at the sub prime
lending crisis one thing is apparant. The financial system is
committing collective suicide. Mervyn King the governor of the Bank of
England has said pretty much that although not in quite those words.
Mr. King is saying is saying that if banks do not lend to each other
they risk bringing about what they want to avoid - the collapse of the
financial system.
If we knew, or thought we knew, that the "filter" was in the future it
would change the way in which we behaved. It would make us a lot more
paranoid. Paranoia could easly contribute to the demise of humanity.
The shortages of resources are :-
a) Due to the success of humanity. A big brain IS an advantage. The
number of humans born in 2 days exceeds the total number of all the
other great apes.
b) They can be overcome by improvements in technology. As I have said
- cover the South West with solar panels and electoyse water.
- Ian Parker
- Ian Parker
BradGuth
> BradGuth wrote:
> > Got any ecxcuse, why not Venus ?
> > . - BG
>
> Because big, evil, ugly Guthians live there.
Real mature, just like the old STR fart that you are.
. - Brad Guth
Rob Dekker
How are things ? I have not been here for a while.
I feel like coming back to the water hole, but almost everyone is gone..
Where is everyone else ?
"Matt Giwer" <jul...@tampabay.REMover.rr.com> wrote in message news:48197062$0$31748$4c36...@roadrunner.com...
....
>
> There is at present liquid water on Mars. A few years ago I gave a link to a rover image of it. Your hope is in vain.
>
> The amusing point about the image was that it is water until shown to be some other liquid yet NASA never even drew attention to
> the image.
You mean this image, right ?
http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov/gallery/all/1/p/307/1P155450047EFF38EVP2557L4M1.JPG
Here is the press-release again :
http://origin.mars5.jpl.nasa.gov/gallery/press/opportunity/20041210a.html
It is rock called "Tipura", pictured on Dec 3, 2004 (sol 306).
It cannot be water, because it's freezing beyond belief there.
Do you think it is ice ?
Rob Dekker
"Ian Parker" <ianpa...@gmail.com> wrote in message news:00b6efe2-bd7b-433a...@t54g2000hsg.googlegroups.com........
>
> There is one other scenario we have considered, the "race" situation.
> The civilization that develops first will colonize the galaxy. You
> either ask "where are the aliens?" or alien colonization is a matter
> of historical fact. I seem to recall that we have indeed discussed
> this and come to the conclusion that if the Earth is to colonize the
> galaxy, the nearest civilization will differ by about 50 million
> years. This is the result of the tail of the Gaussian.
You are right. We cannot rule out that the Galaxy was already colonized before, maybe multiple times.
However, that brings up several questions. Two come to mind :
(1) Where are they now ? If they were so successfull to colonize the Galaxy (which took millions of years at a minimum), why did
they vanish ?
(2) Where is the evidence ? They would have visited our solar system, but apparently did not crunch-up the planets, and even left
the great Asteroid belt along. Full of easy to harvest building material. Also, there is no sign of alien DNA in any of Earth's
lifeforms, so they apparently did not even stay on Earth and became one of us. They did not even contaminate our planet with any
alien bugs. So they must have been extremely careful, to the point where it looks like they were never here. Occam's rasor then
tells us that they probably never were here.
>
> Our future is indeed in our hands and the next 100 years will probably
> be the critical period. If we survive 100 years we will probably
> colonize the galaxy. 100 years is the real danger period for the human
> race.
I would not be so sure of challenges to disappear after 100 years.
We humans are better in anticipating than most animals that roam the planet, but we are still pretty poor in long-term planning.
I think there are 4 categories of challenges : The ones that you know that you know (such as fossil fuel running out, and global
warming), the ones that you don't know that you know (such as what drives humans to do the things they do), the ones that you know
that you don't know (such as how to build a spacecraft that can bring a colony to another star system), but the tricky one are the
challenges that you don't know that you don't know. That last category can kill us. And it may be the largest collection of
challenges in the future. It might be something that we created ourselves, or that is part of the great rules of evolution.
In short, We can see the short-tem problems that we created ourselves but we don't know the challenges ahead. Heck, we don't even
know what the challenges were in the past.
Remeber the time that homo sapiens got almost extinct ? We were going through an evolutionary corridor of about 20,000 individuals.
Evolutionary scientists are pretty sure that this happened. We don't know what the challenges were that time, but they sure were
more problematic for the survival of our species than the inconveniences of the next 100 years.
>
> I am going to say one thing which is perhaps a little antscientific
> and slighly comtroversial. It might perhaps be better not to
> investigate Martian life. Let me expain the logic. We can psych
> ourselves into a crisis. If you look for example at the sub prime
> lending crisis one thing is apparant. The financial system is
> committing collective suicide. Mervyn King the governor of the Bank of
> England has said pretty much that although not in quite those words.
> Mr. King is saying is saying that if banks do not lend to each other
> they risk bringing about what they want to avoid - the collapse of the
> financial system.
>
> If we knew, or thought we knew, that the "filter" was in the future it
> would change the way in which we behaved. It would make us a lot more
> paranoid. Paranoia could easly contribute to the demise of humanity.
Trying not to know something because you are afraid of the concequences of what you will find is not just 'a little' non-scientific,
it is completely incompatible with science.
It transpires a fear of the unknown, and reluctance to explore. It's also a killer for making bolt steps forward.
It does show a different side of humans though, and I am glad you bring it up.
If most people think like this, then we will never get off this planet.
So if there is ONE reason why would would NOT become space-faring species, then it is this one.
>
> The shortages of resources are :-
>
> a) Due to the success of humanity. A big brain IS an advantage. The
> number of humans born in 2 days exceeds the total number of all the
> other great apes.
It's an advantage as long as we are doing good.
I bought some stocks that were really doing good the other day. The were on the right track for a long time, and the future looked
bright. The week after I bought them, they tanked. Why ? A nasty, unanticipated problem surfaced, and the consequences were
devastating. A problem that we did not know that we did not know.
Past success in no guarantee for future success.
>
> b) They can be overcome by improvements in technology. As I have said
> - cover the South West with solar panels and electoyse water.
>
When do we start ?
Mike Combs
that if Gerard O'Neill was right about orbital habitats, technological races
could colonize the galaxy far more outrageously and thoroughly than we can
imagine when staying inside the confines of the planetary assumption. Which
means the lack of obvious visual indicators becomes even more problematic.
Are We Alone in the Galaxy?
http://writings.mike-combs.com/alone.htm
--
Regards,
Mike Combs
----------------------------------------------------------------------
We must be staunch in our conviction that freedom is not the sole
prerogative of a lucky few, but the inalienable and universal right of all
human beings... It would be cultural condescension, or worse, to say that
any people prefer dictatorship to democracy.
Ronald Reagan at Westminster Abbey, 1982
Rob Dekker
"Mike Combs" <mike...@nospam.com_chg_nospam_2_ti> wrote in message news:fvd652$bdk$1...@home.itg.ti.com...
> Bostrom views this much the same way I do. The only point I would add is that if Gerard O'Neill was right about orbital habitats,
> technological races could colonize the galaxy far more outrageously and thoroughly than we can imagine when staying inside the
> confines of the planetary assumption. Which means the lack of obvious visual indicators becomes even more problematic.
>
Hi Mike,
I think your assessment is correct if we talk about the lack of visual indicators in our own solar system.
Nobody has crunched up all our planets and turned them into O'Neill habitats.
But the same argument might not hold up for interstellar astro works :
Extraterrestial civilization could crunch up all their solid planets and turned them into a Dyson swarm of O'Neill habitats. But
when that is done, I just realized that it might be very hard for us to detect anything out of the ordinary. I did a quick
calculation : In our solar system, most solid matter are the 4 inner planets, Earth being the largest. If you add up all their
matter, you have 2.17e12 km^2 of material to build O'Neill habitats from. Assume that these habitats have at least a couple of
meters thick walls (so you can plant things in soil), and swarms spherical around the star between 1 AU and 2 AU, then the swarm
will block less than 0.4 % of the star's sunlight. So at best we can see a bit of dust/debrit in the IR spectrum around the star,
but that's it.
Rob
Golden California Girls
> "Ian Parker" <ianpa...@gmail.com> wrote in message news:00b6efe2-bd7b-433a...@t54g2000hsg.googlegroups.com...
>> On 30 Apr, 22:21, "Rob Dekker" <r...@verific.com> wrote:
> .....
>> There is one other scenario we have considered, the "race" situation.
>> The civilization that develops first will colonize the galaxy. You
>> either ask "where are the aliens?" or alien colonization is a matter
>> of historical fact. I seem to recall that we have indeed discussed
>> this and come to the conclusion that if the Earth is to colonize the
>> galaxy, the nearest civilization will differ by about 50 million
>> years. This is the result of the tail of the Gaussian.
>
> You are right. We cannot rule out that the Galaxy was already colonized before, maybe multiple times.
> However, that brings up several questions. Two come to mind :
>
> (1) Where are they now ? If they were so successfull to colonize the Galaxy (which took millions of years at a minimum), why did
> they vanish ?
You are making an assumption that they are doing full body colonization. Not
necessary. They may have sent out ships with their DNA into star forming
regions and simply dispersed it, knowing that eventually a comet would carry
some of it down on a wet planet. Absent FTL this may be the only way in which a
planet could ever hope to get to another.
> (2) Where is the evidence ? They would have visited our solar system, but apparently did not crunch-up the planets, and even left
> the great Asteroid belt along. Full of easy to harvest building material. Also, there is no sign of alien DNA in any of Earth's
> lifeforms, so they apparently did not even stay on Earth and became one of us. They did not even contaminate our planet with any
> alien bugs. So they must have been extremely careful, to the point where it looks like they were never here. Occam's rasor then
> tells us that they probably never were here.
Again you assume they do full body colonization. We only have earth DNA to look
at so far. It all seems to be related. You assume it arose here without help.
Once we have Mars DNA, if it is the same as Earth DNA then we know a game is
afoot, different, then they likely arose independently.
>> Our future is indeed in our hands and the next 100 years will probably
>> be the critical period. If we survive 100 years we will probably
>> colonize the galaxy. 100 years is the real danger period for the human
>> race.
>
> I would not be so sure of challenges to disappear after 100 years.
> We humans are better in anticipating than most animals that roam the planet, but we are still pretty poor in long-term planning.
I agree. We may find that what we face in 100 years is nothing to what we may
face in 50000 years. Frankly I suspect so perhaps from some super bug
standpoint. Think about GM DNA being taught in say grade school to our smarter
children and some playground fight and some retaliation.
The big challenge we face is learning how to live together and not each man for
himself. knowledge is power and as we get more knowledge we each individually
have more power to do good or evil. In our past say after we discovered fire
learning how to control it may have been our actual greatest challenge. Perhaps
we still face it with our atom powered fire of today, but don't know it. I
suspect our real challenge is in preventing an unstable person from putting his
knowledge to the use of evil. Terrorism in short.
Yes. Absolutely. Fear of the unknown.
>> The shortages of resources are :-
>>
>> a) Due to the success of humanity. A big brain IS an advantage. The
>> number of humans born in 2 days exceeds the total number of all the
>> other great apes.
>
> It's an advantage as long as we are doing good.
> I bought some stocks that were really doing good the other day. The were on the right track for a long time, and the future looked
> bright. The week after I bought them, they tanked. Why ? A nasty, unanticipated problem surfaced, and the consequences were
> devastating. A problem that we did not know that we did not know.
> Past success in no guarantee for future success.
>
>> b) They can be overcome by improvements in technology. As I have said
>> - cover the South West with solar panels and electoyse water.
>>
>
> When do we start ?
At what cost in energy to melt all the sand you need for them and all the toxic
chemicals needed to keep them super clean while you make them?
And just tossing a wild hare out there, there seems to be a lot of missing
matter in the universe. Now just what escapes a Dyson sphere? Gravity.
Gary
Rob Dekker
"Golden California Girls" <gldnc...@aol.com.mil> wrote in message news:RmvSj.3908$lc6.788@trnddc04...
...
>> You are right. We cannot rule out that the Galaxy was already colonized before, maybe multiple times.
>> However, that brings up several questions. Two come to mind :
>>
>> (1) Where are they now ? If they were so successfull to colonize the Galaxy (which took millions of years at a minimum), why did
>> they vanish ?
>
> You are making an assumption that they are doing full body colonization. Not necessary. They may have sent out ships with their
> DNA into star forming regions and simply dispersed it, knowing that eventually a comet would carry some of it down on a wet
> planet. Absent FTL this may be the only way in which a planet could ever hope to get to another.
>
Can you show how DNA of complex lifeforms like us can sprout to life when 'simply dispersed' into an arbitrary ocean ?
Microbal, primitive single-cell organisms, yes. That I find plausible, and would also explain why Earth obtained life so rapidly.
But interstellar traveling life/DNA beyond a single-cell is not very likely to exist. Earth waited 2 billion years before such
'complex' lifeforms emerged.
Anything more complex than that surely would almost certainly need 'full-body' colonization or 'intelligence', including
terra-forming and possibly robotic nurseries, before it can successfully reproduce on a foreign planet.
>> (2) Where is the evidence ? They would have visited our solar system, but apparently did not crunch-up the planets, and even left
>> the great Asteroid belt along. Full of easy to harvest building material. Also, there is no sign of alien DNA in any of Earth's
>> lifeforms, so they apparently did not even stay on Earth and became one of us. They did not even contaminate our planet with any
>> alien bugs. So they must have been extremely careful, to the point where it looks like they were never here. Occam's rasor then
>> tells us that they probably never were here.
>
> Again you assume they do full body colonization. We only have earth DNA to look at so far. It all seems to be related. You
> assume it arose here without help. Once we have Mars DNA, if it is the same as Earth DNA then we know a game is afoot, different,
> then they likely arose independently.
Again, if we are talking about proving or disproving panspermia, then I agree with you.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panspermia
But if we are talking about more complex (and preferably intelligent) ET life seeding on other planets directly (maybe without
full-body but at least in more complex form), then we really do not have any evidence that that has ever happened on Earth. We
should have seen more diverse DNA, or at least not the consistency in DNA that evolutionaries can trace back to common ancestors
billions of years ago...
>
>>> Our future is indeed in our hands and the next 100 years will probably
>>> be the critical period. If we survive 100 years we will probably
>>> colonize the galaxy. 100 years is the real danger period for the human
>>> race.
>>
>> I would not be so sure of challenges to disappear after 100 years.
>> We humans are better in anticipating than most animals that roam the planet, but we are still pretty poor in long-term planning.
>
> I agree. We may find that what we face in 100 years is nothing to what we may face in 50000 years. Frankly I suspect so perhaps
> from some super bug standpoint. Think about GM DNA being taught in say grade school to our smarter children and some playground
> fight and some retaliation.
>
> The big challenge we face is learning how to live together and not each man for himself. knowledge is power and as we get more
> knowledge we each individually have more power to do good or evil. In our past say after we discovered fire learning how to
> control it may have been our actual greatest challenge. Perhaps we still face it with our atom powered fire of today, but don't
> know it. I suspect our real challenge is in preventing an unstable person from putting his knowledge to the use of evil.
> Terrorism in short.
I agree. And not just live peaceful amongst each other, but also peaceful with the other species on the planet.
We humans got to the top of the food chain not by playing mister nice guy. We terminate anything that's in our way.
We hunted species very similar to ours to extinction (for example the end of Neantherthalers coincides with the arrival of homo
sapiens in northern Europe. Coincidence? I think not), and our current actions results already in direct or indirect termination of
many species and are bringing eco systems to the brink of destruction. On top of that we use up fossil fuel accumulated in 50
million years and change the climate without us knowing the outcome. We are a pretty aggressive bunch...
...
>>> b) They can be overcome by improvements in technology. As I have said
>>> - cover the South West with solar panels and electoyse water.
>>>
>>
>> When do we start ?
>
> At what cost in energy to melt all the sand you need for them and all the toxic chemicals needed to keep them super clean while
> you make them?
Well, I think they are just too expensive and too difficult to make, and other alternatives are cheaper.
But in defense of PV cells, they DO recover more energy over their lifetime than they cost to make.
>
> And just tossing a wild hare out there, there seems to be a lot of missing matter in the universe. Now just what escapes a Dyson
> sphere? Gravity.
>
I just posted in a side-thread that it will be very difficult to make Dyson spheres that block all sunlight. Their walls would have
to be less than 1 cm thick walls.
At least in our neck of the Galaxy you would not be able to find true Dyson spheres due to the lack of solid material.
The center of the Galaxy has more solid material, and it might be possible to build true Dyson spheres there.
Incidentally, to explain the current behavior of teh Galaxy, the 'dark matter' that is missing should be in a large halo around the
center.
So maybe you are on to something....
> Gary
Matt Giwer
> Hi Matt,
> How are things ? I have not been here for a while.
I miss the old exchanges too.
> I feel like coming back to the water hole, but almost everyone is gone..
> Where is everyone else ?
Don't know where everyone went. But I suspect BOINC works so smoothly the basic
reason we were here, to gripe about S@H is gone.
> "Matt Giwer" <jul...@tampabay.REMover.rr.com> wrote in message news:48197062$0$31748$4c36...@roadrunner.com...
> .....
>> There is at present liquid water on Mars. A few years ago I gave a link to a rover image of it. Your hope is in vain.
>>
>> The amusing point about the image was that it is water until shown to be some other liquid yet NASA never even drew attention to
>> the image.
>
> You mean this image, right ?
>
> http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov/gallery/all/1/p/307/1P155450047EFF38EVP2557L4M1.JPG
That's the one.
> Here is the press-release again :
> http://origin.mars5.jpl.nasa.gov/gallery/press/opportunity/20041210a.html
> It is rock called "Tipura", pictured on Dec 3, 2004 (sol 306).
> It cannot be water, because it's freezing beyond belief there.
> Do you think it is ice ?
It is something that was or is fluid enough to produce a flat surface. And it
does not appear to be covered with dust to it formed shortly before the picture.
Less likely a dust devil cleaned it just before the picture.
Given those two facts I am open to any suggestion as to what the fluid could
be. The only one I know of with even a remote chance is water. I agree it is
remote. I assume there are a mess of hydrocarbons that are candidates but that
is even more interesting. A better place to start for fuel than making methane
from the atmosphere.
There are other photos of the other regions takes years apart that occasionally
show what appear to be what form on earth after flash floods. The official press
releases note them so it is not due to higher resolution cameras.
You tell me. Any better guess?
--
We know and the entire world knows US domestic and foreign policy is created
by campaign contributors. Why are we surprised when they react to the AIPAC
lobby?
-- The Iron Webmaster, 3982
http://www.giwersworld.org/holo3/holo-survivors.phtml a3
Matt Giwer
> "Ian Parker" <ianpa...@gmail.com> wrote in message news:00b6efe2-bd7b-433a...@t54g2000hsg.googlegroups.com...
>> On 30 Apr, 22:21, "Rob Dekker" <r...@verific.com> wrote:
>> There is one other scenario we have considered, the "race" situation.
>> The civilization that develops first will colonize the galaxy. You
>> either ask "where are the aliens?" or alien colonization is a matter
>> of historical fact. I seem to recall that we have indeed discussed
>> this and come to the conclusion that if the Earth is to colonize the
>> galaxy, the nearest civilization will differ by about 50 million
>> years. This is the result of the tail of the Gaussian.
> You are right. We cannot rule out that the Galaxy was already colonized
> before, maybe multiple times.
> However, that brings up several questions. Two come to mind :
> (1) Where are they now ? If they were so successfull to colonize the Galaxy (which took millions of
> years at a minimum), why did
> they vanish ?
If 1/10th of 1% of the UFO sightings are the real thing then we are a popular
destination. They are here all the time. Some people who have objected to this
are unaware of just how many sightings there are every day. Making the national
news in the US is quite a hurdle these days.
> (2) Where is the evidence ? They would have visited our solar system, but
> apparently did not crunch-up the planets, and even left
> the great Asteroid belt along. Full of easy to harvest building material.
It is difficult to imagine interstellar transportation of raw materials can
ever be cheaper than advanced recycling. We don't use it yet except for getting
rid of serious toxic waste. It is called a plasma torch. It breaks everything
down to elements. Do that and collect them. Everything recycles.
> Also, there is no sign of alien DNA in any of Earth's
> lifeforms,
If it were common, how would we know?
> so they apparently did not even stay on Earth and became one
> of us. They did not even contaminate our planet with any
> alien bugs.
Or maybe all bugs are alien contamination.
> So they must have been extremely careful, to the point where
> it looks like they were never here. Occam's rasor then
> tells us that they probably never were here.
If that were the case then the failure to find DNA contamination on Mars would
prove we never landed on Mars.
>> Our future is indeed in our hands and the next 100 years will probably
>> be the critical period. If we survive 100 years we will probably
>> colonize the galaxy. 100 years is the real danger period for the human
>> race.
> I would not be so sure of challenges to disappear after 100 years.
> We humans are better in anticipating than most animals that roam the
> planet, but we are still pretty poor in long-term planning.
> I think there are 4 categories of challenges : The ones that you
> know that you know (such as fossil fuel running out, and global
> warming),
The only problem there is the political fear of nuclear power and the idiots
who believe in global warming.
> the ones that you don't know that you know (such as what
> drives humans to do the things they do), the ones that you know
> that you don't know (such as how to build a spacecraft that can bring a
> colony to another star system), but the tricky one are the
> challenges that you don't know that you don't know. That last category can
> kill us. And it may be the largest collection of
> challenges in the future. It might be something that we created ourselves,
> or that is part of the great rules of evolution.
The first thing people do in a new environment is die. The second thing they do
is learn not to. Been there, done that, got overpopulation to prove it.
> In short, We can see the short-tem problems that we created ourselves
> but we don't know the challenges ahead. Heck, we don't even
> know what the challenges were in the past.
> Remeber the time that homo sapiens got almost extinct? We were going
> through an evolutionary corridor of about 20,000 individuals.
> Evolutionary scientists are pretty sure that this happened. We don't
> know what the challenges were that time, but they sure were
> more problematic for the survival of our species than the inconveniences
> of the next 100 years.
Remember that is a currently popular idea which is far from established as
fact. I know the arguments so don't bother. The problem is there is no evidence
for any of the supposed causes of it. Either it is a different cause for which
there is evidence or there is another interpretation of the data. And I assure
you there are a mess of other problems with this ever having happened. One is
that during the ice age the sea level was some 3-400 feet lower. That Sinai
chokepoint out of Africa was so wide there is no way to describe it as a
chokepoint.
>> I am going to say one thing which is perhaps a little antscientific
>> and slighly comtroversial. It might perhaps be better not to
>> investigate Martian life. Let me expain the logic. We can psych
>> ourselves into a crisis. If you look for example at the sub prime
>> lending crisis one thing is apparant. The financial system is
>> committing collective suicide. Mervyn King the governor of the Bank of
>> England has said pretty much that although not in quite those words.
>> Mr. King is saying is saying that if banks do not lend to each other
>> they risk bringing about what they want to avoid - the collapse of the
>> financial system.
>> If we knew, or thought we knew, that the "filter" was in the future it
>> would change the way in which we behaved. It would make us a lot more
>> paranoid. Paranoia could easly contribute to the demise of humanity.
> Trying not to know something because you are afraid of the concequences
> of what you will find is not just 'a little' non-scientific,
> it is completely incompatible with science.
> It transpires a fear of the unknown, and reluctance to explore. It's
> also a killer for making bolt steps forward.
> It does show a different side of humans though, and I am glad you bring
> it up.
> If most people think like this, then we will never get off this planet.
> So if there is ONE reason why would would NOT become space-faring species,
> then it is this one.
We will get off the planet. That is not in question. The only question is how
long it will take. Space travel is so far out of the public eye there was no
celebration of our 50th year in space noting Sputnik in 1957. While we have lots
of stuff up there it is no Buck Rogers. It is no SF of the 50s or 60s nor was
2001 much of an excite year in space. The timeframe of our best expectations may
be off by a factor of ten. But 50 years after 1492 nothing much had happened
either. If it takes a thousand years to have a viable colony on Mars that is
only twice as long as from 1492 to today. Hardly a blink of an eye. 5000 years
only takes up back to Sumer not to the beginning of agriculture.
--
Hodie postridie Kalendas Maias MMVIII est
-- The Ferric Webcaesar
http://www.giwersworld.org a1
Ian Parker
> "Mike Combs" <mikeco...@nospam.com_chg_nospam_2_ti> wrote in messagenews:fvd652$bdk$1...@home.itg.ti.com...
Yes but we don't even see that. Don't suppose there have been no
searches for IR radiation round stars. Beta Pictoris has some rubble
round it, but it is condensing asteroid like masterial, NOT Dyson
habitats.
As I think I have said before Dyson civilizations will have radio
teledcopes at least 4AU across and fragmented optical telescopes,
possibly thousands of kilometers across. Hence, if they are there at
all, they know everything about us. This is why SETI is such a
complete waste of time.
- Ian Parker
Ian Parker
> "Ian Parker" <ianpark...@gmail.com> wrote in messagenews:00b6efe2-bd7b-433a...@t54g2000hsg.googlegroups.com...
> > On 30 Apr, 22:21, "Rob Dekker" <r...@verific.com> wrote:
> .....
>
> > There is one other scenario we have considered, the "race" situation.
> > The civilization that develops first will colonize the galaxy. You
> > either ask "where are the aliens?" or alien colonization is a matter
> > of historical fact. I seem to recall that we have indeed discussed
> > this and come to the conclusion that if the Earth is to colonize the
> > galaxy, the nearest civilization will differ by about 50 million
> > years. This is the result of the tail of the Gaussian.
>
> You are right. We cannot rule out that the Galaxy was already colonized before, maybe multiple times.
> However, that brings up several questions. Two come to mind :
>
colonization that we cannot see now. What I meant was that native
Americans do not argue about whether Europe exists of not. The fact of
Euopean colonization in America is a historical fact. I would be
better in fact to say "established fact". That is what I really meant.
>
> > Our future is indeed in our hands and the next 100 years will probably
> > be the critical period. If we survive 100 years we will probably
> > colonize the galaxy. 100 years is the real danger period for the human
> > race.
>
> I would not be so sure of challenges to disappear after 100 years.
> We humans are better in anticipating than most animals that roam the planet, but we are still pretty poor in long-term planning.
>
> I think there are 4 categories of challenges : The ones that you know that you know (such as fossil fuel running out, and global
> warming), the ones that you don't know that you know (such as what drives humans to do the things they do), the ones that you know
> that you don't know (such as how to build a spacecraft that can bring a colony to another star system), but the tricky one are the
> challenges that you don't know that you don't know. That last category can kill us. And it may be the largest collection of
> challenges in the future. It might be something that we created ourselves, or that is part of the great rules of evolution.
>
> In short, We can see the short-tem problems that we created ourselves but we don't know the challenges ahead. Heck, we don't even
> know what the challenges were in the past.
> Remeber the time that homo sapiens got almost extinct ? We were going through an evolutionary corridor of about 20,000 individuals.
> Evolutionary scientists are pretty sure that this happened. We don't know what the challenges were that time, but they sure were
> more problematic for the survival of our species than the inconveniences of the next 100 years.
>
populations is small compared with other species. There is a question
about whether if H.sapiens had become extinct some other intelligent
species would have evolved. After all there were still chimps around
and they could have evolved a second time.
To get us down tio that level though we will need some horrendous
catastophe. Things like Global Warming will never cause the human race
to become extict for 2 simple reasons.
1) A human world population of several million people will not be
capable of causing environmental damage, even with an extremely large
amount of per capita pollution.
2) In practice Global Warming and fossil fuel shortages stimulate
technological development. In fact the "threatened" civilizations are
in the Middle East not the West. If you do no allow women to take part
in your society and your economy is based virtually 100% on oil,
technological developments of the sort we would all wish to see are
immensely threatning. If solar power + hydrogen is developed st $100
per barrel and we all start driving hydogen cars and aircraft use
liquid hydrogen (if not Mook's orbiting lasers) no one is going to go
bak to petrol, kerosene or diesel even if the price were to drop to
$20.
>
>
> > I am going to say one thing which is perhaps a little antscientific
> > and slighly comtroversial. It might perhaps be better not to
> > investigate Martian life. Let me expain the logic. We can psych
> > ourselves into a crisis. If you look for example at the sub prime
> > lending crisis one thing is apparant. The financial system is
> > committing collective suicide. Mervyn King the governor of the Bank of
> > England has said pretty much that although not in quite those words.
> > Mr. King is saying is saying that if banks do not lend to each other
> > they risk bringing about what they want to avoid - the collapse of the
> > financial system.
>
> > If we knew, or thought we knew, that the "filter" was in the future it
> > would change the way in which we behaved. It would make us a lot more
> > paranoid. Paranoia could easly contribute to the demise of humanity.
>
> Trying not to know something because you are afraid of the concequences of what you will find is not just 'a little' non-scientific,
> it is completely incompatible with science.
> It transpires a fear of the unknown, and reluctance to explore. It's also a killer for making bolt steps forward.
> It does show a different side of humans though, and I am glad you bring it up.
> If most people think like this, then we will never get off this planet.
> So if there is ONE reason why would would NOT become space-faring species, then it is this one.
>
Basically I agree. However what I did want to show is that paranoia is
self generating and self feeding and can actually bring about the
situation you wish to avoid.
There are people, and I think most of the people in this group are in
this camp, who see technological development as being the solution to
environmental and resource problems. Some environmentalist, the "hair
shirt" brigade simply want to cut down on energy use and reduce our
standard of living. Of course "hair shirts" are going to maintain the
power of OPEC and the subjugation of women. I cannot see how any woman
can have any symparhy of support for "hair shirts".
Also "hair shirts" want our food sourced locally. Now trade is the
only way to raise living standards in the third world. The "hair
shirts" are all anti Third World. BTW - produce grown in greenhouses
in Holland is NOT green. Third World stuff is in point of fact a lot
greener.
>
>
> > The shortages of resources are :-
>
> > a) Due to the success of humanity. A big brain IS an advantage. The
> > number of humans born in 2 days exceeds the total number of all the
> > other great apes.
>
> It's an advantage as long as we are doing good.
> I bought some stocks that were really doing good the other day. The were on the right track for a long time, and the future looked
> bright. The week after I bought them, they tanked. Why ? A nasty, unanticipated problem surfaced, and the consequences were
> devastating. A problem that we did not know that we did not know.
> Past success in no guarantee for future success.
>
>
>
> > b) They can be overcome by improvements in technology. As I have said
> > - cover the South West with solar panels and electoyse water.
>
> When do we start ?
>
In a sense we already have. Installed solar power is growing at 50%
per year. Nearly as fast as Moore's law. What we in fact need now is
feasibility studies. Above all we need to feel that Science is the
solution. Of the political candidates Hillary is I think the best, she
has taled about ending the war against Science, next McCain who does
see the world in rather Cold War terms but believes in Science as a
solution. Obama does NOT offer "change we can believe in". He is in
terms of his scientific and religious attitudes rather a clone of
Bush. He is strongly evangelical.
- Ian Parker
Rob Dekker
"Matt Giwer" <jul...@tampabay.REMover.rr.com> wrote in message news:481ab9d2$0$5167$4c36...@roadrunner.com...
> Rob Dekker wrote:
>> Hi Matt,
>
>> How are things ? I have not been here for a while.
>
> I miss the old exchanges too.
>
>> I feel like coming back to the water hole, but almost everyone is gone..
>> Where is everyone else ?
>
> Don't know where everyone went. But I suspect BOINC works so smoothly the basic reason we were here, to gripe about S@H is gone.
Maybe, but most interesting discussions were not about Classic Seti or BOINC.
Any way, it's good to have you back !
>
>> "Matt Giwer" <jul...@tampabay.REMover.rr.com> wrote in message news:48197062$0$31748$4c36...@roadrunner.com...
>> .....
>>> There is at present liquid water on Mars. A few years ago I gave a link to a rover image of it. Your hope is in vain.
>>>
>>> The amusing point about the image was that it is water until shown to be some other liquid yet NASA never even drew attention to
>>> the image.
>>
>> You mean this image, right ?
>>
>> http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov/gallery/all/1/p/307/1P155450047EFF38EVP2557L4M1.JPG
>
> That's the one.
>
>> Here is the press-release again :
>> http://origin.mars5.jpl.nasa.gov/gallery/press/opportunity/20041210a.html
>> It is rock called "Tipura", pictured on Dec 3, 2004 (sol 306).
>> It cannot be water, because it's freezing beyond belief there.
>> Do you think it is ice ?
>
> It is something that was or is fluid enough to produce a flat surface. And it does not appear to be covered with dust to it formed
> shortly before the picture. Less likely a dust devil cleaned it just before the picture.
>
> Given those two facts I am open to any suggestion as to what the fluid could be. The only one I know of with even a remote chance
> is water. I agree it is remote. I assume there are a mess of hydrocarbons that are candidates but that is even more interesting. A
> better place to start for fuel than making methane from the atmosphere.
>
> There are other photos of the other regions takes years apart that occasionally show what appear to be what form on earth after
> flash floods. The official press releases note them so it is not due to higher resolution cameras.
>
> You tell me. Any better guess?
I think it is very fine dust.
Rob Dekker
"Ian Parker" <ianpa...@gmail.com> wrote in message news:ff257022-16d4-48d7...@c65g2000hsa.googlegroups.com...
On 2 May, 03:43, "Rob Dekker" <r...@verific.com> wrote:
> "Mike Combs" <mikeco...@nospam.com_chg_nospam_2_ti> wrote in messagenews:fvd652$bdk$1...@home.itg.ti.com...
> > will block less than 0.4 % of the star's sunlight. So at best we can see a bit of dust/debrit in the IR spectrum around the
> > star,
> > but that's it.
> >
> > Rob
>
> Yes but we don't even see that. Don't suppose there have been no
> searches for IR radiation round stars. Beta Pictoris has some rubble
> round it, but it is condensing asteroid like masterial, NOT Dyson
> habitats.
How would you know the difference ?
>
> As I think I have said before Dyson civilizations will have radio
> teledcopes at least 4AU across and fragmented optical telescopes,
> possibly thousands of kilometers across. Hence, if they are there at
> all, they know everything about us. This is why SETI is such a
> complete waste of time.
>
I fail to see how you can combine that belief with that conclusion.
If they know about us, then current SETI (searching for beacons and astro engineering) would make even more sense...
>
> - Ian Parker
Rand Simberg
Dekker" <r...@verific.com> made the phosphor on my monitor glow in such
a way as to indicate that:
>
>"Ian Parker" <ianpa...@gmail.com> wrote in message news:ff257022-16d4-48d7...@c65g2000hsa.googlegroups.com...
>> As I think I have said before Dyson civilizations will have radio
>> teledcopes at least 4AU across and fragmented optical telescopes,
>> possibly thousands of kilometers across. Hence, if they are there at
>> all, they know everything about us. This is why SETI is such a
>> complete waste of time.
>>
>
>I fail to see how you can combine that belief with that conclusion.
>If they know about us, then current SETI (searching for beacons and astro engineering) would make even more sense..
Logic isn't Ian's strong suit.
Rob Dekker
"Ian Parker" <ianpa...@gmail.com> wrote in message news:d5590515-8b08-444a...@e39g2000hsf.googlegroups.com...
Correct, but the issue was that we almost did not make it...
The point I am trying to make is that in a world full of competing species, the one with a big brain could actually have an
advantage only if the conditions are exactly right for the critical period of their beginning. We are rather fragile when compared
to other species, and in our current form (depending on our technology) we are even more fragile.
> To get us down tio that level though we will need some horrendous
> catastophe. Things like Global Warming will never cause the human race
> to become extict for 2 simple reasons.
>
> 1) A human world population of several million people will not be
> capable of causing environmental damage, even with an extremely large
> amount of per capita pollution.
>
> 2) In practice Global Warming and fossil fuel shortages stimulate
> technological development. In fact the "threatened" civilizations are
> in the Middle East not the West. If you do no allow women to take part
> in your society and your economy is based virtually 100% on oil,
> technological developments of the sort we would all wish to see are
> immensely threatning. If solar power + hydrogen is developed st $100
> per barrel and we all start driving hydogen cars and aircraft use
> liquid hydrogen (if not Mook's orbiting lasers) no one is going to go
> bak to petrol, kerosene or diesel even if the price were to drop to
> $20.
A catastrophe might be needed to eradicate homo sapiens altogether, but a minor hick-up might be enough for our technology
civilisation to end.
Remember that we have the bounty of millions of years of planet Earth and a perfectly stable environment for the past 20,000 years.
During these ideal conditions, we managed to take over the globe, transform it, irradicate our forests, and take away fossil
resources.
We do this already when conditions are ideal for us in the first place. What will happen if there is some stress ? Minor only :
Maybe a global nuclear war or a human-induced climate change, or an ice age or brutal global drought, or some other global hickup of
Nature that lasts a significant period of time (100 - 1000 years or so). We would sure be in very deep trouble. We won't go extinct,
but the anargy that inevitably will result from the stress could cost 90 % of us our lives, and most of us will fight and risk
anything before we die. During such a period of anarchy, it is hard to imagine how a free market can still operate, and what money
is worth, and consequently how a technological civilisation can continue to exist. During anarchy, when we are busy protecting our
own life and our family's and we are scavaging for food, who will be making sub-micron devices ? Who will keep power plants running
? Who will maintain the internet? Who will survive such a period ? The very healthy and strong ones. Not the scientists, not the
technologists.
After this, when things calm down, the survivers will be left with a ravenged planet. We would probably go back to farming if that's
even possible (depending on what the hick-up was about), and it would sure take many generations before we can start re-inventing
some of our technology again. Not just that this takes time, but now the planet's resources. Fossil fuel is not there, all rain
forests are gone, fish in the ocean is hard to find etc etc. The next generation will thus have a harder time rebuilding. Maybe they
need so much time that the next hick-up of Nature is already occurring. Enough hick-ups and we may not get back to a technology
civilization at all.
We have been extremely lucky so far, so lucky that we forgot how fragile we are.
I have no idea what you are talking about.
>>
>>
>> > The shortages of resources are :-
>>
>> > a) Due to the success of humanity. A big brain IS an advantage. The
>> > number of humans born in 2 days exceeds the total number of all the
>> > other great apes.
>>
>> It's an advantage as long as we are doing good.
>> I bought some stocks that were really doing good the other day. The were on the right track for a long time, and the future
>> looked
>> bright. The week after I bought them, they tanked. Why ? A nasty, unanticipated problem surfaced, and the consequences were
>> devastating. A problem that we did not know that we did not know.
>> Past success in no guarantee for future success.
>>
>>
>>
>> > b) They can be overcome by improvements in technology. As I have said
>> > - cover the South West with solar panels and electoyse water.
>>
>> When do we start ?
>>
> In a sense we already have. Installed solar power is growing at 50%
> per year. Nearly as fast as Moore's law.
PV provides a few hundred MW of power installed per year.
Wind is growing 10x faster in terms of MW/year installed.
But the winner is.... coal-fired power plants !!!
China alone brings 1GW per WEEK on-line in coal-fired power.
When do we start ?
> What we in fact need now is feasibility studies.
Uhhhm. Hello ?
PV is a bit far behind ! If you want it to make a difference, we better our butts off the floor.....
Mike Combs
news:GevSj.612$17....@newssvr22.news.prodigy.net...
>
> Assume that these habitats have at least a couple of meters thick walls
> (so you can plant things in soil), and swarms spherical around the star
> between 1 AU and 2 AU, then the swarm will block less than 0.4 % of the
> star's sunlight. So at best we can see a bit of dust/debrit in the IR
> spectrum around the star, but that's it.
All I know about the matter is that quite some while back Dyson expressed
the opinion that ETs could wind up using significant fractions of their
sun's total available energy, up to and including 100%. I don't know if he
was assuming transmutation of gas-giant hydrogen, or material sources other
than the terrestrials.
Mike Combs
> Don't suppose there have been no
> searches for IR radiation round stars. Beta Pictoris has some rubble
> round it, but it is condensing asteroid like masterial, NOT Dyson
> habitats.
This paper does mention that there would be a distinctive difference between
the IR spectral signature of sun-warmed orbiting rocks, and some structure
which was using energy to do work.
http://www.nidsci.org/essaycomp/gmatloff.html
> As I think I have said before Dyson civilizations will have radio
> teledcopes at least 4AU across and fragmented optical telescopes,
> possibly thousands of kilometers across. Hence, if they are there at
> all, they know everything about us. This is why SETI is such a
> complete waste of time.
I agree with you. But SETI is relatively inexpensive, thus I have no
significant objection to other people who view this differently than I
having a look. But SETI will never be one of my passions.
Mike Combs
news:RmvSj.3908$lc6.788@trnddc04...
>
> matter in the universe. Now just what escapes a Dyson sphere? Gravity.
Neat idea, but here's the rub: In addition to gravity, IR radiation also
escapes a Dyson sphere. From the outside, we would see a source of
radiation equal in wattage to a main-sequence sun, but entirely in the IR.
Matt Giwer
...
> Yes but we don't even see that. Don't suppose there have been no
> searches for IR radiation round stars. Beta Pictoris has some rubble
> round it, but it is condensing asteroid like masterial, NOT Dyson
> habitats.
> As I think I have said before Dyson civilizations will have radio
> teledcopes at least 4AU across and fragmented optical telescopes,
> possibly thousands of kilometers across. Hence, if they are there at
> all, they know everything about us. This is why SETI is such a
> complete waste of time.
The problem with what we think we would expect from a Dyson civilization is
that it is based upon out technology today whereas by definition a Dyson
civilization would be unimaginably ahead of us.
There is no way we could possibly know what to look for.
Thermodynamics does not apply in the sub-atomic interaction of matter to
energy. There is no reason to assume an energy to matter conversion would
generate any waste heat at all. So if they are converting unneeded solar energy
back to matter by a fundamental process even the IR radiation we not occur. It
would be a sphere whose temperature would be 0 degrees. Or perhaps 4.7 degrees
on average.
--
The only good thing about Hillary becoming president will be conservatives
turning against the Iraq war.
-- The Iron Webmaster, 3992
http://www.giwersworld.org/environment/aehb.phtml a2
Matt Giwer
> Rob Dekker wrote:
>> "Ian Parker" <ianpa...@gmail.com> wrote in message
>> news:00b6efe2-bd7b-433a...@t54g2000hsg.googlegroups.com...
>>> On 30 Apr, 22:21, "Rob Dekker" <r...@verific.com> wrote:
>> .....
>>> There is one other scenario we have considered, the "race" situation.
>>> The civilization that develops first will colonize the galaxy. You
>>> either ask "where are the aliens?" or alien colonization is a matter
>>> of historical fact. I seem to recall that we have indeed discussed
>>> this and come to the conclusion that if the Earth is to colonize the
>>> galaxy, the nearest civilization will differ by about 50 million
>>> years. This is the result of the tail of the Gaussian.
>>
>> You are right. We cannot rule out that the Galaxy was already
>> colonized before, maybe multiple times.
>> However, that brings up several questions. Two come to mind :
>>
>> (1) Where are they now ? If they were so successfull to colonize the
>> Galaxy (which took millions of years at a minimum), why did they vanish ?
>
> You are making an assumption that they are doing full body
> colonization. Not necessary. They may have sent out ships with their
> DNA into star forming regions and simply dispersed it, knowing that
> eventually a comet would carry some of it down on a wet planet. Absent
> FTL this may be the only way in which a planet could ever hope to get to
> another.
Unlike in bad SciFi movies when your DNA falls on a wet planet it either
deteriorates or is eaten.
--
You can always trust a Zionist to be a Zionist.
-- The Iron Webmaster, 3988
Matt Giwer
> "Matt Giwer" <jul...@tampabay.REMover.rr.com> wrote in message news:481ab9d2$0$5167$4c36...@roadrunner.com...
>> Rob Dekker wrote:
>>> Hi Matt,
>>> How are things ? I have not been here for a while.
>> I miss the old exchanges too.
>>> I feel like coming back to the water hole, but almost everyone is gone..
>>> Where is everyone else ?
>> Don't know where everyone went. But I suspect BOINC works so smoothly the basic reason we were here, to gripe about S@H is gone.
> Maybe, but most interesting discussions were not about Classic Seti or BOINC.
> Any way, it's good to have you back !
I never stopped reading. There were mainly only guthposts. Even I have standards.
>>> "Matt Giwer" <jul...@tampabay.REMover.rr.com> wrote in message news:48197062$0$31748$4c36...@roadrunner.com...
>>> .....
>>>> There is at present liquid water on Mars. A few years ago I gave a link to a rover image of it. Your hope is in vain.
>>>> The amusing point about the image was that it is water until shown to be some other liquid yet NASA never even drew attention to
>>>> the image.
>>> You mean this image, right ?
>>> http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov/gallery/all/1/p/307/1P155450047EFF38EVP2557L4M1.JPG
>> That's the one.
>>> Here is the press-release again :
>>> http://origin.mars5.jpl.nasa.gov/gallery/press/opportunity/20041210a.html
>>> It is rock called "Tipura", pictured on Dec 3, 2004 (sol 306).
>>> It cannot be water, because it's freezing beyond belief there.
>>> Do you think it is ice ?
>> It is something that was or is fluid enough to produce a flat surface. And it does not appear to be covered with dust to it formed
>> shortly before the picture. Less likely a dust devil cleaned it just before the picture.
>> Given those two facts I am open to any suggestion as to what the fluid could be. The only one I know of with even a remote chance
>> is water. I agree it is remote. I assume there are a mess of hydrocarbons that are candidates but that is even more interesting. A
>> better place to start for fuel than making methane from the atmosphere.
>> There are other photos of the other regions takes years apart that occasionally show what appear to be what form on earth after
>> flash floods. The official press releases note them so it is not due to higher resolution cameras.
>> You tell me. Any better guess?
> I think it is very fine dust.
It does not appear in any manner to be dust of any kind. Make talcum powder
look like that. But first mix it with all finenesses of dust and get the finest
to rise to the top. In the real world the coarsest rises to the top even if it
is the heaviest. And there is no obvious mechanism for separation by fineness.
That is all done by sieves in this world because it is not found in nature.
I have worked with powders down to 800, 1/800" on a side, and they do not
behave like fluids. In a jar it looks like sand dunes. The smaller the more
surface area the more friction.
It is not a powder. It has to be something that behaves as a fluid. Powders
only do that when vibrated at the right frequencies. Having had just the right
kind of earthquake to smooth it and taking a picture before the first breeze
disturbs it is a low probability event. There are enough pictures of dust devils
to show breezes are more common although perhaps very uncommon compared to
earth. A proper explanation has to hold the picture is an average observation.
--
The only thing to negotiate between Palestine and Israel is the schedule for
Israel's withdrawal.
-- The Iron Webmaster, 3990
http://www.giwersworld.org/holo/nizgas3.html a4
Matt Giwer
> Hi Mike,
Lets make an absurd suggestion, Dyson lived in the 10th century and had the
same ideas and people thought about how to make them.
The first idea would be to calculate how much wood it would take.
That he was recent, even if so last century, we think in terms of we might be
able to do with today's techniques.
It is not more reasonable to start with what what at least shows promise of
working in the future? So we start with building it from carbon fibers using
organics from Jupiter and Saturn as the source of carbon. And not just the
fibers we produce today but the theoretical maximum so the volume per square
foot is less.
And then why limit ourselves to just planets when the entire Oort cloud is out
there? And I am in no hurry. So the project takes a million years. But if it
takes more than fifty years the technology will have improved so much that the
method of manufacture will be radically different. And radically different every
fifty years thereafter. Radically different and better every fifty years is
about right for now in our major infrastructures like power plants, public
transportation, water and sewage treatment and the like. It is not the
technology. It is scaling it up to infrastructure size that takes the time.
So what might start out looking impossibly huge and and take an impossibly long
to accomplish will certainly happen faster and sooner and by unimaginable
methods. Consider the ocean liner companies in 1890 looking into hydrofoils for
the next great decrease in transit time. If you are a treehugger flying is a
hugely greater cost in fuel per pound than a ship. But the total cost of living
at sea makes flying cheaper.
--
No one has done what they wish they had done.
No one has been what they wish they had been.
That does not mitigate the mythology.
-- The Iron Webmaster, 3987
http://www.giwersworld.org/disinfo/occupied-2.phtml a6
Ian Parker
In fact the only thing which could totally eliminate the human race is
a military catastrophe. Something of the nature of a genetically
engineered lethal common cold.
History has taught us that pressure will not only not bring an end to
a technological civilization but will in fact encourage it. WW2
brought about radar and both aviation and electronics advanced by
leaps and bounds. A civilization without any pressure would not have
had all metal aircraft travelling at up to 800km/h by 1945. It is
doubtful too whether computers would have been developed as fast.
Lets face it cars powered by internal combustion engines are cheap and
have a good performance. At $20 a barrel they are the logical
solution. At $20 no one would have any incentive to build anything
different. Lets also think about this. The only reason why we have 6
billion (9 billion in 2050) is because we have the technology to
support it. Abandoning technology will be the cause of catastrophe by
itself.
- Ian Parker
Ian Parker
> "Ian Parker" <ianpark...@gmail.com> wrote in messagenews:ff257022-16d4-48d7...@c65g2000hsa.googlegroups.com...
way not to be seen. Either we wait for a good strong signal that does
not require much searching for, or we will look for a stealth
civilizaton which, as it is advanced, will be undetectable.
- Ian Parker
Golden California Girls
Golden California Girls
> "Golden California Girls" <gldnc...@aol.com.mil> wrote in message news:RmvSj.3908$lc6.788@trnddc04...
> ...
>>> You are right. We cannot rule out that the Galaxy was already colonized before, maybe multiple times.
>>> However, that brings up several questions. Two come to mind :
>>>
>>> (1) Where are they now ? If they were so successfull to colonize the Galaxy (which took millions of years at a minimum), why did
>>> they vanish ?
>> You are making an assumption that they are doing full body colonization. Not necessary. They may have sent out ships with their
>> DNA into star forming regions and simply dispersed it, knowing that eventually a comet would carry some of it down on a wet
>> planet. Absent FTL this may be the only way in which a planet could ever hope to get to another.
>>
>
> Can you show how DNA of complex lifeforms like us can sprout to life when 'simply dispersed' into an arbitrary ocean ?
> Microbal, primitive single-cell organisms, yes. That I find plausible, and would also explain why Earth obtained life so rapidly.
> But interstellar traveling life/DNA beyond a single-cell is not very likely to exist. Earth waited 2 billion years before such
> 'complex' lifeforms emerged.
> Anything more complex than that surely would almost certainly need 'full-body' colonization or 'intelligence', including
> terra-forming and possibly robotic nurseries, before it can successfully reproduce on a foreign planet.
Of course full body intelligent life can't just plop down on a planet, no matter
how it gets there, because there won't be anything to eat. Getting eats is a
huge problem in itself. The way to arrange that is to start with the same
single cell life that woke up your own home planet. You would have to take that
microbe and then package it for spaceflight, so it would survive the long trip
in the high radiation environment. You might even try and build in some extras
into its DNA to try and direct its evolution when it arrives at a suitable
destination.
>>> (2) Where is the evidence ? They would have visited our solar system, but apparently did not crunch-up the planets, and even left
>>> the great Asteroid belt along. Full of easy to harvest building material. Also, there is no sign of alien DNA in any of Earth's
>>> lifeforms, so they apparently did not even stay on Earth and became one of us. They did not even contaminate our planet with any
>>> alien bugs. So they must have been extremely careful, to the point where it looks like they were never here. Occam's rasor then
>>> tells us that they probably never were here.
>> Again you assume they do full body colonization. We only have earth DNA to look at so far. It all seems to be related. You
>> assume it arose here without help. Once we have Mars DNA, if it is the same as Earth DNA then we know a game is afoot, different,
>> then they likely arose independently.
>
> Again, if we are talking about proving or disproving panspermia, then I agree with you.
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panspermia
Yes
> But if we are talking about more complex (and preferably intelligent) ET life seeding on other planets directly (maybe without
> full-body but at least in more complex form), then we really do not have any evidence that that has ever happened on Earth. We
> should have seen more diverse DNA, or at least not the consistency in DNA that evolutionaries can trace back to common ancestors
> billions of years ago...
Agree.
Actually I doubt it. WMAP should have found any close by.
http://map.gsfc.nasa.gov/ As they would still have to be a couple of degrees
warmer than the CBR.
Golden California Girls
My complete DNA needs a womb to grow it in. Chicken and egg.
Now you can take a large part of my DNA and it will be happy in a single cell
microbe. Heck you are even related to single cell microbes.
Rob Dekker
"Matt Giwer" <jul...@tampabay.REMover.rr.com> wrote in message news:481c063d$1$7711$4c36...@roadrunner.com...
...
>>> It is something that was or is fluid enough to produce a flat surface. And it does not appear to be covered with dust to it
>>> formed shortly before the picture. Less likely a dust devil cleaned it just before the picture.
>>> Given those two facts I am open to any suggestion as to what the fluid could be. The only one I know of with even a remote
>>> chance is water. I agree it is remote. I assume there are a mess of hydrocarbons that are candidates but that is even more
>>> interesting. A better place to start for fuel than making methane from the atmosphere.
>>> There are other photos of the other regions takes years apart that occasionally show what appear to be what form on earth after
>>> flash floods. The official press releases note them so it is not due to higher resolution cameras.
>>> You tell me. Any better guess?
>
>> I think it is very fine dust.
>
> It does not appear in any manner to be dust of any kind. Make talcum powder look like that. But first mix it with all finenesses
> of dust and get the finest to rise to the top. In the real world the coarsest rises to the top even if it is the heaviest. And
> there is no obvious mechanism for separation by fineness. That is all done by sieves in this world because it is not found in
> nature.
>
> I have worked with powders down to 800, 1/800" on a side, and they do not behave like fluids. In a jar it looks like sand dunes.
> The smaller the more surface area the more friction.
>
> It is not a powder. It has to be something that behaves as a fluid. Powders only do that when vibrated at the right frequencies.
> Having had just the right kind of earthquake to smooth it and taking a picture before the first breeze disturbs it is a low
> probability event. There are enough pictures of dust devils to show breezes are more common although perhaps very uncommon
> compared to earth. A proper explanation has to hold the picture is an average observation.
Before we draw such groundbreaking conclusions about liquids on Mars, we better rule out the obvious.
How about this for a more realistic theory :
Mars' extremely feable winds are able to move only the finest dust around, which happens to settle behind bolders and rocks.
If you look closer, you can see that the surface (of the 'liquid') is not flat. It is a 'pile' with the peak reaching the edge of
the rock.
Similar dust pools and piles are seen on the lay side (left and lower edges) of all the rocks in the picture.
This image of "Tipuna", taken a couple of hours before (or after) the first one, shows the 'pile' a bit better, revealed as a minor
shading effect on the piles' "slopes" :
http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/jpeg/PIA07101.jpg
Another indication that this cannot be liquid is that Tipuna part of "Burns Cliff", on the edge of Endurance Crater. So the surface
is not level.
file:///C:/Documents%20and%20Settings/rob/Local%20Settings/Temporary%20Internet%20Files/Content.IE5/R8B5736C/wir_12-12%5B1%5D.ppt#263,2,Slide 2
Any liquid would simply flow down into the crater.
Rob Dekker
"Matt Giwer" <jul...@tampabay.REMover.rr.com> wrote in message news:481c063e$0$7711$4c36...@roadrunner.com...
While it is certainly possible to imagine that advanced ETIs can create more matter by using the star's power output, it seems
far-fetched that they would do so in reality.
I recall a discussion we had about this 2 or 3 years ago, where I showed that IF an ETI needs more solid material for their Dyson
colonies, then it would be far more energy-efficient to haul that away from other start systems rather than choose plain
energy-to-matter conversion. Of course, rather than haul-away from another star system, it would again be more efficient to simply
colonize that new star system and use the local materials for a local Dyson colony.
So that brings back the original problem : Why did they not end up in our star system, and either hauled all materials away, or
build another Dyson colony right here in our back yard..?
Long story short : IMHO, the visible 'evidence' of absense of Dyson colonies in the Galaxy is not so strong evidence of the absense
of ETI :
Dyson colonies might be present around other stars, but with our current technology they are visually/IR virtually indistinguishable
from an asteroid belt or dust around the star, and would not block much more than 0.4 % of the starlight in our neck of the Galaxy.
Rob Dekker
Get ready for the first test : fossil fuels, and how our technology civilisation depends on them.
Oil hit $120/barrel today.
Peak Oil production was hit 2 years ago, and is likely to decline 2% per year for a while.
Peak Nat Gas is not far away.
We have no alternatives that can make a quantitative difference.
And so far, only a fraction of our global population actually has been using fossil fuels.
Let's see how sensitive we are...
Rob
"Ian Parker" <ianpa...@gmail.com> wrote in message news:28e4066a-5454-492a...@p25g2000hsf.googlegroups.com...
On 2 May, 20:21, "Rob Dekker" <r...@verific.com> wrote:
....
Rob Dekker
"Ian Parker" <ianpa...@gmail.com> wrote in message news:da7aa5d9-d59c-4ccd...@w7g2000hsa.googlegroups.com...
....
>>
>> > As I think I have said before Dyson civilizations will have radio
>> > teledcopes at least 4AU across and fragmented optical telescopes,
>> > possibly thousands of kilometers across. Hence, if they are there at
>> > all, they know everything about us. This is why SETI is such a
>> > complete waste of time.
>>
>> I fail to see how you can combine that belief with that conclusion.
>> If they know about us, then current SETI (searching for beacons and astro engineering) would make even more sense...
>>
> Because they will either find us first or they will be go out of their
> way not to be seen. Either we wait for a good strong signal that does
> not require much searching for, or we will look for a stealth
> civilizaton which, as it is advanced, will be undetectable.
How can you wait for a "good strong" signal without SETI ?
There may be many strong signals out there, because we barely touched the (EM spectrum) surface with SETI.
Also, how 'strong' a signal is strong enough for you ?
Do they need to break into the dayly news to get your attention ?
Or, in case you don't watch the news, do they need to break into the next episode of Seinfelt ?
>
>
> - Ian Parker
Rob Dekker
"Matt Giwer" <jul...@tampabay.REMover.rr.com> wrote in message news:481c063f$0$7711$4c36...@roadrunner.com...
> Ian Parker wrote:
> ...
>> Yes but we don't even see that. Don't suppose there have been no
>> searches for IR radiation round stars. Beta Pictoris has some rubble
>> round it, but it is condensing asteroid like masterial, NOT Dyson
>> habitats.
>
>> As I think I have said before Dyson civilizations will have radio
>> teledcopes at least 4AU across and fragmented optical telescopes,
>> possibly thousands of kilometers across. Hence, if they are there at
>> all, they know everything about us. This is why SETI is such a
>> complete waste of time.
>
> The problem with what we think we would expect from a Dyson civilization is that it is based upon out technology today whereas by
> definition a Dyson civilization would be unimaginably ahead of us.
>
> There is no way we could possibly know what to look for.
>
> Thermodynamics does not apply in the sub-atomic interaction of matter to energy. There is no reason to assume an energy to matter
> conversion would generate any waste heat at all. So if they are converting unneeded solar energy back to matter by a fundamental
> process even the IR radiation we not occur. It would be a sphere whose temperature would be 0 degrees. Or perhaps 4.7 degrees on
> average.
It takes 45 million years to synthesize mass of Earth (6e24 kg) via energy-to-matter conversion using the power of an average star.
It takes more than 2 billion years to synthesize a Dyson sphere of a just a few meters thick at 1 AU this way.
This would have to be some extremely patient civilization, knowing that there are so many resources out there in the Galaxy.
The slightly less patient ones would have been here already many times over, and converted our solar system.
Rob
Mike Combs
>
> "Ian Parker" <ianpa...@gmail.com> wrote in message
> news:ff257022-16d4-48d7...@c65g2000hsa.googlegroups.com...
>>
>> searches for IR radiation round stars. Beta Pictoris has some rubble
>> round it, but it is condensing asteroid like masterial, NOT Dyson
>> habitats.
>
> How would you know the difference ?
http://www.nidsci.org/essaycomp/gmatloff.html
Rob Dekker
"Mike Combs" <mike...@nospam.com_chg_nospam_2_ti> wrote in message news:fvngbp$dsa$1...@home.itg.ti.com...
> "Rob Dekker" <r...@verific.com> wrote in message news:XtISj.12889$GE1....@nlpi061.nbdc.sbc.com...
>>
>> "Ian Parker" <ianpa...@gmail.com> wrote in message news:ff257022-16d4-48d7...@c65g2000hsa.googlegroups.com...
>>>
>>> Yes but we don't even see that. Don't suppose there have been no
>>> searches for IR radiation round stars. Beta Pictoris has some rubble
>>> round it, but it is condensing asteroid like masterial, NOT Dyson
>>> habitats.
>>
>> How would you know the difference ?
>
> http://www.nidsci.org/essaycomp/gmatloff.html
>
>
Thanks for the link.
Although interesting, this paper discusses detectability of Dyson habitats local to our solar system (or slightly beyond).
If I understand the paper correctly, such local extra-terrestial habitats would be recognizable as showing a (slightly?) higher
temperature (IR emission) as what would be expected if they were normal asteroids at the same distance to the sun. Still highly
speculative, since they make many assumptions about the power (and temperature) requirements for these ETs.
Either way, the same test would not work for habitats or Dyson swarms around other stars, considering our limitations in accuracy of
IR/visible emissions.
Rob
Ian Parker
> "Ian Parker" <ianpark...@gmail.com> wrote in messagenews:da7aa5d9-d59c-4ccd...@w7g2000hsa.googlegroups.com...
watching Seinfelt and then you get a message from ET. A strong signal
can be picked up without special equipment, without mathematical
processing.
Is an interstellar broadcast of this strength possible? Emphatically
yes. If we assume a radio telescope 4AU across transmitting at 3cm.
This is 600 million km, or 20 * 10^12 lambda. This will give a 60km
(1.22lambda/d) spot at 100 light years. 600km at 1000ly. The galaxy
would only be about 60,000km. You might have to do some clever Fourier
Transform techniques to get rid of dark matter and other lensing
effects, but basically it could be done.
I think you can guaranatee a broadcast quality signal at least. This
coupled with the fact that you will have a significant fraction of the
energy enitted by a star to play with. In fact if they really wanted
to they could even fry us. No sir, there is no problem with a
broadcast strength signal.
On the same lines they will also have learnt all the languages that
are currently used for broadcasting. No need to put pulsar distances
on a la Voyager. Plain English or plain Spanish will do the trick.
- Ian Parker
Ian Parker
> Ian Parker wrote:
>
> ...
>
> > Yes but we don't even see that. Don't suppose there have been no
> > searches for IR radiation round stars. Beta Pictoris has some rubble
> > round it, but it is condensing asteroid like masterial, NOT Dyson
> > habitats.
> > As I think I have said before Dyson civilizations will have radio
> > teledcopes at least 4AU across and fragmented optical telescopes,
> > possibly thousands of kilometers across. Hence, if they are there at
> > all, they know everything about us. This is why SETI is such a
> > complete waste of time.
>
> The problem with what we think we would expect from a Dyson civilization is
> that it is based upon out technology today whereas by definition a Dyson
> civilization would be unimaginably ahead of us.
>
> There is no way we could possibly know what to look for.
>
> Thermodynamics does not apply in the sub-atomic interaction of matter to
> energy. There is no reason to assume an energy to matter conversion would
> generate any waste heat at all. So if they are converting unneeded solar energy
> back to matter by a fundamental process even the IR radiation we not occur. It
> would be a sphere whose temperature would be 0 degrees. Or perhaps 4.7 degrees
> on average.
>
The only reason why we do not associate it with sub atomic particles
is that there are not many particles involved in a single acelerator
based interacton. Thermodynamics is statistical. If you have a large
number of particles at accelerattor energies, if you have a Big Bang
in effect thermodynamics certainly applies. During the first 3 minutes
there was a defined temperature, a high temperature, but a
temperature.
Thermodynamics in fact applies to information. James Cleark Maxwell
proposed a daemon that would let fast moving atoms pass and stop slow
moving ones. The refutation of this is that to make a decision you
need a multiple of kT.
Maxwell's daemon tells us (indirectly) that information obeys the laws
of thermodynamics. Indeed Marcus Hutter has shown that compression is
not only associated with thermodynamic entropy, but is an indication
of the presence of AI itself.
Of course you can postulatre all kinds of magical powers for advanced
extraterrestrial civilizations. However to break the 2nd law you do in
fact need to break causality itself.
- Ian Parker
Rob Dekker
"Ian Parker" <ianpa...@gmail.com> wrote in message news:b1e6cbfc-4ec4-4fc0...@34g2000hsh.googlegroups.com...
> On 5 May, 22:28, "Rob Dekker" <r...@verific.com> wrote:
>> "Ian Parker" <ianpark...@gmail.com> wrote in messagenews:da7aa5d9-d59c-4ccd...@w7g2000hsa.googlegroups.com...
....
>> There may be many strong signals out there, because we barely touched the (EM spectrum) surface with SETI.
>>
>> Also, how 'strong' a signal is strong enough for you ?
>> Do they need to break into the dayly news to get your attention ?
>> Or, in case you don't watch the news, do they need to break into the next episode of Seinfelt ?
>>
> A strong signal is a signal of terrestrial broadcast strength. You are
> watching Seinfelt and then you get a message from ET. A strong signal
> can be picked up without special equipment, without mathematical
> processing.
>
> Is an interstellar broadcast of this strength possible? Emphatically
> yes. If we assume a radio telescope 4AU across transmitting at 3cm.
> This is 600 million km, or 20 * 10^12 lambda. This will give a 60km
> (1.22lambda/d) spot at 100 light years. 600km at 1000ly. The galaxy
> would only be about 60,000km. You might have to do some clever Fourier
> Transform techniques to get rid of dark matter and other lensing
> effects, but basically it could be done.
Nice. A radio telescope (array) 4 AU across, that works up till 10 GHz (3cm). Wow. I would give a leg to get my hands on that on.
It still seems far-fetched and a lot of trouble and energy use for an ETI to send broacast strength signals to 100s of billions of
other stars/planets in the Galaxy.
It would be a total waste of energy for the billions of years that we were in the single-cell/multi-cell level with our life status.
With that many targets, and that much risk of beaming to a deaf planet, the "Contact" scenario seems plausible : They would listen
to emerging communicating civilisations by eavesdropping on their transmissions before switching the beacon on. In our case (60
years of broadcast), this means they would have to be less than 30 light-years away for us to receive their signal now. There are
only a few dozen stars in a 30 light-years radius.
For ETIs further away, we probably won't hear their strong beacon for thousands of years.
So you would be waiting for thousands of years.
On the other hands, if they have that 4 AU antenna, it would be fairly easy (relatively low energy use) to send out a weak beacon to
every star system in the Galaxy.
Finding such beacons is what SETI is about for now.
>
> I think you can guaranatee a broadcast quality signal at least. This
> coupled with the fact that you will have a significant fraction of the
> energy enitted by a star to play with. In fact if they really wanted
> to they could even fry us. No sir, there is no problem with a
> broadcast strength signal.
Sure, with some emagination, but why fry a planet halfway through the Galaxy ?
>
> On the same lines they will also have learnt all the languages that
> are currently used for broadcasting. No need to put pulsar distances
> on a la Voyager. Plain English or plain Spanish will do the trick.
>
Re-broadcasting the received signal seems plausible. I'm sure you watched "Contact" ?
>
> - Ian Parker
Ian Parker
> "Ian Parker" <ianpark...@gmail.com> wrote in messagenews:b1e6cbfc-4ec4-4fc0...@34g2000hsh.googlegroups.com...
ET will be able to manoever spacecraft to within a wavelength of each
other. The telescope is not a solid mass, it is a set of small phase
locked telescopes. We are starting to achieve similar things. I recall
that in an earlier posting I talked about the preponderance of fiber
optic technology. The driving force is a telescope the size of the
Earth + Particle Physics.
There is thus nothing inherently impossible about what I am proposing.
It is a logical culmination of ET (Emergent Technology). Of course ET
(Extra Terrestrial) will have had a few thousand years (at least)
start.
As far as halfway across the galaxy is concerned, this is purely a
statistical assumption. If we take a random point on Earth, odds are
it will be 10,000km away (a quadrant). Half of the Earth's surface is
in the nearest quadrant.
- Ian Parker
Rob Dekker
"Ian Parker" <ianpa...@gmail.com> wrote in message news:ba82e399-e2d2-4ecb...@34g2000hsh.googlegroups.com...
....
>> Re-broadcasting the received signal seems plausible. I'm sure you watched "Contact" ?
>>
> In terms of the 4AU radio telescope, all I am doind is assuming that
> ET will be able to manoever spacecraft to within a wavelength of each
> other. The telescope is not a solid mass, it is a set of small phase
> locked telescopes. We are starting to achieve similar things. I recall
> that in an earlier posting I talked about the preponderance of fiber
> optic technology. The driving force is a telescope the size of the
> Earth + Particle Physics.
>
> There is thus nothing inherently impossible about what I am proposing.
> It is a logical culmination of ET (Emergent Technology). Of course ET
> (Extra Terrestrial) will have had a few thousand years (at least)
> start.
You are right, and I do not contest that at all.
But you mentioned that SETI is a waste of time and that we should wait for a strong signal.
The thing is, what do we do if that very strong signal does NOT appear.
What conclusion can we draw then ?
Seems that the only conclusion we can draw is that no ETI has set up intergallactic radio/TV broadcasts.
(Thank heaven ! I was already concerned about 5,689 channels of ETI advertisements and infomercials).
But maybe they set up a modest beacon. Maybe that transmits some info about what is important to know about ETI life in the Galaxy.
If we do not look for that beacon and it is there, then we miss out on the most significant piece of information in the history of
mankind.
Is that a waste of time ??
Matt Giwer
> On 3 May, 07:27, Matt Giwer <jul...@tampabay.REMover.rr.com> wrote:
>> Ian Parker wrote:
>> ...
>>> Yes but we don't even see that. Don't suppose there have been no
>>> searches for IR radiation round stars. Beta Pictoris has some rubble
>>> round it, but it is condensing asteroid like masterial, NOT Dyson
>>> habitats.
>>> As I think I have said before Dyson civilizations will have radio
>>> teledcopes at least 4AU across and fragmented optical telescopes,
>>> possibly thousands of kilometers across. Hence, if they are there at
>>> all, they know everything about us. This is why SETI is such a
>>> complete waste of time.
>> � � � � The problem with what we think we would expect from a Dyson civilization is
>> that it is based upon out technology today whereas by definition a Dyson
>> civilization would be unimaginably ahead of us.
>> � � � � There is no way we could possibly know what to look for.
>> � � � � Thermodynamics does not apply in the sub-atomic interaction of matter to
>> energy. There is no reason to assume an energy to matter conversion would
>> generate any waste heat at all. So if they are converting unneeded solar energy
>> would be a sphere whose temperature would be 0 degrees. Or perhaps 4.7 degrees
>> on average.
> Thermodynamics applies universally. Sub atomic as well as molecular.
I do not see how it can be applied to neutron decay. The process is not lossy.
Quantum phenomena regularly violent every aspect of thermo. Even for entropy I
do not see what constitutes "order" at the partical level. If the matter of
interactions expressed by Feynman diagrams it is no clear from when a change in
entropy is to be observed and in which direction.
> The only reason why we do not associate it with sub atomic particles
> is that there are not many particles involved in a single acelerator
> based interacton. Thermodynamics is statistical. If you have a large
> number of particles at accelerattor energies, if you have a Big Bang
> in effect thermodynamics certainly applies. During the first 3 minutes
> there was a defined temperature, a high temperature, but a
> temperature.
So all that is required is to find processes which do not require accelerators.
> Thermodynamics in fact applies to information. James Cleark Maxwell
> proposed a daemon that would let fast moving atoms pass and stop slow
> moving ones. The refutation of this is that to make a decision you
> need a multiple of kT.
As a house can appear on this side of an event horizon I sort of think the
demon has met his match.
> Maxwell's daemon tells us (indirectly) that information obeys the laws
> of thermodynamics. Indeed Marcus Hutter has shown that compression is
> not only associated with thermodynamic entropy, but is an indication
> of the presence of AI itself.
> Of course you can postulatre all kinds of magical powers for advanced
> extraterrestrial civilizations. However to break the 2nd law you do in
> fact need to break causality itself.
Or run causality in reverse locally. Perhaps with that supermassive rotating
object which drags information into the past.
If there are conservation laws it would seem they should apply over all time
not in every arbitrary interval of time. But does information exist as we might
describe it? Position and speed are not independent pieces of information. It is
only one quanta of information else by measuring position the speed information
is not conserved.
--
The leading cause of suicide in the US is military service.
-- The Iron Webmaster, 3991
http://www.giwersworld.org/environment/aehb.phtml a2
METIfan
The HOPE is the HOPE
You hope the search for extraterrestrial life finds nothing,
I hope the search for extraterrestrial life finds ALL
and no man can neither falsify nor prove one's case
because the HOPE is only the HOPE...
Ian Parker
you are talkink about Big Bang temperatures.
I know this is slightly off topic, but one of the things that is not
yet understood about the BB is why there is matter. In a hot box you
have equal amounts of matter and antimatter. There must be some
symmetry breaking interaction of baryonic quarks, possibly with a
guage particle which is of too high an energy to have been seen yet.
>
> > Thermodynamics in fact applies to information. James Cleark Maxwell
> > proposed a daemon that would let fast moving atoms pass and stop slow
> > moving ones. The refutation of this is that to make a decision you
> > need a multiple of kT.
>
> As a house can appear on this side of an event horizon I sort of think the
> demon has met his match.
Ah, you have are thinking about Hawking and the entropy of Black
Holes. BTW the radiation given off by a BH is random and of high
entropy.
>
> > Maxwell's daemon tells us (indirectly) that information obeys the laws
> > of thermodynamics. Indeed Marcus Hutter has shown that compression is
> > not only associated with thermodynamic entropy, but is an indication
> > of the presence of AI itself.
> > Of course you can postulatre all kinds of magical powers for advanced
> > extraterrestrial civilizations. However to break the 2nd law you do in
> > fact need to break causality itself.
>
> Or run causality in reverse locally. Perhaps with that supermassive rotating
> object which drags information into the past.
Many people have speculated that the expansion of the Universe is what
gives rise to the arrow of time. If you have a sealed hot box it will
maintain its entropy. It has a temperature and is in equilibrium. As
soon as you allow it to expand there will be more quantum states in
the future. Thus to put it in a nutshell, if quark soup expands it
will produce galaxies, stars and the Universe we in fact observe. Can
the Universe condense into quark soup. Yes it can but it is so
unlikely as to be discounted. All intersactions are reversable - Yes -
in a strict dynamical sense. Are intersactions reversable in the
statistical sense? No, because we are going from a small number of
possible quantum states to a very much larger number. All states are
equally probable.
If I say all states are equally probable, if I have a Hermetian
Hamiltonian where each path is as likely as the one in the opposite
direction, entropy has to increase. If it did not increase we would
not have a causitive relationship.
- Ian Parker
Ian Parker
> "Ian Parker" <ianpark...@gmail.com> wrote in messagenews:ba82e399-e2d2-4ecb...@34g2000hsh.googlegroups.com...
have a stealthy ET or a non existant ET. You can never completely
disprove a steathy ET, although by Occams razor ET should be deemed
not to exist.
- Ian Parker
American
>
> - Show quoted text -- Hide quoted text -
>
> - Show quoted text -
If you're talking about entropy here, is there also any use talking
about how macromolecule crystals, will diffract positronic energy at
lower resolution than some of the smaller molecular crystals, without
mentioning the specific polarization levels used for a 4D
crystallographic Hamiltonian? In the 4D case, I think you're confusing
the symmetry exhibited by the bound quark to an "unbound" one.
At specific frequency and intensity, the "color force" becomes
"unbounded", and gets "reflected" rather than "transited". What's left
that gets "transited" are the "chargeless" neutrons, thru virtual
transmigration!
Since ionic plasmas are the "carriers" of "discharging" entropic
systems, can we say that every single eigenvalue of the Hermitian
matrix is real, and that the Hermitian matrix is one that contains
itself WITHIN the Hamiltonian matrix, but only w.r.t. ONE directivity
for a singly isolated "frequency and wavelength of decompression"?
Not unless there are MORE THAN ONE "Hermitians" at work here!
American
Jochem Huhmann
[BIG SNIP]
> But in the absence of any such evidence, I conclude that the silence
> of the night sky is golden, and that in the search for
> extraterrestrial life, no news is good news.
You could have put a bit more effort into that and shorten it a bit... So
what you're saying is: The universe seems to be quite void of visible
alien civilizations these centuries and you hope that the reason is that
life getting started is very improbable, so we are already
beyond that Great Filter and have nothing to fear now and automatically
get promoted to Galaxy Leader very soon?
I would say: Life is quite common on planets with the right environment
for it (judging from the fact that it didn't take long for life to pop
up here). But I think complex and even intelligent life is much rarer.
Our planet is about one billion years away from dying (when our sun will
start to expand) and if complex and intelligent and technological adept
life would've taken one or two billion years longer to appear (it took
quite a while already, with long periods of nothing really new appearing
at all) it would have gotten into a tight race between that and Earth
turning into a dry, hot rock with no trace of life at all anymore.
And then there's the question if life, once being intelligent and
technology-wise rising to what we're going through now, can *sustain*
that long enough to survive natural resources (like fossil fuels) going
dry. After all to go the stars or even to send signals powerful enough
to be recognized you have to keep that up for a while and this means
using the available resources of a planet wise enough to tap into space
resources as long as your planet isn't totally stripped down. *This* is
another Great Filter. Looking at what happens down on Earth right now I
wouldn't bet on us making it through that filter. And maybe the last
life that made it through this did it a few millions years ago and isn't
there anymore. This would explain much without making us in any way
special. Maybe we're just too common an example of life. There could
have been a lot of planets going trough that now and then, flaring up
troughout the billions of years for a moment, going into space a bit,
sending stuff and noise and going dark again. We are still being in a
state of rising brilliant light, not knowing if this a rising sun or
just a flash of light irrelevant in the great shape of things.
So I think that life is common, complex life rarer, intellligent life
even rarer and life that is intelligent enough and sane enough to
*sustain* a technology age over millions of years without collapsing is
extremely rare. Easily rare enough that in our galaxy there're long
times between each such civilizations, long enough that each of them
looks up and finds the skies silent and empty. And asking itself "what's
the reason for the skies being that empty?".
I hope that we find that life is common and the Great Filter lies yet
before us. This way we might be prepared to the fact that all hardships
that life and mankind went through will be tiny against the things we'll
have to struggle against in the next centuries. "We" (whoever that is)
will have to get used to the fact that we have to manage our future to
survive and to not only survive but to make progress and to get over
whatever our planet has to offer. And the sooner we get the fact that
the currently wide open window is about to start closing very fast, the
better.
I think that either we will be launching spacecrafts and satellites a
hundred of years from now (which will mean we got over it) or we will be
heading back fast to being just another kind of animal roving that
planet for a short time, and no one out there will ever know or care.
And I have no doubt that such tragedies are more common than the
powerful aliens you're looking for and that there were many civilizations
which were on the right way and which had some worldwide networks
including things like Usenet and that this very discussion has happened
millions of times all over the universe already...
Jochem
--
"A designer knows he has arrived at perfection not when there is no
longer anything to add, but when there is no longer anything to take away."
- Antoine de Saint-Exupery
Alain Fournier
Here are the topics I will discuss.
1- The likeliness of emergence of life.
2- The emergence of sex.
3- The emergence of a species capable of technology.
4- Differences in evaluating the likeliness of the above and the "Great Filters" (in the sense
described by Mr. simple_language) of the past.
5- We have survived all "Great Filters".
1- About the likelihood of the emergence of life:
Several people here have repeated the fallacious argument that because life has appeared rapidly on
Earth that we can conclude that the emergence of life is not difficult and should be common. Things
that happen fast are not more likely to happen than things that happen slowly. If you jump from a 1m
high stool you are not more likely to hit the ground than if you jump from a 4 km high plane. The fact
that it takes less than 1 second to hit the ground from the stool and about 1 minute from the plane
doesn't change the fact that in both cases you will hit the ground. One could argue that life appeared
rapidly *because* it is a very unlikely event. Maybe the emergence of life needs an ocean of molten
lava to be hit by two asteroids simultaneously and life has emerged early because such conditions are
virtually impossible except in the chaos of planetary formation. I know, you are thinking that is not
very likely, that is my point, maybe you need some very unlikely events for life and very unlikely
events are more frequent in a chaotic situation (as in planetary formation). I'm not saying that this
is how life starts, I'm just saying that we can't conclude that life emerges frequently on planets because
it did so early on Earth. I know that many people, some of which with impressive credentials, have
held that argument, it still doesn't make it valid.
It doesn't seem that life has started spontaneously many times here on Earth, in fact it probably
did so only once. Therefore it doesn't seem to be such a very likely event.
2- About the emergence of sex.
People frequently skip this important evolutionary step. It is very important. Once you have sexual
reproduction, the pace of evolution increases dramatically. If your offspring have a single parent
then a great many evolutionary improvements will be discarded because they happened on a life form
who also had a flaw. With sex, your offspring with your evolutionary improvements will be
more successful than those with your flaws, therefore if you have flaws and improvements you
will transmit your improvements and through the generations, the flaws will be discarded. It isn't
easy to go from a non sexual species to a sexual species. This could be a filter. It took billions
of years to have sex after the emergence of life.
3- About intelligence evolution.
Even after the emergence of sex it took a few hundred million years to have a species smart enough
to build spaceships.
4- As I said in point 1, the time it takes for an event to happen isn't a good measure of its
likeliness. Lets look at the differences between points 1, 2 and 3.
It took billions of years to go from first life to first species reproducing through sex and
only hundreds of millions of years to go from first sexual species to humans. That in itself
doesn't show that the latter is less likely than the former. But in my opinion, once you have
sexual reproduction going to a technological species is very likely. You see, we didn't go from
earth worms to humans in a single step. You can't possibly expect the offspring of an earth
worm to be capable of building spaceships. What happened is that some low life form developed
neurons, and then other life forms more neurons, and other life forms arranged those neurons
a little better and then... It took thousands of small evolutionary steps to get humans.
You see, the evolution of intelligence didn't happen once, it happened millions of times.
Or at least millions of times there has been some small evolutionary step towards making
some animal smarter. Some of those small steps led to humans, other steps were in completely
different lineage. Obviously something that has happened millions of times here on Earth
is not the "Great Filter".
If we look at the emergence of sex which took billions of years things are a little more
murky. It is difficult to imagine the lowest life forms of circa 3.8 billion years ago
developing sex. It is difficult to imagine prokaryotes having sex. So there were several
evolutionary steps needed before having sex. Nonetheless, there was a defining moment.
There was a first species reproducing through sex. Going from non sexual reproduction to
sexual reproduction is much more of a quantum leap than going from no brains at all to a
human brains. The latter being done by a multitude of small steps but the former has one
big defining moment. Possibly, the emergence of sexual reproduction has happened only a
single time on Earth, so this might be a "Great Filter", not so for the emergence of
intelligence.
The same can be said about the emergence of life. It probably has happened only once on
Earth. If it was a very likely event, it would've happened several times. It might have
happened more than once, but there is some convincing evidence that if it has happened
more than once it did not happen many time. Therefore this too could be the "Great Filter".
5- I don't think it is likely that there is a "Great Filter" looming ahead of us, maybe
a small filter but not a "Great Filter".
The difference I make between a "Great Filter" and a small filter, is that a "Great
Filter" is something that can explain why we don't see ET civilizations every where.
A "Great Filter" is something that would let only one in a million planet go to the
next step towards a galactic civilization. The reason why I think such a "Great Filter"
can't be ahead of us is because we could already be a multi-world civilization. The
reason we don't have a colony on Mars is because of political choices that have been
made in the last 40 years not because we haven't yet advanced enough to do so. It
seams to me unlikely that no more than 1 in a million civilizations would make political
choices leading to a space colony at our technological level. Therefore, maybe we
will doom ourselves before being a galactic civilization, but that doesn't explain
why other haven't done it.
Also, some in this thread have talked about depleting our resources as a "Great Filter".
That is nonsense. If we had burnt the very last drop of petroleum and mined all the
steel in the top 20 km of the planet, that would not be a serious show stopper for
space colonization. If all the steel has been mined it just means that you need to
recycle some old steel. If all the petroleum has been burnt, you just need another
energy source, solar energy and wind power won't go away anytime soon.
Alain Fournier
Chris
The Great Filter we have now is religion. Religious leaders (who merely make
money out of death) pounce on any evidence for the existance of aliens and
destroy it.
Several of my friends have suffered the consequences of being contactees and
have dissapeared. The ones I know ended up in the local nuthouse (ran by the
Church) and if they did not step down they were lobotomised and in some
cases their faces disfigured or their arms or legs broken or in other cases
cut off.
The evidence for extraterrestial visits is destroyed, their messangers cut
to pieces.
These atrocities are instigated and carried out by normal religious leaders
mostly christians. This is because any proof of the existance of aliens
would invalidate their faith. That is their faith in a life beyond the
grave. This is fear, fear of our own inevitable death.
There is historical evidence for extraterrestial vists by intelligent life
from another planet orbiting another star. My ancestor Gulliver Goddard owed
a farm near Basingstoke, Hampshire, UK (Goddards Farm) and in about 1660 a
black disc landed on his farm and he was befreinded by alien hominids. These
creatures lived in the farm with Gulluiver and in a Roman Palace nearby (The
Vine - now demoloshed I understand). The local gentry said it was not true
and one of the witneses was hanged as a heretic at Basing House. Goddard got
an army together led by Oliver Cromwell and the civil war was fought over
this. The royalists went to the farm and interrupted dinner where the aliens
were all shot dead by the hand cannon's the royalists had. The disc had been
hidden in a circular barn built round it. One alien got away and made it
back to his craft but he needed to refuel it with water. One royalist
followed him into the disc and shot him at the controls.
The rebellion culminated in the beheading of Charles I (then King of
England).
Gulliver was allowed to live and wrote about his contact in "Gullivers
Travels". The first edition of five copies was straight and told about his
travels into space, later editions were modified to make them acceptable to
the religious authorities at the time.
One story is almost intact and is told as a child's story about the planet
of goblins (hominids with compound eyes). I recall one episode where
Gulliver gave food and water to a old goblin couple who called at his door.
The Farm is still there and is up for sale as a working farm.
I went to the abandoned farm when I was a child of ten with the family where
the story was told to us children. The disc was still there and I looked
inside. I saw the dead Royalist's blue silk coat with gold braiding and hand
cannon on the floor where he ha starved to death when the automatic hatch
closed. The remains of the alien were there too.
The circular barn was built round it. I could just reach up and touch the
metal on the underside of the discuss shaped object which had an automatic
hatch with a lift in the centre of the underside of the disc which stood on
four legs.
The aliens recently (2006) returned, collected their dead (some were buried
in caskets in the farm and some (a family) at The Vine).
This story is from the margins of my memory.
--
Chris
http://www.myphilosophy.eu
<simple_...@yahoo.com> wrote in message
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source:
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<Deleted>
Chris
zeta reticulum. Their star is a triple star and it is never dark. There are
two stars close and one furher away. You get a triple sunset at dawn and
twilight at noon.
The aliens have four arms and two legs ending in a talon. They have compound
eyes with antenna growing out of the eyes and a humanoid mouth parts. Their
face is like a moth.
They have families and worship one God.
Each of the suns in their system has planets and life occured on all of
them, two evolved intelligent space travellers, one was a spider man (the
aliens have a 4th pair of legs which are under their skin). The other planet
had snake people the third inhabited planet is "rather primitive".
An alien who visited by home told me. I have also had information given to
me by the science reseach council and a web site.
zeta is 38 light years away.
--
Chris
http://www.myphilosophy.eu
"Chris" <nor...@noserver.com> wrote in message
news:6vfVj.16822$Kq....@newsfe09.ams2...
jonathan
"Mike Combs" <mike...@nospam.com_chg_nospam_2_ti> wrote in message
> Bostrom views this much the same way I do. The only point I would add is that
> if Gerard O'Neill was right about orbital habitats, technological races could
> colonize the galaxy far more outrageously and thoroughly than we can imagine
> when staying inside the confines of the planetary assumption. Which means the
> lack of obvious visual indicators becomes even more problematic.
I don't see that at all. The assumption that advanced civilizations would
move out and colonize is flawed. So is the assumption that they would
travel or try to communicate. Just the opposite should be true.
Colonizing as a necessity is assumed why?
Because now we can't see how we can sustain ourselves
on this planet. We assume colonizing is the only way
to survive long term. A truly advanced civilization wouldn't
NEED to colonize. As they would've figured out how to sustain
themselves and their population growth within their own
natural environment.
As for traveling, remote sensing is a far faster and easier way of gaining
information. Not to mention, a truly advanced society would already
have the 'answers' to the grand questions. Rendering exploring and
contacting others moot. We don't have those 'answers' yet ad
feel the need to make contact.
Simple observation of the trends of humanity show that as we become
more advanced, the need to colonize, travel or communicate with
others diminish.
And the assumption life predates earth by any significant time period
is also weak. The observations show life evolved just about as soon
as possible in our case. The age of our sun is a very significant portion
of the age of the universe. It's likely we are an early example of life
in our galaxy. Life is most certainly evolving everywhere it can, just
at about the same time frames everywhere.
For those not keeping up with the latest cosmology, the discovery of
dark energy and matter are changing everything. Life on earth evolved
at a very unique time in the evolution of the universe, at the transition
point between a dark matter and dark energy dominated universe.
This transition point should define the ideal conditions for life as it
occurs when matter domination has matured.
The latest cosmology can be found here.
http://wwwphy.princeton.edu/~steinh/
Steinhardt and Turok, of Princeton and Cambridge
are rewriting the text books as we speak.
Excerpts below from....
A Quintessential Introduction to Dark Energy
Paul J. Steinhardt
Department of Physics, Princeton University, Princeton
http://wwwphy.princeton.edu/~steinh/steinhardt.pdf
"We live at a special time in the history of the universe.
The Copernican revolution taught us that there is nothing special about our
location in the universe. If space is uniform, then should not the same be
true for time? Hubble's discovery that the universe is expanding taught us
that the universe is evolving, but the notion had been that the evolution
has been steady over the last 15 billion years with no remarkable
changes. We now know that time is anti-Copernican. We live at a special
moment in cosmic history, the transition between a decelerating,
matter-dominated universe and an accelerating, dark energy dominated universe.
The progressive formation of ever-larger scale structure and increasing
complexity that characterized the matter-dominated universe has reached
an end, and now the universe is headed towards a period that is
ever-emptier and structureless."
"The fine-tuning and cosmic coincidence problems are vexing. They are often
posed
as a paradox: Why should the acceleration begin just as humans evolve? In
desperation, some cosmologists and physicists have been led to give renewed
attention to anthropic models (Weinberg 2000). But many continue to seek
a dynamical explanation which does not require the fine-tuning of initial
conditions
or mass parameters and which is decidedly nonanthropic."
I see nothing at all inconsistent with the idea the universe is, or will be,
full of life. Yet we never make contact.
Jonathan
>
> Are We Alone in the Galaxy?
> http://writings.mike-combs.com/alone.htm
Ian Parker
> "Mike Combs" <mikeco...@nospam.com_chg_nospam_2_ti> wrote in message
>
> Steinhardt and Turok, of Princeton and Cambridge
> are rewriting the text books as we speak.
>
> Excerpts below from....
>
> A Quintessential Introduction to Dark Energy
> Paul J. Steinhardt
>
> "We live at a special time in the history of the universe.
> The Copernican revolution taught us that there is nothing special about our
> location in the universe. If space is uniform, then should not the same be
> true for time? Hubble's discovery that the universe is expanding taught us
> that the universe is evolving, but the notion had been that the evolution
> has been steady over the last 15 billion years with no remarkable
> changes. We now know that time is anti-Copernican. We live at a special
> moment in cosmic history, the transition between a decelerating,
> matter-dominated universe and an accelerating, dark energy dominated universe.
> The progressive formation of ever-larger scale structure and increasing
> complexity that characterized the matter-dominated universe has reached
> an end, and now the universe is headed towards a period that is
> ever-emptier and structureless."
>
> "The fine-tuning and cosmic coincidence problems are vexing. They are often
> posed
> as a paradox: Why should the acceleration begin just as humans evolve? In
> desperation, some cosmologists and physicists have been led to give renewed
> attention to anthropic models (Weinberg 2000). But many continue to seek
> a dynamical explanation which does not require the fine-tuning of initial
> conditions
> or mass parameters and which is decidedly nonanthropic."
>
> I see nothing at all inconsistent with the idea the universe is, or will be,
> full of life. Yet we never make contact.
>
1) We will need to colonize from the point of view of self defense. If
we don't get in first someone else will. If I were a Native American
and somehow history was reversed and I had a technological lead over
Europe I would feel obliged to colonize Europe. In 1421 the Chinese
risked oblivion in the same way.
2) If we had a 4AU diameter radio telescope you could listen to a
mobile phone on Alpha Centuri. If there is life out there it WILL be
found. That is unless it is so advanced as to be able to make itself
stealthy. Something which is a theroreical possibility though not
likely in fact.
3) The question of coincidences and the Anthropic Principle is a
subject for a posting in itself. Clearly a weak anthopic principle
exists in that we would not be here observing if the Universe were not
friendly to life.
There is probably NO other intelligent species within about 1000 LY of
us and we will have to just get used to this fact.
- Ian Parker
Matt Giwer
...
> Several points.
>
> 1) We will need to colonize from the point of view of self defense. If
> we don't get in first someone else will. If I were a Native American
> and somehow history was reversed and I had a technological lead over
> Europe I would feel obliged to colonize Europe. In 1421 the Chinese
> risked oblivion in the same way.
>
> 2) If we had a 4AU diameter radio telescope you could listen to a
> mobile phone on Alpha Centuri. If there is life out there it WILL be
> found. That is unless it is so advanced as to be able to make itself
> stealthy. Something which is a theroreical possibility though not
> likely in fact.
>
> 3) The question of coincidences and the Anthropic Principle is a
> subject for a posting in itself. Clearly a weak anthopic principle
> exists in that we would not be here observing if the Universe were not
> friendly to life.
>
> There is probably NO other intelligent species within about 1000 LY of
> us and we will have to just get used to this fact.
One thing we have learned for a fact is that no two people think alike The idea
of making an assumption about what an entire intelligent species would do is
rather unfounded. For example making contact with others. If there are only 100
people per billion with an interest in it there are going to be people saying
hello.
--
You can always trust a Zionist to be a Zionist.
-- The Iron Webmaster, 3988
http://www.giwersworld.org/disinfo/occupied-2.phtml a6
cliff wright
All this talk of "Great filters" etc is all very well but doesn't it
assume that the "Aliens" think and act just like us and within the
limits of our imagination?
For on eimportant thing it is slowly becoming clear that the speed of
light is NOt necessarily the limit on sending information. That could
mean that SETI is like a Polynesian Tohunga looking out for smoke
signals from over the horizon. The only signals that just might be
picked up by SETI would come from a relatively backward civilisation
like ours.
Indeed since about 1970 the Earth has been steadily getting quieter in
terms of radio communications going out into space. Modern systems using
tight beams, fibre optics, satellites and the internet instead of radio
broadcasting are all quieting us down.
So we would have to find another civilisation with a technical
development within say a century of us just to pick up their radio
signals which they are pouring out into space.
I very much hope we find some form of primitive life elsewhere
especially if it uses something other than our DNA/RNA replication
system. It doesn't look to me as though we are going to succeed as a
race, so ther had better be someone else to "have a go" after us.
I'm getting old myself but these days I'm getting convinced that we are
getting very decadent both socially and technologically.
My generation went to the Moon. it didn't spend all its efforts on
computer simulations, it actually went out and experimented!
Cliff Wright.