Fermi paradox
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Lawrence Crowell
May 10, 2021, 1:42:02 PM5/10/21
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On January 6, 2021, a disorganized mob of Trump supporters batter-rammed their way into the Capital building of the United States and forced Congress to flee. Those supporting this action, and there are plenty still out there, saw this as the next “Spirit of 1776” revolution by true patriots. The image and parallels I get from this are far more disturbing. I might compare this to the first sacking of Rome in 410AD; an event that saw the beginning of the end of a civilization that over the next 66 years unraveled and collapsed. Even deeper though, this may suggest something far more deeply flawed about the entire human species and our prospects.
Most interested in space and astronomy are familiar with Enrico Fermi’s question “Where are they?” concerning intelligent life. This so-called Fermi paradox poses the Copernican Principle, that any region of the universe is not unique and so life must be universal, conflicts with the lack of any evidence of intelligent life. So far, the SETI program has found radio noise and silence after several decades of looking. Of course, so far only a small segment of this galaxy has been searched, so the prospect is maybe still open. Yet, Fermi’s paradox remains, because if any form of intelligent life were to persist it suggests they, or maybe their robotic emissaries or successors, would move through the galaxy within a period of a million years or so. So far astronomical evidence reveals no instance of some intelligent life modifying a stellar system in any large manner. So, where are they?
It is best to consider what we mean by intelligent life. Cetaceans are clearly intelligent in some way, even if very different from human intelligent. However, they do not modify their environment by controlling energy and materials. Humans do, and this started with a branch of Homo erectus called Homo ergaster that emerged around 600 thousand years ago. This species in the hominid lineage learned to control fire. At this point a life form on this planet learned to use energy outside of its metabolic needs, and to grow this energy use far beyond metabolic needs. Also, the manufacture of flint axes and stone tools began to accelerate. To make a stone axe requires a considerable amount of neural processing to know from the appearance of a flint the planes of crystallization and how it will fracture. With these developments it is evident hominids began to modify their environment and evolution was a coordinated selection process that saw modification of species and the ability to modify their immediate environment. With the evolution of Homo sapiens some 100 to 150 thousand years ago the adaptation of the environment by intelligent thought surpassed biological evolution. We now life in conditions where this has exponentially accelerated to extreme dimensions.
Some conservative politicians complain we are on a Ponzi game. Sure, we have been in a Ponzi game for at least the last half million years with using ever more energy and environment.
What does this have to do with Fermi’s paradox? Life on Earth, and presumably this would hold with life on other planets as well, evolves by natural selection. The white noise or Markovian statistics with single nucleotide polymorphisms and other mutations is run through a filter of fitness. The output is then a form of pink noise or sub-Markovian statistics that have structure. This is a remarkable process, and one that I think has deeper aspects in physics. In this way life evolves into forms that have greater complexity. Compare the complexity of an advanced mammal such as a human, whale, elephant and even a dog, with that of a fish. Or for that matter compare an insect with a bacillus. Such life forms evolve to fit an environment, and while such evolution does modify the environment as well, such species do not engineer their environment. We humans engineer our environment and in doing so we set ourselves in an environment that becomes ever more different than what we evolved to fit within. It is plausible that any form of intelligent life in the universe that engineers its environment may do much the same.
There are several examples of this. Human beings are not entirely peaceful. As much as we want to think we are creatures of peace, there are plenty examples of subsistence or tribal cultures that engage in warfare. In fact, the African slave trade emerged from a practice of tribal raids that captured individuals for slaves. Archeological finds in the American southwest have found kivas filled with burned remains of people, who were evidently burned alive by people from another tribe or culture. Of course, our history is packed with examples of wars. Then with the end of World War II came the atomic bomb and the realization that total war is not possible, However, humans persist in building or trying to acquire nuclear weapons. It may only be a matter of time before something goes terribly wrong. Another example to this is our impact on the planetary environment. Humans are erasing arable land and active biology on this planet by an area equal to about one Belgium per year. Human populations are growing, and declining arable land is a problem. The oceans are dying off at an alarming rate and at end of this decade the mass of plastic in the oceans will exceed that of ocean life. Of course, then comes the warming of the climate by our burning of fossil fuels that produce CO_2. This may in time render this planet uninhabitable, and already regions are becoming difficult with fires.
We might think that we can solve these things. However, increasingly we seem paralyzed by ourselves. Of course, a part of this is the massive denial of any problem with the environment, and in particular climate change. There has been a growing “alt-science” cult development, and this extends in general to what Trump’s spokeswoman Kelly Ann Conway said with, “We have our alternative facts.” We have seen the rise of anti-vaccination movements, at a time of a nasty pandemic, and the rise of increasingly tribalistic politics that seeks to raise conflicts between people. These things are becoming ever more political.
This rise of denialism saw its first rise with the creationist movement with fundamentalist or evangelical Christians in the United States. The rejection of biological evolution, something that began to rise in force in the 1970s, saw the social rejection of a branch of scientific work. Biological evolution has a massive amount of data to support it, and this extends from the paleontological work with fossils to molecular biology of genes. Yet fully 50% of American refuse to admit evolution, and this trend is being proselytized into the rest of the world. This “alt-science” denialism has found other expressions from anti-vaxxers, climate denialism, geocentrism and in recent years the ultimate absurdism with flat-Earth ideas. This reflects very possibly the advance of mythic based psychology over reasoning, and this is finding a wide variety of forms. It is also being promoted most successfully by the computer, which is ironically a device developed by the epitome of rational thinking.
The idea human intelligence evolved primarily to solve rational problems is probably false. It probably mostly evolved to promote communications between members of any group. Think of this as the evolution of language. The evolution of language probably came about to communicate information about the environment. This involved probably the projection of the human mind onto the world combined with the ability to express this in a narrative format. Projection is a power psychological tool, and the young Einstein in effect projected his mind onto a reference frame moving at the speed of light to realize a paradox. We do this in fiction with structuring fictional characters, and we project our minds onto the world in the form of spirits or gods. This may have had a survival advantage in communicating information about the environment in a story format.
With this has come religions and narratives about supernatural beings, that in late ancient periods of history and religions from the iron age involved an infinite being. By the medieval period monotheist religions had a firm grip on societies from the Indus Valley to Ireland. This changed with the rise of science, where with Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo the culminating in Newton saw a world view completely at odds with theology. The return of Halley’s comet in the later 18th century saw calculation as a predictor work, while prophesy waned. The age of enlightenment came and brought about the idea that reasoning, measurement and phenomenology were the basis of the world. Even Christianity amongst the educated turned into deism, a shadow of its former self.
In modern times this has shifted again. With the rise of monotheism was the rise of alpha-numerical formats. Paleo-Hebrew and the Greek linear-b script were a part of a transition from pictograms to complete symbolic forms. The Commandment “Though shall have no graven image” in its strict form means there are to be no pictures, certainly not of people and even more against images of God. It takes little thought to realize with television and now computers this has been overturned utterly. While Christians obeyed this commandment in serious breech, consider the barrage of pictures of Jesus, at least most information was communicated by writing. Now in this age of the internet and social media we have utterly turned about. We may in fact be approaching a post-literate age or culture.
With this has come the rise of what I might call cybermythos, or the emergence of world views that are very specific, even tribal with tribes defined ideologically, and not based on reasoning or evidence. There is a fragmentation of cultish tribes, from reptilian-people ideas, to flat-Earth, to QAnon and of course traditional religion. We should be aware how this all involves a lot of magical thinking. The book of Revelations has Jesus coming back and sweeping all the clouds away, and the story of Cinderella has her “wish upon a star” and her fairy godmother comes to turn a pumpkin and mice into a horse drawn carriage that in the end takes her to “happily ever after.” The thinking is really the same. Magical thinking, where we might at least cite the story of Cinderella as honest in admitting it is a fairy tale, while the second coming of Jesus keeps being hustled off as ontological or truth. The rise of conspiracy narratives, I avoid the term “theory” because these are not theories, is a sort of magical suspension of reasoning and the belief in some guru, Alex Jones comes to mind, and a focus on there being a “plot” we must all beware of.
Maybe we are backing away from this, if at least in a temporary and halting way. The electoral defeat of Donald Trump, where there is a sizable cult following saying he was in fact elected, may be some response to this. However, there are problems with the political left as well. George Orwell in his treatise on the psychology of totalitarian power, written in fictional form 1984, warned of the compression of language and its reduction to tiny, fragmented terms, and we see this on both the left and the right. Trumpism brought us MAGA, Stop the Steal and Q (amazing a political ideal can be compressed into one letter), but on the left we have BLM and Defund Police and other calls. The whole language is reduced to the smallest possible, and it reflect our trajectory into a post literate culture, which has a pernicious effect of leading us into a post-truth culture,
What does this have to do with the Fermi paradox? It points to how we are emerging into conditions that are impossible to sustain. I have done a fair amount of computer programming in my time, and a post-symbolic or post-literate culture will fail to cultivate people who can actually program computers. Will AI ever get to the point it can program itself? That remains to be seen, and the short science fiction video “PETS” makes some point about this prospect. This might mean the format for promoting this cybermythos may not be long lived in the future. Further, if humans are thinking this way, we will become ever less capable of solving problems. Through my lifetime there is only one environmental problem that was nearly completely solved, the CFC induced ozone hole problem. With everything else we have honestly not really solved anything. We still have nuclear weapons, and this contradicts our warring tendencies. Curiously, this inability to solve much corresponds a lot with the rise of right winged politics. We have in effect developed an environment that we are not adapted to or have evolved to fit into. This in various ways may occur to intelligent life in the rest of the universe.
The late comedian George Carlin has a routine, “Saving Planet Earth.” It starts out as an anti-environmental rant, where George was cleverly prepping the audience. He then transitions with the line “Earth is not going anywhere. WE ARE! Pack your shit folks, we are going away.” He then makes the point that Earth will survive. 20 million years from now life on Earth will probably be carrying on very well. We will not be here. He further makes some interesting comments of a cosmic nature. Is there any cosmological reason for us being here? Maybe John Wheeler was onto something with his idea of a self-excited universe, this is maybe a possibility. Wheeler also proposed how a measurement made at one time can select states at an earlier time, the so called Wheeler Delayed Choice Experiment. This has been experimentally demonstrated. Possibly, if we measure neutrinos or even gravitons from the early universe, we may select the quantum states or even the strength of coupling constants that make the observable universe possible. Think of this as a cosmological Wheeler Delayed Choice experiment. It might be possible, though I have no idea how we can ever know we end up playing this role. Maybe intelligent life in the universe forms a statistical sample space of such outcomes that in some average selects the quantum states of the observable universe.
It might be that George Carlin’s “big electron” or this sort of self-excited cosmology are real. It though does not seem as likely intelligent life develops in most science fiction paths as star faring beings. If this happens for even a significant fraction of them, we would probably know it. I suspect intelligent life in the vast majority of cases develops an environment they are not really evolved for and then snuffs themselves out.
Most interested in space and astronomy are familiar with Enrico Fermi’s question “Where are they?” concerning intelligent life. This so-called Fermi paradox poses the Copernican Principle, that any region of the universe is not unique and so life must be universal, conflicts with the lack of any evidence of intelligent life. So far, the SETI program has found radio noise and silence after several decades of looking. Of course, so far only a small segment of this galaxy has been searched, so the prospect is maybe still open. Yet, Fermi’s paradox remains, because if any form of intelligent life were to persist it suggests they, or maybe their robotic emissaries or successors, would move through the galaxy within a period of a million years or so. So far astronomical evidence reveals no instance of some intelligent life modifying a stellar system in any large manner. So, where are they?
It is best to consider what we mean by intelligent life. Cetaceans are clearly intelligent in some way, even if very different from human intelligent. However, they do not modify their environment by controlling energy and materials. Humans do, and this started with a branch of Homo erectus called Homo ergaster that emerged around 600 thousand years ago. This species in the hominid lineage learned to control fire. At this point a life form on this planet learned to use energy outside of its metabolic needs, and to grow this energy use far beyond metabolic needs. Also, the manufacture of flint axes and stone tools began to accelerate. To make a stone axe requires a considerable amount of neural processing to know from the appearance of a flint the planes of crystallization and how it will fracture. With these developments it is evident hominids began to modify their environment and evolution was a coordinated selection process that saw modification of species and the ability to modify their immediate environment. With the evolution of Homo sapiens some 100 to 150 thousand years ago the adaptation of the environment by intelligent thought surpassed biological evolution. We now life in conditions where this has exponentially accelerated to extreme dimensions.
Some conservative politicians complain we are on a Ponzi game. Sure, we have been in a Ponzi game for at least the last half million years with using ever more energy and environment.
What does this have to do with Fermi’s paradox? Life on Earth, and presumably this would hold with life on other planets as well, evolves by natural selection. The white noise or Markovian statistics with single nucleotide polymorphisms and other mutations is run through a filter of fitness. The output is then a form of pink noise or sub-Markovian statistics that have structure. This is a remarkable process, and one that I think has deeper aspects in physics. In this way life evolves into forms that have greater complexity. Compare the complexity of an advanced mammal such as a human, whale, elephant and even a dog, with that of a fish. Or for that matter compare an insect with a bacillus. Such life forms evolve to fit an environment, and while such evolution does modify the environment as well, such species do not engineer their environment. We humans engineer our environment and in doing so we set ourselves in an environment that becomes ever more different than what we evolved to fit within. It is plausible that any form of intelligent life in the universe that engineers its environment may do much the same.
There are several examples of this. Human beings are not entirely peaceful. As much as we want to think we are creatures of peace, there are plenty examples of subsistence or tribal cultures that engage in warfare. In fact, the African slave trade emerged from a practice of tribal raids that captured individuals for slaves. Archeological finds in the American southwest have found kivas filled with burned remains of people, who were evidently burned alive by people from another tribe or culture. Of course, our history is packed with examples of wars. Then with the end of World War II came the atomic bomb and the realization that total war is not possible, However, humans persist in building or trying to acquire nuclear weapons. It may only be a matter of time before something goes terribly wrong. Another example to this is our impact on the planetary environment. Humans are erasing arable land and active biology on this planet by an area equal to about one Belgium per year. Human populations are growing, and declining arable land is a problem. The oceans are dying off at an alarming rate and at end of this decade the mass of plastic in the oceans will exceed that of ocean life. Of course, then comes the warming of the climate by our burning of fossil fuels that produce CO_2. This may in time render this planet uninhabitable, and already regions are becoming difficult with fires.
We might think that we can solve these things. However, increasingly we seem paralyzed by ourselves. Of course, a part of this is the massive denial of any problem with the environment, and in particular climate change. There has been a growing “alt-science” cult development, and this extends in general to what Trump’s spokeswoman Kelly Ann Conway said with, “We have our alternative facts.” We have seen the rise of anti-vaccination movements, at a time of a nasty pandemic, and the rise of increasingly tribalistic politics that seeks to raise conflicts between people. These things are becoming ever more political.
This rise of denialism saw its first rise with the creationist movement with fundamentalist or evangelical Christians in the United States. The rejection of biological evolution, something that began to rise in force in the 1970s, saw the social rejection of a branch of scientific work. Biological evolution has a massive amount of data to support it, and this extends from the paleontological work with fossils to molecular biology of genes. Yet fully 50% of American refuse to admit evolution, and this trend is being proselytized into the rest of the world. This “alt-science” denialism has found other expressions from anti-vaxxers, climate denialism, geocentrism and in recent years the ultimate absurdism with flat-Earth ideas. This reflects very possibly the advance of mythic based psychology over reasoning, and this is finding a wide variety of forms. It is also being promoted most successfully by the computer, which is ironically a device developed by the epitome of rational thinking.
The idea human intelligence evolved primarily to solve rational problems is probably false. It probably mostly evolved to promote communications between members of any group. Think of this as the evolution of language. The evolution of language probably came about to communicate information about the environment. This involved probably the projection of the human mind onto the world combined with the ability to express this in a narrative format. Projection is a power psychological tool, and the young Einstein in effect projected his mind onto a reference frame moving at the speed of light to realize a paradox. We do this in fiction with structuring fictional characters, and we project our minds onto the world in the form of spirits or gods. This may have had a survival advantage in communicating information about the environment in a story format.
With this has come religions and narratives about supernatural beings, that in late ancient periods of history and religions from the iron age involved an infinite being. By the medieval period monotheist religions had a firm grip on societies from the Indus Valley to Ireland. This changed with the rise of science, where with Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo the culminating in Newton saw a world view completely at odds with theology. The return of Halley’s comet in the later 18th century saw calculation as a predictor work, while prophesy waned. The age of enlightenment came and brought about the idea that reasoning, measurement and phenomenology were the basis of the world. Even Christianity amongst the educated turned into deism, a shadow of its former self.
In modern times this has shifted again. With the rise of monotheism was the rise of alpha-numerical formats. Paleo-Hebrew and the Greek linear-b script were a part of a transition from pictograms to complete symbolic forms. The Commandment “Though shall have no graven image” in its strict form means there are to be no pictures, certainly not of people and even more against images of God. It takes little thought to realize with television and now computers this has been overturned utterly. While Christians obeyed this commandment in serious breech, consider the barrage of pictures of Jesus, at least most information was communicated by writing. Now in this age of the internet and social media we have utterly turned about. We may in fact be approaching a post-literate age or culture.
With this has come the rise of what I might call cybermythos, or the emergence of world views that are very specific, even tribal with tribes defined ideologically, and not based on reasoning or evidence. There is a fragmentation of cultish tribes, from reptilian-people ideas, to flat-Earth, to QAnon and of course traditional religion. We should be aware how this all involves a lot of magical thinking. The book of Revelations has Jesus coming back and sweeping all the clouds away, and the story of Cinderella has her “wish upon a star” and her fairy godmother comes to turn a pumpkin and mice into a horse drawn carriage that in the end takes her to “happily ever after.” The thinking is really the same. Magical thinking, where we might at least cite the story of Cinderella as honest in admitting it is a fairy tale, while the second coming of Jesus keeps being hustled off as ontological or truth. The rise of conspiracy narratives, I avoid the term “theory” because these are not theories, is a sort of magical suspension of reasoning and the belief in some guru, Alex Jones comes to mind, and a focus on there being a “plot” we must all beware of.
Maybe we are backing away from this, if at least in a temporary and halting way. The electoral defeat of Donald Trump, where there is a sizable cult following saying he was in fact elected, may be some response to this. However, there are problems with the political left as well. George Orwell in his treatise on the psychology of totalitarian power, written in fictional form 1984, warned of the compression of language and its reduction to tiny, fragmented terms, and we see this on both the left and the right. Trumpism brought us MAGA, Stop the Steal and Q (amazing a political ideal can be compressed into one letter), but on the left we have BLM and Defund Police and other calls. The whole language is reduced to the smallest possible, and it reflect our trajectory into a post literate culture, which has a pernicious effect of leading us into a post-truth culture,
What does this have to do with the Fermi paradox? It points to how we are emerging into conditions that are impossible to sustain. I have done a fair amount of computer programming in my time, and a post-symbolic or post-literate culture will fail to cultivate people who can actually program computers. Will AI ever get to the point it can program itself? That remains to be seen, and the short science fiction video “PETS” makes some point about this prospect. This might mean the format for promoting this cybermythos may not be long lived in the future. Further, if humans are thinking this way, we will become ever less capable of solving problems. Through my lifetime there is only one environmental problem that was nearly completely solved, the CFC induced ozone hole problem. With everything else we have honestly not really solved anything. We still have nuclear weapons, and this contradicts our warring tendencies. Curiously, this inability to solve much corresponds a lot with the rise of right winged politics. We have in effect developed an environment that we are not adapted to or have evolved to fit into. This in various ways may occur to intelligent life in the rest of the universe.
The late comedian George Carlin has a routine, “Saving Planet Earth.” It starts out as an anti-environmental rant, where George was cleverly prepping the audience. He then transitions with the line “Earth is not going anywhere. WE ARE! Pack your shit folks, we are going away.” He then makes the point that Earth will survive. 20 million years from now life on Earth will probably be carrying on very well. We will not be here. He further makes some interesting comments of a cosmic nature. Is there any cosmological reason for us being here? Maybe John Wheeler was onto something with his idea of a self-excited universe, this is maybe a possibility. Wheeler also proposed how a measurement made at one time can select states at an earlier time, the so called Wheeler Delayed Choice Experiment. This has been experimentally demonstrated. Possibly, if we measure neutrinos or even gravitons from the early universe, we may select the quantum states or even the strength of coupling constants that make the observable universe possible. Think of this as a cosmological Wheeler Delayed Choice experiment. It might be possible, though I have no idea how we can ever know we end up playing this role. Maybe intelligent life in the universe forms a statistical sample space of such outcomes that in some average selects the quantum states of the observable universe.
It might be that George Carlin’s “big electron” or this sort of self-excited cosmology are real. It though does not seem as likely intelligent life develops in most science fiction paths as star faring beings. If this happens for even a significant fraction of them, we would probably know it. I suspect intelligent life in the vast majority of cases develops an environment they are not really evolved for and then snuffs themselves out.
William Flynn Wallace
May 10, 2021, 3:59:45 PM5/10/21
to extro...@googlegroups.com, ExI chat list
Human beings are not entirely peaceful. Lawrence
Thanks for that - biggest laugh of the week. In my fungus book I read where traditional agriculture leaves fields nearly sterile of fungi and many other creatures . Too many assets that fungi bring to raising crops to list here, but people are working on it. I am highly encouraged - more later. bill w
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John Clark
May 11, 2021, 9:22:11 AM5/11/21
to extro...@googlegroups.com
On Mon, May 10, 2021 at 1:42 PM Lawrence Crowell <goldenfield...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Most interested in space and astronomy are familiar with Enrico Fermi’s question “Where are they?”
> Most interested in space and astronomy are familiar with Enrico Fermi’s question “Where are they?”
The answer to that question is probably the most obvious one, they are nowhere because we are the first, at least in the observable universe. In a finite universe somebody has to be. I think people are probably too impressed by the large size of the universe and too under impressed by the much much larger size of the complexity space of life. The number of ways the 20 amino acids of life can make one very small protein just 20 amino acids long is about the same as the number of stars in the observable universe, and Titin, just one of the many proteins in the human body, is 34,351 amino acids long. Astronomy can come up with some very big numbers but biology can come up with even larger ones, much larger.
> It is best to consider what we mean by intelligent life.
For the purposes of this discussion the best operational definition of "intelligence" would be something capable of understanding how a radio telescope works, and the best definition of "civilization" would be something capable of actually making one and not just thinking about it. Using those definitions I think we are probably the only intelligent civilization in the observable universe.
> We humans engineer our environment and in doing so we set ourselves in an environment that becomes ever more different than what we evolved to fit within.
Yes, but because we are intelligent and have hands that enable us to put our thoughts into actions that means we are no longer slaves to Evolution, we can either change the environment to fit us or we can change ourselves to fit the environment, and we can do both far faster than Evolution ever could.
> Human beings are not entirely peaceful.
True, but humans are far more peaceful than our nearest relative the chimpanzee. The typical social group for chimps is only about a hundred, if you tried to cram 30 million of them in an area the size of Tokyo they'd tear each other apart even if there was enough food for everyone.
> there are plenty examples of subsistence or tribal cultures that engage in warfare.
And the further from minimum subsistence level a civilization gets the less likely a member of it is to be murdered by one of its fellows.
> with the end of World War II came the atomic bomb and the realization that total war is not possible,
I'm pretty sure the nuclear bomb is the reason the second half of the 20th century was far less bloody than the first half. Sometimes I wonder what would happen to a intelligent civilization if their planet didn't have usable amounts of Uranium or Thorium in its crust, they wouldn't be able to develop nuclear weapons until they developed space mining first, and perhaps not even then if they couldn't find a planet or an asteroid that had some of those elements in them.
But the rate of growth is decelerating, last year the US had its lowest birth rate in more than a century. The more prosperous a civilization gets and the lower the child mortality rate is the slower the population increases, and both trends are occurring worldwide.
> Human populations are growing,
But the rate of growth is decelerating, last year the US had its lowest birth rate in more than a century. The more prosperous a civilization gets and the lower the child mortality rate is the slower the population increases, and both trends are occurring worldwide.
> declining arable land is a problem. The oceans are dying off at an alarming rate and at end of this decade the mass of plastic in the oceans will exceed that of ocean life. Of course, then comes the warming of the climate by our burning of fossil fuels that produce CO_2. This may in time render this planet uninhabitable,
The Earth hasn't had an environment that would have been uninhabitable to a human since the Great Oxidation Event that occurred 2.4 billion years ago, and I don't think that's gonna change anytime soon. If a repeat of the Chicxulub event of 66 millions years ago happen tomorrow billions of people world die but I don't think it would mean the extinction of the human race, after all even Chicxulub didn't kill all large animals, and unlike us those survivors were not intelligent and so couldn't adapt to new conditions nearly as rapidly as we can.
> There has been a growing “alt-science” cult development, and this extends in general to what Trump’s spokeswoman Kelly Ann Conway said with, “We have our alternative facts.”
As much as I hate Trump from a long-term perspective he'll just be a small downward blip on a rising curve.
> The idea human intelligence evolved primarily to solve rational problems is probably false. It probably mostly evolved to promote communications between members of any group.
It doesn't really matter why intelligence evolved because once it did intelligence can be used for anything. I don't think Evolution would be happy about using intelligence to invent the condom, but if Evolution doesn't like it then Evolution can lump it.
> Will AI ever get to the point it can program itself?
Sure. Why not? Machines can already teach themselves to play Chess and GO at a superhuman level, the next step would be for them to learn how to program.
> if humans are thinking this way, we will become ever less capable of solving problems.
That probably would happen but that wouldn't explain the Fermi paradox because it could only occur if machines became more capable of solving problems.
John K Clark
John K Clark
Lawrence Crowell
May 13, 2021, 6:51:46 AM5/13/21
to extropolis
On Tuesday, May 11, 2021 at 8:22:11 AM UTC-5 johnk...@gmail.com wrote:
On Mon, May 10, 2021 at 1:42 PM Lawrence Crowell <goldenfield...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Most interested in space and astronomy are familiar with Enrico Fermi’s question “Where are they?”The answer to that question is probably the most obvious one, they are nowhere because we are the first, at least in the observable universe. In a finite universe somebody has to be.
I think the Bayesian probability for this is low. There have been stars with sufficient metallicity for 8 to 10 billion years to have stellar systems with terrestrial planets. There may of course be the first in any O-region, and that is possible for us, but I think the probability is low. It is also probable we are the first in this galaxy. I did an estimate of how many bio-planets comparable to Earth might exist in this galaxy, and came to a few thousand. Since metallicity has permitted rocky planets for 8 to 10 billion years, which might question whether we can be the first.
I think people are probably too impressed by the large size of the universe and too under impressed by the much much larger size of the complexity space of life. The number of ways the 20 amino acids of life can make one very small protein just 20 amino acids long is about the same as the number of stars in the observable universe, and Titin, just one of the many proteins in the human body, is 34,351 amino acids long. Astronomy can come up with some very big numbers but biology can come up with even larger ones, much larger.
This means that on a molecular biological level there may be considerable alternatives. Life on another planet may be organized very differently on a molecular level. There are even R-groups between the carboxyl and amine end that could serve as amino acids, or even nuclei acids. On an organism level such life may be different from animal, plant and fungal kingdoms and the 4th kingdom of slime molds, that never dominated life on large, do suggest a radical alternative. Does this mean there are alternatives to intelligence? Maybe, but on a large organism level evolution selects for functionality and there are plenty of cases of parallel evolution.
> It is best to consider what we mean by intelligent life.For the purposes of this discussion the best operational definition of "intelligence" would be something capable of understanding how a radio telescope works, and the best definition of "civilization" would be something capable of actually making one and not just thinking about it. Using those definitions I think we are probably the only intelligent civilization in the observable universe.
I suspect a lot of intelligent life is not technological, or much so. Cetaceans are not and lack the physical abilities for this. Clearly to detect them they must have abilities to modify their world and the transmission of EM waves is a good example. Any intelligent life must also exist in some collective, which for ourselves we call civilization. These criteria though may not necessarily mean we are the only one in the observable universe. This appears contrary to a Copernican principle that no region of the world is completely unique.
> We humans engineer our environment and in doing so we set ourselves in an environment that becomes ever more different than what we evolved to fit within.Yes, but because we are intelligent and have hands that enable us to put our thoughts into actions that means we are no longer slaves to Evolution, we can either change the environment to fit us or we can change ourselves to fit the environment, and we can do both far faster than Evolution ever could.
> Human beings are not entirely peaceful.True, but humans are far more peaceful than our nearest relative the chimpanzee. The typical social group for chimps is only about a hundred, if you tried to cram 30 million of them in an area the size of Tokyo they'd tear each other apart even if there was enough food for everyone.
> there are plenty examples of subsistence or tribal cultures that engage in warfare.And the further from minimum subsistence level a civilization gets the less likely a member of it is to be murdered by one of its fellows.> with the end of World War II came the atomic bomb and the realization that total war is not possible,I'm pretty sure the nuclear bomb is the reason the second half of the 20th century was far less bloody than the first half. Sometimes I wonder what would happen to a intelligent civilization if their planet didn't have usable amounts of Uranium or Thorium in its crust, they wouldn't be able to develop nuclear weapons until they developed space mining first, and perhaps not even then if they couldn't find a planet or an asteroid that had some of those elements in them.
Most people are not aware of this, but the number of humans killed by warfare since World War II is larger than those killed in WWII. In fact the post-WWII period has been one of almost constant war. We no longer declare war in the traditional way prior to 1945. The entire character of war is fundamentally different, and the objectives are no longer quite the same. In part this is to avoid the prospect of total war, which with nuclear weaponry would put the end to us. However, given the technological hair trigger of strategic nuclear war, there have been several instances where a 2 minute decision kept us from global nuclear war, and the prospect for a psychopath leading a nation the probability for nuclear war in any given year is probably not zero. In a simple setting, if we say the probability for nuclear war in any given year is p, then the probability for not having a nuclear war over N years is P = (1 - p)^N. If p = .01 then for N = 50 years P is about .6 or 60% and we have past the 50% mark since the invention of the atomic bomb.
> Human populations are growing,
But the rate of growth is decelerating, last year the US had its lowest birth rate in more than a century. The more prosperous a civilization gets and the lower the child mortality rate is the slower the population increases, and both trends are occurring worldwide.> declining arable land is a problem. The oceans are dying off at an alarming rate and at end of this decade the mass of plastic in the oceans will exceed that of ocean life. Of course, then comes the warming of the climate by our burning of fossil fuels that produce CO_2. This may in time render this planet uninhabitable,The Earth hasn't had an environment that would have been uninhabitable to a human since the Great Oxidation Event that occurred 2.4 billion years ago, and I don't think that's gonna change anytime soon. If a repeat of the Chicxulub event of 66 millions years ago happen tomorrow billions of people world die but I don't think it would mean the extinction of the human race, after all even Chicxulub didn't kill all large animals, and unlike us those survivors were not intelligent and so couldn't adapt to new conditions nearly as rapidly as we can.
I would say that is a problematic statement. The land cover of Earth only saw large vegetation starting about 500 million years ago. Prior to then the regolith of Earth, and I would say that outside of some bacteria life it was not soil in our usual sense, would not have been able to easily grow food. Earth was pretty barren. In fact our diets depend heavily on grains, which are grasses, and these emerged in the Cretaceous period.
> There has been a growing “alt-science” cult development, and this extends in general to what Trump’s spokeswoman Kelly Ann Conway said with, “We have our alternative facts.”As much as I hate Trump from a long-term perspective he'll just be a small downward blip on a rising curve.
About every 100 years there are regions of the world that enter into a sort of collective hyper-mania. We are pretty much coming on queue for the next grand episode of ghastliness. In fact it is happening primarily in the United States, the nation that claims a moral mandate in the world as the beacon of freedom, and we may in the 21st century show those Germans and Japanese how this is really done after they failed in the last century.
AI is potentially a delusion. We may get AI to solve various problems and emulate intelligent life, but it could well be that we are fooling ourselves in a sort of Pinocchio delusion. I as yet see few reasons to think AI is actually conscious, and further AI systems do not seem to have the ability to actually ask questions. They may be able to take physical or astronomical data and infer Copernicus and Kepler, which has happened, but the AI system does not exhibit curiosity to ask the question to start with. AI systems may at the end of it all be no more conscious or actually intelligent than an abacus.
LC
John Clark
May 13, 2021, 12:54:55 PM5/13/21
to extro...@googlegroups.com
>>> Most interested in space and astronomy are familiar with Enrico Fermi’s question “Where are they?”
>> The answer to that question is probably the most obvious one, they are nowhere because we are the first, at least in the observable universe. In a finite universe somebody has to be.> I think the Bayesian probability for this is low.
Perhaps, but the Bayesian probability is not the only way we can get information about this, we also know that the universe does not show the slightest sign of having been engineered; and that fact is extremely hard to explain if we are not the first.
>> I think people are probably too impressed by the large size of the universe and too under impressed by the much much larger size of the complexity space of life. The number of ways the 20 amino acids of life can make one very small protein just 20 amino acids long is about the same as the number of stars in the observable universe, and Titin, just one of the many proteins in the human body, is 34,351 amino acids long. Astronomy can come up with some very big numbers but biology can come up with even larger ones, much larger.
> This means that on a molecular biological level there may be considerable alternatives.Life on another planet may be organized very differently on a molecular level.
> There are even R-groups between the carboxyl and amine end that could serve as amino acids, or even nuclei acids. On an organism level such life may be different from animal, plant and fungal kingdoms and the 4th kingdom of slime molds, that never dominated life on large, do suggest a radical alternative. Does this mean there are alternatives to intelligence?
No. How in the world, or in the universe, could somebody or something understand how to make a radio telescope without intelligence?
>>For the purposes of this discussion the best operational definition of "intelligence" would be something capable of understanding how a radio telescope works, and the best definition of "civilization" would be something capable of actually making one and not just thinking about it. Using those definitions I think we are probably the only intelligent civilization in the observable universe.> I suspect a lot of intelligent life is not technological, or much so. Cetaceans are not and lack the physical abilities for this.
I think it would be almost impossible for sea creatures, however smart, to develop technology. The laws of Newtonian Physics were hard enough to discover for humans who lived in an atmosphere not a vacuum, but it would be astronomically harder under water; there it would look like things NEVER move at the same speed unless a force is constantly applied, and intelligent fish wouldn't have the motions of the stars and planets to help them figure out basic physics. Even humans would never have discovered Quantum Mechanics if they hadn't figured out a way to make a vacuum first. And intelligent fish would lack one of the first and most important inventions, fire. And without fire you couldn't make iron tools, or bronze, or even copper.
> Any intelligent life must also exist in some collective, which for ourselves we call civilization.
Not necessarily. If the communication pipeline between 2 intelligent beings is wide enough and fast enough then I think it would be meaningless to refer to them as separate beings, there would only be one mind that just happens to have 2 brains.
> These criteria though may not necessarily mean we are the only one in the observable universe. This appears contrary to a Copernican principle that no region of the world is completely unique.
The Copernican principle is not a law of physics. It's true the universe does not revolve around the Earth, but the Earth quite definitely is not a typical place in the universe either; a typical place in the universe is a place that contains almost nothing. The Copernican principle was a useful rule of thumb that served us well for 400 years, but nothing lasts forever, it's time to move on to something new.
>> I'm pretty sure the nuclear bomb is the reason the second half of the 20th century was far less bloody than the first half. Sometimes I wonder what would happen to a intelligent civilization if their planet didn't have usable amounts of Uranium or Thorium in its crust, they wouldn't be able to develop nuclear weapons until they developed space mining first, and perhaps not even then if they couldn't find a planet or an asteroid that had some of those elements in them.> Most people are not aware of this, but the number of humans killed by warfare since World War II is larger than those killed in WWII.
Perhaps if you include the 11 million people killed in Mao's cultural revolution in the 1960's, but World War II was not the only war of note in the first half of the 20th century, among others 20 million died in the First World War, 7 million in various Chinese wars, 2.5 milliom in the Ottoman genocide, 10 million in Stalin's purges, and 1 million in Russia's 1918 Civil War. You should read Steven Pinker's "The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined", it's full of cold hard facts that is a great antidote to doom and gloom philosophy.
>>The Earth hasn't had an environment that would have been uninhabitable to a human since the Great Oxidation Event that occurred 2.4 billion years ago, and I don't think that's gonna change anytime soon. If a repeat of the Chicxulub event of 66 millions years ago happen tomorrow billions of people world die but I don't think it would mean the extinction of the human race, after all even Chicxulub didn't kill all large animals, and unlike us those survivors were not intelligent and so couldn't adapt to new conditions nearly as rapidly as we can.
> I would say that is a problematic statement. The land cover of Earth only saw large vegetation starting about 500 million years ago.
That is simply because before then multicellular life hadn't evolved yet.
> Prior to then the regolith of Earth, and I would say that outside of some bacteria life it was not soil in our usual sense, would not have been able to easily grow food.
You can grow crops in pure sterilized silica sand (a.k.a. quartz grains) as long as you add a pinch of phosphorus and potassium and had a way to fix nitrogen from the air, for example by adding a little ammonia to the sand made with the Haber–Bosch process; or if you didn't like Haber–Bosch you could simply plant soybeans, they know how to fix nitrogen, or rather the bacterial symbionts that live with them do.
>> As much as I hate Trump from a long-term perspective he'll just be a small downward blip on a rising curve.> About every 100 years there are regions of the world that enter into a sort of collective hyper-mania. We are pretty much coming on queue for the next grand episode of ghastliness. In fact it is happening primarily in the United States
Before the election I worried a lot about that, but the fact that He Who Must Not Be Named lost gave me a new hope, and his January 6 coup d'état attempt failed; although I admit it's unsettling that 74 million people voted for that dimwitted creature, thank Darwin 81 million voted for Biden.
>AI is potentially a delusion. We may get AI to solve various problems and emulate intelligent life,
Well .... maybe Einstein was not intelligent, maybe Einstein was just emulating intelligence, but if so then emulating intelligence is good enough for me!
> I as yet see few reasons to think AI is actually conscious,
Forget the AI, do you have any reason to think that I am actually conscious?
> and further AI systems do not seem to have the ability to actually ask questions.
When an AI beat the human world champion at the game show Jeopardy! it did so by asking questions :). I see no reason to think that humans possess some secret sauce that silicon can never duplicate.
John K Clark
Stuart LaForge
May 13, 2021, 8:36:39 PM5/13/21
to extrop...@lists.extropy.org, extro...@googlegroups.com
Quoting BillK:
> That's one of the big questions generated by the Fermi Paradox silence.
> Is the Great Filter behind us or still waiting to hit us in the future?
> The rarity of life developing could be the big early Filter.
> Intelligent life destroying itself because the Evolution necessary for
> development leads to destruction could be the late Filter.
>
An alternative hypothesis would be that we live in a galactic
Goldilocks zone and that our nearest stellar neighbors are the ones
most likely to harbor life.
The Bayesian in me wonders if the SETI detection of a radio signal
from Proxima Centauri, a mere 4 LY away from earth, and the sudden
seriousness of the government and the military about UAP and public
disclosure of previously classified video.
https://www.jstor.org/stable/resrep29692?seq=2#metadata_info_tab_contents
https://www.seti.org/signal-proxima-centauri
https://www.popularmechanics.com/military/research/a35904670/pentagon-ufo-reports-objects-breaking-sound-barrier-without-sonic-boom/
I mean taken separately, they are easy to dismiss but taken together
having occurred within a few months of eac other? Inquiring minds want
to know what you think appropriate priors would be for this
application of Bayes law?
Stuart LaForge
John Clark
May 14, 2021, 10:52:46 AM5/14/21
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> An alternative hypothesis would be that we live in a galactic Goldilocks zone and that our nearest stellar neighbors are the ones most likely to harbor life.The Bayesian in me wonders if the SETI detection of a radio signal from Proxima Centauri, a mere 4 LY away from earth,
Proxima Centauri is a red dwarf, the most common type of star in the universe, it has 12.2% the mass of the sun and gives off 588 times less heat than our sun, that's why although its the closest star to us it's far too dim to be observed with the naked eye, and that's why although the sun is brighter than 80% of the stars in the universe every star you can see with your unaided eye is brighter than the sun. Any planet around a star as dim as Proxima Centauri would have to be 24 times closer to its sun than the Earth is to ours to be at the same liquid water loving temperature. A planet that close would be gravitationally locked so one side continuously faced the sun and the other side would never see it, so either mega-hurricane force winds would continuously sweep the planet's surface or one side would be too hot and the other too cold, and that's not even the worst.
> and the sudden seriousness of the government and the military about UAP and public disclosure of previously classified video.
No matter how hard I try I just can't seem to get very excited over flying saucers.
John K Clark
Stuart LaForge
May 20, 2021, 2:54:30 AM5/20/21
to extropolis
It sounds like what you are saying is that red dwarfs in general do not have a habitable-zone regardless of the presence liquid water due to ironically greater solar (stellar?) activity in an intrinsically cooler star. But if they produce so many gigantic flares and coronal mass ejections then how do they keep fusion going so long, what keeps them from boiling away too much of their hydrogen as solar wind and going dim? If all red dwarfs are sterile, then that is very sad since most of the stars in the galaxy are red dwarfs.
Also how can we be sure the SETI signal did not come from around one of the other two stars of the Alpha Centauri system?
As far as your lack of interest in flying saucers, did you know that such a shape accelerating along its axis of radial symmetry is the most resistant shape to Bell's Spaceship Paradox and can get closer to light speed than traditional long rocket-type designs before being torn apart by Lorentz contractions and the Rindler horizon.
While we are on the topic, what do you make of this?
What could fly into and and out of the water like that without slowing down due to increased viscous drag? And then split in two at the end?
In other news, warp drive has been shown to physically possible:
Stuart LaForge
John Clark
May 20, 2021, 6:54:48 AM5/20/21
to extro...@googlegroups.com
On Thu, May 20, 2021 at 2:54 AM Stuart LaForge <stuart....@gmail.com> wrote:
> It sounds like what you are saying is that red dwarfs in general do not have a habitable-zone regardless of the presence liquid water due to ironically greater solar (stellar?) activity in an intrinsically cooler star.
Yes.
> But if they produce so many gigantic flares and coronal mass ejections then how do they keep fusion going so long, what keeps them from boiling away too much of their hydrogen as solar wind and going dim?
Proxima Centauri has 12% of the mass of the sun but on average it only radiates 1/500 as much energy so it will live far longer than our sun will, however due to its intense solar flares it's radiance is much more variable than the sun. Proxima Centauri will remain a main sequence star for about 4 trillion years, that's about 1000 times as long as our sun will. There are some stellar models that indicate red dwarfs might start to calm down and become more stable after a trillion years or two, so maybe life would be possible then, but you'd still have the tidal locking problem, one side of the planet would be forever facing its sun and the other side forever facing the cold of infinite empty space.
> If all red dwarfs are sterile, then that is very sad since most of the stars in the galaxy are red dwarfs.
Another reason I think we're probably alone.
> Also how can we be sure the SETI signal did not come from around one of the other two stars of the Alpha Centauri system?
I can't be sure. Since it was never repeated I can't prove it didn't come from ET, in fact since it was never repeated I can't prove anything about that signal at all, not even that it really existed.
> As far as your lack of interest in flying saucers, did you know that such a shape accelerating along its axis of radial symmetry is the most resistant shape to Bell's Spaceship Paradox and can get closer to light speed than traditional long rocket-type designs before being torn apart by Lorentz contractions and the Rindler horizon.
A paradox needs a logical contradiction and this has none, so Bell's Spaceship "Paradox" is misnamed; no spaceship is going to get torn apart by Lorentz contraction. If I tacked a string inside the cockpit of my accelerating spaceship from the front to back the string would NOT BREAK as I approach the speed of light because the atoms and electromagnetic fields inside the string would shrink at the same rate as the atoms in the cockpit walls counterbalancing each other, so no force would be applied to the string. However if I tied a string from the front of my spaceship to the back of another spaceship 10 feet ahead of mine and we both accelerated at the same rate the string WOULD BREAK because the atoms in the string would shrink just as they did before but there is nothing else between the two spaceships to counterbalance that effect, there is only empty space.
Or look at it from the point of view of an observer at one end of the string. Suppose a fellow at the far end of the string has a clock and sends a pulse of LASER light to you every 10 seconds and suppose you also have a clock and it's synchronized with his, so you know how long it took the light to reach you, hence you know how far away the other end of the string is. The other fellow also reports from time to time on how fast he is moving relative to some fixed point that both of you can see.
An instant after you start moving you receive a report from the fellow at the other end of the string saying he hasn't started moving yet. Because of this you predict that when you make the next distance measurement you will find that the distance has decreased, but when the next LASER pulse arrives you find that the distance is just the same. You can only conclude that sometime after the last report the other fellow must have started to accelerate and did so faster than you did. When he sends his next report you find he has indeed started to move but he still isn't moving as fast as you are, and yet the distance is the same as before. The fellow at the other end of the string must still be accelerating faster than you and in fact he always will be.
Of course an observer at the other end of the string could make similar observations and conclude that you are accelerating faster than he is. The two observers disagree on who started moving first, but both agree that the other end of the string is accelerating faster than their end; and that pulls the string apart.
An instant after you start moving you receive a report from the fellow at the other end of the string saying he hasn't started moving yet. Because of this you predict that when you make the next distance measurement you will find that the distance has decreased, but when the next LASER pulse arrives you find that the distance is just the same. You can only conclude that sometime after the last report the other fellow must have started to accelerate and did so faster than you did. When he sends his next report you find he has indeed started to move but he still isn't moving as fast as you are, and yet the distance is the same as before. The fellow at the other end of the string must still be accelerating faster than you and in fact he always will be.
Of course an observer at the other end of the string could make similar observations and conclude that you are accelerating faster than he is. The two observers disagree on who started moving first, but both agree that the other end of the string is accelerating faster than their end; and that pulls the string apart.
By the way, I think this would make a good MythBusters segment.
I don't know what it is so it must be a UFO, with emphasis on the U. People forget that the U stands for unidentified, if you know it was a spaceship from another planet then it would be an IFO, an Identified Flying Object.
John K Clark
John Clark
Jun 14, 2021, 11:42:37 AM6/14/21
to extro...@googlegroups.com
On Thu, May 20, 2021 at 2:54 AM Stuart LaForge <stuart....@gmail.com> wrote:
I suggest you take a look at:
You might wanna start 11 minutes and 20 seconds in to get over the preliminaries because at that point he starts talking about possible alternatives to the spaceship explanation for those UFO videos. I'm not saying any of the ideas presented are necessarily true but they all seem more probable to me than the spaceship hypothesis.
John K Clark
Stuart LaForge
Jun 14, 2021, 1:27:06 PM6/14/21
to extro...@googlegroups.com
The problem is that too little of the evidence has been released to the public. Just a few poor quality FLIR videos. The actual body of evidence is allegedly much larger and contains FLIR, visual, radar, and sonar data gathered over several days by the crews of multiple naval ships operating together as a battle group. Allegedly when these anomalies were in the air, they were caught on FLIR and radar. When they dove beneath the water, they were caught on sonar. The F18 Hornets were scrambled to intercept incoming radar blips and when the jets got on the scene, they were outperformed by these anomalies when the jets tried to engage them. These days there is just no way all that could have happened and not been extensively and redundantly logged across numerous platforms.
The Pentagon has also issued a definitive statement, on Jun 3, that these things are not classified U.S. technology.
Unless and until more information gets released by the government, it is all just fruitless speculation over too little data.
Stuart LaForge
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Lawrence Crowell
Jun 14, 2021, 1:36:25 PM6/14/21
to extropolis
Notice how this black object remains almost perfectly in the same field of view of the camera. That suggests to me this is an optical phenomenon. .
LC
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Stuart LaForge
Jun 14, 2021, 1:52:05 PM6/14/21
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That is not some normal camera. That camera is designed to track fast-moving targets like enemy jets trying to evade a missile lock. In a different video, the object DOES manage to get away from the camera's target lock with a sudden burst of speed. That is in some sense even more disconcerting.
Stuart LaForge
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John Clark
Jun 14, 2021, 1:53:38 PM6/14/21
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On Mon, Jun 14, 2021 at 1:27 PM Stuart LaForge <stuart....@gmail.com> wrote:
> The problem is that too little of the evidence has been released to the public. Just a few poor quality FLIR videos.
VERY poor quality indeed! If these things really did show up every day for a year as claimed you'd think they'd have something better than these blurry shots of black and white Tic Tacs.
> The actual body of evidence is allegedly much larger
Do you have any evidence that there is more evidence?
> These days there is just no way all that could have happened and not been extensively and redundantly logged across numerous platforms.
Yes, given that spy satellites can Watch the progress of a football game by reading the players names off of their uniforms from space you'd certainly think they'd have something better than these crappy videos. Or at least they would if the things really existed and there was actually something to see.
> Unless and until more information gets released by the government,
They can't release what they don't have. And Stuart, if the government really did have videos that were definitive proof that ET existed I don't think there is a snowball's chance in hell they would've been able to keep those videos secret for decades, especially when you consider the fact that Donald Trump was president for 4 years and he couldn't keep anything secret, he'd blad about it on Twitter and then post it on Facebook.
John K Clark
Stuart LaForge
Jun 14, 2021, 1:57:50 PM6/14/21
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All these leaked videos are from the last decade. Also Trump did start the Space Force and not one Democrat congressman opposed him on it. Maybe they knew something that we did not?
Stuart LaForge
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John Clark
Jun 14, 2021, 3:23:13 PM6/14/21
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On Mon, Jun 14, 2021 at 1:57 PM Stuart LaForge <stuart....@gmail.com> wrote:
> Trump did start the Space Force and not one Democrat congressman opposed him on it. Maybe they knew something that we did not?
The length of time Congress could keep a secret like "ET definitely exists" must be measured in nanoseconds, and the amount of time Trump could keep it must be measured in picoseconds.
John K Clark
Dan TheBookMan
Jun 14, 2021, 3:37:51 PM6/14/21
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Also, wouldn’t you have expected Snowden or Wikileaks to have uncovered some government documentation on all this? It’d have to be the world’s best kept secret for that not to happen — meaning there wouldn’t even be grainy videos or other reports. Instead, the document trail appears to be completely clean. This suggests that either somehow myriad bureaucracies are perfectly competent at covering their document trails but yet bumble around with video and photographic evidence — the stuff that would be far more convincing then any memo or email — or there’s really nothing to see here. (Not the only two choices, so maybe not an either/or in the usual sense, but the two most likely options.)
Regards,
Dan
Lawrence Crowell
Jun 14, 2021, 7:54:48 PM6/14/21
to extropolis
Spaceforce is about protecting space assets against forms of attack. Don-the-Con t[Rump abandoned treaties, and some of these involved space. Some people think we are safer in an arms race than in treaties and agreements to limit arms. It is possible that before long various forms of space combat may erupt between robotic systems deployed by different nations. The constant cyberwars that are now going on may be something occurring in space as well. It may not involve destroying satellites, but maybe small sats with spray cans of paint that spray at spy satellite optics. Then before long serious assets, both military and commercial may have robo-sentries to stop such assaults.
This is not at all about space aliens. It is never about aliens until we know for sure it is aliens.
LC
Lawrence Crowell
Jun 14, 2021, 7:58:00 PM6/14/21
to extropolis
Cover-ups and conspiracies are only ever temporary. Those engaging in such better have completed what ever they are up do before the lib is blown open. Information is related to heat and entropy. Heat is diffusive and so is information. There will never be a multi-year or decade long conspiracy or cover-up, particularly if it has contact with thousand of people.
LC
Stuart LaForge
Jun 15, 2021, 12:58:58 PM6/15/21
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You are right, Dan. If the government was holding out anything juicy, at least some of it should have wound up on the darkweb.Aside from the usual tinfoil hat crowd, I couldn't find anything. The UFO stuff I found on Wikileaks is decades old. And Edward Snowden did tell Joe Rogan during an interview that back when he was contracting for the NSA, he used his Top Secret security clearance to deliberately search for UFO and ET-related documents and could not find anything interesting.
All of the sound and fury on the news really could just be Elizondo and company trying to parley a few blurry videos into fame and fortune.
Stuart LaForge
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Henry Rivera, PsyD
Jun 16, 2021, 7:15:23 AM6/16/21
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I encourage people to watch the two films by Dr. Steve Greer. He’s a former Emergency Dept MD. The films are:
Unacknowledged : An Expose of the Greatest Secret in Human History (Hulu)
Close Encounters of the Fifth Kind (Amazon Prime)
He claims that because US Presidents are term employees, they are not in a clearance high enough to receive info the military industrial complex holds on UAPs. He couldn’t believe this when he learned and sees it as a threat to democracy, so he created the Disclosure Project and then these films and a contact protocol anyone can use to initiate contact, bypassing the govt who functions as horrible ambassadors in these cases. I’m on FB groups where his CE5 protocol is put to use. I’ve seen hundreds of UAP videos in these groups. Protocol seems to work…
The first movie is a history of the coverup and his experiences working as a consultant for in the government. The second one is about the protocols mostly. Really interesting stuff.
-Henry
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Stuart LaForge
Jun 17, 2021, 12:00:42 AM6/17/21
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On Wed, Jun 16, 2021 at 4:15 AM Henry Rivera, PsyD <henryri...@gmail.com> wrote:
I encourage people to watch the two films by Dr. Steve Greer. He’s a former Emergency Dept MD. The films are:Unacknowledged : An Expose of the Greatest Secret in Human History (Hulu)Close Encounters of the Fifth Kind (Amazon Prime)He claims that because US Presidents are term employees, they are not in a clearance high enough to receive info the military industrial complex holds on UAPs. He couldn’t believe this when he learned and sees it as a threat to democracy, so he created the Disclosure Project and then these films and a contact protocol anyone can use to initiate contact, bypassing the govt who functions as horrible ambassadors in these cases. I’m on FB groups where his CE5 protocol is put to use. I’ve seen hundreds of UAP videos in these groups. Protocol seems to work…
I watched the Close Encounters of the Fifth Kind video. It seems to be precisely the kind of woowoo that legitimate scientists are afraid of being associated with. So far every CE5 video I have seen looks like a bunch of people holding seances out in the woods and shining laser pointers at small glowing lights they see in the distance. Then claiming that the lights were benevolent aliens that telepathically communicated a message of peace, love, and harmony to them.
It is more like what Lawrence was alluded to as uncritical New Age religion rather than any legitimate attempt to communicate with extraterrestrial life. If you go outside looking up at the sky in a particular frame of mind, it is possible to experience a deep and profound spiritual connection with a firefly, a high-up mylar balloon glinting in the sunlight, or even a helicopter in the distance. In short, when you don't have any enough sensory information to go off, your brain fills in as many blanks as it needs to in order for you to experience what you expect to experience.
In any case, this CE5 stuff is a far cry from 40 foot Tic Tacs boiling the sea and outmaneuvering F-18 jet fighters. In some of the CE5 videos, the lights move in front of background objects and are clearly on the scale of inches or even smaller. They remind me of the out of focus glowing orbs that the ghost-hunter community claims are ghosts.
I am curious about Dr. Greer's claims that the U.S. has shot down 9 different UFOs over the years and keeps the wreckage and alien bodies stored somewhere in Arizona. The tiniest biopsy of cells from one of those bodies sent to any university biology lab would settle the matter once and for all. Such a small thing to ask, yet I doubt it would be forthcoming.
Have you had any personal CE5 experiences, Henry?
Stuart LaForge
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Henry Rivera, PsyD
Jun 17, 2021, 7:41:25 AM6/17/21
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I have not tried CE5 myself yet. Seems to be more effective in groups. I have a few friends who keep wanting to get together and try. So I’ll try soon enough. There are also regional groups I’m in on FB that have monthly gatherings. I may got one of those. A meditation party can’t be that bad. I’ve been to worse gatherings.
While I agree with everything you wrote, I have seen some great, long duration, not blurry vids from CE5 gatherings. The thing that intrigues me most perhaps is that what Greer says is plausible and consistent with Elizondo/ATIP stories. Also, if I was a peaceful visitor to Earth, I would be quite dismayed by the military’s response to me and might be inclined to make contact direct with the inhabitants vs the military industrial complex. And the tone and spirit of the CE5 approach is much more consistent with what I’d expect in term of communication with a highly advanced/evolved lifeform. I doubt they’d be aggressive like us or the Borg. But who knows.
On Jun 17, 2021, at 12:01 AM, Stuart LaForge <stuart....@gmail.com> wrote:
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Lawrence Crowell
Jun 17, 2021, 9:02:43 AM6/17/21
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These images are always poor, blurry and noisy. UFO stuff has always had a low signal to noise ratio.
LC
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Stuart LaForge
Jun 18, 2021, 3:26:12 PM6/18/21
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On Thu, Jun 17, 2021 at 4:41 AM Henry Rivera, PsyD <henryri...@gmail.com> wrote:
I have not tried CE5 myself yet. Seems to be more effective in groups. I have a few friends who keep wanting to get together and try. So I’ll try soon enough. There are also regional groups I’m in on FB that have monthly gatherings. I may got one of those. A meditation party can’t be that bad. I’ve been to worse gatherings.
While I might be skeptical of the scientific merits of CE5, it does seem like harmless fun for the most part. If you do go, then please let us know how it turns out. On the very remote chance you actually come into telepathic contact with aliens, please try to get past the interstellar love-in and ask them about something substantive like quantum gravity or controlled fusion. ;-)
While I agree with everything you wrote, I have seen some great, long duration, not blurry vids from CE5 gatherings. The thing that intrigues me most perhaps is that what Greer says is plausible and consistent with Elizondo/ATIP stories. Also, if I was a peaceful visitor to Earth, I would be quite dismayed by the military’s response to me and might be inclined to make contact direct with the inhabitants vs the military industrial complex.
Assuming that they exist and are peaceful visitors, it is very strange how so many of the most well-documented sightings have been by military personnel: Foo fighters, the Battle of Los Angeles, and all the reports of UFOs visiting and messing with nuclear missile silos in both the U.S. and the Soviet union. It would be interesting what the percentages would be if one controlled for the relative population sizes of the military versus the civilian population. I have been watching the skies my whole life and the only UFO I ever saw was while I was serving in the U.S. Army in 1990. Note that I have seen many strange but identifiable things also like the exhaust plumes of rockets, satellites like the ISS zipping across the sky overhead, and helicopters in the desert covered by the eerie blue flames of St. Elmo's fire. But the one UFO I saw was a rotating disk-shaped craft with two concentric rings of glowing lights that could make 90 degree turns in the air. At least a dozen other guys saw it too including some air-defense artillery guys that are trained to identify aircraft as friendly or foreign.
And the tone and spirit of the CE5 approach is much more consistent with what I’d expect in term of communication with a highly advanced/evolved lifeform. I doubt they’d be aggressive like us or the Borg. But who knows.
Darwinian evolution by natural selection being a universal law of nature, I would not assume anything at all about their intentions. If they are advanced enough, they might not have any intentions regarding us at all, like the unintended disruptions we cause to anthills simply by going about our business.
Stuart LaForge
Stuart LaForge
Jun 20, 2021, 7:24:50 AM6/20/21
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But the visual quality of the images are less important than the overall data. Those images were from ATFLIR which is a very precise targeting camera and the various physical properties of the thing being imaged such as its position, momentum, and temperature relative to a multi-million dollar jet fighter should be recoverable from the data. Here is a paper that purports to do that based on the UAP that I mentioned earlier that broke an ATFLIR targeting lock with sudden acceleration.
A minor detail I noticed while watching the original video is that just as it starts to accelerate out of the targeting reticle, the image gets momentarily scrambled like the object emitted some manner of broadband electromagnetic pulse at 1:13 in the video that affected the ATFLIR system.
Stuart LaForge
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