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100/1 Odds On 'First Contact' Within a Year
astroengine writes "After all the kerfuffle of 'Ambassadorgate' — when the UK media went nuts over the rumored promotion of Mazlan Othman to become the UN's first choice as mankind's alien point of contact — it would appear that gamblers saw this as a tip that an alien landing was imminent."
Bullshit.
A morning without coffee is like something without something else.
If aliens do visit massive fluctuations in currencies and wealth will render said bet meaningless. It only makes sense to vote against.
If video games influenced behavior the Pac Man generation would be eating pills and running away from their problems.
I could be better than 1% interest by putting the money in a good bank for a year. A sure thing, indeed...but still not worth the bet.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Let the Probing begin...
First as first official contact and not the past covered up ones?
... that some bookies figured that by giving great odds on an impossible events, idiots would flock to give them money.
They're misreading it the situation.
If a landing were imminent, they would have appointed a complete incompetent as ambassador.
If you bet against extraterrstrials you win %1 of you bet in year, which I am sure "worlds biggest bookmaker" will invest at a higher percent.
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
...are a hundred to one, they say...
but still they come!
"We can confirm that Debian does *not* ship the version with the trojan horse. Our version predates it." [CA-2002-28]
Yeah, why not 10,000:1 or even 1,000,000:1. They would get a lot more takers and they still wouldn't have to pay out. I mean the lottery is in some cases over 60 million:1 and people will happily give out a dollar to that. Of course, the lottery is a lot more likely to fall in your favor then aliens landing any time soon.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
In the instance that this does happen, Clarke was only a year off. Stay away from Europa.
The summary is incorrect. The 100 to 1 odds aren't even for first contact, but merely that the US/UK will announce the existence of aliens. From TFA:
the gambling company is offering odds of 100/1 on either the US President or the serving British Prime Minister to announce the existence of intelligent extra-terrestrials within a year of the bet being placed.
The problem being is that they have to account for the fact that if an alien species makes contact, they have to pay out ALL the bets, not just a single winning ticket.
Maybe they're here to build a hyperspace bypass...
Where the hell is my towel?!
I'm sorry but First Contact happened in 1996.
Even if there is/was/will be a first contact, chances are, it would not be public knowledge. I thought this quote from Men In Black would be appropriate:
Edwards: Why the big secret? People are smart. They can handle it.
Kay: A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it. Fifteen hundred years ago everybody knew the Earth was the center of the universe. Five hundred years ago, everybody knew the Earth was flat, and fifteen minutes ago, you knew that humans were alone on this planet. Imagine what you'll know tomorrow.
"giving great odds on an impossible event"
It's a tax on stupidity, and the money keeps rolling in!
All we have to do have the Treasury Department put everything on Aliens and then have Obama make announcement of exis announcement.
The U.N. is corrupt and they most likely wanted to give some individual a job where they didn't have to do anything.
Except for ending slavery, the Nazis, communism, & securing American independence, war has never solved anything.
The odds are worse in Arizona. They're doing everything possible to keep the aliens out.
that what we know about physics and speed limits is wrong? Because unless you have "easy" FTL odds for contacting an alien civilization are pretty low (far less than 1/100).Or they are talking about an alien-ated civilization? because we are going definately in that direction if that kind of bets becomes part of our culture.
In the other hand, odds are not so low that we are the one driving the "first contact" to an alien lifeform, just probably not intelligent ones, if life in any way is discovered i.e. in Mars
Since earlier comments indicate that humans see this as a bad bet, I can only assume that 1 in 100 people on Earth are already, in fact, aliens.
100/1=100. Should read 100:1.
"the best case scenario of alien contact would be us ending up as their pets"
The two dogs and one cat who I cohabit with have their meals prepared and served on time, daily. They sleep as often as they want, and are completely sheltered from the evils of the world. I would say that so long as my new alien overload refrains from habitually beating me, I'm good.
Opinion:=TMyOpinion.Create(Me);
Denver has this really persistent guy trying to increase UFO awareness in the area. He asks city council to create a program every year and is politely turned down. This year he managed to put it on the ballot. Denver has a relatively low threshhold for proposition petitions, something like 5000 signatures.
I thought our First Contact staff would include Will Smith.
... and please don't rush to the "tin foil hat" responses, but I've noticed a great increase in the number of movies, shows and books dealing with the human races' contact and collaboration with aliens.
Here's my wild speculation theory: The Governments of the world and media are working together to slowly get us used to the idea of aliens being on earth. Little by little we are getting more complacient with the idea and accepting of the reality that alien lifeforms could visit Earth and we could somehow lean to live with each other.
Is this just some grand plan being put forth over years / decades to get humans ready for some type of incredible revelation?
I for one would be willing to sacrifice a gambling company to bankruptcy in exchange for first contact. Naturally the owners of said company may feel differently.
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That guy (Jeff Peckman) is a known hoax artist and crank, from what I gather.
in Siberia.
A couple of weeks ago, wasn't he quoted as saying contact with aliens at our current level of tech would be a bad idea? Hmmm...
What's with all the crap hitting the front page that should be on Idle? We've gotten stories about creative art in Minecraft, Asteriods on web pages, and now this. Slow news the past couple of days?
I think you meant "I'm-gonna-rape-your-face-if-you-add-'gate'-to-anything-ever-again."
"When Wernher Von Braun [German rocket scientist] was dying of cancer [1974], he asked me to be his spokesperson. Von Braun actually told me that the reasons for space-based weaponry that were going to be given - the enemies that we were going to identify - were all based on a lie. He said the strategy that was being used to educate the public and decision makers was to use scare tactics; that first the Russians are going to be considered the enemy. Then terrorists would be identified. Then we were going to identify third-world 'crazies.' The next enemy was asteroids - against asteroids we are going to build space-based weapons. And over and over during the four years that I knew him and was giving speeches for him, he would bring up the last card. 'And remember, Carol, the last card is the alien card. We are going to have to build space-based weapons against aliens, and all of it is a lie.' He was too afraid to talk about it. He would not tell me the details. I am not sure I would have absorbed them if he had told me the details, or even believed him in 1974... In 1977, I was at a meeting in Fairchild Industries in a conference room called the War Room... They continued the conversation about how they were going to antagonize these enemies and at some point, there was going to be a war in the Gulf, a Gulf War. Now this is 1977!" - Dr. Carol Rosin, Fairchild Industries Corporate Manager, Von Braun spokesperson
If an event is sure, then it will always happen, and no other event can possibly occur. If an event is almost sure, then other events are theoretically possible in a given sample space; however, as the cardinality of the sample space increases, the probability of any other event asymptotically converges toward zero. Thus, one can never definitively say for any sample space that other events will never occur, but can in the general case assume this to be true. In this respect, the concept is similar to that of a mathematical limit.
adding to that, "almost impossible" sounds good to me.
The Disclosure Project - 2006:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=6552475158249898710#
The Disclosure Project - 2010:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YqzoC3QPI_E&feature=player_embedded#
But, of course they're all liars (sarcasm).
~hylas
The idea that something like Project BlueBeam exists sounds more likely to me than actual aliens visiting us.
If they are here, they're not the aliens, they're the drones. Send out a legion of drones who roam the galaxy and reproduce every so often to send out their own set of drones. Think of it as the Voyager mission with fleshy AI. If they report back, great, but the creators of the drones know well they will most likely all be gone before getting word back. The drones just take information and aren't necessarily as intelligent as their makers (usually a bad idea to make something that reproduces to many times your own number smarter than you if you can control it). So, bunch of boring data takers floating above. And yes, with probably advanced nanotechnology and other science wizardry. Interesting side note: if you read the account of Fire in the Sky author, Travis Walton, as detailed in "The Walton Experience" (totally different than the movie, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Walton_Experience), there is a part where he mentions trying to break a glass-like cylinder and is unable. I wouldn't be surprised (assuming this is all a true account and not made up), that it was made out of pure diamond.
Of course, the probability of all this is scant as there are other explanations that would make more sense. But, as a scientist, I feel it is wrong to dismiss it out of hand as bullshit without at least investigating it a little and setting aside my biases.
...always had a African-American President in them. The end is near.
Energy _could_ be destroyed, if it's building blocks are information. That information can change and thus energy could be transfort into non-energy.
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If you spend $100 gambling that the existence of aliens won't be announced in the next year, and the betting market odds are 100-to-1 against you losing, and the bookmaker requires you to deposit that $100 in advance (so they can be certain to have the money in case you lose), then a year later even if you win you'll have $101.
If you put $100 into an insured savings account, then even at today's atrocious interest rates you'll have $101.30 or so a year later. So why would you have ever bothered to make the wager?
Reality is much more complicated. E.g. your bookmaker may have looser liquidity requirements which allow you to make a simultaneous investment with your betting dollars, your opportunity cost may be a higher return in something less liquid like a CD or something more risky like a bond or stock. But even in "fake money" idea futures markets like the Foresight Exchange there seems to be this sort of opportunity cost effect. Even if you think a bet is 99% sure to win you don't want to spend 99 cents on the dollar for it, because you can find a better rate of return elsewhere. The market then reflects this: 3-1 odds may reflect an underlying market belief in 25% probability, but 99-1 odds reflect a belief of significantly less than 1% probability.
You are presuming that the bookies here are going to have a loss if the aliens show up.
Most places like this set the odds based upon the ratio of what others are placing for bets. There are certainly a great many willing to take this as a sucker's bet and likely put a whole bunch of money down even if the pay--back is just a few percentage points more on the return. That increases the odds because more people are signing up and expecting that the aliens aren't going to be coming.
Let me be more clear here with a good example: Let's say a group of people put together $1000 saying that the aliens are going to show up. Another group puts together $100,000 that the aliens aren't going to come. That gives you the 100:1 betting ratio. The bookie (the "gaming company") isn't really putting anything into this other than holding the money and charging a small fee... say 1% of that money... from everybody placing a bet. So the gaming company keeps roughly $1000 for holding the money and the "winner" gets the combined pot of whatever is left proportionally for what they put into the pot.
Only a stupid bookie gets caught up into his own game, even if it is a "sure bet". Perhaps some of them will put up their own money, but not often. They make the money from the betting process itself not from winning or losing a bet. If the aliens show up, it won't be the gaming company that will be pissed off. Those who thought they made a sucker's bet that turned out wrong.... those will be the guys who will be pissed.
BTW, if a whole bunch of tin-foil hat nerds show up and throw a million bucks into the game, the 100:1 ratio won't be maintained. In that case, the ration will be 1:10 where those betting the aliens won't be coming will be getting $10 buck for every buck they put in. The gaming company collects a larger fee and it becomes something that would be attractive to start placing bets that the aliens won't be coming. In other words, the gaming company is going to be posting record profits even if the aliens come. The betting odds are only suggesting what other suckers are thinking of the situation.
If an alien species makes contact, they'll be the ones placing the bets ahead of the announcement! Never hurts to have a bit of the local currency.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Uhm, no, if energy is defined by information, then if you change information to something else; the information remains, but it doesn't resemple an energy 'state' and so your energy is undone.
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BTW heat, matter and movement is all energy, I know... I'm familiar with relativity and even the theory behind gravity.
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http://ufoseries.com/movieClips/ufoRawFootage.wmv
In GOD we trust, all others we monitor.
The problem being is that they have to account for the fact that if an alien species makes contact, they have to pay out ALL the bets, not just a single winning ticket.
That's what insurance is for! Similar to those $500,000 half-court basketball 1-shot things. If the guy actually makes the basket, the insurance company pays out. The event organizer pays the insurer like a $100 premium whether the guy sinks the shot or not. Same goes for "hole in one" golf contests.
With the first link, the chain is forged.
I'm not talking about elements. These elements encounter more than just 'states'. I'm talking about force and the bookkeeping of information.
(BTW particle collision can result in matter, which is energy, so you need to put energy into the process, because matter is energy glued together, like with the Big Bang; radiation)
Take for example gravity; if you calculate it's effect with current formula's like E=mc squared and Newtons laws among others, you'd find gravity to be a resulting force, instead of a force. This however requires the theory of information.
So when you transform energy by means of information (where information equals energy _in this case_) and end up with forces that are actually resulting forces and therefore energy not encounted for (because they are in the forces themselves), you could end up with energyless information.
How and if that could actually be put into practise is something I sadly can not answer.
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Here's why the odds-makers are wrong: They assume that the people at the UN know something. As in anything at all. It's just the opposite.
As for me, i'd rather have the Doctor as my first point for contact with aliens (or Amy Pond for first point for -nudge nudge- CONTACT with me! Huh huh huh)
--- "The 21st century is when everything changes." Captain Jack Harkness
soylentnews.org Go there to enjoy the people!
UFO chatter is way up? 100/1 feels about right.
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2010/09/28/national/main6907702.shtml
http://www.stripes.com/blogs/stripes-central/stripes-central-1.8040/ufo-expert-aliens-cautioning-humans-on-nukes-1.119813
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
I used theory in the unofficial parlance suitable for social conversation . Scientific parlance is used in the work environment or during conversations with other scientists or Class XIX entities . Inserting hypothesis into social conversation gives the air of elitism and education which distances listeners who focus on content and don't spend their time nitpicking and being douchebags.
ERROR: Contraction used. This entity will commence self-destruct sequence by watching Fox and drinking C2H5OH.
Well I'm not sure where exactly you want to take this conversation to, but energy remains when interactions occure that we currently know of. However my point was that when messing with the underlying system, if possible, we might bump into being able to mess with that. Possibly by altering or _damanging_ parts of out universe.
You wanted to read up about this new paper about what creates gravity? It's only 29 pages long and realy not that hard. I encourage you to read it, but simply put: the three dimensional fabric of space is devided into, let's call it; voxels that can store a limited amount of information. So when you take the sun for example, that's a lot of mass, thus enegry, thus information. But it doesn't fit in these information voxels. So basicaly; if you don't chop it up into pieces that do fit (like blowing up the sun) it needs more information storage. Luckily the fabric of space is bendable. So the more matter, the more space fabric it needs, thus it is pulliung the fabric of space.
Now imagine you have a blanket on your table. You take a pen and devide it up in equaly large squires. Now put a tennisball at an outer end of the table, this is our earth. Then put a larger ball on the other end of the table, this is our sun. Now twist and pull this blanket; our sun needs more squires. The effects is that the sun (more matter) now puls the earth towards is; "ta-da!"; gravity!
Here's the paper in pdf: http://arxiv.org/pdf/1001.0785v1
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Q.) Then, how is the creation of NEW ELEMENTS explained & fit into that set of laws/conditions, 1-4 above, and are they created from already existing materials, not merely from "nothing"?
There is no creation of new elements, only change in form.
The reason there isn't a massive Big Bang erupting within the LHC is because there is no such amount of energy poured into the collision.
Basicaly the LHC is not out to create new elements on the periodic table (where did you get that from?), but find particles that make up elements in a certain configuration.
Now Lisi's theory of everything predicts a 'periodic table' of particles. The LHC is currently set out to find the one they call the Higgs Boson aka the 'God Particle'.
This God particle doesn't create matter. Instead the Higgs Boson traps energy, which is a 'state' we call matter.
The LHC 'experiment' is sometimes described as setting out to 'create' the Higg Boson particle, but that's not realy correct. If the Higgs Boson were to exists; it would be hidden. So all CERN is trying to prove with the LHC is that when you slam these atoms; they fall appart into particles, from which one should be a Higgs Boson. It appears, but is not created; it's just 'unhiding' itself for a very brief period of time.
Does that answer your questions?
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Seriously? Our ambassador to aliens is named M.Othman? Like the MOTHMAN?
Hey no problem ;)
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PS: The Higgs Boson is a meson ;)
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