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Are Habitable Exoplanets Bad News For Humanity?
An anonymous reader writes "The discovery of Kepler-186f last week has dusted off an interesting theory regarding the fate of humanity and the link between that fate and the possibility of life on other planets. Known as the The Great Filter, this theory attempts to answer the Fermi Paradox (why we haven't found other complex life forms anywhere in our vast galaxy) by introducing the idea of an evolutionary bottleneck which would make the emergence of a life form capable of interstellar colonization statistically rare. As scientists gear up to search for life on Kepler-186f, some people are wondering if humanity has already gone through The Great Filter and miraculously survived or if it's still on our horizon and may lead to our extinction."
But the way the human race is behaving currently, getting off this dirtball in any meaningful way seems exceedingly unlikely.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
answer: Space is really big.
A race could have populate half the galaxy's out there and we still wouldn't know.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Maybe the inhabitants of those other planets aren't ravening imperialist douchebags. In that case, I'm liking our odds.
Consider Jack Handey's observation:
--Jack Handey, Deep Thoughts
Welcome to the Panopticon. Used to be a prison, now it's your home.
Therefore the best thing is for the universe to be empty so we don't all get anally probed.
...because of our moon and our axial tilt. The moon creates strong tides and the tilt creates seasons, which both conspire to force organisms to adapt to change. Without one or both of these things, life may be stuck at the uni-cellular stage on many worlds.
Maybe we're just the first to develop? Or simply faster than light travel hasn't been invented.
The force that blew the Big Bang continues to accelerate.
No matter what we will never be able to outlive the universe.
What is this obsession with humanity to live for ever. We are part of the universe and the universe will exist as long as it exits. Either with human race alive or extinct.
From TFA:
EVERYTHING that does not get off the planet it is currently occupying goes extinct. Planets die. Suns die.
Getting off the planet (and out of the solar system) is difficult because space is so HUGE.
The "paradox" depends upon a the assumption that a race COULD successfully colonize another solar system before they died / their planet died / their sun died.
Maybe that is possible. But so far our ONE example (ourselves) hasn't been able to reach the closest solar system.
If Kepler-186f is teeming with intelligent life, then that would be really bad news for humanity because it would push back the Great Filter’s position further into the technological stages of a civilization’s development. This would imply that catastrophe awaits both us and our extraterrestrial companions.
No it wouldn't, because then Fermi's Paradox is solved - Fermi's Paradox exists because we Earthicans are, by all appearances thus far, the only life that exists, intelligent or otherwise. If the first exoplanet we manage to check harbors intelligent life, then it would suggest that there is a lot of intelligent life out there, and it is just effing hard to communicate and travel over interstellar distances.
I like to think that, given enough time, every species in the universe lives just long enough to create an artificial intelligence capable of exterminating that species.
"But so far our ONE example (ourselves) hasn't been able to reach the closest solar system."
We've only been able to leave the planet for fifty years. Give us a chance.
As for the original topic, the answer is 'No'. If technological life was common, it would have colonized the galaxy by now even if thousands of alien races destroyed themselves. We're clearly an exception, and may well be the first.
No. They are two entirely distinct concepts.
If Earth-like planets are rare, then we worry why are we alone.
If they are abundant, again we worry where has everybody gone.
Perhaps it's another instance of anthropic principle: the first galactic civilization exterminates all others.
A civilization would be quite hard to detect. The best chance is probably radio emissions, but even that has a fairly short practical limit. And it's noteworthy that our emissions are dropping today, as we increasinly use the spectrum for low-power digital systems rather than analogue "scream at the top of your lungs" broadcasts. It wouldn't be too far-fetched to imagine that we'd be effectively silent in another couple of generations, as we push toward more effective transmission technologies.
We could probably have dozens of other civilizations in this sector of the milky way and we'd never know it.
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
I think we'll evolve into either Eloi or Morlocks. You're either the cattle or the meat eater.
Harrison's Postulate - "For every action there is an equal and opposite criticism"
That's an interesting alternate God. Most conceptions of singular-God that I'm familiar with have him as a creative force, not a destructive force actively eliminating all life in the universe that does not lead to humans on Earth, like a cosmic bansai bush cultivator.
The idea that Homo Sapiens is a form of intelligent life is ludicrous.
The proof that the Universe is inhabited by intelligent life is that it has not contacted us.
--Calvin
Most of our energy right now comes from old stores of energy which we have been extremely lucky to find, and which will either run out, or become too dangerous to use due to resource exhaustion.
Our behaviour can not cope without scarcity. Look at Australian aboriginal people. Placed in an environment with relatively low scarcity, their culture collapsed. In the next hundred years automation will push large parts of our populations out of work. There will still be food and shelter for them, but will those people cope psychologically?
Personally I think there is a good chance that a workable population will get off Earth before things get really bad. Maybe 20%. Ask Elon Musk. I reckon he will drive the diaspora.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
We will go extinct. Just look at the number of people who gleefully cheer on causes that are against our collective long term interests: global warming deniers, the anti science movement, insane regimes like Iran and North Korea trying to get Nukes, misuse of antibiotics, anti-birth control, etc.
Also, why is Slashdot forcing me to view this story through beta? wtf? I thought we got rid of this shit?
FTL is pretty much irrelevant; even at 1% of the speed of light, we can colonize the entire galaxy in ten million years, which is a small fraction of the lifetime of the galaxy.
They managed to build huge fucking pyramids thousands of years before whitey managed to figure out how to make a house.
The basic problem with the Fermi Paradox is this, we don't really have a technology we ourselves would reliably use to communicate between stars, thus the fact that we can't find alien civilizations using a technology we wouldn't use proves nothing. Arguably the whole radio search is a waste of time since we have no reason to believe we will find anything, indeed we have one reason to believe we won't! For all we know, there could be lots of miniature alien probes all over our solar system right now, or maybe they communicate with wormholes, or it is impractical to communicate long distances, or who knows? Basically, we really don't even know what we are looking for in the first place, so the Paradox falls on it's face for lack of information.
There's about 5,000 years of recorded human history. But there's only about 200 years of industrial civilization. It's been just about 200 years since the first time a paying customer got on a train and went someplace. Think of that as the beginning of large-scale deployment of powered technology.
It wasn't until the middle of the 20th century that human activities started making a big dent in planetary resources. By now, we've extracted and used most of the easy-to-get resources. There's argument over how long it will take to run through what's left, but it's not centuries, and certainly not millennia. More difficult and sparser resources can be extracted, but that's a diminishing-returns thing.
It's quite possible that high-power technological civilization only has a lifespan of a few hundred years before the planet is used up. We might be saved by the Next Big Thing in high-power technology, but there hasn't been a major new energy source in 50 years. Nobody can get fusion to work, and fission is riskier than expected.
Incorrect. Evolution is sick, twisted, and blind. We deserve better. I believe we still have time to take control and become a better, post-human species.
Brought to you by Carl's Junior.
egomaniac much?
We deserves life, and the stars.
we crawled out of the ocean, we got out of the trees, we defeated every predator, we built towers of glass and steel, we have spanned great water ways, we have been to the moon, and we have a machine out side out solar system
We surely DO DESERVE the stars.
The stars are no place for pansies, quitters. The stars are for whom ever can grab them.
People content to live in a squalor with no motivation or goals, no curiosity, those subhumans done't deserve the stars.
"And if you think this is too harsh, you haven't studied our history like I have."
teach you grandmother to suck eggs, quitter.
With the stars comes peace, and technology to solve the issues here.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Death is what we deserve, and if we do not change, death is what should be for every man woman and child on this earth.
Don't worry, that is what every human, and every other living being, will get at some point. Even if we somehow get to the singularity and human minds can be implanted into machines (philosophically can we even be called human at that point anymore?) the heat death or collapse of the universe will destroy everything eventually anyway. And if anything ever counteracts human nature (you can't change it, but you can affect it), it would be spacetravel and contact with another intelligent civilization.
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
Did you forget to take your meds again?
What about Ponies?
What if by the time a race has evolved sufficiently that they have mastered all technology, they simply enter another dimension to escape being destroyed by their star's death?
Physics seems to be saying there could be as many as 11 dimensions, possibly more.
Maybe you only need to exist at right-angles to this one to escape any devastation coming and maybe then energy/resource needs become a non-issue.
No need to exit the solar system then and you're effectively undetectable...
I don't know the meaning of the word 'don't' - J
Which is why space travel is important, especially colonization. Think of it this way: a herd of animals lives in an area with plenty of food and water. Now, after a while, the food and water starts to dry up. Does the herd just sit around and wait to die, or does it venture out into other areas, expanding its territory. Essentially it is a natural process, and the only hope humanity has of any significantly long term existence.
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
There is some truth to this. I worry what happens when personal spacecrafts are available.
We are slowly "civilizing" the planet. Slave labor, pirates, etc.. are somewhat rare.
What happens when you can kidnap someone and create a slave camp on a random planet
millions of miles away? I hope we develop AI and other technologies first so that we can
prevent ourself from regressing once there are places to hide again.
We deserve death.
Sure. You first.
The stars are also fire.
I thought your sig was a car joke. I was more impressed when I was wrong.
We've seen fossils of simple (prokaryotic, bacterial) life that are at least 3.8 billion years old. Basically the instant it became possible for single-cell life to exist, it did. That suggests that simple life is *easy*.
It took evolution roughly a billion years to produce eukaryotic life, suggesting that step is hard. It also took 2 billion more years to produce a eukaryotic lifeform capable of space flight, suggesting that step is also hard.
The sun is predicted to make life on earth impossible in roughly ~1 billion years. An oops anywhere earlier in the process, and evolution wouldn't have had time to recover. We're lucky to exist.
So my suspicion is that the universe is relatively teeming with simple life anywhere it is possible (there are tentative signs that there *might* be life on Mars and possibly Titan too) but complex life is much rarer, rare enough that it's not surprised we haven't found any yet.
Also, wanting to communicate and explore is inherently a human desire, and whatever neo-human-cyber-whatever descendants emerge from the Singularity might not have the same desires. And I can predict their desires much more accurately than I could an aliens.
The ArsTechnica discussion went on for many pages, and may have hit 1,000 posts by now. I recommended it to several friends, just for the hyperlinks to (sometimes peer reviewed) Sci-Fi.
And if you think this is too harsh, you haven't studied our history like I have.
Through a pair of shit-tinted spectacles, apparently. It's a wonder historians aren't throwing themselves off bridges all the time, the way you paint it.
Or maybe you're just manically pessimistic.
Death is what we deserve, and if we do not change, death is what should be for every man woman and child on this earth.
So what are you doing about this apparently dire situation? Apart from posting admonishments on Slashdot?
Go play fetch with a dog in the park.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
Energy, however, may be far less available, outside of nuclear. We have used up the chemical energy stored in coal, oil, etc. that originally came from solar (or geothermal) energy deposited over millions of years.
Yeah, but that was the Egyptian subset of Africans.
The parent troll is obviously going after the darker skin subsets that live further south.
If you think I voted for Trump because of this post, you're wrong. I voted for Dr. Jill Stein of the Green Party. Again.
Life itself is the 'original' Von Neumann machines...
My theory on it is a bit different: If you posit that travel is indeed restricted to 'slow' speeds, IE 1-2% of light speed, and that habitable planets are rare enough that they're quite far apart, you run into that travel between solar systems with habitable planets can take sufficient time for significant amounts of evolution to take place.
Summary: By the time the generation ship manages to reach the new system, it's significantly likely to have evolved to be more suited to live in space, not a planet. At which point it concentrates on colonizing the asteroid belt and such, not bothering with the planet that so interested their ancestors.
Alternatively: We're becoming more and more concerned with conservation today. If this is a common function of intelligent life, our system could have been identified as a potential life-evolving one millions and millions of years ago and declared a nature preserve or something, in the hope that something like us would evolve.
I don't read AC A human right
This is completely absurd. There are roughly 7 BILLION people on this planet that you insist on painting with the same brush in the same stroke. And that counts nothing towards the countless other humans that have gotten us to this point in our evolution. Yes, humanity at its extreme can be a toxic parasite on its environment and fellow man; however that totally disregards the ability of the capable to rise above the morass and drag the bottom up with it. Don't think that's how this story will end? You think we'll end up in oblivion, fighting tribal battles for the rest of our existence? You sit there, typing your rant on a device that wouldn't have been within the wildest reaches of imagination a few short generations ago, and you condemn the greatest of humanities abilties and achievements down to destruction.
Life is a process. Historically, the pressures were strictly survivalist. Now? To me and a great many like minded, survival means a good deal more than our next meal. So instead of seeking to drive humanity down and out, how about joining those of us trying to pull the least of us out of the muck?
"Watch your cornhole, bud."
machines that think they're alive.
There are likely multiple factors preventing alien communication.
First is time. A civilization needs to survive long enough to develop radio communication. Too far along, though, and they might develop a form of communication that is undetectable to us. Furthermore we needed to have been developed enough to listen. A broadcast hitting us in the 1600s wouldn't have been detected by us.
The second is space. It's huge. (Insert HHGTTG quote here.) A civilization might need to direct its communication near the Earth or - if it is too far away - the transmission might be too weak.
Finally, there's the language/encoding barrier. Suppose I presented you with a hundred files and said that one contained a message but didn't tell you what language the message was in, whether it was audio/video/image, or how it was encoded? Would you be able to tell which one had the message and what the message is? Now add in the complications of alien languages & encoding schemes.
With all of those combined, it's no wonder we haven't found intelligent life. Even if such life is very common, it would be tricky to detect it (at least at our technological level).
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
So, what happened?
Space is kind of on the big side. Can it be likely that there are millions of different life forms spreading throughout the galaxy with no knowledge of each other?
Using slave labour, you racist scum.
Hey, can you do us a favor and hang a sign around your neck?
It should read "Caution: Sharp Corners."
Because you're edgy as FUUUUUCK bruh.
But also the path from African human populations to space flight relied on many chance events. The geography had to be just right. Migration had to be easy enough to be possible for stone age people, but hard enough to provide a break from the old ways. The US finally made it to the moon, but that was after two distinct migrations: Africa to Europe and Europe to America. Along the way there had to be enough energy to keep humans from freezing to death in the north, but enough free time to do R&D, for hundreds of years running. The second world war could have wiped us out, because we finished it off with fission bombs, but then stopped using them, but without that experience and the cold war, the Apollo program wouldn't have happened.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
Go play fetch with a dog in the park.
This is such underrated truth. Just spending time with a pooch is good for almost everything that ails you in your life. Playing with a stick in the park as you suggest is even better.
You can sit down with your dog and explain what a crappy day you're having and systematically enumerate the many ways in which your boss|SO|coworker is begging to be abducted by aliens intent on anal rape. No matter what you say, the dog will think you're just about the best thing around and might you please consider rubbing my tummy?
Be aware though, this is less effective with human females. Tummy-rubs inexplicably do little to assist the resulting situation.
Paraphrasing Calvin: "Sometimes I think that the greatest proof that there is intelligent life out there is that none of it has tried to contact us."
I didn't expect such social darwinism from you.
If you think I voted for Trump because of this post, you're wrong. I voted for Dr. Jill Stein of the Green Party. Again.
Holy smokes. I consider myself a somwhat artful troll, but 159037, i just got a chill down my spine. ... evil genius.
i have not studied history like you have.. ergo...
Damn that's good, i mean it's disjointed to the absurdity that it must be true!
Or not? NO, it's true. . No, it can't be.
This argument is silly.
First, it assumes that advances species would still be using radio waves. A silly assumption give that we see the crest of technologies that would make it obsolete on the horizon. I've always found the idea that other species would still be using radio waves in the far future ridiculous given that we've only been using them for less than 100 years.
Second, he's arguing that either there's lots and lots of other species or none. What if less than 1% of them develop intelligent life that survives long enough to travel into space? You'd have 100 planets to colonize before you started bumping into your neighbors.
Why would they bother with "Habitable" planets? The technology required to travel interstellar distances would require the species to already have incredibly powerful propulsion technology, some sort of fusion technology or better, advanced medicine, agricultural expertise, and on and on. If we had all of that, why go to other star systems when we could teraform planets right here? How many planets could we make ourselves by drawing on the resources of our own Ort cloud? Why even live around a star?!?! Why can't these other civilizations be living in the safety of the vacuum of interstellar space? Avoiding the attention of other more powerful species and the chaotic asteroid filled space that surrounds stars?
We are not nearly advanced enough to be claiming any knowledge of how star faring races may behave.
I wouldn't go so far as to call evolution sick and twisted. Evolution is just an optimization system that doesn't give a flying fuck about anything that doesn't increase the number of your offspring in the world. By the way, this is the mistake that social darwinists make - they think evolution is sacred and precious because it favors strength and intelligence, but evolution does no such thing. If evolution were a sentient being, it would be euphoric at its invention of insects and bacteria and tardigrades, and probably look at humans as some side project that didn't get very far before becoming self-destructive. A lot of people complain about the increasing number of stupid people in the world, because "intelligent people don't procreate". Even if that's true, that's evolution in action for you baby! Turns out, too much intelligence is destructive, better evolve some beings that are stupider and will shut up and procreate without asking too many questions.
Evolution doesn't need us, but the good news is that we don't need evolution. We've figured out alternate ways of survival and optimization, involving intelligence and ideas. I think we should spread our better ones to the stars, and leave our destructive evolutionary baggage at home.
A fool and his hard drive are soon parted.
Because it's such a big undertaking, nobody, until recently, has ever even tried to get fusion to work at the scale required to prove it.
The cost meant it was easier just to put off till later.
Fission's got a number of issues but the biggest by far is stupidity of designing and building inherently unstably reactors. And then continuing to use them without fixing the problem!
Again, it comes back to the bean counters. When the spend is warranted, then they'll act. If the cost of disposing of the old fission reactors/fuel and rebuilding with new inherently stable designs can be shown to be cheaper than leaving the existing ones in place then it'll happen. This situation is a good example of why to get it right first time around.
For the time being, sadly, fossil fuels are cheaper. Hence the drive to start accounting for the cost of pumping so much carbon into the atmosphere.
No alien civilizations have substantially colonized our solar system or systems nearby. Thus among the billion trillion stars in our past universe, none has reached the level of technology and growth that we may soon reach. This one data point implies that a Great Filter stands between ordinary dead matter and advanced exploding lasting life. And the big question is: How far along this filter are we?
I think the first sentence in the conclusion has problems. Why the hell would you assume, "No alien civilizations have substantially colonized our solar system or systems nearby."
I think I know why, we are stupid enough to think we are capable of understanding life that is more advanced than us. A sufficiently advanced entity could hide on our planet if it wanted to!
We've always had somewhere to go to escape the "assholes"; that's how America was founded.
Of course, we stole most of it, and handed out blankets laden with smallpox to people with no immunity at all, but hey, that's the way it was back then.
The movement to the frontier is what drove most of the innovation in the last 150 years or so; now the War Machine is the only source of most of the funding in the "Free World".
Expanding to space requires you to be locally sufficient for all your needs; can't wait a week for a shipment of o2, lol.
Working in space would definitely thin the herd, tho. :)
Truth isn't Truth - Guliani
On those other planets, Noah took a shortcut and only put one of each kind on the boat.
Table-ized A.I.
It may simply be the result of space travel being too infeasible coupled with the distance to other civilized worlds. There are probably other advanced intelligence planets but the distance is probably very great. Consider the huge 4.5 billion year lead up needed for advanced technology on earth. Even a civilization around for 100 my could haev missed us in time. Also consider that they may have come here already, say 100 million years ago, but the evidence was destroyed by natural processes, erosion.
Cancer doesn't make up the bulk of the body - but it can kill it just the same. There's enough bad eggs in the human race to make the rest combined a walking skin suit of cancer.
Going with your herd analogy, the herd spends years chasing after dwindling water supplies until it finally goes extinct. Meanwhile, other organisms evolve that are better suited to the new drought conditions.
A fool and his hard drive are soon parted.
You humanists.
You have a strange logic.
You worship at the temple of your Evolutionary God and proclaim its achievments, but deny this God has anything to do with humanities current condition.
But still insist, using the same science this God demands as tribute will somehow bring about a better future because Evolution is sick twisted and blind.
If your God of Evolution has any justice , it will terminate the gene line quickly and efficiently called Homo Sapians.
Got Geometrodynamics? Awe, too hard to figure out? Too bad.
The core of the Fermi Paradox is that there does not appear to be any basic physical limitation that would prevent an intelligent civilization from colonizing the entire galaxy in much less than a 100 million years - yet there is no case that can yet be made that Earth is anything like a boundary case of the "earliest possible biosphere". It is not a solution to the Fermi Paradox to postulate reasons why one intelligent species or another might fail to do so, it has to apply to every one of them since one outlier would go on to colonize the galaxy.
I think part of the resolution of the paradox is the implicit notion common to us humans that our form of tool-using symbolic-communicating intelligence is some sense "inevitable" and will arise given enough time. Yet observing the evolution of the large animals on Earth does not give any reason for thinking this is some sort of normal progression. The Great Apes, very similar to hominids, have not shown any trend toward evolving larger brains since the hominid-ape split 7 million years ago. No general trend toward developing human style intelligence is evident anywhere. The emerging story of hominid development is that a long series of lucky accidents seems to have been necessary to bring it about.
Human-style intelligence may be extremely unlikely to evolve at all.
Second class citizen of the New Gilded Age
"why we haven't found other complex life forms anywhere in our vast galaxy?"
because it IS a vast beyond imagination and a time differential of a few thousand years between civilizations makes all the difference.
Even if the "Great Filter" exists; even if it were 99.999% effective at wiping out civilizations, that would still mean there have been billions of years, for billions of civilizations to arise, and of those billions, perhaps tens of thousands survived to colonize space.
This is why I believe in the Zoo Hypothesis.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
While I agree with you that concentrations of power are bad; with this interpretation of "power" I would argue that corporations get pretty much all of their power from the government.
A true capitalist will apologise for the big corporations on a lot of issues, but will not defend them in leaning on the state (although they'll often place the blame on government for being corrupt in the first place).
Even more interesting to note (though in some ways explored in multitude of science-fiction stories and games) is that the ultimate reason US finally made it to the moon was Cold War - in itself an incredibly unlikely event that's brought humanity to the brink of disaster many times over. Of course, an alien species might find themselves inspired into such effort and exploration for multitude of other reasons, including just because the moon is there. In these kinds of discussions it's dangerous to assume any similar motivations. And let's not even get started on the tremendous luckiness of a moon like ours...
In good sci-fi literature we see this come up again and again in many hypothetical scenarios. Ian Douglas answers the Fermi Paradox by positing a future where a galaxy-spanning race of hyper-darwinist xenophobes mercilessly wipe out any space faring "other" race much to humanity's horror when they stumble across ruins, relics, and artifacts left by other races.
In the Crystal Spheres by David Brin we see a future where all intelligent life is closed off from habitable worlds until they themselves become space faring, and humanity is among the first to reach the stars.
In To Outlive Eternity by Poul Anderson we see a possible scenario in which humans are first by design.
Peter F. Hamilton takes us through another possibility in the Night's Dawn Trilogy where intelligent life is fairly rare and what there is out there doesn't really have an interest in "lesser" forms.
In all, we won't know for sure for a long while yet, but I think there are some good possibilities out there. And until we actually do make contact or prove ourselves to be alone, good sci-fi keeps us company in the meantime =)
I agree. Although I include with that all other life forms as well.
It's not just humans. All life is a horrible mistake, a wrong turn, an error. The inanimate machinations of the universe are plenty enough; there does not need to be stinking life in order to give supposed "meaning" to anything.
Which, I admit, is all just another way of saying "I don't like it".
Fortunately, we're unlikely to get off this rock before Sol expands and ends the whole rotten mess.
We don't deserve the stars.
We deserve death.
Incorrect. Evolution is sick, twisted, and blind. We deserve better. I believe we still have time to take control and become a better, post-human species.
You must be new here. With time you'll understand the error in your last statement. I wouldn't count on some utopian post-human species, I'm confident we'll manage to find some reason to nuke ourselves, along with our planet, out of existence. Cheers!
Another explanation is that intelligent life always emerge as fast as possible. We did it, so did the aliens at Kepler-186f, but light speed makes us unable to detect each others, as we both see the other's activity as it was 400 years ago.
Asteroid- and comet-mining would be the next stage of resource extraction. The economics of robotic space exploration are still high, but once the costs associated with conventional extraction grow high enough, it will move into orbit.
Together, we will drive the rats from the tundra.
I've usually considered myself a caring person. Reading these discussions has made me reconsider that view, because many posters seem to express actual concern over the future of humans, and whether our species will still be around many thousands, even millions of years from now.
But me, I don't seem to care. I certainly don't wish to expedite the process by harming any fellow humans, but if our species was to go extinct in the relatively near future even (hundreds of years), I would be ok with it. Species go extinct all the time. If we don't get to spread all over the galaxy, that's fine too. We aren't any more or less important than other species. (Or maybe I feel that way merely because my sense of self-worth is very low.)
It seems to me as just another example of basic human arrogance to assume that in the miniscule amount of time we've been actively looking for extraterrestrial life it's meaningful that we haven't yet been successful.
Here you go: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H...
Yup!
Brought to you by Carl's Junior.
Nope! Everyday since 1997, under one ID or another.
Brought to you by Carl's Junior.
Perhaps we just missed the previous spacefaring super race. They avoided our planet, for whatever reason.... Maybe they had something equivalent to a Prime Directive, or perhaps they just hadn't quite gotten here yet, or maybe our planet was too cold by their standards and they passed it by since there were plenty of options that more closely met their requirements. Then they all died. Disease. Failure of some biological experiment. War. Reason doesn't matter, to us right now. Could we be overthinking the problem?
So now Slashdot is some weird cult with rules to thinking that everyone agrees on? And you say I must be new here.
Nice!
Brought to you by Carl's Junior.
I'm starting to become convinced there is simply no way to travel in a meaningful way among the stars. No species has figured out how to do anything like FTL or even slow boating. Or they tried and failed.
Sad. But its really starting to seem like we're stuck here unless we wanna try to slow boat to another star system. I don't think there is a way to travel among the stars in a way that is actually useful.
As far as self-destruction.. dunno.. impossible to predict, but if the religious nuts get their way, we'll annihilation ourselves eventually.
... No matter what you say, the dog will think you're just about the best thing around and might you please consider rubbing my tummy? Be aware though, this is less effective with human females. Tummy-rubs inexplicably do little to assist the resulting situation.
I've found that back rubs work a lot better with human females. Dunno why, though. Maybe some biologists can explain it.
(Funny thing is that we have had a number of small parrots - cockatiels, conures, etc. - as pets, and the females have all liked back rubs, but the males generally don't. I wonder how widepread this pattern might be in other vertebrate species. ;-)
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
On the contrary, if we flatline our population at a low enough level, we can maintain a high tech society indefinitely on this planet. The only materials we are truly consuming are uranium and other materials that we transmute to other elements. With enough energy input, we can recycle *everything* else. We can even take CO2 out of the air and turn it back into coal if we want.
It's simply a question of managing our resources for the long term.
And humans can do this, there was an isolated island in the pacific which maintained a good standard of living for hundreds of years via limiting population and managing resources until they were interfered with by outsiders. Their means of population control wasn't pretty--infanticide. However, we have better ways now to control population and in principle we could do the same planetwide.
Another example, the Japanese have re-forested their island, another example where humans can maintain and improve their environment, perhaps indefinitely. There's no need for the "herd" to move on if the "herd" maintains a good environment.
Just because humans presently are mostly NOT doing this does not mean we cannot.
Though I would prefer that humans self-modify so that they are more suitable for space habitats and move off the planet. The planet is only sustainable so long as there's no really big cataclysm of whatever sort.
So I agree with your point about colonization, however, I do NOT agree that 'using up the local resources' is the driving reason for diversifying habitat.
--PM
It's "farther". Farther south. You must be a dumb nigger.
Unfortunately, slave labor and pirates aren't really rare.
Everyone in North Korea except the ruling class is pretty much a slave.
How free are the poor worldwide? I mean really, how free are they? In how many regimes worldwide do people have a really good shot at changing who their masters are?
What chains are YOU wearing that you're not even aware of?
--PM
No, I think you are essentially correct.
And this is the "Great Filter."
A successful escape from the gravity well requires a lot of cooperation. It's much easier to simply take the resources you wish, scarce as they are on the planet, than to expand and colonize off-planet. That's a dead-end route, of course, you and your descendents for a few generations rule a dying world, until it dies, and you with it. Whether you manage to hold out until the world dies naturally, or you purify it with nuclear fire, the outcome is essentially the same.
And those dead-end routes are the odds on favorites for any species in our position. Just a few minutes reviewing the news on any randomly chosen day should make that clear. Many nasty characteristics that have been selected for prior to this point suddenly become liabilities. Physical technology has improved dramatically, but our social tech level is little if any improved from its state 10k years ago. If we do not improve the social tech dramatically and very very quickly then we are extremely likely to exterminate ourselves with our physical technology.
I suspect there ARE other species that have crossed this threshold already, actually, but if there are the last thing they would do is let a primitive, violent race like ours know of their existence.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
And intelligent life is even rarer still. In 4 billion years of evolution, intelligent life (i.e., intelligent enough for high technology) has only evolved once and has only been around a few million years. But I don't think we're in serious danger of extinction any time soon. We're extremely adaptable, and once we establish self-sustaining colonies on other worlds, it's very unlikely that any act of nature will kill us off. That means the only plausible threat to our survival is ourselves, and we've been getting less violent throughout our history. That trend probably won't reverse any time soon.
I suspect that, once intelligent life does evolve, it probably survives more often than not. That means there probably aren't many species anywhere near our level of technology, as most are probably much, much older than us.
Nice obscure reference there...
Liberty in your lifetime
I've read a couple of your posts. You have an odd way of thinking about these things.
For example, you seem to be suggesting that specific conditions like geography and climate were necessary for humanity to develop space flight technology. It's as if you conclude that if things didn't happen exactly as they did, we wouldn't have achieved what we have. As if what we've achieved is the pinnacle of possible achievement in the timespan involved.
But I have no idea why you would assume that as a precondition of your argument. What if the dark ages hadn't happened? We'd probably have had space travel in the 1700s. What if different accidents of geography 50,000 years ago had caused human technology to develop even faster than it did? Maybe we've actually been held back by these accidents, and would be significantly more advanced than we are had they not happened.
Who can say? Pretty much no one. Which is why the basis of your argument is so absurd.
Unfortunately, slave labor and pirates aren't really rare.
Everyone in North Korea except the ruling class is pretty much a slave.
How free are the poor worldwide? I mean really, how free are they? In how many regimes worldwide do people have a really good shot at changing who their masters are?
What chains are YOU wearing that you're not even aware of?
--PM
The great myth of childhood is that as an adult you can do what you want.
That being said, I (like most people in the US) have a day or two off a week,
get a couple weeks off a year for vacation, I am never physically assaulted
by anyone. I can visit my family, go swimming, relax by the pool, visit other
countries, get proper medical care, have more than enough food, and have
very little risk of being attacked while asleep, etc... I am way better off than
even the king of england was a thousand years ago. Even the person on
minimum wage working at walmart can go swimming, read a book, etc.. on
the days they don't work. No they can't easily change who their master is but
they also aren't working 12 hours a day 7 days a week and most can afford
luxuries like TV, electricity, running water, a refrigerator, a telephone, etc..
I just read recently that the rich actually work more hours per week than the
poor do now. You can't compare forced labor where someone might have a
2-3 year life expectancy and nothing to their name to someone on minimum
wage with a house, tv, cellphone, etc.. who still has the option of quiting at
any time and hitchhiking to another state if they really wanted to.
Space is too vast and too dangerous and too antithetical to life (on exponential scales) to expand into. And thank god for that, because otherwise we'd destroy the whole universe and not just this one world like we're going to.
"With the stars comes peace, and technology to solve the issues here."
I just visited Grant's Tomb today, and what is inscribed atop the largest mausoleum in the U.S.?
"Let Us Have Peace"
Every fucking drunken genocidal technocratic asshole always promises "peace" for their imperialistic delusions. Thank god space is a deep enough barrier to finally stop them.
Keep in mind that historians' rating of Presidents is basically correlated with how many citizens got killed while they were in office (more is better). That's historians for you -- "if it bleeds it leads", that being good for their business, writ large.
http://www.academia.edu/1468267/War_and_Presidential_Greatness
Is consciousness and technology a short-term investment or a long-term? That's really the wager. Describing what's happened in "a few short generations" is not really evidence for the latter.
Advanced societies and cultures have salted their soil and burned their resources and destroyed themselves time and time again. Does our technology have more or less capacity of doing that? The fact that space serves as a final firebreak is no bad thing.
>> some people are wondering if humanity has already gone through The Great Filter and miraculously survived or if it's still on our horizon and may lead to our extinction."
I think the Great Filter is almost certainly a "survival through intelligence" test. Species on planets that successfully survive inevitable global threats that come along with technological advancement (such as nuclear wars, runaway global warming etc) are the ones that pass simply by surviving.
They only survived because they were smart enough to all take a long-term view and actively resolve problems, rather than avoid change, live in denial and/or not take responsibility for their own actions just so a few individuals can make/retain more money/power in the short term.
Unfortunately I don't see humanity even coming close to a chance of passing such a test, so it can't be that we've already gone through it.
There is no paradox. The equation predecits the number of space travelling races by assuming a value of 1% for probabilites that are totally unknown. They might be 50%, or they might be 1 in 10^500. They're totally unknown.
it's a blue/green gem of a planet. Maybe you should get off your fat ass and see some of the beauty and splendor it has to offer.
Earth is a nature reserve in their eyes. We're not needed in this reserve though, in their eyes. That's my feeling.
Maybe the reason why we haven't encountered alien civilizations is simply that we are the first in our region?
If you think about it you need a second generation start like our Sun because the first lot of Stars needed to go supernova to generate the heavier elements and compact our star system into something like it is now along a nice plane with larger gas giants and a "cloud" of water bearing asteroids circling far out. The earlier second generation stars also had a problem where earlier in our galaxies history there were more pulsars and O-type stars that could have killed life by sending jets of high energy radiation our way.
Next you have to wait for the planet to form and then get water from the stabilization of larger gas planet orbits bringing in the water bearing asteroids. Then you have to wait for the planet to cool, the water to seep down and create some sort of active continents with plate techtonics. Then you have to wait for the iron to settle in with the water, first life to start producing oxygen in the atmosphere, and evolution taking its long course to make something that can make useful technologies and contemplate the universe.
Could just be that we are the first (somewhat) intelligent life around.
WTF, nothing is running out that we can't find replacements for even if we don't develop new technology, which we will. All we need is energy, and we get a shit-tone of that from the sun even if everything else was used up, which it can't be.
It doesn't matter how many inteligent species are out there if we can't meet or communicate with them.
There is only a small window for a species to get off a planet, that window is determined by cheap plentiful resources and energy.
If missed the ability to get off planet is still there it just has an exponentially longer time frame.
History shows that our species has little chance to survive (with a productive functional civilization) for that long. A species that can't get off world is doomed to perish.
Cheap resources can be wasted quickly, as we have been doing.
Cheap oil , coal, and synthetics to support food production, transport , people and industry
These resources are finite, it is almost like a very hard test. Pass and the universe is yours, fail and you get to eek out a limited existence until your eventual extinction.
Yes we could still get off this rock, but without cheap resources the initial establishment and early supply and maintenance of a large space presence?...the technical hurdles are huge.
Our species also needs to beat aging.
Unless our priorities change humanity isn't getting off this rock any time soon, and as each day passes we get a few million barrels closer to a world with limited energy, plastics and synthetics. A few million barrels closer to never being able to leave in any meaningful way.
Since we're just dabbling with genetic engineering right now, we haven't passed the bottleneck yet. As long as we don't wipe out humanity by GMO-induced starvation or the occasional killer disease, we should be fine.
Also, let's focus on interplanetary colonization first. The solar system has plenty of space - once it's mostly settled, there will be enough economic power to try the interstellar thing.
If the Many-worlds interpretation is correct, then it should be no surprise that we find ourselves existing in a world in which we have avoided an extinction catastrophe. If that outcome is sufficiently rare, then we should not expect to find any other advanced civilizations, because they will have all been eliminated by their own extinction events with high probability. Therefore, if there is a "Great Filter", and Many-worlds is true, then all advanced civilizations are isolated in their own private Everett branch.
"Remember, there never were pineapple-almond cookies here."
My counter argument to the Fermi paradox is this: if there are hundreds, perhaps thousands of nice and peaceful civilizations who all like astronomy, and specially radio astronomy, then perhaps they have forged an agreement that lets keep quiet for long periods of time so that all participants can do meaningful exploration of new civilizations, like us. Maybe the time to advance our radio-space exploration and understanding of cosmos is very short so we will shut up too (radio silence), very soon.
Perhaps we should start investigating what would be the "Central Universe Time (CUT)" or, "Central Galaxy Time (CGT), because if such agreement would exist then the silence would be certainly broken at defined time intervals. Transmission times would be naturally determined by prime numbers and some exotic mathematics. :)
"NEWS AT ELEVEN! (CGT)"
I mean, a little is useful for medicine, but other than that, what would you have us save it for?
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Oh come now, of course discovering potentially habitable planets is great news! The more places one colonizes, the less you have to worry about being wiped out. Fighting extinction via creating self sufficient off-world colonies is #1 priority for any sentient race. Soon as the first rocket leaves your home planet's atmosphere they don't stop launching until you've got bases on your moons and possibly neighboring planets. Introductory school teaches your star will die one day, so as soon as one discovers how to survive without a magnetosphere in a bio-dome the seed ships are being built -- There are always some folks ready to get away from it all, literally. Cosmic oat sowers plan on visiting multiple planets in case the ones you find aren't great, and advancements allow not-so hospitable places to be homes; They just make pit-stops to let off those who want to stay and keep on trucking -- Who needs planets or even stars if you have a self sustaining generation ship? Just scoop up bits of raw material in a picturesque nebula or stellar nursery to build more modules and support more people; Then make like cells and divide!
I mean, really, who could resist with such a nice clear sky beckoning you out to the stars, and a huge moon that seems like you could reach out and touch it -- full of He3 which produces protons instead of neutrons when fused so you can use magnets to contain the radiation. Closer in is Venus, heralding the sunrise, visible with the naked eye, hinting that you might look for other harder to spot planets -- With a reactive atmosphere full of sulfuric acid and carbon too. If you look further out you might notice Mars, distinctly red and orbiting fast enough it's easy to see it's not a star -- covered in iron oxide which dissolves readily in sulphuric acid, I might add... [Fe2O3 + 3H2SO4 ==> Fe2(SO4)3 + 3H2O; and: Fe + H2SO4 ==> FeSO4 + H2]
Your moon and sister world provides a spartan training ground for your next jaunt into deep space, and what do you know? The next step out there's an asteroid belt where a planet used--er would have been, chock full of raw materials for building things in space without paying a huge gravity tax -- Home to the dwarf planet Ceres (1/3rd the mass of the belt) which has water, isn't that nice? There's, Jupiter, a gas giant that's nearly a brown dwarf to study intense gravometrics without burning up in the sun. There's beautiful ringed Saturn with its diamond rain, hexagonal polar weather and a brilliant blue aurora -- higher energy particles than your red and green ones, why it's practically a planet sized particle accelerator already. There's moons full of methane and oceans of water. There's even a ringed planet spinning on its side so you can observe the rare tidal effects without even needing a simulation! Braided rings? Look no further than Neptune, which has winds so fast they circle they can massive planet every 16 hours -- Don't you even want to find out where all that atmospheric heat is coming from to drive those blistering winds despite being so distant from the sun? I'd want to know yesterdecade! To say nothing of the breath taking ice field that surrounds your star further out: There's no end to the sparks of imagination its comets can ignite.
Yep, no sentient race could possibly turn it's back on a cosmic red carpet that amazing and instead just dally about the gravity well, squabbling over pitiful planetary economics of non-replenishable energy sources as if they had all the time in the world -- As if their magnetosphere wasn't 500,000 years Overdue to flip... Fairly regular field flop cycles, then just as soon as life shows signs of intelligence: No more pole switches which leave you vulnerable to cosmic rays, solar flares, CMEs, etc. Purely a coincidence, I'm sure. During reboot shield strength drops to emergency power levels (5%) for a good while, and with the odd geomagnetic reversal pattern interval, who knows when that protective magnetic force field is coming back online. Y
Nature has been burning coal, lumber, peat, for millions of years, and this is observable in the atmosphere. Kinda hard to tell the difference at a 400+ ly remove.
AKA it's a lot easier to take a spectrogram of a star than it is a planet. Size, radiance, etc.
Going to be a while before we have long enough baseline interferometry to be looking at other solar systems planets and saying authoritatively what was going on in their atmosphere hundreds of years ago (remember, 400 ly distance is 400 years delay for light to reach us, too.)
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
I don't see how a species can hope to survive the next catastrophe when people are more interested in living hedonistic lives. As soon as people start to really feel the pressure of finite resources, war and eventual nuclear holocaust seem inevitable.
You don't need a lot of resources when you can spend your free time living in your own virtual paradise universe. We will get to this point well within our lifetime.
Welcome to the Matrix, Neo.
In free space, point to point, lasers. Within an atmosphere, signals, radio or otherwise, in cables. Why? Because that multiplies the spectrum enormously. The only reason to use radio in space past a certain point of technological advancement is for broadcast use. You'd have to postulate some reasons to broadcast to really make your point. I can't think of any, personally. The one case of advertising "we're here" seems to be potentially quite unsafe. Other than that, why would you do so once you had comm lasers in orbit, etc.?
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
The stars are also fire.
Err no! The stars are mainly a fusion reactor that consumes Hydrogen which in turn produces predominately Helium resulting in vast amounts of energy being released. A "fire" normally requires Oxygen and our star has no Oxygen to aid that process.
There ain't no such thing as proprietary standards only proprietary formats. Standards are by definition open.
Actually, I would think that if evolution where sentient, it would be seating back laughing at humans who are ether in the next 200+ years going to use everything up or take evolution with us to space. Including a large number of insects, bacteria, fungus, plants and tardigrades*. That might even out live us off world. Why is evolution laughing??? Because it knows that delaying taking to space is just stupid. It made us inorder to bring life to those other dead rocks, but no you're going to kill ourselves off first when you're so fucking close. He laughs when we run from fission power, which gives us the means to colonize space but we run around acting like a couple nuclear rockets blowing up in the atmosphere is going to make huge impact on get these the environment. Hell, it'll mainly give evolution a bit more entropy to it's random number generator. Well, now I know what to say to next time am talking to some crazy vegan about how bad man is for the environment. Only one question left??? Will evolution make humanity 2.0 more peaceful and agreeable; or less. I think less....
*It would be almost impossible for any large number of people to get into space with those stowaways making it too.
We picture this Great Filter (if it is something lying in our future) as something deeply sinister waiting for us out there in the galaxy. But it may just be simple probability.
For the last few decades or so, we've been playing Russian Roulette with technology that has the potential to end our civilization. Even barring climate change, how high do you rate the odds of us making it through the next thousand years? All it takes is one little fuck-up. And with every technological advance, the edge between our destructive and our defensive capabilities gets a little bigger.
We've only had advanced technology development for a couple hundred years. So far we've no evidence that such development can survive the degradation of natural resources, climate, food supply, supporting species, etc., that it would seem it has a strong tendency to do. Even if we don't go extinct, we may go back to crawling around on all fours any day now, it's rather looking like it. We ARE Devo.
Given the most powerful interests don't seem willing to recognize the path of unsustainability they've sent us careening down, I really don't see this Ayn Randian fever dream panning out too well.
Do Humanists believe in Gods? I don't think you could form a coherent argument if your life depended on it.
If you think someone isn't free to have a different definition of "freedom" you may be a tyrant.
You don't even know what "better" is. That's a relative term for each person and no person will ever know that answer.
The thing is, success is not guaranteed. And right now for many of us, it's not looking all that promising. The fact we've not detected any signs of other technological development in the universe could be because when it happens it's just a short term blip. It may be that an intelligent organism surviving its many stupidities is really, really hard, and therefore, really really rare.
Sorry, it was a throwaway remark - I was referring to Poul Anderson's "The Stars are Also Fire" which won the Prometheus Award back in the 90s. I spent seven years as a professional cosmologists so I'd be extremely worried if I didn't know that stars run on fusion :)
We might already be the result of one, or even several, such oopses.
Unfortunately, our data base (one planet with a civilization capable of rudimentary space flight capabilities) is too small to make statisticially relevant statements beyond "Civilizations capable of space flight can exist.".
Great. So there is hope we disprove its existence. And, you are right, Great filter couldn't have a son.
S/he's just some 15 year old morose goth kid feeling bad because divorced mommy or daddy won't buy him that hearse he saw another unique 15 year old morose goth kid on MTV drive around in.
> We've always had somewhere to go to escape the "assholes"; that's how America was founded.
*BEEP* Wrong, America was formed as you want to be religious arseholes but were not allowed.
Then you were taxed. And that was Not Good.
Better is an intelligent species that can survive it's evolutionary infancy. Better is a species that develops technology that ultimately knocks down silly borders in a welcomed way. Better is a species that uses technology to establish persistent, world-wide dialog. Better is getting along. Better is the ability to use technology to augment ourselves as individuals however we see fit, without regulation or constraint, where this ability develops in parallel with aforementioned points. Better is the right to get old and die only if you want to. So on and so forth...
You cannot deny that something has got to give if we are ever to stop hating and killing each other as a past-time, which is an evolutionary endowment.
Brought to you by Carl's Junior.
Well, the animals I know have decided to slurp up as much water from the drying pond as they can, while they can. They also like to form gangs to fight over the water. They are collectively incapable of reaching a rational conclusion. An intelligent life form would probably fare better.
We deserve death.
Thankfully, Jesus thinks we deserve mercy. His grace his sufficient.
What's a meta for?
Maybe you haven't read the Bible, but God is kind of a dick and by that, I mean a genocidal madman. He had a thing for mass murder, with the whole killing of the first born of every household on Passover, killing Job's family to prove a point, wiping out Sodom and Gomorrah and, oh yeah, destroying the world with a fucking flood.
Wiping out worlds for petty reasons totally seems like it would be in his repertoire.
russia, america, australia,germany, have 200+ years of coal left, maybe even 1000 years
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
You're, like, too silly for me.
If you think someone isn't free to have a different definition of "freedom" you may be a tyrant.
We've only very, very, very recently (in galactic time spans) discovered ways to destroy ourselves. Wake me if we're still here in a thousand years, until then it's all easily explained by beginner's luck.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
I am no sort of scientist, so whatever I say can be entirely misinformed. Personally I think interstellar travel an its' related subjects are still far too much in the dark to be discussed with any form of authority. Another explanation for the lack of visitors could be that interstellar travel would require such an advanced mastery of the elemental forces and laws of nature that by the time this is achieved; the value of life in the universe is comparatively low next to the other natural occurrences we are as now completely ignorant about. But then again, I am rather dumb, this might be completely dumb also.
Luckily we have about 10,000 - 1,000,000 years worth of energy in uranium and thorium (depending on how fast you think energy needs will grow). Plenty of time to work out fusion and expand into space.
What if the time scale were all wrong? We form thoughts in milliseconds. What if an intelligence exists that takes an eon to form a single thought? Their RF period would be measured in hundreds of years. The Drake equation needs this modification, that is, odds that we can detect the intelligence.
Space is big. Time is bigger.
Humans can't get a long with each other and are way too selfish and greedy.
We have more wealth than ever yet so many are living in poverty, starving, without even clean running water.
Humans don't deserve to survive or expand.
That will never happen. Keep dreaming, at least you have that.
Incorrect. Evolution is sick, twisted, and blind. We deserve better. I believe we still have time to take control and become a better, post-human species.
Some of us maybe. For the rest? They might as well be Neanderthals.
The problem is how incredibly, incredibly difficult it is to survive off this planet. Even after global thermonuclear war and the zombie apocalypse, you're still better off on Earth. Think of the most inhospitable places there are here. The Gobi desert. Antarctica. These places are still orders of magnitude easier to survive in than the moon, or Mars, or Venus or anywhere else we can maybe get to. At least you can walk outside without a space suit and live for a few minutes in these places. In the Gobi desert there's air pressure. Oxygen. Some hope of finding food. A magnetic field to shield us from the sun's harmful radiation. But in space? On the moon or Mars? None of that. Step outside and you're dead dead dead from a half dozen different sources.
Pretty much no matter what happens to our civilization or planet, unless the entire atmosphere is boiled away we're still better off trying to eek out an existence here than anywhere we've found off this planet.
This is why I get annoyed by the "we've got to get off this rock!" argument. No, we have to take care of this rock, because there's nowhere else to go.
We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.
We've seen fossils of simple (prokaryotic, bacterial) life that are at least 3.8 billion years old. Basically the instant it became possible for single-cell life to exist, it did. That suggests that simple life is *easy*.
It took evolution roughly a billion years to produce eukaryotic life, suggesting that step is hard. It also took 2 billion more years to produce a eukaryotic lifeform capable of space flight, suggesting that step is also hard.
Since we only have one data point, all of this is basically a guess though. Maybe it doesn't take a billion years to produce eukaryotic life - maybe it's really quite fast, but the conditions just weren't right for a long time and that held it back. Get another planet with more suitable conditions and you might be talking millions instead of billions of years. My point is that we just don't know because we don't have enough data to tell the difference between low probability and high probability events.
http://blog.nexusuk.org
Perhaps whoever is running this version of the universe simulation decided there would only be one intelligent civilization to develop in it because they are studying something very specific.
So it took only a few million years for creatures that can build on ancestors' knowledge to emerge on Earth. The assumption seems to be that as soon as there's some complexity in animals' information processing, we're on our way to a civilization capable of reaching the stars. Maybe this last step is wrong. I don't think we'd have made it off the planet at all without a sound system of written accumulated knowledge and systematic application of the scientific method. Are other intelligent animals building lasting legacies? Will porpoises or chimps be building rockets? Perhaps the development of creatures that can accumulate and use ancestors' knowledge is the bottleneck. Did humans evolve these capabilities so we could look outward and travel to other celestial bodies? Nope. It was a side effect. Did other types of animals evolve with information-hoarding tendencies? So far we only know of others closely related to us that might have, and there's little evidence they did.
From the Article
"No alien civilizations have substantially colonized our solar system or systems nearby. Thus among the billion trillion stars in our past universe, none has reached the level of technology and growth that we may soon reach. This one data point implies that a Great Filter stands between ordinary dead matter and advanced exploding lasting life. And the big question is: How far along this filter are we?"
Just because we cant currently detect it doesnt mean it doesnt exist..
at one point humanity thought the world was flat, then the center of the galaxy, then the only galaxy. hell, some people still think that there is nothing past our atmosphere.
the entire premise of the theories proposed here are based on some rather large assumptions, the first that life on other planets would evolve exactly as it has here on earth, other species would need electromagnetic communication to organize, other societies would have the drive to expand and conquer as we have.
It is known that we only use roughly 10% of our brains, what if another species on another planet managed to develop a form of telepathy early on, that would negate the need for vocal chords and would change the driving force for technological evolution.
we are theorizing about something we haven't even explored yet, someone is trying to get his 15 minutes of fame by pulling on the fear strings. I would argue that this article proves 1 thing and 1 thing alone. it is time to start exploring the stars, when we have space agencies that are so risk adverse they wont send astronauts on a one way trip (even if those astronauts were to volunteer for it) then maybe we are coming up to that filter, maybe the great filter is burocracy and we are inches away from it as we read these silly articles on slash dot.
how about you go do something productive today
Let's let TOM speak shall we:
"I'm having great conversations on this site with one of my alias accounts" - by Tom (822) on Monday April 07, 2014 @02:29PM (#46686259) Homepage
FROM -> http://slashdot.org/comments.p...
APK
P.S.=> Tom *tried* to libel me & failed after I destroyed him in a technical debate on hosts files... result?
Tom ended up "eating his words" here http://slashdot.org/comments.p... spiced with "the bitter taste of SELF-defeat" + HIS FOOT IN HIS MOUTH
... apk
If we find there is intelligent life there, and go make the visit, we'll have resolved the paradox by being the aliens ourselves.
ya know folks had that asteroid that hit earth not hit OR say hit elsewhere or been just a bit smaller or even larger...
you see all through history of earth that evolved life was big bad carnivores......
thus my take is that for every 10000 earths or maybe 100,000 you might get what we call some form of intelligent life
perhaps as little as one in a million but when you consider that out of what a few thousand stars they have found like 2-3 earth like planets...
100 000 000 000 stars / 10000 = 10 000 000 earth like planets
10,000,000 as few as 10 as many as 100 intelligent species in our entire galaxy....
plenty a real estate room thats for sure.
note i could be off by huge factors we could be one of a dozen races of the galxy or TRULY alone ....so far....
also note our location in the galxy i thik there is also a habitable zone in galaxies too....
that 100 number then you could divide by say 10 because more stars are closer to the center ( more radiation and other issues )
Oh, hey Azriel Abyss, the Prince of Sorrows. I didn't see you come in.
Joking aside, what a sad outlook. Sure history highlights the brutality and atrocities, and if you do not accept the achievements in beauty then I point to the kindness and compassion that happens on a day to day basis. The overwhelming wash of small actions that are not globally interesting to make the history books, but profoundly affect the parties involved. Someone jumping a car for a stranger late to a job interview.. donating to a food pantry.. just stopping to say hello to a coworker on a bad day.. or a young mind sparked to better people through community action.
I guess if I were to discount those actions, and only take humanity for the history book cliff notes of violence, then I would definitely pull up a seat on goth talk. Thankfully I don't and I see a slow progression of betterment. Maybe we'll hit that sort of 'awakening' (as seen with tv tropes with alien archetypes), but if not I think we'll do pretty okay.
Replace all coal/nat gas burning power plants, all trucks, ships and airplanes within one year? Citation needed.
Citation provided. Though an all-electric Chevy Citation with a rooftop PV panel to charge while it's parked would be sort of funny.
Like literally impossible. I know we generally refuse to believe that almost anything is impossible in the long run, and we have theories on how it might possibly be possible. But it might not be, and that could create a lot of isolated star clusters all colonized but with little practical ability reach stars separated by any great divide. I also don't think colonizing a planet such that it is massively productive can ever be accomplished quickly, especially if you have to transport the enormous stock of resources necessary to accomplish the feat at sub light speed.
At current planetary power usage, we could only power everything with uranium and thorium for another 3.6 billion years. That's just with known reserves (which include a lot of man made thorium waste mountains). If we harvested uranium from the ocean (still economical today if we didn't have cheap uranium), we could power everything forever and ever.
So there's plenty of cheap available energy for when our distant descendents come out of their caves and realize they can split atoms. And with cheap energy, everything else is cake.
Truth
Or that it's only possible on a new planet, or that it must come early for inteligent life to have a chance of developping, or that it happened by chance.
Rethinking email
Considering we haven't been allowed to conduct full geological surveys throughout North America, this is no understatement.
It's also posible that industrialization is only possible on a world that's built up enough sequestered energy that can be easily exploited (fossil fuels), and that while intelligence has evolved a few times homo sapiens were the first time that it happened post the mass extinctions that created the fossil fuel reserves we needed to get beyond the primitive easily extinguished by natural disasters stage.
If there were sapient dinosaurs for a few thousand years but they didn't have coal or oil to fuel industry would we be able to find evidence of them (considering how hard finding human cities that were loft for a couple hundred/thousand years, the 64 million years since the KT event could cover up a lot.)?
Agreed. Marconi commercialized radio in the mid 1890s. Twenty years later humanity was busy gassing ourselves in trenches.
I'm going to make up a new term (forgive me if there's already a word for it): "engineer-intelligent." Modern humans are "engineer-intelligent" in that we can realy get important shit done. Dolphins are not, nor are dogs, parrots or chimpanzees. Most importantly of all: human beings of merely ten thousand years ago (essentially the same genotype that you see around today) are also not!!
What I mean is that from a really big picture perspective, where dramatic fate-changing things get done -- having nuclear wars, or deflecting killing asteroids, or releasing nanobots that eat the whole planet's surface, or launching an intersteller colony -- things that doom us or save us, a human from ten thousand years ago is essentially indistinguishable from a paramecium. People back then, were no better equipped and able to get big important things done, than your dog is.
I know you can argue with that. I don't say it lightly. Obviously, people weren't really less intelligent, but effectively, they were. For various reasons, they lacked the culture, the industrial base, the technology, the economic surplus, and other things, that kept from from building their nanotech-nuclear-missile-wielding colonial asteroid-deflector spaceships.
What we have here in our century, isn't simply part of Life, or even simply part of Life on Earth. It's uniquely part of Our Life.
All those prerequisites lined up to allowed it, once, in all this planet's four billion years of history. Amazing biodiversity came and went, without ever even getting slightly close to doing it.
You can easily speculate (without any evidence), that maybe some dinosaurs 77 million years ago spoke language to each other and knew how to light fires and told each other stories and could even solve complicated math problems. It probably didn't happen, but let's just pretend it did. The issue isn't just that, in the end, they still didn't build spaceships. What I'm saying is that they probably wouldn't have built spaceships. Those ridiculously-improbable qualities that I just speculated, are not enough.
Engineer-intelligence is rare. We're using a small sample so, sure, it's hard to extapolate accurately, but we really do at least know about this one planet, and it's rare. Life can be common, and even intelligent life (in the sense that maybe dolphins, parrots, chimps, and speaking math-wizard fire-lighting dinosaurs are intelligent) could even possibly be common, and even human-level intelligence could be common and STILL this thing, "engineer-intelligent" life, appears to be rare. It's so rare, that even among modern humans in 2014, you can find parts of the world where people live and don't have it.
What ended up happening to even humanity itself -- given a premise where you get to start with biologically modern humans -- was was not inevitable. That should fucking stun you, and yet, it's true. This is where we start to get into the anthropological issues, where things as simple as a mutation in a grass seed, combined with just perfect/lucky timing of weather, "fertile crescent" geography, and yes, the specifics of our intelligence and biology (e.g. the shape of our hands) as opposed to countless other hypothetical intelligences, all come into play. Our fate hung by such a slender thread. There are so many ways history could have played out, where we wouldn't have ever ended up in a world with nuclear weapons and spaceships, yet still had the same brains that we have.
I think there's life out there, but am not surprised we don't see their Bussard ramjets shining.
Give me a hundred men (and FTL) and I'll conquer them all.
Let's add that Mansa Musa from Mali accidentally crashed the Egyptian economy in his little vacation to Mecca.
Before we go off theorizing about life on a faintly visible planet 500 light years away, it seems like we might learn something by exploring our own solar system and say, explore mars with a manned mission. We are certainly not candidates to ponder overcoming interstellar space travel if we can't even take the smallest baby step by visiting our nearest planetary neighbors.
The universe is 14 billion years old. Earth is 4.5 billion years old. Extrapolation shows that life has likely been evolving for about 9 billion years. We also know that very shortly (in geologic terms) after water arrived on our planet, green slime started spreading. I thought the current dominant theory was that life's origins are extraterrestrial and that somehow it jumped from wherever it started through space to a newly formed earth. If life traveled here aboard the shattered remains of the planet it evolved on, this would seem to indicate that we are the descendants of an extremely unlikely chain of events, which might make us the only life to have survived this long.
set softtabstop=4 shiftwidth=4 expandtab nocp worlddomination
Amazingly on point and intelligent comment; however, this being the internet and all I will throw in some poorly thought out philosophy. "Also, wanting to communicate and explore is inherently a human desire, and whatever neo-human-cyber-whatever descendants emerge from the Singularity might not have the same desires. And I can predict their desires much more accurately than I could an aliens." Or maybe other creatures are intelligent enough to know their limitations. Almost all creatures of evolution ( I cannot speak on behalf of creationist whose world began merely 7-10K years ago. ) will not try to explore or 'rock the boat' unless living conditions have become harsh or less than ideally paired with their evolutionary abilities. Unfortunately this is true with humans too. I do not think the money or full effort will be given to planet colonization until the shiz hits the fan and the time needed is far longer than the time available. Perhaps this has already played out time and time again with other beings in other universes.
You forgot rainbow juice and unicorn farts
God made man to inhabit the Earth.
The LORD God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to work it and keep it. Gen 2:15
What good would a hard drive, etc. do if technology were set back 200 years? Acid-free paper, or better yet engraved tablets, are where it's at for preserving knowledge through a loss of technology. Something like HD-rosetta "microfiche tablets" are also an option, though you have to keep in mind the level of technology necessary to read the engraving at the desired scale.
Hmm, now that could actually be an interesting way to make "time capsules" to preserve knowledge for future generations while imposing a bit of a filter as well - if we knocked ourselves back to the stone age we wouldn't necessarily want to give our descendents immediate access to nuclear tech or even gunpowder - they'd have a lot of cultural adaptation to do as well. So: create tablets engraved at multiple level of detail.
At the topmost "naked-eye" level something inspired by the Voyager "golden record" - a pictographic representation of the fundamentals of the underlying basic principles of science, arranged in decorative patterns so that the whole lends itself to being a decorative antique, or sacred relic of the ancients. Planetary motion. Newton's laws, Archimedes principles, germ theory, etc. The basics that would do our stone-or-iron age descendents some serious good and hopefully keep them from making all the same superstitious mistakes we did. Maybe diagrams of simple machines as well - screws, levers, gears, pulleys, water filters, treadle pumps, magnifying lenses, rocket stoves, etc. The sort of devices that are mostly easy to build and obviously useful, and will free up leisure time for a person just barely scraping by who can then focus more energy on further development.
On a smaller scale requiring a decent (100x maybe?) microscope we could then introduce more sophisticated concepts. The table of elements. Steam engines. Electricity. Vacuum tubes. Quantum mechanics. Semiconductors. Information theory. Photo-voltaics. The dangers of pollution and CO2. Democracy and the institutional pitfalls that can effectively undermine it. The sort of stuff that would be enable an industrial and information revolution while hopefully warning our descendents away from ending up in the same uncomfortable situation we're in now (presumably they'll still have lots of cheap coal available - lets warn them to use it in moderation). At this scale we would probably also need to establish a written language to deal with the more complicated concepts, which might well consume a large fraction of the available space, but will hopefully make for much greater information density on the rest of the disc.
On an even smaller scale, requiring say a scanning electron microscope to read clearly, we could then start covering modern and cutting-edge science, and possibly culture as well. Choice selections of Shakespeare, Mozart, etc? Preserved for the ages. Make hundreds or thousands of those beautiful decorative discs and scatter them around the world, and then hope for the best.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
Keplier-186f is 500 light years distant. I wouldn't worry about it unless alien civilizations have time travel, hyperdrive and worm-holes. If so, maybe they have a quick cure for global warning that we can live with. Sometimes worrying about hypotheticals we can't resolve seems preferable to solving the problems we can actually do something about.
Wow. Patting ourselves on the back for most being able to meet some of the basic needs on the base two layers of Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs pyramid?
Yay us.
I just read recently that the rich actually work more hours per week than the poor do now.
Of course! The rich, they are just as locked in by circumstances as the poor are. That's on top of dealing with the sweet, sweet Freedom(tm) that is the choice to drop everything and hitchhike to another state, if they Really Don't Like It, in their obviously dead end jobs. Nothing to do with enjoying their work or the fruits thereof. My heart, it bleeds for them.
My brain, however, rebels at the fatuous argument that says just because things 'might be a little better', then it means things are 'ok'.
Oddly enough, .01c = 1PSL = 1% of the speed of light. ;) Your estimate is the same as mine.
However, I figure that it'd be more than 'a few centuries' of building up before we reach for the next one. You have to figure that you have this whole system to colonize combined with that a colony ship arrives with something like a millionth of the resources used to launch it.
Due to the expense and time it'd probably take a fairly extreme motivation to get a group to gather the resources and launch a colony ship, so I figure it's pretty rare.
I don't read AC A human right
Granted we have technology and services that did not exist before and that are a huge boon, provided you are sufficiently affluent, but at the same time we seem to have swapped one set of shackles for others. We worked hard then; we work hard now. We are dominated by credos and dogma - it used to be religion and Divine Right, now it is economic fundamentalism. We were frightened of disease and war then, we still are now. Either way we know our place. We can question the established order, but only up to a point. While the myth is that we are more free, you can still disappear in the middle of the night and awake being tortured in some Rendition center. The tax department can still kick in your door. What is true is that we are led to think we are more free.
I think we have yet to face the bottleneck and that we are contributing to its arrival. The basis for that opinion is that the ultimate cause of the five or so mass extinctions that have happened in the past half billion years of earth history is a disruption of the carbon cycle and subsequent poisoning of the biosphere. Mankind is powerful enough to hasten the arrival of another event and we are in the midst of it; there is a major mass extinction going on and has been for more than 10,000 years, and our mismanagement of the biosphere is just the sort of thing that can result in a greater disruption and threaten us and the rest of the megafauna on Earth.
The warning in the Fermi Paradox is that intelligent technological races may not have the wisdom to see the signs of a collapse of the biosphere until it is too late and be able to survive in a colony elsewhere with the numbers of individuals and the time needed. It may take 40,000 to 1 million individuals to migrate somewhere and 10,000 to 200,000 years to wait out the disaster.
Either word would work, actually. Too bad you don't know as much as you think you do.
If you think I voted for Trump because of this post, you're wrong. I voted for Dr. Jill Stein of the Green Party. Again.
Kind of like asking, if there are enough children with access to loaded weapons around the house, why haven't we seen a 2 year old rob a bank?
Star Trek transporters are just 3d printers.
Luckily we have about 10,000 - 1,000,000 years worth of energy in uranium and thorium (depending on how fast you think energy needs will grow). Plenty of time to work out fusion and expand into space.
Bah, I'd bet we'll have fucked up the environment in 100 - 1,000 years if we go on with fission.
Maybe we're just the first to develop? Or simply faster than light travel hasn't been invented.
We could start thinking about sending out 100,000 - 1,000,000 people ships. A moon lift, in-orbit assemblage, hydroponic cultures, photonic sails would help carrying people to exoplanets in a few generations' time. By sending several ships each day it would be possible to keep Earth's population under control.
Friend, you should condense your post a bit and submit it as a topic on its own: "Ask Slashdot: What form could the best modern Rosetta Stone take?" Rosetta not just for language cross-translation of course, but the general idea of knowledge preservation.
Something like HD-rosetta "microfiche tablets" are also an option, though you have to keep in mind the level of technology necessary to read the engraving at the desired scale.
Reading this I think immediately of 3D printing technology. So far I have seen a few great uses for it, such as the printing of replacement parts necessary to keep something running or to fashion the unique precise shapes to replace body parts... and so many not-so-great or BLAH uses such as soap dishes, uncomfortable weird-looking chairs or (my un-favorite) guns that will some day explode in yer face because those 'casual' 3D printed molecular bonds are just not up to the challenge.
But a 3D printed book with pages of stable plastic and holes that are letters could still be be like-new and readable in 1000 years, if stored properly. It's DO-ABLE.
Hocus's Whats-The-Use Law of knowledge preservation:
When civilization is simple, the useful laws of nature are so damned obvious that no one wastes their time carving them in stone, so all you may read from that era is silly political fluff about kings and wars.
When civilization is complicated and knowledge immense, despite advances in technology no one bothers to create textbooks that might last more than 30 years because what's the use, at the end of that period they might be *slightly* incorrect. There's no viable business model for knowledge preservation that pays off in the short term. Most people are too distracted to sift through the noise to gather and present essential knowledge. Those few who do have the time are typically unable to produce a viable product (which is where 3D printing comes in).
So raw science data is DOOMED and WE ARE LIVING IN A FUTURE DARK AGE.
I go for your Rosetta stone at successive levels of magnification, though each level should be a separate object. Books you can read directly will be handed around casually, while 100x and 1000x texts must be carefully stored.
But there should be texts printed in all resolutions. In some hypothetical future dark age, nothing would jump-start the re-invention of precision optics faster than showing them a continuous spiral of text that recedes into optical "invisibility".
I think the boom stuff (gunpowder and runaway nuclear fission) should be represented on all levels with the benefits and hazards clearly indicated, because you do not want to encourage the formation of secret societies and tyrants who confiscate microscopes and go around to destroy all high resolution copies (except their own) to keep some temporary strategic advantage. Dynamite has helped us to build more infrastructure than it has destroyed. Far more nuclear fission has been released to keep us warm in Winter than to take human life. The more people aware of these possibilities the better tha chance that we will make the right decisions. If every classic civilization had run their own Alexandria Library and traded copies freely with it, so much more history would be available today.
I look forward an Ask Slashdot on the topic that explores it better than the one last June where the Whats The Use doom sayers seemed to defend the court against new ideas.
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Hmm, that's a thought, I may just do that, I'll have to see if I can edit down the core points to something that doesn't offer the dreaded wall-o-text. And I love your the knowledge law by the way.
I'm afraid I don't see how 3D printing brings any benefit here - a laser cutter or CNC machine fed with durable, stabilized sheets of plastic would be faster and produce *far* more durable pages. 3D printing is nice for prototyping and making structures that can't be produced any other way, but the material properties will probably always be inferior to those of more specialized production techniques. I also don't see the appeal of cutting out the letters - you've taken a nice sturdy sheet of plastic and turned it into a fragile spiderweb. Then there's the fact that plastic isn't actually terribly stable on those timescales. It tends to spontaneously degrade, and degrade even faster in the presence of sunlight or biological activity. It doesn't go away like paper can, but it does break down into useless fragments. Stone or corrosion resistant metal is where it's at - we need only look at the ancient stuff that's survived into the modern day to see that.
Yes, I agree that different levels of magnification should reveal different "books", my thought was the lowest, naked eye, level is a grade-school science primer supplemented with a handful of particularly useful low-tech applied machines whose invention is aided by a far better understanding of the world than their construction and use requires. A treadle pump is relatively easy to build and incredibly useful, but let them reverse engineer the principles on which it operates. Then at successive levels of magnification you get high school grade stuff, and then college grade, maybe a separate post-doctoral level as well. The reason I'm going for discrete jumps in magnification of 100x or more though is that then you can record each layer as invisible detail overlaid on the one above it, a chapter written within every letter, and more in the space between them, reusing the same surface multiple times. Embed an iridium disc in a transparent gemstone shell to protect against surface wear, and then the same artifacts venerated and preserved by the stone-agers has a chance of surviving to the new nuclear age, even if they decide to progress slowly.
Which brings up a second reason I lean towards a few large leaps in magnification - I don't see any reason to try to really fast-track a stone-age culture back into the nuclear age - there's going to be massive cultural shifts necessary, and lots of infrastructure built out before something like optics becomes viable. We are essentially inflicting massive cultural contamination on a society without being around to try to moderate unintended consequences. There are things we can tell them to hopefully help improve their lives and accelerate the recovery of technology, and perhaps to steer them away from the most damaging pitfalls in our own past, but think of the cultural effects of having all new technologies handed to your civilization from the ancients, of a civilization that spent hundreds of years acclimating to not discovering anything for themselves. I figure if the next level of magnification required is sufficient at each step that the existence of another level is purely speculation and will require a massive leap forward in technology to access, not just incremental upgrades (naked eye - basic microscope - electron microscope), then we can hope to moderate the "giving matches to children" dangers. Perhaps a combination though - a 100x microscope reveals the beginning of the high-school "book", focussing on the preventative and enabling technologies, but you need to get up to 2000x or so to reach the end where the dangerous stuff (that you're now hopefully prepared to deal with) is revealed. I have a feeling though that that would serve primarily to foster massive research into microscopes to get to "the good stuff" and not actually serve to slow the reading by more than a couple decades.
Tha
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
its not nice to contemplate but given the inherent limitations of the human condition and human nature , getting manned flight to the solar system much less some far off star is pretty unlikely. A few bases might happen someday but much more than that is a near impossibility
Resources, energy and the limits thereof have been mentioned ad nauseum but there is also the issues of demography and complexity that are preventing it.
Right now none of the societies that could support such a mission have either the demographic or economic stability to pull it off. Birth rates are at or below replacement in every advanced society on the planet and the groups that have higher birth rates are often highly religious with little interest in it and/or have too low a level of educational attainment to achieve it. Space is a young societies driven educated societies game really and the West (and China and Japan) are old demographically and/or are declining educationally (c.f the US)
Now this might be subject to change but we really don't know. No society in human history has ever achieved the unique set of circumstances that the US did in 1969 say and probably won't again,. we may simply not be able to support the required complexity in the future.
And note I always recommend space buff read or listen to Joseph Tainter's Collapse of Complex Societies. The basic concept, too much complexity means collapse seems to fit the current situation to a T. Basically it requires a very unique set of circumstances and social fabric to make things work and its balanced on a precipice. One flux means the systems flops and it appears that some combination of economics, energy and social change of created the flop.
Now in theory a highly determined society could manage to reverse the trends but it developing a growing middle class, strong outward drive, and high educational attainment while having enough resources to the task at hand is far easier said than done.
My brain, however, rebels at the fatuous argument that says just because things 'might be a little better', then it means things are 'ok'.
So how would you define an "ok" society? Yes, we have our share of problems but can you think of something better?
Even the utopian societies of fiction come with their share of problems. What would it take to be "perfect" or even
"ok"? I'm not talking about world peace, I'm talking about what would it take for the people in a country to be
considered "free" by your definition. Is it possible? Has it ever happened? Obviously we need to eat to live and the
food comes from somewhere but I would argue that the average middle class american is pretty free. He probably
works less hours than the average furtune 500 ceo and has more leisure time. Until we no longer need manual labor
to produce food and other necessities "free" cannot equal "doesn't work" so just because someone provides for themself
doesn't mean they are a "slave" neither does it mean someone is a "slave" just because he isn't 100% self sufficient.
I'm afraid I don't see how 3D printing brings any benefit here - a laser cutter or CNC machine fed with durable, stabilized sheets of plastic would be faster and produce *far* more durable pages.
Of course you're right. Etching by laser on solid sheets of plastic or slow-corrosion metal is the thing. Just desperately trying to come up with ways in which 3D printing might be useful to salvage the time I've spent reading about it. Never mind all the time others have spent trying to make it work.
If you want to place a barrier between knowledge levels, call them 'magnification-stops' in your approach where certain technology and knowledge obtained by the years like 1700, 1800, 1900, 1950, 2000 is encoded with successive difficulty --- then if history is any clue you're best bet is to change medium and method at each stop.
Optics for example. The advancement from a lens allowing the eye to discern Mars clearly to one able to construct a great microscope may be an accident of local geology, quartz and silica, or a single individual's experiments in glass manufacture. There could even be an alternate history where mercury in spinning dishes is optics. You have a clean progression to 100x magnification with a single stage, then it takes compound lenses and take it to 1000x You can push it a little further by using filters to reduce the color component, but you hit the wall of visible light.
Now to break that Reading Rainbow 800-1000x barrier we're in the realm of coherent photons using lasers to 'read' (project and reflect through optics) or scatter (holography). And further on into using streams of electrons where the only usable means optick is electromagnetism shaped by precisely wound coils and some gruesome electronics.
Could there be a single object that is an Easy Reader through all possible optical resolutions, but also incorporates successive levels, the greatest of which is only readable with electrons? That is a challenge but do-able since you can read through things with electrons. The visible stages act as protection for this fragile inner layer.
Perhaps for the intermediate stages requiring laser technology the colorful yet color-challenged field of 2 dimensional holography might offer a solution... something that resembles Asimov's Prime Radiant without the computey stuff, where a coherent beam of laser light will scatter off of foil and project material onto the wall, and precise movement of the object or the beam will 'scroll'.
This being Slashdot, I have to suggest that at some point the Thing will might digital, where we apply leverage to Hamming and Huffman for encoding and error correction... BUT now the content is sub-coded in a series of arbitrary choices that represent our evolution of information technology... and not necessarily anyone else's. To one familiar with the optick perusal of language-symbols, going digital, which we've done gradually -- to those who have only our Prime Radiant as a guide -- it would be a wall of incomprehensibility that would take time to crack.
I just had this idea that at some low resolution text might offer a delicious recipe for Taco Sauce, and a tiny dollop of this concoction makes its way into a tiny space between the letters... completely obliterating the 13th century.
Completely losing the 13th century has happened before. The circumstances surrounding its disappearance (but not its present whereabouts) can be seen here in the brief clip from the 1975 movie "R
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I just knew some silly people would talk about nuclear bombs and radiation.-
After a real nuclear explosion it takes about 1 to 2 months for most of the area to be safe to walk through (with care).
After about 2 to 5 years, it is safe to start clearing contaminated material from most of the site.
After about 5 to 10 to 20 years its ok to start rebuilding the city in almost all areas.
Give it 80 years or so and the radioactive clearance heaps should be generally safe enough to begin industrial reprocessing.
Contrary to public opinion the radiation from nuclear or atomic bombs does not last forever..
Lets look at Hiroshima, ground zero, if you go there today it is no longer a desolate radioactive wasteland - in fact there is actually a first school built on top of ground zero.
Could nuclear war wipe out civilisation or wipe us all out? very unlikely. The real calculations from the cold war era say that something like 50 to 70% of people in the participating countries could have been killed. But at least 90% of the Earths surface and human societies would have been left almost totally untouched - South America, Africa, Central Asia, the Russian steps, etc. At a scientific guess it would have taken the (civilised) world up to about 50 years to recover. A nuclear winter could have made that 60 years.
Today there are far fewer nuclear bombs - and advanced technology and manufacturing are far more widely spread. So today the recovery (overall) might be more like 5 to 10 years. In fact removing USA and Russia and EU as power centres might actually have a net positive compensating effect. Environmentally a nuclear war would slow down climate change and generally have a net positive ecological benefit. (people bomb cities not countryside) As for radiation the Chernobyl disaster produced the equivalent in radiation contamination of about 100 to 1000 nuclear bombs - and didn't wipe out half the population of Russia or half the population of Europe - basically proving that the world could survive a substantial nuclear war.
If you want to look at real civilisation ending events - lets try a 100 meter asteroid, a magnetic pole reversal, substantial climate change, a food web collapse, or a mega volcano - and all are probable within a few hundred to a few thousand years. A decade plus long global nuclear winter caused by a giant volcano could starve most of us out very quickly, and push the whole climate into a new ice age.. But then because climate is a chaotic system it is even possible that current global warming could ultimately push the world into a new ice age - though substantial heating with its slightly less lethal consequences are more likely.
A magnetic pole reversal could shut down the Earths magnetic field for decades or even hundreds of years - and expose the whole world to a prolonged bout of intense electrical interference and solar radiation - producing a new period of mutation and evolution. (maybe not good for 'humanity')
A lot of human made disasters like a complete financial crash or global war might create a blip of a few years or decades but seem unlikely to cause a civilisation ending disaster. - Humans are animals and ultimately we run on self interest and that means that only a truly powerful external event is likely to finish us or our civilisation off completely. So no I don't think I believe in the pinch point. More dangerous than anything else is probably a new era of religious absolutism and intolerance leading to a new dark ages, where over epochs all learning and knowledge are gradually lost- but I don't even see that happening either. Once a technology or knowledge is publicly published and is spread over the whole world it is very unlikely that it will be completely lost while any substantial group of humans survives anywhere.
Even if humanity itself is wiped out then in hundreds of millions of years a new sentient species might arise. Will they unearth anything of us or our technologies or science from the remains?
One of the questions tod
Below the speed of light Special Relativity is one of the most accurate theories in physics - above the speed of light..
“...the silence of the night sky is golden...”
~ Nick Bostrom
No Martian dewdrop’s given rise
To reasoned thought on silent skies
No well-placed planet’s progeny
Have signaled their far world’s esprit
No doubt we all long to express
The hope that this vast quietness
No way casts doubt that our success
Shall outlive our small globe’s largesse;
No problem was ascendency
Of eukaryotic specialty
No problem was the chemistry
Of shameless sexuality
No problem was dry land’s domain
For lungs and limbs to there attain
No problem was the mammal chain
Through which evolved the human brain;
No problem was the fog of war
In which fought microbes long before
No problem was the fatal nuke
Though some still argue that’s a fluke;
Why take the silence for aught from
The sign the filter’s yet to come
Will nascent high technology
Bring doom to this ontology
Will superbugs or nanobots
Conclude these days of abstract thoughts
Or is it but our own conceit
Our relish for the mental feat
That hoisted by our own petard
Is how we’d wish ourselves die hard;
How much more likely is slow death
Midst shufflers shuffling out of breath
As toxic products make more sales
And toxic thoughts would tell no tales
But those of heartache and depression,
Those of luxury’s accession
Force all others’ bows and scraping
All the world’s resources raping
Till there’s nothing left to keep
The lights alit, then all shall sleep
In silence – who’ll be last to frown
To hear last motors winding down,
Those who had no presentiment
Manipulating sentiment –
Till most all nerds who could maintain
The tools of modern life should drain
Their time on workmanship profuse
Since they’d no chance to reproduce –
Or those who were the nerds themselves
If any such is left who delves
Within to realize silence means
More than cessation of machines,
That life’s like this: it has a phase
Of science that strives to amaze
And when that’s through all settle back
To living strictly in the black
Then tribe and not career will count
While no way will there be to mount
A search for aliens, all who
Are much the same as me and you,
Once flirt with world hegemony
Amid smooth talk of liberty,
Now that’s all past just glad to be
Back to their own lives, truly free,
Though if I’m wrong, then best expect them:
We’ll work out how to detect them.
~ Thanks Always Returns
Most of these exoplanets are a significant distance away from us. If you assume that all potential civilizations might have started roughly coterminously with ours, it's possible we just haven't allowed enough time for their electromagnetic footprint to reach us yet. Maybe someone in the next 10,000 years or 100,000 years, we'll gradually get enveloped with signals from all over the place. This Great Filter may be no more than that, and not an extinction matter at all.