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Physicists Discover A Possible Break In the Standard Model of Physics (futurism.com)
Slashdot reader freddienumber13 write:
A series of experiments has shown that tau particles have decayed faster than predicted by the standard model. This has been observed at both CERN and SLAC. This suggests that the standard model for particle physics is incomplete and further research is required to understand this new area of physics.
Nature adds: One of the key assumptions of the standard model of particle physics is that the interactions of the charged leptons, namely electrons, muons and taus, differ only because of their different masses... recent studies of B-meson decays involving the higher-mass tau lepton have resulted in observations that challenge lepton universality at the level of four standard deviations. A confirmation of these results would point to new particles or interactions, and could have profound implications for our understanding of particle physics.
Nature adds: One of the key assumptions of the standard model of particle physics is that the interactions of the charged leptons, namely electrons, muons and taus, differ only because of their different masses... recent studies of B-meson decays involving the higher-mass tau lepton have resulted in observations that challenge lepton universality at the level of four standard deviations. A confirmation of these results would point to new particles or interactions, and could have profound implications for our understanding of particle physics.
Isn't 4 sigma already quite large? I thought the 5 sigma in particle physics was because of the fundamental nature of the facts studied. The more basic stuff you study, the more certain you want to be about it considering that it influences more things.
Ezekiel 23:20
You will be modded to -1, as you should be, because you did not provide evidence for your claims.
Climate change is pseudoscienceâ, because their predictions have been wrong repeatedly
A beautiful fallacy! Medical science is pseudoscience, too, because physicians are often wrong?
Ezekiel 23:20
The straw man parade continues.
Like physicists, climatologists demand solid evidence. If you want to disagree with theirs, present yours.
Scoring is not censorship. You're free to browse at -1 anytime.
Yeah, knowledge is useless and has never solved any problem.
So, which is it?
I am curious where climate models are showing a four sigma error. It must be nice to make a claim without backing it up with some hard data. I'm open to the idea that models can be in error, but without showing where the errors are so dramatic, it's hard to credit you with anything insightful. Models aren't perfect, and we have an imperfect understanding of the interactions and feedbacks in the earth system. That doesn't make the underlying science invalid. At worst, it is incomplete and we need more study. Instead, people are too busy sticking their fingers in their ears and shouting, 'fake science' you can do better than that. Right?
"The bass, the rock, the mic, the treble. I like my coffee black, just like my metal" - Mindless Self Indulgence
A beautiful fallacy! Medical science is pseudoscience, too, because physicians are often wrong?
No, it is pseudoscience because it lacks proper repeatability and has only the barest elements of falsifiability.
In case there is any question, I am in fact referring to both Medical "sciences" and Climate "science".
That having been said, I would still think that it would be the best course of action to err on the side of caution and assume the "scientists" are correct given the extreme ramifications if they are... The venn diagram is pretty convincing:
option 1: They are wrong and we do nothing: No harm no foul.
option 2: They are wrong and we do everything in our power to stop something that wasnt going to happen anyways: Some short term economic losses, maybe.
option 3: They are right and we do everything in our power to stop it: We saved the planet.
option 4: They are right and we do nothing: Extinction.
Only one of those options is really bad. the rest are not that big a deal in the grand scheme of things. Anybody that isn't a gambling junky knows where to put their bet on that one.
I wish I had a good sig, but all the good ones are copyrighted
There is still an enormous amount of stuff we don't know, and are only guessing about. So far, nobody has come up with a better guess, so the current guesses are the accepted theory. It's mostly very good theory, with evidence that it may be correct, but it's still just theory.
Physics: 4 sigma error, question the model
Climate: 4 sigma error, jail those who dare to disagree
Not quite.
Everything: 4 sigma error, question the model
Everything: shame those who think a 6 sigma error is the truth
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
Those nano scale black holes decay faster than you can get scared of them. Same goes for the huge black holes in the universe. They decay due to hawking radiation. It just takes them longer than the micro black holes you cited. A lot longer...
Basically 5 sigma is the 'discovery' or 'gimmie the nobel prize' level. But getting from 4-5 is usually just collecting more data - you are pretty sure it's real if you have a 4 sigma variation.
Your scorecard is a little incomplete because in a lot of physics one or two sigma is fine. In fact, for a while in high energy physics they were allowing one sigma results to be published but then they were "discovering" tons of new particles all the time in the fifties and found that as they took more statistics the signal would disappear. High energy collider physics is very different from the rest of physics where it is an extremely sensitive game of signal to noise and they found that 5 sigma seems to be good enough. That once they reached that level of confidence it usually wasn't just a fluke.
I agree with you except for "extinction", if you mean "extinction of humans". There's almost no chance that humans will go extinct. We already live in the tropics and we already live in the extreme north. We'll protect valuable shorelines, migrate away from others, and agriculture will spread north. We won't go extinct.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Is this really so surprising? I know quite a few physicists (and some armchair physicists) who have long believed the standard model to be incomplete. The measurement problem will always have us making theories that are very, very hard to prove correct.
Additionally (granted, non-scientifically) the standard model 'feels' wrong. The model may explain the behaviors that we see but it seems overly complex for nature. Much like relativity there may be more than meets the eye going on here.
It has seemed like we were in a bit of a stagnation lately and I'm glad there are some new experimental results making us look at the standard model critically. It's not only good science it's exciting science.
Medical science is pseudoscience, too, because physicians are often wrong?
Physicians aren't doing medical science. It's engineering at most. Probably more like medical technicians. Call me when your doctor offers to conduct a double blind experiment to set your broken leg.
Have gnu, will travel.
Burning books isn't censorship unless the government is doing it. You're welcome to have a bonfire anytime. As JK Rowling would say, by the time you're burning books, the author already got your money.
"BSD: Free as in speech. Linux: Free as in beer. Windows 10: Free as in herpes." --Man On Pink Corner in #52607549.
option 4: They are right and we do nothing: Extinction.
And that's bad in the greater scheme of things because .....? Extinction may very well be a natural step along the evolutionary path to an eventual superior species. We need to be removed from the ecosystem to make room.
Imagine if cyanobacteria were sentient and they got together several billion years ago. "Guys, we are producing far too much oxygen pollution. At some point, we will irreversibly alter the ecosystem of this planet. And if we don't go completely extinct, we will drive ourselves into a tiny corner of the environment." Today, this planet would still be populated by pond scum.
Have gnu, will travel.
The high threshold isn't necessarily because of the fundamental nature, but comes down to avoiding problems with estimating the error and avoiding problems from fishing.
In America, he is innocent until proven guilty. Are you going to prove that climate change is real?
nah lets just settle in that he is "innocent"
Just look at the record highs. Then notice how many times the temperature has broke the record high. This isn't even difficult science, just basic reading comprehension will work.
By the time we have the technology to move people to another planet at a technology level, materials and economic cost that is less than just fixing our own planet (assuming you're not talking about within our own solar system, which are all already far more hostile than even the absolute worst climate disaster on earth) it will be because the sun is going to explode, assuming we don't just kill ourselves from our own inventions in the 5 billion years before that happens.
Fool. Our whole species only exists to house bacteria and give them abilities they didn't have before.
And what do we care if there is some superior species? How does that mean we need to go away? They can evolve out of whatever on their own damn time. If being superior means everything else has to die than being superior isn't all that useful is it?
I'm no climate denier, and think climate change is a serious concern, but the "models" are all over the place. Most agree that it's "up" but that's about it:
http://www.worldclimatereport.com/wp-images/scorched1.JPG
You will be modded to -1, as you should be, because you did not provide evidence for your claims.
Uhm... no. Even though it would be nice to have, there is currently no "-1, Pseudoscientific ideologue" moderation control.
"Offtopic" and "Troll" are both available, and neither of them care whether you provided evidence for your claims or not.
sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f(q{sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f});
Burning books is biomass fuel. Perfectly fine as long as the trees were sustainably harvested.
sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f(q{sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f});
Not to mention any black holes created will be traveling several orders of magnitude greater than escape velocity so even if Hawking radiation doesn't exist or they didn't have an incredibly small gravitional capture cross section to be with things would be as far as the moon in about a half sec.
The standard for a new particle being 5 sigma means that there's only a 1e-6 chance that the observed deviation from "standard model correct, no new particle or interaction" is a chance fluctuation. That's it.
The LHC e.g. had a 3-sigma fluctuation around 750GeV last year. There was a bit of cautious excitement, then it went away...
The straw man parade continues.
Like physicists, climatologists demand solid evidence. If you want to disagree with theirs, present yours.
This. It's easy to criticize science. It's a lot harder to do your own.
(Disclosure: IAAP)
If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
"I am curious where climate models are showing a four sigma error"
Please review http://earthguide.ucsd.edu/virtualmuseum/virtualmuseum/PhysicsVsFudgeFactors.shtml
Physics: 4 sigma error, question the model
Climate: 4 sigma error, jail those who dare to disagree
Not quite.
Everything: 4 sigma error, question the model
Everything: shame those who think a 6 sigma error is the truth
I agree with where you're going, but in all fairness, the sigma-level that matters depends on the field.
Not all fields can gather very large amounts of data the way particle physics can. For example, psychological and drug-trial studies must live with small sample sizes for moral and practical reasons. Even astronomy sometimes has to cope with large error-bars in results, yet the conclusions they draw can be significant. I think climate science lies somewhere in the middle in this regard.
If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
Hmmm, that's odd. Whiskey Tango Foxtrot, what's happening here?
They need to make browsing at -1 the default again.
By that logic, burning books isn't censorship because your can always go visit the author to find out what the original story was.
I'm guessing that logic is not your strong point. Here, let me help you.
First of all, burning books is not censorship. Banning books is censorship.
Second, nobody is "burning" a comment by modding it down. It's still available for you to see. And you don't have to "go visit" the poster to see it. You merely adjust your browse level.
If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
Physics: 4 sigma error, question the model
Climate: 4 sigma error, jail those who dare to disagree
The logical fallacy you're using is a straw man argument. Only you proposed treating 4-sigma events differently, and the models are hardly comparable.
You argue poorly, and you should be ashamed, too!
Go fsck your disk.
Damn, /. dropped my link. Let's try again.
If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
Well. Lots of suggestions lately had been that medical studies haven't been good enough.
We're not dinosaurs.
I'm guessing that logic is not your strong point. Here, let me help you.
First of all, burning books is not censorship. Banning books is censorship.
The effect is the same though. Depriving people of reading said content. So why is one censorship and not the other ? Leibniz would like to have a word with you.
Unless you're a dinosaur, you probably don't want to live in a high temperature, high oxygen environment.
This is insanely wrong. Censorship is not only censorship if a government does it. Otherwise, the Chilling Effect and self-censorship can't possibly exist.
- The ESRB isn't a government entity. It's a trade group.
- When Nintendo refused to allow any games with blood or religious symbols, which government were they working for?
- When someone refuses to criticize Islam because of fear of professional backlash, as well as death threats, what "government" censored that person?
Any claim you make without evidence I can reject without evidence.
would be as far as the moon in about a half sec.
Why is the summary talking about particle decay when the real news is that they have produced faster than light travel?
I'm not a dinosaur, well, not that kind. You may as well argue that being entirely immersed in water is not a problem because fish can do it.
Burning books isn't censorship unless the government is doing it. You're welcome to have a bonfire anytime. As JK Rowling would say, by the time you're burning books, the author already got your money.
Not long ago, JK suggested to one angry critic that she he should also burn her DVDs - and generously inhale the fumes
Pain is merely failure leaving the body
What an amazing discovery! It points to a new missing piece of the puzzle.
Remember boys and girls, "Making just recently wandered in off of the Sarah and all our amazing facts can be classified as 'as far as we know'".
Assuming mankind is still here in 200 more years, I wonder what facts from today will be classified as, "I can't even believe they thought that back then."
Man's little brain will never, ever figure it all out, but it is fun to try. :)
As soon as millennial scientists determined that you could have males and anti-males sharing the same transgender bathroom, it was clearly time to throw out the standard rules of physics.
Go stick your head inside the LHC while it's running so you can observe the flaws in the Standard Model directly
option 4: They are right and we do nothing: Extinction.
And that's bad in the greater scheme of things because
Only philosophers and college students care about whether humanity is holding back some other superior species. The rest of us just want to go on living. If you think humanity is meant to shuffle off this mudball post haste, you know what to do.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Burning books is biomass fuel. Perfectly fine as long as the trees were sustainably harvested.
Bollocks. Not only does it produce soot, but there's a lot of unnecessary steps which cost energy and usually produce pollution which went into taking it from tree to book which are not only unnecessary but actually undesirable if you're going to burn them. As long as we are using paper, we should be recycling paper into paper where possible because it takes less energy and materials than making trees into paper.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
The ESRB isn't a government entity. It's a trade group.
The ESRB doesn't have the force of law. You can sell video games which are not ESRB-approved through the internets, or mail order. Which brings us to the next point...
- When Nintendo refused to allow any games with blood or religious symbols, which government were they working for?
#pcmasterrace
When someone refuses to criticize Islam because of fear of professional backlash, as well as death threats, what "government" censored that person?
None. They self-censored. The word you are looking for when you want to describe what was done to them if you want to be euphemistic is censure.
Censorship is when someone doesn't even let you get your message out. If someone kills you to stop you from speaking, that's censorship. If someone kills you for what you have said, they're attacking you, not the message. Your message has gotten out. Obviously there's room for both to happen at once.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
The thing is, no model is required. It just is. This is well known chemistry, for well over 100 years now.
All one needs is an understanding of gas phase infrared spectroscopy and basic thermodynamics. If one does not have that, then comprehension of the atmospheric greenhouse effect is not possible.
You can lead an idiot to science, but you cannot make him think.
If we are willing to wait a 100 years, the economy will be several times larger by then.
As they should be. You hijacked the thread. I'd like to see some interesting comments on the standard model NOT CLIMATE CHANGE , and to all of those who responded DONT FEED THE TROLL
Well again, it's the magnitude of the effect in question, not that it exists. All I was getting at was in terms of certainty and accuracy climate modelling is much more difficult than many other sciences.
Or we could just stop using fossil fuels which cause us harm directly with their emissions. Society pays heavily for their use by the pollution produced when they are burnt. We would save on hospital costs, people would have better lives without or improved asthma and other lung diseases, it would be easier to breath in cities, we wouldn't have to clean up after any further pollution damage. There is a lot of environmental damage using fossil fuels from the extraction, transportation, and burning. The taxpayer has ended up with bill for much more than we were supposed to. In Western Canada there are thousands of old wells that need to be retired that taxpayers got stuck for. What happens when coal ash gets free of its containment and into rivers?
None of this has anything to do with climate change but if we stopped burning fossil fuels because of climate change we would stop having this problems (or at least they would stop being added to). But if it helps you can think of it as we solve all of those problems and get climate change thrown in for free.
Well yeah. Each of those models makes different starting assumptions about incomplete data, so of course they will give different and diverging predictions. That's entirely deliberate, to get a likely range of possibilities.
For example, climate sensitivity to CO2 - we know upper and lower likely bounds for that value, so models using each of those will give higher and lower predictions, and future temperatures should fall somewhere in between. Another unknown is future CO2 levels - will our GHG emissions continue unabated, or will we reign ourselves in? Models based on each scenario should also help bracket the likely temperature range.
And of course, there can be temporary influences on temperatures from random factors that the models can't account for, like ENSO and PDO cycles, or volcanic eruptions. But since those influences are short-term or cyclic, they don't particularly affect the long-term results.
Particle smashing is not knowledge, nor knowledge-creating. But man playing tennis with the net down sure is profitable.
You're an idiot.
We shouldn't accept things as true simply because gathering accurate data is hard. Quite the opposite.
Particle physics, however, by it's very nature is very statistical these days. You don't observe anything directly, you observe things 3-4 steps removed from the interesting event, with a statistical model of what the decay products can be at each step. There's nothing but statistical inference typing actual measurements back to theory. Given that level of indirection, caution is called for.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Sounds like the dinosaurs talking around 67 million years ago. "If the mammals want to evolve, they can go ahead and do so. In the meantime, they make delicious snacks."
Have gnu, will travel.
Quantum genders.
Isn't, or well, shouldn't, it not be about "genders" but rather about whatever you piss on the ring and the floor or not?
Isn't that the deciding factor?
Well, unless you've filled the country with Islamists.
Now physicists will invent a new particle to account for the unexpected behavior and in a few years some static in the lab equipment will confirm the existence of this new particle.
Forget mass. Forget the 57 different varieties of fundamental particle that are added whenever a new hole in the model is found.
You have 2 particles, one is +ve, one is -ve. They have charge not mass.
Spread em around. Run the model, you get spinning dipoles, then twisting chains, then closed hoops. These closed hoops are the stable particles. They have two modes of spin, they twist along their length, and they rotate about their center. The twist wave defines their size because the hoop only closes if its a whole number of wavelengths.
The only thing you need to calculate is the net dipole binding force (which you can even resolve numerically). Two 'hoop' particles, have a net attractive force dependant on their twist and spin frequencies, the diameter of the dipole, the aspect to the other particle, their distance apart, and indirectly to their velocities (from the dopler effect on the component of the spin frequencies in the axis of travel). This attract force is their mass.
So there is no momentum. Momentum is the reduction in dipole attract force you get from the velocity (that doplar effect). Now trying increasing the velocity, notice its a limit function? Ever-increasing velocities correspond to ever smaller decreases in binding force. This is where C comes from. If there were only two dipoles in the world, you couldn't separate them faster than C.
Because I don't want to see -1 posts. Is that good enough for you?
The two are interlinked. A society that tolerates transgenders is also likely to tolerate muslims and other jihadis. Back when America was great, men's rooms were for men, ladies rooms for ladies, and immigrants melded into society as quickly as possible.
There isn't a single post here that has anything to do with the subject of the article.
I for one welcome our super AI driven robotic overlords. As the future amassdors to Planet Earth, they will say hi for us as they trek the farthest reaches of time and space.
We shouldn't accept things as true simply because gathering accurate data is hard. Quite the opposite.
Of course not. But that's not what I was talking about. We may have varying degrees of certainty about something based on the data we have. That doesn't change the utility and importance of trying to infer something from what data we do have.
Particle physics, however, by it's very nature is very statistical these days. You don't observe anything directly, you observe things 3-4 steps removed from the interesting event, with a statistical model of what the decay products can be at each step. There's nothing but statistical inference typing actual measurements back to theory. Given that level of indirection, caution is called for.
Let me share a story I heard once about indirect evidence.
Do you know for certain that electrons exist? How? Have you ever seen one? All of the evidence for their existence is indirect.
Compare this with...
Do you know for certain that the Pope exists? How? Have you ever met him? All of the evidence for his existence is indirect.
If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
this. so much this.
imho anthropogenic climate change is very real.
but all of the efforts to make a cleaner environment and reduce CO2 emissions has plenty of other benefits. it's not like we aren't making things better by trying to solve this problem even if it turns out not to be a problem.
all of the rhetoric about environmentalist totalitarians taking your cars away is just asinine. do you honestly think they could even do that if they wanted to? (which they don't.) they would like you to drive a more environmentally friendly car. that would be great.
You want to "go on living." But you don't realize what that actually means. For ridiculous amounts of time humans were content to just "go on living," which is why they took so long to advance beyond stone age technology. And not a single one of them "went on living." Their lives were hard, unpleasant, and short.
Humanity as we know it today is utterly unlike what it was then. Their way of life has given way to a better one. And you like it and you know it, that's why you haven't dropped everything and fled to a forest already. Those who were not content to "go on living" made this happen.
You want humanity as a whole to go on living? It won't. The sun will go supernova and that will be that. The only possible way to "go on living" as a species is through scientific achievement (to the end of interplanetary colonization). It's the only way. There is no other way. This isn't pie-in-the-sky philosophical nonsense. It is the stark reality that we all face. The time span is just a bit longer than the span of your personal life.
Keep your eyes low, and you will learn nothing, and we will all eventually roast.
Error beyond 3-sigma means the same thing no matter what you are talking about, assuming the same distribution - essentially, the possibility that the data is outside 3 sigma by random error is 0.003, or .3%. 4 sigma is .00006 or 0.006%.
3-sigma is the usual standard for proving something, if your prediction {of whatever} falls outside 3 sigma, your theory has a significant problem, 4 sigma, there is something very big that you are missing.
That's true. Saying that The Environmental Left (capitalised for unknown reasons) often proclaim that we will destroy the planet by making it like Venus really is ridiculous hyperbole.
I on the other hand don't believe in AGW alarmism...but will happily support green alternatives to polluting factories and power generation. I vividly recall driving into Hamilton back in the 80s and seeing the yellowed haze enveloping the city.
Environmentalists would probably get more supporters were they to focus on smog and tailing ponds and such, than polar bears and half-degrees that extinguish all life.
If I understood this correctly they're so tiny one of these micro black holes could plow through a proton and manage to miss the quarks inside.
Did you know 80 to 90% of the moderators on slashdot wouldn't recognize a troll even if one dragged them under a bridge.
The bigger you build particle accelerators and the more energy with which you slam things together, the smaller and more varied shape pieces you break things into. There is no lower limit.
Have gnu, will travel.
Caused by Dark Time.
Table-ized A.I.
" recent studies of B-meson decays involving the higher-mass tau lepton have resulted in observations that challenge lepton universality at the level of four standard deviations" So, basically the tau leptons have a behavior that is occasionally observed in roughly 0.006% of observations? Something akin to an isotopic variance, sort of? Wherein the vast majority of tau observed behave within expected criteria but a tiny percent break the model? Is that correct?
Maybe we won't go extinct, but we're slowly degrading. 20,000 years ago human skulls were 1500 cc in volume; now they're 1350 cc.
Does this impact the accuracy of the dating of the current dating methods such as radio carbon, caesium etc?
"Different", not necessarily better. Better is a subjective term.
Is this really so surprising? I know quite a few physicists (and some armchair physicists) who have long believed the standard model to be incomplete.
We know for certain that the Standard Model is incomplete because it cannot explain gravity. It it also missing Dark Matter and a large enough asymmetry between matter and anti-matter to explain the universe being full of matter. However, none of these explains why this result is not surprising.
The reason that this result is not surprising is because of the number of Standard Model measurements which experiments like LHCb, Babar and Belle make. There are literally thousands of ways in which these experiments have tested the Standard Model and when you make 1000 measurements finding one that over 3 sigma from expectations is not at all unsurprising - in fact you would expect 3.
Now 4 sigma is better because only about 1 in 15,000 measurements will, on average, be this far apart if the Standard Model applies. However, here they have combined multiple experiments but without the respective collaborations being involved. This means it is highly possible that they have failed to combined systematic errors correctly because they are restricted to using only published data. Most combined results come from working groups involving all the collaborations involved e.g. ATLAS+CMS combined results at the LHC, D0+CDF combined results from the Tevatron etc. which can redo parts of the analysis to combine errors properly.
So while it is possible they may be on to something it is far from certain and this is hardly a major result that will elicit much excitement. This is probably why it was published in Nature! While I know this is an important journal for many fields, for particle physics it is largely irrelevant. All the important results in the field are published in journals like Phys Lett B, PRL, Phys Rev D, JHEP etc.
It's really quite sickening how far you people will go to create your highly biased echo chamber.
Just think of the physics experiments we could do with a highly biased echo chamber!
No.
One billion years, give or take, until the Sun gets hot enough to boil the oceans and make the Earth uninhabitable. There's always the option of moving the Earth.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
Look around - the planet is largely inhabited by pond scum.
Seriously, NO. Radioisotope dating relies on known measured values of isotope half life, models of "how" are completely irrelevant to their accuracy. Not that unexpected Tau particle decay rates would have anything to do with nuclei decay anyway. Tau particles are unstable exotic heavy electrons basically, they play no role in nuclei decay mechanisms.
This is exactly the kind of pseudoscientific blabber that we could do without. Evolution has no goal and it has zero incentive to produce a "superior" species.
It doesn't matter what you think about the purpose of our existence on this planet and the "evolutionary path", because at least my aim is to survive. Giving up and killing myself through climate change certainly doesn't help with that. You also have to remember that it took about half a billion years for land-dwelling life to produce a sentient species, and that the Sun will, in around 600 million years, be too hot to support the carbonate-silicate cycle that fuels the C3 form of photosynthesis. It might or might not be possible to produce another sentient species in that time, if there is enough resources left after us for the planet to recover.
It is also important to realize that many of the factors that contributed to the rise of culture were caused by easy and abundant availability of resources (fossil fuels, unexhausted sources of rare earths) that will be permanently gone after we have drawn our last breath. Therefore, I would claim that it is not at all outlandish to claim that we are the absolutely only chance for this planet to successfully produce a species that could reach out to the stars. Based on presently available information, ours might also be the only world in this galaxy, which has even produced a candidate for that (considering that were it possible to construct a interplanetary culture and somebody would have reached the prerequisites, we'd likely see massive amounts of evidence for it).
All in all, the stakes are much higher than you claim. Of course you can just be an edgelord and claim that none of this matters, but it does matter, greatly, to anyone else who has the capacity to feel sympathy for their fellow humans and those who are yet unborn. In other words, grow up and start working on surviving instead of being such a nihilist little shit.
... Extinction.
And that's bad in the greater scheme of things because .....? Extinction may very well be a natural step along the evolutionary path to an eventual superior species. We need to be removed from the ecosystem to make room.
Exactly. It always amazes me that on an anti christian worldview heavy site like Slashdot, the whole "humans are special" meme still has so much currency.
Also, many people opposed to nuclear energy (especially of the military type), even though that could **potentially** be a quick solution in the extinction department.
Captcha: carcass
thats what you have just done unless you provide evidence...
"The hands that help are better far than lips that pray." - Robert Ingersoll (1833-1899)
Ahh, so economic NIMBYism. Please do it as long as I don't have to pay for it, correct?
--sf
We have known for a long time that the standard model isn't complete, not least since it does not incorporate gravity in any way. I think most physicists are surprised at how QM still seems to hold together - unlike GR, it is a really complicated theory, mathematically; it is all too often not well understood by the experimental physicists, and there are examples of techniques (like quantization) being applied as a set of rules thumb, a bit like 'first we caluculate the Hamiltonian for a classical system, then use the magical quantization rules'. Amazingly, it often works even if it is mathematically incorrect, but it is of course not going to last, I think; there must be cases where the cracks in the reasoning have been plastered over by the statistical noise in the measurements, and once we see clear evidence that the theory doesn't hold, we will have to go back over old data and discover the cracks we didn't spot back then.
This discrepancy in the decay of the tau lepton is probably one of these cracks, and I think it is quite exciting, but it isn't quite the sensation the editors want to make of it. I have already read about it several times, even on Scientific American and ScienceDaily, and I have heard it mentioned in recent BBC podcasts; Slashdot's editors would do well to stop reading the big-eyed, gawping articles in glossy magazines like futurism.com, and instead reading the slightly more sober stuff in news closer to the source. You guys should stop perpetuating the ideaa that science is some sort of cool entertainment and scientists are some sort of attention seeking rock-stars.
Checked in to see if there was an interesting discussion of the physics and found a could have been cut and pasted climate flame war thread. SAD
Or we could just stop using fossil fuels which cause us harm directly with their emissions
This! 1000x times this. I don't care about climate change because frankly I don't think I'll be alive to see the worst of it or the best of it. I don't have any children or a stake in the future.
That said I hate the smell of the city. I hate the smell of working one block down from a coal fired power station. I hate when I clean my windows outside the main crap coming off them is black diesel soot.
All this ties back to my favourite comic: http://farm5.static.flickr.com...
Well, wouldn't it be possible that they got absorbed as a supernova does to near stars?
Posting as AC because i just moderated an earlier post up as insightful, and I don't want to undo that. I've seen posts moderated up in a way I personally have found very strange, but if you're concerned that you're missing something because of the moderation then just read at -1, which is what I do when I moderate (I've even occasionally moderated up something I really disagreed with because it was putting a good case or suggesting an interesting possibility), and what I usually do even when I'm not moderating.
"Moderation is, by definition, censorship." - Maybe in your distinctly parallel universe, but not in mine. I don't know whether you're a right-wing or left-wing "special snowflake" (my tentative guess is the former, but it can be difficult to tell), but if you're not prepared to put in a modicum of effort and simply read at "-1" it's hard to know what to suggest: maybe build your own site (of course, without any moderation or censorship), and wait for your viewing numbers to grow exponentially?
From the Slashdot moderation guidance:
Is this [moderation] censorship?
We're not technically deleting anything. In fact "We" technically aren't really doing much at all. The masses are doing this for themselves (in theory anyway). And you are always given the option of clicking the threshold control over to '-1' and reading everything uncut, so I really have a hard time saying this truly is censorship. But if you really want to call it that, I can't really argue. We're trying to make as many people happy as possible here- if you don't like something, you can probably change it in the user preferences to more suit your tastes anyway.
To bad The Environmental Right(tm) says the same thing.
Extinction is a decent possibility, really... We've barely survived genetic bottlenecks before. But you're right for the most part- Humanity is likely to survive, though at a drastically reduced level of civilization.
Practically all posts in this thread are offtopic so far, because of stupid assholes like you. Thanks for destroying /., moron!
Perfectly fine as long as the trees were sustainably harvested.
Technically speaking, this covers your complaints.
In practice, that probably just means rotating stands, which is obviously not enough, but at its purest literal interpretation, it means harvested sustainably, from cradle to grave, so to speak.
So... not bollocks.
It can be one of the tools in censorship. You also have to kill the author, anyone who has memorized the work, destroy all soft copies, keep killing people and destroying copies whenever they surface.
When books only existed in hard copies, destroying all representations of the book, conveniently by burning, used to be a large proportion of the work needed to censor.
Of course, my definition of censorship is - prevention of dissemination of information. If yours requires it be done by government, fair enough. Call it something else.
Bingo Dictionary - Pragmatist, n. A myopic idealist.
Extinction may very well be a natural step along the evolutionary path to an eventual superior species. We need to be removed from the ecosystem to make room.
You first.
In practice, that probably just means rotating stands, which is obviously not enough, but at its purest literal interpretation, it means harvested sustainably, from cradle to grave, so to speak.
No, harvesting only refers to taking it down, not what you do with it afterwards.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Who want's to bet it'll be another one of those faulty cables?
And that pond scum would have proven itself worthy of global domination.
We have proven ourselves capable of global domination, but are we worthy?
it took about half a billion years for land-dwelling life to produce a sentient species
If your definition of sentience includes industrial scale exploitation of the environment, then, yes.
We can stop using fossil fuels like an alcoholic can stop using rum, like the morbidly obese can stop using doughnuts, like an addicted gambler can walk away from a bank of slot machines...
First, you need to cure the addiction to wealth and power in about 2% of the population, then you need to prevent the rest of us from developing it.
I'm wondering if global thermonuclear war is actually a "natural" predecessor to evolution into a space-faring species? Are we preventing Gaia from seeding the stars by not irradiating the biosphere?
Censure is a rebuke, it's a response - it comes after the negative action. Censorship is the correct word for what the parent is describing, where Nintendo prevented certain types of speech on their platform. When Nintendo did it to their own games that was self-censorship (the worst kind of censorship, since it's invisible), when Nintendo did it to other developers trying to publish on their platform it was just regular censorship.
What you seem to be suggesting is that because other platforms existed, and publishers could have taken their games to those other platforms, then being blocked from one platform doesn't count as censorship. You must be blocked form all platforms. In other words, speech isn't censored so long as it is possible, somehow, to still speak in some way. Whispering in your lover's ear, for example, while the radio plays loudly in the background so the spooks can't hear you.
By that logic, censorship basically can't exist. That definition is just far too restrictive.
Off topic but fitting anecdote. Last week I saw a guy wearing a "Raptor Run 5k" t-shirt that was sponsored by the creation museum. Of course the graphic on the t-shirt was a man riding on a dinosaur.
"Action without philosophy is a lethal weapon; philosophy without action is worthless."
It is still populated by pond scum, dufus.
No, it is pseudoscience because it lacks proper repeatability and has only the barest elements of falsifiability.
That can just mean that the subject is hard and that we have discoveries to make, not that we're heading in the completely wrong direction.
option 2: They are wrong and we do everything in our power to stop something that wasnt going to happen anyways: Some short term economic losses, maybe.
Reminded me of this. :)
Ezekiel 23:20
the way the universe actually works is not a constant.
You should never accept anything as "true." In science we accept things as "most likely" and "meeting our prespecified level of evidence."
For observational sciences like parts of astronomy and climate, you might just have to live with what you get. For most of medicine and some of climate, we could certainly achieve five sigma confidence. It would cost orders of magnitude more than the two or three sigma we generally use now.
Two sigma is the usual standard. The magic p 0.05.
Some fields use higher standards for very high profile findings, either directly or indirectly. The FDA for example, usually requires at least two independent trials with p 0.05 to approve a new drug. In high energy particle physics it is possible to do very tightly controlled experiments that are expensive to set up but then relatively cheap to run. With this situation, getting more data is fairly inexpensive, so you can achieve very high confidence on your results just by waiting a little longer.
No, Physics assumes that particles behave in consistent ways, at least statistically. Simplified, the observation here seems to be that tau particles decay a little faster than we predict they should. There's some uncertainty, because there are errors in our measurements, and the decay time itself is stochastic. As you collect more data you can put narrower limits on the average decay time and become more confident that it is really different from prediction.
Has said that we understand everything, so this can't be true
> being 5 sigma means that there's only a 1e-6 chance
Umm that's 3E-7 actually.
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
That page does a nice job of explaining in simple terms why we don't have perfect models, but it does not make any claims about the amount of error in any given model. It does not support the argument that you're trying to make.
So you are in effect censoring yourself.
Time is what keeps everything from happening all at once.
I believe that mankind is at least somewhat responsible for the increase in the energy of the system (atmosphere). Whether that is a bad thing is a different question (I think more energy system is a good thing overall, long term, but expensive if we try to continue living as we do, relocating settlements, etc...).
Problem with the venn diagram is that it is the same argument as believing in "God".
I am very sucseptible to "let's have another drink"
I'm curious as to where you're getting 4 sigma errors. Pulling numbers out of your ass is not scientifically valid.
And if you're really curious about climate models, how they're run, errors, etc. you could toss out your willful ignorance and actually read the research. The IPCC reports contain extensive sections on modeling, errors, assumptions, etc.
Climate science isn't some new fad or secret cabal. The first prediction of global warming was made 120 years ago. Educate yourself.
Warma wrote: "...for land-dwelling life to produce a sentient species"
MangoCats wrote: "...sentience includes industrial scale exploitation..."
Would you both please consider replacing "sentience" with "sapience" in such sentences? Those of us who are ourselves sapient would then find your comments make more sense.
A comparison of these words: http://casinerina.blogspot.com...
Tell the guy who just got a cancer diagnosis that they should be happy because they only had a 1 in 4 chance of getting it.
"Fighting terrorists with millitary might is like killing a mosquitor on your Dad's forehead with a rifle."
First world problems.
That is indeed the theory.
But if we were certain the theory were correct, then there would be very little point in performing experiments.
Personally I suspect the evaporation hypothesis will prove to hold true, but that doesn't mean I would choose to bet the continued existence of all life on Earth on it.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
I think you should reconsider your assumptions.
1) While the constituent particle are indeed moving at almost lightspeed, a head-on collision between two such identical particles traveling in oposite direction will completely neutralize their momentum - in fact that's the entire point, you want to convert all that kinetic energy into particle creation.
2) Black holes can have a charge - in which case they will be trapped and slowed in the same magnetic field that traps the many other created particles. So long as they evaporate according to (unproven) theory, that's not a problem, but if they don't... well then we have a problem.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
(Disclosure: IAAP)
WTF are you still doing here?
This is insanely wrong. Censorship is not only censorship if a government does it. Otherwise, the Chilling Effect and self-censorship can't possibly exist.
Well, I'm not going to argue about the specific definition of censorship here, I would however like to point out that censorship not done by the government isn't necessarily wrong.
If I for example host a web forum then I will have to pay for whatever communication is going through that forum and spend time maintaining the server.
Should someone use that forum to spread an agenda that I disagree with then I have any right in the world to remove those posts. If they want to spread that agenda they are free to start their own forum.
You have the right to say what you want. You don't have the right to force people to listen or to prevent them from telling you to stfu.
No-one have the obligation to help you get your word out and slashdot is free to remove your post for whatever reason, be it that it contains too many characters of the wrong type or that it in general is disliked.
If you don't like slashdots terms, start your own forum, others have done it before.
And how well did humans maintain a high-tech, planetary wide civilization during the transition from a cooler earth to a warmer earth?
We have experimental evidence of the EM drive producing thrust, but it must be bad because that means physics is broken.
We have experimental evidence that Leptons aren't behaving as predicted, so that means physics is broken and we are eager to understand it.
Science can sometimes behave like a Junior High school girl.
> We're not dinosaurs.
Speak for yourself, and get off my lawn or I'll come after you with my buggy whip!
Waahahha, too late: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Indeed. As this is published now, it is in the "likely, but not certain" class. This is a call for assistance, may it be with possible flaws in the measurement or mathematics, may it be with more experiments. Also keep in mind that "experiment" can mean some targeted searching though the absolute huge amounts of data a collider like the LHC produces. This is how particle physicists firm up things, this is a global cooperation and that is the only way it works.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
> It is also important to realize that many of the factors that contributed to the rise of culture were caused by easy and abundant availability of resources
I'm not totally sure about this. Our entire society- the good and the bad- is hugely influenced by what we ourselves incentivize. There probably are some baselines that a sentient culture MUST obey to meaningfully be a culture, but we aren't going to be able to divide those from the ones that must appear in a HUMAN culture. Given that, it is hard to make an assumption like yours. Not impossible, but hard.
Quantum Gravity
Do black holes produce thermal radiation, as expected on theoretical grounds? Does this radiation contain information about their inner structure, as suggested by gauge–gravity duality, or not, as implied by Hawking's original calculation? If not, and black holes can evaporate away, what happens to the information stored in them (since quantum mechanics does not provide for the destruction of information)? Or does the radiation stop at some point leaving black hole remnants?
It sounds like they're not 100% certain about Hawking radiation.
You mention "(unproven) theory", whereas the scientific use of the word "theory" signifies that it is as close to proven as possible i.e. no data has so far contradicted it.
Another point regarding these microscopic black holes is that cosmic rays behave like extremely powerful particle accelerators in that particles are smashed together with far greater energy than we can manage in our own accelerators. If microscopic black holes are a problem then we wouldn't be here to complain about them.
You're a temporary arrangement of matter sliding towards oblivion in a cold, uncaring universe
"There's nobody else out there" is but one of many possible answers to Fermi's Paradox.
Neither you nor anybody else knows how likely that is.
"Mind, as manifested by the capacity to make choices, is to some extent present in every electron." -Freeman Dyson
"Fallacy" is not just some magic word you incant upon things you don't like, at least if you're not an idiot.
What fallacy? Can you even describe a logical inconsistency without strawmanning your opponent's meaning?
From reading many of your comments on this site, my life savings is on NO
The human-caused climate change theory is mired in academic corruption. Warming spurt coinciding with human activity is not proof anyway.
I heard Archimedes had a plan for that. It'd be quite difficult though.
Take two rocks, smash them together. Observe the pieces. Now, smash them together harder. Pieces do stranger things. Keep smashing harder. Always something new. Smash them harder and faster, wow new unexplained stuff. Ok, let's smash them even harder...
Physics: 4 sigma error, question the model
Climate: 4 sigma error, jail those who dare to disagree
Not quite.
Everything: 4 sigma error, question the model
Everything: shame those who think a 6 sigma error is the truth
I agree with where you're going, but in all fairness, the sigma-level that matters depends on the field.
Not all fields can gather very large amounts of data the way particle physics can. For example, psychological and drug-trial studies must live with small sample sizes for moral and practical reasons. Even astronomy sometimes has to cope with large error-bars in results, yet the conclusions they draw can be significant. I think climate science lies somewhere in the middle in this regard.
Climate science is so broad though that it arguably sits in mulitple places. The heat trapping of CO2 is known with extreme precision. Global climate models though still have known unknowns that significantly exceed the global energy imbalance.
Check the IPCC reports on climate models and the CERES and ERBE satellite data on Top of Atmosphere(TOA) energy balances.
Here's the short version. Climate models still model many things poorly because we still don't understand them fully, like clouds. Because of this, the TOA energy balance in the models is similarly poor. To correct for this the models use these poorly known parameters to 'tune' the model's TOA energy results, and the tuning isn't done to make cloud parameters give better matching cloud performance, but instead to give TOA energy a better match. It's all a necessary evil as we refine and improve our understanding. However, the imbalance corrected for by tuning these variables is GREATER than both the directly measured TOA imbalance AND any value of predicted TOA imbalance contribution from changing CO2 concentrations.
The CERES and ERBE direct satellite measurements make the problem even harder. The measurements we do have still have error bars that also exceed the signal of the year to year TOA imbalance and the expected contribution from changing CO2 concentrations.
option 4: They are right and we do nothing: Extinction.
And that's bad in the greater scheme of things because .....? Extinction may very well be a natural step along the evolutionary path to an eventual superior species. We need to be removed from the ecosystem to make room.
Imagine if cyanobacteria were sentient and they got together several billion years ago. "Guys, we are producing far too much oxygen pollution. At some point, we will irreversibly alter the ecosystem of this planet. And if we don't go completely extinct, we will drive ourselves into a tiny corner of the environment." Today, this planet would still be populated by pond scum.
You say that as if a planet populated by pond scum is a bad thing. What's so bad about that? What's so inherently great about higher biological complexity? And while we're pulling fantasy scenarios from thin air, who's to say that the next thing to show up after us wouldn't be some sort of Lovecraftian horrors that exist only to subjugate or wipe out all other life in the universe? Is that automatically "better" because it came later, evolutionarily?
I believe what you've described is intelligent design via evolution... You're assuming that there's some "better" form that everything is evolving towards and that overly successful species need to die off and get out of the way for the next successful species to arrive. Neither the theory of natural selection nor the theory of evolution have ever made this claim. It's a claim put forth by those who prefer to think that the universe is deterministic in its path. It has nothing to do with scientific theory. It's purely philosophy.
Personally, I don't think the universe cares one way or another whether our species remains the dominant species on the planet (or even the universe), or it dies out and another species rises, or if it dies out and all life on earth dies with it. But as an animal with a standard self preservation instinct, I'd prefer that myself and my species continues to thrive. Especially if all we have to do is accept short term economic slowdown to guarantee avoiding potential catastrophe.
No, but the creationists will point to this as evidence that scientists don't know what they are talking about, and measurements that say the dinosaurs lived millions of years are wrong and they did, in fact, live 5000 years ago.
Refer to noodley clue found in Deuteronomy 30:19.
Not even remotely. When a kid pees in the pool, I'm not wanting it cleaned because I fear it will become a hot tub. I just don't want to swim in pee.
Spoiler: where I am, the air quality is rather good. Still want HK to have blue skies and Batou Steel to stop making apocalyptic landscapes. I just don't ascribe to the Cult of Big Oil (nono, atmosphere is infinite, we can add whatever to it and makes NO difference) or the Cult of the Hockey Stick (If i scream it's settled even louder, it makes it more true!).... or Paris's "Only in My Backyard" unfairness (or 'trading carbon credits' for that matter).
A beautiful fallacy! Medical science is pseudoscience, too, because physicians are often wrong?
No, it is pseudoscience because it lacks proper repeatability and has only the barest elements of falsifiability.
In case there is any question, I am in fact referring to both Medical "sciences" and Climate "science".
That having been said, I would still think that it would be the best course of action to err on the side of caution and assume the "scientists" are correct given the extreme ramifications if they are... The venn diagram is pretty convincing:
option 1: They are wrong and we do nothing: No harm no foul.
option 2: They are wrong and we do everything in our power to stop something that wasnt going to happen anyways: Some short term economic losses, maybe.
option 3: They are right and we do everything in our power to stop it: We saved the planet.
option 4: They are right and we do nothing: Extinction.
Only one of those options is really bad. the rest are not that big a deal in the grand scheme of things. Anybody that isn't a gambling junky knows where to put their bet on that one.
Of course, when you define all the outcomes somehow your argument is compelling...
I'm afraid I can't agree with your views on what it means for us to "do everything in our power to stop it". Nor can I agree with your view on if we do nothing... extinction. So your handy and irrefutable Venn diagram is just a fancy way of declaring yourself the winner by definition, if we can start from assuming you are correct about everything, we can clearly see that you are correct...
If we do everything in our power to stop CO2 that's very extreme. We have the power after all to switch over to negative CO2 emissions if everyone on the planet simply agreed to. We'd turn off ALL fossil fuel based power generation, and start up CO2 capture schemes. Of course, millions and millions of people would die from starvation in this scenario as our ability to produce food would drop radically, and worse our ability to both store and distribute it would as well. The worse part, is humans aren't going to amiably agree to watch their children starve, so if we want some kind of government power to make sure we prevent extinction by acting, even more people are gonna have to be killed for trying to use fossil fuels. We are talking in practical terms of wealthy nations like the west and Europe that can maybe survive on renewables waging war on the developing world to enforce the zero emissions mandate on them.
As for doing 'nothing', it seems to me no stretch at all to say that by the year 2100, electric cars will have made gasoline engines an antique novelty item, and either fission power or renewable sources, or better still fusion will be well on the way to replacing fossil fuel power generation on a COST basis. So, if we do nothing, we've got our emissions globally dramatically dropping off by 2100 anyways. Our climate models have some wide ranging predictions and unknowns, but extinction level change does not result from our curbing our emissions prior to the year 2100.
Exactly. It always amazes me that on an anti christian worldview heavy site like Slashdot, the whole "humans are special" meme still has so much currency.
There's nothing particularly christian about valuing human life.
And yet your post didn't disappear and is even getting replies despite being modded to -1. What strange censorship this is that doesn't prevent ideas from being put forth, read, and discussed by anyone at all regardless of score...
option 4: They are right and we do nothing: Extinction.
Today, this planet would still be populated by pond scum.
It's not?
And you should be moded funny instead if insightful :D
An other option would be 'wise'.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
For that they need to travel more than 2 times as fast as the speed of light ... just mentioning it.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
The level of indirection for the observation of the Higgs Boson was quite a bit more ... indirect than the evidence for the electron. The level of statistical certainty they waited for before any announcement was completely correct, given that fact. When it's all statistics, you want really good statistical evidence.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Currently climate models are giving us about 2 sigmas of certainty (and there are so many models that you'd get that by accident, if they were independent). It's a great place to start: good progress for a very young field.
But before we make decisions involving $trillions, maybe higher confidence is called for, even if it is a bit pricey.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
The theory that tells us that black holes exist tells us that the small ones decay really, really fast.
Moreover, a small uncharged black hole has no significant attraction to anything, because gravity is really, really weak as forces go. It would gain mass only by an almost exact collision with a fundamental particle (it could go through a proton and miss all the quarks). Lots of people think black holes suck because one with an event horizon big enough to see would have a considerable amount of mass, but one with the mass of a proton will have the gravitational attraction of a proton.
The empirical observation is that we're not all part of a black hole yet, since particles about seventy thousand times the maximum LHC energy hit each square kilometer of Earth about once a year, so if anything bad was going to happen we would be unlikely to have lasted long enough to build the LHC.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
Can you provide a cite to a 4-sigma error? The error bars on climate predictions tend to be fairly large, so a 4-sigma error would be pretty darn big.
Moreover, do you know what a climate scientist would do with a 4-sigma model error? Take that into account and try to improve the model. Do you know what a particle physicist would do with a 4-sigma model error? Precisely the same thing.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
The planet will be just fine. I don't know anyone who thinks it'll disintegrate or explode or turn into a black hole because of global warming. I'm more interested in how the humans do.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
the only problem I have with option 4 is, that it is a fallacy to assume that because we've don'e something that Scientists think need to be corrected may be true, it does not necessarily follow that the actions advocated from scientists necessarily will make it better. In fact, the way science actually works, the way new discoveries happen, it is far more likely that we will screw it up even more as we try to find solutions.
Don't even get me started on how the complication of compounding multiple failures might make it more difficult to reason our way to a final solution.
We are, ostensibly, the first organism with the ability to change it's own DNA consciously and with purpose. I like to think of the coming genetic revolution as the evolution of evolution. All of the technical pieces are in place now. All that is missing is the impetus or necessity to use them on ourselves. A full blown climate crisis could be just the thing to kick start a new kind of directed and accelerated evolution. Fortunately, the Earth does this frequently, and with particular fervor!
When we experience the next one, I hope that the squeamishness toward human genetic experiments doesn't prevent us from surviving and ultimately thriving. It could certainly cement our survival as a new type of adaptable species: self evolving, cognition based, and physically mutable.
When the only tool you have is a claw hammer every problem starts to look like the back of someone's skull.
Without actually disagreeing with you (except for the "evolutionary path to an eventual superior species", which imposes a lot of value judgments on evolution), I don't see what it matters. I, personally, am more or less human. I'm interested in humans (they're really quite interesting). I base my thoughts and actions primarily on the effects on humans. I'm actually against the extinction of the species, no matter what members of other species may think. I'm prejudiced, biased, and perhaps bigoted here, but that's me.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
FTFY.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
Meh. I'm hardcore environmentalist and even I don't think climate change will cause human extinction. It'll be bad, but not that bad.
Today, this planet would still be populated by pond scum.
You must be new to Slashdot.
We can stop using fossil fuels like an alcoholic can stop using rum, like the morbidly obese can stop using doughnuts, like an addicted gambler can walk away from a bank of slot machines...
First, you need to cure the addiction to wealth and power in about 2% of the population, then you need to prevent the rest of us from developing it.
Phase 1:
Outlaw non-physical currency
Phase 2:
make plutonium coinage
Result:
the first True financial "meltdown"
snarky acronym, really proves your point
you should watch even more of the daily show and the 'current year' guy show, you probably have the potential to take over as the host of either!
This. It's easy to criticize science. It's a lot harder to do your own.
I'd say it's easy to rag on science. Even having anything approaching a reasonable criticism is much harder.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
Given no prior knowledge, 2 sigmas is roughly 95% confidence that the observation is not a false positive. Given the risk of spending trillions to avert a possible false positive or not doing anything and having billions displaced and the world's food production severely damaged in the case of a false negative, doing something seems like a reasonable course no?
It's academic anyway. There's no way the world is politically going to do much. Fortunately it looks like the economic choice will be non-fossil in the next few years anyway. Perhaps this is the solution to the Fermi paradox: you only avoid cooking yourselves back to the stone age (with no easily exploitable oil for next time) if you mange to invent economically superior solar panels in time.
Wow. A more ignorant use of that phrase has never before been seen.
Given no prior knowledge, 2 sigmas is roughly 95% confidence that the observation is not a false positive.
Give 20 independent models that are totally random in their predictions, one is expected to get 2 sigmas of accuracy. There are hundreds of models (but, they are not independent, so it probably isn't noise).
We can't estimate the costs well either way, is the problem. These models just don't have the predictive power (yet) to say "if we change X, it will save us $Y", so we can't do a cost-benefit analysis.
But, as you say, it's academic anyway. The inevitable march of technology will obsolete fossil fuels before very much longer.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
If you have 20 models and each one measures an effect with a confidence of, say, 0.1 sigma, the ensemble is MORE than 0.1 sigma. Only if you've got some showing an effect one way and other showing an effect the other way does the confidence go down.
In fact, this very article is about such a situation. IIRC the results from the LHC and SLAC individually are about 3 sigma, but both in the same direction, so when you combine them you get 4.
Climate models all generally agree, at least in the direction of the changes. That means the total confidence is greater than the confidence from any single model.
"Evolution" by _our_superior_understanding_and_definition_ is the formation of new species from older, and now, less successful species; ergo, the term "Evolution" means to succeed in creating a superior species of life for survival. Fitness lost out on the older species, but it mostly does succeed to produce an heir to the throne of life's succession.
What this did not mean was that "Evolution" had thoughts and feelings to achieve that goal. But now, in us, it does.
Also, a lot of what people throw around about resources running into "peak" and "finite", it's all bullshit. We as a society have barely scratched the earth's surface for resources by far less than 1%, literally, this is true. Our technology for going deep is just in its infancy. The "easy" and "finite" stuff is becoming harder to find, but that is just all there is to the "surface" of the "outer" crust.
As for running out of rare earths? wtf are you on about? e=mc^2. It didn't just vaporise. The half life of some of that shit will be around far longer than humanity, in waste dumps scattered around the cities. My city collects methane and other gases from our dumps. The stuff is a biological dream and future gold mine of resources.
The only way earth loses mass is when we stick stuff in orbit and beyond. Even orbital garbage is temporary before it comes crashing back to earth.
For what it's worth, I agree that recycling books is better.
Don't get me started on flag burning. If the flag is a natural fibre (hemp), that's one thing, but synthetic flags are technically fossil fuels.
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Well, you have that backwards, Models are to opposite of measurements. Multiple models let you make correct predictions by random chance, and thus decrease confidence. Multiple measurements go the other way, and are less likely to concur by chance.
Sure, the models agree with each other on a lot of stuff, but that means only that they aren't independent models - but of course they aren't, that's not at all how science works.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
"medicine...five sigma confidence"
Ha ha ha, funniest thing I've read all fucking day. Those in medicine don't have a clue what's going on in your body. Look at the efficacy data for common drugs. Surgeons have been known to take off the wrong limb!
Look, you clearly have some kind of axe to grind. I'm not really interested in that.
The great thing about math is that you can work it out yourself. If you're interested, go read up on some statistics and work the probability problem of combining the results from multiple models yourself. If you want a shortcut, check out Fisher's method, or Stouffer's z-score method.
There is no evidence (or even claims from the wilder fringes) that the flux of cosmic rays travelling towards Earth at a very large fraction of c has greatly changed in the last few hundred thousand years (in fact, from Be-exposure dating, we've got fairly good evidence that the flux hasn't changed). We have definitely seen single cosmic rays with telescopes (covering only a few square kilometres of sky, for a few years) which are many orders of magnitude more energetic than any that our particle accelerators have produced. So, anything that we create at SLAC, or CERN or BEPC is not anywhere near the limit of what already hits the Earth quite commonly. (And the Sun, more commonly.)
With current and proposed technologies, to exceed the energy of recorded natural cosmic rays, you'd need to build an accelerator approximately the size of Pluto's orbit. And by the time that we buld that, we'll have been watching the cosmic ray flux for long enough that we'd probably have another order of magnitude higher to go in energy. Eventually, we may catch up with nature, but probably not while we've unvisited parts of the Kuiper Belt. Maybe not until your descendants set out for their descendants to visit the Large Magellanic Cloud.
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
[Gets LARGE bag of coffee beans and pays water rates for the next year.] Do elaborate.
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
Errr, the cyanobacteria were both the perpetrators of the Great Oxidation, and survived it perfectly well. Marine cyanobacteria and their derivative algae are still responsible for something around half of the oxygen production on Earth.
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
There was a video going around YouTwit, or TwiTube or something a few weeks ago of someone riding a dinosaur through traffic in a Kazakh (+/- a 'stan) city centre. The dinosaur in question was an ostrich.
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
Fuck, I hear some stupid things about panspermia, but this is both stupid and dangerous.
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
Actually no, it's not. Hawking radiation is built within the context of GR, but they are NOT equivalent.
I also specifically mentioned the possibility of a small *charged* black hole, which would have several orders of magnitude more attractive force than gravity alone. Granted it would neutralize fairly quickly, but its charge could also oscillate for a while if for example a single positive charge attracted several negatively charged particles to within gravitational capture range.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
And the knowledge to predict how protein chains will fold into structures. We can describe how that protein chain forms that structure, but we can't work out from scratch what structure will form from this protein chain. Of course, this knowledge is not necessary for evolution to proceed - just try the mutation and if the organisms don't survive, cull them and eat the remains.
We're slowly getting enough of a handle on physiology and metabolism that we can try rational design of drugs - we want this structure to interact with that structure in this way - but it is ferociously complicated, and all too often the result is an unexpected interation of our molecule with that one over there. That is why, for the foreseeable future, culture testing, then animal testing, then clinical testing in humans will remain the paradigm. you could, of course, shorten the production cycle by volunteering to participate in a test, but accepting the result of being culled if that is how the cookie crumbles for you.
Evidence please? There is some evidence that in times of environmental stress, some bacteria reduce the effectiveness of their genetic error-correcting mechanisms, allowing more undirected mutations to persist into reproduction. That is a very long way from "directed" evolution. Of course, if you know of peer-reviewed published data supporting your opinion, educate me. IANAbiologist, but approach these questions from the fossil record.
I think I've seen the next step on that progression. It's that "Kardashian Space Program" game, isn't it? The one that produces bizarre freakish mutants with peculiar shapes which couldn't possibly survive in the real world, but are nonetheless popular.
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
There is a dinosaur sitting on top of the lamppost outside my house, shitting onto my car. They're not extinct today, and pretty unlikely to be extinct tomorrow.
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
if it's very low mass, is it going to be able to get more than one negative charge into gravitational capture range against the mutual repulsion between the negatives? It seems more likely that it'll get one in, and then it'll be neutral and won't have anything but gravity going for it anymore.
Today, this planet would still be populated by pond scum.
Look around you. It is still. Donald trump for one example.
True, the question is will it have drawn any other particles onto a collision course before it neutralizes?
If it manages to stay "fed" long enough to leave near-vacuum and start falling through the Earth, then it becomes a question of how it's own mass gets deflected by the masses of the atoms in the various crystalline lattices it's falling through. A single grain of table salt is over a million fairly well-ordered atoms across, creating well-ordered deflections towards the most dominant "line" of atoms along the falling path.
How certain are you that passing through such a grain, much less a good-sized chunk of quartz won't bring it within critical range of an atom or ten?
And on the topic, what exactly *is* the critical range for capture? Subatomic "particles" after all aren't solid objects that can cross the event horizon - they are more diffuse quantum wavefunctions whose limits (technically) extend to infinity. Exactly what percentage of the wavefunction has to intersect the event horizon before it's "captured"? And does the presence of an event horizon within a wavefunction cause any sort of probabilistic distortions that might increase the odds of capture?
And perhaps most importantly - how certain are we of the soundness of our theory in this particular intersection of the thus-far still unreconciled theories of Relativity and QM? Certain enough to bet the entire potential future of humanity? And against what gain?
I'm all for continuing the research, just not on Earth. The benefits seem insufficiently urgent to justify the risk, however small, especially in the face of a very real possibility of being able to do the same things far more safely in space within a century or two. As long as the collapse wasn't too catastrophic, having a moon-mass black hole in orbit might actually be incredibly useful...
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
Eh. It needs to capture a crapload of stuff to have much of a lifespan. A grain of salt is approximately 5.85e-5g, or 5.85e-8kg, which is on the order of one planck mass... which means a hole with that mass is going to poof in approximately one planck time (8e-40s), which (since it's not moving fast) means it's not going to find much to eat in a vacuum chamber before it goes. And one generated by particle collision isn't going to have even that much mass, so it won't last as long.
As to risk-vs-reward, "The benefits seem insufficiently urgent to justify the risk, however small" translates pretty directly to "benefits are less than risk as risk approaches zero", which means you see zero benefits. I disagree :)
Well aren't you just a happy bundle of nihilism.
As members of the human race, most of us have a vested interest in ensuring its ongoing survival.
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
Easiest is to fly a large asteroid very close by the Earth, repeatedly, transferring the momentum from the asteroid to the Earth, much like how spacecraft get a gravity boost doing a flyby except backwards. Have to accelerate the asteroid in between each flyby and I guess it would take a lot of energy but given fusion power and enough time...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
If you imagine that multiple models can ever improve confidence, I'd suggest starting over on stats.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
"Fallacy" is not just some magic word you incant upon things you don't like, at least if you're not an idiot. What fallacy? Can you even describe a logical inconsistency without strawmanning your opponent's meaning?
I'm not "incanting" anything, and it is trivially clear that for a reasoning to be invalid, it does not matter what fallacy invalidates it as long as it is one. So unless you claim that "if X generates flawed results sometimes, then X is not scientific" is a valid implication, why should I bother with any detailed taxonomy?
From reading many of your comments on this site, my life savings is on NO
Very random and quite funny. :D
Ezekiel 23:20
exactly, why should you bother
since you did, you should explain to the other person the error you perceive, otherwise it rather seems you are just taking an opportunity to inflate yourself
and what you call a "valid implication" i wouldn't. The problem is that you are generalizing over too much controversy.
Again, this goes back to your motive. Are you trying to inflame the controversy or put it to rest?
If you wouldn't call it a valid implication, and the comment in question was "Climate change is pseudoscience, because their predictions have been wrong repeatedly", what problem do you have with that comment being labeled as a fallacy?
Ezekiel 23:20
Eventually.
Very eventually.
Let's have a think on this. We'll use Ceres for our bowling ball ; it'll need to be in a ca.1-year orbit (even if eccentricity greater than Earth's, to get the right sort of interaction geometry). So, to move enough energy to move Earth out by a factor of SQRT(2), you'd need on the order of (efficiency*mass Ceres/ mass Earth) interactions. If they were 1% efficient, that would be around 650,000 interactions, which would take around a million years. Doable, but you could use it as a radioactive waste store while doing the manoeuvring.
You could perhaps do it quicker using a small black hole, but the tidal effects might strip some of Earth's tenuous atmosphere off in the process. That'll upset any voters left on board.
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
That's the reason that the project would have to start soon, only a billion years to get it done :)
The voters would be a problem, convincing them to finance a billion year project that involves millions of near misses by asteroids (why only use one) large enough to destroy the ecosystem would never get passed.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
Because it isn't fallacious.
It's a matter of fact, true or false.
Indeed, it's false as a formula. But that makes it a fallacy to use it and substitute propositions into it.
Ezekiel 23:20
Even if it's false, it's in no way fallacious.
But you haven't addressed the evidence at all.
You've been caught. Just stop. You're a dogmatic climate change proponent.
Even if it's false, it's in no way fallacious.
So it's suddenly possible to perform sound reasoning with garbage inputs? How does that work? And why would I discuss the evidence for climate change at all (there's a lot of sources doing that in my stead anyway) when I was addressing flawed reasoning on part of a /. poster? That's a completely different matter. And I'm definitely not "a climate change proponent"; I never advocated for climate change.
Ezekiel 23:20
What about this aren't you getting?
You haven't made an argument for the quality of the inputs!
You still haven't addressed the reasoning of the poster.
If the conclusions from the data repeatedly show the hypothesis is false, then continuing to test for the hypothesis, let alone concluding its true, DOES NOT FOLLOW
You are WRONG
the end
Try me. It's gotta be better than living in a neoliberal, human-infested environment
The only problem is that you're basing all those numbers on entirely untested "theory" extrapolated to the extreme limits of the intersection of two known-incompatible theories. We *know* that we're, at best, missing some critical piece of theory that would reconcile the incompatibilities between QM and GR, and at worst one or both theories may be fundamentally flawed.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
You haven't made an argument for the quality of the inputs!
*You* argued about things being "false but not fallacious". Not me.
You still haven't addressed the reasoning of the poster.
*The poster* hasn't addressed his own reasoning, namely "if X generates flawed results sometimes, then X is not scientific", which is garbage. I've addressed it.
If the conclusions from the data repeatedly show the hypothesis is false, then continuing to test for the hypothesis, let alone concluding its true, DOES NOT FOLLOW
That may very well be, but why did you suddenly jump to this entirely different topic and how does it apply here?
Ezekiel 23:20
Fallacy means logically unsound, with possible implication of intent, the originally meaning is a lie or trick. False means factually untrue in an objective model of reality, without implication of intent.
*The poster* hasn't addressed his own reasoning
He refers to several failed models and predictions that are well known and should be common knowledge in an informed discussion here.
But I am innocently curious to see if you know of a model that has succeeded in taking observed data (CO2 production, methane release, water vapour patterns, etc.) into a theoretical model based on the interaction of the sun with these particles in the atmosphere that lines up with observed temperature increases? "It's kind of warmer out in general" is piss poor observation. Where is the geographic breakdown? Sorry but 'human caused climate change' IS NOT science.
Anyway the poster's lack of specific address doesn't excuse yours. 'He did it so I can do it too' doesn't build empires.
Don't tell the voters. Apart from the vanishingly small population of people with telescopes (let's give them a name - like the "Illuminati" for their enhanced lighting), who's going to notice? Even if we extend life spans to give us a "Thousand Year dryeo," you'd need the records of a lifetime to see what is going on.
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"