>>Are you really that ignorant ? There have been many other proposals, some of them remarkably better. The whole CC license concept is based on an alternative to what copyright normally does, as is free/open-source software. In both cases the massive size of these cultural collections prove that the creators find them appealing.
>Are YOU really that ignorant? Creative Commons, Copyleft, and other schemes are all copyright licenses! If it were not for copyright law, they could not even exist, and because they rely on copyright law for their very existence, they can't be "better" than copyright! What copyright "normally does" is irrelevant. That's just a matter of how the copyright holder sets the license up. The subject here was copyright law, not how some people choose to use it.
"The entire point of copyleft is that it's easier to subvert copyright by using it than to try and lobby for it's abholition" - Richard Stallman.
>You think our Founding Fathers dreamed up our version of copyright on their own? You really don't know your history, do you? Sure, there were earlier forms of "copyright" that were not exactly what we think of when we think of the idea. But not at that time, in England. You are simply wrong about the "wasn't even proposed" part.
All previous "copyright" laws were really just censorship laws. I actually DO know the history of them.
>Sure we do. Your insistence on bringing up the distant past is exactly what I meant by straw-man arguments. But what about the last century? Before the outrageous time extensions on copyrights, and the allowing of software patents? We had international treaties that recognized foreign works. The arts and sciences were booming. Sorry, but all evidence is against you on this one. It obviously DID work. You show ME how it didn't.
Your greatest success in the early part of the previous century (Disney for example) all built on areas where copyright doesn't apply (all Disney's most important work were based on public domain - most of you early cinema used play scripts from foreign countries whose copyright you didn't even RECOGNIZE until 1937). Evidence given.
>That's a bit of a stretch. The time you talk about was long ago, and I challenge you to show how it affected the situation today.
You got your initial lead because companies like Disney did not need to worry about copyright to get good stories cheap.
>You need to work on your logic a bit. That doesn't matter. Because there were just as many artists at other times who did NOT have copyright protection, and were equally unrecognized during their lifetimes. That's the point - these artists WERE recognized in their time. They were famous - and even wealthy for artists. Nevertheless the monetary value of their work WHILE copyrighted was only a FRACTION of it's value once in the public domain. Stop using strawmen yourself, I specifically ONLY gave you artists who were SUCCESSFULL.
> You show ME how it didn't. For the entire part of the last century where your description fits, America did NOT recognize foreign copyright.
>I think it's pretty obvious that I was speaking generally. And it has been better at other times than it is now. I don't recall putting any absolutes in that statement. There has NEVER been a time in all of human history when a government department was actually efficient and well run. Except perhaps on rare occasions the tax gatherers.
>There is a very strong correlation. That's not proof, but it's as close to proof as anybody will ever be able to get.
I shoot you down very simple: the free software movement predates the DMCA by more than 20 years. Frank Zappa predicted the problems we now face more than 40 years before that ! In short, everybody who actually UNDERSTOOD copyright knew it was flawed long before these things highlighted it.
>But the only examples you have given of ideas of a "different nature" (Creative Commons, etc.) are actually copyright licenses! You're not thi
>> Being able to write a song does NOT give you the right to dominate the decisions of everybody who ever wants to hear it. Not even ONE of those decisions.
>Wrong.
>Copyright serves the public interest by providing for a financial incentive to create artistic works. It does not mean that its purpose has not been served just because you don't like its restrictions.
Your argument has nothing to do with what I said. Artists do NOT have a NATURAL right to control anything at all. We give them an artificial one by RESTRICTING our own rights to do whatever we want. As long as copyright serves its purpose - to expand the public domain - this is a trade-off we are prepared to make. We're willing to give up those freedoms for a period of time because we can buy something worthwhile with it. The moment copyright stopped serving that purpose - the trade-off became an unjustifiable restriction on OUR natural right to copy. The justification you cite isn't TRUE anymore. And no the justification is NOT to give an incentive for creation. The justification is teh EXPANSION OF THE PUBLIC DOMAIN. We incentivise creation as a means to an end, to grow the public domain. In this age of retroactive extensions of already ludicrous copyrigth terms -that goal is no longer being met. Since the distributors get the money and not the artists - and actively REMOVE from availability some works - it fails even more as it doesn't even meet the intermediary step toward the goal anymore.
>> What is it with some people and their inability to imagine any issue having more than one side or possibly all sides being valid PARTS of a whole ?
>The problem is that you keep thinking your "side" invalidates the legal right for an artist to control the distribution of his work. Itunes and amazon let you buy your songs online.
That legal right is an artificial restriction made for a certain goal - since that goal is no longer being met by (I would personally say meetable by) copyright - copyright is no longer sensible. The natural right here is our right to copy. We allow it to be sacrificed TEMPORARILY in order ot have MORE things to copy. The moment we stopped GETTING more things to copy, we lost all incentive to make that sacrifice.
>> The reality is that downloads have significantly more appeal
>I never said anything about downloads being bad. You should just have to pay for them. But your straw man argument works great when you can't find any other rebuttal.
I wasn't saying you did.
> The record companies didn't move into the online space in time >Amazon is drm free. Are you sure you aren't using an outdated argument to justify piracy?
It was too late. That was my point. The second part of my post was a historical perspective on how we came to BE in this position. I'm well aware of what has changed since then but that's not relevant. I justify downloading and sharing based on the faillure of copyright to deliver it's promise to us as citizens. Thus removing the justification for restricting our rights in the first place. I still think incentivising artists is a good thing- but only as long as the benefit is to the public domain. Copyright doesn't do that - it may have done so once, but it doesn't now. Therefore it has to go. We can argue about other ways to pay artists but copyright is now an unjustifiable intrusion into the civil liberties of all citizens that has no reward for them. What the historical perspective indicates is why and how the citizens came to discover a real USE for copying, which didn't exist before. We didn't much care about sacrificing hte right to copy in the past since we couldn't usefully excercise it anyway. Now we can, so unless copyright is giving us MAJOR value in some other way- it's a senseless restriction on us. Since it isn't, all it is is a draconian restriction on our basic personal lives.
>(how about preemptively attacking ships that sail out of known pirate enclaves?) So holding people without trail because they are "suspected terrorists" for indefinite periods aren't enough... now you want to attack ships at sea without them having done anything simply because pirates use the same harbor ?
You know a lot of car hijackers use the brooklyn bridge. Let's pre-emptively shoot at every car that drives over it...
Or we can give other nations and their citizens the same innocent-till-proven guilty position we demand for ourselves and punish the actual pirates, not every bloody fisherman who is still trying to make a living honestly - because then they will ALL be pirates since you removed the possibility of being anything else.
>Yeah, because what the West needs is another nation building exercise....
If the West doesn't want to be building nations... maybe it should stop destroying them in the first place ? Western interference was the primary reason Somalia's original government collapsed and that government wasn't great (it was a post-collonial government) so you can trace the West CAUSING the pirate problem back to raping the country for about 300 years. Then when the government collapsed, the West made NO effort to prevent corporate ships from overfishing those unpoliced shores and polluting them until the local fishing industry (the ONLY local industry) collapsed.... The West created this problem - it's our responsibility to solve it, or deal with the consequences of our own decisions.
>Isn't the whole reason for the military to protect civilians? The only other reason is to conquer other nations but we consider ourselves to be more civilised than that these days.
Unless they have something you want. Like oil.
>It's my understanding that piracy in international waters has always been punishable by any nation that felt threatened by such actions. It's been pretty well established for centuries.
Aye this is true.
>Mind you, punishing the pirates doesn't get to the route of the problem. Deal with overfishing and illegal dumping as well. These people are pirates because they don't have any other choice. There's no way for them to earn an honest living. They become pirates or starve. The risk of being captured and sentenced to life in prison is small compared with the certainty of death. Punish them by all means, but for practical purposes we should provide an opportunity for another way of life.
While I agree with what you're saying - both those problems were caused in their case because nobody was policing the waters. The real solution to the whole mess in it's entirety is to stabilize the country and get a real government in place. Somalia right now doesn't EVEN have anarchy. It's a bunch of feuding warlords all hoping to become a military dictator but none ever quite powerful enough to pull it off. They spend all their time fighting one another and nobody spends any time running the country, handling diplomacy or providing any kind of infrastructure, economic or other service. There is no law enforcement and even if there was, no law to be enforced. I am one of those people who think anarchist societies can sometimes work, that governments are usually bad -but Somalia is a prime example that merely not having a government doesn't give you a working anarchist society. Without the right kind of social structures and protections in place, you just get a shithole where life has no value and prospects are things that happen to other people. The only kind of business that would want to venture there is the kind who sees real value in the lack of law. Organised crime mostly. Perhaps the more ethically questionable types of genetic research. But even those guys stay away because there is no education system and whatever you build will get looted, if you put in enough security to prevent looting by the population then you'll get looted by the warlords who are always desperate for any kind of supplies.
>What jurisdiction do those countries you name have? Did these acts of piracy take place in US coastal waters?
There's an ancient naval tradition which I BELIEVE is now international law (but please do correct me if I'm wrong) that the surface of a ship in international waters IS considered the native soil of the sailors. In other words if you are a German on a Spanish ship and you steal a Dutchmen's wallet and get caught, you can be prosecuted in Spain as the crime was committed on Spanish soil.
Assuming I'm right then, if the pirates board the ship - their on U.S. soil even if they are in international waters. Since Somalia has no government to speak off, the only sensible choice by the way is to treat their territorial waters as if it was international waters for the time being.
>Because if the didn't, I fail to see any legal jurisdiction the USA might have.
Well I've given a possible explanation above though I admit I'm no expert and I could be outright wrong. Would be nice if somebody who knew the fine details could elaborate.
>Further, placing arms on a non-military ship in international waters violates a couple of international accords.
This is true, but when has America ever given a damn about those ? International accords and treaties are for America to enforce on other countries, not for America to actually obey themselves. Haven't you paid any attention ?
>While I support the idea of shutting down the murderous thugs, doing so illegally is rather hypocritical, and undermines any righteous goals.
Utterly agreed. Trouble is, none of those guys in the fancy suits whose pictures are printed on ballots every now and then could possibly understand this concept.
>Oh yeah, and why is the US and other countries using their MILITARY to protect civilian cargo ships? Who is paying for that I wonder?
That would be you and me paying. But using the military to protect civilian infrastructure from armed assault is nothing new or unusual, in fact it's one of the military's basic functions. The fact that in this case the infrastructure is off-shore is fairly irrelevant to THAT part of the discussion (it is however relevent to other aspects like international law).
>the problem with "downloading music for free" is that its NOT like hearing it on the radio to try for free, True, when you download it you can listen to it when you're in the mood for it - not 5000 times a day until you're so utterly sick of it that he last thing you ever want to do in your whole life is hear it again. I wonder how many sales are lost by overplaying on the radio ?
>and this is a disingenuous analogy at best. If you can download and own it for free, what incentive would you have to pay for it? If you can turn on the radio and hear the latest single by $FLAVOR_OF_THE_MONTH at least once an hour for the whole day... what incentive do you have to pay for it then ? But you can't download a concert experience. The downloads/radio songs you do could be decisive in WHICH concert tickets you spend your money on though.
>This isn't about "exposure" or promotion - its simply about getting consumers to actually pay for the music they download and keep from artists Oh so it can't be about both then ? What is it with some people and their inability to imagine any issue having more than one side or possibly all sides being valid PARTS of a whole ? The reality is that downloads have significantly more appeal than album purchases - for most people. You get hte songs you want, when you want them. You never have to hunt for an album that is not being pushed anymore. You don't ever have to actually listen to the 5 filler tracks on it and you can mix and match the order of songs in your playlist to suit your mood instead of the order the producer thought you had to hear them in. The record companies didn't move into the online space in time - from the start they fought digital music as hard as possible. Remember when the RIO created the first real mp3 player ? That was BEFORE the napster thing and downloads - they sued them and tried to get the device banned - even though presumably the major use would be for people to put their ripped CD's on. They could see their distribution model about to fail - and refused to adapt. The problem with itunes and all the other legal methods are they arrived too late and even now are too limited in power. There's still no good way to do itunes purchases on Linux- and they are still utterly overpriced. RMS suggested that an ideal way would be to be able to embed in the songfile itself a simple one-button process to "Send the artist one dollar". One button- not a bunch of legal forms, and it pops up as you play, for each song, if you click it, one dollar to the artist. That removes any need for record companies at all -and the money actually GOES to the artists - it makes ALL artists indy and creates a perfectly level playing field. That would actually mean we get BETTER music produced.
>but you keep ignoring that maybe some artists dont want to give away their music for free. what then? Who the fuck cares what they want ? Copyright wasn't created to serve artists but to serve the PUBLIC. Specifically to increase the public domain by offering ARTISTS an incentive. It's not ABOUT what they want. The public's demands are what matters. It's a good IDEA to remunerate artists. Buying music on an artificial monopoly is not the only way to remunerate artists - it's probably not even the best way anymore. The one thing that has NO place in this debate whatsoever is what "artists WANT us to be able to do". Being able to write a song does NOT give you the right to dominate the decisions of everybody who ever wants to hear it. Not even ONE of those decisions.
That particular microsoft license has ALSO been approved by the FSF. The requirements are identical. It's the GOAL of setting them that's different. The difference between free software and open-source is in their goals not in their practise. They do exactly the same things in exactly the same ways - they just do it for different reasons. This is why they two communities generally collaborate on practical matters even as they argue on philosophical ones.
Minix's license was changed for version 3. I doubt very much it would have been offered under the original license as minix2 was under prominence before the OSI existed, before Linux really.
The license however was one of the main reasons linux took off and stole most of Minix's users- it was deemed unacceptable by the community. This is why Tannenbaum changed it later.
>Exposer to sexual material at a young age can cause serious long term effects.
Universal statements about something as complex as human behavioral response can sound almost confident enough to hide the fact that it is by definition bullshit.
Prove it.
Average age at which girls masturbate the first time: between 3 and 5 years old. Just because we like to IMAGINE sexuality starts at puberty doesn't make it any less stupid. It doesn't. Humans are BORN sexual beings - actually more than that, I've seen sonars of babies masturbating IN THE WOMB.
It's part of our human nature. What can and DOES cause terrible harm is surrounding it with mystery (result = STDs and teen pregnancy), or shame and guilt (result all too often a lifelong unhappy and guilty sex life).
Just as many of us try to prevent otherwise - we even have a TERM for the childhood sexual exploration we all engaged in and know our children will too (no matter how many parents imagine theirs won't). "Playing doctor".
Does that mean we're ready for full on sex at that age ? No. Even puberty is a bit early because humans are bit more complex than our biology and our minds don't mature quite as fast as our bodies anymore. Does it mean seeing sexual content is harmfull - for damn sure it doesn't. But information, teaching values like body-ownership and privacy and being open and encouraging about your child's PERSONAL sexuality will allow them to make BETTER choices when the time comes to share that sexuality with another person. They will choose better who with, when and under what circumstances.
If you haven't bought your daughter a vibrator before age 14 - you're a bad parent, likely to get your chance to be a bad grandparent a lot sooner than you planned (indeed studies have shown that girls who are comfortable about masturbation by puberty tend to lose their virginity at a much LATER age than those who are not, and make better choices about it when they do. Choices like protection).
>The license requires that distribution of the original source code cannot be done, but that modifications and derivative works may be distributed as patches. (Potentially satisfies section 3)
That we have precedent on. The original Minix license said the same and it was neither recognized as open-source OR free software. Sheez now I feel old.
>I never said anything about practicality. I said that it could be possible to construct a license that fit the open source definition, yet still did not allow indiscriminate redistribution. (That one can restrict it to only aggregate redistributions means not indiscriminate.)
If this actually gets done - I promise you the very next DAY the OSI would change the definition to remove it, they certainly wouldn't grant it "approved" status either way - on the grounds that it CLEARLY violates the spirit of the definition.
And while you could still in theory match the open-source definition - you'd be flat out on your arse at meeting he FSF's requirements so you definitely won't be free(libre) software. Freedom 2 specifically refers to unmodified free distribution (and freedom 3 to distribution of modified versions).
If the rift between the two movements actually split on this point. I think a LOT of people would follow Bruce Perens' lead. Yes, the man who WROTE the open-source definition in declaring "it's time we stopped talking about open-source and start talking about free software and ethics again." He stated as much in a mail to the OSI mailing list a few months ago. His reasoning was that open-source was a term to focus on the technical merrits to get free software a foot in the door of business. It's there now and the goal achieved, but the ethical requirements that led to the CREATION of free software in the first place still exist, and it's time to start talking about that again because businesses ARE sold now and it's time to think of the users.
Personally, I never went to the open-source side. I've stuck with free software for the sake of freedom since well before 1998 when the term open-source was coined. I will keep sticking to it, but it's nice to see good folk like Bruce starting to think about the Stallman-ethics of this situation once more. I wonder how much things like the Novell-Microsoft deal had to do with that ? The same deal that made Jeremy Allison quit his job ?
>However, there could be an open source license that doesn't allow this. Find a counter-example is left as a problem for the reader.
Any license like that would violate the FSF's 2nd freedom. To be free software it MUST grant that right. The same requirement exists as part of the open-source definition. Since open-source is trademark (at least, it was going to be - I'm not up to speed on whether the trademark application was approved) it would be a trademark violation to call something open-source unless it's license is on their approved list.
All the licenses that are approved by either the FSF or the OSI permit free distribution and approving a license which didn't would violate the founding rules of either organisation so it's not going to happen.
>I don't think they'd need to recognize the microchip as a microchip. They'd just need to recognize it as "hey, this thing could not have formed naturally - it had to have been made."
I said that myself. But you know -we used to say the same thing about living organisms. It was the heart of the watchmaker argument and it remains the heart of the intelligent-design argument today. It was wrong. Whoever finds it, if they are scientific at all will spend perhaps centuries arguing about whether it's a fossil or a constructed thing - some will genuinely believe it to be evidence of a time when there were silicon based life-forms on this planet.
>Just like the Baghdad Battery - for years after we found it, no one knew what the hell it was. Oh sure, it LOOKED like some sort of capacitor-like-thing, but they didn't have electricity back then so there's no way that's what it really is (a great example of preconceived notions screwing up interpretation of historical evidence). But we knew it was something that was made by an intelligent being. That's the basic criteria I'm going after for future civilizations to figure out that we were here. As long as something we made survives, then no matter what it is, it'll be evidence that something intelligent was on this planet at some time.
I agree that this is likely - I even postulated as much. The question here is deep time. I have no doubt 5000 years from now a civilization, even a non-earth-born one would find plenty of evidence of our existence even if we went extinct tomorrow. But 30 million years ? We can't (economically at least according to GM) build a car that lasts 5 years... what makes us think anything we build have such durability as to survive for millions through every natural catastrophe (up to and including future life-forms digging things up and making them collapse long before there is anything that could be called sentient - a future class of animals as big as dinosaurs could trampled every bit of concrete we have into fine dust millions of years before the next technological society exists). I think the idea of our constructions being THAT durable is... well rather far-fetched.
>Of course, there are problems with this - - How does the FutureGuy know that whatever he found was made by something living on earth? Maybe it was dropped off by an alien. How does he know that it wasn't made by a member of his own species? It'd be an easy assumption to make. He'd find it, date it, and then figure "oh, well that's proof we were around 800,000 years ago."
If we found something like that what would we say ? It's not a very GOOD metric, but it's the only one we have. I can tell you what we would probably say. We'd insist it can't be as old as it looks and assume a flaw in our dating methodology and reuse as many of the others as we can till something gives us a believable figure (anything after humans made fire would be more easily accepted). About the only way around that was if it was undeniably old. Say the military bunker lay underneath a volcanic flow and they knew from multiple sources of other evidence that this volcanic eruption happened that long ago, and what it buried must have been older than that. Again, there'd be arguments. If it was just one microchip especially. If the whole bunker somehow survived it would be absolute proof - as much so as finding caves with rock-art proves our ancestors could paint. One microchip... as I said above, there would be a lot of argument about what it actually WAS and it may never be recognizable enough to become consensus.
>These are the same problems we would face if we ever unearthed ancient technology.
Yep. We wouldn't know what we found - and we may not recognize it. We use silicon in our microchips because it's the most efficient material we know off. What if their technology was as advanced as ours but went in a completely different direction. Even if they had something doing the job of computers - it may be made from something completely different (silicon is
>People have been mining and refining metals for thousands of years now. Ever heard of the bronze age? Refined metals look completely different from unrefined ores
And your evidence that this remains true after 10 million years is... what exactly ? I would love to see the experiment that proved that one. Considering also it isn't laboratory conditions we're talking about here. What happens to refined metals after being hit by a glacier ? How do they look after being drowned in magma ? You don't know do you ? Nobody does. I don't recall ever reading of bronze things found in pompey and there wasn't even much magma there, that was mostly ash.
>Concrete has also been around for roughly 2000 years. It was invented by the Romans. And your evidence that concrete can survive for a million years is ?
>This may be news to you, but people have been making things out of materials other than (and more durable than) wood for a long time. I don't deny that - I just think "more durable than wood" and "10 million years later durable" are a VAST difference.
>Don't be ridiculous. Lots of electronics are shielded from EMP (esp. military stuff), and it wouldn't be hard for engineers and technicians to repair everything else. They'd just have to get the semiconductor factories running again.
And what the hell will they do that with after every power station on earth get's fried ?
Somebody earlier reminded me of another Carl Sagan quote: extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
But I'm not the one making extraordinary claims. You are the one claiming anything of human (or even "life-form") construction is so durable that it can survive tens of millions of years and remain in a form recognizable as having been constructed. To me - THAT is an extraordinary claim and not only does it not have extraordinary evidence- you have NO evidence whatsoever to back it up.
Yes I meant Ian Steward but you know - he and Jack Cohen didn't ONLY write Science of the Discworld books (good as they are) - ever read "evolving the alien" ?
I also own a copy of "a brief history of time" and I several of Carl Sagan's books both fiction and non-fiction. I've actually READ all of Isaac Asimov's non-fiction essays... you know I don't just base any idea on a single source.
This particular idea I used their wording for because it was so well put, but the fact is it was also backed by real science - and I've read most of that science as well. Just because a scientist writes non-fiction chapters in a fictional book, or even a whole science-fiction revolution (like Asimov and Sagan both did) they don't STOP being scientists.
>Yes and no. I think some technologies are going to be universal across societies. If we want electricity, we're gonna need some metal to conduct it. If we happened to evolve on a planet that didn't have metal, then we wouldn't have electricity. Simple as that. Doesn't mean we're stupid - we just don't have the resources we need to make "technology."
Electricity is the only form of energy technology can be based on ? It's the one we used, there is no reason to assume that others couldn't have done the same. Perhaps it would be harder, perhaps MUCH harder - all THAT would mean is slower progress, it would mean zero progress, and once the problem is solved once -everything becomes easy again anyway. Even electricity isn't bound to metal - it's just a convenient conductor, there are many others and the best electrical advances we've made were made when came up with semiconductors - most of which aren't metallic.
>People 3,000 years ago weren't any less intelligent overall than we are, even though they were mainly building stuff out of wood. That wood is not going to survive the next global mass-disaster, and any fossil remains or ceramic evidence is likely to get obliterated.. Or buried under a mile of dirt.
You imagine that if there were no metals - they would have remained at that level of progress (which btw ALREADY meets the criteria of technological civilization) - I assume they would have found other sollutions, or made better things out of wood and ceramic than we ever dreamed off - because we didn't NEED to.
>And our technology isn't much better long-term. The buildings will rust and crumble, the concrete will be overgrown. Probably our longest-lived evidence would be nuclear waste, since it's designed to be stored for an unfathomably long time. But even the biggest anti-nuclear pessimist sets the hazard duration at 300,000 years.
That I certainly agree on. The pyramids made it 3000 years and that impresses us, but it's a blink of an eye in geological terms and they are eroding as we speak. Their sandstone at that... sooner or later all they will be is sand.
>If we went extinct tomorrow, the next species would have, at most, 300,000 years to gain sufficient intelligence to recognize nuclear waste as a sign of a (then) ancient civilization. And considering that anything that makes us go extinct is likely to leave only cockroaches behind, that's a lot of evolution that has to happen very quickly. I think it's entirely possible that if another Earth civilization rises up a few million years after we're gone, they'll find little to no trace of us at all.
Thank you - that's exactly the point I was making and getting flak for. I think it's an obvious corollary that it means if a previous civilization HAD existed sufficiently far back - that it may not have left any traces we could recognize. In both cases it's pure conjecture. We can't predict at this level with accuracy because there's too much. One microchip that survives could be more evidence of a previous advanced civilization than a future one would ever need. But don't assume it will tell them anything about us. We had the Antikethera mechanism for nearly 70 years before we figured out what it was, and that's a fairly simple technology made by humans. Until that point though, we had absolutely no reason to believe humans had such technology that long ago. It's forced us to reevaluate a lot of our ideas about the history of technology. Would one microchip possibly survive ? Maybe - one in an underground military bunker perhaps -there's plenty, would it be found by a scientist before some kid thinks it's a funny rock and chucks it in a pond ? Would he realize it's worth ? Would they possibly understand what it was or what it did ?
If they had built dataprocessing devices using something completely different photons would they recognize it as similar ? If they had HAD quantum computers for a thousand years when they find it, would they remember their own electronic computers
We can only guess how representative our fossil record is, but we do know that the vast, vast majority of creatures that die don't leave fossils. Fossils require some or other special circumstance. With the time we have and the amount of creatures it happens often enough to give us pieces of the puzzle - but we have no idea how big the puzzle actually is. Chances are it's much, much bigger than our pieces show.
Humans having gone out of way to create our own fossils at times may well be over-represented in future (well I'm guessing mummyfication would up the odds of fossilization, especially where we did it in things like peat - but I may be wrong) even so - I doubt we'd even appear to be dominant species on the planet right now to a future onlooker.
The only clue he would have is our very wide distribution - but frankly there's an entire species of beetle for every 12 of us. Bees have as wide a range as we do and there is no way the future onlooker would know it's because we farmed them. Rats outnumber us and live everywhere we do -they'll probably be more likely to appear the most successful mammal around when you think about it.
You say we'd find evidence - but the fact is, nobody has been looking (it's hard to get a grant for - we may very well find nothing but if we do it would be groundbreaking although we have no idea what to look for or where to start). Every response to this thread has been filled with the same assumption. That another civilization's technology would resemble ours - but that's ludicrous. We developed technology to adapt the world to our needs - that makes it's very nature dependent on two things. The world as it was before technology (it would have been VERY different - remember grass didn't even EXIST until well after the K/T event). And the needs of the species - not us, probably not bipedal possibly not even a landliving creature. Where would you look ?
An aquatic civilization would NOT have based their technology on heat and electricity since these energy varieties are very hard to work with and maintain under water. But there are other energy varieties there. Light (if not too deep anyway), volcanic vents, the currents themselves... how would a computer look that used photons instead of electrons ? What would it be made off ? Would it be biodegradable ? How can we know ?
You still ignore a crucial point. What about 500 years ago ? What about 1000 years ? What would we have left behind then ? Were we not a technological society then ? Just because the wheels were made from wood doesn't mean they weren't wheels.
The point is that there is no evidence either way. We may be the first, or we may not - but we have NO proof on which to base an answer, and frankly nobody really looked so there may be plenty. If nobody who ever found any thought it worth a second look - who cares ?
Also you're assuming such a prior civilization - not living under the conditions we lived in, not of the same species... would somehow for some reason have had a history even REMOTELY similar to ours ? Who says we're talking about bipeds ? That alone radically changes what type of technology you could expect them to develop. Who says we're talking creatures that developed writing ? They may have had a radically different form of information storage we've never even IMAGINED.
We have absolutely nothing on which to base any assumptions about such a hypothetical species. What their society would have been like, nor the technology it would have led to. So how can you assume anything ? Hard-wooded trees have only been around a fairly short while. So any species before that would have found their first building materials in stones and ferns because there wasn't anything else - soft-wooded plants fossilize far less often, and besides how would you tell either way ? Except for rare cases where trees fossilized whole, a chunk of fossilized wood looks no different than one that had been a wheel - and to the eyes of almost everybody who might find it, no different from any other piece of rock. I've stood on top of a whole fossilized tree and I am telling you it was hard to see any resemblance to a tree. It was just a long circular (very cracked) red rock lying on it's side.
A scientist whose an expert could probably recognize a small chunk - but he had to be the one to find it. People only report fossils when they know that's what they found and even then many collect them for themselves instead (ever wonder how much more our paleontologists would know if every private fossil collection was instead kept in a museum for study ?) you and I would not be able to. And even the scientist would be hard pressed to say it had been chopped down and worked on before it rotted and got petrified millions of years ago.
And we've only even thought about hot stuff. Some scientists believe that in the superglacial periods the polar ice-caps actually reached the equator. Remember water (alone of all known matter) expands when it solidifies - it's vollume increase. We're talking about every major landmass on earth covered in huge layers of ice.
Every seen what a riverbed looks like after a glacier's gone down it ? Every single tiny bit of evidence could be lying scraped, crushed and mangled and deeply buried beneath the challenger depth...
Now of course most glacial periods aren't superglacials and even the scientists who suggest the superglacials were THAT bad are deemed a bit on the outside of possibility by the majority of the climate scientists - but even one of them could have done all needed to remove all traces - and it needn't even be shortly after this civilization - it could be anywhere in the gap between us and them. That could be 2 million years for all we know.
Yes I know this sounds illogical since we think of melting polar ice-caps as flooding the earth - but that's because ice FLOATS. if ALL the water froze it would take up a HUGE amount more space than it does now. Water expands around 10% when frozen - for salt water it's harder to calculate as the salt doesn't freeze - but it decreases the overall density a lot by causing air bubbles - so let's say 20% The earth is 70% water on the surface -a 20% increase in volume obeying gravity (e.g. it spreads sideways before it goes up) will thus cover 90% of the surface... 2/3 of all landmass covered by gigantic glaciers.
Okay likely or unlikely is a lot more subjective than possible or impossible. When KT hit it left a layer of clay about inches thick that covered the entire surface of the earth. It's still there, it's a whole long way down and buried but the scientists studying the meteorite who predicted it should exist went and looked- and found it, in every major landmass, there it was, the right type of clay (identifiable by it's particularly high nickle content) the right age.
That was just ONE of the big rocks the sky has thrown at us. It doesn't even consider vulcanism, tectonic plates. 3" doesn't sound like much but it would be silly to assume it was also the largest. K/T wasn't a once-off event. It's just the famous one. This planet has been struck by disasters that make civilization pale in comparison by multiple orders of magnitude.
Life survives, any particularly species usually doesn't.
That line was a direct quote from "Evolving the alien" - so there's your names since you seem to think a call to authority is NOT a fallacy.
There's quite a big chapter about it, I gave a fairly brief summary but please do read the book and get some actual information. Yes - we got a lot of fossils, in reality they probably represent less than a billionth of the species that actually have existed.
Scientists don't always agree. My sources and your sources disagree on the average. More-over the genetic clock and the fossil record are not in agreement and this is well known - it's one of the major unanswered science questions of our time which on will prove accurate.
Personally, my money is on the paleontologists not the geneticists.
Slashdot Mirror
>>Are you really that ignorant ? There have been many other proposals, some of them remarkably better. The whole CC license concept is based on an alternative to what copyright normally does, as is free/open-source software. In both cases the massive size of these cultural collections prove that the creators find them appealing.
>Are YOU really that ignorant? Creative Commons, Copyleft, and other schemes are all copyright licenses! If it were not for copyright law, they could not even exist, and because they rely on copyright law for their very existence, they can't be "better" than copyright! What copyright "normally does" is irrelevant. That's just a matter of how the copyright holder sets the license up. The subject here was copyright law, not how some people choose to use it.
"The entire point of copyleft is that it's easier to subvert copyright by using it than to try and lobby for it's abholition" - Richard Stallman.
>You think our Founding Fathers dreamed up our version of copyright on their own? You really don't know your history, do you? Sure, there were earlier forms of "copyright" that were not exactly what we think of when we think of the idea. But not at that time, in England. You are simply wrong about the "wasn't even proposed" part.
All previous "copyright" laws were really just censorship laws. I actually DO know the history of them.
>Sure we do. Your insistence on bringing up the distant past is exactly what I meant by straw-man arguments. But what about the last century? Before the outrageous time extensions on copyrights, and the allowing of software patents? We had international treaties that recognized foreign works. The arts and sciences were booming. Sorry, but all evidence is against you on this one. It obviously DID work. You show ME how it didn't.
Your greatest success in the early part of the previous century (Disney for example) all built on areas where copyright doesn't apply (all Disney's most important work were based on public domain - most of you early cinema used play scripts from foreign countries whose copyright you didn't even RECOGNIZE until 1937). Evidence given.
>That's a bit of a stretch. The time you talk about was long ago, and I challenge you to show how it affected the situation today.
You got your initial lead because companies like Disney did not need to worry about copyright to get good stories cheap.
>You need to work on your logic a bit. That doesn't matter. Because there were just as many artists at other times who did NOT have copyright protection, and were equally unrecognized during their lifetimes.
That's the point - these artists WERE recognized in their time. They were famous - and even wealthy for artists. Nevertheless the monetary value of their work WHILE copyrighted was only a FRACTION of it's value once in the public domain. Stop using strawmen yourself, I specifically ONLY gave you artists who were SUCCESSFULL.
> You show ME how it didn't.
For the entire part of the last century where your description fits, America did NOT recognize foreign copyright.
>I think it's pretty obvious that I was speaking generally. And it has been better at other times than it is now. I don't recall putting any absolutes in that statement.
There has NEVER been a time in all of human history when a government department was actually efficient and well run. Except perhaps on rare occasions the tax gatherers.
>There is a very strong correlation. That's not proof, but it's as close to proof as anybody will ever be able to get.
I shoot you down very simple: the free software movement predates the DMCA by more than 20 years. Frank Zappa predicted the problems we now face more than 40 years before that !
In short, everybody who actually UNDERSTOOD copyright knew it was flawed long before these things highlighted it.
>But the only examples you have given of ideas of a "different nature" (Creative Commons, etc.) are actually copyright licenses! You're not thi
>> Being able to write a song does NOT give you the right to dominate the decisions of everybody who ever wants to hear it. Not even ONE of those decisions.
>Wrong.
>Copyright serves the public interest by providing for a financial incentive to create artistic works. It does not mean that its purpose has not been served just because you don't like its restrictions.
Your argument has nothing to do with what I said. Artists do NOT have a NATURAL right to control anything at all. We give them an artificial one by RESTRICTING our own rights to do whatever we want. As long as copyright serves its purpose - to expand the public domain - this is a trade-off we are prepared to make. We're willing to give up those freedoms for a period of time because we can buy something worthwhile with it.
The moment copyright stopped serving that purpose - the trade-off became an unjustifiable restriction on OUR natural right to copy. The justification you cite isn't TRUE anymore. And no the justification is NOT to give an incentive for creation. The justification is teh EXPANSION OF THE PUBLIC DOMAIN. We incentivise creation as a means to an end, to grow the public domain. In this age of retroactive extensions of already ludicrous copyrigth terms -that goal is no longer being met. Since the distributors get the money and not the artists - and actively REMOVE from availability some works - it fails even more as it doesn't even meet the intermediary step toward the goal anymore.
>> What is it with some people and their inability to imagine any issue having more than one side or possibly all sides being valid PARTS of a whole ?
>The problem is that you keep thinking your "side" invalidates the legal right for an artist to control the distribution of his work. Itunes and amazon let you buy your songs online.
That legal right is an artificial restriction made for a certain goal - since that goal is no longer being met by (I would personally say meetable by) copyright - copyright is no longer sensible. The natural right here is our right to copy. We allow it to be sacrificed TEMPORARILY in order ot have MORE things to copy. The moment we stopped GETTING more things to copy, we lost all incentive to make that sacrifice.
>> The reality is that downloads have significantly more appeal
>I never said anything about downloads being bad. You should just have to pay for them. But your straw man argument works great when you can't find any other rebuttal.
I wasn't saying you did.
> The record companies didn't move into the online space in time
>Amazon is drm free. Are you sure you aren't using an outdated argument to justify piracy?
It was too late. That was my point. The second part of my post was a historical perspective on how we came to BE in this position. I'm well aware of what has changed since then but that's not relevant. I justify downloading and sharing based on the faillure of copyright to deliver it's promise to us as citizens. Thus removing the justification for restricting our rights in the first place. I still think incentivising artists is a good thing- but only as long as the benefit is to the public domain. Copyright doesn't do that - it may have done so once, but it doesn't now. Therefore it has to go. We can argue about other ways to pay artists but copyright is now an unjustifiable intrusion into the civil liberties of all citizens that has no reward for them.
What the historical perspective indicates is why and how the citizens came to discover a real USE for copying, which didn't exist before. We didn't much care about sacrificing hte right to copy in the past since we couldn't usefully excercise it anyway. Now we can, so unless copyright is giving us MAJOR value in some other way- it's a senseless restriction on us. Since it isn't, all it is is a draconian restriction on our basic personal lives.
>(how about preemptively attacking ships that sail out of known pirate enclaves?)
So holding people without trail because they are "suspected terrorists" for indefinite periods aren't enough... now you want to attack ships at sea without them having done anything simply because pirates use the same harbor ?
You know a lot of car hijackers use the brooklyn bridge. Let's pre-emptively shoot at every car that drives over it...
Or we can give other nations and their citizens the same innocent-till-proven guilty position we demand for ourselves and punish the actual pirates, not every bloody fisherman who is still trying to make a living honestly - because then they will ALL be pirates since you removed the possibility of being anything else.
>Yeah, because what the West needs is another nation building exercise....
If the West doesn't want to be building nations ... maybe it should stop destroying them in the first place ? Western interference was the primary reason Somalia's original government collapsed and that government wasn't great (it was a post-collonial government) so you can trace the West CAUSING the pirate problem back to raping the country for about 300 years.
Then when the government collapsed, the West made NO effort to prevent corporate ships from overfishing those unpoliced shores and polluting them until the local fishing industry (the ONLY local industry) collapsed....
The West created this problem - it's our responsibility to solve it, or deal with the consequences of our own decisions.
>Isn't the whole reason for the military to protect civilians? The only other reason is to conquer other nations but we consider ourselves to be more civilised than that these days.
Unless they have something you want. Like oil.
>It's my understanding that piracy in international waters has always been punishable by any nation that felt threatened by such actions. It's been pretty well established for centuries.
Aye this is true.
>Mind you, punishing the pirates doesn't get to the route of the problem. Deal with overfishing and illegal dumping as well. These people are pirates because they don't have any other choice. There's no way for them to earn an honest living. They become pirates or starve. The risk of being captured and sentenced to life in prison is small compared with the certainty of death. Punish them by all means, but for practical purposes we should provide an opportunity for another way of life.
While I agree with what you're saying - both those problems were caused in their case because nobody was policing the waters. The real solution to the whole mess in it's entirety is to stabilize the country and get a real government in place. Somalia right now doesn't EVEN have anarchy. It's a bunch of feuding warlords all hoping to become a military dictator but none ever quite powerful enough to pull it off. They spend all their time fighting one another and nobody spends any time running the country, handling diplomacy or providing any kind of infrastructure, economic or other service. There is no law enforcement and even if there was, no law to be enforced.
I am one of those people who think anarchist societies can sometimes work, that governments are usually bad -but Somalia is a prime example that merely not having a government doesn't give you a working anarchist society. Without the right kind of social structures and protections in place, you just get a shithole where life has no value and prospects are things that happen to other people.
The only kind of business that would want to venture there is the kind who sees real value in the lack of law. Organised crime mostly. Perhaps the more ethically questionable types of genetic research. But even those guys stay away because there is no education system and whatever you build will get looted, if you put in enough security to prevent looting by the population then you'll get looted by the warlords who are always desperate for any kind of supplies.
>What jurisdiction do those countries you name have? Did these acts of piracy take place in US coastal waters?
There's an ancient naval tradition which I BELIEVE is now international law (but please do correct me if I'm wrong) that the surface of a ship in international waters IS considered the native soil of the sailors. In other words if you are a German on a Spanish ship and you steal a Dutchmen's wallet and get caught, you can be prosecuted in Spain as the crime was committed on Spanish soil.
Assuming I'm right then, if the pirates board the ship - their on U.S. soil even if they are in international waters. Since Somalia has no government to speak off, the only sensible choice by the way is to treat their territorial waters as if it was international waters for the time being.
>Because if the didn't, I fail to see any legal jurisdiction the USA might have.
Well I've given a possible explanation above though I admit I'm no expert and I could be outright wrong. Would be nice if somebody who knew the fine details could elaborate.
>Further, placing arms on a non-military ship in international waters violates a couple of international accords.
This is true, but when has America ever given a damn about those ? International accords and treaties are for America to enforce on other countries, not for America to actually obey themselves. Haven't you paid any attention ?
>While I support the idea of shutting down the murderous thugs, doing so illegally is rather hypocritical, and undermines any righteous goals.
Utterly agreed. Trouble is, none of those guys in the fancy suits whose pictures are printed on ballots every now and then could possibly understand this concept.
>Oh yeah, and why is the US and other countries using their MILITARY to protect civilian cargo ships? Who is paying for that I wonder?
That would be you and me paying. But using the military to protect civilian infrastructure from armed assault is nothing new or unusual, in fact it's one of the military's basic functions. The fact that in this case the infrastructure is off-shore is fairly irrelevant to THAT part of the discussion (it is however relevent to other aspects like international law).
>the problem with "downloading music for free" is that its NOT like hearing it on the radio to try for free,
True, when you download it you can listen to it when you're in the mood for it - not 5000 times a day until you're so utterly sick of it that he last thing you ever want to do in your whole life is hear it again. I wonder how many sales are lost by overplaying on the radio ?
>and this is a disingenuous analogy at best. If you can download and own it for free, what incentive would you have to pay for it?
If you can turn on the radio and hear the latest single by $FLAVOR_OF_THE_MONTH at least once an hour for the whole day... what incentive do you have to pay for it then ?
But you can't download a concert experience. The downloads/radio songs you do could be decisive in WHICH concert tickets you spend your money on though.
>This isn't about "exposure" or promotion - its simply about getting consumers to actually pay for the music they download and keep from artists
Oh so it can't be about both then ? What is it with some people and their inability to imagine any issue having more than one side or possibly all sides being valid PARTS of a whole ? The reality is that downloads have significantly more appeal than album purchases - for most people. You get hte songs you want, when you want them. You never have to hunt for an album that is not being pushed anymore. You don't ever have to actually listen to the 5 filler tracks on it and you can mix and match the order of songs in your playlist to suit your mood instead of the order the producer thought you had to hear them in.
The record companies didn't move into the online space in time - from the start they fought digital music as hard as possible. Remember when the RIO created the first real mp3 player ? That was BEFORE the napster thing and downloads - they sued them and tried to get the device banned - even though presumably the major use would be for people to put their ripped CD's on. They could see their distribution model about to fail - and refused to adapt.
The problem with itunes and all the other legal methods are they arrived too late and even now are too limited in power. There's still no good way to do itunes purchases on Linux- and they are still utterly overpriced.
RMS suggested that an ideal way would be to be able to embed in the songfile itself a simple one-button process to "Send the artist one dollar". One button- not a bunch of legal forms, and it pops up as you play, for each song, if you click it, one dollar to the artist. That removes any need for record companies at all -and the money actually GOES to the artists - it makes ALL artists indy and creates a perfectly level playing field.
That would actually mean we get BETTER music produced.
>but you keep ignoring that maybe some artists dont want to give away their music for free. what then?
Who the fuck cares what they want ? Copyright wasn't created to serve artists but to serve the PUBLIC. Specifically to increase the public domain by offering ARTISTS an incentive. It's not ABOUT what they want. The public's demands are what matters. It's a good IDEA to remunerate artists. Buying music on an artificial monopoly is not the only way to remunerate artists - it's probably not even the best way anymore. The one thing that has NO place in this debate whatsoever is what "artists WANT us to be able to do". Being able to write a song does NOT give you the right to dominate the decisions of everybody who ever wants to hear it. Not even ONE of those decisions.
EVERY Milo will become a girl who doesn't like clothes and is always in the mood.
Even the ones with girl-gamer owners.
That particular microsoft license has ALSO been approved by the FSF. The requirements are identical. It's the GOAL of setting them that's different. The difference between free software and open-source is in their goals not in their practise. They do exactly the same things in exactly the same ways - they just do it for different reasons.
This is why they two communities generally collaborate on practical matters even as they argue on philosophical ones.
Minix's license was changed for version 3. I doubt very much it would have been offered under the original license as minix2 was under prominence before the OSI existed, before Linux really.
The license however was one of the main reasons linux took off and stole most of Minix's users- it was deemed unacceptable by the community. This is why Tannenbaum changed it later.
>Exposer to sexual material at a young age can cause serious long term effects.
Universal statements about something as complex as human behavioral response can sound almost confident enough to hide the fact that it is by definition bullshit.
Prove it.
Average age at which girls masturbate the first time: between 3 and 5 years old. Just because we like to IMAGINE sexuality starts at puberty doesn't make it any less stupid. It doesn't. Humans are BORN sexual beings - actually more than that, I've seen sonars of babies masturbating IN THE WOMB.
It's part of our human nature. What can and DOES cause terrible harm is surrounding it with mystery (result = STDs and teen pregnancy), or shame and guilt (result all too often a lifelong unhappy and guilty sex life).
Just as many of us try to prevent otherwise - we even have a TERM for the childhood sexual exploration we all engaged in and know our children will too (no matter how many parents imagine theirs won't). "Playing doctor".
Does that mean we're ready for full on sex at that age ? No. Even puberty is a bit early because humans are bit more complex than our biology and our minds don't mature quite as fast as our bodies anymore.
Does it mean seeing sexual content is harmfull - for damn sure it doesn't. But information, teaching values like body-ownership and privacy and being open and encouraging about your child's PERSONAL sexuality will allow them to make BETTER choices when the time comes to share that sexuality with another person. They will choose better who with, when and under what circumstances.
If you haven't bought your daughter a vibrator before age 14 - you're a bad parent, likely to get your chance to be a bad grandparent a lot sooner than you planned (indeed studies have shown that girls who are comfortable about masturbation by puberty tend to lose their virginity at a much LATER age than those who are not, and make better choices about it when they do. Choices like protection).
>The license requires that distribution of the original source code cannot be done, but that modifications and derivative works may be distributed as patches. (Potentially satisfies section 3)
That we have precedent on. The original Minix license said the same and it was neither recognized as open-source OR free software. Sheez now I feel old.
>I never said anything about practicality. I said that it could be possible to construct a license that fit the open source definition, yet still did not allow indiscriminate redistribution. (That one can restrict it to only aggregate redistributions means not indiscriminate.)
If this actually gets done - I promise you the very next DAY the OSI would change the definition to remove it, they certainly wouldn't grant it "approved" status either way - on the grounds that it CLEARLY violates the spirit of the definition.
And while you could still in theory match the open-source definition - you'd be flat out on your arse at meeting he FSF's requirements so you definitely won't be free(libre) software. Freedom 2 specifically refers to unmodified free distribution (and freedom 3 to distribution of modified versions).
If the rift between the two movements actually split on this point. I think a LOT of people would follow Bruce Perens' lead. Yes, the man who WROTE the open-source definition in declaring "it's time we stopped talking about open-source and start talking about free software and ethics again."
He stated as much in a mail to the OSI mailing list a few months ago. His reasoning was that open-source was a term to focus on the technical merrits to get free software a foot in the door of business. It's there now and the goal achieved, but the ethical requirements that led to the CREATION of free software in the first place still exist, and it's time to start talking about that again because businesses ARE sold now and it's time to think of the users.
Personally, I never went to the open-source side. I've stuck with free software for the sake of freedom since well before 1998 when the term open-source was coined. I will keep sticking to it, but it's nice to see good folk like Bruce starting to think about the Stallman-ethics of this situation once more. I wonder how much things like the Novell-Microsoft deal had to do with that ? The same deal that made Jeremy Allison quit his job ?
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html
See freedoms 2 and 3 = e.g. it cannot be free software.
http://www.opensource.org/docs/osd
See article 1 of the open source definition. Therefore it cannot be open-source either.
Conclusion: do you think your words would be tastier if you add some ketchup before you eat them ?
>However, there could be an open source license that doesn't allow this. Find a counter-example is left as a problem for the reader.
Any license like that would violate the FSF's 2nd freedom. To be free software it MUST grant that right. The same requirement exists as part of the open-source definition.
Since open-source is trademark (at least, it was going to be - I'm not up to speed on whether the trademark application was approved) it would be a trademark violation to call something open-source unless it's license is on their approved list.
All the licenses that are approved by either the FSF or the OSI permit free distribution and approving a license which didn't would violate the founding rules of either organisation so it's not going to happen.
>I don't think they'd need to recognize the microchip as a microchip. They'd just need to recognize it as "hey, this thing could not have formed naturally - it had to have been made."
I said that myself. But you know -we used to say the same thing about living organisms. It was the heart of the watchmaker argument and it remains the heart of the intelligent-design argument today. It was wrong. Whoever finds it, if they are scientific at all will spend perhaps centuries arguing about whether it's a fossil or a constructed thing - some will genuinely believe it to be evidence of a time when there were silicon based life-forms on this planet.
>Just like the Baghdad Battery - for years after we found it, no one knew what the hell it was. Oh sure, it LOOKED like some sort of capacitor-like-thing, but they didn't have electricity back then so there's no way that's what it really is (a great example of preconceived notions screwing up interpretation of historical evidence). But we knew it was something that was made by an intelligent being. That's the basic criteria I'm going after for future civilizations to figure out that we were here. As long as something we made survives, then no matter what it is, it'll be evidence that something intelligent was on this planet at some time.
I agree that this is likely - I even postulated as much. The question here is deep time. I have no doubt 5000 years from now a civilization, even a non-earth-born one would find plenty of evidence of our existence even if we went extinct tomorrow. But 30 million years ? We can't (economically at least according to GM) build a car that lasts 5 years... what makes us think anything we build have such durability as to survive for millions through every natural catastrophe (up to and including future life-forms digging things up and making them collapse long before there is anything that could be called sentient - a future class of animals as big as dinosaurs could trampled every bit of concrete we have into fine dust millions of years before the next technological society exists).
I think the idea of our constructions being THAT durable is... well rather far-fetched.
>Of course, there are problems with this - - How does the FutureGuy know that whatever he found was made by something living on earth? Maybe it was dropped off by an alien. How does he know that it wasn't made by a member of his own species? It'd be an easy assumption to make. He'd find it, date it, and then figure "oh, well that's proof we were around 800,000 years ago."
If we found something like that what would we say ? It's not a very GOOD metric, but it's the only one we have. I can tell you what we would probably say. We'd insist it can't be as old as it looks and assume a flaw in our dating methodology and reuse as many of the others as we can till something gives us a believable figure (anything after humans made fire would be more easily accepted).
About the only way around that was if it was undeniably old. Say the military bunker lay underneath a volcanic flow and they knew from multiple sources of other evidence that this volcanic eruption happened that long ago, and what it buried must have been older
than that. Again, there'd be arguments. If it was just one microchip especially. If the whole bunker somehow survived it would be absolute proof - as much so as finding caves with rock-art proves our ancestors could paint. One microchip... as I said above, there would be a lot of argument about what it actually WAS and it may never be recognizable enough to become consensus.
>These are the same problems we would face if we ever unearthed ancient technology.
Yep. We wouldn't know what we found - and we may not recognize it. We use silicon in our microchips because it's the most efficient material we know off. What if their technology was as advanced as ours but went in a completely different direction. Even if they had something doing the job of computers - it may be made from something completely different (silicon is
>People have been mining and refining metals for thousands of years now. Ever heard of the bronze age? Refined metals look completely different from unrefined ores
And your evidence that this remains true after 10 million years is... what exactly ? I would love to see the experiment that proved that one. Considering also it isn't laboratory conditions we're talking about here. What happens to refined metals after being hit by a glacier ? How do they look after being drowned in magma ? You don't know do you ? Nobody does. I don't recall ever reading of bronze things found in pompey and there wasn't even much magma there, that was mostly ash.
>Concrete has also been around for roughly 2000 years. It was invented by the Romans.
And your evidence that concrete can survive for a million years is ?
>This may be news to you, but people have been making things out of materials other than (and more durable than) wood for a long time.
I don't deny that - I just think "more durable than wood" and "10 million years later durable" are a VAST difference.
>Don't be ridiculous. Lots of electronics are shielded from EMP (esp. military stuff), and it wouldn't be hard for engineers and technicians to repair everything else. They'd just have to get the semiconductor factories running again.
And what the hell will they do that with after every power station on earth get's fried ?
Somebody earlier reminded me of another Carl Sagan quote: extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
But I'm not the one making extraordinary claims. You are the one claiming anything of human (or even "life-form") construction is so durable that it can survive tens of millions of years and remain in a form recognizable as having been constructed.
To me - THAT is an extraordinary claim and not only does it not have extraordinary evidence- you have NO evidence whatsoever to back it up.
Yes I meant Ian Steward but you know - he and Jack Cohen didn't ONLY write Science of the Discworld books (good as they are) - ever read "evolving the alien" ?
I also own a copy of "a brief history of time" and I several of Carl Sagan's books both fiction and non-fiction. I've actually READ all of Isaac Asimov's non-fiction essays... you know I don't just base any idea on a single source.
This particular idea I used their wording for because it was so well put, but the fact is it was also backed by real science - and I've read most of that science as well.
Just because a scientist writes non-fiction chapters in a fictional book, or even a whole science-fiction revolution (like Asimov and Sagan both did) they don't STOP being scientists.
>Yes and no. I think some technologies are going to be universal across societies. If we want electricity, we're gonna need some metal to conduct it. If we happened to evolve on a planet that didn't have metal, then we wouldn't have electricity. Simple as that. Doesn't mean we're stupid - we just don't have the resources we need to make "technology."
Electricity is the only form of energy technology can be based on ? It's the one we used, there is no reason to assume that others couldn't have done the same. Perhaps it would be harder, perhaps MUCH harder - all THAT would mean is slower progress, it would mean zero progress, and once the problem is solved once -everything becomes easy again anyway.
Even electricity isn't bound to metal - it's just a convenient conductor, there are many others and the best electrical advances we've made were made when came up with semiconductors - most of which aren't metallic.
>People 3,000 years ago weren't any less intelligent overall than we are, even though they were mainly building stuff out of wood. That wood is not going to survive the next global mass-disaster, and any fossil remains or ceramic evidence is likely to get obliterated .. Or buried under a mile of dirt.
You imagine that if there were no metals - they would have remained at that level of progress (which btw ALREADY meets the criteria of technological civilization) - I assume they would have found other sollutions, or made better things out of wood and ceramic than we ever dreamed off - because we didn't NEED to.
>And our technology isn't much better long-term. The buildings will rust and crumble, the concrete will be overgrown. Probably our longest-lived evidence would be nuclear waste, since it's designed to be stored for an unfathomably long time. But even the biggest anti-nuclear pessimist sets the hazard duration at 300,000 years.
That I certainly agree on. The pyramids made it 3000 years and that impresses us, but it's a blink of an eye in geological terms and they are eroding as we speak. Their sandstone at that... sooner or later all they will be is sand.
>If we went extinct tomorrow, the next species would have, at most, 300,000 years to gain sufficient intelligence to recognize nuclear waste as a sign of a (then) ancient civilization. And considering that anything that makes us go extinct is likely to leave only cockroaches behind, that's a lot of evolution that has to happen very quickly. I think it's entirely possible that if another Earth civilization rises up a few million years after we're gone, they'll find little to no trace of us at all.
Thank you - that's exactly the point I was making and getting flak for. I think it's an obvious corollary that it means if a previous civilization HAD existed sufficiently far back - that it may not have left any traces we could recognize.
In both cases it's pure conjecture. We can't predict at this level with accuracy because there's too much. One microchip that survives could be more evidence of a previous advanced civilization than a future one would ever need. But don't assume it will tell them anything about us.
We had the Antikethera mechanism for nearly 70 years before we figured out what it was, and that's a fairly simple technology made by humans. Until that point though, we had absolutely no reason to believe humans had such technology that long ago.
It's forced us to reevaluate a lot of our ideas about the history of technology. Would one microchip possibly survive ? Maybe - one in an underground military bunker perhaps -there's plenty, would it be found by a scientist before some kid thinks it's a funny rock and chucks it in a pond ? Would he realize it's worth ? Would they possibly understand what it was or what it did ?
If they had built dataprocessing devices using something completely different photons would they recognize it as similar ? If they had HAD quantum computers for a thousand years when they find it, would they remember their own electronic computers
Erm small correction my maths failed me. It's species of beetle for every 12 million humans, not 1:12 ...
We can only guess how representative our fossil record is, but we do know that the vast, vast majority of creatures that die don't leave fossils. Fossils require some or other special circumstance. With the time we have and the amount of creatures it happens often enough to give us pieces of the puzzle - but we have no idea how big the puzzle actually is.
Chances are it's much, much bigger than our pieces show.
Humans having gone out of way to create our own fossils at times may well be over-represented in future (well I'm guessing mummyfication would up the odds of fossilization, especially where we did it in things like peat - but I may be wrong) even so - I doubt we'd even appear to be dominant species on the planet right now to a future onlooker.
The only clue he would have is our very wide distribution - but frankly there's an entire species of beetle for every 12 of us. Bees have as wide a range as we do and there is no way the future onlooker would know it's because we farmed them. Rats outnumber us and live everywhere we do -they'll probably be more likely to appear the most successful mammal around when you think about it.
You say we'd find evidence - but the fact is, nobody has been looking (it's hard to get a grant for - we may very well find nothing but if we do it would be groundbreaking although we have no idea what to look for or where to start).
Every response to this thread has been filled with the same assumption. That another civilization's technology would resemble ours - but that's ludicrous.
We developed technology to adapt the world to our needs - that makes it's very nature dependent on two things. The world as it was before technology (it would have been VERY different - remember grass didn't even EXIST until well after the K/T event). And the needs of the species - not us, probably not bipedal possibly not even a landliving creature.
Where would you look ?
An aquatic civilization would NOT have based their technology on heat and electricity since these energy varieties are very hard to work with and maintain under water. But there are other energy varieties there. Light (if not too deep anyway), volcanic vents, the currents themselves... how would a computer look that used photons instead of electrons ? What would it be made off ? Would it be biodegradable ?
How can we know ?
Answer to all the above - we don't have a clue.
You still ignore a crucial point. What about 500 years ago ? What about 1000 years ? What would we have left behind then ? Were we not a technological society then ? Just because the wheels were made from wood doesn't mean they weren't wheels.
The point is that there is no evidence either way. We may be the first, or we may not - but we have NO proof on which to base an answer, and frankly nobody really looked so there may be plenty. If nobody who ever found any thought it worth a second look - who cares ?
Also you're assuming such a prior civilization - not living under the conditions we lived in, not of the same species... would somehow for some reason have had a history even REMOTELY similar to ours ?
Who says we're talking about bipeds ? That alone radically changes what type of technology you could expect them to develop. Who says we're talking creatures that developed writing ? They may have had a radically different form of information storage we've never even IMAGINED.
We have absolutely nothing on which to base any assumptions about such a hypothetical species. What their society would have been like, nor the technology it would have led to. So how can you assume anything ? Hard-wooded trees have only been around a fairly short while.
So any species before that would have found their first building materials in stones and ferns because there wasn't anything else - soft-wooded plants fossilize far less often, and besides how would you tell either way ? Except for rare cases where trees fossilized whole, a chunk of fossilized wood looks no different than one that had been a wheel - and to the eyes of almost everybody who might find it, no different from any other piece of rock. I've stood on top of a whole fossilized tree and I am telling you it was hard to see any resemblance to a tree. It was just a long circular (very cracked) red rock lying on it's side.
A scientist whose an expert could probably recognize a small chunk - but he had to be the one to find it. People only report fossils when they know that's what they found and even then many collect them for themselves instead (ever wonder how much more our paleontologists would know if every private fossil collection was instead kept in a museum for study ?) you and I would not be able to. And even the scientist would be hard pressed to say it had been chopped down and worked on before it rotted and got petrified millions of years ago.
And we've only even thought about hot stuff. Some scientists believe that in the superglacial periods the polar ice-caps actually reached the equator.
Remember water (alone of all known matter) expands when it solidifies - it's vollume increase.
We're talking about every major landmass on earth covered in huge layers of ice.
Every seen what a riverbed looks like after a glacier's gone down it ? Every single tiny bit of evidence could be lying scraped, crushed and mangled and deeply buried beneath the challenger depth...
Now of course most glacial periods aren't superglacials and even the scientists who suggest the superglacials were THAT bad are deemed a bit on the outside of possibility by the majority of the climate scientists - but even one of them could have done all needed to remove all traces - and it needn't even be shortly after this civilization - it could be anywhere in the gap between us and them. That could be 2 million years for all we know.
Yes I know this sounds illogical since we think of melting polar ice-caps as flooding the earth - but that's because ice FLOATS. if ALL the water froze it would take up a HUGE amount more space than it does now. Water expands around 10% when frozen - for salt water it's harder to calculate as the salt doesn't freeze - but it decreases the overall density a lot by causing air bubbles - so let's say 20% The earth is 70% water on the surface -a 20% increase in volume obeying gravity (e.g. it spreads sideways before it goes up) will thus cover 90% of the surface... 2/3 of all landmass covered by gigantic glaciers.
Okay likely or unlikely is a lot more subjective than possible or impossible. When KT hit it left a layer of clay about inches thick that covered the entire surface of the earth. It's still there, it's a whole long way down and buried but the scientists studying the meteorite who predicted it should exist went and looked- and found it, in every major landmass, there it was, the right type of clay (identifiable by it's particularly high nickle content) the right age.
That was just ONE of the big rocks the sky has thrown at us. It doesn't even consider vulcanism, tectonic plates. 3" doesn't sound like much but it would be silly to assume it was also the largest. K/T wasn't a once-off event. It's just the famous one. This planet has been struck by disasters that make civilization pale in comparison by multiple orders of magnitude.
Life survives, any particularly species usually doesn't.
Jack Cohen, Ian Stewardt.
That line was a direct quote from "Evolving the alien" - so there's your names since you seem to think a call to authority is NOT a fallacy.
There's quite a big chapter about it, I gave a fairly brief summary but please do read the book and get some actual information. Yes - we got a lot of fossils, in reality they probably represent less than a billionth of the species that actually have existed.
Jack Cohen and Ian Kirby good enough sources ? That's what these actual SCIENTISTS say in their books.
Scientists don't always agree. My sources and your sources disagree on the average.
More-over the genetic clock and the fossil record are not in agreement and this is well known - it's one of the major unanswered science questions of our time which on will prove accurate.
Personally, my money is on the paleontologists not the geneticists.