The odds against advanced life sprouting up could very well be equally countless. You can't fill in half of the Drake equation, and just assume the other half are some numbers you'd prefer.
Then you run up against Fermi's paradox. Occam's razor says my explanation is better than yours.
The "international norms" you're so excited about, have done absolutely nothing to stop government overthrows. They consist of a lot of politicians spouting a lot of hot air, and nothing more. Soverignty works today, exactly as it always has.
The Universe is NOT infinite. It is unimaginably, astronomically ginormous, but decidedly finite. If it was infinite, the Big Bang theory couldn't work.
And since the Universe is finite, it's absolutely possible for odds to be so long, that something (or a series of interdependant somethings) is unlikely to have happened more than once. Whether that's true of advanced life remains to be seen, but is entirely possible.
Except you missed a whole other billion in there, leaving the odds of it EVER happening (in this universe) just in the single-digits or perhaps the teens.
Besides, my whole point was that 1 example can't be used to extrapolate ANY odds, big or small. The odds could be 1 in 500 trillion, or one in 10. We don't have a clue, and making a guess either way is a utterly baseless, bald-assed assumption.
The notion that aliens would want to come all the way here just to destroy us had always seemed pretty silly to me. But upon further reflection i don't think it's at all silly now.
Do you feel an uncontrollable desire to nuke the African continent? If not, I can't see why a superior alien species would want to destroy our planet.
If they're more advanced than us, they'll have cheap and easy defenses against anything we could do to them. And why wouldn't their technology continue to develop just as quickly as ours, so that they continue to maintain their vast superiority?
Devastating conflicts tend to arise when two rivals are evenly matched. When one is much superior, the balance of power is obvious, and the weaker side doing something to anger the other, is just stupid, suicidal, and short-lived at worse.
With the number of stars in the sky, it's pretty clear that the number of intelligent civilizations out there has to be infinite.
Nonsense. That's purely wishful thinking.
We have precisely ONE example of abiogenesis. That's statistically insignificant, so we have NO POSSIBLE WAY to extrapolate out how likely or unlikely it is to happen anywhere else.
We do not have any evidence that it happened a second time in the history of Earth, otherwise we'd see crazy branches in DNA trees. We have not made it happen in a lab, so that we'd have the faintest concept of how difficult it would be.
We similarly have only one example of higher life-forms developing from the lower life-forms... Again, no sign in the DNA tree that it happened, independently, twice, so that might be a pretty rare and difficult thing, itself.
And finally, we have just one example of those higher life-forms becoming sentient beings, in the form of humans. As smart as dolphins may be, they're not building radios or space ships. Same goes for millions of years of dinosaurs. Why don't we see left-over buildings constructed by smart, pre-human animals? Probably weren't any other sentiences on Earth.
So there you've got 3-in-a-row long-shots... If each is a billion-to-one shot, the combined odds would be a stretch of happening more than once, even with trillions of planets out there. But that's just as much of a wild-assed guess as yours...
It seems to be wishful thinking that people WANT to have, not just life, not just higher life-forms, and not just sentient life out there, but sentient life that's much more advanced than us. Creatures that are going to swoop in, give us advanced technology, and solve all our problems for us. No matter how little we know of the odds, many people will just keep assuming they're out there, because they WANT it to be true.
Meanwhile, nobody has solved the Drake Equation, to actually give us the correct odds of either extreme.
Government routinely pays a lot more than what they could purchase the same item for at Walmart.
...in the same way that I could get a set of "Hot Wheels" for a fraction the price of a pickup truck.
The US Government doesn't want, and doesn't buy the item that Walmart sells. They might be buying a light bulb, but they want one that's ALWAYS going to be EXACTLY the same, and certified as such. They don't want one that's going to be silently changed to a different design... That would cause maintenance nightmares, and/or could get people killed.
The vendor buys the item for $30 and sells it to the government for $150.
I've seen the financial reports from a few defense contractors, and I've never seen the huge profit margins you are suggesting. Where are they? Why isn't Lockheed-Martin more profitable than Google, Exxon-Mobile, etc?
The added expense may come from the testing and milspec certification of every individual item... Or from being required to stockpile and warehouse the item for 50 years to ensure they can continue to supply the exact item to the government. Or it may just be confusion on the part of the ignorant public, thinking that all "toilet seats" are created equal, and the expensive aluminum one used on aircraft could be substituted for a $30 walmart one, when nothing could be further from the truth.
prospective companies are put off by the cost-prohibitive regulations associated with government acquisition given the low returns (less than 10% as compared to 20% or more in the commercial world).
The head of a major company, that has interests in both defense and private contracts, described it quite simply (paraphrasing):
You get larger profit margins in the commercial space, but it's uneven and uncertain. The defense contracts offer long-term stable and predictable profits.
Of course the defense contracts require a bit of revolving-door politics... Hiring former government employees who know all the exhaustive rules and regulations, and can write a contract proposal in such a way that it will get accepted... and a whole team of people similarly focused on the government relationship, and compliance with rules and regulations.
In the end, on balance the two come out roughly even. But, of course a company that doesn't do any government contracts, can't hope to start getting some without a big investment in a team that get you off the ground.
People don't get to arbitrarily just seize areas of land and declare them the leaders of it
Yes, actually. That's how it has worked since the beginning of time. If there's no authority that's willing and able to force you out, you are the de-facto ruler of your own sovereign country. There's nothing more to it than that.
I am convinced that the price per channel would go up if everyone was able to purchase channels a la carte.
Yes it would, but your bill would still go down. Only thing you lose is the pissing match about how many "channels" you can brag that you have.
But if all of a sudden people decide they want to only pay for 20 channels, then everybody is going to be paying the same price for just those 20 channels.
Not true. Some channels will go away no matter what. Other channels will find customers don't value their content as much as they do, and can't get enough money for the crap they produce, and have to lower rates.
I'd love ala carte pricing, even if it was more expensive, if only for the instant gratification of denying real money to channels that turn to crap. "Oh you want to move your few good programs to 3 other spin-off channels? Screw you!" This will be the end of spin-off channels, channels with constant repeats of syndicated content everybody's seen, mediocre crap all-day that people just leave on when there's nothing else (TruTV, HGTV, CNN, etc.) and more.
Many (probably most) channels will suck it up, charge $0 for carriage so that they don't limit their audience, and just make due with whatever advertising dollars they can get. Your cable bill goes way down, and you still get lots of channels.
Personally, I'd rather just put up an antenna. Perfect picture quality, and LOTS of channels, with higher content to crap ratios.
if you're a software engineer working on the Linux Kernel you can do so knowing that your work wont be used to kill people.
I guess if they switched from Linux to OpenBSD, it would make EVERYBODY happier:
"software which OpenBSD uses and redistributes must be free to all (be they people or companies), for any purpose they wish to use it, including modification, use, peeing on, or even integration into baby mulching machines or atomic bombs to be dropped on Australia." - cvs@openbsd.org mailing list, May 29, 2001
North Korea is probably a nice country, if you are in the leadership, or a VIP like Dennis Rodman, too.
I've considered taking my savings, and living like a king in some 3rd world shithole before, myself, too. That some people have it good, doesn't make it a nice place.
OSCE observers were invited, but the organization declined. Somewhere around 100 international observers from other organizations were present. They might have mostly been Russian schills, but they were there.
"we better double down with even more micromanagement by implementing rationing so that everybody will stop using as much of the resource that we forcefully made too inexpensive."
Actually, the opposite side of the coin dominates...
Ad campaigns ask people to use less water. Government programs pay people to rip out their lawns. Then in a couple years, water districts raise their rates, because the lower water consumption means they're getting less money to run the system.
If we every really wanted to be super-dicks to the rest of the world. We'd unleash our capabilities, flood the markets with cheap food for a decade or until everyone else's agriculture industries collapsed and then simply stop making shipments. The Arab spring started with food riots.
The heavily industrialized rice production in the US, is about the same price as traditionally produced (labor-intensive) Chinese rice. Sometimes indentured servitude is cheaper than, and just as effective as, heavy machinery.
If the state simultaneously refuses to constrain growth within their water resources, and cannot GTFO of the way of communities *solving* the water resource limitations themselves, does anyone see there's a contradiction there?
The state DOES constrain growth. Developers and cities in the state have to prove that there's adequate water resources, before they can issue building permits. Many cities spend lots of money, and go extremely far afield just to secure water rights for continued expansion.
Personally, I'd say the state is too lax in enforcing baseline water quality. Things like water districts running afoul of standards for arsenic levels and the like, don't give me a warm fuzzy feeling about reducing regulations and fast-tracking water projects.
Consumption -> energy use -> global warming -> worse droughts -> desalinization -> energy use ->->-> This is a very poor long term solution
Except global warming could just as easily result in more rain and fewer droughts in any given area.
Lots of energy use for desalination is necessarily going to drive-up water prices, which will have a market effect all its own.
If anybody cared about residential water use, we wouldn't still be on the old 2.5gpm standard for shower heads and 1.5gpm standard for faucets since '92. And grey water systems would actually be deployed in major cities, cutting water usage in half. Instead, you're being told to rip out your lawn so that your town can keep some manufacturer's water rates low.
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The odds against advanced life sprouting up could very well be equally countless. You can't fill in half of the Drake equation, and just assume the other half are some numbers you'd prefer.
Then you run up against Fermi's paradox. Occam's razor says my explanation is better than yours.
The "international norms" you're so excited about, have done absolutely nothing to stop government overthrows. They consist of a lot of politicians spouting a lot of hot air, and nothing more. Soverignty works today, exactly as it always has.
You can keep your tedious rants to yourself.
Most won't be potentially habitable, Earth-like planets.
The Universe is NOT infinite. It is unimaginably, astronomically ginormous, but decidedly finite. If it was infinite, the Big Bang theory couldn't work.
And since the Universe is finite, it's absolutely possible for odds to be so long, that something (or a series of interdependant somethings) is unlikely to have happened more than once. Whether that's true of advanced life remains to be seen, but is entirely possible.
Except you missed a whole other billion in there, leaving the odds of it EVER happening (in this universe) just in the single-digits or perhaps the teens.
Besides, my whole point was that 1 example can't be used to extrapolate ANY odds, big or small. The odds could be 1 in 500 trillion, or one in 10. We don't have a clue, and making a guess either way is a utterly baseless, bald-assed assumption.
Do you feel an uncontrollable desire to nuke the African continent? If not, I can't see why a superior alien species would want to destroy our planet.
If they're more advanced than us, they'll have cheap and easy defenses against anything we could do to them. And why wouldn't their technology continue to develop just as quickly as ours, so that they continue to maintain their vast superiority?
Devastating conflicts tend to arise when two rivals are evenly matched. When one is much superior, the balance of power is obvious, and the weaker side doing something to anger the other, is just stupid, suicidal, and short-lived at worse.
Nonsense. That's purely wishful thinking.
We have precisely ONE example of abiogenesis. That's statistically insignificant, so we have NO POSSIBLE WAY to extrapolate out how likely or unlikely it is to happen anywhere else.
We do not have any evidence that it happened a second time in the history of Earth, otherwise we'd see crazy branches in DNA trees. We have not made it happen in a lab, so that we'd have the faintest concept of how difficult it would be.
We similarly have only one example of higher life-forms developing from the lower life-forms... Again, no sign in the DNA tree that it happened, independently, twice, so that might be a pretty rare and difficult thing, itself.
And finally, we have just one example of those higher life-forms becoming sentient beings, in the form of humans. As smart as dolphins may be, they're not building radios or space ships. Same goes for millions of years of dinosaurs. Why don't we see left-over buildings constructed by smart, pre-human animals? Probably weren't any other sentiences on Earth.
So there you've got 3-in-a-row long-shots... If each is a billion-to-one shot, the combined odds would be a stretch of happening more than once, even with trillions of planets out there. But that's just as much of a wild-assed guess as yours...
It seems to be wishful thinking that people WANT to have, not just life, not just higher life-forms, and not just sentient life out there, but sentient life that's much more advanced than us. Creatures that are going to swoop in, give us advanced technology, and solve all our problems for us. No matter how little we know of the odds, many people will just keep assuming they're out there, because they WANT it to be true.
Meanwhile, nobody has solved the Drake Equation, to actually give us the correct odds of either extreme.
The US Government doesn't want, and doesn't buy the item that Walmart sells. They might be buying a light bulb, but they want one that's ALWAYS going to be EXACTLY the same, and certified as such. They don't want one that's going to be silently changed to a different design... That would cause maintenance nightmares, and/or could get people killed.
I've seen the financial reports from a few defense contractors, and I've never seen the huge profit margins you are suggesting. Where are they? Why isn't Lockheed-Martin more profitable than Google, Exxon-Mobile, etc?
The added expense may come from the testing and milspec certification of every individual item... Or from being required to stockpile and warehouse the item for 50 years to ensure they can continue to supply the exact item to the government. Or it may just be confusion on the part of the ignorant public, thinking that all "toilet seats" are created equal, and the expensive aluminum one used on aircraft could be substituted for a $30 walmart one, when nothing could be further from the truth.
The head of a major company, that has interests in both defense and private contracts, described it quite simply (paraphrasing):
You get larger profit margins in the commercial space, but it's uneven and uncertain. The defense contracts offer long-term stable and predictable profits.
Of course the defense contracts require a bit of revolving-door politics... Hiring former government employees who know all the exhaustive rules and regulations, and can write a contract proposal in such a way that it will get accepted... and a whole team of people similarly focused on the government relationship, and compliance with rules and regulations.
In the end, on balance the two come out roughly even. But, of course a company that doesn't do any government contracts, can't hope to start getting some without a big investment in a team that get you off the ground.
Of course not... Condoms aren't nearly strong enough. Hasn't anyone seen Ridley Scott's Prometheus (2012)?
This is utter, complete, and total bullshit. No sane scientists "accepts" anything of the sort. /crap
Election observers != Military observers
Yes, actually. That's how it has worked since the beginning of time. If there's no authority that's willing and able to force you out, you are the de-facto ruler of your own sovereign country. There's nothing more to it than that.
"Legal" in who's jurisdiction, exactly? The ruling authority in the area invited them. On the level of countries, that's as legal as it gets.
Yes it would, but your bill would still go down. Only thing you lose is the pissing match about how many "channels" you can brag that you have.
Not true. Some channels will go away no matter what. Other channels will find customers don't value their content as much as they do, and can't get enough money for the crap they produce, and have to lower rates.
I'd love ala carte pricing, even if it was more expensive, if only for the instant gratification of denying real money to channels that turn to crap. "Oh you want to move your few good programs to 3 other spin-off channels? Screw you!" This will be the end of spin-off channels, channels with constant repeats of syndicated content everybody's seen, mediocre crap all-day that people just leave on when there's nothing else (TruTV, HGTV, CNN, etc.) and more.
Many (probably most) channels will suck it up, charge $0 for carriage so that they don't limit their audience, and just make due with whatever advertising dollars they can get. Your cable bill goes way down, and you still get lots of channels.
Personally, I'd rather just put up an antenna. Perfect picture quality, and LOTS of channels, with higher content to crap ratios.
I wouldn't. 5 episodes into season 4, and every single one is boring the hell out of me. GoT may have jumped the shark.
And if you have any patience at all, you can eventually rent the DVDs from Netflix for a few cents.
I guess if they switched from Linux to OpenBSD, it would make EVERYBODY happier:
"software which OpenBSD uses and redistributes must be free to all (be they people or companies), for any purpose they wish to use it, including modification, use, peeing on, or even integration into baby mulching machines or atomic bombs to be dropped on Australia." - cvs@openbsd.org mailing list, May 29, 2001
North Korea is probably a nice country, if you are in the leadership, or a VIP like Dennis Rodman, too.
I've considered taking my savings, and living like a king in some 3rd world shithole before, myself, too. That some people have it good, doesn't make it a nice place.
OSCE observers were invited, but the organization declined. Somewhere around 100 international observers from other organizations were present. They might have mostly been Russian schills, but they were there.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Actually, the opposite side of the coin dominates...
Ad campaigns ask people to use less water. Government programs pay people to rip out their lawns. Then in a couple years, water districts raise their rates, because the lower water consumption means they're getting less money to run the system.
The heavily industrialized rice production in the US, is about the same price as traditionally produced (labor-intensive) Chinese rice. Sometimes indentured servitude is cheaper than, and just as effective as, heavy machinery.
Se habla español
The state DOES constrain growth. Developers and cities in the state have to prove that there's adequate water resources, before they can issue building permits. Many cities spend lots of money, and go extremely far afield just to secure water rights for continued expansion.
Personally, I'd say the state is too lax in enforcing baseline water quality. Things like water districts running afoul of standards for arsenic levels and the like, don't give me a warm fuzzy feeling about reducing regulations and fast-tracking water projects.
Except global warming could just as easily result in more rain and fewer droughts in any given area.
Lots of energy use for desalination is necessarily going to drive-up water prices, which will have a market effect all its own.
If anybody cared about residential water use, we wouldn't still be on the old 2.5gpm standard for shower heads and 1.5gpm standard for faucets since '92. And grey water systems would actually be deployed in major cities, cutting water usage in half. Instead, you're being told to rip out your lawn so that your town can keep some manufacturer's water rates low.
Typically, upwards of a decade. I'd call that more than "a while".
You can't give back the decades the person spent in prison, either... Now THAT'S cruel and unusual punishment.
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