The idea that we alone are the only living beings in the galaxy is so unbelievably improbable that, IMHO, such a belief that requires far more faith than to believe there are other intelligent beings out there, and we simply haven't found them yet.
You're falling into the trap of the Anthropic Principle. The existence of humans tells us absolutely nothing about how probable life/intelligence is or isn't.
Here's a thought experiment for you: let's say the odds against intelligent life are 1E30 to 1. It took trillions and trillions of cycles of the universe(s) for it to happen. How would we know it took that long?
You know, the one iron-clad argument the creationists have going for them is that humans are incredibly, amazingly, unbelievably complicated. I'm an atheist, but I have to acknowledge that simple fact. Is it so hard to believe that intelligence may just be a totally unique occurance, but since we don't experience when it DOESN'T happen, we think it must be everywhere?
Unless, of course, there's nothing particular strange about the timeline humanity is following and everyone else is on much the same one.
Think about what you're saying. All the stars and all the planets have to form at exactly the same time (which we know is false), evolution follows EXACTLY the same timeline over BILLIONS of years, and EVERY race, without variation, comes to the same technological level within, what, a century of each other? Just for reference, a century is 0.00001% of a billion years. Pretty narrow target to hit.
Or that we're just like everyone else and *no-one* has yet developed sufficient technology.
Considering we're talking about billions of years of time, and our civilization has gone from stone to atomics in a handful of thousands of years, that's highly unlikely.
Every copy of something introduces error. The instant you introduce a physical replicating system in the real world you also introduce evolution. At which point it stops working for you and starts working for itself.
Or, you could just program them to destroy themselves if the has of their program doesn't match. Evolution requires a LOT of diversity, not to mention competition for resources. The odds of getting even one mutant would be astronomically (heh) small with a simple hash.
Any intelligent race would therefore, Sagan and Newman reasoned, not design Von Neumann probes in the first place, and would try to destroy any Von Neumann probes found as soon as they were detected.
The problem is that Sagan's argument is a crock. He was a very intelligent guy, but had a blind spot when it came to intelligent life. He wanted it to be true too much.
The answer to Sagan's argument is simple: It only takes one. If the life was teeming with intelligence, as he argued for again and again, one civilization would've either colonized the galaxy or at least sent out probes. That none of them did argues that we're unique in the galaxy.
Uh-huh. And how many self-replicating probes traveling at.1 c have you developed?
Hence my use of the phrase, "wait until you had the technology." No one is going to do this until they're so bored with their own solar system that it makes sense to tackle something of this magnitude.
The fact that we can imagine self-replicating interstellar probes doesn't mean they are practical or
possible.
You're right, the whole idea of self-replication is clearly impossible.
Funny I thought the galaxy was 100k ish light years across. So it would take half of that if we started at the center and the probes moved at light speed. It would take the same half of that to get the final results back so the minimum time is 100k years, without going faster than light.
The galaxy is 30,000 light years across. I actually thought of that after I posted, but I figured "thousands" covers everything up to a million.:)
Sheesh, talk about "proof by lack of imagination." This is supposed to answer the Fermi Paradox?
You can't explore a galaxy with a handful of probes. 72 probes??? First of all, if you're going to do it that way, you'd create hundreds of thousands of probes, if not millions of probes (mass production would reduce the cost). Second, you still probably wouldn't do it that way. You'd wait until you had the technology to make self-replicating probes, and the galaxy could potentially be explored in thousands of years.
Of course a Communist country can spend huge amounts of money on anything it wants in order to be "leading" at something (e.g., the Soviet Union and the arts, atomic weapons and rockets). So what? I'm responding specifically to your use of the phrase "western propoganda", which is normally a code phrase that means you think Cuba is some misunderstood wonderful political system, if only the West would open its eyes.
Or are you just determined to prove my point about brain-washing by your own example?
I'm not even sure what your point is. If you think my points prove "brain-washing", then you must think my points aren't a fair representation of Cuba.
Mostly the victim's fault? Surely it is mostly the fault of the person who pulled the trigger?
The crime itself is the fault of the perpetrator. The circumstance is the fault of the victim. If you knowingly and willingly put yourself in harm's way, you deserve the harm.
Your fault for your living circumstances?
Of course it's their fault (at least, in rich countries like the US where one has choices). Or to put it another way, if it's not their fault where they live, whose fault is it? -sigh- Wouldn't it be a great world if everyone took responsibility for their own circumstances?
Is it the victims fault if it happens in a place that seems safe?
Why? Last time I checked, it was still a crime to shoot somebody.
I didn't say it wasn't a crime or that the perpetrator shouldn't be punished, only that it's mostly the victim's fault. Stupidity led directly to the circumstance. As I told my kid just this morning, "Accidents happen for a reason. They don't 'just happen'." Unfortunately, too many adults have a child-like view of responsibility.
So, if someone gets raped or shot, it is their fault for not evading the rapist/bullet?
Depends on the circumstances. If you go to the bank and it's robbed, you couldn't have reasonably avoided the crime. If you walk down a dark alley in a bad part of town at 2am, you deserve what you get.
A bright man under utilized in our society. And the article points out all of his problems. Although he made mistakes, I doubt his situation is entirely his fault. Another misunderstood engineer.
With certain exceptions (e.g., things you can't control, like some forms of cancer, mental illness, etc), someone's problems are ALWAYS their own fault. For example, if your boss screws you, it's YOUR fault for not being careful.
People who voted for democrats thinking liberty would be restored should take notice. Only Libertarians truly stand for constitutionally protected freedoms!
Libertarians only stand for what Libertarians think of as "freedom", which is generally on the opposite side of common sense (like selling off the national parks, as one small example). It'd also be nice if the Libertarian party read the Ninth Amendment some time.
The simple fact is that there is no party in the United States with moderate balances of individual liberty, reasonable and restrained government services, low taxes, business growth, and strong defense. It simply doesn't exist.
If it were 100% certain, then there would have been no reasonable doubt, and therefore he would have been convicted.
I'm not sure if you're being subtly sarcastic here... LOL. But just in case...
If a jury is comprised of impartial robots, then a lack of reasonable doubt always would lead to a conviction. In this case, the jury nullified the certainty of OJ's guilt and set him free.
So do you think the press should have covered up what the prize was?
Wha...? Where did I say the prize shouldn't be mentioned? The point is that exactly what the prize was had nothing to do with why the accident occurred.
Would she have died if the station was giving out tickets to a concert as a prize? No, because she did it to get a Wii for her kids.
Yes, she would have died if it had been tickets, and she had had to drink water to win the tickets for her kids. What's so special about the prize being a console? Any prize could have done it.
The reality is that you yourself just rattled off a laundry list of problems that "educated people" would do away with.
By most accounts, people in Cuba and the former Soviet Union are/were very well educated. How much has/did that help them? Education is not some magic talisman you can wave around.
Uh, education is the only answer to problems with sanitation, starvation, etc.
This, unfortunately, is one of the great fallacies of rich countries. If we can just bring knowledge to the ignorant savages, all the problems go away.
The reality is that education is completely useless is an environment of corrupt governments, gang warfare, civil war, local warlords, etc, etc, who basically steal anything of value. For education to be useful, you first have to have a stable civilization in place. These people live in a reality that rich people cannot understand (including myself, but I at least know that it exists). Education is not a magic wand that suddenly allows them to fight against oppressors.
Up front, I admit that I despise Apple as a company. I hate their lying, I hate their arrogance, and I hate how they abuse their customers.
However -- when I saw the iPhone, I was really tempted. Finally Apple may have a made a product that appeals to me, and doesn't have the stink of arrogance around it (e.g., Steve doesn't like radio, therefore, no one else will get radio on the iPod).
Until the details started leaking. No replaceable battery??? WTF??? I'm supposed to throw it away after a year when the battery dies?
No third party development tools??
Lock-in to only one cellular provider? Not surprising from the company that locks you into their hardware, but... what the hell?
-sigh- Same old Apple. Same old arrogant stupidity. Same old nuggests of good ideas packaged in a screw-the-consumer package.
The only claim that deadspin is a non-profit comes from paypal.
The only claim that Paypal screwed up comes from deadspin. Why would PayPal arbitrarily make an account a non-profit? I think deadspin messed it up, and is now trying to pin the blame on Paypal. Something smells fishy.
I looked at the assembler it produced -- and I don't get where the gain is coming from. The compiler understands the machine better than I do.
All that proves is that the compiler knew a trick you didn't (probably it understood which instructions will go into which pipelines and will parallelize). I bet if you took the time to learn more about the architecture, you could find ways to be even more clever.
I'm not arguing for a return to assembly... it's definitely too much of a hassle these days, and again, hardware is cheap, and programmers are expensive. Just that given enough programmer time, humans can nearly always do better than the compiler, which shouldn't be surprising since humans programmed the compiler, and humans have more contextual knowledge of what a program is trying to accomplish.
Who thinks that a specialized application (or algorithm) won't beat a generalized one in just about every case?
The reason people use general databases is not because they think it's the ultimate in performance, it's because it's already written, already debugged, and -- most importantly -- programmer time is expensive, and hardware is cheap.
See also: high level compiled languages versus assembly language*.
(*and no, please don't quote the "magic compiler" myth... "modern compilers are so good nowadays that they can beat human written assembly code in just about every case". Only people who have never programmed extensively in assembly believe that.)
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The idea that we alone are the only living beings in the galaxy is so unbelievably improbable that, IMHO, such a belief that requires far more faith than to believe there are other intelligent beings out there, and we simply haven't found them yet.
You're falling into the trap of the Anthropic Principle. The existence of humans tells us absolutely nothing about how probable life/intelligence is or isn't.
Here's a thought experiment for you: let's say the odds against intelligent life are 1E30 to 1. It took trillions and trillions of cycles of the universe(s) for it to happen. How would we know it took that long?
You know, the one iron-clad argument the creationists have going for them is that humans are incredibly, amazingly, unbelievably complicated. I'm an atheist, but I have to acknowledge that simple fact. Is it so hard to believe that intelligence may just be a totally unique occurance, but since we don't experience when it DOESN'T happen, we think it must be everywhere?
Unless, of course, there's nothing particular strange about the timeline humanity is following and everyone else is on much the same one.
Think about what you're saying. All the stars and all the planets have to form at exactly the same time (which we know is false), evolution follows EXACTLY the same timeline over BILLIONS of years, and EVERY race, without variation, comes to the same technological level within, what, a century of each other? Just for reference, a century is 0.00001% of a billion years. Pretty narrow target to hit.
Does this sound absurd enough yet?
Or that we're just like everyone else and *no-one* has yet developed sufficient technology.
Considering we're talking about billions of years of time, and our civilization has gone from stone to atomics in a handful of thousands of years, that's highly unlikely.
Every copy of something introduces error. The instant you introduce a physical replicating system in the real world you also introduce evolution. At which point it stops working for you and starts working for itself.
Or, you could just program them to destroy themselves if the has of their program doesn't match. Evolution requires a LOT of diversity, not to mention competition for resources. The odds of getting even one mutant would be astronomically (heh) small with a simple hash.
Any intelligent race would therefore, Sagan and Newman reasoned, not design Von Neumann probes in the first place, and would try to destroy any Von Neumann probes found as soon as they were detected.
The problem is that Sagan's argument is a crock. He was a very intelligent guy, but had a blind spot when it came to intelligent life. He wanted it to be true too much.
The answer to Sagan's argument is simple: It only takes one. If the life was teeming with intelligence, as he argued for again and again, one civilization would've either colonized the galaxy or at least sent out probes. That none of them did argues that we're unique in the galaxy.
Uh-huh. And how many self-replicating probes traveling at .1 c have you developed?
Hence my use of the phrase, "wait until you had the technology." No one is going to do this until they're so bored with their own solar system that it makes sense to tackle something of this magnitude.
The fact that we can imagine self-replicating interstellar probes doesn't mean they are practical or possible.
You're right, the whole idea of self-replication is clearly impossible.
Funny I thought the galaxy was 100k ish light years across. So it would take half of that if we started at the center and the probes moved at light speed. It would take the same half of that to get the final results back so the minimum time is 100k years, without going faster than light.
The galaxy is 30,000 light years across. I actually thought of that after I posted, but I figured "thousands" covers everything up to a million. :)
Sheesh, talk about "proof by lack of imagination." This is supposed to answer the Fermi Paradox?
You can't explore a galaxy with a handful of probes. 72 probes??? First of all, if you're going to do it that way, you'd create hundreds of thousands of probes, if not millions of probes (mass production would reduce the cost). Second, you still probably wouldn't do it that way. You'd wait until you had the technology to make self-replicating probes, and the galaxy could potentially be explored in thousands of years.
Not impressed by this guy's argument.
Why are you posting red herrings?
Of course a Communist country can spend huge amounts of money on anything it wants in order to be "leading" at something (e.g., the Soviet Union and the arts, atomic weapons and rockets). So what? I'm responding specifically to your use of the phrase "western propoganda", which is normally a code phrase that means you think Cuba is some misunderstood wonderful political system, if only the West would open its eyes.
Or are you just determined to prove my point about brain-washing by your own example?
I'm not even sure what your point is. If you think my points prove "brain-washing", then you must think my points aren't a fair representation of Cuba.
Only if you've been brainwashed by western propaganda.
I suppose the travel restrictions not allowing cuban citizens to leave their Paradise is also Western propaganda?
Maybe it's just that no citizen wants to visit other places. And the citizens probably like having one leader for, like, 100 years straight.
Mostly the victim's fault? Surely it is mostly the fault of the person who pulled the trigger?
The crime itself is the fault of the perpetrator. The circumstance is the fault of the victim. If you knowingly and willingly put yourself in harm's way, you deserve the harm.
Your fault for your living circumstances?
Of course it's their fault (at least, in rich countries like the US where one has choices). Or to put it another way, if it's not their fault where they live, whose fault is it? -sigh- Wouldn't it be a great world if everyone took responsibility for their own circumstances?
Is it the victims fault if it happens in a place that seems safe?
See my prior comments.
Why? Last time I checked, it was still a crime to shoot somebody.
I didn't say it wasn't a crime or that the perpetrator shouldn't be punished, only that it's mostly the victim's fault. Stupidity led directly to the circumstance. As I told my kid just this morning, "Accidents happen for a reason. They don't 'just happen'." Unfortunately, too many adults have a child-like view of responsibility.
So, if someone gets raped or shot, it is their fault for not evading the rapist/bullet?
Depends on the circumstances. If you go to the bank and it's robbed, you couldn't have reasonably avoided the crime. If you walk down a dark alley in a bad part of town at 2am, you deserve what you get.
A bright man under utilized in our society. And the article points out all of his problems. Although he made mistakes, I doubt his situation is entirely his fault. Another misunderstood engineer.
With certain exceptions (e.g., things you can't control, like some forms of cancer, mental illness, etc), someone's problems are ALWAYS their own fault. For example, if your boss screws you, it's YOUR fault for not being careful.
People who voted for democrats thinking liberty would be restored should take notice. Only Libertarians truly stand for constitutionally protected freedoms!
Libertarians only stand for what Libertarians think of as "freedom", which is generally on the opposite side of common sense (like selling off the national parks, as one small example). It'd also be nice if the Libertarian party read the Ninth Amendment some time.
The simple fact is that there is no party in the United States with moderate balances of individual liberty, reasonable and restrained government services, low taxes, business growth, and strong defense. It simply doesn't exist.
If it were 100% certain, then there would have been no reasonable doubt, and therefore he would have been convicted.
I'm not sure if you're being subtly sarcastic here... LOL. But just in case...
If a jury is comprised of impartial robots, then a lack of reasonable doubt always would lead to a conviction. In this case, the jury nullified the certainty of OJ's guilt and set him free.
So do you think the press should have covered up what the prize was?
Wha...? Where did I say the prize shouldn't be mentioned? The point is that exactly what the prize was had nothing to do with why the accident occurred.
OJ didn't kill anyone yet was sued for wrongful death.
OJ was sued for wrongful death because he DID kill someone (that fact is 100% certain), yet was not convicted of the crime.
Would she have died if the station was giving out tickets to a concert as a prize? No, because she did it to get a Wii for her kids.
Yes, she would have died if it had been tickets, and she had had to drink water to win the tickets for her kids. What's so special about the prize being a console? Any prize could have done it.
The reality is that you yourself just rattled off a laundry list of problems that "educated people" would do away with.
By most accounts, people in Cuba and the former Soviet Union are/were very well educated. How much has/did that help them? Education is not some magic talisman you can wave around.
Uh, education is the only answer to problems with sanitation, starvation, etc.
This, unfortunately, is one of the great fallacies of rich countries. If we can just bring knowledge to the ignorant savages, all the problems go away.
The reality is that education is completely useless is an environment of corrupt governments, gang warfare, civil war, local warlords, etc, etc, who basically steal anything of value. For education to be useful, you first have to have a stable civilization in place. These people live in a reality that rich people cannot understand (including myself, but I at least know that it exists). Education is not a magic wand that suddenly allows them to fight against oppressors.
Up front, I admit that I despise Apple as a company. I hate their lying, I hate their arrogance, and I hate how they abuse their customers.
However -- when I saw the iPhone, I was really tempted. Finally Apple may have a made a product that appeals to me, and doesn't have the stink of arrogance around it (e.g., Steve doesn't like radio, therefore, no one else will get radio on the iPod).
Until the details started leaking. No replaceable battery??? WTF??? I'm supposed to throw it away after a year when the battery dies?
No third party development tools??
Lock-in to only one cellular provider? Not surprising from the company that locks you into their hardware, but... what the hell?
-sigh- Same old Apple. Same old arrogant stupidity. Same old nuggests of good ideas packaged in a screw-the-consumer package.
The only claim that deadspin is a non-profit comes from paypal.
The only claim that Paypal screwed up comes from deadspin. Why would PayPal arbitrarily make an account a non-profit? I think deadspin messed it up, and is now trying to pin the blame on Paypal. Something smells fishy.
I looked at the assembler it produced -- and I don't get where the gain is coming from. The compiler understands the machine better than I do.
All that proves is that the compiler knew a trick you didn't (probably it understood which instructions will go into which pipelines and will parallelize). I bet if you took the time to learn more about the architecture, you could find ways to be even more clever.
I'm not arguing for a return to assembly... it's definitely too much of a hassle these days, and again, hardware is cheap, and programmers are expensive. Just that given enough programmer time, humans can nearly always do better than the compiler, which shouldn't be surprising since humans programmed the compiler, and humans have more contextual knowledge of what a program is trying to accomplish.
Who thinks that a specialized application (or algorithm) won't beat a generalized one in just about every case?
The reason people use general databases is not because they think it's the ultimate in performance, it's because it's already written, already debugged, and -- most importantly -- programmer time is expensive, and hardware is cheap.
See also: high level compiled languages versus assembly language*.
(*and no, please don't quote the "magic compiler" myth... "modern compilers are so good nowadays that they can beat human written assembly code in just about every case". Only people who have never programmed extensively in assembly believe that.)