1. I would think that a race advanced enough to explore the galaxy would have anough capability to realize if intelligent life were likely, and continue to observe it.
2. is the main point of the argument. In a short biological period of time we will be able to explore the entire galaxy. So radio waves not reaching other planets, etc., is moot.
3. is addressed in the main post as a possibility. I believe that there is only one intelligent race in our galaxy is more likely than that there are exactly two. I think it is more likely that there are many such races than that there are exactly two. Given the idea there are many, one of these would keep tabs on us, find us interesting enough, etc. If they don't, then I guess I have to agree that our petty lives are inconsequential, but I'm an optimist:).
4. Is also a possibility. If alien civilizations are watching us, and they wish to be undetected, what are the chances SETI is going to find anything out there? Also, this goes to 3., which is that if there is one more then there are probably many of them, and one of these many would spill the beans.
BUT, there is no way we are going to find intelligent life in this galaxy, and life itself is going to be rare.
To understand why, consider the galaxy is only about 100,000 light years across. Super intelligent species are super intelligent because they crossed biological distances, and the same forces will cause them to cross galactic distances and explore.
some may say 100K light years is so large as to be impossible to explore. But consider this idea. What these civilizations will do is create cell sized artificial life. The DNA of the artifical cell will create a RF receiver that takes instructions from remote locations to build whatever analytical equipment is necessary to explore the planet. given we can already accelerate protons to near speed of light, why couldn't an intelligent race build something that sprays the galaxy with the artificial DNA? Clearly, it would need to be wrapped in some kind of seed, etc., but still, this is doable. Since you aren't sending around a huge multi-kilogram mass, the enormous energy requirements to achieve near SOL isn't there.
Now, the next point about intelligent life is that we are just at the very beginning of the whole thing. This is/., so I won't bore you with the "how short intelligent life" has been around, but consider life has been around roughly 4 billion years, and intelligent life perhaps.0025% as long. Now to really get to it, civilization has been around for maybe 30K years (.00075% as long), and automobiles have been around a hundred years. Imagine what the next million years is going to bring? I believe in the next 10,000 years exploring the galaxy will be possible after the fashion I suggest above, and it will take about 500K - 1M years to do it.
Now, if intelligent life is really common, in this galaxy, then wouldn't there have been a race that could do do this already? I say YES! Of course there would have been, unless we are just incredibly lucky to be the most advanced. But given our evolution, that seems unlikely. What is more likely: that intelligent life itself isn't so common. Maybe even there is NO other intelligent life in the galaxy.
That's why I think SETI is a bunch of nonsense. If there were other intelligent life, it would have found us. It almost certainly would be > 10K years advanced to us, probably closer to 100M years or so, and it would have discovered us.
There are of course other alternatives, which I don't like too much.
1. Intelligent life is unstable, there is little chance of getting to through the next 10K years. 2. Intelligent life is inherently introverted (not social). 3. Life and consciousness are an illusion, and our deaths aren't worth other races' consideration.
But being an optimist, I will continue to believe intelligent life is just rare.
All the things you site are projects. Of course people can work on projects or separate things and come up with good ideas.
What often time group thinkers fail to realize is that breakthrough ideas can not be parallelized. Imagine Albert Einstein consulting on General Relativity. You might get something ridiculous like string theory.
I think the way to think of the problem is as follows.
Today, you use email exclusively for some purposes. Now be imaginitive here, you don't respond to your boss' group email with an IM to your boss and 15 coworkers, and you sometimes use email because it is late in the evening etc. The no email question is "Imagine you could no longer use the internet for those purposes." Don't be creative and inventive and come up with alternatives, you just can't use the internet for it any more.
Same thing with the web. What are those things you use the web for exclusively, and be honest about it. Imagine you can no longer use the internet for those purposes: getting fast access to news articles from so many sources, latest research docs, etc.
The basic trade-off is the following: With a duopoly, more individuals and organizations use PCs because prices are lower, and this raises welfare. However, with a duopoly, no operating system ends up exploiting fully its potential because developers' efforts wind up divided between the two systems. However, with a monopoly, the efforts to develop new software and improve the platform are directed towards one system only and this may turn out to be better from a social welfare perspective.
This sounds like something out of the Communist Manifesto. If it were true that competition does not improve products and services, then we ought to drop capitalism and move to a socialist system. Of course, it isn't true. This seems like basic economics, and these guys don't understand it?
Finally, the paper investigates the societal welfare consequences of OSS availability by comparing different industry structures (monopoly and duopoly). We find that while a monopoly of Linux is always preferable (from the point of view of societal welfare) to a Windows monopoly, it is ambiguous whether a duopoly Linux-Windows is better than a Windows monopoly.
Here we have some also rather questionable thinking. I guess these guys don't believe in layers of abstraction (nor do Linux types often). If I'm a writer of children's stories, I don't want to have to know how to fix bugs in the OS, word processor, etc. I want to have whomever wrote the thing to fix it. So why give so much credit to Linux? Give me something that works. In fact, if I were uSoft, I would begin to guarantee the function of my software for fitness of a particular purpose to combat the ridiculous notion that my mother or grandmother wants to modify linux sources.
What has happened to the Harvard department of economics? sounds like they've bought into the socialist view of the world.
If uSoft would just fix turning off the computer. Try turning off the stupid thing, and it has to ask "Oh, there are other users logged in, are you sure you want to shut down?" Or until the later release of outlook "I can compress your data, you know." Applications that don't close, etc.
I'm tired of shutting off the computer, only to find the next morning when stupid dialogue boxes are popped up, and upon closing them I have to wait for Windows to shut down.
Either the open source concept has merit or it does not. If it does, then others outside of the software development circle will support it. After all, as can be seen in this simple example, patents are upstream of the software implementing them.
I don't understand what the problem is with having drivers proprietary. It isn't as if the Open Source community is having much success in opening up IBM's VHDL or Verilog, though IBM is getting a lot of free help selling their VHDL and Verilog by open source. Who cares if others want to drive their proprietary widgets through linux? Makes a lot of sense to me.
I think one of the problems is they are talking about two different kinds of constants (at least). Dimensionless constants and the dimensionful constants that are expected to vary in time.
But meanwhile, the article is wishy washy. One the one hand they state the fine structure constant is dimensionless, and researchers found it was smaller in the past, but then go on to say if the principle is broken (i.e., a time varying constant is found), then there general relativity would be broken. Hmm. They just said the researchers found one.
This seems to me to be the string theorists rushing out some kind of evidence to support their model as it is coming under question recently.
Racism would be blocking money transfers to arabs. Instead, they are blocking money to people with the same names as terrorists. So if terrorists start calling themselves "George Bush," his Western Union transfers will be blocked too.
Do you have any ideas as to why there is no meaningful progress?
Two thoughts:
I have a friend that majored in Physics at MIT, and he said quantum mechanics is unintuitive (i.e., not comprehensible by the human mind). Perhaps because of this we have reached our limits to make major breakthroughs?
Another thought is that the sciences have become so shunned by Americans (my dad is a professor, and he says for the last twenty years it is unusual to get an American doctoral student), that those with the intelligence to make meaningful progress are attracted to other disciplines?
But even in Charlie Chaplain's bed, there is an assymetry that had to have occurred that made that one corner pop up. If it all forces were perfectly symmetrical, either all sides would pop at once, or none would.
I get the feeling this is trying to explain why there are clumps of matter in the universe, rather than a uniform blob of matter. Still doesn't explain it to me.
I just went back over each and every post I made, and it seems pretty clear what I'm saying. If you don't return value to the donors, then what's the point of funding the research. It's pretty simple. No one owes anyone else a living doing what they want to do because they want to do it.
I don't understand your anger and why you need to be so insulting. I think you really should examine your own motives. I suspect, no I don't know, that you have an axe to grind. That's unfortunate, but I'm glad to see you are at least passionate about what you are doing. That's great.
No one owes you grants for your research. The original post, ironically moded up, was something to the effect that having to show a potential value to research was lip service. Lip service to the people making the decisions to fund the research with someone elses hard earned money. Obviously the grantors are too lowly to actually comprehend the beauty, whatever of the research, of science itself, so they have to be appeased by slopping together loosely connected applications to the pure science.
While I agree that connecting science to an application can be difficult, I think that the only reason to fund science is to gain the benefits for mankind, particularly for the donors. I don't see what's so contentious about that, and I don't understand your anger in this regards.
You seem to judge "value to me" to be the same as "value to people"
No, actually I think the point is that you do. You value whatever non productive science branch you value, and then say I ought to fund it. I on the other hand point out there is no difference between the cosmos and navel contemplation, and you end up calling me selfish. You are the selfish one, wanting to take people's money for something they find zero value in. I on the other hand dont' really want people to pay me to contemplate my navel. that was just sarcasm.
I feel truly sad for you that you have no interest in funding things that won't return something tangible
If there is probably no value to people, then yeah, I think it ought not be funded by taxpayer $. What probably is depends on a lot of factors, including the potential payoff, etc.
You know, I like contemplating my navel, and I need a great electron microscope to do it. Gee, mind if I take some of your $ to do it?
Of course, Wikipedia is an amazing feat. In my view, it is one of the profound ideas that can catapult human civilization forward.
That having been said, wikipedia management should have found a better way of dealing with the differing views, and perhaps even the vandalism. Could it really be that hard? I could imagine a method whereby popular editors have their own version of the entry, and you could choose which to read. Editors could even choose who was allowed to edit.
The problem with control is that we are all biased, and that should be the beauty of Wikipedia: it isn't tainted by our bias.
True, but it does consistently reward us for methodically searching for interesting things in unusual places.
right, the poster is arguing (I think) that we ought to fund things that have zero probability of return. I disagree with that. We ought to fund things in decreasing order of value/investment ratio.
It's safe to say that most cosmology research will never have a practical application, yet I am glad my tax dollars support such research.
Then you ought to support it, but don't ask me to. If there is no application (value) to the public, what's the point of doing the research? What's the point of putting money into a sinkhole? It isn't as if science is going to send us for heaven for paying it lip service.
where science is seen as a tool of the devil, don't support science for the sake of science
Science for the sake of science? That sounds a lot like worshipping. Science doen't have feelings. People do science because they want to. Should taxpayers subsidize every hobby?
But you would agree if it were known apriori there could be NO application to a research avenue, there isn't much use for the research.
It's not as if taxpayers want to subsidize your interest in understanding the world: that's your business. In the agreggate, taxpayers want something back for their investment..
No, New Orleans was not built below sea level. It was built above sea level, and sunk. But, those with an agenda to push don't ever bother to try for accuracy.
And then
You are correct. I did not make my comments explicit. There was construction on fresh ground that was below sea level.
So by your own criterea you have an agenda.
Now it is fraud (isn't that illegal?) of little old ladies that has allowed the massive billion dollar rip-offs. Perhaps if the insurance agents had made the people fearful of the floods, maybe they would have had insurance? And how do you get to the Federal Government getting into the insurance business, when they could have written reasonable laws regulating it, if such laws didn't exist. Note, I don't disagree that selfish arrogance and insecurity are powerful drivers to commit illegal and unethical acts, and that's a good role for government to stop that kind of stuff. But it isn't a green light to commit the far worse crime of taking billions from people who had nothing to do with the bad decisions. The government should help to optimize capitalism by making it fair and ethical.
I think you need to look a little closer at your own assertions and beliefs.
Thanks though for the information. I didn't know NO was sinking, albeit quite slowly, but I also see nothing in any of your comments that invalidates my position.
Slashdot Mirror
Addressing your points:
:).
1. I would think that a race advanced enough to explore the galaxy would have anough capability to realize if intelligent life were likely, and continue to observe it.
2. is the main point of the argument. In a short biological period of time we will be able to explore the entire galaxy. So radio waves not reaching other planets, etc., is moot.
3. is addressed in the main post as a possibility. I believe that there is only one intelligent race in our galaxy is more likely than that there are exactly two. I think it is more likely that there are many such races than that there are exactly two. Given the idea there are many, one of these would keep tabs on us, find us interesting enough, etc. If they don't, then I guess I have to agree that our petty lives are inconsequential, but I'm an optimist
4. Is also a possibility. If alien civilizations are watching us, and they wish to be undetected, what are the chances SETI is going to find anything out there? Also, this goes to 3., which is that if there is one more then there are probably many of them, and one of these many would spill the beans.
BUT, there is no way we are going to find intelligent life in this galaxy, and life itself is going to be rare.
/., so I won't bore you with the "how short intelligent life" has been around, but consider life has been around roughly 4 billion years, and intelligent life perhaps .0025% as long. Now to really get to it, civilization has been around for maybe 30K years (.00075% as long), and automobiles have been around a hundred years. Imagine what the next million years is going to bring? I believe in the next 10,000 years exploring the galaxy will be possible after the fashion I suggest above, and it will take about 500K - 1M years to do it.
To understand why, consider the galaxy is only about 100,000 light years across. Super intelligent species are super intelligent because they crossed biological distances, and the same forces will cause them to cross galactic distances and explore.
some may say 100K light years is so large as to be impossible to explore. But consider this idea. What these civilizations will do is create cell sized artificial life. The DNA of the artifical cell will create a RF receiver that takes instructions from remote locations to build whatever analytical equipment is necessary to explore the planet. given we can already accelerate protons to near speed of light, why couldn't an intelligent race build something that sprays the galaxy with the artificial DNA? Clearly, it would need to be wrapped in some kind of seed, etc., but still, this is doable. Since you aren't sending around a huge multi-kilogram mass, the enormous energy requirements to achieve near SOL isn't there.
Now, the next point about intelligent life is that we are just at the very beginning of the whole thing. This is
Now, if intelligent life is really common, in this galaxy, then wouldn't there have been a race that could do do this already? I say YES! Of course there would have been, unless we are just incredibly lucky to be the most advanced. But given our evolution, that seems unlikely. What is more likely: that intelligent life itself isn't so common. Maybe even there is NO other intelligent life in the galaxy.
That's why I think SETI is a bunch of nonsense. If there were other intelligent life, it would have found us. It almost certainly would be > 10K years advanced to us, probably closer to 100M years or so, and it would have discovered us.
There are of course other alternatives, which I don't like too much.
1. Intelligent life is unstable, there is little chance of getting to through the next 10K years.
2. Intelligent life is inherently introverted (not social).
3. Life and consciousness are an illusion, and our deaths aren't worth other races' consideration.
But being an optimist, I will continue to believe intelligent life is just rare.
You miss the point. I'm not saying things are not built on other things, I'm saying that new breakthroughs are not parallelizable.
All the things you site are projects. Of course people can work on projects or separate things and come up with good ideas.
What often time group thinkers fail to realize is that breakthrough ideas can not be parallelized. Imagine Albert Einstein consulting on General Relativity. You might get something ridiculous like string theory.
I think the way to think of the problem is as follows.
Today, you use email exclusively for some purposes. Now be imaginitive here, you don't respond to your boss' group email with an IM to your boss and 15 coworkers, and you sometimes use email because it is late in the evening etc. The no email question is "Imagine you could no longer use the internet for those purposes." Don't be creative and inventive and come up with alternatives, you just can't use the internet for it any more.
Same thing with the web. What are those things you use the web for exclusively, and be honest about it. Imagine you can no longer use the internet for those purposes: getting fast access to news articles from so many sources, latest research docs, etc.
This sounds like something out of the Communist Manifesto. If it were true that competition does not improve products and services, then we ought to drop capitalism and move to a socialist system. Of course, it isn't true. This seems like basic economics, and these guys don't understand it?
Here we have some also rather questionable thinking. I guess these guys don't believe in layers of abstraction (nor do Linux types often). If I'm a writer of children's stories, I don't want to have to know how to fix bugs in the OS, word processor, etc. I want to have whomever wrote the thing to fix it. So why give so much credit to Linux? Give me something that works. In fact, if I were uSoft, I would begin to guarantee the function of my software for fitness of a particular purpose to combat the ridiculous notion that my mother or grandmother wants to modify linux sources.
What has happened to the Harvard department of economics? sounds like they've bought into the socialist view of the world.
If uSoft would just fix turning off the computer. Try turning off the stupid thing, and it has to ask "Oh, there are other users logged in, are you sure you want to shut down?" Or until the later release of outlook "I can compress your data, you know." Applications that don't close, etc.
I'm tired of shutting off the computer, only to find the next morning when stupid dialogue boxes are popped up, and upon closing them I have to wait for Windows to shut down.
Sooner or later some famous person or other will be stalked, it will become national news and we will all learn about the evils of "public" calenders.
Meanwhile, the article IMO misses an important point, that all this information is stored somewhere, and that in and of itself is a liability.
Either the open source concept has merit or it does not. If it does, then others outside of the software development circle will support it. After all, as can be seen in this simple example, patents are upstream of the software implementing them.
what makes you think the embryo would ever become a person? There are 500000 embryos on ice in the US right now. I'm sure they would use one of those.
This is a great example. The patent claims read just as described: how do you find a track to play using indexing.
Patents like this are not helping the public interest, but are simply ways for companies to lock out ideas without having to pay to develop them.
Time for the open source community to make "open patents" that are used to attack companies like creative that abuses them.
I don't understand what the problem is with having drivers proprietary. It isn't as if the Open Source community is having much success in opening up IBM's VHDL or Verilog, though IBM is getting a lot of free help selling their VHDL and Verilog by open source. Who cares if others want to drive their proprietary widgets through linux? Makes a lot of sense to me.
I think one of the problems is they are talking about two different kinds of constants (at least). Dimensionless constants and the dimensionful constants that are expected to vary in time.
But meanwhile, the article is wishy washy. One the one hand they state the fine structure constant is dimensionless, and researchers found it was smaller in the past, but then go on to say if the principle is broken (i.e., a time varying constant is found), then there general relativity would be broken. Hmm. They just said the researchers found one.
This seems to me to be the string theorists rushing out some kind of evidence to support their model as it is coming under question recently.
This isn't racism. It is nameism.
Racism would be blocking money transfers to arabs. Instead, they are blocking money to people with the same names as terrorists. So if terrorists start calling themselves "George Bush," his Western Union transfers will be blocked too.
Do you have any ideas as to why there is no meaningful progress?
Two thoughts:
I have a friend that majored in Physics at MIT, and he said quantum mechanics is unintuitive (i.e., not comprehensible by the human mind). Perhaps because of this we have reached our limits to make major breakthroughs?
Another thought is that the sciences have become so shunned by Americans (my dad is a professor, and he says for the last twenty years it is unusual to get an American doctoral student), that those with the intelligence to make meaningful progress are attracted to other disciplines?
But even in Charlie Chaplain's bed, there is an assymetry that had to have occurred that made that one corner pop up. If it all forces were perfectly symmetrical, either all sides would pop at once, or none would.
I get the feeling this is trying to explain why there are clumps of matter in the universe, rather than a uniform blob of matter. Still doesn't explain it to me.
I just went back over each and every post I made, and it seems pretty clear what I'm saying. If you don't return value to the donors, then what's the point of funding the research. It's pretty simple. No one owes anyone else a living doing what they want to do because they want to do it.
I don't understand your anger and why you need to be so insulting. I think you really should examine your own motives. I suspect, no I don't know, that you have an axe to grind. That's unfortunate, but I'm glad to see you are at least passionate about what you are doing. That's great.
No one owes you grants for your research. The original post, ironically moded up, was something to the effect that having to show a potential value to research was lip service. Lip service to the people making the decisions to fund the research with someone elses hard earned money. Obviously the grantors are too lowly to actually comprehend the beauty, whatever of the research, of science itself, so they have to be appeased by slopping together loosely connected applications to the pure science.
While I agree that connecting science to an application can be difficult, I think that the only reason to fund science is to gain the benefits for mankind, particularly for the donors. I don't see what's so contentious about that, and I don't understand your anger in this regards.
No, actually I think the point is that you do. You value whatever non productive science branch you value, and then say I ought to fund it. I on the other hand point out there is no difference between the cosmos and navel contemplation, and you end up calling me selfish. You are the selfish one, wanting to take people's money for something they find zero value in. I on the other hand dont' really want people to pay me to contemplate my navel. that was just sarcasm.
I feel truly sad for you that you have no interest in funding things that won't return something tangible
If there is probably no value to people, then yeah, I think it ought not be funded by taxpayer $. What probably is depends on a lot of factors, including the potential payoff, etc.
You know, I like contemplating my navel, and I need a great electron microscope to do it. Gee, mind if I take some of your $ to do it?
Of course, Wikipedia is an amazing feat. In my view, it is one of the profound ideas that can catapult human civilization forward.
That having been said, wikipedia management should have found a better way of dealing with the differing views, and perhaps even the vandalism. Could it really be that hard? I could imagine a method whereby popular editors have their own version of the entry, and you could choose which to read. Editors could even choose who was allowed to edit.
The problem with control is that we are all biased, and that should be the beauty of Wikipedia: it isn't tainted by our bias.
right, the poster is arguing (I think) that we ought to fund things that have zero probability of return. I disagree with that. We ought to fund things in decreasing order of value/investment ratio.
It's safe to say that most cosmology research will never have a practical application, yet I am glad my tax dollars support such research.
Then you ought to support it, but don't ask me to. If there is no application (value) to the public, what's the point of doing the research? What's the point of putting money into a sinkhole? It isn't as if science is going to send us for heaven for paying it lip service.
where science is seen as a tool of the devil, don't support science for the sake of science
Science for the sake of science? That sounds a lot like worshipping. Science doen't have feelings. People do science because they want to. Should taxpayers subsidize every hobby?
But you would agree if it were known apriori there could be NO application to a research avenue, there isn't much use for the research.
It's not as if taxpayers want to subsidize your interest in understanding the world: that's your business. In the agreggate, taxpayers want something back for their investment..
That, long after it was founded and established, there was some small amount of new construction in areas that had sunk below sea level
Post your references to back up your assertions.
I would love to see a regulation that was enforcable and not overly invasive that required ethical behavior.
Check out the FDA.
And then
So by your own criterea you have an agenda.
Now it is fraud (isn't that illegal?) of little old ladies that has allowed the massive billion dollar rip-offs. Perhaps if the insurance agents had made the people fearful of the floods, maybe they would have had insurance? And how do you get to the Federal Government getting into the insurance business, when they could have written reasonable laws regulating it, if such laws didn't exist. Note, I don't disagree that selfish arrogance and insecurity are powerful drivers to commit illegal and unethical acts, and that's a good role for government to stop that kind of stuff. But it isn't a green light to commit the far worse crime of taking billions from people who had nothing to do with the bad decisions. The government should help to optimize capitalism by making it fair and ethical.
I think you need to look a little closer at your own assertions and beliefs.
Thanks though for the information. I didn't know NO was sinking, albeit quite slowly, but I also see nothing in any of your comments that invalidates my position.