The longer we wait...to do what exactly? Stop combustion? Make it a capital offense? Reduce combustion by 1%, 10%, 80% and if so how? And whatever 'policy' the powers that be decide on how are they going to enforce that policy everywhere else on the planet?
The only even remotely realistic plan I've heard is to go 100% nuclear for electricity generation, and then figure out a way to make electric cars practical. Personally I favor raised electric wires on all highways so that cars only have to rely on battery technology on secondary roads.
Really all of this debate over AGW validity is a moot point if we can all agree that going 100% nuclear is a worthy goal. I think AGW is a religion and, being an atheist, I don't believe in it, but I'm pro-nuclear so if that is your solution then we can agree on the actions and that is all that matters. Of course it also means letting every country on the planet go 100% nuclear including countries that the US would rather not have so much plutonium.
We deniers will admit there is a problem as soon as you true believers can scientifically prove there is one. Controversy is generally inversely proportional to the amount of evidence available. There is very little evidence for AGW. So there is a lot of controversy about it. I am an AGW denier for the same reason that I am an atheist: a lack of evidence. When you have the evidence then you can present it. And opinion polls should have no place in such a presentation. Science is not a democracy. Popular vote does not determine the truth.
So you don't believe people would trade at all without a government? I've been the victim of fraud a few times on Ebay and I don't recall the government reimbursing me for my losses. Nor do I recall a government agent following me around to protect me from being mugged.
So I think you are wrong on all counts. The government doesn't protect me from force or fraud and there would certainly be a free market without a government.
Rather than protecting me at all, the government is what I need protection from. The government is the one using both force and fraud. I've even been a victim of the force part. A victim of government violence.
I can see that many in this thread cannot get enough of government cock. You could happily suck it all day long. When a corporation unzips his fly and asks for a free suck you turn away. I don't understand what it is about the taste of government dick that you love so much. I get that you think powerful corporations are bad (and I agree), but I don't understand why you think powerful governments are good.
I don't want to suck government dick or corporate dick. Nor do I want to be anyone's slave. It is for this reason that I am quite poor and only work the bare minimum of hours necessary to survive. If I'm going to be a slave at least I can be a lazy one. I refuse to be a beast of burden either for the government or for corporations. In such a system I will only work the bare minimum necessary for survival.
I don't like any concentrations of power. People in general are selfish narrow-minded, corrupt scumbags and can always be counted on to behave badly. The government consists of people and corporations consist of people. So they are both evil. But corporations are less powerful. At least they cannot arrest you and put you in a cage because you didn't follow some silly rule of theirs or because you didn't treat one of their enforcers with the respect they feel is owed to them. No doubt some corporations would love to have that kind of power, but they just don't.
I believe that slavery is bad. All forms of slavery. Just as I would hate any corporation that demanded a percentage of every hour of my labor I hate and resent any government that feels I owe them part or even all what I make working at some shit job. I say fuck greedy people, whether it is the government or corporations. I don't owe them a damn thing. My life is my own. It belongs to me and not to the government. They have no right to even one penny of the money that I need for paying rent or buying food.
The people who founded this country were like me. The British government believed that they owned the colonists. That a portion of their labor belonged to some king across the ocean. Well the colonists gave the finger to that king and told him to come and get it if he could.
It is scary how easy it is to convince people to be slaves. It must be a very deep part of human nature to want to be owned. Well enjoy the taste of that cock. Suck it all you want. Just don't try to force me to suck it as well. Enjoy licking your masters' boots.
SETI doesn't actually expect to receive radio leakage. So the analog window isn't really an issue. If a twin earth were orbiting Alpha Centauri A even the giant Arecibo dish would not be sensitive enough to receive even fairly loud leakage. The signals are far too weak, generally too low in frequency, and are quite often aimed tangentially to the planet surface and not at the zenith. Omnidirectional signals which might have a greater tendency to travel in the right direction are just too weak. None of it can really be distinguished beyond the noise floor even at 1 light year, let alone the 4.2 light years to the nearest star.
It's always possible that alien technology could pick out our own pathetically weak signals from the noise at great distances, but I don't think we can even (realistically) imagine such technology. Perhaps a planetary scale antenna, like carving a paraboloid shape into one side of a moon or planet might allow the detection of leakage to a distance of Alpha Centauri, but obviously we don't have anything like that yet.
Passive SETI hopes to detect either an omnidirectional galactic beacon of pulsar-like magnitude or a directed beam from a source that is deliberately attempting to communicate with us. If this seems tremendously unlikely to you then you understand the problem with traditional SETI. Even if we are surrounded by technical civilizations there is no reason to expect that they know we are here and even if they know they may choose not to attempt communication for various reasons.
I don't think anyone has ever attempted to send a signal to Alpha Centauri for instance. Our closest neighbor. A sun-like G class star. We've had the technology to send a signal since radar was invented before WWII and we have chosen not to do so. Admittedly, for a while it was believed that such a binary system would not allow life to evolve, but still. It would have been quite easy for us to do. Passive SETI relies on a whole bunch of unlikely scenarios or a whole lot of intelligent civs in our part of the Milky Way. It relies a bit too much on getting lucky.
That's why I prefer Active SETI. If you believe a particular star system might have intelligent life then first say hello and then only after enough time has passed for a response do you actually listen. Or just await the arrival of the invasion fleet. Either way you've made contact.
I hadn't heard that the heliopause causes so much EM interference? Do you have a reference for that? Is it broadband or does it only affect a narrow range of frequencies?
A kilometer-scale Orion ship with a cruising speed of.08c would take 12.5 years to travel 1 light year. ETAs for a some interesting destinations (ignoring acceleration times):
Alpha Centauri A/B: 54 years 6 months. (1 gen) Sirius A/B: 107 years and 6 months (2-3 gens) Epsilon Eridani: 131 years (3 gens) Procyon A/B: 142 years and 6 months (3 gens) 61 Cygni A/B: 142 years (3 gens) Epsilon Indi: 148 years (3 gens) Tau Ceti: 148 years 9 months (3 gens) Gliese 876: 191 years 3 months (3-4 gens) Groombridge 1618: 198 years 7 months (4 gens) Gliese 581: 253 years 9 months (4 gens) Gliese 667: 276 years 3 months (4 gens) Beta Canum Venaticorum: 344 years (6 gens) Zeta Reticuli: 489 years 6 months (8 gens) 55 Cancri: 503 years 9 months (8 gens) HD 10307: 515 years (8 gens) Gliese 1214: 529 years 9 months (8 gens) 18 Scorpii: 566 years 3 months (9 gens) HD 10180: 1587 years 6 months (25 gens) HIP 56948: 2500 years (38 gens) PSR J0108-1431 (closest pulsar): 9778 years (151 gens) V4641 (closest black hole): 20,000 years (307 gens) galactic center: 325,000 years (5000 gens) Andromeda galaxy: 32,500,000 years (500,000 gens)
That should give some perspective on 'close' and 'far'. So even Sirius would be out of direct reach with the best possible (city scale nuclear pulse ship) technology we could use if we cannot design a life support system capable of more than a single generation.
Obviously robots do not require life support per se, but having some humans aboard to fix things and to deal with unexpected problems would be awfully nice. We could probably build a kilometer scale nuclear pulse ship in orbit within a timeframe of 100-300 years if we were willing to spend the money (we are not), but we almost certainly will not have human-level AI by then. So life support would represent a major barrier if we hadn't thought of a solution by the 23rd or 24th century when we were ready to launch our first interstellar ship.
With current tech (and a lot of money and time) we could make direct contact with our closest solar twin system in 2500 years. Allow another 200 years to receive communications from the ship and the total time would be 2700 years. Another 300 years to actually build the ship and you get a nice even 3 millenia. So it is hard to think of it as close, but it certainly is close if you compare it to the nearest pulsar or black hole or our galactic center.
Needless to say there are quite a few interesting targets that are much, much closer and would require only between 3 and 8 generations instead of 38. Gliese 581 and 667 are pretty interesting and would only require 4 generations. Although thinking about a quarter of a millenium makes me impatient.
A 54 year trip to Alpha Centauri would take just about 1 human lifetime. That would be a good test outing for our first ship. After that we should have a much better idea of the kinds of problems to expect from longer missions. Giving birth in interstellar space? The success of that would be very important and would have to be tested.
The CDC fucked up. It's that simple. Based on "better safe than sorry" they inconvenienced and scared a plane full of passengers for absolutely no reason. There was no conclusion they could draw from a second hand report of symptoms. They were clearly wrong to make a diagnosis of monkey pox. Even the most cursory direct examination of the patient would not have given the slightest reason to suspect monkey pox over insect bites. The patient herself even suspected that they were just insect bites. She was not sick. She did not have a fever. Holding the plane for 2 or more hours based on some red bumps? That cannot be justified just because she was recently in Uganda.
So, most other countries, finding out that a passenger on an inbound flight from Uganda is exhibiting signs of what could be the highly contagious monkeypox... just shrug their shoulders? You know that's not true.
What signs of monkey pox? The red bumps? Seriously? I don't think we should start holding aircraft on the ground for hours every time a passenger has some red bumps. Not even if they have recently been to Africa. And as far as the mother talking about pus, they should have confirmed that with the patient herself before drawing any conclusions. I'm sure it must get boring at the CDC without any major epidemics happening at the moment, but geez. This isn't rocket science. Even a first year med student should have been able to do better than this.
Ah. Super pandemics. The scourge of mankind. When was the last one again? 1918?
This absolutely was an over-reaction. There was no reason to believe that the passenger was infected with some sort of exotic tropical virus. If she had presented with her symptoms to most doctors they would no doubt just tell her to call an exterminator or prescribe a topical corticosteroid and not create a major panic and have her quarantined.
I hope you do not work in the medical field. Something about hoofbeats and zebras comes to mind. The only reason to have suspected a zebra in this case was the mention of a central African country. That is most definitely not sufficient. Red bumps.:facepalm:
"She told them her daughter is on a flight back from Uganda and has some red bumps which are pussing and what should she do to treat them," Roger Sievers said. "She was looking for some general advice."
I don't know wtf she expected to happen making a report like that to a public hospital. Saying something like that in the US has very obvious and somewhat ridiculous consequences which would be unlikely to occur in most other countries. Despite what many Americans seem to believe there is such a thing as an over-reaction. Based on an unverified, second hand report, the health authorities acted as if there was a confirmed Ebola Zaire infected passenger. Just because someone has red spots does not mean they have Monkey Pox or Ebola FFS. Is it that everyone is terrified of being sued that makes Americans so easy to rile into hysterics? The motto of 'better safe than sorry' is the real infection in this country.
An intelligent response would have been to first verify the symptoms. Hell, they could have called the passenger herself to ask about her symptoms. I think people need to start getting fired for being overly cautious from time to time and not just for erring in the other direction.
Thank you. Target acquired. With a declination of 69 degrees this is definitely a northern star. I won't be able to reach it from my location. Most interesting nearby targets are in the southern hemisphere. This is a rare exception.
In the constellation Draco. Apparent magnitude 8.7. It shouldn't be too hard to find with a telescope in a nice dark sky.
Let me give you an analogy. It is possible that as you post this someone is posting an answer to your question at exactly the same time you hit the 'submit' button. So why don't you expect that your questions will be instantaneously answered as soon as you think them up, making all such posts utterly pointless? It is highly, highly unlikely that our nearest intelligent neighbors developed at exactly the same rate. If they developed even a tiny bit slower they would not have radio technology. So what's the alternative?
Another one who thinks SETI listens for radio leakage. It doesn't. Let's just leave it at that since you obviously didn't feel the subject is even worthy of a brief google.
Also google for METI while you're at it. Whenever your conclusion seems to be that you are far more intelligent than a large group of scientists it may be time to check your premises. It is far more likely that you are the one who is ignorant or stupid.
Although passive SETI does not send messages, Active SETI (ASETI) or METI does precisely that. As a planet, we have already sent messages to Gliese 581 and a number of other systems. If I'm successful I will even start sending such targeted messages full time from a 20 meter dish in Argentina. Unfortunately my power levels and antenna size probably limit my messages to a radius of about 50-100 light years, but with very large receiving antennas such messages could travel, much farther, possibly out to 200 ly. My goal is to start a full time. 24/7 targeted beacon. Now that has not been done before, but it's only a matter of time. If I'm not successful in my lifetime surely someone else will be eventually. Even some less cowardly government programs like that of the open minded Ukranians do not shy away from sending messages. They just don't do so as part of a permanent program. I believe that will be left to amateur projects like my own.
Does anyone know the declination and right ascension of this solar twin? I can't find any information on it from googling HP 56948. I'm guessing it probably has another more commonly used name.
Whose morals? My morals, the rules of right and wrong which guide what actions I consider permissible, are not based on any religion. They are based on my own ideas of what is right or wrong. It is certainly true that some of those ideas are shared by Christians and Buddhists and Muslims, but my ideas are not based on them.
Does religion serve a useful purpose in savage societies where people would otherwise murder and rape each other in the absence of a belief in some powerful, magical entity that will punish them for their bad behavior? Sure.
Maybe thousands of years ago that was quite useful. I'll even concede that in my lifetime, as religion has continuously lost influence, I have noticed that people have become more narrowly selfish in all the worst senses of the word. Of course correlation is not causation and there may be other factors involved. But it's possible that people in general are still sufficiently asshole-ish that the belief in supernatural punishment for bad behavior can be useful. Nevertheless there is no evidence for such impossible entities and part of the problem with the modern world is that reason and independent thought are not sufficiently respected.
Religion was an ancient attempt at philosophy for very, very stupid people. For people who were little more than violent apes. It was probably created by intelligent people in order to control stupid people and attempt to coerce them into behaving in a more civilized fashion. In the modern world it is a very mixed blessing and any intelligent person should be able to see right through its absurdities. There was a time not so long ago when to defy a religion meant certain death. Now religion has a difficult time even to be taken seriously, more seriously than a fairy tale at least.
Are you seriously trying to argue that most religious people believe in supernatural entities because they have direct personal experience with such creatures? The true reasons for their beliefs are nearly always nonrational. Typically emotional. Not as a direct result of independent thought or observation. Not that this disproves the existence of whatever supernatural entity they happen to believe in, but that is another matter.
Actually religion cannot explain anything to a rational person. And to an irrational person no explanation is needed. They will accept any idea, even ones that are self-contradictory and cannot even really be imagined. Religion is about obedience rather than understanding.
Ah. The rarest of things. A theist who claims to respect logic and reason and independent thought. I highly doubt that you are a Christian due to direct observational evidence and even if you truly are I would bet that that evidence would dry up very quickly if you started taking anti-psychotic medication. Genuine observational evidence does not disappear when you start taking Seroquel.
I might ask you what evidence you can offer for the existence of an omnipotent supernatural entity that created the entire universe, but the Christian god is self-contradictory by most descriptions. So evidence wouldn't really help you until you changed your definition at least enough for the creature to be able to exist at least in theory. Of course a pretty good argument can be made that any supernatural creature does not exist by definition. The existence of something outside of nature doesn't really fit within the definition of the verb "exist".
If you were merely positing the existence of some kind of super-alien from another star system with powers that seem like magic to us then all you would need is observational evidence to support your claim. Supporting the existence of a supernatural creature is not so easy.
There is a name for what you believe. It is called pantheism.
To many theists that is just a kind of Atheist. Instead of not believing in a supernatural deity of some kind you simply try to redefine the concept out of existence. You say you do believe in a 'god' and that 'god' and 'universe' are synonyms.
Interesting strategy. Very useful during the times when heretics were burned at the stake. But you won't fool the more intelligent theists with such arguments. They will still place you in the same category as other unbelievers. And rightfully so.
As an atheist I would consider you only slightly less rational than atheists and agnostics. It might even be argued that you are an atheist without the courage of your convictions. As soon as you are convinced that your use of the word "God" is non-standard and unnecessary you become a true athiest or agnostic. The bottom line is you don't believe in a supernatural entity that created not just our planet, but the entire universe and which is the great puppetmaster who controls all human action.
I believe his point is that monotheists seem almost like atheists to a polytheist. They already dismiss the existence of hundreds or even thousands of gods. All they have to do is apply the same logic by which they dismiss all of those other gods to their own god and they will go from being a monotheist to an atheist.
And the converse may even be true. Religious belief tends to be the enemy of all rational thought. The more you are prone to faith the less you may be prone to reason.
Well, technically religion can be about any belief which is not supported by evidence and which has to be accepted on faith alone, but most religious beliefs tend to be about some kind of supernatural, unobservable, entity or phenomenon.
Science is based on observation. It doesn't matter who is doing the observing. Science is not infallible any more than observations themselves are. Initial observation seemed inconsistent with a spherical world. It was only when you looked a bit more carefully and thought about the larger picture that the world started to seem clearly spherical. At first the observational evidence in astronomy seemed to favor Ptolemy's epicycle model over Copernicus's elliptical one. Science is not some kind of infallible direct path to The Truth. It is just the only method we have for learning about the world around us and for predicting the results of an interaction with that world. Faith is not some alternative means of learning about the world. It is not a means of gaining knowledge. Faith is just another term for obedience. For stick-your-head-in-the-sand ignorance.
Religion itself is just a primitive form of philosophy. The problem is with the believers themselves. They want to be told what to think so that they don't have to think for themselves. And they want to be emotionally comforted.
I think religious belief is 100% emotion based. Thinking simply has nothing to do with it. Believers believe because doing so makes them feel better. They feel both protected and part of a larger group. Without some kind of emotional payoff, a payload if you will, I don't think a religion would have any chance of becoming popular.
As a teenager I was the kind of militant atheist who would deliberately debate with believers for fun and I think I learned something from those exchanges about what motivates such people. The most common reason for believing in such nonsensical ideas which are entirely without evidence is 'intellectual hedonism', the penchant for believing something just because believing it makes you feel good. So you'll hear things about what a dry, inhospitable world it would be without their personal supernatural deity.
I must admit that I would prefer a world of werewolves and vampires and even of ghosts. Life would seem more interesting to me. But that doesn't lead me to believe in such things. I suppose that is one of the fundamental differences between rational skeptics and believers. Religionists believe in something because of how it makes them feel. They don't care whether it is factually true or not. Any arguments about logic or evidence completely miss the point. The only way to alter their beliefs is through their emotions. You would have to make an emotional impact. Not a logical one.
Another characteristic I have noticed is a fear or dislike of uncertainty. Religion grants certainty about all things. Science is not big on certainty. In fact science is all about uncertainty. A constant state of weighing the evidence. There is very little that science believes with 100% certainty. Well aside from global warming perhaps:). Scientists tend not to fear uncertainty. They might even embrace it. Not knowing something plants the seed of curiosity. Not fear. And something about which we cannot gather evidence might be something to wonder about, but that sense of not knowing does not motivate them to seek out a guru, someone who claims to know what they do not.
Many of the most interesting questions about our place in the world are simply not answerable. We may never know answers about what the edge of the universe is like or the larger perspective of worlds in a grain of sand. I would love to know whether our entire visible universe is just one grain of sand. I would love to know the grander structure that is behind all of the countless galaxies that seem to make up our world. I don't think we will ever have the answers to those sorts of questions. Some of us just accept that, but others cannot and seek certainty through blind belief.
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The longer we wait, the more expensive it gets.
The longer we wait...to do what exactly? Stop combustion? Make it a capital offense? Reduce combustion by 1%, 10%, 80% and if so how? And whatever 'policy' the powers that be decide on how are they going to enforce that policy everywhere else on the planet?
The only even remotely realistic plan I've heard is to go 100% nuclear for electricity generation, and then figure out a way to make electric cars practical. Personally I favor raised electric wires on all highways so that cars only have to rely on battery technology on secondary roads.
Really all of this debate over AGW validity is a moot point if we can all agree that going 100% nuclear is a worthy goal. I think AGW is a religion and, being an atheist, I don't believe in it, but I'm pro-nuclear so if that is your solution then we can agree on the actions and that is all that matters. Of course it also means letting every country on the planet go 100% nuclear including countries that the US would rather not have so much plutonium.
We deniers will admit there is a problem as soon as you true believers can scientifically prove there is one. Controversy is generally inversely proportional to the amount of evidence available. There is very little evidence for AGW. So there is a lot of controversy about it. I am an AGW denier for the same reason that I am an atheist: a lack of evidence. When you have the evidence then you can present it. And opinion polls should have no place in such a presentation. Science is not a democracy. Popular vote does not determine the truth.
So you don't believe people would trade at all without a government? I've been the victim of fraud a few times on Ebay and I don't recall the government reimbursing me for my losses. Nor do I recall a government agent following me around to protect me from being mugged.
So I think you are wrong on all counts. The government doesn't protect me from force or fraud and there would certainly be a free market without a government.
Rather than protecting me at all, the government is what I need protection from. The government is the one using both force and fraud. I've even been a victim of the force part. A victim of government violence.
I can see that many in this thread cannot get enough of government cock. You could happily suck it all day long. When a corporation unzips his fly and asks for a free suck you turn away. I don't understand what it is about the taste of government dick that you love so much. I get that you think powerful corporations are bad (and I agree), but I don't understand why you think powerful governments are good.
I don't want to suck government dick or corporate dick. Nor do I want to be anyone's slave. It is for this reason that I am quite poor and only work the bare minimum of hours necessary to survive. If I'm going to be a slave at least I can be a lazy one. I refuse to be a beast of burden either for the government or for corporations. In such a system I will only work the bare minimum necessary for survival.
I don't like any concentrations of power. People in general are selfish narrow-minded, corrupt scumbags and can always be counted on to behave badly. The government consists of people and corporations consist of people. So they are both evil. But corporations are less powerful. At least they cannot arrest you and put you in a cage because you didn't follow some silly rule of theirs or because you didn't treat one of their enforcers with the respect they feel is owed to them. No doubt some corporations would love to have that kind of power, but they just don't.
I believe that slavery is bad. All forms of slavery. Just as I would hate any corporation that demanded a percentage of every hour of my labor I hate and resent any government that feels I owe them part or even all what I make working at some shit job. I say fuck greedy people, whether it is the government or corporations. I don't owe them a damn thing. My life is my own. It belongs to me and not to the government. They have no right to even one penny of the money that I need for paying rent or buying food.
The people who founded this country were like me. The British government believed that they owned the colonists. That a portion of their labor belonged to some king across the ocean. Well the colonists gave the finger to that king and told him to come and get it if he could.
It is scary how easy it is to convince people to be slaves. It must be a very deep part of human nature to want to be owned. Well enjoy the taste of that cock. Suck it all you want. Just don't try to force me to suck it as well. Enjoy licking your masters' boots.
SETI doesn't actually expect to receive radio leakage. So the analog window isn't really an issue. If a twin earth were orbiting Alpha Centauri A even the giant Arecibo dish would not be sensitive enough to receive even fairly loud leakage. The signals are far too weak, generally too low in frequency, and are quite often aimed tangentially to the planet surface and not at the zenith. Omnidirectional signals which might have a greater tendency to travel in the right direction are just too weak. None of it can really be distinguished beyond the noise floor even at 1 light year, let alone the 4.2 light years to the nearest star.
It's always possible that alien technology could pick out our own pathetically weak signals from the noise at great distances, but I don't think we can even (realistically) imagine such technology. Perhaps a planetary scale antenna, like carving a paraboloid shape into one side of a moon or planet might allow the detection of leakage to a distance of Alpha Centauri, but obviously we don't have anything like that yet.
Passive SETI hopes to detect either an omnidirectional galactic beacon of pulsar-like magnitude or a directed beam from a source that is deliberately attempting to communicate with us. If this seems tremendously unlikely to you then you understand the problem with traditional SETI. Even if we are surrounded by technical civilizations there is no reason to expect that they know we are here and even if they know they may choose not to attempt communication for various reasons.
I don't think anyone has ever attempted to send a signal to Alpha Centauri for instance. Our closest neighbor. A sun-like G class star. We've had the technology to send a signal since radar was invented before WWII and we have chosen not to do so. Admittedly, for a while it was believed that such a binary system would not allow life to evolve, but still. It would have been quite easy for us to do. Passive SETI relies on a whole bunch of unlikely scenarios or a whole lot of intelligent civs in our part of the Milky Way. It relies a bit too much on getting lucky.
That's why I prefer Active SETI. If you believe a particular star system might have intelligent life then first say hello and then only after enough time has passed for a response do you actually listen. Or just await the arrival of the invasion fleet. Either way you've made contact.
I hadn't heard that the heliopause causes so much EM interference? Do you have a reference for that? Is it broadband or does it only affect a narrow range of frequencies?
A kilometer-scale Orion ship with a cruising speed of .08c would take 12.5 years to travel 1 light year.
ETAs for a some interesting destinations (ignoring acceleration times):
Alpha Centauri A/B: 54 years 6 months. (1 gen)
Sirius A/B: 107 years and 6 months (2-3 gens)
Epsilon Eridani: 131 years (3 gens)
Procyon A/B: 142 years and 6 months (3 gens)
61 Cygni A/B: 142 years (3 gens)
Epsilon Indi: 148 years (3 gens)
Tau Ceti: 148 years 9 months (3 gens)
Gliese 876: 191 years 3 months (3-4 gens)
Groombridge 1618: 198 years 7 months (4 gens)
Gliese 581: 253 years 9 months (4 gens)
Gliese 667: 276 years 3 months (4 gens)
Beta Canum Venaticorum: 344 years (6 gens)
Zeta Reticuli: 489 years 6 months (8 gens)
55 Cancri: 503 years 9 months (8 gens)
HD 10307: 515 years (8 gens)
Gliese 1214: 529 years 9 months (8 gens)
18 Scorpii: 566 years 3 months (9 gens)
HD 10180: 1587 years 6 months (25 gens)
HIP 56948: 2500 years (38 gens)
PSR J0108-1431 (closest pulsar): 9778 years (151 gens)
V4641 (closest black hole): 20,000 years (307 gens)
galactic center: 325,000 years (5000 gens)
Andromeda galaxy: 32,500,000 years (500,000 gens)
That should give some perspective on 'close' and 'far'. So even Sirius would be out of direct reach with the best possible (city scale nuclear pulse ship) technology we could use if we cannot design a life support system capable of more than a single generation.
Obviously robots do not require life support per se, but having some humans aboard to fix things and to deal with unexpected problems would be awfully nice. We could probably build a kilometer scale nuclear pulse ship in orbit within a timeframe of 100-300 years if we were willing to spend the money (we are not), but we almost certainly will not have human-level AI by then. So life support would represent a major barrier if we hadn't thought of a solution by the 23rd or 24th century when we were ready to launch our first interstellar ship.
With current tech (and a lot of money and time) we could make direct contact with our closest solar twin system in 2500 years. Allow another 200 years to receive communications from the ship and the total time would be 2700 years. Another 300 years to actually build the ship and you get a nice even 3 millenia. So it is hard to think of it as close, but it certainly is close if you compare it to the nearest pulsar or black hole or our galactic center.
Needless to say there are quite a few interesting targets that are much, much closer and would require only between 3 and 8 generations instead of 38. Gliese 581 and 667 are pretty interesting and would only require 4 generations. Although thinking about a quarter of a millenium makes me impatient.
A 54 year trip to Alpha Centauri would take just about 1 human lifetime. That would be a good test outing for our first ship. After that we should have a much better idea of the kinds of problems to expect from longer missions. Giving birth in interstellar space? The success of that would be very important and would have to be tested.
The CDC fucked up. It's that simple. Based on "better safe than sorry" they inconvenienced and scared a plane full of passengers for absolutely no reason. There was no conclusion they could draw from a second hand report of symptoms. They were clearly wrong to make a diagnosis of monkey pox. Even the most cursory direct examination of the patient would not have given the slightest reason to suspect monkey pox over insect bites. The patient herself even suspected that they were just insect bites. She was not sick. She did not have a fever. Holding the plane for 2 or more hours based on some red bumps? That cannot be justified just because she was recently in Uganda.
So, most other countries, finding out that a passenger on an inbound flight from Uganda is exhibiting signs of what could be the highly contagious monkeypox ... just shrug their shoulders? You know that's not true.
What signs of monkey pox? The red bumps? Seriously? I don't think we should start holding aircraft on the ground for hours every time a passenger has some red bumps. Not even if they have recently been to Africa. And as far as the mother talking about pus, they should have confirmed that with the patient herself before drawing any conclusions. I'm sure it must get boring at the CDC without any major epidemics happening at the moment, but geez. This isn't rocket science. Even a first year med student should have been able to do better than this.
When the next super pandemic breaks out
Ah. Super pandemics. The scourge of mankind. When was the last one again? 1918?
This absolutely was an over-reaction. There was no reason to believe that the passenger was infected with some sort of exotic tropical virus. If she had presented with her symptoms to most doctors they would no doubt just tell her to call an exterminator or prescribe a topical corticosteroid and not create a major panic and have her quarantined.
I hope you do not work in the medical field. Something about hoofbeats and zebras comes to mind. The only reason to have suspected a zebra in this case was the mention of a central African country. That is most definitely not sufficient. Red bumps. :facepalm:
Still, his point is well taken.
"She told them her daughter is on a flight back from Uganda and has some red bumps which are pussing and what should she do to treat them," Roger Sievers said. "She was looking for some general advice."
I don't know wtf she expected to happen making a report like that to a public hospital. Saying something like that in the US has very obvious and somewhat ridiculous consequences which would be unlikely to occur in most other countries. Despite what many Americans seem to believe there is such a thing as an over-reaction. Based on an unverified, second hand report, the health authorities acted as if there was a confirmed Ebola Zaire infected passenger. Just because someone has red spots does not mean they have Monkey Pox or Ebola FFS. Is it that everyone is terrified of being sued that makes Americans so easy to rile into hysterics? The motto of 'better safe than sorry' is the real infection in this country.
An intelligent response would have been to first verify the symptoms. Hell, they could have called the passenger herself to ask about her symptoms. I think people need to start getting fired for being overly cautious from time to time and not just for erring in the other direction.
Gingerbread?
Thank you. Target acquired. With a declination of 69 degrees this is definitely a northern star. I won't be able to reach it from my location. Most interesting nearby targets are in the southern hemisphere. This is a rare exception.
In the constellation Draco. Apparent magnitude 8.7. It shouldn't be too hard to find with a telescope in a nice dark sky.
Let me give you an analogy. It is possible that as you post this someone is posting an answer to your question at exactly the same time you hit the 'submit' button. So why don't you expect that your questions will be instantaneously answered as soon as you think them up, making all such posts utterly pointless? It is highly, highly unlikely that our nearest intelligent neighbors developed at exactly the same rate. If they developed even a tiny bit slower they would not have radio technology. So what's the alternative?
Another one who thinks SETI listens for radio leakage. It doesn't. Let's just leave it at that since you obviously didn't feel the subject is even worthy of a brief google.
Also google for METI while you're at it. Whenever your conclusion seems to be that you are far more intelligent than a large group of scientists it may be time to check your premises. It is far more likely that you are the one who is ignorant or stupid.
Although passive SETI does not send messages, Active SETI (ASETI) or METI does precisely that. As a planet, we have already sent messages to Gliese 581 and a number of other systems. If I'm successful I will even start sending such targeted messages full time from a 20 meter dish in Argentina. Unfortunately my power levels and antenna size probably limit my messages to a radius of about 50-100 light years, but with very large receiving antennas such messages could travel, much farther, possibly out to 200 ly. My goal is to start a full time. 24/7 targeted beacon. Now that has not been done before, but it's only a matter of time. If I'm not successful in my lifetime surely someone else will be eventually. Even some less cowardly government programs like that of the open minded Ukranians do not shy away from sending messages. They just don't do so as part of a permanent program. I believe that will be left to amateur projects like my own.
Does anyone know the declination and right ascension of this solar twin? I can't find any information on it from googling HP 56948. I'm guessing it probably has another more commonly used name.
Whose morals? My morals, the rules of right and wrong which guide what actions I consider permissible, are not based on any religion. They are based on my own ideas of what is right or wrong. It is certainly true that some of those ideas are shared by Christians and Buddhists and Muslims, but my ideas are not based on them.
Does religion serve a useful purpose in savage societies where people would otherwise murder and rape each other in the absence of a belief in some powerful, magical entity that will punish them for their bad behavior? Sure.
Maybe thousands of years ago that was quite useful. I'll even concede that in my lifetime, as religion has continuously lost influence, I have noticed that people have become more narrowly selfish in all the worst senses of the word. Of course correlation is not causation and there may be other factors involved. But it's possible that people in general are still sufficiently asshole-ish that the belief in supernatural punishment for bad behavior can be useful. Nevertheless there is no evidence for such impossible entities and part of the problem with the modern world is that reason and independent thought are not sufficiently respected.
Religion was an ancient attempt at philosophy for very, very stupid people. For people who were little more than violent apes. It was probably created by intelligent people in order to control stupid people and attempt to coerce them into behaving in a more civilized fashion. In the modern world it is a very mixed blessing and any intelligent person should be able to see right through its absurdities. There was a time not so long ago when to defy a religion meant certain death. Now religion has a difficult time even to be taken seriously, more seriously than a fairy tale at least.
Are you seriously trying to argue that most religious people believe in supernatural entities because they have direct personal experience with such creatures? The true reasons for their beliefs are nearly always nonrational. Typically emotional. Not as a direct result of independent thought or observation. Not that this disproves the existence of whatever supernatural entity they happen to believe in, but that is another matter.
Actually religion cannot explain anything to a rational person. And to an irrational person no explanation is needed. They will accept any idea, even ones that are self-contradictory and cannot even really be imagined. Religion is about obedience rather than understanding.
Ah. The rarest of things. A theist who claims to respect logic and reason and independent thought. I highly doubt that you are a Christian due to direct observational evidence and even if you truly are I would bet that that evidence would dry up very quickly if you started taking anti-psychotic medication. Genuine observational evidence does not disappear when you start taking Seroquel.
I might ask you what evidence you can offer for the existence of an omnipotent supernatural entity that created the entire universe, but the Christian god is self-contradictory by most descriptions. So evidence wouldn't really help you until you changed your definition at least enough for the creature to be able to exist at least in theory. Of course a pretty good argument can be made that any supernatural creature does not exist by definition. The existence of something outside of nature doesn't really fit within the definition of the verb "exist".
If you were merely positing the existence of some kind of super-alien from another star system with powers that seem like magic to us then all you would need is observational evidence to support your claim. Supporting the existence of a supernatural creature is not so easy.
There is a name for what you believe. It is called pantheism.
To many theists that is just a kind of Atheist. Instead of not believing in a supernatural deity of some kind you simply try to redefine the concept out of existence. You say you do believe in a 'god' and that 'god' and 'universe' are synonyms.
Interesting strategy. Very useful during the times when heretics were burned at the stake. But you won't fool the more intelligent theists with such arguments. They will still place you in the same category as other unbelievers. And rightfully so.
As an atheist I would consider you only slightly less rational than atheists and agnostics. It might even be argued that you are an atheist without the courage of your convictions. As soon as you are convinced that your use of the word "God" is non-standard and unnecessary you become a true athiest or agnostic. The bottom line is you don't believe in a supernatural entity that created not just our planet, but the entire universe and which is the great puppetmaster who controls all human action.
I believe his point is that monotheists seem almost like atheists to a polytheist. They already dismiss the existence of hundreds or even thousands of gods. All they have to do is apply the same logic by which they dismiss all of those other gods to their own god and they will go from being a monotheist to an atheist.
And the converse may even be true. Religious belief tends to be the enemy of all rational thought. The more you are prone to faith the less you may be prone to reason.
Well, technically religion can be about any belief which is not supported by evidence and which has to be accepted on faith alone, but most religious beliefs tend to be about some kind of supernatural, unobservable, entity or phenomenon.
Science is based on observation. It doesn't matter who is doing the observing. Science is not infallible any more than observations themselves are. Initial observation seemed inconsistent with a spherical world. It was only when you looked a bit more carefully and thought about the larger picture that the world started to seem clearly spherical. At first the observational evidence in astronomy seemed to favor Ptolemy's epicycle model over Copernicus's elliptical one. Science is not some kind of infallible direct path to The Truth. It is just the only method we have for learning about the world around us and for predicting the results of an interaction with that world. Faith is not some alternative means of learning about the world. It is not a means of gaining knowledge. Faith is just another term for obedience. For stick-your-head-in-the-sand ignorance.
Religion itself is just a primitive form of philosophy. The problem is with the believers themselves. They want to be told what to think so that they don't have to think for themselves. And they want to be emotionally comforted.
I think religious belief is 100% emotion based. Thinking simply has nothing to do with it. Believers believe because doing so makes them feel better. They feel both protected and part of a larger group. Without some kind of emotional payoff, a payload if you will, I don't think a religion would have any chance of becoming popular.
As a teenager I was the kind of militant atheist who would deliberately debate with believers for fun and I think I learned something from those exchanges about what motivates such people. The most common reason for believing in such nonsensical ideas which are entirely without evidence is 'intellectual hedonism', the penchant for believing something just because believing it makes you feel good. So you'll hear things about what a dry, inhospitable world it would be without their personal supernatural deity.
I must admit that I would prefer a world of werewolves and vampires and even of ghosts. Life would seem more interesting to me. But that doesn't lead me to believe in such things. I suppose that is one of the fundamental differences between rational skeptics and believers. Religionists believe in something because of how it makes them feel. They don't care whether it is factually true or not. Any arguments about logic or evidence completely miss the point. The only way to alter their beliefs is through their emotions. You would have to make an emotional impact. Not a logical one.
Another characteristic I have noticed is a fear or dislike of uncertainty. Religion grants certainty about all things. Science is not big on certainty. In fact science is all about uncertainty. A constant state of weighing the evidence. There is very little that science believes with 100% certainty. Well aside from global warming perhaps :). Scientists tend not to fear uncertainty. They might even embrace it. Not knowing something plants the seed of curiosity. Not fear. And something about which we cannot gather evidence might be something to wonder about, but that sense of not knowing does not motivate them to seek out a guru, someone who claims to know what they do not.
Many of the most interesting questions about our place in the world are simply not answerable. We may never know answers about what the edge of the universe is like or the larger perspective of worlds in a grain of sand. I would love to know whether our entire visible universe is just one grain of sand. I would love to know the grander structure that is behind all of the countless galaxies that seem to make up our world. I don't think we will ever have the answers to those sorts of questions. Some of us just accept that, but others cannot and seek certainty through blind belief.