Just wait for AT&T to countersue Citigroup for their use of AT&T trademarked letter 'T'. In fact they should get double the damages since they trademarked it twice.
Exactly and tracing the article back to the original Cornell press release it is not a mistake in the reporting either. I expect there will be a few red faces in the media relations department at Cornell soon...
Not only did my post clearly show that the solar system come from earlier stars (in fact it even told you how old the preceding supernova was!) it also pointed out that because there were preceding stars and the timescale for evolution is short (relatively) this is why we would expect life to have evolved.
The fact that you still don't grasp the concepts involved and are unable to post any sort of question or fact rebutting the argument means that either you are just being stupid and trolling or that you are not intelligent enough to grasp the concepts and not willing to try. My money is on the later since you seem genuinely incapable of comprehending the argument so sorry but I really can't think of a way to explain it any simpler so you can understand it.
If Apple's version of "Breathe" is built-in, how does it brings revenues? You really think people will buy a USD$550 watch to remind them to breathe?
Just remember that this app also runs on the $22,000 gold iWatch and if you are stupid enough to spend that much on a watch with a one day battery which will be obsolete in a year then you may need a reminder to breathe otherwise you might forget and then Apple will have lost a customer who spends $22k/year.
It's not a fucking race. It's not like the universe started and automatically life must start springing up instantly. The only fact that we have is that it took us 13 billion years to be here.
Sorry but you are just plain wrong here. It did NOT take us 13 billion years to evolve, it only took us 3.5 billion years. In fact the sun itself only formed 4.5-5 billion years ago from the remnants of a supernova that occurred 6 billion years ago (we know this from the ratio of natural Uranium isotopes found on the earth today). The universe has been around for more than 2.5 times the age of our solar system and almost 4 times as long as it took for us to evolve and there have been stars which have been created, burned for billions of years and even died before our sun formed.
Hence all the evidence we have suggests that life evolves, or at least can evolve, on far shorter timescales than the age of the universe so far. This is the heart of the Fermi paradox. Why does it seem that no intelligent life exists anywhere else except the Earth? It's not a race for life to evolve but simply an almost statistical certainty given our current understanding.
Yes it is possible that we have everything understood perfectly and that it just happens that the billions to one odds came up and we are the only life in the galaxy but we would need a lot more evidence before anyone starts to believe it. Given our current level of knowledge it is far, far more probable that we are missing something and so the question is what? This could be that life is common but intelligent life is incredibly rare; it could be that we lack the technology to detect advanced races; it could be that interstellar travel is impossible etc. However it CANNOT be that the universe has a lot longer to life. The problem we are faced with is why there is no intelligent life NOW when our best understanding is that there should be lots. The fact that intelligent life may evolve again later in no way helps solve the problem with the apparent lack of intelligent life now.
So can an abacus if you use it to do the calculation of when the sun will rise and since the abacus is 500 years older than this device surely it is the first analog computer which can predict the future.
Since the topic is ostensibly about timescales greater than our civilization, it all matters and your inflammatory preface doesn't make your redundant point well
Actually I thought that the topic was about why we have not detected aliens. Your point about the Universe being young on a cosmological scale would indeed be relevant if the cosmological timescale was comparable to the evolutionary timescale but it isn't which makes your point that the universe is young is irrelevant to the discussion.
I apologise if the logic here escapes you so let me try to explain. If you have a house which is only 3 years old this is young for a house. However if you looked in the garden in summer and found it devoid of all plant life, even weeds, you cannot explain it by saying that this is because the house was young because plants, particularly weeds, grow on a time scale of weeks or months, not years. There would need to be another explanation such as someone regularly praying weed killer.
For the same reason the fact that the universe is young is not a good explanation for the absence of life given that there appears to have been plenty of time for life to evolve multiple times over and so there has to be some other explanation. I can understand how pointing out facts which make your statements irrelevant might annoy you but generally is not considered inflammatory since the comments addressed the argument and were not intended to make you look stupid, you did that all by yourself with the second post although I suppose pointing that out could be considered inflammatory.
But now that he's retired, there's nothing that can be done
If the allegations are true then surely his actions are against the law, corruption or perverting the course of justice come to mind but IANAL. So surely charing him with a suitable offence followed by prison time if convicted would be something that could be done regardless of whether or not he is retired.
The universe is still very young by cosmological time scales.
The evolutionary timescale is the one that matters for the development of life and based on our sample of one this seems to be a lot, lot shorter than cosmological timescales although getting to the multi-cellular stage took a while so it is possible we were just lucky.
When you move into a new neighborhood and the neighbors don't come to visit you, that doesn't mean they don't exist
True but usually you can see some signs that there are neighbours there such as hearing their car or the music they are playing. In our case we have not heard anything so either we are not listening in the right way, they make practically no 'noise' or they don't exist at least close by. However I completely agree that detailed, but wild, speculation like this is a waste of time because it adds nothing to the discussion since they provide no firm evidence to support the conjecture.
My suspicion is that once we dig our way down to the bottom layer of physics, it'll turn out to be very simple
Actually the experience we have so far is exactly the reverse. Trying to simulate the fundamental interactions of the strong force (the one which binds the nucleus together) is unbelievably hard. The current best effort is Lattice QCD and so far the approximate simulation of even a single proton takes up enormous computing resources.
The Monte-Carlo simulations we use in particle physics try to parameterize QCD to get around this but they are notoriously inaccurate and tuning the parameters to get better agreement with data is a never ending undertaking. Often analyses will estimate data from background based methods because the simulation cannot be trusted enough to determine the QCD background accurately.
Now of course there may be ways to work around these issues in the future for example with new mathematical techniques (there is a higher dimensional approach from String Theory that some are looking at). However my point is simply to show that very simple physical laws - QCD is actually very like electromagnetism with only one small but far-reaching difference - can be phenomenally difficult to simulate so even with perfect knowledge of the universe there is absolutely no guarantee it will be possible to simulate it on any sort of large scale.
The question is, would we even recognize a bug, or would just accept it as normal because we wouldn't know any different?
That depends on the bug. If you have capricious failures in the fundamental laws of physics for which there is no explanation nor repeatability then this would be a smoking gun for a bug in the underlying simulation. On the other hand if there were supposed to be some extra force which the developer forgot to enable then there is no way we could spot that or likewise if gravity was set to be weaker than intended that would be impossible for us to know.
Despite Apple's reputation among lay people as an innovator, they're really not. They don't use much of their income on R&D.
When it comes to modern patents where "one click to purchase" counts as an "invention" you cannot measure innovation by the number of patents or an R&D budget. Apple's innovations have been in design more than technology and despite that far smaller budget they seem to have come up with far more innovations than e.g. Microsoft for whom I'm struggling to come up with any recent innovative products except perhaps the Surface despite their far higher budget.
That's all fine and dandy if we are measuring it right, but there seems to be at least a smidgen of confirmation bias
But there is plenty of evidence that we are not doing that as well! One of the biggest mysteries in physics at the moment is the nature of Dark Matter. The evidence of this comes from the rotation curves of stars orbiting galaxies as well as the cosmic microwave background radiation: both disagree with what we expect to see from the physics we know. Previous examples of new physics which was first spotted from astrophysical observation are neutrino oscillations (discovered by trying to explain the apparent absence of solar neutrinos) as well as the discovery of an unknown element (eventually called helium) from its lines in the solar spectrum.
So when there are discrepancies between what we expect and what we observe there is plenty of evidence to show that we DO notice the discrepancy and that this eventually leads to a far better understanding of the universe. Yes better measurements lead to a better understanding of the universe but that is common for all of science and is not evidence of confirmation bias, just evidence that we have incomplete data from which to draw conclusions.
How would we know the simulation was resumed from a backup after a system crash?
Why would it crash? There are plenty of bugs which do not cause crashes. I don't see why not having gravity work for chocolate teapots for a minute a week would cause the entire universe to fall apart. At this point the question then becomes what are the chances that we are living in a simulation where there are zero noticeable bugs of any sort and in that case the statistical arguments for simulations become a lot weaker.
The problem code is fixed, and the simulation is reset to a point before the problem did anything untoward.
That is not possible for all simulations. In the ones I use you generally only notice the bug after the simulation has completed and you are analysing the results unless the bug is so bad that it causes a crash or a massive memory leak. This completely undermines the statistical argument that people like Musk are trying to make because at this point it becomes what is the chance that we are living in one of the few runs of the simulation which is bug-free.
Even if there are bugs, you can just stop the simulation, fix the bugs and start it over. Furthermore, even if there were bugs, that's for the creator of the simulation to notice and fix
Many bugs in the laws of physics would be quite easy to spot. For example if gravity failed to work on tuesdays at 10am for chocolate teapots I doubt we would have much luck coming up with a consistent set of fundamental laws which explained that.
For the start-over idea you have now just completely ruined the whole argument made in favour of this being a simulation. What are the odds that we are in the one run of the simulation that has been bug-free rather than the presumably billions of of runs where there have been bugs?
Examples include famine, floods, earthquakes, tornadoes, wars...
These are all completely consistent with the physical laws of the universe we live in. The simulation must be simulating all the matter and fields we can observe and so bug would be an inconsistency in the laws of physics. For example gravity not working at a certain time or for a certain object etc.
As for those that think this level of simulation is impossible, it isn't.
Without ANY bugs? Really? The only way this idea works is if you have a divine programmer who cannot make any mistakes who created the universe. This is more like scientology than science.
What humanity views as dark mater may be in fact the result of dimensional space interaction causing one part of the standard dimensional space time bubble time to be slightly out of sync with another.
...or perhaps there is just a particle we have not yet found. I can't disprove what you suggest but neither can I disprove that the Universe is not a simulation (as suggested by some US TV personality who used to be a scientist) and that Dark Matter is just a bug in the code. There are an infinite number of possible explanations for Dark Matter many of which will be fantastically preposterous.
Occam's razor suggests that we start with the simplest ideas first. In this case that's solutions which require minimal addition of new physics to what we already know. This is always a good idea because the more new things you add the harder it is to make your idea completely consistent with all existing data. So unless we find a distant group of galaxies which spell out "Syntax error at line 45" let's leave the crazier theories until we have ruled out the simpler ones.
We tend to think the laws of physics are uniform across the entire universe without a shred of proof that this is actually the case.
Actually we have quite a lot of proof of that. Stars has the same spectra which show absorbtion and emission lines consistent with elements here on earth. Supernovae occur in other galaxies in apparently the same way that they do in ours. The nucleosynthesis of the Big Bang seems to work really well etc. There is considerable evidence that the laws of physics are apparently the same everywhere and, if they are not, then fundamental laws such as conservation of energy and momentum will not be correct since these rely on the symmetry of the laws of physics with respect to time and position respectively.
Just because something we originally thought of as constant is perhaps not does not mean that the laws of physics must be different elsewhere all it means is that the laws of physics are not quite what we thought they were, or at least what we have is incomplete.
The new Hubble constant...does not match estimated expansion rates from the energetic leftovers of the Big Bang, thus causing a headache for cosmologists.
I thought the real headache for cosmologists was that the measured value of the cosmological constant, which is what powers the accelerating expansion, was ~120 orders of magnitude different from the best calculations. If I have understood it correctly then this new result seems to suggest that the cosmological constant is not in fact a constant. So given that we clearly have absolutely no idea what is driving the expansion of the universe I don't see this new information as a headache but rather as clue which should help solve the puzzle of dark energy.
Actually I was more intrigued by his suggestion that we should never freeze population growth. I'm not quite sure how he plans to do this with his plan. We might be able to increase the sustainable population limit using resources from space, although apart from the cost I doubt all the rocket launches required will hep the planet much. However that is just putting off the inevitable. Unless we figure out the technology required to get people off the planet and settle elsewhere we are going to hit a population limit at some point and likely in the not too distant future with or without space resources.
Slashdot Mirror
Just wait for AT&T to countersue Citigroup for their use of AT&T trademarked letter 'T'. In fact they should get double the damages since they trademarked it twice.
In 25,000 years, you'd reach far less than half.
Exactly and tracing the article back to the original Cornell press release it is not a mistake in the reporting either. I expect there will be a few red faces in the media relations department at Cornell soon...
Not only did my post clearly show that the solar system come from earlier stars (in fact it even told you how old the preceding supernova was!) it also pointed out that because there were preceding stars and the timescale for evolution is short (relatively) this is why we would expect life to have evolved.
The fact that you still don't grasp the concepts involved and are unable to post any sort of question or fact rebutting the argument means that either you are just being stupid and trolling or that you are not intelligent enough to grasp the concepts and not willing to try. My money is on the later since you seem genuinely incapable of comprehending the argument so sorry but I really can't think of a way to explain it any simpler so you can understand it.
If Apple's version of "Breathe" is built-in, how does it brings revenues? You really think people will buy a USD$550 watch to remind them to breathe?
Just remember that this app also runs on the $22,000 gold iWatch and if you are stupid enough to spend that much on a watch with a one day battery which will be obsolete in a year then you may need a reminder to breathe otherwise you might forget and then Apple will have lost a customer who spends $22k/year.
It's not a fucking race. It's not like the universe started and automatically life must start springing up instantly. The only fact that we have is that it took us 13 billion years to be here.
Sorry but you are just plain wrong here. It did NOT take us 13 billion years to evolve, it only took us 3.5 billion years. In fact the sun itself only formed 4.5-5 billion years ago from the remnants of a supernova that occurred 6 billion years ago (we know this from the ratio of natural Uranium isotopes found on the earth today). The universe has been around for more than 2.5 times the age of our solar system and almost 4 times as long as it took for us to evolve and there have been stars which have been created, burned for billions of years and even died before our sun formed.
Hence all the evidence we have suggests that life evolves, or at least can evolve, on far shorter timescales than the age of the universe so far. This is the heart of the Fermi paradox. Why does it seem that no intelligent life exists anywhere else except the Earth? It's not a race for life to evolve but simply an almost statistical certainty given our current understanding.
Yes it is possible that we have everything understood perfectly and that it just happens that the billions to one odds came up and we are the only life in the galaxy but we would need a lot more evidence before anyone starts to believe it. Given our current level of knowledge it is far, far more probable that we are missing something and so the question is what? This could be that life is common but intelligent life is incredibly rare; it could be that we lack the technology to detect advanced races; it could be that interstellar travel is impossible etc. However it CANNOT be that the universe has a lot longer to life. The problem we are faced with is why there is no intelligent life NOW when our best understanding is that there should be lots. The fact that intelligent life may evolve again later in no way helps solve the problem with the apparent lack of intelligent life now.
So can an abacus if you use it to do the calculation of when the sun will rise and since the abacus is 500 years older than this device surely it is the first analog computer which can predict the future.
Since the topic is ostensibly about timescales greater than our civilization, it all matters and your inflammatory preface doesn't make your redundant point well
Actually I thought that the topic was about why we have not detected aliens. Your point about the Universe being young on a cosmological scale would indeed be relevant if the cosmological timescale was comparable to the evolutionary timescale but it isn't which makes your point that the universe is young is irrelevant to the discussion.
I apologise if the logic here escapes you so let me try to explain. If you have a house which is only 3 years old this is young for a house. However if you looked in the garden in summer and found it devoid of all plant life, even weeds, you cannot explain it by saying that this is because the house was young because plants, particularly weeds, grow on a time scale of weeks or months, not years. There would need to be another explanation such as someone regularly praying weed killer.
For the same reason the fact that the universe is young is not a good explanation for the absence of life given that there appears to have been plenty of time for life to evolve multiple times over and so there has to be some other explanation. I can understand how pointing out facts which make your statements irrelevant might annoy you but generally is not considered inflammatory since the comments addressed the argument and were not intended to make you look stupid, you did that all by yourself with the second post although I suppose pointing that out could be considered inflammatory.
But now that he's retired, there's nothing that can be done
If the allegations are true then surely his actions are against the law, corruption or perverting the course of justice come to mind but IANAL. So surely charing him with a suitable offence followed by prison time if convicted would be something that could be done regardless of whether or not he is retired.
The universe is still very young by cosmological time scales.
The evolutionary timescale is the one that matters for the development of life and based on our sample of one this seems to be a lot, lot shorter than cosmological timescales although getting to the multi-cellular stage took a while so it is possible we were just lucky.
When you move into a new neighborhood and the neighbors don't come to visit you, that doesn't mean they don't exist
True but usually you can see some signs that there are neighbours there such as hearing their car or the music they are playing. In our case we have not heard anything so either we are not listening in the right way, they make practically no 'noise' or they don't exist at least close by. However I completely agree that detailed, but wild, speculation like this is a waste of time because it adds nothing to the discussion since they provide no firm evidence to support the conjecture.
My suspicion is that once we dig our way down to the bottom layer of physics, it'll turn out to be very simple
Actually the experience we have so far is exactly the reverse. Trying to simulate the fundamental interactions of the strong force (the one which binds the nucleus together) is unbelievably hard. The current best effort is Lattice QCD and so far the approximate simulation of even a single proton takes up enormous computing resources.
The Monte-Carlo simulations we use in particle physics try to parameterize QCD to get around this but they are notoriously inaccurate and tuning the parameters to get better agreement with data is a never ending undertaking. Often analyses will estimate data from background based methods because the simulation cannot be trusted enough to determine the QCD background accurately.
Now of course there may be ways to work around these issues in the future for example with new mathematical techniques (there is a higher dimensional approach from String Theory that some are looking at). However my point is simply to show that very simple physical laws - QCD is actually very like electromagnetism with only one small but far-reaching difference - can be phenomenally difficult to simulate so even with perfect knowledge of the universe there is absolutely no guarantee it will be possible to simulate it on any sort of large scale.
The question is, would we even recognize a bug, or would just accept it as normal because we wouldn't know any different?
That depends on the bug. If you have capricious failures in the fundamental laws of physics for which there is no explanation nor repeatability then this would be a smoking gun for a bug in the underlying simulation. On the other hand if there were supposed to be some extra force which the developer forgot to enable then there is no way we could spot that or likewise if gravity was set to be weaker than intended that would be impossible for us to know.
Despite Apple's reputation among lay people as an innovator, they're really not. They don't use much of their income on R&D.
When it comes to modern patents where "one click to purchase" counts as an "invention" you cannot measure innovation by the number of patents or an R&D budget. Apple's innovations have been in design more than technology and despite that far smaller budget they seem to have come up with far more innovations than e.g. Microsoft for whom I'm struggling to come up with any recent innovative products except perhaps the Surface despite their far higher budget.
That's all fine and dandy if we are measuring it right, but there seems to be at least a smidgen of confirmation bias
But there is plenty of evidence that we are not doing that as well! One of the biggest mysteries in physics at the moment is the nature of Dark Matter. The evidence of this comes from the rotation curves of stars orbiting galaxies as well as the cosmic microwave background radiation: both disagree with what we expect to see from the physics we know. Previous examples of new physics which was first spotted from astrophysical observation are neutrino oscillations (discovered by trying to explain the apparent absence of solar neutrinos) as well as the discovery of an unknown element (eventually called helium) from its lines in the solar spectrum.
So when there are discrepancies between what we expect and what we observe there is plenty of evidence to show that we DO notice the discrepancy and that this eventually leads to a far better understanding of the universe. Yes better measurements lead to a better understanding of the universe but that is common for all of science and is not evidence of confirmation bias, just evidence that we have incomplete data from which to draw conclusions.
How would we know the simulation was resumed from a backup after a system crash?
Why would it crash? There are plenty of bugs which do not cause crashes. I don't see why not having gravity work for chocolate teapots for a minute a week would cause the entire universe to fall apart. At this point the question then becomes what are the chances that we are living in a simulation where there are zero noticeable bugs of any sort and in that case the statistical arguments for simulations become a lot weaker.
The problem code is fixed, and the simulation is reset to a point before the problem did anything untoward.
That is not possible for all simulations. In the ones I use you generally only notice the bug after the simulation has completed and you are analysing the results unless the bug is so bad that it causes a crash or a massive memory leak. This completely undermines the statistical argument that people like Musk are trying to make because at this point it becomes what is the chance that we are living in one of the few runs of the simulation which is bug-free.
I've hoped so too but apparently Apple aren't ready for it yet. That just leaves the Bizon Box for the moment.
In that case you still need the perfect programmer to program the bug-free AI.
Even if there are bugs, you can just stop the simulation, fix the bugs and start it over. Furthermore, even if there were bugs, that's for the creator of the simulation to notice and fix
Many bugs in the laws of physics would be quite easy to spot. For example if gravity failed to work on tuesdays at 10am for chocolate teapots I doubt we would have much luck coming up with a consistent set of fundamental laws which explained that.
For the start-over idea you have now just completely ruined the whole argument made in favour of this being a simulation. What are the odds that we are in the one run of the simulation that has been bug-free rather than the presumably billions of of runs where there have been bugs?
Examples include famine, floods, earthquakes, tornadoes, wars...
These are all completely consistent with the physical laws of the universe we live in. The simulation must be simulating all the matter and fields we can observe and so bug would be an inconsistency in the laws of physics. For example gravity not working at a certain time or for a certain object etc.
As for those that think this level of simulation is impossible, it isn't.
Without ANY bugs? Really? The only way this idea works is if you have a divine programmer who cannot make any mistakes who created the universe. This is more like scientology than science.
What humanity views as dark mater may be in fact the result of dimensional space interaction causing one part of the standard dimensional space time bubble time to be slightly out of sync with another.
Occam's razor suggests that we start with the simplest ideas first. In this case that's solutions which require minimal addition of new physics to what we already know. This is always a good idea because the more new things you add the harder it is to make your idea completely consistent with all existing data. So unless we find a distant group of galaxies which spell out "Syntax error at line 45" let's leave the crazier theories until we have ruled out the simpler ones.
We tend to think the laws of physics are uniform across the entire universe without a shred of proof that this is actually the case.
Actually we have quite a lot of proof of that. Stars has the same spectra which show absorbtion and emission lines consistent with elements here on earth. Supernovae occur in other galaxies in apparently the same way that they do in ours. The nucleosynthesis of the Big Bang seems to work really well etc. There is considerable evidence that the laws of physics are apparently the same everywhere and, if they are not, then fundamental laws such as conservation of energy and momentum will not be correct since these rely on the symmetry of the laws of physics with respect to time and position respectively.
Just because something we originally thought of as constant is perhaps not does not mean that the laws of physics must be different elsewhere all it means is that the laws of physics are not quite what we thought they were, or at least what we have is incomplete.
The new Hubble constant...does not match estimated expansion rates from the energetic leftovers of the Big Bang, thus causing a headache for cosmologists.
I thought the real headache for cosmologists was that the measured value of the cosmological constant, which is what powers the accelerating expansion, was ~120 orders of magnitude different from the best calculations. If I have understood it correctly then this new result seems to suggest that the cosmological constant is not in fact a constant. So given that we clearly have absolutely no idea what is driving the expansion of the universe I don't see this new information as a headache but rather as clue which should help solve the puzzle of dark energy.
Actually I was more intrigued by his suggestion that we should never freeze population growth. I'm not quite sure how he plans to do this with his plan. We might be able to increase the sustainable population limit using resources from space, although apart from the cost I doubt all the rocket launches required will hep the planet much. However that is just putting off the inevitable. Unless we figure out the technology required to get people off the planet and settle elsewhere we are going to hit a population limit at some point and likely in the not too distant future with or without space resources.