> When Comcast can't address new customers, they'll get off their ass.
When Comcast doesn't have IPv4 addresses for all their simultaneously-connected customers, they'll just assign one address to each service hub, install NAT, and tell the DHCP servers to start handing out 10.x.x.x to the customers. *Each* service hub can then support up to sixteen million simultaneously connected customers, and they only need one IPv4 address per service hub. Sorted.
The problem is servers. To offer a public service, you have to be reachable by the public, and that means you need a public address. There are more than enough public addresses to go around, of course, but most of them have been handed out in large blocks to people who don't need anywhere near that many. The solution, which will arise naturally as a result of market forces, is that people with surplus IPv4 addresses will sell or rent them (or the use of them) to people who need them in order to run public services. And they'll be fairly cheap, because like I said there are really plenty. Most internet-connected systems have absolutely no need for a public address.
> > add some protocol translation to their network to > > deal with anything that can't handle IPv6 > You do realize that you need IPv4 addresses to do that, don't you?
Exactly.
That's why we haven't moved to IPv6 yet and probably never will.
What will *actually* happen when ARIN says "no" is that the organization that needs an IPv4 address will go find somebody who has more IPv4 addresses than they actually need (which at this point is practically everyone) and get one of those (or the use thereof via hosting; we're only talking about servers here, since workstations can obviously just go behind NAT -- arbitrarily many layers of NAT if necessary).
No amount of time would be enough. Duke Nukem Forever will come out, Perl 6 will be finished, the 2038 problem will be solved, the paperless society will arrive, and we'll all have flying cars like in the Jetsons before IPv6 replaces IPv4.
What will happen is that people who have more public IP addresses than they actually need (e.g., because most of their systems are just workstations and can go behind NAT with no significant downside) will start selling them off to people who have an actual need for them (for running public services). This isn't as elegant as some people would like, but it will *work* until at least the mid twenty-second century.
And, of course, anyone who wants to use IPv6 *can* do that, but it's about as worthwhile in practice as setting up IPX/SPX. The rest of the world is all using IPv4, so if you want to be connected to "the internet" you want IPv4. Nothing else will do.
The answer to this question is always going to be the same, no matter what context you put around the question.
Are people stupid enough to send money to 419 scammers? Stupid enough to waste thousands of hours *baiting* 419 scammers and getting them to pose for photos in various ridiculous settings and attire? Stupid enough to *be* baited? Sure enough, some people are.
Are people stupid enough to give their credit cards details to any random person who claims to represent their bank and/or be looking out for their interests? Yep, some people are.
Are people stupid enough to leave young children unattended for extended periods of time? Stupid enough to show up at the police station and ask to have their confiscated contraband returned to them? Stupid enough to install pink fiberglass insulation all day wearing shorts and a t-shirt? Are women stupid enough to continue to date obviously abusive boyfriends? Are people stupid enough to shoot themselves in the sensitive bits with firearms, attempt to operate dangerous equipment (chainsaws, motor vehicles, you name it) when they're too tired to keep their eyes, deliberately ingest carelessly-measured quantities of poison without even knowing what the safe does is just to see how much they can take, stick random inappropriate objects where the sun don't shine, drill holes in their own skulls under unsanitary conditions, hijack commercial jets and fly them into the sides of buildings, buy shares in SCO, play Russian roulette, buy bottled spring water for pets, and give their computer password from work to a stranger for chocolate? These are all things people have actually done, so yeah, I'd say people are that stupid. At least, some people are.
Display signs might be one reason why the shorter, simpler spelling 'donut' has become more common lately. There are other reasons as well, not least that it's easier to remember.
Personally I prefer "toroidal continental-breakfast pastry", but for some strange reason I have not yet been able to convince the entire English-speaking world to switch over to this terminology.
Actually, dike/dyke is one of many English words with more than one accepted spelling. The spelling with the y has become less common in recent decades, but it has never passed entirely out of use, and there are still some people who consider it "more correct", though descriptive dictionaries generally disagree, as the spelling with the i has become more common.
You can see this same phenomenon with doughnut/donut; modern descriptive dictionaries consider both to be correct, and "donut" has become the more common spelling these days, although some pedants still consider it an aberration and prefer the older spelling.
Kirk is just about the weakest major character in all Star Trek (with the *possible* exception of Uhura, and even that is a near thing). He's flat, static, *and* shallow, which is a pretty rare combination in a protagonist. Several TOS villians are better characters than Kirk.
But the real problem is Shatner's acting, which would be right at home in a lame B-grade horror flick directed by Ed Wood. The only other bridge-officer Star Trek character to even begin to approach his level of incompetence is Nana Visitor, and at least she was cast well enough that you really only notice her bad acting in episodes that require her to act a different part from usual (e.g., mirror universe, that ceremony where she takes on the personality of one of Dax's former hosts, Bashir's holodeck programs, and that one where Sisko is a twentieth-century sci-fi writer). When she's playing Major Kira, you don't notice that the acting is bad, because you just attribute the actor's personality to the character, and it works. With Shatner's Kirk, on the other hand, the acting is so bad it's impossible to ignore. You can actually *see* him struggling to come up with his lines, like it's some kind of junior high play production. The words the writers put in Kirk's mouth would, if you read them on a printed page, convey emotions that the actor doesn't seem to be able to manage to get across when he says them out loud -- an impressive level of badness. He may be the worst actor ever to appear in a major motion picture, although the competition for that dubious honor is pretty steep.
The closest thing to Shatner's acting in the rest of Star Trek is in Time's Arrow (the TNG episode where they find Data's head in a cave on Earth then travel back in time and meet Mark Twain and Guinan) when Mrs. Carmichael (the boarding house lady) is reading off the line from A Midsummer Night's Dream: "What. Jealous. Oberon. Fairies. Skip. Hence. I have... forsworn... his bed... and company." It's like that because they were deliberately portraying Mrs. Carmichael as completely incapable of acting, but she's really not very much worse than Shatner.
Oh, I skipped over this before, but I should probably address it: the EU is (at least as a relevant factor with any significance) nowhere near that old. Thirty years ago the Cold War was still on, the wall and the curtain still up, and the situation in Europe somewhat different, politically, from today. Well, not different in a big-picture "a bunch of little states squabbling and trying to avoid actually coming to blows, except in the Balkans" sort of way, but the details were different.
> Um, Europe has been a war zone for most of its history, too.
Granted.
> The only time you get peace is when you have a big, stable state that keeps the peace,
Well, either that or Mutually Assured Destruction. Which is basically the same thing.
> and the Middle East has had centuries in which it had those.
Always externally imposed. No state local to the region has yet been able to manage it, unless you count the Ottomans as local (but they were pretty much at war on two fronts for pretty much their entire existence) or the Achaemenids (a relatively decent government as totalitarian empires go, but they were at war with Greece almost as soon as they finished conquering Babylon). The longest and most peaceful period of peace in the Middle East to date is the Pax Romana, and there were frequent uprisings even then.
Of course, it is arguable that this is because none of the governments local to the Middle East has yet become quite large enough to manage a prolonged and stable peace. Not for lack of trying (several of the Caliphates attempted to expand beyond the region, for instance, as did Parthia and several of the Egyptian dynasties) but just because history didn't quite work out that way.
> for most of their existence they've peacefully interacted with one another
On the one hand, the Middle East has always been a war zone as far back as we know anything about it. There has perpetually been a conflict of some sort going on there; it's just been a question of what the two sides were. Elam versus Persia, Media versus Persia, Elam versus Babylon, Assyria versus Egypt, Assyria versus Babylon, Babylon versus Egypt, Medo-Persia versus Babylon,... the only times the Middle Eastern people weren't fighting amongst themselves were when they were busy opposing or being dominated by sundry external powers (notably Alexandrian Greece, the Roman Caesars, the Mongol Khans, and the colonial powers of Western Europe).
But you're right up to a point: the conflict certainly hasn't always been Sunni versus Shia. Relations between them have always been tense, and there have been numerous wars between them over the centuries, but they also have often been united against various common enemies.
> There is a gigantic yawning chasm full of nasty pointy teeth > between "believe wholeheartedly" and "have proof of".
Only if the question is one that actually matters, and even then the distinction has little impact on the behavior of most people.
> I care very much whether aliens exist, and I also believe wholeheartedly that they do exist
I guess I'm on the other side of both of those. I think it's rather unlikely that aliens exist, but I also don't much care. Even if there were aliens, we don't have any way to meaningfully interact with them, so getting worked up about it is kind of like having strong opinions about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin.
> Eh, doesn't really matter since nobody carries hundreds.
You'd be surprised.
> They're large enough that most places won't take them anyways.
That doesn't stop people from trying constantly.
Where I work (small public library) we deal with such tiny amounts of money that we don't even like taking twenties, because it exhausts our supply of change and we have to send somebody to the bank. Anything larger than a twenty, forget it: we tell the patron to go to the bank. We don't have that kind of money in the building, sorry.
But we still get people *trying* to pay for their fifty cents worth of photo copies (or overdue fines, or whatever) with a hundred dollar bill. This happens every single day. We tell them and tell them and tell them, we're never going to have enough cash on hand to change a hundred, but it never sinks in.
I blame it on ATMs. They give out the largest bills they can for the amount you're getting, which has to be a multiple of twenty bucks. I don't think most people *go* to the bank any more (like, you know, actually go in and speak to a live person face to face), so the only time they ever have normal-sized bills (like fives for instance) is if they get them back as change when spending something larger.
> Having proof positive that aliens exist would not have a profound > impact on our daily lives, true, but it would have a deeply profound > impact on our outlook and perception of the universe around us
I don't see how. Most of the people who care very much whether aliens exist already believe wholeheartedly that they do.
> I suggest you look at the average life expectancy of a slave in > colonial and the post federal US and compare it to the life > expectancy of slaves in the French and Spanish controlled "Americas".
That's not entirely a fair comparison. Life expectancy was worse in the tropics for free men, as well as slaves. If you go with worldwide averages, life expectancy is *still* a good deal worse in the tropics than in the temperate zones.
I'm not saying the French and Spanish treated their slaves well. I'm just saying there were other things besides that that had an impact on life expectancy.
> Interstellar travel is only impractical if you think like a human, > in terms of 100 years and in terms of social value of one individual. > If we had a different culture, but the exact same technology, we > could probably colonize other planets NOW.
You're only thinking about the speed limitations, but that's not the real problem. I mean, it is a problem, but it's not the biggie. The real problem is the complete lack of any supply line or infrastructure along the way. It would be like crossing the Sahara desert on crutches.
I didn't say it was technically impossible. Only that it's wildly impractical.
> All you need is the ability to climb out of the star's gravity well,
No, we *have* that. And yet, interstellar travel is wildly impractical. Heck, at our current technological level, manned interplanetary travel is wildly impractical.
> the flight itself takes little energy
That's not really the point.
> Sure, even something trivial like 1000 metric tons of spacecraft > is completely impossible to launch in the near future, but that is > the only big expense. 5000 Solar year travel time is feasible for > a frozen DNA and a highly redundant computer that watches out for > microscopic fractures and repairs them. This will take us to > Proxima Centauri at 1/1000 STL. Once there, the ship will unfold > a solar panel and start growing humans in vats. The first generation > will have to be raised by robots, but it's clear sailing after that.
Do you even know what the word "practical" means? I'll give you a hint: the above paragraph isn't it.
That's meaningless nonsense. If there were more than one of them, they wouldn't be universes. Straightforwardly, the universe is, by definition, the totality of everything that exists.
> As to faster than light communications, tachyons would be a possibility.
*Yawn*. Let me know if tachyons are ever show to even exist, much less be capable of carrying information in a manner that could be detected by beings composed of traditional matter (i.e., stuff with a real-valued mass, like baryons and such).
> The obvious and simple answer is to start with mathematics. > Maths don't change no matter what the culture behind it.
The notation and terminology changes. Drastically. Just switching to a different math textbook series written in the same language can mean you have to spend twelve weeks relearning a lot of stuff you technically already know, because you have to learn how it's expressed in the new book's notation style.
> Obviously the notation will most likely look different, > but the meaning of the notation will be decipherable
I have a very hard time imagining that it could be decipherable in a vacuum, without back-and-forth communication, and without some shared cultural background or context. All human communication, without exception, is based on shared social context. With aliens, there's no shared social context.
> Of course that assumes you have some way of getting to a point where > communication is necessary/helpful such as having interstellar travel.
If it could be achieved, communication would be valuable for its own sake. But the chances of achieving it are (unless relativity as we currently understand it is completely totally all wet) so remote that it is not worth bothering to attempt it. We're way beyond buying lottery tickets here.
> > Interstellar travel is wildly impractical. It makes for interesting > > fiction, but unless our understanding of physics is TOTALLY messed up > > (*way* more flawed than we currently think pure Newtonian physics was), > > there's absolutely zero practical application, ever.
> Given the fact that we don't really understand how 95% of the universe works
You appear to have only written the first sentence in my paragraph above, even though you quoted the whole thing. Go back and read the rest of the paragraph. If our understanding of physics is ever drastically revised, then obviously we would revisit the issue (and a great many other issues as well).
But based on everything we currently know, speculating about aliens is only useful for the purpose of entertainment.
> Messages between civilizations would be the opposite. > You'd know just as little going in, but they would > instead be crafted to be as easy as possible to decode.
The Curse of Knowledge: it's virtually impossible to divest yourself of everything you know because of your cultural background and communicate to someone who doesn't. You don't even realize the assumptions you're making, which the other party has absolutely no way to guess. The more different the two cultures are, the worse it is.
If real-time communication were possible, so that you could get feedback back and forth, it *might* be possible to overcome this. But with multiple years of lag, forget it.
If there were intelligent aliens out there, and they wanted to communicate with us as badly as we seem to want to communicate with them, and there were a viable means to do so, we would certainly already know about it. We wouldn't have any idea what they were saying, but we'd have noticed the signals by now. We haven't. Ipso facto, there aren't any being sent.
> The thing is, you never know, and should never > *absolutely* say it's impossible
What I said was, "unless our current understanding of physics is WAY off".
If we come to understand physics drastically differently (in particular, if relativity is shown to be MUCH farther off from reality than good old Newtonian physics is currently known to have ever been), then I'd reconsider.
Only if it's moving fast enough to create appreciable lift.
With all of your engines out, wind resistance slows you down faster than you might think. Once your speed drops below takeoff/landing speed, you start losing lift, at which point your trajectory starts to closely resemble that of a thrown object (like, say, a rock). The wings, just by their surface area, create enough wind resistance to limit the terminal velocity of your fall somewhat, but it's still PLENTY fast enough to cause damage to the plane and injury to the occupants -- the kind of injury that can result in someone looking up your dental records.
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> When Comcast can't address new customers, they'll get off their ass.
When Comcast doesn't have IPv4 addresses for all their simultaneously-connected customers, they'll just assign one address to each service hub, install NAT, and tell the DHCP servers to start handing out 10.x.x.x to the customers. *Each* service hub can then support up to sixteen million simultaneously connected customers, and they only need one IPv4 address per service hub. Sorted.
The problem is servers. To offer a public service, you have to be reachable by the public, and that means you need a public address. There are more than enough public addresses to go around, of course, but most of them have been handed out in large blocks to people who don't need anywhere near that many. The solution, which will arise naturally as a result of market forces, is that people with surplus IPv4 addresses will sell or rent them (or the use of them) to people who need them in order to run public services. And they'll be fairly cheap, because like I said there are really plenty. Most internet-connected systems have absolutely no need for a public address.
> > add some protocol translation to their network to
> > deal with anything that can't handle IPv6
> You do realize that you need IPv4 addresses to do that, don't you?
Exactly.
That's why we haven't moved to IPv6 yet and probably never will.
What will *actually* happen when ARIN says "no" is that the organization that needs an IPv4 address will go find somebody who has more IPv4 addresses than they actually need (which at this point is practically everyone) and get one of those (or the use thereof via hosting; we're only talking about servers here, since workstations can obviously just go behind NAT -- arbitrarily many layers of NAT if necessary).
No amount of time would be enough. Duke Nukem Forever will come out, Perl 6 will be finished, the 2038 problem will be solved, the paperless society will arrive, and we'll all have flying cars like in the Jetsons before IPv6 replaces IPv4.
What will happen is that people who have more public IP addresses than they actually need (e.g., because most of their systems are just workstations and can go behind NAT with no significant downside) will start selling them off to people who have an actual need for them (for running public services). This isn't as elegant as some people would like, but it will *work* until at least the mid twenty-second century.
And, of course, anyone who wants to use IPv6 *can* do that, but it's about as worthwhile in practice as setting up IPX/SPX. The rest of the world is all using IPv4, so if you want to be connected to "the internet" you want IPv4. Nothing else will do.
> Are people really that stupid?
The answer to this question is always going to be the same, no matter what context you put around the question.
Are people stupid enough to send money to 419 scammers? Stupid enough to waste thousands of hours *baiting* 419 scammers and getting them to pose for photos in various ridiculous settings and attire? Stupid enough to *be* baited? Sure enough, some people are.
Are people stupid enough to give their credit cards details to any random person who claims to represent their bank and/or be looking out for their interests? Yep, some people are.
Are people stupid enough to leave young children unattended for extended periods of time? Stupid enough to show up at the police station and ask to have their confiscated contraband returned to them? Stupid enough to install pink fiberglass insulation all day wearing shorts and a t-shirt? Are women stupid enough to continue to date obviously abusive boyfriends? Are people stupid enough to shoot themselves in the sensitive bits with firearms, attempt to operate dangerous equipment (chainsaws, motor vehicles, you name it) when they're too tired to keep their eyes, deliberately ingest carelessly-measured quantities of poison without even knowing what the safe does is just to see how much they can take, stick random inappropriate objects where the sun don't shine, drill holes in their own skulls under unsanitary conditions, hijack commercial jets and fly them into the sides of buildings, buy shares in SCO, play Russian roulette, buy bottled spring water for pets, and give their computer password from work to a stranger for chocolate? These are all things people have actually done, so yeah, I'd say people are that stupid. At least, some people are.
Display signs might be one reason why the shorter, simpler spelling 'donut' has become more common lately. There are other reasons as well, not least that it's easier to remember.
Personally I prefer "toroidal continental-breakfast pastry", but for some strange reason I have not yet been able to convince the entire English-speaking world to switch over to this terminology.
Actually, dike/dyke is one of many English words with more than one accepted spelling. The spelling with the y has become less common in recent decades, but it has never passed entirely out of use, and there are still some people who consider it "more correct", though descriptive dictionaries generally disagree, as the spelling with the i has become more common.
You can see this same phenomenon with doughnut/donut; modern descriptive dictionaries consider both to be correct, and "donut" has become the more common spelling these days, although some pedants still consider it an aberration and prefer the older spelling.
Do you know what I hate?
Printers.
He probably has to retire because he's losing control of his emotions. That's what happened to his father, you know.
> Kirk is my favorite character.
Kirk is just about the weakest major character in all Star Trek (with the *possible* exception of Uhura, and even that is a near thing). He's flat, static, *and* shallow, which is a pretty rare combination in a protagonist. Several TOS villians are better characters than Kirk.
But the real problem is Shatner's acting, which would be right at home in a lame B-grade horror flick directed by Ed Wood. The only other bridge-officer Star Trek character to even begin to approach his level of incompetence is Nana Visitor, and at least she was cast well enough that you really only notice her bad acting in episodes that require her to act a different part from usual (e.g., mirror universe, that ceremony where she takes on the personality of one of Dax's former hosts, Bashir's holodeck programs, and that one where Sisko is a twentieth-century sci-fi writer). When she's playing Major Kira, you don't notice that the acting is bad, because you just attribute the actor's personality to the character, and it works. With Shatner's Kirk, on the other hand, the acting is so bad it's impossible to ignore. You can actually *see* him struggling to come up with his lines, like it's some kind of junior high play production. The words the writers put in Kirk's mouth would, if you read them on a printed page, convey emotions that the actor doesn't seem to be able to manage to get across when he says them out loud -- an impressive level of badness. He may be the worst actor ever to appear in a major motion picture, although the competition for that dubious honor is pretty steep.
The closest thing to Shatner's acting in the rest of Star Trek is in Time's Arrow (the TNG episode where they find Data's head in a cave on Earth then travel back in time and meet Mark Twain and Guinan) when Mrs. Carmichael (the boarding house lady) is reading off the line from A Midsummer Night's Dream: "What. Jealous. Oberon. Fairies. Skip. Hence. I have... forsworn... his bed... and company." It's like that because they were deliberately portraying Mrs. Carmichael as completely incapable of acting, but she's really not very much worse than Shatner.
> The EU is - what - 30-some years old?
Oh, I skipped over this before, but I should probably address it: the EU is (at least as a relevant factor with any significance) nowhere near that old. Thirty years ago the Cold War was still on, the wall and the curtain still up, and the situation in Europe somewhat different, politically, from today. Well, not different in a big-picture "a bunch of little states squabbling and trying to avoid actually coming to blows, except in the Balkans" sort of way, but the details were different.
> Um, Europe has been a war zone for most of its history, too.
Granted.
> The only time you get peace is when you have a big, stable state that keeps the peace,
Well, either that or Mutually Assured Destruction. Which is basically the same thing.
> and the Middle East has had centuries in which it had those.
Always externally imposed. No state local to the region has yet been able to manage it, unless you count the Ottomans as local (but they were pretty much at war on two fronts for pretty much their entire existence) or the Achaemenids (a relatively decent government as totalitarian empires go, but they were at war with Greece almost as soon as they finished conquering Babylon). The longest and most peaceful period of peace in the Middle East to date is the Pax Romana, and there were frequent uprisings even then.
Of course, it is arguable that this is because none of the governments local to the Middle East has yet become quite large enough to manage a prolonged and stable peace. Not for lack of trying (several of the Caliphates attempted to expand beyond the region, for instance, as did Parthia and several of the Egyptian dynasties) but just because history didn't quite work out that way.
> for most of their existence they've peacefully interacted with one another
... the only times the Middle Eastern people weren't fighting amongst themselves were when they were busy opposing or being dominated by sundry external powers (notably Alexandrian Greece, the Roman Caesars, the Mongol Khans, and the colonial powers of Western Europe).
On the one hand, the Middle East has always been a war zone as far back as we know anything about it. There has perpetually been a conflict of some sort going on there; it's just been a question of what the two sides were. Elam versus Persia, Media versus Persia, Elam versus Babylon, Assyria versus Egypt, Assyria versus Babylon, Babylon versus Egypt, Medo-Persia versus Babylon,
But you're right up to a point: the conflict certainly hasn't always been Sunni versus Shia. Relations between them have always been tense, and there have been numerous wars between them over the centuries, but they also have often been united against various common enemies.
> There is a gigantic yawning chasm full of nasty pointy teeth
> between "believe wholeheartedly" and "have proof of".
Only if the question is one that actually matters, and even then the distinction has little impact on the behavior of most people.
> I care very much whether aliens exist, and I also believe wholeheartedly that they do exist
I guess I'm on the other side of both of those. I think it's rather unlikely that aliens exist, but I also don't much care. Even if there were aliens, we don't have any way to meaningfully interact with them, so getting worked up about it is kind of like having strong opinions about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin.
> Eh, doesn't really matter since nobody carries hundreds.
You'd be surprised.
> They're large enough that most places won't take them anyways.
That doesn't stop people from trying constantly.
Where I work (small public library) we deal with such tiny amounts of money that we don't even like taking twenties, because it exhausts our supply of change and we have to send somebody to the bank. Anything larger than a twenty, forget it: we tell the patron to go to the bank. We don't have that kind of money in the building, sorry.
But we still get people *trying* to pay for their fifty cents worth of photo copies (or overdue fines, or whatever) with a hundred dollar bill. This happens every single day. We tell them and tell them and tell them, we're never going to have enough cash on hand to change a hundred, but it never sinks in.
I blame it on ATMs. They give out the largest bills they can for the amount you're getting, which has to be a multiple of twenty bucks. I don't think most people *go* to the bank any more (like, you know, actually go in and speak to a live person face to face), so the only time they ever have normal-sized bills (like fives for instance) is if they get them back as change when spending something larger.
> Having proof positive that aliens exist would not have a profound
> impact on our daily lives, true, but it would have a deeply profound
> impact on our outlook and perception of the universe around us
I don't see how. Most of the people who care very much whether aliens exist already believe wholeheartedly that they do.
> I suggest you look at the average life expectancy of a slave in
> colonial and the post federal US and compare it to the life
> expectancy of slaves in the French and Spanish controlled "Americas".
That's not entirely a fair comparison. Life expectancy was worse in the tropics for free men, as well as slaves. If you go with worldwide averages, life expectancy is *still* a good deal worse in the tropics than in the temperate zones.
I'm not saying the French and Spanish treated their slaves well. I'm just saying there were other things besides that that had an impact on life expectancy.
> Interstellar travel is only impractical if you think like a human,
> in terms of 100 years and in terms of social value of one individual.
> If we had a different culture, but the exact same technology, we
> could probably colonize other planets NOW.
You're only thinking about the speed limitations, but that's not the real problem. I mean, it is a problem, but it's not the biggie. The real problem is the complete lack of any supply line or infrastructure along the way. It would be like crossing the Sahara desert on crutches.
I didn't say it was technically impossible. Only that it's wildly impractical.
> All you need is the ability to climb out of the star's gravity well,
No, we *have* that. And yet, interstellar travel is wildly impractical. Heck, at our current technological level, manned interplanetary travel is wildly impractical.
> the flight itself takes little energy
That's not really the point.
> Sure, even something trivial like 1000 metric tons of spacecraft
> is completely impossible to launch in the near future, but that is
> the only big expense. 5000 Solar year travel time is feasible for
> a frozen DNA and a highly redundant computer that watches out for
> microscopic fractures and repairs them. This will take us to
> Proxima Centauri at 1/1000 STL. Once there, the ship will unfold
> a solar panel and start growing humans in vats. The first generation
> will have to be raised by robots, but it's clear sailing after that.
Do you even know what the word "practical" means? I'll give you a hint: the above paragraph isn't it.
> as time passes countless Universes are created
That's meaningless nonsense. If there were more than one of them, they wouldn't be universes. Straightforwardly, the universe is, by definition, the totality of everything that exists.
> As to faster than light communications, tachyons would be a possibility.
*Yawn*. Let me know if tachyons are ever show to even exist, much less be capable of carrying information in a manner that could be detected by beings composed of traditional matter (i.e., stuff with a real-valued mass, like baryons and such).
> The obvious and simple answer is to start with mathematics.
> Maths don't change no matter what the culture behind it.
The notation and terminology changes. Drastically. Just switching to a different math textbook series written in the same language can mean you have to spend twelve weeks relearning a lot of stuff you technically already know, because you have to learn how it's expressed in the new book's notation style.
> Obviously the notation will most likely look different,
> but the meaning of the notation will be decipherable
I have a very hard time imagining that it could be decipherable in a vacuum, without back-and-forth communication, and without some shared cultural background or context. All human communication, without exception, is based on shared social context. With aliens, there's no shared social context.
> Of course that assumes you have some way of getting to a point where
> communication is necessary/helpful such as having interstellar travel.
If it could be achieved, communication would be valuable for its own sake. But the chances of achieving it are (unless relativity as we currently understand it is completely totally all wet) so remote that it is not worth bothering to attempt it. We're way beyond buying lottery tickets here.
> > Interstellar travel is wildly impractical. It makes for interesting
> > fiction, but unless our understanding of physics is TOTALLY messed up
> > (*way* more flawed than we currently think pure Newtonian physics was),
> > there's absolutely zero practical application, ever.
> Given the fact that we don't really understand how 95% of the universe works
You appear to have only written the first sentence in my paragraph above, even though you quoted the whole thing. Go back and read the rest of the paragraph. If our understanding of physics is ever drastically revised, then obviously we would revisit the issue (and a great many other issues as well).
But based on everything we currently know, speculating about aliens is only useful for the purpose of entertainment.
> Messages between civilizations would be the opposite.
> You'd know just as little going in, but they would
> instead be crafted to be as easy as possible to decode.
The Curse of Knowledge: it's virtually impossible to divest yourself of everything you know because of your cultural background and communicate to someone who doesn't. You don't even realize the assumptions you're making, which the other party has absolutely no way to guess. The more different the two cultures are, the worse it is.
If real-time communication were possible, so that you could get feedback back and forth, it *might* be possible to overcome this. But with multiple years of lag, forget it.
If there were intelligent aliens out there, and they wanted to communicate with us as badly as we seem to want to communicate with them, and there were a viable means to do so, we would certainly already know about it. We wouldn't have any idea what they were saying, but we'd have noticed the signals by now. We haven't. Ipso facto, there aren't any being sent.
> The thing is, you never know, and should never
> *absolutely* say it's impossible
What I said was, "unless our current understanding of physics is WAY off".
If we come to understand physics drastically differently (in particular, if relativity is shown to be MUCH farther off from reality than good old Newtonian physics is currently known to have ever been), then I'd reconsider.
> so god is black?
Technically, He's a Jew.
> Yes, you can glide a jetliner without engines
Only if it's moving fast enough to create appreciable lift.
With all of your engines out, wind resistance slows you down faster than you might think. Once your speed drops below takeoff/landing speed, you start losing lift, at which point your trajectory starts to closely resemble that of a thrown object (like, say, a rock). The wings, just by their surface area, create enough wind resistance to limit the terminal velocity of your fall somewhat, but it's still PLENTY fast enough to cause damage to the plane and injury to the occupants -- the kind of injury that can result in someone looking up your dental records.