I think we are in general agreement. I'm not claiming to have answers for 1) & 2) other than (excluding Earth) the probability they are non-zero is for all practical purposes 1. Anyone who offers a more precise answer than that is simply pulling numbers out of their arse.
I also agree my claim that life exists elsewhere is a belief, but it's not blind faith, it's a belief based on logical speculation about what the evidence we do have implies.
In a universe with at least 10^18 star systems any natural phenomea observed on Earth is going to exist elsewhere not only because of the law of large numbers but also because the laws of physics and chemistry that drive the phenomena are universal regardless of whether we know the details of those laws or not. And with that many stars life could be exeedingly rare and yet still exist on millions of planets.
Also just to be clear I didn't mean to imply you had an invisible friend, the comment I made is a quote from the end of the video (it's really worth watching it past the first few mimutes of creationist debunking). Having said that I find the idea that the Earth is some sort of miraculously implausible island of life does smell of religious mythology or at the very least cosmological parochialisim.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not trying to dismiss the Earth as just another planet that we can trash and move on to the next one. On the contrary, just as I can accept every one of those stars is unique in the fine grained details I can also accept that Earth has a biosphere that is unique in it's details and I'm keenly aware that we humans have evolved in an intimate symbiotic relationship with those unique details. As Sagan's famous pale blue dot teaches us; "Like it or not, Earth is where we make our stand, the only home we've ever known".
Perhaps it's priced to avoid some minimum threashold for a charge of blackmail. There are lots of perfectly legitimate bussinesse that set their prices simply to avoid legal recourse. Here in Oz the minimum claim in the small claims court is $50 so a lot of TV specials are priced at $49.95, also a lot of used cars are priced at $4995 to avoid mandatory warranty obligations that kick in at $5K.
The random motions of the atoms that make up the air in the room I'm sitting in means that I cannot rule out the statistical possibilty that I may suddenly find myself sitting in a vacum, and yet I do.
I use similar intuition to rule out the possibility that life (particularly single celled life) is unique to Earth. I don't see abiogenisis as anything special, although we don't know exactly where or when it happened it didn't involve supernatural forces, ridiculous probablities, or lightning striking a mud puddle, it's just chemistry.
Ignoring amnesty is due to your own bias not theirs. But I agree with the general point that good cops have a tough job. The people who sterotype cops as thugs would ironically make terrible cops due to their tendency to sterotype people as thugs beacuse they belong to a particular social group. As for violence the cops I know personally, all agree that alcoholics are by far the most unpredictable and violent people they come across on a regular basis.
Thank you, the idea that a species that could develop a video game would then play themselves into extinction is as silly as the idea that a species that can invent porn would masterbate themelves into extinction.
Population really is the elephant in the room, I'm 50yrs old and there are now twice as many people on the planet as when I was born and the strain on our planetary life support systems is apparent everywhere you look. However if you dare to suggest that the long term survival and quality of life for mankind requires keeping our population in check then somehow that observation makes you a genocidal maniac. If we don't find a way to humanely live within our environmental means then it is in our nature to resort to genocidal behaviour for access to resources such as fresh water, food, minerals, etc.
"liquid water is the only environment where life has a chance to appear spontaneously"
That's a reasonable assumption from what we can observe about life.
"It is bad practice in statistics to use only two observations to do a projection."
It's not a reasonable asumption that people are simply extrapolating from what we see on Earth. They are looking at the spectra of the cosmos and finding that there are billions of galaxies chock full of hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen and carbon. These elements condense into gigantic clouds light years across that are composed of the same organic building blocks we find on earth. In fact the silicon, iron, nickel, etc, that you are standing on are much less abundant in the universe than the basic organics and water you and I are made from. As Carl Sagan once said "we are star stuff".
"and that the earth is really the only one with liquid water and liquid water"
Hydrogen and oxygen are the 1st and 3rd most abundant elements in the universe and spontaneously react to from water. Given what we know about galaxy composition and the formation of planetary systems the odds that Earth has the only surface level ocean in the cosmos are so impractically small that they could be used to drive an infinite improbability machine. Just in our own solar system you have Earth's current ocean, past oceans on Mars and most likely Venus, an ocean under the ice of Europa that has more water than Earth and a high probability of smaller sub-surface oceans on a handfull of other icy moons.
"I earned that comfort through years of minimum wage jobs, hundreds of hours developing software in my free time, and getting a degree."
Ditto, but take my word for it when I say that's the easy way. I spent the first 15yrs of my 35yr working life doing it the hard way.
"you know nothing about me....What I don't understand is why a job that pretty much anybody with two hands can do should be protected by a union."
I know from reading your comments that you haven't walked a mile in the shoes of the working poor (maybe as a child, but that doesn't count). That is not a critisisim it's just an observation that goes a long way to explaining why you're so quick to dismiss unions, unions are something alien to you because you have never had the need for one and given your education you never will. Due to your life experience you can't see how they could possibly usefull in the society that you know about. But society is made up of many sub-cultures that neither of us know anything about, although 3yrs as a taxi driver while studying for my degree gave me a small windows into quite a few of them.
One of the little things that struck me in my first office job after graduating as a mature age student was that people would say thank-you for something I was being paid to do. Compare that common office attitude to a factory I worked in that removed the toilet doors so the boss could check that you really were going for a dump and not slacking off.
The union had the doors back up the same day, what do you think would have been the result of individually barganing for a toilet door with that arsehole if the union were not there to stop him from replacing you with another pair of hands?
Don't get me wrong I think science is the only genuinely usefull philosphy we have. However once a technological species arises on a planet it will rapidly dominate the environment and it's population will explode. In all other species such population growth rapidly consumes the available resourse then promptly drops of the proverbial cliff. It's only in the last century that our technology and population have reached the point where it's plausible that we could wipe ourselves out with nuclear war or environmental vandalisim.
Perhaps we don't hear ET because tecnological species are an evolutionanary flash in the pan, on geologic times scales as soon as they aquire the ability to destroy themselves they do so. Perhaps there are billions of life bearing planets where the only trace of technology is a mass extinction event marked by a layer of plastic and radioisotopes burried in the rock and a "razor thin" ripple of communication signals expanding across the cosomos. What would be the chances that Earth just happened to be sitting in one of those ripples at this particular point in cosmological history?
Depends on the balance of power. Is he using a slingshot or a stinger missile? Am I sitting behind a 120mm cannon in a tank or am I on patrol with an assult rifle? Is there any cover available where I can assess the situation before calling in an airstrike and leveling the block?
Skilled or semi-skilled office workers do not need a union, sure they are replaceable but not without short term pain for the employer, in other words they have individual bargining power regardless of wether they have the balls to use it or not.
When your skills are "a strong back and a weak head" there is no reason for the employer to negotiate. Without unions having fought in the past for things such as a 40hr week, minimum wage, no child labour, safe working conditions, minimum rest breaks, etc, the un-skilled would be still working and dying in Victorian era sweatshops and coal mines.
"I personally detest the idea of Unions and I'm glad programmers have avoided them. In most unions, your potential raise is dependent on all the other union members in your department. You also don't negotiate raises, your union lawyers/reps do."
Since you've obviously never dug ditches for a living I can understand that the benifits of collective negotiation to the worker may be difficult for you to appreciate from the comfort of your office chair.
Slashdot Mirror
"I'm not saying that those binary blogs contain spyware, but I have no way (short of reverse-engineering them) to be sure they don't"
If your that paranoid you could inspect the traffic.
Maybe not that big of a difference...remember, it's related to WW1, there were Germans involved.
PS. They were the evil ones.
Because they lost?
I saw a drum solo at a santana concert that blew me away, he was playing a different beat with all four limbs.
Next time a woman claims to be a better mutitasker because she is a woman point out that it's just an excuse for her inability to focus.
Disclaimer: Don't try this stunt without a crotch protector.
PS: You are conflafting a particular instance of a mountain with the general phenomena of mountains.
I think we are in general agreement. I'm not claiming to have answers for 1) & 2) other than (excluding Earth) the probability they are non-zero is for all practical purposes 1. Anyone who offers a more precise answer than that is simply pulling numbers out of their arse.
I also agree my claim that life exists elsewhere is a belief, but it's not blind faith, it's a belief based on logical speculation about what the evidence we do have implies.
In a universe with at least 10^18 star systems any natural phenomea observed on Earth is going to exist elsewhere not only because of the law of large numbers but also because the laws of physics and chemistry that drive the phenomena are universal regardless of whether we know the details of those laws or not. And with that many stars life could be exeedingly rare and yet still exist on millions of planets.
Also just to be clear I didn't mean to imply you had an invisible friend, the comment I made is a quote from the end of the video (it's really worth watching it past the first few mimutes of creationist debunking). Having said that I find the idea that the Earth is some sort of miraculously implausible island of life does smell of religious mythology or at the very least cosmological parochialisim.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not trying to dismiss the Earth as just another planet that we can trash and move on to the next one. On the contrary, just as I can accept every one of those stars is unique in the fine grained details I can also accept that Earth has a biosphere that is unique in it's details and I'm keenly aware that we humans have evolved in an intimate symbiotic relationship with those unique details. As Sagan's famous pale blue dot teaches us; "Like it or not, Earth is where we make our stand, the only home we've ever known".
"I honestly expected better from the BBS"
Can't quite put my finger on the joke but I'm thinking; Murdoch, budget cuts, dinosours....
But seriously TFA states "used by up to 200m people". The key phrase being "up to" meaning they couldn't find accurate stats on unique users.
Perhaps it's priced to avoid some minimum threashold for a charge of blackmail. There are lots of perfectly legitimate bussinesse that set their prices simply to avoid legal recourse. Here in Oz the minimum claim in the small claims court is $50 so a lot of TV specials are priced at $49.95, also a lot of used cars are priced at $4995 to avoid mandatory warranty obligations that kick in at $5K.
"$6B for five years? $1.2B a year. Less money than Microsoft is losing on Bing. Less than 5% of the annual revenues of Mars candy [wikipedia.org]."
200X the IPCC budget.
Yes, basically it clogs them up with molten glass.
I think you mean Ivana Humpalot.
The random motions of the atoms that make up the air in the room I'm sitting in means that I cannot rule out the statistical possibilty that I may suddenly find myself sitting in a vacum, and yet I do.
I use similar intuition to rule out the possibility that life (particularly single celled life) is unique to Earth. I don't see abiogenisis as anything special, although we don't know exactly where or when it happened it didn't involve supernatural forces, ridiculous probablities, or lightning striking a mud puddle, it's just chemistry.
Next time read the slashdot thought for the day before posting, currently it reads; "A clever prophet makes sure of the event first".
:)
BTW I like your sig, it's kinda like a formalised version of my own
Ignoring amnesty is due to your own bias not theirs. But I agree with the general point that good cops have a tough job. The people who sterotype cops as thugs would ironically make terrible cops due to their tendency to sterotype people as thugs beacuse they belong to a particular social group. As for violence the cops I know personally, all agree that alcoholics are by far the most unpredictable and violent people they come across on a regular basis.
From what I have seen anyone suffering a phycotic episode is not going to stop what their doing even if you point a cannon at them.
The same way as you smoke any other leaf.
Thank you, the idea that a species that could develop a video game would then play themselves into extinction is as silly as the idea that a species that can invent porn would masterbate themelves into extinction.
Population really is the elephant in the room, I'm 50yrs old and there are now twice as many people on the planet as when I was born and the strain on our planetary life support systems is apparent everywhere you look. However if you dare to suggest that the long term survival and quality of life for mankind requires keeping our population in check then somehow that observation makes you a genocidal maniac. If we don't find a way to humanely live within our environmental means then it is in our nature to resort to genocidal behaviour for access to resources such as fresh water, food, minerals, etc.
"liquid water is the only environment where life has a chance to appear spontaneously"
That's a reasonable assumption from what we can observe about life.
"It is bad practice in statistics to use only two observations to do a projection."
It's not a reasonable asumption that people are simply extrapolating from what we see on Earth. They are looking at the spectra of the cosmos and finding that there are billions of galaxies chock full of hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen and carbon. These elements condense into gigantic clouds light years across that are composed of the same organic building blocks we find on earth. In fact the silicon, iron, nickel, etc, that you are standing on are much less abundant in the universe than the basic organics and water you and I are made from. As Carl Sagan once said "we are star stuff".
"and that the earth is really the only one with liquid water and liquid water"
Hydrogen and oxygen are the 1st and 3rd most abundant elements in the universe and spontaneously react to from water. Given what we know about galaxy composition and the formation of planetary systems the odds that Earth has the only surface level ocean in the cosmos are so impractically small that they could be used to drive an infinite improbability machine. Just in our own solar system you have Earth's current ocean, past oceans on Mars and most likely Venus, an ocean under the ice of Europa that has more water than Earth and a high probability of smaller sub-surface oceans on a handfull of other icy moons.
"I earned that comfort through years of minimum wage jobs, hundreds of hours developing software in my free time, and getting a degree."
Ditto, but take my word for it when I say that's the easy way. I spent the first 15yrs of my 35yr working life doing it the hard way.
"you know nothing about me....What I don't understand is why a job that pretty much anybody with two hands can do should be protected by a union."
I know from reading your comments that you haven't walked a mile in the shoes of the working poor (maybe as a child, but that doesn't count). That is not a critisisim it's just an observation that goes a long way to explaining why you're so quick to dismiss unions, unions are something alien to you because you have never had the need for one and given your education you never will. Due to your life experience you can't see how they could possibly usefull in the society that you know about. But society is made up of many sub-cultures that neither of us know anything about, although 3yrs as a taxi driver while studying for my degree gave me a small windows into quite a few of them.
One of the little things that struck me in my first office job after graduating as a mature age student was that people would say thank-you for something I was being paid to do. Compare that common office attitude to a factory I worked in that removed the toilet doors so the boss could check that you really were going for a dump and not slacking off.
The union had the doors back up the same day, what do you think would have been the result of individually barganing for a toilet door with that arsehole if the union were not there to stop him from replacing you with another pair of hands?
Don't get me wrong I think science is the only genuinely usefull philosphy we have. However once a technological species arises on a planet it will rapidly dominate the environment and it's population will explode. In all other species such population growth rapidly consumes the available resourse then promptly drops of the proverbial cliff. It's only in the last century that our technology and population have reached the point where it's plausible that we could wipe ourselves out with nuclear war or environmental vandalisim.
Perhaps we don't hear ET because tecnological species are an evolutionanary flash in the pan, on geologic times scales as soon as they aquire the ability to destroy themselves they do so. Perhaps there are billions of life bearing planets where the only trace of technology is a mass extinction event marked by a layer of plastic and radioisotopes burried in the rock and a "razor thin" ripple of communication signals expanding across the cosomos. What would be the chances that Earth just happened to be sitting in one of those ripples at this particular point in cosmological history?
Depends on the balance of power. Is he using a slingshot or a stinger missile? Am I sitting behind a 120mm cannon in a tank or am I on patrol with an assult rifle? Is there any cover available where I can assess the situation before calling in an airstrike and leveling the block?
Skilled or semi-skilled office workers do not need a union, sure they are replaceable but not without short term pain for the employer, in other words they have individual bargining power regardless of wether they have the balls to use it or not.
When your skills are "a strong back and a weak head" there is no reason for the employer to negotiate. Without unions having fought in the past for things such as a 40hr week, minimum wage, no child labour, safe working conditions, minimum rest breaks, etc, the un-skilled would be still working and dying in Victorian era sweatshops and coal mines.
"I personally detest the idea of Unions and I'm glad programmers have avoided them. In most unions, your potential raise is dependent on all the other union members in your department. You also don't negotiate raises, your union lawyers/reps do."
Since you've obviously never dug ditches for a living I can understand that the benifits of collective negotiation to the worker may be difficult for you to appreciate from the comfort of your office chair.
"format and contextualize them"
I can't spell to save myself but I think you misspelt sensationalize.
"How many hours per day will your brain allow you to be functional at a given task?"
24 when I worked the fishing trawlers but towards the end of the third day the fish start talking to you.