Do you not think it would be meaningful just to receive the message "hello"?
Meaningful, yes, but let me paint a pessimistic picture for you. What if the ONLY signal we get is "hello"? What if FTL is impossible, and all we get is a random message that their equivalent of SETI beamed out to nearby stars just to show they were trying - just like us, in fact - and we get nothing else from them, ever? No messages, no ships, no magic technology... what if they just quit transmitting, like us, and live in solitude and eventually kill themselves before our reply message can arrive?
I believe there would be uproar and debate for centuries to come in many fields of science. But I believe that the political structure of the world would not change significantly after this news. The average man in the street looks up in the stars a little more often, but his day to day life is unaffected. The way we number our years would not be suddenly restarted. One year later there would still be trouble in the Middle East.
To quote Clarke, there are two possibilities. Either we are completely alone in the universe. Or we are not. In either case, the thought is staggering. But thanks to the experiences of reality we are totally used to the first possibility and thanks to science fiction we cannot fail to be underwhelmed if and when the second possibility becomes a reality.
I hate myself for saying all this, really, I want first contact to permanently unify the whole globe in a single moment, but be honest with yourself, is that at all likely?
Actually this has already been used as the plot of the second Tomb Raider movie, the sequel to the movie based on the videogame series inspired by the Indiana Jones franchise. Lara Croft sets out to find Pandora's Box, which supposedly contains the most dangerous plague ever.
If Wikipedia starts carrying advertising, then I, for one, will probably block it. I doubt I'm the only person thinking this, and for this I think it a factor worth considering.
Personally, I would prefer to see Wikipedia trimmed down in size to a level where it CAN still be supported by donations, ideally by raising the notability criteria. This would have the beneficial effect of reducing the amount of unattended never-to-be-filled stubs and increasing the level of user coverage on more central topics.
There are plenty of new ideas around. Thousands, millions of them. You can bet your bottom dollar that Hollywood is absolutely crammed to bursting with smart, dynamic writers with amazingly edgy, groundbreaking, intelligent film scripts, any one of which could, if made, become an iconic classic, a milestone in modern cinema, a fixture of pop culture to come. You have your ideas, I'm sure. I know I do too. There is no shortage of ideas.
The problem is the, studios don't care about movies. They don't care about creating new icons. They care about money. And nothing else. And when you want to make money, you don't take risks, you make safe movies. Cash cows. Sequels to existing successful movies are by far the most reliable of these. Even most original movies you will find slot neatly into pre-existing genre templates. There's the teen comedy movie, the action movie, the romantic comedy, the animated kids' movie, and so on, and so on. It's all numbers.
The other problem is the viewing audience. They don't want to see new things. While there is less money at stake, they, too, want a safe movie. They go to movie theaters to see something they are pretty sure will entertain them. Out-there, avant-garde movies do not appeal to the general public - at least, not to the most profitable movie-going demographics. Therefore making a stunningly imaginative new movie is risky - it's a risk for punters to see it, which makes it a risk for studios to make it, which is why they are so rarely made.
Everybody is being very short-sighted about this. We're talking a LONG time in the future. The human brain is a structure; therefore, it can be built; therefore, it can be built artificially instead of being grown and trained like "normal"; therefore, we can build intelligent minds. Now, assuming all this, why WOULDN'T such a mind demand rights? What if you get a neural network which learns to phrase questions? What if you get a computer which becomes smart enough to ask for rights? Why WOULDN'T you consider that brain to be alive? Just because *currently*, robots are made to serve a function, doesn't mean 1) that will always be the case or 2) the robots will WANT to serve that function. You might want your kid to grow up to be a lawyer like you, but he has a right to pick his own role in life. It's the same thing here. Eventually you will get a job which you want to automate, but the job is so sophisticated the automaton must be sentient. In that situation the automaton could well ask to have time off, or another job, even.
RIGHT NOW this entire discussion is largely moot. But in a thousand years' time I can see this being interpreted as a very bigoted comment indeed.
If you do the arithmetic, Seymour was flash-fossilized in 2012. Cohen O'Brian lost his obscenely long legs in the "War of 2012". David Duchovny's mind (a.k.a. Calculon) was transplanted into a robot arm by the time of Project Satan in 2019. And according to a girl Fry once met, cyborgs once enslaved humanity in the 21st Century... probably the early 21st Century.
I appreciate your apprehension, but let's be positive about this: five minute animated episodes like Clone Wars? Clone Wars was AWESOME. Better than all three prequel movies. For real. For a long time I've been saying ST needs to go for shorter episodes, this may be just the ticket. A one-hour episode is slow-paced and drawn out. Compress it to five minutes and what you have is an icon.
Firstly, remember there's a good chance this could turn out non-canonical, if that comforts you at all.
Secondly,
"The Captain is more forward thinking and wants to go out and do some exploring but half the crew will be against that and want to just protect the border," says Rossi.
I think the dichotomy here is completely the wrong way around. The lesson learned from this will be "The Captain is always right, don't mess with him." I think what you need is a gung-ho "new breed" captain and a crew which is very much of old school Starfleet and want traditional values stuck to - exploration as motivation, violence as a last resort. Thus the captain is fallible but as a team effort the whole group manages to pull through and learn stuff.
Thirdly, where's the allegory? Borg = China? Hello?
That line isn't nearly blurred enough yet. How do you accurately determine the age of an individual who doesn't exist except as a virtual construct or a drawing? What if the character's purportedly sixteen but looks like she's fifteen? What if she's thirteen but looks like she's seventeen? What if it's a 30-year-old woman's mind transplanted into a twelve-year-old cloned body? What if it's a shape shifter? What if it's an adult character drawn in chibi style? What if she's drawn from the back and her age is completely unclear? What if it's so dark in the drawing you can't tell what's going on? What if there are just haphazard lines on the page and you can't tell if it's even a person?
What happens when you realise that all you are actually looking at is marks on a piece of paper or patterns of light on a screen, and nobody was actually hurt to create them?
We (that is, my fellow slashdotters, not me personally) generally seem to be speaking from the perspective of CraigsList users. Apparently we enjoy the current level and quality of service provided by the site with its current focus on user satisfaction, and we fear that would diminish if the site were sold to a gigantic conglomerate which viewed user satisfaction as a byproduct of attaining their primary goal, which is money.
No, it wouldn't. Earth is made of rock, not superheated hydrogen. If it were possible for a solar tsunami to happen on Earth, then Earth would have to be another Sun. And obviously the Sun is not in any imminent danger of being destroyed.
Personally I think we should turn off or at least dim the Sun anyway. It is, unlike CO2, the ultimate cause of global warming.
If you want to quibble, you could ask where he got the EvilAlienOS programmer's reference manual or the EvilAlienCPU's architecture description or how he managed to find an exploitable vulnerability in EvilAlienOS so quickly.
I don't even this counts. The lab he was working in had one of their alien spacecraft - and the people he was working with had been studying said spacecraft for decades. It's not remotely far-fetched that they would have figured out how the computers worked in that time. The only problem left is the somewhat unlikely timeframe, which I think we can forgive.
we should ban or force monitoring on minors that use those services
Don't be ridiculous, man, where would we possibly find the funding or manpower? You'd need to employ an adult full-time to look after each individual child. Or even two adults.
Slashdot Mirror
What does this mean?
No, seriously, what does it mean? I honestly don't know.
Meaningful, yes, but let me paint a pessimistic picture for you. What if the ONLY signal we get is "hello"? What if FTL is impossible, and all we get is a random message that their equivalent of SETI beamed out to nearby stars just to show they were trying - just like us, in fact - and we get nothing else from them, ever? No messages, no ships, no magic technology... what if they just quit transmitting, like us, and live in solitude and eventually kill themselves before our reply message can arrive?
I believe there would be uproar and debate for centuries to come in many fields of science. But I believe that the political structure of the world would not change significantly after this news. The average man in the street looks up in the stars a little more often, but his day to day life is unaffected. The way we number our years would not be suddenly restarted. One year later there would still be trouble in the Middle East.
To quote Clarke, there are two possibilities. Either we are completely alone in the universe. Or we are not. In either case, the thought is staggering. But thanks to the experiences of reality we are totally used to the first possibility and thanks to science fiction we cannot fail to be underwhelmed if and when the second possibility becomes a reality.
I hate myself for saying all this, really, I want first contact to permanently unify the whole globe in a single moment, but be honest with yourself, is that at all likely?
1 to 1.3 million years.
Do we honestly think microsoft.xxx is going to be used to contain pornography? Do we honestly think porn.com isn't?
Actually this has already been used as the plot of the second Tomb Raider movie, the sequel to the movie based on the videogame series inspired by the Indiana Jones franchise. Lara Croft sets out to find Pandora's Box, which supposedly contains the most dangerous plague ever.
It's not a particularly bad movie, either.
If Wikipedia starts carrying advertising, then I, for one, will probably block it. I doubt I'm the only person thinking this, and for this I think it a factor worth considering.
Personally, I would prefer to see Wikipedia trimmed down in size to a level where it CAN still be supported by donations, ideally by raising the notability criteria. This would have the beneficial effect of reducing the amount of unattended never-to-be-filled stubs and increasing the level of user coverage on more central topics.
Seeder 788 to mothership. They know.
There are plenty of new ideas around. Thousands, millions of them. You can bet your bottom dollar that Hollywood is absolutely crammed to bursting with smart, dynamic writers with amazingly edgy, groundbreaking, intelligent film scripts, any one of which could, if made, become an iconic classic, a milestone in modern cinema, a fixture of pop culture to come. You have your ideas, I'm sure. I know I do too. There is no shortage of ideas.
The problem is the, studios don't care about movies. They don't care about creating new icons. They care about money. And nothing else. And when you want to make money, you don't take risks, you make safe movies. Cash cows. Sequels to existing successful movies are by far the most reliable of these. Even most original movies you will find slot neatly into pre-existing genre templates. There's the teen comedy movie, the action movie, the romantic comedy, the animated kids' movie, and so on, and so on. It's all numbers.
The other problem is the viewing audience. They don't want to see new things. While there is less money at stake, they, too, want a safe movie. They go to movie theaters to see something they are pretty sure will entertain them. Out-there, avant-garde movies do not appeal to the general public - at least, not to the most profitable movie-going demographics. Therefore making a stunningly imaginative new movie is risky - it's a risk for punters to see it, which makes it a risk for studios to make it, which is why they are so rarely made.
Did you know that passive smoking is the only way you can legally, intentionally harm another person (outside of self-defence)?
616 also happens to be the reality designation number of the mainstream Marvel Universe. Which, as we all know, is evil. Ish.
This would work just fine, in my opinion.
Everybody is being very short-sighted about this. We're talking a LONG time in the future. The human brain is a structure; therefore, it can be built; therefore, it can be built artificially instead of being grown and trained like "normal"; therefore, we can build intelligent minds. Now, assuming all this, why WOULDN'T such a mind demand rights? What if you get a neural network which learns to phrase questions? What if you get a computer which becomes smart enough to ask for rights? Why WOULDN'T you consider that brain to be alive? Just because *currently*, robots are made to serve a function, doesn't mean 1) that will always be the case or 2) the robots will WANT to serve that function. You might want your kid to grow up to be a lawyer like you, but he has a right to pick his own role in life. It's the same thing here. Eventually you will get a job which you want to automate, but the job is so sophisticated the automaton must be sentient. In that situation the automaton could well ask to have time off, or another job, even.
RIGHT NOW this entire discussion is largely moot. But in a thousand years' time I can see this being interpreted as a very bigoted comment indeed.
What's the matter? Never heard of slavery?
Fourth series, I think you'll find.
Introducing the Seymour Theory:
If you do the arithmetic, Seymour was flash-fossilized in 2012. Cohen O'Brian lost his obscenely long legs in the "War of 2012". David Duchovny's mind (a.k.a. Calculon) was transplanted into a robot arm by the time of Project Satan in 2019. And according to a girl Fry once met, cyborgs once enslaved humanity in the 21st Century... probably the early 21st Century.
Seymour was flash-preserved during the Cyborg War of 2012, which is where human/machine interface technology originates (or at least, started going out of control)!
I appreciate your apprehension, but let's be positive about this: five minute animated episodes like Clone Wars? Clone Wars was AWESOME. Better than all three prequel movies. For real. For a long time I've been saying ST needs to go for shorter episodes, this may be just the ticket. A one-hour episode is slow-paced and drawn out. Compress it to five minutes and what you have is an icon.
Firstly, remember there's a good chance this could turn out non-canonical, if that comforts you at all.
Secondly,
I think the dichotomy here is completely the wrong way around. The lesson learned from this will be "The Captain is always right, don't mess with him." I think what you need is a gung-ho "new breed" captain and a crew which is very much of old school Starfleet and want traditional values stuck to - exploration as motivation, violence as a last resort. Thus the captain is fallible but as a team effort the whole group manages to pull through and learn stuff.
Thirdly, where's the allegory? Borg = China? Hello?
That line isn't nearly blurred enough yet. How do you accurately determine the age of an individual who doesn't exist except as a virtual construct or a drawing? What if the character's purportedly sixteen but looks like she's fifteen? What if she's thirteen but looks like she's seventeen? What if it's a 30-year-old woman's mind transplanted into a twelve-year-old cloned body? What if it's a shape shifter? What if it's an adult character drawn in chibi style? What if she's drawn from the back and her age is completely unclear? What if it's so dark in the drawing you can't tell what's going on? What if there are just haphazard lines on the page and you can't tell if it's even a person?
What happens when you realise that all you are actually looking at is marks on a piece of paper or patterns of light on a screen, and nobody was actually hurt to create them?
We (that is, my fellow slashdotters, not me personally) generally seem to be speaking from the perspective of CraigsList users. Apparently we enjoy the current level and quality of service provided by the site with its current focus on user satisfaction, and we fear that would diminish if the site were sold to a gigantic conglomerate which viewed user satisfaction as a byproduct of attaining their primary goal, which is money.
That was a joke, son. I'm not a Republican and I dislike being modded down for being accused of being one.
No, it wouldn't. Earth is made of rock, not superheated hydrogen. If it were possible for a solar tsunami to happen on Earth, then Earth would have to be another Sun. And obviously the Sun is not in any imminent danger of being destroyed.
Personally I think we should turn off or at least dim the Sun anyway. It is, unlike CO2, the ultimate cause of global warming.
I don't even this counts. The lab he was working in had one of their alien spacecraft - and the people he was working with had been studying said spacecraft for decades. It's not remotely far-fetched that they would have figured out how the computers worked in that time. The only problem left is the somewhat unlikely timeframe, which I think we can forgive.
Maybe we should say that the plane is being depassengered.
Don't be ridiculous, man, where would we possibly find the funding or manpower? You'd need to employ an adult full-time to look after each individual child. Or even two adults.
Well, maybe there'll be novels one day or something.