When the term Earth-like is used, it usually means 'rocky planet of approximately the same mass'.
Whether it's the right temperature, has an atmosphere, is in a 'safe' orbit with theoretically tolerable levels of radiation and reasonable temperature variation, tidally locked, etc... all more or less up for grabs depending on who offered the quote and who is reporting it.
I expect the term will end up being more specific as we learn of more exoplanets and improve our ability to determine their characteristics.
>It gets better when you consider 100,1000, 10,000 years ago how much we changed. A cell phone would be magic to those just 100 years ago, and amazing tech to those of 75 years ago. You would be burned alive for having one in the 16 and 1700's
Technological improvements can't overcome the energy required to move a given mass a given distance within a given time. The scale of space is such that sending anything physical that could be expected to survive the journey might not be practical.
We're a bit better off in terms of photon - we can certainly glean some interesting information by just looking up at the sky... but while we may one day get a detailed spectroscopic analysis of an Earth-like world with every sign that it hosts life... we won't KNOW, unless that life is communicating with us. And, again given the distances involved, a laser beam powerful enough to overcome background noise at the destination is probably still not worth it. After all, you don't share a language, and you don't even know if they have the appropriate equipment to receive your signal, if they're looking for it or if 'they' even exist. And even if all that works out, you're going to wait a LONG time for a response.
I just don't see us spending a significant portion of global productivity on flashing a dim light at a far away world in the hopes there might be someone there able to see it and willing to go to a similar effort to send a signal back that would probably arrive long after everyone involved in the original project had died of old age.
>we still don't know the answer to Fermi's paradox.
"Space is big. Really big. You just wonâ(TM)t believe how vastly hugely mindbogglingly big it is. I mean you may think itâ(TM)s a long way down the road to the chemistâ(TM)s, but thatâ(TM)s just peanuts to space." - The Hitchhikerâ(TM)s Guide To The Galaxy
I know some space enthusiasts talk about even a single civilization sending out a Von Neumann probe resulting in the whole galaxy being blanketed in a few hundred million years... but space is big, hostile, slow to traverse, and resources are really tough to get access to.
It's very much possible that there's no single answer to the Fermi Paradox, but it's a little bit of all the factors. The base raw materials for life are likely extremely common (similar clouds of gas collapsing into similar systems), but life may be rare and I would expect complex life building technologically advanced space-faring (or even communicating) civilizations to be a fraction of those.
Combine the likely rarity of intelligent life with the massive distances (involving massive time delays)... and you can get a lot of lonely species all thinking there's nobody else out there simply because they can't communicate with each other in any practical way.
So far as I know, in Canada and the USA there's already e911, which is a system whereby the cell phone's GPS is turned on, regardless of the user's set preferences, and a GPS fix is sent to the 911 call center by the mobile service provider.
At least in Canada, this was mandated by law for all new phones (because the USA was doing it anyway, and we're effectively a sub-market of the USA so we were getting it anyway). It's also mandated in Canada that the phone companies pass along the e911 data, and that 911 call centers be set up to accept it... though I believe there are/were plenty of delays by both in implementing.
I'm somewhat confused as to whether AML is a different name for e911, or if it's an additional system that uses WiFi maps to enhance location services. I suspect the latter is the case, and Apple already has e911 which is, as far as I know, required by law, and they simply don't want to have to worry about paying Google for a good map of known WAPs. (Because you know Google would be the one that knows every WAP by SID and lat/long)
>Either way if you actually look at the long term it will be very cold indeed,
Good point... but temperature is more or less relative, right? So even if the eventual state of the universe is a near-0K homogeneous quantum foam everything should be 'lukewarm', because nothing will be relatively hot or relatively cold.
>The ever-increasing output of our parent star says you're wrong.
The logical 'bet' is 100% on 'planet toasted to a crisp', though I think there's still some debate as to whether it will actually be absorbed by the Sun or not.
Actually, 'tit-for-tat' turns out to be a deeply instinctual primate behaviour.
In fact, it's more like 'two tits per tat'. We like to punish people who we view as having violated the perceived rules, even at our own expense.
So... having been used and abused by media for as long as we can recall, lots of us have no qualms at all about stealing even if we suspected it would drive the big content producers to bankruptcy. We'd probably celebrate.
Actually, no. And it has nothing to do with sex - a big guy beating a small one is still wrong.
I'm not saying you shouldn't defend yourself, but if you want to be a fully civilized human being you use the minimum force required to nullify the threat. In extreme cases that means killing them, but in the typical situation you're probably thinking of, holding them until the cops arrive is the correct choice.
Anything else is just macho bullshit, and you ought to aspire to be better than that.
I've never been privy to the relevant conversations, but my understanding is the girls are worse slut-shamers than the guys.
That makes more sense!at least, since the girls who want relationships without having to be what would be to them 'overly sexual' would surely resent other girls setting the bar too high. Then again, I get the feeling a lot of young women like to be socially vicious just for practice...
I'm probably crazy, but I think maybe the world would be a better place if the response was, "That girl was an enthusistic partner, shame the guy turned out to be an asshole".
Most of us have sex. Most of us appreciate a willing, enthusiastic partner we feel we can trust. Why do so many look down on the woman with cum on her face instead of the dick that put it there?
As a rebuttal of my point, your post is worthless.
You generalize, assume, and insult because you have no valid argument to work with. Perhaps you should just have posted the most likely truth, "I don't care about facts, I have my beliefs and want you all punished for not believing the same as I do".
Or... it's annoying and rage-inducing to rational people and we're letting off steam.
You're not drawing a logical conclusion from the evidence you cite. You're assuming a link without proof because it supports your assumptions, and that's weak thinking.
And sometimes you just don't have the social standing of the person co-opting your idea, so you're ignored and they get away with improving their position on someone else's effort.
Which sucks, but has nothing to do with your genitals.
Until we have general purpose robots with good AI, there will be some manual jobs left.
Construction still involves a lot of heavy lifting that most women don't have the strength for, which is why they are most often holding the signs up to control traffic. Or look at nurses and guess at who gets to deal with the heavy or troublesome patients.
Technology, despite what you may read on Slashdot and similar sites, is nowhere near rendering the differences between the sexes irrelevant, and it's even further from levelling the playing field with regards to the mental ones (and I have a feeling that once it does, ALL humans will be redundant).
>Where are the programs to increase the male representation in the fields of Veterinary / Teaching or Child Care workers? And we clearly need programs to get more women into logging, garbage collection and construction too.
There are lots of male vets... it's the vet assistant jobs that have a female hiring bias. For child care workers it's assumed men are only there to molest the kids (one reason I turned down that career option when younger... the others being I was already getting paid more money than an ECE, and that I'm not keen on changing diapers).
For something that takes a bit of thinking to identify the injustice: with manual labour jobs, the women generally get the light work because they don't have testosterone giving them bigger muscles. On the surface that sounds like a fair division, right? Most women *can't* do the work, so they can take over the physically less demanding tasks and free up the men for the more demanding tasks. Now think about that: the more physically demanding tasks are also going to be the more dangerous ones, with greater risk of serious injury. So what you're doing is increasing the odds of a man getting injured, and simultaneously removing the easier jobs an injured man might take while recovering from injury (or be permanently assigned to if permanently injured, or perhaps just getting old...). Is that fair when you consider the whole picture? And if you agree there's a problem there... just try coming up with a fair solution to it. I'm fairly confident there isn't one to be found.
I get where the rage comes from (because if you think there isn't HR-approved, SJW-approved injustice in a lot of corporate environments... well, actually, you're probably not worth talking to), but the retaliatory ignorance is always amazing.
I mean, how do you get from "HR did a 'diversity' hire and is paying someone based on their sex/gender/sexual orientation/ethnicity/whatever and I resent that as someone who had to earn their spot" to "All people of that sex/gender/sexual orientation/ethnicity/whatever are my inferiors and their presence is an affront not to be tolerated"?
Then again, the response to the angry ignorant outburst is almost always over the top condescending propaganda that just stirs more rage.
FFS, it's like nobody can accept that people with different characteristics can have slightly differing other characteristics that result in different Bell curves for the second characteristic based on that first characteristic. Nope, everybody starts shouting either "We're all the exactly same, accept it!" or "We're all absolutely different, and everyone else is in a lesser class as a result".
Nuke the site from orbit, it's the only way to be sure.
I've never been much of a drinker, and I would absolutely give up the few social drinks I have every year in return for otherwise safe male contraception. Hormone-based birth control gets riskier for women as they get older, and around 35 doctors start advising you might want to try something else. As a middle-aged man I'd be fine taking a pill so women don't have to.
And though I could live without it, there's also the possibility (I'm ignorant of the chemistry involved, so until someone who knows advises otherwise, to ME it's a possibility) of a secondary pill to aid in the metabolizing of alcohol that you could take on occasion.
After all, the effect on sperm wouldn't be instantly reversed, but if you could get flushed with the required ingredients to assist in breaking down alcohol safely, that could work while you were drinking. In effect, temporarily neutralize the pill for a short enough period that it doesn't significantly degrade the contraceptive function.
Like you, I'm a bit surprised that they ignored the non-drinker (or willing to be a non-drinker) market. Must be the evil beer lobby pulling strings!
Go save the world, then. There are a lot of people who don't have a clean water supply, yet you're likely getting processed municipal water from your tap when you're not drinking bottled water while making ignorant and sarcastic comments on the Internet.
It'd be just AWESOME if you got off your ass and made sure everyone on the planet had safe water before you next twist that tap for yourself.
Does not permit auto-play videos. Has per-tab audio muting (and is muted by default). Does not permit cross-site content by default Supports ad blocking (esp. pop-ups and -unders), script blocking, tracker blocking, and includes anti-fingerprinting obfuscation. Does not hide the cache files from me. Has a download manager that will auto-resume on failure. And while I have the bandwidth to handle it... I don't want my browser downloading videos and animations until I decide I want them. Don't waste my bits!
Right now, Firefox does most of that 99% of the time for me with a few select add ons installed. The only reason I have Chrome installed is that occasionally I like to use Google Maps 3D, and my kids' school uses Google Docs, Sheets, and Slides for homework.
I get the sense that life's pretty cheap in India, given how tolerant they are of pollution and overcrowding.
I can't imagine my country allowing a lake to get so polluted it could catch fire like Bellandur Lake, for instance. Or have a river like the Ganges that in places seems to be more garbage than water.
What's a little CO2 emission compared to those much more immediate and obvious symptoms of pretty much unchecked pollution?
Slashdot Mirror
When the term Earth-like is used, it usually means 'rocky planet of approximately the same mass'.
Whether it's the right temperature, has an atmosphere, is in a 'safe' orbit with theoretically tolerable levels of radiation and reasonable temperature variation, tidally locked, etc... all more or less up for grabs depending on who offered the quote and who is reporting it.
I expect the term will end up being more specific as we learn of more exoplanets and improve our ability to determine their characteristics.
>It gets better when you consider 100 ,1000, 10,000 years ago how much we changed. A cell phone would be magic to those just 100 years ago, and amazing tech to those of 75 years ago. You would be burned alive for having one in the 16 and 1700's
Technological improvements can't overcome the energy required to move a given mass a given distance within a given time. The scale of space is such that sending anything physical that could be expected to survive the journey might not be practical.
We're a bit better off in terms of photon - we can certainly glean some interesting information by just looking up at the sky... but while we may one day get a detailed spectroscopic analysis of an Earth-like world with every sign that it hosts life... we won't KNOW, unless that life is communicating with us. And, again given the distances involved, a laser beam powerful enough to overcome background noise at the destination is probably still not worth it. After all, you don't share a language, and you don't even know if they have the appropriate equipment to receive your signal, if they're looking for it or if 'they' even exist. And even if all that works out, you're going to wait a LONG time for a response.
I just don't see us spending a significant portion of global productivity on flashing a dim light at a far away world in the hopes there might be someone there able to see it and willing to go to a similar effort to send a signal back that would probably arrive long after everyone involved in the original project had died of old age.
>we still don't know the answer to Fermi's paradox.
"Space is big. Really big. You just wonâ(TM)t believe how vastly hugely mindbogglingly big it is. I mean you may think itâ(TM)s a long way down the road to the chemistâ(TM)s, but thatâ(TM)s just peanuts to space." - The Hitchhikerâ(TM)s Guide To The Galaxy
I know some space enthusiasts talk about even a single civilization sending out a Von Neumann probe resulting in the whole galaxy being blanketed in a few hundred million years... but space is big, hostile, slow to traverse, and resources are really tough to get access to.
It's very much possible that there's no single answer to the Fermi Paradox, but it's a little bit of all the factors. The base raw materials for life are likely extremely common (similar clouds of gas collapsing into similar systems), but life may be rare and I would expect complex life building technologically advanced space-faring (or even communicating) civilizations to be a fraction of those.
Combine the likely rarity of intelligent life with the massive distances (involving massive time delays)... and you can get a lot of lonely species all thinking there's nobody else out there simply because they can't communicate with each other in any practical way.
So far as I know, in Canada and the USA there's already e911, which is a system whereby the cell phone's GPS is turned on, regardless of the user's set preferences, and a GPS fix is sent to the 911 call center by the mobile service provider.
At least in Canada, this was mandated by law for all new phones (because the USA was doing it anyway, and we're effectively a sub-market of the USA so we were getting it anyway). It's also mandated in Canada that the phone companies pass along the e911 data, and that 911 call centers be set up to accept it... though I believe there are/were plenty of delays by both in implementing.
I'm somewhat confused as to whether AML is a different name for e911, or if it's an additional system that uses WiFi maps to enhance location services. I suspect the latter is the case, and Apple already has e911 which is, as far as I know, required by law, and they simply don't want to have to worry about paying Google for a good map of known WAPs. (Because you know Google would be the one that knows every WAP by SID and lat/long)
>Either way if you actually look at the long term it will be very cold indeed,
Good point... but temperature is more or less relative, right? So even if the eventual state of the universe is a near-0K homogeneous quantum foam everything should be 'lukewarm', because nothing will be relatively hot or relatively cold.
>The ever-increasing output of our parent star says you're wrong.
The logical 'bet' is 100% on 'planet toasted to a crisp', though I think there's still some debate as to whether it will actually be absorbed by the Sun or not.
Actually, 'tit-for-tat' turns out to be a deeply instinctual primate behaviour.
In fact, it's more like 'two tits per tat'. We like to punish people who we view as having violated the perceived rules, even at our own expense.
So... having been used and abused by media for as long as we can recall, lots of us have no qualms at all about stealing even if we suspected it would drive the big content producers to bankruptcy. We'd probably celebrate.
Actually, no. And it has nothing to do with sex - a big guy beating a small one is still wrong.
I'm not saying you shouldn't defend yourself, but if you want to be a fully civilized human being you use the minimum force required to nullify the threat. In extreme cases that means killing them, but in the typical situation you're probably thinking of, holding them until the cops arrive is the correct choice.
Anything else is just macho bullshit, and you ought to aspire to be better than that.
I've never been privy to the relevant conversations, but my understanding is the girls are worse slut-shamers than the guys.
That makes more sense!at least, since the girls who want relationships without having to be what would be to them 'overly sexual' would surely resent other girls setting the bar too high. Then again, I get the feeling a lot of young women like to be socially vicious just for practice...
Even if true, revenge porn isn't the answer, it's still a dick move.
I'm probably crazy, but I think maybe the world would be a better place if the response was, "That girl was an enthusistic partner, shame the guy turned out to be an asshole".
Most of us have sex. Most of us appreciate a willing, enthusiastic partner we feel we can trust. Why do so many look down on the woman with cum on her face instead of the dick that put it there?
As a rebuttal of my point, your post is worthless.
You generalize, assume, and insult because you have no valid argument to work with. Perhaps you should just have posted the most likely truth, "I don't care about facts, I have my beliefs and want you all punished for not believing the same as I do".
Or... it's annoying and rage-inducing to rational people and we're letting off steam.
You're not drawing a logical conclusion from the evidence you cite. You're assuming a link without proof because it supports your assumptions, and that's weak thinking.
And sometimes you just don't have the social standing of the person co-opting your idea, so you're ignored and they get away with improving their position on someone else's effort.
Which sucks, but has nothing to do with your genitals.
>We already have humans for that
There are limits to overclocking humans, and they have an unbelievably high percentage of downtime combined with low overall reliability.
>How about doing things humans cannot do?
This is doing things humans do, but more quickly and accurately, with a lower TCO.
I appear to have accidentally a word.
I believe the missing word in my previous post is 'physical'. Place it where you feel it is most needed.
Until we have general purpose robots with good AI, there will be some manual jobs left.
Construction still involves a lot of heavy lifting that most women don't have the strength for, which is why they are most often holding the signs up to control traffic. Or look at nurses and guess at who gets to deal with the heavy or troublesome patients.
Technology, despite what you may read on Slashdot and similar sites, is nowhere near rendering the differences between the sexes irrelevant, and it's even further from levelling the playing field with regards to the mental ones (and I have a feeling that once it does, ALL humans will be redundant).
>Where are the programs to increase the male representation in the fields of Veterinary / Teaching or Child Care workers? And we clearly need programs to get more women into logging, garbage collection and construction too.
There are lots of male vets... it's the vet assistant jobs that have a female hiring bias. For child care workers it's assumed men are only there to molest the kids (one reason I turned down that career option when younger... the others being I was already getting paid more money than an ECE, and that I'm not keen on changing diapers).
For something that takes a bit of thinking to identify the injustice: with manual labour jobs, the women generally get the light work because they don't have testosterone giving them bigger muscles. On the surface that sounds like a fair division, right? Most women *can't* do the work, so they can take over the physically less demanding tasks and free up the men for the more demanding tasks. Now think about that: the more physically demanding tasks are also going to be the more dangerous ones, with greater risk of serious injury. So what you're doing is increasing the odds of a man getting injured, and simultaneously removing the easier jobs an injured man might take while recovering from injury (or be permanently assigned to if permanently injured, or perhaps just getting old...). Is that fair when you consider the whole picture? And if you agree there's a problem there... just try coming up with a fair solution to it. I'm fairly confident there isn't one to be found.
I get where the rage comes from (because if you think there isn't HR-approved, SJW-approved injustice in a lot of corporate environments... well, actually, you're probably not worth talking to), but the retaliatory ignorance is always amazing.
I mean, how do you get from "HR did a 'diversity' hire and is paying someone based on their sex/gender/sexual orientation/ethnicity/whatever and I resent that as someone who had to earn their spot" to "All people of that sex/gender/sexual orientation/ethnicity/whatever are my inferiors and their presence is an affront not to be tolerated"?
Then again, the response to the angry ignorant outburst is almost always over the top condescending propaganda that just stirs more rage.
FFS, it's like nobody can accept that people with different characteristics can have slightly differing other characteristics that result in different Bell curves for the second characteristic based on that first characteristic. Nope, everybody starts shouting either "We're all the exactly same, accept it!" or "We're all absolutely different, and everyone else is in a lesser class as a result".
Nuke the site from orbit, it's the only way to be sure.
I've never been much of a drinker, and I would absolutely give up the few social drinks I have every year in return for otherwise safe male contraception. Hormone-based birth control gets riskier for women as they get older, and around 35 doctors start advising you might want to try something else. As a middle-aged man I'd be fine taking a pill so women don't have to.
And though I could live without it, there's also the possibility (I'm ignorant of the chemistry involved, so until someone who knows advises otherwise, to ME it's a possibility) of a secondary pill to aid in the metabolizing of alcohol that you could take on occasion.
After all, the effect on sperm wouldn't be instantly reversed, but if you could get flushed with the required ingredients to assist in breaking down alcohol safely, that could work while you were drinking. In effect, temporarily neutralize the pill for a short enough period that it doesn't significantly degrade the contraceptive function.
Like you, I'm a bit surprised that they ignored the non-drinker (or willing to be a non-drinker) market. Must be the evil beer lobby pulling strings!
Hey look, the guy too busy being an arrogant ass to get the point!
ANYONE can get genetic modifications, assuming they have access to a lab and supplies.
Reliable safe drinking water is only available to portions of the industrialized world and there's no way around that.
Maybe if you weren't so focused on your own hubris, you'd get into less idiotic arguments via misunderstanding.
You know, and GET THE FUCKING POINT that life is unfair, and that's not a good reason to deny your children the best you can give them.
I give my kids clean water when there are kids who go without, I'd give them gene therapy despite there being kids who will go without.
Moron.
Go save the world, then. There are a lot of people who don't have a clean water supply, yet you're likely getting processed municipal water from your tap when you're not drinking bottled water while making ignorant and sarcastic comments on the Internet.
It'd be just AWESOME if you got off your ass and made sure everyone on the planet had safe water before you next twist that tap for yourself.
>Firefox has this covered, by dropping non-PulseAudio sound.
I solved that by not upgrading. I suppose I'll have to make a choice some day when my current setup fails me... but I'm not there yet.
Does not permit auto-play videos.
Has per-tab audio muting (and is muted by default).
Does not permit cross-site content by default
Supports ad blocking (esp. pop-ups and -unders), script blocking, tracker blocking, and includes anti-fingerprinting obfuscation.
Does not hide the cache files from me.
Has a download manager that will auto-resume on failure.
And while I have the bandwidth to handle it... I don't want my browser downloading videos and animations until I decide I want them. Don't waste my bits!
Right now, Firefox does most of that 99% of the time for me with a few select add ons installed. The only reason I have Chrome installed is that occasionally I like to use Google Maps 3D, and my kids' school uses Google Docs, Sheets, and Slides for homework.
I get the sense that life's pretty cheap in India, given how tolerant they are of pollution and overcrowding.
I can't imagine my country allowing a lake to get so polluted it could catch fire like Bellandur Lake, for instance. Or have a river like the Ganges that in places seems to be more garbage than water.
What's a little CO2 emission compared to those much more immediate and obvious symptoms of pretty much unchecked pollution?