I know all about accidents, and errors in calculation. Ever wrapped and tagged someone because they misjudged an overtake? I have, and they were 17, it wasn't fun..
Anyone so incompetent as to make a trivial error like that would be unlikely to be trusted to such a complex task as inter stellar travel. Did we allow idiots to go to the moon? Or was it serious, professional pilots with years of proven track record...
Up until I was 34 I had never studied Calculus, and yet I was able, in three months to grasp gravitation and devise a model of the solar system which was accurate enough to replicate the motion of spacecraft in the solar system.
And I haven't even got a pilots licence, hell, I can't even drive a car.
You *cannot* get involved in space travel of any kind whatsoever without understating at the very least, gravitation, period. as for inter stellar travel? Well that requires considerably more understanding.
No I didn't miss your point. Mine was valid too, the human brain hasn't changed in a long time, I probably wasn't very clear, this is slashdot, after all, It's not where I do my most diligent writing.
I'm just assuming (perhaps errantly I admit) that anyone smart enough to cover the distances involved would be smart enough not to crash on arrival. Besides which, you can't tell me that an interstellar spacecraft wouldn't even leave a crater on crashing? Because I see no reports of any such thing. That's one tidy alien race...
I just don't buy the alien crashing thing. Not least because it arose not from a scientific analysis of debris after a verified impact, but from newspaper reporters and sensationalists out for a quick buck.
Conspiracy theorists have lots to say on the subject of cover up, but any alien dumb enough to crash once would crash again, so far as I can tell, and I have seen no accounts of alien crashing and wreckage appearing in the news. Therefore I go with my original idea, that its bunk.
You make a good point, and it's one I ascribed too in my youth. The idea that Aliens might watch us without interfering is something I find appealing. However without proof it remains pure conjecture, even if a good topic for philosophising after a bottle or two of Jack..
One other thing though. I disagree that SF is not a good place to look to for inspiration when pondering the existence and behaviour of Aliens. After all, it is human to wonder at the unknown. Many early SF writers who submitted stories to Hugo Gernsback where no doubt inspired to speculate on the nature of alien life. What I object to is the trumpetting of fiction as fact.
I trashed another guys mentioning of aliens adhering to a 'prime directive' in another reply. Mostly because that is a rather silly idea. Not least because character in the idealised star trek world can't even adhere to it. It's a 'three laws' type of thing, sounds nice, but in reality it is too restrictive to be practical.
Bring a 'caveman' of even tens of thousands of years ago into the present, and educate him for a couple of years, and he would be indistinguishable from a great many people alive today.
We don't evolve that fast....
Also, if you look at the failure rate of technology over time you will find that it reduces as time progresses and the technology is improved. That applies to every form of technology.
I dismiss them for one simple reason. There is not one shred of scientifically viable proof. Not one single bit.
People can wax lyrical or appeal to my compassion all they want, without proof of Aliens I will never accept that they have visited Earth.
You mention fantastic proof, but that's not what is needed. Anything at all, even the meanest verifiable piece of alien material, organic or artificial would do, no matter how small, but no such evidence has ever been produced.
And another thing 'Prime directive'? Oh come on. What the ferk would an alien Race be doing following a set of rules proposed by Gene Roddenberry to go along with a television SF series? No really, are you serious?
If you go study animals in the forest, you don't want those animals to see you. So you can observe their natural habits, and somehow I don't think you want to make proper contact with, say, mountain lions.
Even if they want to talk to us, they might just can't. We human are a lot smarter than those animals in the forests, we know many of them communicate, but we just can't exactly understand the messages.
That sir, if you are impplying an extension to extraterrestrial contact scenarios, is what we in the scientific world like to call an unprovable conjecture.
You must first provide some proof to initially support your idea, then we can talk....
One can infer from the fact that we exist that others either do, or have. If other life has existed, then it's a pretty fair bet that it will again.
If you take into account the size of the universe though it's pretty easy to see that the overwhelming majority of such life would be out of reach anyhow.
1: Any race lacking in the ability to calculate the basic math of gravitational calculations would probably never get into space in the first place.
2: Any Race unable to enter the atmosphere of a planet safely in a crewed ship would also be unlikely to be inclined to do so, or they would have gathered experience. After all, we've barely got started and already we know the problems involved in landing on different planets.
If you consider UFO to be what it actually means, that it is an object in the sky for which there is no current explanation, then that's fine. Ball Lightening was a 'UFO' till it was explained.
To believe that these unexplained things are extra terrestrials is a huge leap, and one I would tend to scoff at. Not least because the whole 'flying saucer' and 'greys' crap only appeared in the US during the early cold war, with greys not being named till later.
I will never believe that an advanced race can travel all the way across the inconceivable distance between stars, and be dumb enough to crash. Nor that they would travel that far and buzz people on their own, which is all that has supposedly happened.
Not once have they made proper contact and opened a dialogue, or established a visible presence. That's would be like Christopher Columbus landing in America, blowing a rasberry at a native American, jumping back in his ship and heading home without another word. It's just silly.
Most alien visitation theories read like children's stories, and most 'the aliens operated on me' stories read like early memories of visits to a dentist mixed with sexual fantasies.
And yet I do believe that other life exists, to do otherwise is to be a fool, given the size of the universe.
I do not, however, subscribe to the 'aliens are morons who can't steer a ship, and like to cut on us some from time to time' line of thought.
actually a lot of the early Doctor Who was written by some very talented people (eg Terry_Nation) who often worked to incredibly short deadlines, and had crap all in the way of money to back of the special effects they wanted in.
Bizarrely that produced some wonderful SF and social commentary that is still of interest to SF buffs old and new.
I don't like to say that I disapprove of special effects, I don't, and sometimes I even like the very latest thing. Let me say right off that my primary interest in SF is on the cheaper end of the scale. I'm a H2G2/pulp SF fan, I don't much go in for the extravagant approach currently being taken in SF drama (I don't want to talk about the H2G2 film, no really, I don't..).
'Star wars that was' rocked, but the new stuff is crap I feel. Not because of the special effects, but because they weren't the kind of thing you'd stick on after a night out to watch for the n'th time and quote your way through, they had no depth, you couldn't relate to the characters. That was what Star wars was about to me, pure, unadulterated escapism, masterfully done, You wanted to *be* Han Solo or Obiwan (or Luke, if you're some kinda pooftaah:). The most I got out of Phantom Menace was an urge to make JarJar real so I could kill it oh so many times.
Blade Runner was full of special effects, and that is an awesome film, so it can't be that all SFX are bad.
I think the problem isn't something you can lay at the feet of Electric Light and Magic and their ilk. Nope, the problem is that Film and television SF makers seem to have forgotten that SF is as much about social commentary as it is about lasers. My problem with adaption of old Pulp SF stories to multi million doller SFX orgies is not that they've changed the story as a rule, that can't be helped. It's that they have often removed the entire point of the story and extracted just the SF bits.
And yet I like Blade runner. Why is that? Because while they almost entirely changed the story, they left the underlying point, the way in which man might treat a self aware creation that does not do as it is told, intact, and expressed it using the same general idea but with some innovative alteration to the core story.
I'm not against all new SF. I liked Stargate, and I do enjoy a bit of star trek on the side from time to time. That said, my favorite Stargate Episode is 'Window of Opportunity', not some of the later SFX crazy episodes.
I wait hopefully for a new SF film that can be truly considered a classic, and has all the very latest SFX bells and whistles. I'm sure it will happen eventually.
This woman basically just kicked them in the nuts, hard. Good for her. Just like a good old fashioned kick in the nuts, you don't feel the 'real' pain immediately, for the benefit of those without nuts or experience in having them kicked
Little too much detail on your final point there bud
Hmm, lets be honest now, you mean that in a century they might just get half of their country back from the people who took it from them.
However, Assuming this is to make a fundamental mistake due to the proximity of events.
While we today have a supposedly decent set of moral values (I have some doubts given our performance in the middle east for the last 90 years), it is a mistake to apply those morals to our predecessors. This may not be strictly PC, but the norm in the past was to kill people who had something you wanted and take it, there was no moral crisis. We pretend that this is no longer the case, but human nature can't change that fast. Sad to say the current middle east crisis has more to do with greed for resources then so called humanitarian concerns.
Had the total conquest of America occurred in ancient times there would have been two fundamental differences.
- The native population would either have been destroyed or assimilated, so their culture would be gone. - No-one but historians would care about the details, which would come solely from the victor.
Hundreds of installs? You mean in an IT environment with mainly smiler hardware doing a standard install? If you don't then you must be the worlds richest home user to own that many machines.
People who have to re-install often because windows is fundamentally unstable when its being asked to do a lot *do* tend to have problems. Gamers do find they have to re-install more often I find, but then they are pounding their machines a lot.
My IT experience was heavily concerned with fixing borked windows and I saw a fair few crashes during installs.
To be fair I have on linux too, it's a common problem, installing an OS is tricky. Automated installs just mean that you have less to do while you wait to see if it will work.
It is villified because unlike most other such conquests
1: Indians are still around in recognisable form, their culture is recovering. 2: You didn't wipe them out completelly. 3: It didn't happen that long ago 4: You made all those dumb 'indians are bad guys' films that actually end up revealing the conptempt the white european settlers had for the native population.
Probably point 4 would be irrelevent if point 3 wasn't there.
The English did a far worse job on the Aborigines of Australia. We have the advantage that much of what happened is so far back that it's no interesting, and it all happened a long way from prying eyes.
wouldn't work. Erased logs would just mean more costs as the RIAA dragged you through a process of trying to identify the people concerned.
Since the main aim here is to force universities to police their students of behalf of the RIAA, this would suit the RIAA just fine. They make your life difficult until to close down campus file sharers.
Might there not be a certain public image aspect to this?
The university doesn't want to be seen as being willing to hand over its students for prosecution, because this might impact their admission rates. Being tainted by the RIAAs public image can't be good.
Just speculation, but if they back out of the whole process then they can say it's none of their concern. After all, are universities asked to pass on parking fines?
Slashdot Mirror
oh come on.
I know all about accidents, and errors in calculation. Ever wrapped and tagged someone because they misjudged an overtake? I have, and they were 17, it wasn't fun..
Anyone so incompetent as to make a trivial error like that would be unlikely to be trusted to such a complex task as inter stellar travel. Did we allow idiots to go to the moon? Or was it serious, professional pilots with years of proven track record...
Ok then, let me give you an example.
Up until I was 34 I had never studied Calculus, and yet I was able, in three months to grasp gravitation and devise a model of the solar system which was accurate enough to replicate the motion of spacecraft in the solar system.
And I haven't even got a pilots licence, hell, I can't even drive a car.
You *cannot* get involved in space travel of any kind whatsoever without understating at the very least, gravitation, period. as for inter stellar travel? Well that requires considerably more understanding.
No I didn't miss your point. Mine was valid too, the human brain hasn't changed in a long time, I probably wasn't very clear, this is slashdot, after all, It's not where I do my most diligent writing.
I'm just assuming (perhaps errantly I admit) that anyone smart enough to cover the distances involved would be smart enough not to crash on arrival. Besides which, you can't tell me that an interstellar spacecraft wouldn't even leave a crater on crashing? Because I see no reports of any such thing. That's one tidy alien race...
I just don't buy the alien crashing thing. Not least because it arose not from a scientific analysis of debris after a verified impact, but from newspaper reporters and sensationalists out for a quick buck.
Conspiracy theorists have lots to say on the subject of cover up, but any alien dumb enough to crash once would crash again, so far as I can tell, and I have seen no accounts of alien crashing and wreckage appearing in the news. Therefore I go with my original idea, that its bunk.
You make a good point, and it's one I ascribed too in my youth. The idea that Aliens might watch us without interfering is something I find appealing. However without proof it remains pure conjecture, even if a good topic for philosophising after a bottle or two of Jack..
One other thing though. I disagree that SF is not a good place to look to for inspiration when pondering the existence and behaviour of Aliens. After all, it is human to wonder at the unknown. Many early SF writers who submitted stories to Hugo Gernsback where no doubt inspired to speculate on the nature of alien life. What I object to is the trumpetting of fiction as fact.
I trashed another guys mentioning of aliens adhering to a 'prime directive' in another reply. Mostly because that is a rather silly idea. Not least because character in the idealised star trek world can't even adhere to it. It's a 'three laws' type of thing, sounds nice, but in reality it is too restrictive to be practical.
Bring a 'caveman' of even tens of thousands of years ago into the present, and educate him for a couple of years, and he would be indistinguishable from a great many people alive today.
We don't evolve that fast....
Also, if you look at the failure rate of technology over time you will find that it reduces as time progresses and the technology is improved. That applies to every form of technology.
I dismiss them for one simple reason. There is not one shred of scientifically viable proof. Not one single bit.
People can wax lyrical or appeal to my compassion all they want, without proof of Aliens I will never accept that they have visited Earth.
You mention fantastic proof, but that's not what is needed. Anything at all, even the meanest verifiable piece of alien material, organic or artificial would do, no matter how small, but no such evidence has ever been produced.
And another thing 'Prime directive'? Oh come on. What the ferk would an alien Race be doing following a set of rules proposed by Gene Roddenberry to go along with a television SF series? No really, are you serious?
If you go study animals in the forest, you don't want those animals to see you. So you can observe their natural habits, and somehow I don't think you want to make proper contact with, say, mountain lions.
Even if they want to talk to us, they might just can't. We human are a lot smarter than those animals in the forests, we know many of them communicate, but we just can't exactly understand the messages.
That sir, if you are impplying an extension to extraterrestrial contact scenarios, is what we in the scientific world like to call an unprovable conjecture.
You must first provide some proof to initially support your idea, then we can talk....
One can infer from the fact that we exist that others either do, or have. If other life has existed, then it's a pretty fair bet that it will again.
If you take into account the size of the universe though it's pretty easy to see that the overwhelming majority of such life would be out of reach anyhow.
1: Any race lacking in the ability to calculate the basic math of gravitational calculations would probably never get into space in the first place.
2: Any Race unable to enter the atmosphere of a planet safely in a crewed ship would also be unlikely to be inclined to do so, or they would have gathered experience. After all, we've barely got started and already we know the problems involved in landing on different planets.
Give aliens a little credit...
I wasn't sure if his work was actually broadcast, it's the only area of his work I've never looked into.
Anyway, I still haven't forgiven him for dying without finishing Salmon of Doubt [sob]
[koff] Well, being British I am given to ignore that particular event [koff]
If you consider UFO to be what it actually means, that it is an object in the sky for which there is no current explanation, then that's fine. Ball Lightening was a 'UFO' till it was explained.
To believe that these unexplained things are extra terrestrials is a huge leap, and one I would tend to scoff at. Not least because the whole 'flying saucer' and 'greys' crap only appeared in the US during the early cold war, with greys not being named till later.
I will never believe that an advanced race can travel all the way across the inconceivable distance between stars, and be dumb enough to crash. Nor that they would travel that far and buzz people on their own, which is all that has supposedly happened.
Not once have they made proper contact and opened a dialogue, or established a visible presence. That's would be like Christopher Columbus landing in America, blowing a rasberry at a native American, jumping back in his ship and heading home without another word. It's just silly.
Most alien visitation theories read like children's stories, and most 'the aliens operated on me' stories read like early memories of visits to a dentist mixed with sexual fantasies.
And yet I do believe that other life exists, to do otherwise is to be a fool, given the size of the universe.
I do not, however, subscribe to the 'aliens are morons who can't steer a ship, and like to cut on us some from time to time' line of thought.
actually a lot of the early Doctor Who was written by some very talented people (eg Terry_Nation) who often worked to incredibly short deadlines, and had crap all in the way of money to back of the special effects they wanted in.
:). The most I got out of Phantom Menace was an urge to make JarJar real so I could kill it oh so many times.
Bizarrely that produced some wonderful SF and social commentary that is still of interest to SF buffs old and new.
I don't like to say that I disapprove of special effects, I don't, and sometimes I even like the very latest thing. Let me say right off that my primary interest in SF is on the cheaper end of the scale. I'm a H2G2/pulp SF fan, I don't much go in for the extravagant approach currently being taken in SF drama (I don't want to talk about the H2G2 film, no really, I don't..).
'Star wars that was' rocked, but the new stuff is crap I feel. Not because of the special effects, but because they weren't the kind of thing you'd stick on after a night out to watch for the n'th time and quote your way through, they had no depth, you couldn't relate to the characters. That was what Star wars was about to me, pure, unadulterated escapism, masterfully done, You wanted to *be* Han Solo or Obiwan (or Luke, if you're some kinda pooftaah
Blade Runner was full of special effects, and that is an awesome film, so it can't be that all SFX are bad.
I think the problem isn't something you can lay at the feet of Electric Light and Magic and their ilk. Nope, the problem is that Film and television SF makers seem to have forgotten that SF is as much about social commentary as it is about lasers. My problem with adaption of old Pulp SF stories to multi million doller SFX orgies is not that they've changed the story as a rule, that can't be helped. It's that they have often removed the entire point of the story and extracted just the SF bits.
And yet I like Blade runner. Why is that? Because while they almost entirely changed the story, they left the underlying point, the way in which man might treat a self aware creation that does not do as it is told, intact, and expressed it using the same general idea but with some innovative alteration to the core story.
I'm not against all new SF. I liked Stargate, and I do enjoy a bit of star trek on the side from time to time. That said, my favorite Stargate Episode is 'Window of Opportunity', not some of the later SFX crazy episodes.
I wait hopefully for a new SF film that can be truly considered a classic, and has all the very latest SFX bells and whistles. I'm sure it will happen eventually.
This woman basically just kicked them in the nuts, hard. Good for her. Just like a good old fashioned kick in the nuts, you don't feel the 'real' pain immediately, for the benefit of those without nuts or experience in having them kicked
Little too much detail on your final point there bud
Has there ever been a time when total free speech has existed in America? I am thinking of all members of the population here, not just the whites.
The thought occurs that it has not ever covered the entire population, just bits of it.
oh come on. This is slashdot.
Protocol requires that I leap to the wrong conclusion immediately and rant on about that whilst also having a go at Microsoft.
Do you know nothing?
Hmm, lets be honest now, you mean that in a century they might just get half of their country back from the people who took it from them.
However, Assuming this is to make a fundamental mistake due to the proximity of events.
While we today have a supposedly decent set of moral values (I have some doubts given our performance in the middle east for the last 90 years), it is a mistake to apply those morals to our predecessors. This may not be strictly PC, but the norm in the past was to kill people who had something you wanted and take it, there was no moral crisis. We pretend that this is no longer the case, but human nature can't change that fast. Sad to say the current middle east crisis has more to do with greed for resources then so called humanitarian concerns.
Had the total conquest of America occurred in ancient times there would have been two fundamental differences.
- The native population would either have been destroyed or assimilated, so their culture would be gone.
- No-one but historians would care about the details, which would come solely from the victor.
Depends what you're actually doing.
Hundreds of installs? You mean in an IT environment with mainly smiler hardware doing a standard install? If you don't then you must be the worlds richest home user to own that many machines.
People who have to re-install often because windows is fundamentally unstable when its being asked to do a lot *do* tend to have problems. Gamers do find they have to re-install more often I find, but then they are pounding their machines a lot.
My IT experience was heavily concerned with fixing borked windows and I saw a fair few crashes during installs.
To be fair I have on linux too, it's a common problem, installing an OS is tricky. Automated installs just mean that you have less to do while you wait to see if it will work.
Buy a Mac.
Seriously, sounds like that's more what you need.
It is villified because unlike most other such conquests
1: Indians are still around in recognisable form, their culture is recovering.
2: You didn't wipe them out completelly.
3: It didn't happen that long ago
4: You made all those dumb 'indians are bad guys' films that actually end up revealing the conptempt the white european settlers had for the native population.
Probably point 4 would be irrelevent if point 3 wasn't there.
The English did a far worse job on the Aborigines of Australia. We have the advantage that much of what happened is so far back that it's no interesting, and it all happened a long way from prying eyes.
Well I've taught Lex and Yacc, and it confuses me...
How they managed to come up with that stuff still amazes me.
wouldn't work. Erased logs would just mean more costs as the RIAA dragged you through a process of trying to identify the people concerned.
Since the main aim here is to force universities to police their students of behalf of the RIAA, this would suit the RIAA just fine. They make your life difficult until to close down campus file sharers.
Might there not be a certain public image aspect to this?
The university doesn't want to be seen as being willing to hand over its students for prosecution, because this might impact their admission rates. Being tainted by the RIAAs public image can't be good.
Just speculation, but if they back out of the whole process then they can say it's none of their concern. After all, are universities asked to pass on parking fines?
That happened in Alcan Fabrications (banbury) in the late 1970's.
They had a fancy nitrogen based system to put out fires, and it was tripped by accident, almost doing for a few of their technical bods.
the slightest impact from something dropped or moved by an astronout would cause a cloud of dust that could be a real pain. Much better to seal it