Apple doesn't own Motorola. Motorola's bottom line doesn't accrue anywhere on Apple's balance sheet, so they really didn't like the idea of losing sales to them. If Apple bought Palm, however, that would probably not be seen as a threat as it's likely they would view the success of one Apple division as not really a problem for Apple. That's my rudimentary understanding of corporate finance.:-)
Given that dying tends to be a side-effect of AIDS, what drug effects would one really be worried about? I never understood this whole neurotic mentality of overtesting drugs. The testing is often wrong (Vioxx?) and even when it works it probably kills far more people than it saves. The libertarian in me hates to see government regulation kill people, and the liberal in me hates to see people die for no reason and the conservative in me hates to see our economy hurt by having drug costs artificially inflated by beaurocrats.
It's pompous if I'm wrong. Google around a bit and you'll see I'm not. (Also, it's quite pompous to use a sic quote for a clear typo.] The WSJ, in particular, recently had a very good article on hybrids. It's all marketing. What a lot of people fail to realize is that the ONLY way a hybrid gains efficiency is when recovering power from braking, and perhaps at idle. Other than that, it's just a heavier gas-powered car. Honda has made small conventional cars for YEARS that have much better mileage than the Prius. My turbo-diesel Jetta gets about 49 MPG. So, I don't think it's going too far to say that the people who buy Prii for the fuel economy are kind of clueless. They are paying a lot of money, society is paying some, and their fuel consumption would be better with much cheaper, same-size cars. Why do we have hybrids? Marketing and clueless consumers.
Would anybody buy a car marketing as simply recovering power from braking? Hell no. But call it a "hybrid," thereby alluding to the (incorrect) notion that the car is alternatively powered, and yuppies suck it up.
You're wrong about the economy marketing. Hybrids tend to be expensive, government handouts notwithstandings. The target audience of the first hybrids (and current ones, too) were rich white ex-hippies who feel guilty about driving, but who are too misinformed and ignorant1 to realize a hybrid does nothing for mother nature, unless you drive it in the city. And if you drive to work in a city, you're a problem no matter what you drive.
It's all just marketing. When our environmental policy is determined by car manufacturers, you know we're in big trouble. The only reason hybrids are considered worth a damn is marketing.
Oh yeah, I forgot about the search appliance they sell. I'm pretty sure it's a negligable percentage of their profits, which are dominated by online advertising.
My assumption was that the money going to the Gates Foundation came directly from Bill's personal MS stock holdings, at least in majority, which would mean he actually gave quite a bit of his personal wealth. However, I'm not sure about that.
About the other stuff (bundling, upgrades, etc.) my personal feeling (and it's just that) is that recently such things are simply the work of Balmer and his minions. Bill's just a geek who works on the software at this point, and the fact that that is how he wants it says something.
Anyway, everything I said was simply about Gates. MS, as a company, is still on my evil list, too. I just think Gates is no longer responsible (at least in a decision-making sense) for the corporate maneuverings of MS. I think he's grown tired trying to take over the world is now more interested in seeing how he can change it for the better. Finally, you have to admit that MS seems to be less evil these days. They've (sortof) opened up the Office file formats, they responded to complaints about IE with an interim release and they've openly admitted that Windows is bloated and overly complex and have had the humility (!) to rethink their entire software engineering practice. Personally, I think Bill is behind much of this introspection and fault-admitting, and I think it's a sign our little geek has grown up.
Like I said, until they prove otherwise, they're on my evil list, but I actually have some hope they might turn into a good company. Lord knows Google and Apple don't look very promising anymore...
I think there is a big difference between ketchup and internet search, though I do see your point. Personally, I have more loyalty to Heinz than Google, and a lot more to gain by having a better search engine than a better ketchup.
I think Heinz has more than you think, too. They have an industrial process that produces delicious ketchup at a reasonable price. They have contracts with millions of restaurants that cause you to see them every day. A ketchup factory that's been optimized over decades is hard to beat by a startup. Google has no unique physical product. That's what I was trying to get at. They have no substance, just a website that you never have to see again if you don't want. Google can be destroyed virtually overnight. Heinz would take a long time to kill, simply because beating them would require vast amount of time and capital, assuming you even KNOW how to do it. It's the lack of intertia inherent to virtual products like search that i think puts Google in danger, especially if they don't innovate around their core product. From what I've seen, their search hasn't improved much since they've gone public...
This is probably going to get me flamed off/. forever, but here's my answer: Gates. I really think he's matured into a reasonably decent human being. Balmer is the spawn of satan, which is probably why he had to be put in charge once Bill lost his edge for being an asshole. But based on my subjective observations of Bill's actions and behavior, he really does seem to have his ego in check as of late. I have reasons to believe this (such as his ability to give money and support to MIT despite the fact that everybody at MIT is hostile to him and Microsoft, his huge foundational gifts) but there's probably no point in going further...
Also, while everybody has an ego, I think there are certainly business leaders who have theirs in a little more check than the Google founders do. The Yahoo guys, for example, spring to mind. Warren Buffet, too. Anyway, I don't think "Do no evil" is total BS. I think it's self aggrandizing BS that they actually believe. Anybody who starts a successful website and believes that it somehow puts them in the position to be social heroes worries me a bit. There's a difference between arrogance and illusions of grandeur... And I also totally agree with you that once they are out (and it will be soon, based on their ability to spew cash that is no longer 100% theirs) then Google will become 100% evil incarnate, and will do things with our personal data that is going to make us wish we'd all been using MSN search.
A decade ago, we would've been. Now the arrogance of MS is catching up to them. I'm not sure how long it will take to catch up to Google. My guess it won't take that long. They seem much more frenetic in their self-destruction than MS ever was, and they have far fewer intellectual assets (I'm talking products, not people). At the end of the day, I just don't see what Google has that can be protected. Microsoft is in a much stronger position than Google in terms of leverage. Google has a website that lots of people use, and its based on openly available hardware, and a rather simple idea. Good luck sustaining a market cap larger than the GDP of Bolivia, guys.
Eventually, while Google is busy buying the town of Mountain View, CA free wireless underwear warmers somebody will come up with some some search software that is truly revolutionary. Probably based on some clever machine learning with human feedback, or something. Then people will drop Google with the same amazing speed they adopted it.
Google knows this. That's why they are so quick to buy anything that gets within missile range of Mountain View. They look big, but in the end they simply make money from advertising on a website (so far I don't think Picassa is cash flow positive) and their entire business can shrivel up as quickly as people can change their bookmarks. That would scare the hell out of me if I were them, and I'm guessing it does. The smartest thing the two founders ever did [even smarter than PageRank(TM)] was selling a shitload of their shares to the teaming masses shortly after the IPO.
Actually, it's run by people who are arrogant and megalomaniacal. Two unspectacular guys were in the right place at the right time and are vaulted to the top of the tech industry for an idea that is incredibly easy to copy, and they know it. Google has mindshare, but everybody knows how quickly that can change. (Is it starting to, already?) Now they have to race to justify their status. The very fact that they made such a big deal out of "do no evil" is the biggest warning sign that their ego is leading the way. In the end, it's all about people, and the people in charge here don't have the maturity to match their market cap. Eventually, this will all end badly.
Glad I could amuse.:-) Seriously, as much as I dislike MS, I have to admit their developer programs are very good, and their dev software is probably better than anything else out there. Do you really disagree that Visual Studio is not pretty darn good? And C# is certainly new, though perhaps you don't like it. And I believe Visual Studio has been on a pretty regular update cycle. I'm not sure what there is to factually disagree with, except that perhaps you think that the tools aren't 'first rate'.
It's got far worse developer support than Windows. In the end, an OS is only as good as its apps. With Microsoft you get constantly developed, first-rate tools and new languages like C#. With Apple you get a barebones environment wrapped around GNU gcc, a 20 year old language with performance problems (obj-c) and a new chip architecture every few years.
If Apple would modernize its developer tools and quit making life miserable for developers with kernel changes and architecture switches, they might have more market share. But right now it seems they are more interested in the way their boxes look on the outside. The arrogance of Jobs claiming obj-c was better than C# doesn't give me hope that they'll improve any time soon.
Apple may be able to pull Adobe and Microsoft along (the former due to historical markets, and the latter due to monopoly concerns) but every time they pull an architecture switch, or screw up another API, they lose small developers.
In closing, if you want to know why OS X is doing badly in the broad market, just take a look at a copy of MATLAB running on Windows and MATLAB running on the Mac. Pretty window shadows aside, which would you rather use? It's all about apps.
My guess is that the CS departments of Berkeley and Stanford, being two of the best in the world, don't need handouts to do this kind of floofy pseudo-academics. I'm not denigrating it; this kind of thing is of immense importance. I'm just saying it's really not a very good academic project. Now, maybe we could use more projects like this, and less projects that typical get done at universities. That's another debate. But my guess is that Stanford and Berkeley, among others, probably turned this down.
What's wrong with the physics mantra? Should I shake things up and argue the feasibility of complex molecules based on intrepretive dance? Again, just because people couldn't explain Mercury doesn't mean we're wrong about chemistry today. I'm not sure I understand why that's even analogous. We don't understand lots of stuff, today. But the laws of physics are understood completely when it comes to chemistry. The remaining body of knowledge left to be discovered in physics will have no effect on chemistry, no matter what it turns out to be. There's no way we'll be surprised some day to find out that Sodium, can, in fact, do things we didn't think it could, because we truly do know everything about Sodium at the relevent atomic level. The only missing pieces left to fill is to come up with more basic theories that can replace some of our empirical knowledge with pure theory.
Maybe we're misunderstanding each other, though. I'm not saying we know (and I certainly don't know) exactly what the limiting temperature for life is. But I'm quite sure there is one, and I'm quite sure there are environments that simply cannot support life.
Why would you not make the same argument about airplanes? Maybe we don't really know what we think we know about the properties of aluminum?
I agree with what you said, but just to clarify one thing: it's not true that if gravity were to stop tomorrow, then it's a matter of us refiguring our laws. More would change than just us adding whatever "dynamics" were involved. It would be a fundamentally new mode of operation for nature, since it would imply that energy is no longer conserved. And that's why people think it won't happen. Not just that it hasn't yet, but that it would have too many repurcussions on the nature of physics. But I completely see your point about there being no such thing as "supernatural" since nature should encompass everything. I've always felt the same way, and this "supernatural" should be considered an oxymoron, or at least should be redefined to be somewhat synonymous with imagination.
I'm honestly sorry if it came off as a harsh lash-out. It was meant much less stidently that I guess it came off. I was simply trying to show through ad absurdum logic that there is no way to back out of making a positive statement. If you say "we don't know" then you're still making a positive statement. You're still going out on a limb of assuming our ignorance, which I don't see as much different than me going out on a limb of saying some people do know. Now, one of us is more right than the other, but you can't argue which on a priori grounds. Essentially, you (mostly others) were saying "we don't know" is the more safe, wise route, essentially regardless of the situation. Anytime you suggest holding a view for reasons other than the content of that view, I'm suspicious. So, on my side we have physics and chemistry, and on the side of the "we just don't know" camp we have ideas of humility and possibility. Well, when it comes to life, the relevent areas of knowledge are physics and chemistry, etc., not psychology and philsophy.
Anyway, I am sorry for being so flippant in my last post.
That's a very interesting point you bring up. How do we know the laws of physics aren't just going to change? Well, there is actually reason more sophisticated and meaningful beyond the simple idea that "they haven't changed yet."
One of the ways physicists look at things is by considering symmetries, in a mathematical sense. For example, in quantum mechanics, if you assume that the laws of physics don't change in space, then the conservation of momentum falls out as a neccesary conclusion. Similarly, you find that invariance in time (what you're asking about) and conservation of energy are aspects of the same thing. So to give up on the idea of an immutable physics is to also give up on conservation of energy. That's not proof things won't change, but it gives extra incentive for any creator who likes order and consistency to not turn off gravity.
I know it's amazing, but we are almost certain that the laws of physics are translation invariant. We know this not from local experiments, but also from noting that the spectra of hydrogen is the same here (from our sun) as it is from suns millions of lightyears away from us. So any alien will have the same hydrogen and the same quantum mechanics we do! They will have the same chemistry! We'll be able to instantly recognize each other as intelligent life by simply listing a sequence of physical numbers to them, like the hydrogen energy levels, for example.
Because of this universality of physics, we know that something that is impossible here is also impossible there. It may sound romantic to say "you never know what's out there" but the truth is we do. If you wouldn't say it could happen in Detroit, you shouldn't say it can happen anywhere. I'm not saying we know everything, or even close to it. But we do have good reason to believe that life can't exist below certain temperatures. And that temperature will be the same here as anywhere.
In 2000 years, I'm quite confident people will look back on our physics and see the same physics they are using then. It will still work! (Unless they are doing theoretical particle physics.) But people doing engineering work on buildings will still use newtonian physics and electrical engineers will still use maxwell's equations. They are not just current ideas. They are discovered truth. And I don't just mean approximate. They are limiting equations governing certain aspects of physics, ones which we know to dominate in certain regimes.
I agree I should use the word "likely" more. But you're missing my point about "earth-like" life. That we have two arms may be earth like, but there is sound reason to believe that certain elements of life are not just earth-like, but are fundamental to the universe we're in. No matter where you find it, all life has to obey the same physics. We're not going to stumble upon life somewhere that is sodium based. We KNOW that, because sodium works the same everywhere and there's no way to make complex sodium-based molecules.
Ok, if you're gonna argue scientific things on wishy-washy terms like "human arrogance" and "you never know" then how's about this: it's arrogant of YOU to suggest others don't, in fact, have a good reason for thinking is virtually impossible for life to exist on a liquid methane planet. And "you never know," it may turn out that you and the OP are totally wrong about us being wrong. Wouldn't that be wierd? Wouldn't that give you a ton to learn from?
On the other hand, you can either (a) say you don't have much basis for making a guess EITHER WAY and not post or (b) come up with a reasoned opinion about the matter, not an easy feel-good cop out like "you never know".
The "laws of physics" are not some laws constraining our universe, it's a model used by humans as an attempt to understand what's going on. To use it to litterally mean "laws", then dogma is created. This will only serve to hinder our progress of knowledge and discovery since it is constraining our consciousness.
The laws of physics are constraining a shitload more than our consciousness. I'm sick of people using the ignorance of people 2000 years ago as sole justification for suggesting everything we know now is just as suspect. The amazing thing about our physical world is that it does allow us to make progress. We know the laws of physics to the extent that we can make numerical predictions accurate to tens of decimal places. And the greatest thing about modern physics? We also know the exact decimal place where we stop knowing. The fact that we can put quantitative bounds on our ignorance is one of the greatest achievements of modern hard science, if you ask me. You're the one still living in the middle ages if you keep up with this mystical "science is dogma" bullshit. The only dogma I can see is yours.
There is really no evidence either for- or against it. The objective standpoint is that we just don't know.
I think it's more that YOU don't know. But don't speak for the rest of science.
It may be scary to have nothing to hold on to, but we should grow more comfortable with it since it will benefit us in the longer run. The wise man knows he don't know.
Yeah, but don't forget the wise part, too. The wise man also knows stuff. Probably chemistry. Mysticism isn't wisdom; it's often just a fancy justification for ignorance.
i understand the apparent fallacy of basing one's idea of life on one planet. but that doesn't change the fact that physics is the same on any planet, and it is not just luck of the draw that we're carbon-based. it's more about the valence structure of carbon, and less about the temperatures we happened to find our proto-selves in. besides the complexity allowed by carbon systems (and i don't think there are too many alternatives, except maybe silicon) there is also the fact that certain elements are in abundance in the universe, and it is those element which are likely to be used by life.
now, just because scientists made bad predictions before doesn't mean that i'm wrong in saying life probably won't exist at -200 C. that's YOU making an extrapolation from n = 1. there are hard limits on the temperatures at which life can exist. that's obvious from physics. so it's crazy to say that we can't speculate about other bases for limits. i'm arguing chemistry provides some limits. maybe i'm wrong about -200 C, but it's a lot more interesting, i think, to try to discuss this on a scientific basis than just pie-in-the-sky "you never know" dismissal.
i see your point, especially about life under the surface. however, what i was trying to get at is the idea that some things about life will probably be universal. for example, life will probably be carbon-based, or at least silicon-based, no matter where you find it. the rules of chemical combination apply everywhere, and carbon wasn't just blind luck. as a result, the chemistry of life will probably be somewhat similar no matter where you find it. it's not for nothing that life, having formed on this planet in the extreme conditions it did, did it's best to find more temperate climes before evolving into monkeys and lawyers.
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Apple doesn't own Motorola. Motorola's bottom line doesn't accrue anywhere on Apple's balance sheet, so they really didn't like the idea of losing sales to them. If Apple bought Palm, however, that would probably not be seen as a threat as it's likely they would view the success of one Apple division as not really a problem for Apple. That's my rudimentary understanding of corporate finance. :-)
Given that dying tends to be a side-effect of AIDS, what drug effects would one really be worried about? I never understood this whole neurotic mentality of overtesting drugs. The testing is often wrong (Vioxx?) and even when it works it probably kills far more people than it saves. The libertarian in me hates to see government regulation kill people, and the liberal in me hates to see people die for no reason and the conservative in me hates to see our economy hurt by having drug costs artificially inflated by beaurocrats.
Would anybody buy a car marketing as simply recovering power from braking? Hell no. But call it a "hybrid," thereby alluding to the (incorrect) notion that the car is alternatively powered, and yuppies suck it up.
I can't argue with that, but wasn't there a lot of royalty revenue coming in? I thought a good portion of Apple's chips came from PPC licensees.
It's all just marketing. When our environmental policy is determined by car manufacturers, you know we're in big trouble. The only reason hybrids are considered worth a damn is marketing.
Oh yeah, I forgot about the search appliance they sell. I'm pretty sure it's a negligable percentage of their profits, which are dominated by online advertising.
About the other stuff (bundling, upgrades, etc.) my personal feeling (and it's just that) is that recently such things are simply the work of Balmer and his minions. Bill's just a geek who works on the software at this point, and the fact that that is how he wants it says something.
Anyway, everything I said was simply about Gates. MS, as a company, is still on my evil list, too. I just think Gates is no longer responsible (at least in a decision-making sense) for the corporate maneuverings of MS. I think he's grown tired trying to take over the world is now more interested in seeing how he can change it for the better. Finally, you have to admit that MS seems to be less evil these days. They've (sortof) opened up the Office file formats, they responded to complaints about IE with an interim release and they've openly admitted that Windows is bloated and overly complex and have had the humility (!) to rethink their entire software engineering practice. Personally, I think Bill is behind much of this introspection and fault-admitting, and I think it's a sign our little geek has grown up.
Like I said, until they prove otherwise, they're on my evil list, but I actually have some hope they might turn into a good company. Lord knows Google and Apple don't look very promising anymore...
I think Heinz has more than you think, too. They have an industrial process that produces delicious ketchup at a reasonable price. They have contracts with millions of restaurants that cause you to see them every day. A ketchup factory that's been optimized over decades is hard to beat by a startup. Google has no unique physical product. That's what I was trying to get at. They have no substance, just a website that you never have to see again if you don't want. Google can be destroyed virtually overnight. Heinz would take a long time to kill, simply because beating them would require vast amount of time and capital, assuming you even KNOW how to do it. It's the lack of intertia inherent to virtual products like search that i think puts Google in danger, especially if they don't innovate around their core product. From what I've seen, their search hasn't improved much since they've gone public...
Also, while everybody has an ego, I think there are certainly business leaders who have theirs in a little more check than the Google founders do. The Yahoo guys, for example, spring to mind. Warren Buffet, too. Anyway, I don't think "Do no evil" is total BS. I think it's self aggrandizing BS that they actually believe. Anybody who starts a successful website and believes that it somehow puts them in the position to be social heroes worries me a bit. There's a difference between arrogance and illusions of grandeur... And I also totally agree with you that once they are out (and it will be soon, based on their ability to spew cash that is no longer 100% theirs) then Google will become 100% evil incarnate, and will do things with our personal data that is going to make us wish we'd all been using MSN search.
Eventually, while Google is busy buying the town of Mountain View, CA free wireless underwear warmers somebody will come up with some some search software that is truly revolutionary. Probably based on some clever machine learning with human feedback, or something. Then people will drop Google with the same amazing speed they adopted it.
Google knows this. That's why they are so quick to buy anything that gets within missile range of Mountain View. They look big, but in the end they simply make money from advertising on a website (so far I don't think Picassa is cash flow positive) and their entire business can shrivel up as quickly as people can change their bookmarks. That would scare the hell out of me if I were them, and I'm guessing it does. The smartest thing the two founders ever did [even smarter than PageRank(TM)] was selling a shitload of their shares to the teaming masses shortly after the IPO.
Actually, it's run by people who are arrogant and megalomaniacal. Two unspectacular guys were in the right place at the right time and are vaulted to the top of the tech industry for an idea that is incredibly easy to copy, and they know it. Google has mindshare, but everybody knows how quickly that can change. (Is it starting to, already?) Now they have to race to justify their status. The very fact that they made such a big deal out of "do no evil" is the biggest warning sign that their ego is leading the way. In the end, it's all about people, and the people in charge here don't have the maturity to match their market cap. Eventually, this will all end badly.
Glad I could amuse. :-) Seriously, as much as I dislike MS, I have to admit their developer programs are very good, and their dev software is probably better than anything else out there. Do you really disagree that Visual Studio is not pretty darn good? And C# is certainly new, though perhaps you don't like it. And I believe Visual Studio has been on a pretty regular update cycle. I'm not sure what there is to factually disagree with, except that perhaps you think that the tools aren't 'first rate'.
It's got far worse developer support than Windows. In the end, an OS is only as good as its apps. With Microsoft you get constantly developed, first-rate tools and new languages like C#. With Apple you get a barebones environment wrapped around GNU gcc, a 20 year old language with performance problems (obj-c) and a new chip architecture every few years.
If Apple would modernize its developer tools and quit making life miserable for developers with kernel changes and architecture switches, they might have more market share. But right now it seems they are more interested in the way their boxes look on the outside. The arrogance of Jobs claiming obj-c was better than C# doesn't give me hope that they'll improve any time soon.
Apple may be able to pull Adobe and Microsoft along (the former due to historical markets, and the latter due to monopoly concerns) but every time they pull an architecture switch, or screw up another API, they lose small developers.
In closing, if you want to know why OS X is doing badly in the broad market, just take a look at a copy of MATLAB running on Windows and MATLAB running on the Mac. Pretty window shadows aside, which would you rather use? It's all about apps.
My guess is that the CS departments of Berkeley and Stanford, being two of the best in the world, don't need handouts to do this kind of floofy pseudo-academics. I'm not denigrating it; this kind of thing is of immense importance. I'm just saying it's really not a very good academic project. Now, maybe we could use more projects like this, and less projects that typical get done at universities. That's another debate. But my guess is that Stanford and Berkeley, among others, probably turned this down.
Maybe we're misunderstanding each other, though. I'm not saying we know (and I certainly don't know) exactly what the limiting temperature for life is. But I'm quite sure there is one, and I'm quite sure there are environments that simply cannot support life.
Why would you not make the same argument about airplanes? Maybe we don't really know what we think we know about the properties of aluminum?
I agree with what you said, but just to clarify one thing: it's not true that if gravity were to stop tomorrow, then it's a matter of us refiguring our laws. More would change than just us adding whatever "dynamics" were involved. It would be a fundamentally new mode of operation for nature, since it would imply that energy is no longer conserved. And that's why people think it won't happen. Not just that it hasn't yet, but that it would have too many repurcussions on the nature of physics. But I completely see your point about there being no such thing as "supernatural" since nature should encompass everything. I've always felt the same way, and this "supernatural" should be considered an oxymoron, or at least should be redefined to be somewhat synonymous with imagination.
Anyway, I am sorry for being so flippant in my last post.
One of the ways physicists look at things is by considering symmetries, in a mathematical sense. For example, in quantum mechanics, if you assume that the laws of physics don't change in space, then the conservation of momentum falls out as a neccesary conclusion. Similarly, you find that invariance in time (what you're asking about) and conservation of energy are aspects of the same thing. So to give up on the idea of an immutable physics is to also give up on conservation of energy. That's not proof things won't change, but it gives extra incentive for any creator who likes order and consistency to not turn off gravity.
Because of this universality of physics, we know that something that is impossible here is also impossible there. It may sound romantic to say "you never know what's out there" but the truth is we do. If you wouldn't say it could happen in Detroit, you shouldn't say it can happen anywhere. I'm not saying we know everything, or even close to it. But we do have good reason to believe that life can't exist below certain temperatures. And that temperature will be the same here as anywhere.
I agree I should use the word "likely" more. But you're missing my point about "earth-like" life. That we have two arms may be earth like, but there is sound reason to believe that certain elements of life are not just earth-like, but are fundamental to the universe we're in. No matter where you find it, all life has to obey the same physics. We're not going to stumble upon life somewhere that is sodium based. We KNOW that, because sodium works the same everywhere and there's no way to make complex sodium-based molecules.
On the other hand, you can either (a) say you don't have much basis for making a guess EITHER WAY and not post or (b) come up with a reasoned opinion about the matter, not an easy feel-good cop out like "you never know".
The laws of physics are constraining a shitload more than our consciousness. I'm sick of people using the ignorance of people 2000 years ago as sole justification for suggesting everything we know now is just as suspect. The amazing thing about our physical world is that it does allow us to make progress. We know the laws of physics to the extent that we can make numerical predictions accurate to tens of decimal places. And the greatest thing about modern physics? We also know the exact decimal place where we stop knowing. The fact that we can put quantitative bounds on our ignorance is one of the greatest achievements of modern hard science, if you ask me. You're the one still living in the middle ages if you keep up with this mystical "science is dogma" bullshit. The only dogma I can see is yours.
I think it's more that YOU don't know. But don't speak for the rest of science.
It may be scary to have nothing to hold on to, but we should grow more comfortable with it since it will benefit us in the longer run. The wise man knows he don't know.
Yeah, but don't forget the wise part, too. The wise man also knows stuff. Probably chemistry. Mysticism isn't wisdom; it's often just a fancy justification for ignorance.
now, just because scientists made bad predictions before doesn't mean that i'm wrong in saying life probably won't exist at -200 C. that's YOU making an extrapolation from n = 1. there are hard limits on the temperatures at which life can exist. that's obvious from physics. so it's crazy to say that we can't speculate about other bases for limits. i'm arguing chemistry provides some limits. maybe i'm wrong about -200 C, but it's a lot more interesting, i think, to try to discuss this on a scientific basis than just pie-in-the-sky "you never know" dismissal.
i see your point, especially about life under the surface. however, what i was trying to get at is the idea that some things about life will probably be universal. for example, life will probably be carbon-based, or at least silicon-based, no matter where you find it. the rules of chemical combination apply everywhere, and carbon wasn't just blind luck. as a result, the chemistry of life will probably be somewhat similar no matter where you find it. it's not for nothing that life, having formed on this planet in the extreme conditions it did, did it's best to find more temperate climes before evolving into monkeys and lawyers.