The basic premise of his argument is this: There is one great filter. If we cannot find one in our past, then it must be in our future.
First of all, there doesn't need to be a single highly improbable event. The improbability of a single event is indistinguishable from several somewhat more probable, but still unlikely events that must all occur to satisfy the conditions for life. The odds of me winning $10m in the state lottery might be about as good or even better than me winning $10m in 100 or more $100,000 slot machine jackpots.
There are so many improbable events that occurred between the first microbial life to human life today. We can begin to list the various improbable events that have directly or indirectly led to intelligent life on earth. Eventually, we will have a list so long that it will make it clear that a SINGLE great filter is extremely improbable.
There does not have to be a single great filter. It can be many events, both in our past and in our future that prevent a similar civilization from making contact. To an advanced race building Dyson spheres, we would be about as advanced as the microbes we may or may not find on the Mars polar cap. Maybe they are in the great void of the Bootes sector, capturing all of the stars' energy from that part of the universe. It could be that in our future we DO find microbial life on Mars and just decide that it's not that different from life on Earth and thus not that interesting to study or preserve. Most likely, we simply colonize over any microbial life we happen to find because it will be common.
In any case, here is a few improbable events, out of the top of my head, which may allow intelligent life on Earth to evolve, but make it unlikely elsewhere, including Mars. - The human race at one point was reduced to 5000 individuals. Perhaps lack of genetic diversity in an advanced species was a precondition for intelligence.
- We have H20, but not enough to cover the entire surface of the planet. Sharks are the most evolutionarily advanced species because they are perfectly fit for their environment and have not changed significantly in millions of years. Perhaps intelligent life cannot develop without a geologically young planet that has mountains and shifting land masses because in a mono-ocean world, a single predatory non-intelligent species would dominate.
- A carbon-dioxide rich environment is slowly transformed by plantlife to an oxygen rich environment that allows oxygen respiratory systems to develop. Perhaps having all of our carbon trapped in crude oil for millions of years allowed us to breathe the air.
- Dinosaurs were wiped out, paving the way for mammals. Who knows what the implications are here? Just recognize that mass extinctions in which some life still survives and thrives is rare.
- Rapid reproduction and rapid metabolism. Let's face it. As creatures we are very fast compared to geological or cosmological time. This lets us get this far in the wink of a cosmological eye--- before any of the common cosmological events have a chance to hit us.
I would respond that it's already moving. If they said no it's not, I would shift my chair a few inches and say, "In that case, I just moved it." If they continue to insist that it's not moving, I would get up and move their chair and say, "There, I now moved it for you, too." And if they say that I don't understand then, I would respond "No, you don't understand. You are the one who insisted that it wasn't moving in the first place. If you can explain why it's not moving, then the same explanation can be used to explain why I just moved it when I changed positions."
Then he should say so. An acceptable answer would be "No, I think any individual being imprisoned for non-violent drug offenses is an injustice, but as president my power to address those injustices would be limited." Since that is an acceptable conclusion to his original statement, I believe that he did answer the question. His answer was broad, but included your precise answer above as a subset.
Any publicly funded service will have the problem of indirect payment. Public education has the worst of it.
There are 4 ways to spend your money. 1) You can buy something for yourself. 2) You can buy something for someone else. 3) You can give the money to someone else to buy something for you. 4) You can give the money to someone else to buy something for yet a different person.
In the first case, you will be very careful and frugal to match your money with your needs. You will probably get the most value out of your money spending it in #1, and perhaps decent value in #2, though the person who receives your gift may really want something different. In cases 3 and 4, we are less likely to get the best value for our money.
The most direct way to get the best value out of a service (ie. teaching) is for the students or parents of students to directly pay the teachers for their service. If we are forced to give our money to a third party and we are forced to put our children in whatever school is available in our district, then parents will give little consideration to the value they get from that school once they have chosen the only thing they have a choice over--- which school district they live in.
For whatever reason, we Americans have decided that socialism in the market of education is a good thing, even though we accept that socialism is inefficient in every other market in which it has been tested.
The public education system won't get fixed overnight. But the first step is to recognize that an improper system of incentives has been put into place. I think that people recognize that more choice would be beneficial to public education. The difficult part is moving the system towards that goal.
Seems like the libertarian version of a typical politician - light on details, light on commitment,
I was a little disappointed with the answer to my question, the one about marijuana. I asked:
what are you going to do to protect me from being arrested?
He answered:
I oppose federal laws outlawing marijuana and I oppose federal interference with state medical marijuana laws.
I already knew that he opposed such laws, but what would he actually do about it? How would he use his powers as president to effect such change? What specific orders would he give to the DEA and the justice department to ensure that no more people are victimized by these laws?
There's another way in which he didn't really answer my question. He said he opposes federal marijuana laws, but marijuana is illegal in my state. Does he believe I should go to jail or not? From his answer, it sounds like he does.
I lobbed him a softball and he fumbled. He is running for Federal office. The only laws he can affect are ones on the Federal level. If you want your state laws to change, you would need to vote for someone with similar views on the state level. That might be easier to do once someone like Ron Paul is president.
He is running for President of the United States, not Dictator of the United States. If you believe the President should have dictatorial powers over the States, then you should vote for a third term of George W. Bush. Oh, that's not legal, you say? Well, neither is a president's power to overturn States' laws. Supreme Court has that power, not the President.
Once again, NASA rejects the plans to build the world's first warp nacelle. Each year, I fight through this bureaucratic red tape. I swear, at this rate, I won't be able to launch a warp vessel until 2063!
That's actually a pretty good idea. The main barrier is that it's a pain to enter in symbols with a d-pad. It's hard enough to enter your name at the beginning of a game. How would you enter in an integral, a summation, a differential equation, or any number of scary equations with Greek symbols?
The second barrier is that educational software is very hard to sell on a game system. There are educational consoles out there, but they skew to a younger age. Their programs are also more rigid than a general purpose graphing software like Mathematica.
However, despite these problems, it's an intriguing idea. I work in the game industry and could make this happen if someone could justify that a market existed and/or fund it.
It's ironic that hybrid cars save energy by spinning a platter and hybrid hard drives save energy by not spinning a platter.
It's like blowing on your coffee to cool it and blowing on your hands on a brisk day to warm them.
If we could just hook these devices up in round-robin, we'd have a perpetual energy machine!
May I remind you that you are living on a planet where countless hordes torture, maim and murder each other to prove that their omnipotent invisible man in the sky has a longer dick then the other guys', where vast masses prostate themselves before some random idiot because he has pretended to be someone else in a series of moving pictures, where the supposed leaders of various tribes promise the sun and the moon while consistently delivering manure instead, only for themselves or their ideological twins be re-elected, over and over and over, etc and so on.
Oh and it is also a place where one can "buy", "sell" and "steal" large integer numbers.
The unfortunate truth is that most of humanity does not really qualify for the "sapiens" label in "homo sapiens". Well, at least I have chicken.
Because of Grand Theft Auto 4, a 3rd rate lawyer whines about a 2nd Amendment lawyer in a video game and tramples the 1st Amendment in order to earn zero respect.
This is really exciting but the prospect of swarms of any kind of robot is a bit scary - hopefully designers will build in a simple, easily exploitable flaw so that an out-of-control swarm could be easily deactivated.
Yes, they will run Windows with Internet Explorer.
C++ likes to hide things from the programmer... There are so many cases of this, I won't even list them to prove my point. If you're a C++ programmer, you'll know what I mean.
If you're not a C++ programmer, then the best way to describe it is like this:
There was a Tom and Jerry cartoon where Tom finally catches Jerry in his hands. As he peeks into a hole made by his fists, he sees Jerry peeking into his own tiny hands. Tom is curious what is in Jerry's hands and tries to look, too. Jerry pulls his hand away and hides it out of Tom's view. Now Tom is really curious and has to kindly ask Jerry to show him what he's hiding in his hands. Jerry then gets his fist near Tom's eye and then gives him a big sucker punch in the eye and runs away.
Tom is the programmer (you) and Jerry is C++. You *think* you have control. But when you want to look very closely at things, then Jerry won't let you. You have to do a few things "against the spirit of the language" in order to get your work done (or else have a very costly rewrite for very marginal additional features.) After you have done this dirty deed, Jerry will sock you in the eye some time later. You don't know when, and you think you got away with it, but it'll happen... usually before a critical deadline because that's when the highest volume of code changes occurs. Of course, you feel kind of dumb that Jerry did this to you. But there are so many countless ways, you can always get caught by a new one, and then eventually he tries an old trick on you that you forgot about. An experienced programmer will sort of just accept that this abuse is part of why he gets paid so much.
C++ is like this Tom and Jerry cartoon where Jerry sucker punches Tom in the eye. Until we invent a language that doesn't do that, we will be stuck in this prehistoric age where future generations will look at our existing programming languages in puzzlement in the same way as we now look at doing math in Roman numerals as peculiar and unintuitive.
Whether the code itself is interpreted or native compiled is irrelevant to our progress in software development.
You would think that by now someone would have invented a better language to replace all of our existing ones. But then again, you would have thought that the Romans would have invented a numeral system that allowed them to progress in mathematics to a point where they could understand how their multiplication tricks worked:
Some people prefer to wear a suit every day, even if they are just going to sit at a desk and code for 12 hours. Others will be wearing shirts with fake boobs attached.
Hmmm... I guess I might start wearing a suit to work if I actually want to get some work done. Considering how I normally dress, it would give my coworkers the impression that "OMG, this time, he's REALLY gone crazy" and maybe they would leave me alone to do some coding.
Nahhh... I'll just come in late and leave at 4am as usual.
If the brilliant insight of this man is true, then why limit ourselves to just the OpenSource community? Certainly, they may benefit the most, but if they benefit at all, then who *wouldn't* benefit?
All we need to do to improve the economy of the United States is to buy everyone suits and ties and give them haircuts. Bush can initiate this sort of "dot-com-fashionate conservative" economic reform.
Furthermore, with our worldwide lead in fancy suits, we can further reinvest our profits into fancier suits and more expensive haircuts so that our global competition has no chance to ever catch our groove! Meanwhile, the rest of the international community is foolishly investing in education, infrastructure, and technology when they ain't never gonna be all that, baby.
Slashdot Mirror
I thought that Linux programmers *did* work for 1/20th of my hourly wage. "For the love of coding" or some crap.
Maybe some Linux guy will write a bunch of malware for Linux just because he loves coding so much.
Where do we turn in our heads of Copernicus to collect our uber loot?
I wish I was working on this project. I'd find a way for the lasers to make that cool sound, even in the vacuum of outer space.
...and that's how we got Cowboy Neal for President!
The basic premise of his argument is this: There is one great filter. If we cannot find one in our past, then it must be in our future.
First of all, there doesn't need to be a single highly improbable event. The improbability of a single event is indistinguishable from several somewhat more probable, but still unlikely events that must all occur to satisfy the conditions for life. The odds of me winning $10m in the state lottery might be about as good or even better than me winning $10m in 100 or more $100,000 slot machine jackpots.
There are so many improbable events that occurred between the first microbial life to human life today. We can begin to list the various improbable events that have directly or indirectly led to intelligent life on earth. Eventually, we will have a list so long that it will make it clear that a SINGLE great filter is extremely improbable.
There does not have to be a single great filter. It can be many events, both in our past and in our future that prevent a similar civilization from making contact. To an advanced race building Dyson spheres, we would be about as advanced as the microbes we may or may not find on the Mars polar cap. Maybe they are in the great void of the Bootes sector, capturing all of the stars' energy from that part of the universe. It could be that in our future we DO find microbial life on Mars and just decide that it's not that different from life on Earth and thus not that interesting to study or preserve. Most likely, we simply colonize over any microbial life we happen to find because it will be common.
In any case, here is a few improbable events, out of the top of my head, which may allow intelligent life on Earth to evolve, but make it unlikely elsewhere, including Mars.
- The human race at one point was reduced to 5000 individuals. Perhaps lack of genetic diversity in an advanced species was a precondition for intelligence.
- We have H20, but not enough to cover the entire surface of the planet. Sharks are the most evolutionarily advanced species because they are perfectly fit for their environment and have not changed significantly in millions of years. Perhaps intelligent life cannot develop without a geologically young planet that has mountains and shifting land masses because in a mono-ocean world, a single predatory non-intelligent species would dominate.
- A carbon-dioxide rich environment is slowly transformed by plantlife to an oxygen rich environment that allows oxygen respiratory systems to develop. Perhaps having all of our carbon trapped in crude oil for millions of years allowed us to breathe the air.
- Dinosaurs were wiped out, paving the way for mammals. Who knows what the implications are here? Just recognize that mass extinctions in which some life still survives and thrives is rare.
- Rapid reproduction and rapid metabolism. Let's face it. As creatures we are very fast compared to geological or cosmological time. This lets us get this far in the wink of a cosmological eye--- before any of the common cosmological events have a chance to hit us.
Would a goatse reference be on topic here?
I would respond that it's already moving. If they said no it's not, I would shift my chair a few inches and say, "In that case, I just moved it." If they continue to insist that it's not moving, I would get up and move their chair and say, "There, I now moved it for you, too." And if they say that I don't understand then, I would respond "No, you don't understand. You are the one who insisted that it wasn't moving in the first place. If you can explain why it's not moving, then the same explanation can be used to explain why I just moved it when I changed positions."
Any publicly funded service will have the problem of indirect payment. Public education has the worst of it. There are 4 ways to spend your money. 1) You can buy something for yourself. 2) You can buy something for someone else. 3) You can give the money to someone else to buy something for you. 4) You can give the money to someone else to buy something for yet a different person. In the first case, you will be very careful and frugal to match your money with your needs. You will probably get the most value out of your money spending it in #1, and perhaps decent value in #2, though the person who receives your gift may really want something different. In cases 3 and 4, we are less likely to get the best value for our money. The most direct way to get the best value out of a service (ie. teaching) is for the students or parents of students to directly pay the teachers for their service. If we are forced to give our money to a third party and we are forced to put our children in whatever school is available in our district, then parents will give little consideration to the value they get from that school once they have chosen the only thing they have a choice over--- which school district they live in. For whatever reason, we Americans have decided that socialism in the market of education is a good thing, even though we accept that socialism is inefficient in every other market in which it has been tested. The public education system won't get fixed overnight. But the first step is to recognize that an improper system of incentives has been put into place. I think that people recognize that more choice would be beneficial to public education. The difficult part is moving the system towards that goal.
I was a little disappointed with the answer to my question, the one about marijuana. I asked:
He answered:
I already knew that he opposed such laws, but what would he actually do about it? How would he use his powers as president to effect such change? What specific orders would he give to the DEA and the justice department to ensure that no more people are victimized by these laws?
There's another way in which he didn't really answer my question. He said he opposes federal marijuana laws, but marijuana is illegal in my state. Does he believe I should go to jail or not? From his answer, it sounds like he does.
I lobbed him a softball and he fumbled. He is running for Federal office. The only laws he can affect are ones on the Federal level. If you want your state laws to change, you would need to vote for someone with similar views on the state level. That might be easier to do once someone like Ron Paul is president. He is running for President of the United States, not Dictator of the United States. If you believe the President should have dictatorial powers over the States, then you should vote for a third term of George W. Bush. Oh, that's not legal, you say? Well, neither is a president's power to overturn States' laws. Supreme Court has that power, not the President.
As we all know, frankincense is crucial to the production of Frankenberries. Count Chocula will be most pleased.
Try this:
f = function(d) {
print(d);
}
Now it will ask you to print from your printer. Print it to a file and view its contents.
Yes, he's giving you the finger and saying, "Sit and spin, Huuu---maahhn!"
I'll bet it'll fall over if it watches 2girls1cup.
Once again, NASA rejects the plans to build the world's first warp nacelle. Each year, I fight through this bureaucratic red tape. I swear, at this rate, I won't be able to launch a warp vessel until 2063!
That's actually a pretty good idea. The main barrier is that it's a pain to enter in symbols with a d-pad. It's hard enough to enter your name at the beginning of a game. How would you enter in an integral, a summation, a differential equation, or any number of scary equations with Greek symbols? The second barrier is that educational software is very hard to sell on a game system. There are educational consoles out there, but they skew to a younger age. Their programs are also more rigid than a general purpose graphing software like Mathematica. However, despite these problems, it's an intriguing idea. I work in the game industry and could make this happen if someone could justify that a market existed and/or fund it.
It's ironic that hybrid cars save energy by spinning a platter and hybrid hard drives save energy by not spinning a platter. It's like blowing on your coffee to cool it and blowing on your hands on a brisk day to warm them. If we could just hook these devices up in round-robin, we'd have a perpetual energy machine!
Inductance reluctantly agrees.
Because of Grand Theft Auto 4, a 3rd rate lawyer whines about a 2nd Amendment lawyer in a video game and tramples the 1st Amendment in order to earn zero respect.
I don't know how many times I've wondered what temperature my jacuzzi was, and wanted a parrot to deliver the news!
This is really exciting but the prospect of swarms of any kind of robot is a bit scary - hopefully designers will build in a simple, easily exploitable flaw so that an out-of-control swarm could be easily deactivated.
Yes, they will run Windows with Internet Explorer.
C++ likes to hide things from the programmer... There are so many cases of this, I won't even list them to prove my point. If you're a C++ programmer, you'll know what I mean.
If you're not a C++ programmer, then the best way to describe it is like this:
There was a Tom and Jerry cartoon where Tom finally catches Jerry in his hands. As he peeks into a hole made by his fists, he sees Jerry peeking into his own tiny hands. Tom is curious what is in Jerry's hands and tries to look, too. Jerry pulls his hand away and hides it out of Tom's view. Now Tom is really curious and has to kindly ask Jerry to show him what he's hiding in his hands. Jerry then gets his fist near Tom's eye and then gives him a big sucker punch in the eye and runs away.
Tom is the programmer (you) and Jerry is C++. You *think* you have control. But when you want to look very closely at things, then Jerry won't let you. You have to do a few things "against the spirit of the language" in order to get your work done (or else have a very costly rewrite for very marginal additional features.) After you have done this dirty deed, Jerry will sock you in the eye some time later. You don't know when, and you think you got away with it, but it'll happen... usually before a critical deadline because that's when the highest volume of code changes occurs. Of course, you feel kind of dumb that Jerry did this to you. But there are so many countless ways, you can always get caught by a new one, and then eventually he tries an old trick on you that you forgot about. An experienced programmer will sort of just accept that this abuse is part of why he gets paid so much.
C++ is like this Tom and Jerry cartoon where Jerry sucker punches Tom in the eye. Until we invent a language that doesn't do that, we will be stuck in this prehistoric age where future generations will look at our existing programming languages in puzzlement in the same way as we now look at doing math in Roman numerals as peculiar and unintuitive.
Whether the code itself is interpreted or native compiled is irrelevant to our progress in software development.
You would think that by now someone would have invented a better language to replace all of our existing ones. But then again, you would have thought that the Romans would have invented a numeral system that allowed them to progress in mathematics to a point where they could understand how their multiplication tricks worked:
http://www.phy6.org/outreach/edu/roman.htm
But that never happened, and similarly, Western civilization may expire before we have a competent programming language.
Some people prefer to wear a suit every day, even if they are just going to sit at a desk and code for 12 hours. Others will be wearing shirts with fake boobs attached.
Hmmm... I guess I might start wearing a suit to work if I actually want to get some work done. Considering how I normally dress, it would give my coworkers the impression that "OMG, this time, he's REALLY gone crazy" and maybe they would leave me alone to do some coding.
Nahhh... I'll just come in late and leave at 4am as usual.
If the brilliant insight of this man is true, then why limit ourselves to just the OpenSource community? Certainly, they may benefit the most, but if they benefit at all, then who *wouldn't* benefit?
All we need to do to improve the economy of the United States is to buy everyone suits and ties and give them haircuts. Bush can initiate this sort of "dot-com-fashionate conservative" economic reform.
Furthermore, with our worldwide lead in fancy suits, we can further reinvest our profits into fancier suits and more expensive haircuts so that our global competition has no chance to ever catch our groove! Meanwhile, the rest of the international community is foolishly investing in education, infrastructure, and technology when they ain't never gonna be all that, baby.