That would require the Earth to be very very special indeed, and I just don't see it.
Not at all. For example, I just generated a random number between 1 and 1e9. It was 869,502,332. By your logic, therefore, that number must have been very, very special. But no, it was just really improbable and that number happened to come up.
It may very well be the same case with life. Life could just be extremely improbable, and Earth just happened to be "the number" that was picked. This is what the Anthropic Principle is all about. Our perceptions are colored by the fact that we're here, so we think, "Since the Earth is not special, therefore, other planets must have life like Earth." It might just be that Earth was the lottery winner.
I said this in another post, but I'll say it again: The best evidence against life being common is the fact that it only happened once on Earth. It's fairly conclusive that all life on Earth has a common ancestor. If abiogenesis were easy and common, it wouldn't just stop once it happened one time, it would happen continuously over the billions of years since it happened for us. But it didn't.
And honestly, life on Earth being completely unique in the universe isn't that hard for me to believe when I look at the utterly insane complexity of cellular machinery. But again, extreme improbability doesn't matter when we're deal with the anthropic principle. We don't sense how long it took for intelligent life to pop up, just like we didn't sense the 13 billion years until you and I were born to think about all this.
We have zero evidence for life being likely, except wishful thinking in the form hand-waving like the utterly useless Drake equation. On the other hand, we do have some suggestive evidence that life itself is improbable. The biggest evidence is that, as near as we can determine, it only happened once on Earth. If life was probable, it should have continued to re-occur, but we're fairly certain that all life has a common ancestor.
Dumbass, improbable does not imply magical. That's the other problem with life being really improbable, a lot of science people get all uptight that the religionists are going to run around gleefully saying "HA!!! THE SCIENTISTS ADMIT GOD IS THE ONLY EXPLANATION!!!"
More like, "it's how it was in the beginning. We all know at this point it's a dumb idea and a huge mistake, and Reddit has proven that editing can work and work well, but we're too set in our ways to admit it's a mistake and thus we'll call it 'working as intended' and pretend that it serves a purpose."
See also: Deleting accounts.
Dammit. Reddit has spoiled me on submitting without having to make absolutely sure I didn't make any formatting mistakes and editing later. I wish Slashdot would come into the 21st century.
> I think life at the single cell level might be fairly common.
I actually think the single cell is the hard part. People underestimate just how INSANELY complex single cell organisms are. I don't mean a little complex, I mean crazy complex. Look at this animation of DNA replication:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
One side is duplicated straightforwardly... the other side has to be taken apart, flipped around and reassembled... and this is only one example. It gets even crazier from there. We tend to think of cells as "simple life forms", but they mind-blowingly complicated machines.
It would not shock me at all if there was no other example of single cells in the entire universe.
My personal opinion is that life is really, really, really, REALLY rare. It only seems like it ought to be common because of the Anthropic Principle. We're can observe ourselves and thus it seems like life is easy. But everything would be exactly the same if we were completely unique in the universe. In fact, if the universe were cyclic and it took 1e1035 universe cycles for life to happen, things would look exactly the same. We simply have no basis for knowing how probable it is.
Given how insanely complex we are, I suspect that it's exceedingly rare.
You say that like it's a bad thing. As far as I'm concerned, I love the fact that I can trade demographic data for various online services. I'd far rather give them that than have to shell out real money. And as a bonus, I get ads that are potentially actually useful to me, rather than (say) feminine hygiene products.
Major imagination fail. You have no idea what you're talking about. This is going to change the world on many, many levels. That's why FB bought them. I'm not going to bother to prove this for you, but just wait for it to happen.
I was making the arguments that others make to dislike the languages, not my personal feelings. There's no such thing as a perfect language. The arguments against Ruby (as I understand them, I haven't used the language all that much) is that it's very slow and the community is full of asshats.
To be fair, Minecraft is a (surprisingly) quality program that is written in Java. It's also a total memory pig and is much slower than other 3D games, though also to be fair, it's a quite complex 3D environment (infinitely changeable), so it's hard to compare to games with more static worlds. But it does show that it's at least possible to write a good game in Java. It does occasionally freeze up, however, probably doing garbage collection to my son's infinite annoyance.:)
Now, a fair comparison is comparing the Java version of the Scratch environment to the Flash version, and the Flash version is about 5-10x the speed.
Java can nearly as fast as C for very small pieces of code where the runtime can do straightforward JIT compilation, that is true. If you define that as "where Java is used", then your claim is true. However, for code of any size or complexity, Java slows down tremendously. Why do you think Java is "slow on the desktop"? It's because desktop apps are applications of size and aren't trivial pieces of glue code.
Or, to put it another way, if Java isn't inherently slow and is "as fast as C" as you claim, why would there be an exception around desktop apps or "graphics in general"?
Oops, you are correct. My apologies to the original poster. But then, C# is Microsoft, so I think it's fair to say that you can find programmers out there that say it's stupid and awful.:) [I actually haven't used the language to a significant enough extent to have an opinion]
I notice that most (not you, obviously) of the PHP defenders are posting as A/C.:)
There is no doubt that PHP has some deep flaws, but they give you an escape from a lot of the flaws. It's possible to have a reasonable codebase written in PHP if you have good experience in the language.
The main reason I like PHP is that it's ubiquitous. I learned a long time ago that it SUCKS to work in an unpopular environment, even if it has some sort of theoretical advantage. It's hard to find information, libraries are nonexistent or buggy, programmers are hard to find or expensive, etc, etc.
As I see it, there are only four viable language if you want to stay mainstream: Java, C++, C# and PHP. If you want to avoid Microsoft, you're down to three. If you hate Java's verbosity, slowness and pain, as I do, you're down to two. And if you want quick productivity and rapid development for entrepreneurial reasons, that eliminates C++ and also eliminates Java again, and that leaves one to rule them all: PHP.
I don't particularly like PHP. But it does have a lot of modern language features, and it's really easy to get code written and out. And it's reliable, if you put in the work to establish a framework (E_STRICT, turn on exceptions, etc).
I would love to see a better mainstream language emerge, but PHP just plain wins out for certain purposes. If I was working for a large organization with plenty of time and money, I'd probably pick C++ or Java. But for a small, hungry organization, it's hard to beat PHP, which was forged by necessity. And I wish I could beat it, because it does have some pretty big flaws.
Re:Recursive? No, very iterative.
on
The PHP Singularity
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· Score: 4, Insightful
Very few serious programmers will say that they are stupid or awful.
Huh? Have you just fallen off the turnip truck?
C: Unsafe at any speed. Un-bound-checked array, null pointers, etc, etc. Many people HATE C because it's unsafe, though they grudgingly admit that it's sometimes a necessary evil for system programming.
C++: Overly complex, insane learning curve, no garbage collection. There are no shortage of people who hate C++.
And Java is possibly your most absurd point. Overly verbose to the extreme, slow, insane memory requirements, slow, crazy libraries, and slow (please don't bother to claim that isn't slow).
Don't know why you're putting the scare-italics on bacteria. I probably should have said microorganisms to be as general as possible, but are you thinking bacteria requires oxygen? Anaerobic bacteria evolved on Earth, so I would think it could possibly evolve on Mars (assuming there isn't trapped oxygen in the soil, for whatever reason).
Of course our sterilization wasn't perfect, but at least we did it, and there wasn't an easy way for them to grow and spread into the environmental soil. That's a far cry from putting dirty humans there along with hydroponics with literally quadrillions of bacteria actively growing, not to mention the living space located within the ground and tapping the native water supplies.
Like I said in another post, I highly doubt there is native life there. But doubt is not the same as proven, and the fact is that contamination from a colony is a real possibility. The point isn't really about the factual question of life or no life, the question is whether there are sufficient scientists who believe it's likely enough to be an issue, and then it becomes a political issue.
For what it's worth, I agree with you. I highly doubt there is life on Mars, but our opinion doesn't matter to the big picture that there are a lot of people who believe there might be. And really, we're just guessing. The point is that once we have contamination, it might kill off something that was there.
I've always been of the opinion that once a private Mars mission gets close to becoming reality, scientists and the government will go in league to shut it down because of environmental contamination. The question of whether there is life on Mars is still open, and once you have a group setting up a settlement, the planet is potentially contaminated forever with Earth bacteria, which might even kill off native bacteria, if any.
My question is, are you concerned with the contamination question and do you think you might be prevented from going if scientists get the right politicians to listen? You sort-of have a FAQ question about this ("Will the mission be harmful to Mars' environment?"), but you don't really answer it.
Christians today (since Christ's time, actually) are under a new covenant which we call the New Testament. The Old Testament is no longer applicable as law.
You are (sadly) mistaken. There is a reason the OT is included in Christian bibles.
"It is easier for Heaven and Earth to pass away than for the smallest part of the letter of the law to become invalid." (Luke 16:17 NAB)
"Do not think that I have come to abolish the law or the prophets. I have come not to abolish but to fulfill. Amen, I say to you, until heaven and earth pass away, not the smallest part or the smallest part of a letter will pass from the law, until all things have taken place." (Matthew 5:17 NAB)
“For truly, I say to you, till heaven and earth pass away, not an iota, not a dot, will pass the law until all is accomplished. Whoever then relaxes one of the least of these commandments and teaches men so, shall be called least in the kingdom of heaven; but he who does them and teaches them shall be called great in the kingdom of heaven.” (Matthew 5:18-19 RSV)
Every single word of the OT was commanded by Jesus himself to be obeyed. Why this doesn't tell people that it's all a bunch of mythical hooey I will never understand.
I use Perl nearly every (damn) day, on a very old codebase project. There are things about Perl I like, but there are also things that I really despise. Not through fault of Perl, really -- it's simply old, slow (yes, slow) and outdated compared to other modern languages.
There is no way I would start a new project in Perl, and the only people who would are people who are willfully ignorant of the rest of the industry. Perl is beyond its life. There is nothing it does better than other languages, and there are a whole hell of a lot of things it does much, much worse.
What you clearly don't get is that much of the reason you can get a good OS and applications for free is the GPL, for which you can thank RMS. I remember what it was like to install *BSD before the various BSDs were shamed into modernity by Linux. No thanks, you can have that.
I don't believe you can make the case that Linux wouldn't be Linux without the GPL, had it used some other license. Linux is Linux through force of Torvald's personality. It would be identical if it had used, say, the BSD license. Granted, the tools developed by the FSF gave Linux a good start. But that's software, not a license.
You know what, I imagine it probably does take "bulldozing" to overcome the entrenched existing entities in order to do Really Big Effective Things.
If it takes hurting some feelings to ELIMINATE Polio and Malaria forever (!!), and who knows what other diseases in the coming decades, then that seems fine to me. Polio has been eliminated in India. I'm pretty sure all the millions of children saved aren't too concerned about the fact that Bill Gates is in a bit of hurry to get things done.
Slashdot Mirror
That would require the Earth to be very very special indeed, and I just don't see it.
Not at all. For example, I just generated a random number between 1 and 1e9. It was 869,502,332. By your logic, therefore, that number must have been very, very special. But no, it was just really improbable and that number happened to come up.
It may very well be the same case with life. Life could just be extremely improbable, and Earth just happened to be "the number" that was picked. This is what the Anthropic Principle is all about. Our perceptions are colored by the fact that we're here, so we think, "Since the Earth is not special, therefore, other planets must have life like Earth." It might just be that Earth was the lottery winner.
I said this in another post, but I'll say it again: The best evidence against life being common is the fact that it only happened once on Earth. It's fairly conclusive that all life on Earth has a common ancestor. If abiogenesis were easy and common, it wouldn't just stop once it happened one time, it would happen continuously over the billions of years since it happened for us. But it didn't.
And honestly, life on Earth being completely unique in the universe isn't that hard for me to believe when I look at the utterly insane complexity of cellular machinery. But again, extreme improbability doesn't matter when we're deal with the anthropic principle. We don't sense how long it took for intelligent life to pop up, just like we didn't sense the 13 billion years until you and I were born to think about all this.
likely
We have zero evidence for life being likely, except wishful thinking in the form hand-waving like the utterly useless Drake equation. On the other hand, we do have some suggestive evidence that life itself is improbable. The biggest evidence is that, as near as we can determine, it only happened once on Earth. If life was probable, it should have continued to re-occur, but we're fairly certain that all life has a common ancestor.
I think you mean "wrong" rather than "dangerous". There is a limited impact to our having a wrong opinion on the matter.
This will help you out
Dumbass, improbable does not imply magical. That's the other problem with life being really improbable, a lot of science people get all uptight that the religionists are going to run around gleefully saying "HA!!! THE SCIENTISTS ADMIT GOD IS THE ONLY EXPLANATION!!!"
More like, "it's how it was in the beginning. We all know at this point it's a dumb idea and a huge mistake, and Reddit has proven that editing can work and work well, but we're too set in our ways to admit it's a mistake and thus we'll call it 'working as intended' and pretend that it serves a purpose." See also: Deleting accounts.
Dammit. Reddit has spoiled me on submitting without having to make absolutely sure I didn't make any formatting mistakes and editing later. I wish Slashdot would come into the 21st century.
> I think life at the single cell level might be fairly common. I actually think the single cell is the hard part. People underestimate just how INSANELY complex single cell organisms are. I don't mean a little complex, I mean crazy complex. Look at this animation of DNA replication: https://www.youtube.com/watch?... One side is duplicated straightforwardly... the other side has to be taken apart, flipped around and reassembled... and this is only one example. It gets even crazier from there. We tend to think of cells as "simple life forms", but they mind-blowingly complicated machines. It would not shock me at all if there was no other example of single cells in the entire universe.
My personal opinion is that life is really, really, really, REALLY rare. It only seems like it ought to be common because of the Anthropic Principle. We're can observe ourselves and thus it seems like life is easy. But everything would be exactly the same if we were completely unique in the universe. In fact, if the universe were cyclic and it took 1e1035 universe cycles for life to happen, things would look exactly the same. We simply have no basis for knowing how probable it is. Given how insanely complex we are, I suspect that it's exceedingly rare.
That's a fake video.
You say that like it's a bad thing. As far as I'm concerned, I love the fact that I can trade demographic data for various online services. I'd far rather give them that than have to shell out real money. And as a bonus, I get ads that are potentially actually useful to me, rather than (say) feminine hygiene products.
Major imagination fail. You have no idea what you're talking about. This is going to change the world on many, many levels. That's why FB bought them. I'm not going to bother to prove this for you, but just wait for it to happen.
I was making the arguments that others make to dislike the languages, not my personal feelings. There's no such thing as a perfect language. The arguments against Ruby (as I understand them, I haven't used the language all that much) is that it's very slow and the community is full of asshats.
To be fair, Minecraft is a (surprisingly) quality program that is written in Java. It's also a total memory pig and is much slower than other 3D games, though also to be fair, it's a quite complex 3D environment (infinitely changeable), so it's hard to compare to games with more static worlds. But it does show that it's at least possible to write a good game in Java. It does occasionally freeze up, however, probably doing garbage collection to my son's infinite annoyance. :)
Now, a fair comparison is comparing the Java version of the Scratch environment to the Flash version, and the Flash version is about 5-10x the speed.
Java can nearly as fast as C for very small pieces of code where the runtime can do straightforward JIT compilation, that is true. If you define that as "where Java is used", then your claim is true. However, for code of any size or complexity, Java slows down tremendously. Why do you think Java is "slow on the desktop"? It's because desktop apps are applications of size and aren't trivial pieces of glue code.
Or, to put it another way, if Java isn't inherently slow and is "as fast as C" as you claim, why would there be an exception around desktop apps or "graphics in general"?
Oops, you are correct. My apologies to the original poster. But then, C# is Microsoft, so I think it's fair to say that you can find programmers out there that say it's stupid and awful. :) [I actually haven't used the language to a significant enough extent to have an opinion]
I notice that most (not you, obviously) of the PHP defenders are posting as A/C. :)
There is no doubt that PHP has some deep flaws, but they give you an escape from a lot of the flaws. It's possible to have a reasonable codebase written in PHP if you have good experience in the language.
The main reason I like PHP is that it's ubiquitous. I learned a long time ago that it SUCKS to work in an unpopular environment, even if it has some sort of theoretical advantage. It's hard to find information, libraries are nonexistent or buggy, programmers are hard to find or expensive, etc, etc.
As I see it, there are only four viable language if you want to stay mainstream: Java, C++, C# and PHP. If you want to avoid Microsoft, you're down to three. If you hate Java's verbosity, slowness and pain, as I do, you're down to two. And if you want quick productivity and rapid development for entrepreneurial reasons, that eliminates C++ and also eliminates Java again, and that leaves one to rule them all: PHP.
I don't particularly like PHP. But it does have a lot of modern language features, and it's really easy to get code written and out. And it's reliable, if you put in the work to establish a framework (E_STRICT, turn on exceptions, etc).
I would love to see a better mainstream language emerge, but PHP just plain wins out for certain purposes. If I was working for a large organization with plenty of time and money, I'd probably pick C++ or Java. But for a small, hungry organization, it's hard to beat PHP, which was forged by necessity. And I wish I could beat it, because it does have some pretty big flaws.
Very few serious programmers will say that they are stupid or awful.
Huh? Have you just fallen off the turnip truck?
C: Unsafe at any speed. Un-bound-checked array, null pointers, etc, etc. Many people HATE C because it's unsafe, though they grudgingly admit that it's sometimes a necessary evil for system programming.
C++: Overly complex, insane learning curve, no garbage collection. There are no shortage of people who hate C++.
And Java is possibly your most absurd point. Overly verbose to the extreme, slow, insane memory requirements, slow, crazy libraries, and slow (please don't bother to claim that isn't slow).
Don't know why you're putting the scare-italics on bacteria. I probably should have said microorganisms to be as general as possible, but are you thinking bacteria requires oxygen? Anaerobic bacteria evolved on Earth, so I would think it could possibly evolve on Mars (assuming there isn't trapped oxygen in the soil, for whatever reason).
Of course our sterilization wasn't perfect, but at least we did it, and there wasn't an easy way for them to grow and spread into the environmental soil. That's a far cry from putting dirty humans there along with hydroponics with literally quadrillions of bacteria actively growing, not to mention the living space located within the ground and tapping the native water supplies.
Like I said in another post, I highly doubt there is native life there. But doubt is not the same as proven, and the fact is that contamination from a colony is a real possibility. The point isn't really about the factual question of life or no life, the question is whether there are sufficient scientists who believe it's likely enough to be an issue, and then it becomes a political issue.
For what it's worth, I agree with you. I highly doubt there is life on Mars, but our opinion doesn't matter to the big picture that there are a lot of people who believe there might be. And really, we're just guessing. The point is that once we have contamination, it might kill off something that was there.
I've always been of the opinion that once a private Mars mission gets close to becoming reality, scientists and the government will go in league to shut it down because of environmental contamination. The question of whether there is life on Mars is still open, and once you have a group setting up a settlement, the planet is potentially contaminated forever with Earth bacteria, which might even kill off native bacteria, if any.
My question is, are you concerned with the contamination question and do you think you might be prevented from going if scientists get the right politicians to listen? You sort-of have a FAQ question about this ("Will the mission be harmful to Mars' environment?"), but you don't really answer it.
Christians today (since Christ's time, actually) are under a new covenant which we call the New Testament. The Old Testament is no longer applicable as law.
You are (sadly) mistaken. There is a reason the OT is included in Christian bibles.
"It is easier for Heaven and Earth to pass away than for the smallest part of the letter of the law to become invalid." (Luke 16:17 NAB)
"Do not think that I have come to abolish the law or the prophets. I have come not to abolish but to fulfill. Amen, I say to you, until heaven and earth pass away, not the smallest part or the smallest part of a letter will pass from the law, until all things have taken place." (Matthew 5:17 NAB)
“For truly, I say to you, till heaven and earth pass away, not an iota, not a dot, will pass the law until all is accomplished. Whoever then relaxes one of the least of these commandments and teaches men so, shall be called least in the kingdom of heaven; but he who does them and teaches them shall be called great in the kingdom of heaven.” (Matthew 5:18-19 RSV)
Every single word of the OT was commanded by Jesus himself to be obeyed. Why this doesn't tell people that it's all a bunch of mythical hooey I will never understand.
I use Perl nearly every (damn) day, on a very old codebase project. There are things about Perl I like, but there are also things that I really despise. Not through fault of Perl, really -- it's simply old, slow (yes, slow) and outdated compared to other modern languages.
There is no way I would start a new project in Perl, and the only people who would are people who are willfully ignorant of the rest of the industry. Perl is beyond its life. There is nothing it does better than other languages, and there are a whole hell of a lot of things it does much, much worse.
What you clearly don't get is that much of the reason you can get a good OS and applications for free is the GPL, for which you can thank RMS. I remember what it was like to install *BSD before the various BSDs were shamed into modernity by Linux. No thanks, you can have that.
I don't believe you can make the case that Linux wouldn't be Linux without the GPL, had it used some other license. Linux is Linux through force of Torvald's personality. It would be identical if it had used, say, the BSD license. Granted, the tools developed by the FSF gave Linux a good start. But that's software, not a license.
You know what, I imagine it probably does take "bulldozing" to overcome the entrenched existing entities in order to do Really Big Effective Things.
If it takes hurting some feelings to ELIMINATE Polio and Malaria forever (!!), and who knows what other diseases in the coming decades, then that seems fine to me. Polio has been eliminated in India. I'm pretty sure all the millions of children saved aren't too concerned about the fact that Bill Gates is in a bit of hurry to get things done.