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  • Current Events & Politics Moderators: deficiT | tryptakid | Foreigner

The amount of CO2 in the atmosphere just hit its highest level in 800,000 years

Good points Jess. Fermi's paradox isn't really a paradox at all based on the definition of what a paradox is. I remember when paradoxes where actually paradoxical. Like Zeno's paradox where you have to invent calculus to finally show that it isn't paradoxical. Fermi's statement about extraterrestrial life is more like an observation about a probable outcome given the premise of extraterrestrial life. Its a good point but so what. I can give a long list of explanations for why that might be the case. For example, it's worth noting just how small an amount of time humans have on this planet and evolved enough to communicate an extraterrestrial contact event to future generations.
 
Good points Jess. Fermi's paradox isn't really a paradox at all based on the definition of what a paradox is. I remember when paradoxes where actually paradoxical. Like Zeno's paradox where you have to invent calculus to finally show that it isn't paradoxical. Fermi's statement about extraterrestrial life is more like an observation about a probable outcome given the premise of extraterrestrial life. Its a good point but so what. I can give a long list of explanations for why that might be the case. For example, it's worth noting just how small an amount of time humans have on this planet and evolved enough to communicate an extraterrestrial contact event to future generations.

That's on the list. The point is, other people have come up with possible explanations. See the aforementioned list.
 
Also just because there are infinite possibilities, doesn't mean all possibilities are realized. There are infinite numbers between 1 and 2, but not one of those numbers is 3. That being said, I do believe in life outside of earth.
 
Also just because there are infinite possibilities, doesn't mean all possibilities are realized. There are infinite numbers between 1 and 2, but not one of those numbers is 3. That being said, I do believe in life outside of earth.

Um, actually it does. Infinite chances for a positibility to happen means that possibility WILL happen. It's only a matter of time, with enough time the likely hood of it happening is absolute.

With enough opportunities for something to happen, everything that ever could happen eventually will happen until that dice stops being thrown. And there are a LOT of opportunities for life to happen in the universe.

Saying "a lot" is seriously understated. It's a crazy number of opportunities, a crazy crazy number.
 
1. They have already proven deadly.
2. I don't know. How many?
3. Dan Pena is a business man, who has no education in the field and is likely to be regurgitating information not based on fact, but, instead, for an underlying, hidden agenda.
4. YouTube movies are not reliable sources.

1. Where? Has pollution killed more people than anthropogenic global warming?
2. Some said all the ice would be melted by now.
3. He still raised a legitimate question.
4. Sometimes they are some they aren't. You can find a youtube video of someone reading a peer-reviewed study written by an IPCC-approved climate scientist. It's merely a source of media. It's like saying mainstream media segments are not reliable sources.
 
1. Where? Has pollution killed more people than anthropogenic global warming?
2. Some said all the ice would be melted by now.
3. He still raised a legitimate question.
4. Sometimes they are some they aren't. You can find a youtube video of someone reading a peer-reviewed study written by an IPCC-approved climate scientist. It's merely a source of media. It's like saying mainstream media segments are not reliable sources.
1. It is global, hence the term, though I do prefer climate change. The quantities of deaths are irrelevant.
2. That is merely conjecture based on hearsay.
3. If you see it as legitimate, then that is your own perception.
4. If it is a video of someone reading a peer-reviewed study, then it should be properly referenced and thus become the source.
 
I was looking at Loschmidt's paradox, Maxwell's demon/zombies and the Second Law of Thermodynamics (entropy) and I remembered reading about J England's concept of dissipation-driven adaptation, which addresses the idea of the growth of complex living systems and even reproduction as probable in a relatively open system that is not near equilibrium with an external energy source in which the energy dissipated is increasingly greater than organizational (non-entropic) energy configurations.

Major implications:
If England’s approach stands up to more testing, it could further liberate biologists from seeking a Darwinian explanation for every adaptation and allow them to think more generally in terms of dissipation-driven organization. They might find, for example, that “the reason that an organism shows characteristic X rather than Y may not be because X is more fit than Y, but because physical constraints make it easier for X to evolve than for Y to evolve,” Louis said.

A New Physics Theory of Life

Update:
CONTROVERSIAL NEW THEORY SUGGESTS LIFE WASN'T A FLUKE OF BIOLOGY—IT WAS PHYSICS

OT: We're screwed and we screwed the ecosystem big-time.
 
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Um, actually it does. Infinite chances for a positibility to happen means that possibility WILL happen. It's only a matter of time, with enough time the likely hood of it happening is absolute.

With enough opportunities for something to happen, everything that ever could happen eventually will happen until that dice stops being thrown. And there are a LOT of opportunities for life to happen in the universe.

Saying "a lot" is seriously understated. It's a crazy number of opportunities, a crazy crazy number.

Idk I'm pretty sure the Infinite Monkey Theorem would be similar to this. Just because something is possible doesn't mean the universe will ever manifest it.
 
Could PAINT be the answer to global warming? America's streets could soon be white as California pioneers 'cool pavements' to tackle the extreme heat effects of climate change
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-4780306/Could-PAINT-answer-global-warming.html

No more pancake syrup? Climate change could bring an end to sugar maples

http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018...p-climate-change-could-bring-end-sugar-maples

Savor that sticky, slightly nutty sweetness drenching your Sunday morning pancakes now. The trees that make maple syrup will struggle to survive climate change, a new study reveals.

Will Chocolate Become Extinct Due to Climate Change? Here Are the Foods We Might Lose
http://www.newsweek.com/chocolate-extinct-climate-change-foods-coffee-avocados-almonds-770098

Schwarzenegger says he wants to sue global oil companies for first-degree murder

https://www.cnbc.com/2018/03/13/sch...al-oil-companies-for-first-degree-murder.html

Arnold Schwarzenegger says he is going after Big Oil and climate change.

The actor former governor of California said in a Politico-sponsored podcast at the SXSW festival in Austin that he is in talks with law firms about possibly suing global oil companies "for knowingly killing people all over the world."

"The oil companies knew from 1959 on, they did their own study that there would be global warming happening because of fossil fuels, and on top of it that it would be risky for people's lives, that it would kill," Schwarzenegger said in the podcast.

"I don't think there's any difference: If you walk into a room and you know you're going to kill someone, it's first degree murder; I think it's the same thing with the oil companies," he said.

Aliens may destroy humanity to protect other civilisations, say scientists
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2011/aug/18/aliens-destroy-humanity-protect-civilisations

It may not rank as the most compelling reason to curb greenhouse gases, but reducing our emissions might just save humanity from a pre-emptive alien attack, scientists claim.

Watching from afar, extraterrestrial beings might view changes in Earth's atmosphere as symptomatic of a civilisation growing out of control ? and take drastic action to keep us from becoming a more serious threat, the researchers explain.

This highly speculative scenario is one of several described by a Nasa-affiliated scientist and colleagues at Pennsylvania State University that, while considered unlikely, they say could play out were humans and alien life to make contact at some point in the future.
 
Idk I'm pretty sure the Infinite Monkey Theorem would be similar to this. Just because something is possible doesn't mean the universe will ever manifest it.

Again, yes, it does. This one really isn't an opinion, it's established mathematical fact. There are only two questions. Is the proposed possibility in fact a possibility, even if it's an extremely unlikely possibility, as opposed to impossible. And two, are there infinite chances for that something to happen. If both of these are correct, it WILL happen eventually. It just will.

Specifically on the monkeys mashing at typewriters thing, let's change monkeys to something more controllable that randomly hits keyboard buttons. Just to keep this concept focused and not get off track. Cause in real life the monkeys will likely die before they compose anything substantial. Hell the earth might die before then even if you replace the monkeys.

So long as the process repeats to infinity without breaking, every possible string of text will appear at some point an infinite number of times.

This really isn't up for debate. I mean, science is all about falsifiability, the potential however small that a theory could be wrong. But this isn't even a theory. This isn't an explanation for an observed phenomenon, it IS the phenomenon. You can disagree if you want but it's like disagreeing that 3+2=5. This is the sort of thing that is as true as true ever is in life.

Hell, I can work it out for you if you like, give me a string of text, how fast the keys are pressed, and I'll tell you how long until that string reaches a 50% chance of being produced. And there isn't an upper limit here. We are assuming infinite chances. It WILL happen. You can simulate this sort of thing and watch it work. So long as there are infinite chances everything that could happen will happen an infinite number of times.
 
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^ Yes it has. Im not gonna pull out my Hawking cliff notes mate however the universe beginning to expand at an exponential rate CAUSED time to happen, prior to that the universe was rock solid and the laws of physics and time did not exist.

The beginning of time was just a result of the big bang like we are. Time ends in a RED dwarf .


CO2 and everything else wont exist anymore either in a billion years.
 
The universe will succumb to heat death. It cannot last forever. It has not been in existence forever.

We don't know that for sure. I mean, yes you're right that it's a distinct possibility. But not a certainty. Regardless, it doesn't have to be infinite for it to be mathematically very very unlikely that we are the only life in the universe. My original point is that based on what we know about how life comes into existence, and the sheer crazy number of opportunities for it to happen, it is highly improbable that we're alone in the universe.

Life is rare. But not THAT rare. Intelligent life is a lot rarer yes, but all you need is a planet like ours. And from what we know there are probably a LOT of planets just like ours in the universe. We've already found several that could probably hold some form of life. And that's only from a really crazy tiny sample size of the entire universe.

It's important to distinguish life and intelligent life. Intelligent life is likely much rarer, but based on what we know about what you need for it to come into existence, there are likely a LOT of places in the universe it can happen. Sure, it's a small number compared to the number of planets. But even a tiny number of a crazy huge number is still a lot to us.

Even if life is obscenely crazy rare it could still result in millions of worlds with intelligent life out there. They're just probably pretty far apart. And again, you can't assume that both finding them and contacting them is plausible just because their existence is.
 
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There's no reason to assume that we aren't in a low-entropy pocket of the universe with (and a lot of other things should be mentioned) fields that have a limited gravitational pull.

Consequently, if the second law of thermodynamics is applicable to the most meta perspective, then outside of the known universe is a high-entropy area, in which there is no intelligent life by definition.

So outside of a limited area, there's no reason to assume that any organization exists or that any other low-entropy pockets even exist, whereas the second law of thermodynamics predicts the opposite.

With regard to the relationships between gravity, time and space, there's also no reason to believe that those balances exist outside of a limited area, and obviously these are interrelated in quantifiable relationships as far as we know (e.g., black holes).

I'm trained primarily in biology but I find it difficult to understand why physics is disregarded by mathematicians and, for lack of a better term, the biological sciences in any discussion about intelligent life beyond Earth.

A discontinuity had to occur for life to evolve, which might be dependent on the irreversibility of time in our little corner of the universe. No reason to think it happened twice.
 
But the sheer size of the universe... even what we have seen is incomprehensibly vast. Billions of galaxies, each with billions of stars, many with a whole system of planets like ours... what are the chances life happened ONCE, right here? I can't fathom the idea, myself. It seems that there MUST be other life. Why just here, in all of the cosmos? What a tremendous waste of space, I just can't imagine that we're it. I do think it's unlikely we have been visited by another intelligent species, maybe we never will, maybe none of them do, unless they have perhaps spread and inhabited every habitable planet in a region of some galaxy, a species that has managed to branch out to other planets successfully. Still, the universe is almost unrealistically vast. The space between things is phenomenal and prohibitive.

I think more than any other thing, I am curious to see the life on another planet. Take note of the similarities and differences. What a trip that would be!
 
But the sheer size of the universe... even what we have seen is incomprehensibly vast. Billions of galaxies, each with billions of stars, many with a whole system of planets like ours... what are the chances life happened ONCE, right here? I can't fathom the idea, myself. It seems that there MUST be other life. Why just here, in all of the cosmos? What a tremendous waste of space.

I think more than any other thing, I am curious to see the life on another planet. Take note of the similarities and differences. What a trip that would be!

Plus, as I mentioned before. We've already found several planets that could support basic microbial life. And that's from a very VERY small sample of the universe. So that right there tells us there must be billions of potentially habitable worlds, billions of billions. And what, we are the ONLY one with the additional variables needed for macroscopic, intelligent life? It just doesn't track with the math and the evidence.
 
I think we agree on this topic. :) When I think about it logically, it seems clear that it must exist in other places too. It's a numbers game.

We're sending a probe to one of Jupiter's moons soon, Europa I think? It's basically a ball of ice with a water ocean inside the ice. They think they've seen silt and organic materials seeping through cracks. I'm really excited to see what we find. :)

Ever think about living on a moon of Jupiter? The sun would be dim, but for half the day, Jupiter would rise, and the sky would be super trippy.

screen-shot-2018-01-08-at-10-25-20-am.png


juno-jupiter.jpg


Imagine if that was your sky during the day. <3
 
^Isn't this a post-global warming disaster sky rendering? :D

There is no evidence of intelligent life elsewhere. If we're going to include microbes then okay.

The research I posted above supports the driving force towards the evolution of life within the limits of a low-entropy system. (I am providing theoretical evidence of the possibility that complex organisms can develop within limits if the second law of physics holds across the universe. I don't believe in the reality of intelligent life elsewhere as of yet.)

The math without the physics is uninteresting to me.

Neal de Grasse is a cool guy tho. Astrophysicist.
 
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Mars kinda steals all the glory but there's a lot of interesting stuff in our solar system. Titan in particular has potential.
 
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