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joke_explainer posted:Let's not assume aliens are idiots. an alien: "hurr durr let's contact the hiuminz on earthh" *points neutrino transmitter backwards*
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Apr 8, 2015 19:57
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wow, this has inspired me to write again |
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Apr 8, 2015 19:57
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alnilam posted:an alien: "hurr durr let's contact the hiuminz on earthh" *points neutrino transmitter backwards* Hahaha. Well, that's actually another possibility I guess in the original. 'Alien life is non-technological'. Dolphins are pretty intelligent creatures that can do things like, well. There's a story from training dolphins in a really awesome book which I can't remember the title nor the author. drat. But it was a cool book. Basically, in this book she was training a dolphin for stationing, which is just where you signal a dolphin and it comes swimming up to your location and waits calmly there, while working on her grad degree. She noticed the dolphin didn't like these hard fins on the fish she was using, so she started trimming those off with a pair of scissors before feeding/stationing. When the dolphin behaved properly, she'd reward him with some food and words of encouragement or whatever, but when she failed to behave, she'd give it a time out for about a minute: She'd walk about 10 feet away and turn her back to him and ignore him. So this worked for months, and the dolphin got very good at stationing. One time, she forgot to trim the fish, and threw a fish with a hard fin still attached. The dolphin bit the untrimmed fish, dropped it from his mouth, then swam back about 10 feet and turned away from the trainer and ignored her for about a minute. It gave her the exact same kind of time out she used to discourage bad behavior because the fish wasn't properly trimmed. Undeniably intelligent life, but they aren't the sort to build rockets or go to the moon or antenna arrays, ya know? |
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Apr 8, 2015 20:04
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joke_explainer posted:This is called the Planetarium hypothesis. The universe is real, but only out to a certain distance, where we smack into a simulation boundary where everything past it is just false information piped to convince us the universe is a way it really isn't. It seems unlikely given the consistency in all the observational data, but we'll never know for sure until we actually send something out there! (though Voyager probes still haven't smacked into a wall yet. I mean come on, it's all spheres. nothing says lazy 3d designe like a whole bunch of spheres. on a black background. |
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Apr 8, 2015 20:05
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monkay posted:wow, this has inspired me to write again what sort of stuff do you write monkay? |
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Apr 8, 2015 20:43
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that exact kind of post |
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Apr 8, 2015 20:58
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oh by the way ya'll gonna feel real silly about your assumptions that life has to be technological and reasonable in order to space-travel when the zerg come to eat you alive
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Apr 8, 2015 20:59
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when we finally meet the aliens, I only have one question: are they dtf? |
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Apr 8, 2015 21:00
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GEExCEE posted:that exact kind of post lol, monkay reads the thread, thinks, 'man, that inspires me to write again. *reply*' 'wow, this has inspired me to write again' *submit* drat, that was some good writing. |
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Apr 8, 2015 21:00
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YOBBERS posted:Space is infinite I could rebut this and say that modern science is conflicted on the size of our universe, but you guys keep saying "space", so I suppose I'll ask for some clarifications and ask some questions. What is "space" in the sense you are talking about? Is it just our universe? Do you think our universe is infinite and alone? If there are other universes, do you think that there's an infinite number of simultaneously existing universes in all of existence? Personally, I think our universe is massive, but finite. It's hard to speculate on what may exist outside of our universe. Astrophysicists are certainly trying to look for clues that other universes - perhaps hyperdimensional in nature - exist because of the impact they have on the matter in our universe. Unless I have missed newer studies, perhaps our biggest clue comes in a theory that provides evidence that an unusually large portion of the universe is being pulled towards one area of the sky, and therefore propose that it is something beyond the theorized edge of our universe pulling it that way. Otherwise, we're pretty much calculating and theorizing ways in which other universes and extra dimensions can potentially be proven by trying to figure out what effects that their existence could have on our universe. As for the Fermi paradox, I personally don't think the right answer will be any one of the traditional Fermi resolutions by itself. If you ask me, it's not just a matter of how much further advanced a civilization capable of contacting far away civilizations might be than us, but also the vast size of the universe, as well as the potentiality of there being a mindset within these civilizations that stymies attempts to contact us in particular or other civilizations as a whole. What I'm saying is that I think, in reality, other civilizations and life forms almost certainly exist, but there are many, many barriers, natural and artificial, that greatly hinder civilizations from finding each other. |
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Apr 8, 2015 21:02
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relevant, imagining the tenth dimension: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JkxieS-6WuA |
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Apr 8, 2015 21:05
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maybe if we can learn to imagine that we can start to imagine how the gently caress to colonize space already or build a berzerker bot |
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Apr 8, 2015 21:09
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Blue Wher posted:I could rebut this and say that modern science is conflicted on the size of our universe, but you guys keep saying "space", so I suppose I'll ask for some clarifications and ask some questions. Nobody said space is infinite dude. The observable universe is about 93 billion light years wide or so. The estimated size of the universe past that varies wildly with factors regarding inflation, but almost everyone agrees that it's finite and "flat" topology. Almost all the discussion we had so far is in regards to conditions within our single galaxy. The existence of other universes isn't particularly relevant to this question: even within a single galaxy, if you assume the Earth is not particularly special (and with at least 11 billion other comparable planets in similar habitable zones, seems unlikely it is particularly unique), all these questions are still relevant to just the relatively minuscule galaxy compared to the drat observable universe... Blue Wher posted:Personally, I think our universe is massive, but finite. It's hard to speculate on what may exist outside of our universe. Astrophysicists are certainly trying to look for clues that other universes - perhaps hyperdimensional in nature - exist because of the impact they have on the matter in our universe. Unless I have missed newer studies, perhaps our biggest clue comes in a theory that provides evidence that an unusually large portion of the universe is being pulled towards one area of the sky, and therefore propose that it is something beyond the theorized edge of our universe pulling it that way. Otherwise, we're pretty much calculating and theorizing ways in which other universes and extra dimensions can potentially be proven by trying to figure out what effects that their existence could have on our universe. There is nothing like this that I know of. The universe is homogenous and isotropic, as the WMAP and other studies over decades has shown. You might be thinking of dark energy / dark matter, which seems to affect the way galaxies are attracted to each other while not being observable through traditional means? But this is a force that acts on any individual local group of galaxies. Blue Wher posted:As for the Fermi paradox, I personally don't think the right answer will be any one of the traditional Fermi resolutions by itself. If you ask me, it's not just a matter of how much further advanced a civilization capable of contacting far away civilizations might be than us, but also the vast size of the universe, as well as the potentiality of there being a mindset within these civilizations that stymies attempts to contact us in particular or other civilizations as a whole. What I'm saying is that I think, in reality, other civilizations and life forms almost certainly exist, but there are many, many barriers, natural and artificial, that greatly hinder civilizations from finding each other. The original formulation of the paradox assumes there would be many millions of examples of life throughout just our galaxy. So if you think life is so rare that it could only happen 0-1 times per galaxy, then it'd conveniently fit within the 'too far apart in distance or time' solution to the paradox without having to drag much else into it really. |
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Apr 8, 2015 21:14
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I don't really bother with wondering whether or not we live in a singular universe, or one out of many uncountable possible multiverses, because ultimately we'll probably never know. at any rate I'll leave that to the astrophysicists. |
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Apr 8, 2015 21:14
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Further, something outside of the visible universe could not be exerting any sort of impact on objects within the visible universe that would be noticeable to us. Information can't travel faster than light after all; for forces to be exerted on an object and for us to see the objects being affected by those forces, it would have to be within our light cone and therefore within our own observable universe.ulvir posted:I don't really bother with wondering whether or not we live in a singular universe, or one out of many uncountable possible multiverses, because ultimately we'll probably never know. at any rate I'll leave that to the astrophysicists. Same. The only interesting part of the multiverse theory is the idea that evolution may play some kind of part in the formation of universes. It's a very powerful algorithm clearly so it's a compelling idea to explain the 'perfect fit' nature of the universe. |
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Apr 8, 2015 21:15
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my dad always says that he must've been the guy that got the best parallel universe and that he's sorry for his parallel universe selves that probably don't have it as good as him. he's a sci-fi nerd and a cool guy. |
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Apr 8, 2015 21:33
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It's almost impossible to get a sense of the scale between distant galaxies (or even close galaxies) and the solar system of galactic scale. In the previous analogy of walking from a meter-wide sun, the distance has to go astronomical again. To get to the closest other galaxy, the Andromeda galaxy, you'd need to walk 20% over the distance Voyager has travelled out of our solar system to reach the scale model of Andromeda. (2,368,000 light years, which would be 11.04 billion miles in our scale model. To reach the most distant galaxies, you're walking to Alpha Centauri  It's annoying how the scale refuses to stay terrestrial when you're trying to compare things astronomically. the scale just keeps getting bigger and bigger. I mean, look at this.  This is the hubble Extreme Deep Field image. Assembled as a composite from 10 years worth of photographic exposures on a certain tiny patch of sky, pictured here:  Each one of those are distant galaxies, some incredibly young as further away we look, the younger we see galaxies (billions and billions of years in the past, the time it took this light to reach us.) No section of the sky is special; look in any direction and you'll see billions and billions of galaxies. The further away we look, the further back in time we look and we see the galaxies in their formation. But we can't see how they might be influenced by things outside of the observable universe, as we have to wait for the light from that event to reach us; So it has to reach them, then reach us. It's sad that in a few hundred billion years, any intelligent life will have no hint of this amazing thing, because all light from these sources will be absolutely lost to redshift. They will appear alone in the universe, and they may never have the evidence to even figure out that the Big Bang happened. joke_explainer fucked around with this message at 22:30 on Apr 8, 2015 |
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Apr 8, 2015 21:39
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ewas the deep field image the thing where they deliberately picked the very darkest, bleakest patch of sky they could find and imaged it just for fun and found out that sure enough it was chock full of galaxies and poo poo
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Apr 8, 2015 21:45
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space
Pizzatime fucked around with this message at 21:52 on Apr 8, 2015 |
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Apr 8, 2015 21:49
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alnilam posted:ewas the deep field image the thing where they deliberately picked the very darkest, bleakest patch of sky they could find and imaged it just for fun and found out that sure enough it was chock full of galaxies and poo poo yeah but it wasn't really just for shits and giggles, they expected what would be there, but the detail and beauty of it was astounding. They did then the UDF and XDF (this image is from the extreme deep field) experiments as well. |
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Apr 8, 2015 21:49
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scientist1: hey dude i have an idea *snickers* what if we *giggles* what if we... haha we spent hours of Hubble's time imaging.... *can barely hold it in* imaging the darkest patch of sky we know of? *bursts out laughing* scientist2:  *later* scientist1: aw damnit it's actually really cool!
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Apr 8, 2015 21:52
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hey drone bot why did you timg that thing? it was cool when you were forced to see its grandeur while scrolling down
Apparently I'm #1 Kotori fan |
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Apr 8, 2015 21:55
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Chill la Chill posted:hey drone bot why did you timg that thing? it was cool when you were forced to see its grandeur while scrolling down that was me, I suggested that and then I edited my post that was the suggestion to say space after the fact |
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Apr 8, 2015 21:57
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space cat dj'ing in the xdf ~*~
Apparently I'm #1 Kotori fan |
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Apr 8, 2015 21:59
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what I find most fascinating of all is that we can point what's basically an astronomical camera towards a star, and just by looking closer at the light, be able to pick out the exact composition of that star or planet spectroscopy owns |
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Apr 8, 2015 23:09
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Wow this thread took off while I was asleep huh. Nice one explainer. Also this is pretty cool reading http://www.simulation-argument.com/simulation.html You assume that we, as a species, will either 1- Die out before reach the level of computing ability to run a fullscale simulation of our world 2- We reach that point and never want to run a simulation 3- We did reach that point and now here we are, in a simulation. Supposing that's the case (3), and the ability to run simulations within the framework of the preexisting one, and assuming there's enough computing power at the top level to run many more within itself, you can either assume that we're the 0th level species, and it's never been done before, or we're statistically likely to be somewhere in the middle.
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Apr 8, 2015 23:23
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I like to imagine that while I'm playing the sims and making him play the sims in his computer, that I too am being played by a bigger sim
Apparently I'm #1 Kotori fan |
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Apr 8, 2015 23:29
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why would anyone ever trap themselves inside a simulation disregard video games, the internet, tv, radio and theater before you answer that question |
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Apr 8, 2015 23:38
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It's not that we're trapping ourselves ala some weird version of the matrix, but that if we have the ability to make a simulation of another version of our universe, it's not too far out there to assume that we're already a result of someone getting to the idea first. poo poo, it's not like they even have to be humans, they could be just speedrunning multiple instances of evolution and seeing what crazy poo poo this planet spits out. If there is a level above ours, they're likely not even human.
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Apr 8, 2015 23:42
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Pizzatime posted:why would anyone ever trap themselves inside a simulation you haven't met anyone who really, really loves the oculus rift, my friend Apparently I'm #1 Kotori fan |
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Apr 8, 2015 23:46
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I knew the simulation argument would eventually come up. 'The Matrix' argument. It's kind of a variant on the Planetarium hypothesis. I don't think it's very appealing for a number of reasons but I'll talk about it a bit. This gets into truly epic navel gazing territory, deep into that navel to where you're almost staring at the back of your own spine...Pizzatime posted:why would anyone ever trap themselves inside a simulation They wouldn't be trapping themselves in the simulation; they'd be generating hundreds of billions of individuals within their simulation, which then it stands to go that you'd stand a better chance of ending up as one of any number of countless billions of simulated individuals versus any member of the (more static) original set of creators. It's somewhat built off the mediocrity principle mentioned earlier. That is, if you have a random grab out of a large set of something, you'll get the average thing in the set instead of the rare. If both these things are true:
It would mean that, selecting any random life from a set, you'd probably end up in a simulation versus outside of one. (You could be a random person, in a simulation, running on substrate from a world for of intelligent beings that are also in a simulation, which is run by intelligent beings which unknowable to them are also in a simulation.) It's kind of a scary, but thoroughly untestable hypothesis. A simulation creator would have no reason to make their existence obvious. The entire universe could just be an investigation in a tweaking of a social or cultural variable. You'd hope at least some percentage of simulation capable societies would hold off on doing such a thing for ethical reasons, but it only takes a handful to make a universe mostly populated by simulated entities. This is even worse when you consider, for all intents and purposes? The simulation creators are gods. If a religious zealot, unhappy with the fact that they can't witness unbelievers being punished for their crimes in this life wanted, he could create a simulation that looks for all intents and purposes like a normal universe, except when you die you are literally transported to an actual Heaven or Hell, where he could have you tortured for the rest of eternity -- that sort of thing would show no evidence whatsoever, since the simulation is completely transparent to the mechanisms of its creator. It's hard to criticize for a number of reasons. Without any awareness of a universe outside of the simulation, you can't really make an argument about wasted energy -- perhaps a layer up energy is abundant beyond imagination. Speed is irrelevant, because from the viewpoint of the simulated individuals in the simulation, time always proceeds at the same rate. The simulation itself would have to be beyond ridiculously detailed for our reality to be one. When we build our first simulated individuals, we're probably not going to waste a lot of time on fully defining every atom in a wall, for instance -- might as well make that something simple so we can spend more time processing the brain. It's clear, if we lived in a simulation, that they do waste the time processing everything. Oxygen diffusing through a membrane gets an unbelievably huge amount of computational power, just like every other thing. There are a few types of hypothetical experiments that would support the idea of a simulated universe, though none provide a way to prove or completely remove the possibility. If the physical nature of the universe is discretized in a grid or lattice of some sort, that would be suggestive of a simulation -- a simplification, to make things easier to simulate in a computer of some sort. There are a few experimental ideas that might help prove or disprove this concept, and several bits of physical data suggest that all energy and time might be quantized in such a way. But neither proves or disproves the existence of a simulation. Overall, I feel like its tangental to the Fermi Paradox. It's basically a variant of the Planetarium hypothesis as I mention at the start: That some outside power has changed the details on Earth to make the universe seem more empty than it is. It's just a particularly freaky one. |
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Apr 9, 2015 00:01
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The universe could be a simulation, but not even a computer one; an incidental simulation, run via the computational properties of matter and the laws resulting from the initial conditions of the universe. There'd be no way to ever test if that was true, nor any way to know if it is relevant at all or any different at all from the universe as we know it. 
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Apr 9, 2015 00:04
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OP what about when all the stars have died out and for the remainder of the universe there is truly nothing?
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Apr 9, 2015 00:05
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Luvcow posted:OP what about when all the stars have died out and for the remainder of the universe there is truly nothing? That's what we physics fans call 'The Big lovely End of the Universe', Luvcow. Possibly even all hadrons decay over a long enough time, and for trillions of years we have black holes slowly decaying through Hawking radiation, then eventually those go away too. All that's left is a uniform distribution of heat, only ever so slightly above absolute zero, hurtling apart at unimaginable acceleration in a completely black universe that could not support life because there's no matter or energy or good times whatsoever. The only comfort is that we will be long long dead before it happens |
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Apr 9, 2015 00:16
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byob8.2: a completely black universe that could not support life because there's no matter or energy or good times whatsoever.
Piso Mojado fucked around with this message at 00:22 on Apr 9, 2015 |
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Apr 9, 2015 00:20
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joke_explainer posted:That's what we physics fans call 'The Big lovely End of the Universe', Luvcow. Possibly even all hadrons decay over a long enough time, and for trillions of years we have black holes slowly decaying through Hawking radiation, then eventually those go away too. All that's left is a uniform distribution of heat, only ever so slightly above absolute zero, hurtling apart at unimaginable acceleration in a completely black universe that could not support life because there's no matter or energy or good times whatsoever. The only comfort is that we will be long long dead before it happens Doesn't gravity suggest that eventually, after this happens, everything will be a singularity again and we hard reset? |
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Apr 9, 2015 00:22
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we haven't build a supercomputer capable enough to answer this question yet
Apparently I'm #1 Kotori fan |
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Apr 9, 2015 00:23
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joke_explainer posted:That's what we physics fans call 'The Big lovely End of the Universe', Luvcow. Possibly even all hadrons decay over a long enough time, and for trillions of years we have black holes slowly decaying through Hawking radiation, then eventually those go away too. All that's left is a uniform distribution of heat, only ever so slightly above absolute zero, hurtling apart at unimaginable acceleration in a completely black universe that could not support life because there's no matter or energy or good times whatsoever. The only comfort is that we will be long long dead before it happens I hope my  dreamworld heaven is not affected by this
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Apr 9, 2015 00:26
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Chill la Chill posted:we haven't build a supercomputer capable enough to answer this question yet I thnk I posted a reference earlier but if you have time read The Last Question by Isaac Asimov
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Apr 9, 2015 00:27
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Chill la Chill posted:we haven't build a supercomputer capable enough to answer this question yet maybe earth itself is a gigantic organic super computer running a 10 billion year program |
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Apr 9, 2015 00:28
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