Conspiratiorist posted:

Isn't there an energy thread?

Libluini posted:

Even if literally real, it still doesn't work though, for the simple fact that going forward or backwards in time has no meaning, everything always moves towards entropy. True, you can flip the equations around, but this only works if you first assume everything now rolls backwards towards entropy. Which from our viewpoint would just be exactly the same as forward mode. Another point, we just found out anti-matter and matter are not exactly the same, which deflates this idea instantly.

quote:

Ma and his colleagues sifted through Breakthrough Listen observations of 820 stars, made using the 100-metre Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope. They built machine-learning software to analyse the data, which netted nearly three million signals of interest but discarded most as Earth-based interference. Ma then manually reviewed around 20,000 signals and narrowed them down to 8 intriguing candidates.

The search ultimately came up empty — all eight signals disappeared the second time the team listened. But the methods could be used on other data, such as a flood of observations from the MeerKAT array of 64 radio telescopes in South Africa, which Breakthrough Listen began using in December. The machine-learning algorithms could also be used on archived SETI data, says Ma, to seek signals that might previously have been overlooked.

I AM GRANDO posted:

The article seems vague on this point on purpose, so I’m guessing the answer is no, but would these 8 signals each potentially be something as interesting as the wow signal that was missed because nobody has looked at them until now, vs them being false positives from satellites or something?

I AM GRANDO posted:

The article seems vague on this point on purpose, so I’m guessing the answer is no, but would these 8 signals each potentially be something as interesting as the wow signal that was missed because nobody has looked at them until now, vs them being false positives from satellites or something?

quote:

Regarding the nature of the rest of the events, most of them look like false positives associated with RFI signals. We have not exhaustively classified every single event and it is entirely possible that there are additional ETI-like signals that we have not picked up, including those that are too weak to be seen by human eyes. Other reasons as to why the false-positive rate is higher than in our validation process include overfitting of backgrounds. The diversity of the RFI environment and the brightness of the RFI signals mean that it is unavoidable that our model would sometimes focus more on the background than on the foreground signals. In addition, we do not have real ETI signals to train the model on, and instead have to rely on simulated signals that are injected to the sky backgrounds. Injection of signals might have altered the statistics of the snippets, introducing artefacts that were unintentionally learnt by the ML model.

I AM GRANDO posted:

I realize I just resurrected this thread yesterday, but today youtube fed me this hour-long explanation of how insane Avi Loeb has become. It’s by a recent physics Ph.D. who has some nice stuff on her channel and is quite good (half of it is setup, and she gives a timecode for when the Loeb stuff starts):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aY985qzn7oI

I had thought that he was just a fraud doing bad-faith stuff to get famous and bilk rich morons, and there is some of that. But he’s also a genuinely unhinged crank who apparently churns out hundreds of garbage papers and shouts down Jill Tarter for not recognizing that he is the only person who has ever been serious about looking for aliens.

I only ever listened to his John Michael Godlier podcast appearances, where he seemed to behave himself, but he has had worse appearances, like with Joe Rogan.

I AM GRANDO posted:

I realize I just resurrected this thread yesterday, but today youtube fed me this hour-long explanation of how insane Avi Loeb has become. It’s by a recent physics Ph.D. who has some nice stuff on her channel and is quite good (half of it is setup, and she gives a timecode for when the Loeb stuff starts):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aY985qzn7oI

I had thought that he was just a fraud doing bad-faith stuff to get famous and bilk rich morons, and there is some of that. But he’s also a genuinely unhinged crank who apparently churns out hundreds of garbage papers and shouts down Jill Tarter for not recognizing that he is the only person who has ever been serious about looking for aliens.

I only ever listened to his John Michael Godlier podcast appearances, where he seemed to behave himself, but he has had worse appearances, like with Joe Rogan.

mdemone posted:

You don't become a department chair at Harvard by being a crackpot

eXXon posted:

Fred Hoyle won nearly every award there is (and probably deserved a Nobel) and founded the Institute for Astronomy at Cambridge, which I gather was well after he had earned a reputation for being an incredible crank on a wide variety of topics.

Avi Loeb has certainly become a crank about aliens and SETI, and his Galileo Project sure looks grifty (as does NASA's vaunted UAP study team). That does not invalidate the work he did in other non-alien/SETI fields, and while he has a propensity for publishing a certain kind of highly speculative paper with napkin math, shotgunning improbable predictions to increase the odds of one of them may eventually prove to be correct, I don't think they're all or even mostly "garbage".

cat botherer posted:

Although a while back I read Golem XIV by Stanislaw Lem, where instead hyperintelligences draw inward and pretty much become catatonic.

https://rtraba.files.wordpress.com/2017/01/golem-xiv.pdf

Raenir Salazar posted:

The default "sphere" object approximately fills a cube of 100 by 100 by 100 "cm". If the Sun is 110 times the size of the Earth, and the Earth is 11,600 Earths away from the sun, is the Earth "sphere" object 1,160,000 "cm" from the Sun "sphere"?

quote:

Is the 2D disc of the Sun's shape visible from the Earths orbit? Or just it's "brightness"? Because trying the above the sun object basically disappears and with a camera positioned next to the earth object the sun is now tiny. And I don't know if this means my scale is wrong or I'm not accounting for how bright the sun is in real life which is what makes it "visible"?

mdemone posted:

I took a while to stumble on this post but I wanted to sincerely thank you because that is one of the best goddamn things I ever read.

I printed it out and bound it, because apparently you can't buy it in English.

Read that poo poo. All of you, do it now.

mdemone posted:

Read my post again. The radius of the Sun is 109x the radius of Earth.

Epic High Five posted:

Lem has loads of amazing stuff that explored themes like this and other really far sighted stuff, highly recommend pretty much whatever seems interesting to you. Solaris (what finding alien life may actually look like) is my personal favorite, with Return From the Stars (basically The Forever War but without the war) a close second. Going through his stuff is funny because it's half fun romp and half really serious and somber Le Guin style philosophical exploration using scifi as a contradiction forcer

Raenir Salazar posted:

Chicken Butt posted:

Stanislaw Lem was so far ahead of his time that I think we need to consider the possibility that he *was* an alien.

… jk, but drat, his brain was on a different level. For example, one his books consists entirely of reviews of books that don’t exist (“A Perfect Vacuum”).

quote:

Lem singled out only one[46] American science fiction writer for praise, Philip K. Dick, in a 1984 English-language anthology of his critical essays, Microworlds: Writings on Science Fiction and Fantasy. Lem had initially held a low opinion of Philip K. Dick (as he did for the bulk of American science fiction) and would later say that this was due to a limited familiarity with Dick's work, since Western literature was hard to come by in Communist Poland.

Dick alleged that Stanisław Lem was probably a false name used by a composite committee operating on orders of the Communist party to gain control over public opinion, and wrote a letter to the FBI to that effect.[47].

Rappaport posted:

To be fair, Stanislaw never had a satellite beaming thoughts into his mind, so mister Dick had a leg up on that regard.

Captain_Maclaine posted:

Dick was also on all the drugs, whereas Lem's work always gave the impression that no he really just naturally was that weird.

Rappaport posted:

He lived under the Nazis and the Soviets, give the man a break.

I guess he rarely wrote female characters? And when he did, it was unfortunate.

Mister Dick had no troubles writing ladies, but it's a bit hit and miss.

Captain_Maclaine posted:

I didn't mean it as a bad thing.

But yeah his infrequent women characters rarely worked out well.

Epic High Five posted:

part of the reason why Le Guin stands out so much even accounting for her GOAT status.

Hieronymous Alloy posted:

The funny thing to me about Le Guin as an author is that a lot of her best works are in a very significant way her taking another author's whole oeuvre and doing it better. Like, The Dispossessed came out shortly after The Moon is a Harsh Mistress; Lathe of Heaven feels like a response to Dick; Earthsea feels like a response to Tolkien.