Grrl Power #755 – The great gouda caper
Ooh! Press conference bombshell!
Okay, before everyone gets too excited, Cora’s first line on the next page is, “Well, mostly.” For further explanation, you’ll have to actually wait for the actual page.
The great filters Cora talks about, if it’s not obvious from her next word bubble, is one of those things that scientists bring up when they’re speculating about why the galaxy isn’t apparently teeming with advanced civilizations. Basically, we estimate there’s between 100 and 400 billion stars in our galaxy, and more and more, we’re learning that probably most if not nearly all of the stars have planets around them. So that’s two parts of the Drake Equation answered. We can make some estimates about how many of those planets are in the Goldilocks zone, but there are some unknowns, like how often life will arise even when conditions are ideal. But even if we plug in some really pessimistic numbers into the rest of the equation, there should be tens of thousands of planets out there with life. So where is it?
The filters are things that would prevent life from living long enough to advance to galactic exploration. Anything from runaway global climate change, extinction from super viruses, famine from overpopulation, self destruction from nuclear or virological war, extermination from AI, or destruction by a superior alien race that wipes out species that approach a certain level of technology, a la Mass Effect Reapers. The list goes on.
Obviously in this case, there aren’t any Reaper like aliens in the Grrl-verse, otherwise Fracture Station wouldn’t have been nearly as populated. (Admittedly we don’t know what Sydney was fighting on the Alari homeworld.) The filters Cora is talking about are the ones that races have to slip through on their own. She also is exaggerating slightly about us needing to build our own warp drives. It’s preferred if a race can manage that on their own, but there are quite a few species that are part of the galactic community which never would have figured that stuff out on their own. You know, space orcs or whatever. Well, not space orcs. Just regular orcs, in space. Or an orc like equivalent. In a lot of cases, those species were brought into space because another race needed a bunch of brutes for something. War, construction… I don’t know. Bodyguards. Brute stuff. Some planets had more than one intelligent race, and the ones that advanced to space travel first brought the other ones along with them. In the cases where the more advanced race didn’t wipe out the less advanced one.
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What’s with that weird face behind Suzie News? Looks like they’re wearing a pantyhose on their head like a bank robber or something.
Dave’s art style has changed since Suzie last made an appearance. Each character which he has translated to the new style has gone through a slightly weird phase. Which we ruthlessly point out, to encourage Dave to perfect the look. So he is much set upon. But always manages to pull through.
And, yea, the tip of her nose is a bit squished, creating the effect you describe. Although it may just be at a very slight angle, creating that impression. Whatever else may be contributing to it, Suzie’s face did strike me as being odd too.
Possibly it may be the shading which is contributing. A bit unfair to point that out mind, as Keith has done a brilliant job prior to that (and on the rest of this page). But he was landed with translating the old look to the new, colouring wise, so faced the same challenges Dave did on other characters.
I think they referred to the face to the top right of Suzie’s head, not Suzie herself ;)
Oops. Yea. That is just a background face, to represent the further ranks of more press behind her, but without having to show lots more.
*shuffles off quietly hoping nobody will spot the blunder*
Nah, you’re not wrong. Nose looks a bit blackish and flat in that first panel, but I do think it is the shading and angle. Same frame practically, panel 7, looks significantly better.
Blockish*
Nah, her aunt saw her on TV so she got some free quality time with her and got suzie to change her hair cut/style and gave her a “few” tips on makeup…
I believe Suzie and Brownhairguy are standing in front of something. It has a picture of Brownhairguy on it, so it might be a TV screen.
No, that’s David Tennant behind them
This is huge news, so of course the Doctor would be there
That’s awesome. Unless he says “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.” Then, not so awesome.
Only if it’s raining, you’re safe as long as it doesn’t start raining
Never mind, was trying to find that clip of him in the rain (stupid click baits, thought had found one butt wasn’t sitting through nine minutes for just a 2 second clip, not after getting to Smith), most times, when Tennant said it, it was because someone screwed up BIG time and he was going to have to punish them (or when he didn’t hear what someone was saying :P)
He used it a few times when he knew something terrible was going to happen but, because it was a “fixed point in time” (something that would screw up reality royally if it was altered), his foreknowledge was useless, and he was powerless to intervene.
Yeah, it depended on if he was sad, angry or just confused :D
That’s a character who wasn’t rendered.
There’s a movie where the video on a video screen was going to be added in post production
but it was missed and in the final film the screen is still green.
Same principle.
Dave was probably going to add that character later.
Possibly. But we saw similar effects with crowds around Sydney’s shop. Albeit this is indeed a single individual, so you may be right.
Whoever was filming it used a weird setting for depth-of-field focusing.
I have a $2,500 video camera. If you just use it straight out of the box, it does a great job on its own. If you take it manual to make use of all of the awesome filters/effects/corrections that it can do, if you don’t like the autodetection defaults that it selects for the given lighting and environmental conditions … well, you can seriously fuck things up, if you don’t know what you’re doing.
The station shouldn’t have sent along such an amateur cameraperson to such an important event, huh?
What’s this I hear about ‘Red’ Cameras costing more than your car?
“Red” cameras? I’m not sure what you mean.
There are plenty of professional cameras that cost over $20k, though. I stopped just short of professional grade. The entry level for those is around $5k, from what I’ve seen.
Red Epic. $50k??
https://youtu.be/-AiA_QEFWJ8
Christ.
Red Epic.
$70K?
See the Youtube ‘$1000 Camera VS $40,000 Camera | Explained’
Go and watch some of Linus Tech Tips (LTT) videos on YouTube. They have been fiddling around with the 8K red cameras and the “Hey look what happens when we take a $50,000 one apart and try and water cool it etc. They have gear on there that can cost more than a house!
Dave apparently needs to upgrade his video card, so he can bump the polygon count and LoD settings.
You want him to waste time creating the look for a character we see once and probably never again? o_O
No, I want to waste his colorist’s time.
The guy he has to pay? And can only afford occasionally? o_O
Hey, once the page is handed off, it’s the colorist’s problem. Stuff like this isn’t usually contracted out based upon an hourly rate.
She is human? Ok, calling it one of two things right now.
1. She’s the granddaughter of someone who immigrated (or was kidnapped) from earth, and ‘went native’ out there. And this can also be the reason why she was born without limbs, he DNA didn’t quite mesh up with another, even with high-tech medical help.
2. Translation glitch or culture misunderstanding. Cora means human in the context that anyone with 2 arms, 2 legs, and a head is considered a ‘human’, it is not species specific in her philosophy.
3. She’s just trolling everyone.
Considering that she is a friend of Dabbler that seems possible.
She is the daughter of Quetzalcoatl and an alien princess.
And she took the job to rescue Sydney in order to find her long lost half sister.
https://www.grrlpowercomic.com/archives/comic/grrl-power-360-chalking-up/
Wonder who won the origins bet?
Wait . . . does that mean Varia might be her half-sister??? Find out next week on As The Grrl Turns!
4. “Humans” were seeded on multiple planets by “the ancestors” or somesuch – (as were other races, perhaps) – and so “human” is a galactic term after all.
I was thinking this too, and if that is the case then expect the religious fallout to be… substantial.
3, Human is a recognized species because there are already some in the galactic community because some of us are out there already, either as exotic pets or slaves or the same way there are elephants on india and africa
The genetic difference between a human and a Bonobo and Chimpanzee is 1.2%. Barring the fact Cora has some drastically different buidling blocks other then DNA, then chances are she’s going to be really close to human….genetically.
Now the HOW of those very similar genetics expressing themselves? Well, considering that the humans have a genetic difference between each other of 0.1% and we still have a drastic differences in skin color, hair color/type, etc…. you get where I’m going with this.
That figure doesn’t help. 50% of the similarities between humans and chimps is also shared with bacteria; many of those genes just deal with being a living cell on Earth. Then there’s a huge extra chunk to say “and both are multicellular” and more again to say “and both are mammals”.
Plus it matters a lot which genes are different; not all are equal! Ones that control what other genes are switched on, where and when, even tiny changes to those can have huge impacts.
Life began on Earth almost as soon as it possibly could have. I know that’s a small sample size, compounded by a sort of confirmation bias (i.e. “Well, here we are, so obviously life will begin wherever it can!”), but it is fairly interesting at least that there was no and has never been no point at which this planet could support life where it didn’t actually support life.
There was some discussion of Issac Arthur’s YouTube channel in the comments of the last update. He goes through a discussion of the filters, but I have yet to see anyone actually assign numbers and then calculate the odds that right now there is intelligent life elsewhere in our galaxy.
Time seems to me to be a fairly significant filter. Given the length of time Earth has supported life overall, the amount of time it has supported intelligent life has been a vanishingly small proportion of that time. And that’s not a sideways joke on Republican politics or the current US President, but a simple mathematical reality.
Profound observation.
“Life began on Earth almost as soon as it possibly could have.”
As you yourself point out, it has only ONE SINGULAR example, so the confirmation bias is practically at 100%.
Effectively, that statement means very little to nothing.
Also, humans thus far seem only capable of recognizing intelligence that seem similar to its own, so we have really no idea how long this planet has *Truly* supported intelligent life.
There is also variations in how one defines “life”, and this is not merely a philosophical matter, but something that even actual scientists would point out if asked “where life starts”.
If dolphins had hands ( or tentacles ) instead of flippers…. my point is that intelligence isn’t enough. An appendage that lets you do something ( AKA tool use ) with it is key if ya want to make a civilization. The reason humans got so smart is because the size of our ‘tribe’ got bigger. Meaning as soon s farming and thusly villages, happened we jumped to very large social groups… and keeping up with who is doing what with who else is why we needed the big brain. ( not kidding, look it up )
We really don’t have a good way to talk with other life. Tv would tell you to start with prime numbers or some other mathematical constant. Course any specials without ten fingers probably uses a different base then ten for its number system (binary or hexadecimal would be much more likely). And yet we still haven’t figured out how to talk to dolphins. Large social groups, dialects by location, words for personal names (porposefal?) And numbers… but we still can’t do more then teach them a few of our words instead. Sorry SETI
Even humans didn’t always use base 10 … we use a base 60 for time (Sumerians & Babylonians).
There’s also the base 12 system for calendars and astrology (not astronomy).
Primes will be the same no matter which numerical base a species/culture uses. The point is to count out the primes with a repetition of pulses. Natural phenomena tend to be cyclical, at some level. The hypothesis goes that a long string of pulses without an easy multiple is more likely to be the result of intentional production.
Let me complete that thought.
There are obvious flaws with the hypothesis, of course. Things like Fibonacci spirals indicate that you can get some pretty weird shit in nature. You have to start somewhere, though.
Hardly anyone would recognise the significance of 21097.4558.
You don’t just throw out a single prime. You count up from 1, continuing up into … I dunno, at least into the ten-thousands, since the field thins out after the first couple hundred.
The field thins out after the NUMBER 200 or 300, I mean, not after the first 200 or 300 primes. Sorry, my verbiage is a bit loose, today. Need more coffee.
I think that sending a string of the first couple hundred primes might get someone’s attention, if the signal wasn’t garbled by interstellar interference. Damned if I know how you would generate a signal that strong, though.
i’d suggest a smaller cap before repeating the sequence, “we picked up the signal, since we started listening there have been a little over nine thousand evenly spaced pulses. there was a brief pause, and so far there have been another thousand.” all assuming their signal reception is perfect and our transmission is perfect. When was the last time you had a cell phone or VOIP call that didn’t have a single blip of dead air? One in the wrong place in a message that long ruins the message. I would say transmit the first 10 or 100 prime numbers before repeating, so they the repeated message is manageably short and they know 10 or 100 is a significant number for us
Heh heh heh. Well, something like that. I was mostly just throwing out numbers. Best to stop and repeat around the number 200 or 300, I suppose. They’ll probably get the idea.
I like your idea of doing the first 100 primes to indicate significance, though. 10 wouldn’t be enough for them to be sure it was intentional, particularly through the interference.
I heard that quantum computers could be linked on a quantum level … regardless of distance.
If that’s true … we could “ping” quantum IP addresses (for lack of a better term) to find other civilizations. Even if we couldn’t talk to them, we would know it’s a valid address.
I don’t think that quantum entanglement is that stable. We’d have to get one of the entangled particles there somehow, too.
Ender’s Game was a bit optimistic in that regard.
I’m pretty sure it doesn’t work that way. Entangling data packets for quantum computers requires laying out your connection just like classical computers. We’d have to point our quantum fiber optics cable or quantum laser beam at their quantum receiver or quantum ethernet port all the same. Even more, actually understanding anything sent through a quantum connection still requires a speed-of-light delay.
Things like “valid address” are going to be standardized conventions. It’s going to be pretty weird if our standards and their standards match up, when not even all of our own standards match up with each other.
Basically, we need compatible infrastructure and compatible protocols with any aliens to do something like that, which implies we found them and can communicate already.
“… actually understanding anything sent through a quantum connection still requires a speed-of-light delay.”
Mmm, I know physicists like this limit. But it seems that their reason for it (other than math that requires more paws to follow, than I have) is “causality”. But as we also have physicists saying that it is possible to go back in time, with a wormhole (if you don’t mind a deadly dose of radiation) then causality is not an absolute limit.
Gamma Ray Burst!?
The calendar was base10 before the Julian calendar was adopted to balance the seasons and crops or something along those lines. That’s why December is the last month.
Yup, freaking emperors, screwing up a simple numbering system. So, it’s in October, the eighth month of … shit.
Except that dolphin brains are primarily insulative tissue, and they have less than a quarter of the number of cerebral neurons as a human brain has.
Yesterday’s hard science fiction is today’s fantasy science fiction.
And they’re still smarter than most humans.
You are quite correct. But all you’re doing is introducing another filter. Intelligent life that actually creates enough technology that they can hear our SETI (or whatever hypothetical other messages, such as radio broadcasts), or that they can generate such a signal that we can intercept and interpret as a sign or intelligent life.
Let us start with the principle that there is nothing special about us nor the times we (living creatures, rather than just humanity) live in. Per the Copernican principle we should assume that our existence is not at the beginning of an era nor the end. Just some average point somewhere in the middle. So we would expect our single example to have had life evolving at some mid point of the span of time the planet has been capable of supporting life.
The Earth is 4.5 billion years old. So why, if it is so hard for life to begin, would we see evidence of it as far back as 3.5 billion years ago (and every time we look further back, when we find older rocks, we keep pushing the date back even more)?
We do not just have a single data set to account for (life) but also the lack of life. There should have been a lot longer absence of it, if it is really hard to evolve. Unless we are at some extreme outlier of a curve. However the Copernican principle states that we should not make that assumption. Why should we assume that there is something unique about Earth which allowed life to spontaneously appear promptly after it ceased to be a molten ball?
It seems to be made out of pretty common things available in the galaxy, which points us away from it being unique.
As far as we know, life could have developed a billion years ago, as our universe is about 13 billion years old.
We know from the fossil record that it began at least 3.5 billion years ago. And there is every chance that it is even earlier than that, but older rocks have been subsumed back into the Earth’s mantle. So geologists keep looking for any older examples which may have escaped the process. Whilst paleontologists will be hot on their heels to see what life is in those rocks. Simply because as we have found older and older samples we have been able to push back the ‘earliest known life on Earth’ date.
One thing that has been suggested as unusual for Earth is the size of our moon. Earth has the biggest moon relative to its mother planet in the solar system. And it makes for sizable tidal effects which must have stirred the primordial soup. Any chemist would tell you stirring is a way for processes to happen faster as more reactants come in contact with each other. Including the process of developing life. In Isaac Asimovs stories life on other planets was either Earth-derived or at a very primitive stage as those planets lacked Earths big moon.
Good point. Plus we do have one other anomoly, with our solar system. Namely that usually the Jupiter sized planets are closer to the star, so not many solar systems may have Earth sized planets in our kind of orbit (in the ‘Goldilocks Zone’).
That said though our observations are skewed at the moment in that it is a lot easier to detect ‘Hot Jupiters’ (i.e. those closely orbiting their star) than any other kind of planet. Once our detection methods and quantities of stars surveyed increases we may find that our kind of solar system is still relatively common. All it would take is one large planet being thrown out of the system, which tends to happen quite often in simulations.
As for moon sizes, lets wait and see once we get the resolutions to pick out enough exo moons, rather than basing our predictions just on our Solar system. It will not be that long.
Note, however, that for first few billions of years there was not enough heavier elements in universe to support life. By “heavier” I mean stuff like copper, although it’s quite possible there are even heavier elements necessary for multicellular organisms.
Given how old the universe is and how short a time We have existed in it, the question isn’t ‘Is there any other life forms out there?’ it’s ‘Are there any life forms close enough to our level of evolution/development that we can a have any meaningful interaction with?’. Lets say an intelligent life form that is over a Billion years old passes through our region of space, would they consider us a life form or would we just be ‘Carbon Based Organic Sample #####’? Makes me wonder.
How much effort have we given to communicating with ants? How much have we give to communicating with the plant earth as a single entity?
More than you think;
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/08/150828081312.htm\\
Objection! On an account, that Earth harbored life probably twice. There is non-zero probability, that either Theia or Gaia (most probably) could potentially have life already before the collision (I am referring to an event that created our moon – it is known from Apollo missions that Luna has same makeup as Earth’s crust, so it may be cluster of ejecta from an impact). It’s obvious that event resulting in two celestial bodies’ cores reflowing together would completely reset the surface. If we ever manage to dig deep enough, either here, or on Luna, we may actually find something..
I do not believe that this is at all possible. At the time when the collision which created our moon occurred the Earth was still far too hot.
>but I have yet to see anyone actually assign numbers and then calculate the odds that right now there is intelligent life elsewhere in our galaxy.
You don’t have to.
The scale of the galaxy is so huge that no matter how pessimistic you get with your numbers, its still a virtual certainty of there being other intelligent life.
If you start getting optimistic (Our star is young, we came about pretty quickly, we’re made of common elements) the question rapidly moves from “if there is life” to “Where the hell is everybody?”
I’d still need to see those numbers before I could agree, because the single filter I mentioned above, time, has as it’s filtration property track record on this planet alone a known and measurable record of cutting the probability down to 3.3017829e-5% all by itself. That’s the % of time for the existence of what can be called human life on the planet (estimated at 150,000 years) measured against the overall age of the planet (4,543,000,000 years).
That’s just one filter, of a very, very long list of other significant filters. So yes, despite the ~200 billion stars in the Milky way the numbers do drop precipitously once you start applying logical filters against them.
200,000 years … if you’re referring to modern humans.
6,000,000 years … if you refer to the first tangible link to humanity (a primate group called Ardipithecus).
2,000,000 years … if you refer to Homo Sapiens.
So, a wide range of time to use in that variable.
When did intelligence enter the picture? This will have a severe impact on the time frame. But regardless, the fact remains that almost every filter, of the dozens or hundreds which exist, will cut down the probability by huge numbers. Even starting with 200 Billion you arrive at a very small end result if you have to knock the figure down by 50% to 99% a few hundred times.
Ohh an actual quote box? How’d you do that?
On a more serious note.
That’s not how math works. It’s really not.
You realize we actually got life on the planet pretty much instantly right? Like, Liquid water was followed by life pretty much instantly in terms of the time scales we’re talking about.
Our solar system is very new compared to the rest of the galaxy, we’re only about a quarter as old, so that means lots of other places had time to get there before us.
And of course, we aren’t made out of anything strange. Carbon, Hydrogen, Oxygen. None of our building blocks are rare, its not like we’ve got something other’s would miss.
You’re dividing out intelligent life to the solar systems formation, as if humans should have stepped out of the molten earth, and forgetting everything in between.
It’s BBCcode, mostly. Use Google to find out. There used to be samples at the bottom of the reply area, but that got lost at some point.
“no matter how pessimistic you get with your numbers, its still a virtual certainty of there being other intelligent life.”
Once I read that the probability of our existence (ONE civilization like ours within our galaxy) is 0.5.
If you count the probability of an INTELLIGENT civilization existing, it’s LESS than 0.5.
(rimshot)
I think a difference should be made between intelligent life and industrialized intelligent life. For much of human history humans actually made so little impact on the overall structure of the planet that within a few hundred thousand years or less of going extinct all but the smallest fragments of their presence could have been erased by nothing more than natural erosion and corrosion. We do occassioanlly find out of place artifacts but tend to (guess) away their presence, like odd mineral deposits, layers of non-natural occurring material in sedimentary layers, chunks like pipes found in mines.
Even today it is theorized that with a few million years most of what humans have made would be completely lost to time; with the biggest impacts being tunnels we’ve dug underground lasting the longest into the future as well as due to large scale global industrialization deposits of corroded enriched mineral and unnatural substances such as plastic; and the biggest legacy of human kind…totally screwing up the fossil record for anything 200 million years from now by misplacing life forms on continents they would never have reached naturally.
In fact, due to the conditions of materials after being buried for so long, anything so far into the future would have no reason to believe plastics and enriched minerals were ever unnaturally occurring as their world such deposits would be common place; and the tunnels and signs of tunnels perhaps thought of as naturally occurring or theories of giant soft bodied worms. The idea of a sentient species existing would be just as outlandish to them as it is to you.
A tad off topic, but the point being. There very easily could have been sapient life forms in the past on this planet; but never reached global industrialization levels, so their structures (wooden huts, sand brick houses, ect…) gone without a trace, what few things may have survived, buried, bits of broken pieces; add to that humans claiming them or destroying them (melting everything gold into coins for example, destroying any signs of earlier religions…not a new practice; and natural disasters).
Of course go down a few scales on the sapient scale, to horticulture only or just can plan ahead and learn from past mistakes and the number of intelligent life forms increases significantly.
Earth with it’s life and tectonic activity is truly very inhospitable for long-term preservation of signs of intelligent life. Moon however … I think the artifacts we left on Moon would be clearly identifiable as artificial until Sun gets big enough to melt them few billions years from now.
Considering that out of all planets and stars that ever will exist, we’re only like 4%-6% into the age of the a Universe.
And our search for intelligent life has been focused on radio broadcasts of the 60’s. But even now with modern technology our radio broadcasts wouldn’t even be detectable on Alpha Centauri.
And we’ve only observed a small percentage of the known universe in that time.
So really we’re looking for something that can only be detectable for a cosmically short period of time through a ridiculously small window for the shortest blip of time.
The real question is why are we so arrogant that our capabilities are sufficient to detect what’s out there that we can conclude that it is not?
I suppose it’s way more likely for spacefaring species to come from planets that *didn’t* manage to preserve their own planets than from those that did. Nothing motivates an escape quite like life-threatening conditions at home. That particular lesson doesn’t seem like a probable filter to me. For much the same reason, war. Humanity’s most self-destructive traits are also the exact ones that have led to most of its most useful advancements. The reason we don’t have a moon base now has a lot more to do with the lack of an obvious militaristically useful application for it than it does with our lack of capacity as a species to pull it off.
Historically speaking, explorers and pioneers are not the most well-socialized elements of a society – very, very much the opposite is true, in fact. Why would a species that had “figured out” climate change and war ever bother to leave? Boredom? Missionary zeal? I just don’t see it. The LACK of war or conflict seems like a bigger filter than its presence.
Keep in mind that right now on Earth, we’re in a race between extra-planetary colonization and extinction by our own devices. We can’t tell even where one filter ends and the next begins at this point. We’re definitely dealing with at least two or more filters at our current difference btwn what we can do and what we’re willing to do as a species.
“Extinction by our own devices” – So, basically Skynet? I mean they made a self driving car that drove right over a poor bicyclist last year.
We seriously need to get our act together and start building anti-NEO defenses. We’ve known about cosmic extinction level events for quite a while now, you would think we’d be building something to increase our chances of deflecting anything coming in, or at least some extra-planetary colonies so if the Earth gets curbstomped by a black hole or a coronal mass ejection or something, we can survive.
We are way less likely to die by asteroid impact than climate change.
The last major extinction event by asteroid impact was 66 million years ago. If we assume that we get another one tomorrow, that means there was a 0.000000004% chance of an asteroid impact each day.
That’s an absolutely negligible chance, and yes it IS still a chance, and it’s something that we will need to be worried about eventually, but it’s nowhere near a pressing issue.
By comparison, Climate Change is something that IS happening, and at this point it is likely irreversible. Within the next hundred years we WILL see the death of most of the earths biodiversity, with the potential repercussions making large swaths of the earth uninhabitable (or at least, unable to maintain their current populations) drastically decreasing the odds of human survival.
If we don’t address it immediately, it will destroy us, an any orbital defenses will be less than worthless.
I know cosmic extinction events SEEM scary, but that’s just because we only recently learned about them. In truth they are no more of a danger now than they have been for the past few million years of our existence. – Climate change is different because us knowing about it DOES increase the odds of it killing us, since the same mechanisms that lead to us finding out about it are the very ones causing it. There has never been a time in earths history that was more threatened by it than now.
Pardon me while I snicker.
The climate is a chaotic system. It has been changing for the last 4 billion plus years, and nothing humans can do, either accidentally or deliberately, can make it predictable. The big scare the politicians at the IPCC are frightening you with are all based on “Computer Models” which are about as accurate as trying to predict real life by playing SimCity.
As a software engineer, I can tell you that no matter how complex a computer simulation might be, it cannot predict a chaotic system.
Even the BBC, hardly a bastion of conservative thought, couldn’t find a single real climatologist who believed in AGW in 2007. Rather than waste the money they’d spent looking for one, they used the resulting interviews and research to produce the following special: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pIRICfZOvpY
In short, a meteor or comet strike, coronal mass ejection, or supervolcano is FAR more likely to result in human extinction than increasing Carbon Dioxide from 0.04 percent of the atmosphere to (At most, using the most ludicrously exaggerated projections) 0.2 percent of the atmosphere. If you want to worry about humans causing their own extinction, worry about nuclear bombs or rogue AI, not a gas that is critical to plant growth and is already a trace gas.
A new field of science has developed to help us avoid the poor quality anecdotal evidence you cited and give a quantitative way to judge which set of conflicting scientific opinions to give weight to, when dealing with fields which are notoriously hard to predict (such as when a volcano may go off).
The ingenious solution they developed is to simply add up all the peer reviewed papers the respective proponents have published in the relevant field. This has long been a rule of dewclaw used by scientists to judge the experience of a peer who they have never met or otherwise heard of their reputation. The more papers published the greater their expertise in the field. Any exceptions to this guestimate will be averaged out given sufficient numbers.
And there are a lot of climate scientists working on the issue of global warming (anthropic or otherwise).
The vast majority of the most experienced climate scientists (using this objective measure*) have publicly come out supporting anthropomorphic climate change. So whilst the other camp do have some notable individuals, they actually have far fewer supporters in total, and of much less experience.
Something very much mirroring the ‘does smoking cause cancer’ debate. Vested interests with big budgets were able to publicise the research from a small minority, discredit reputable scientists and research and obscure the truth for far longer than should have happened if objective science was published on an equal budget.
Here, insead of the tobacco industry, we have the energy industry (and other industries dependent on them) able to invest heavily in promoting their angle, in similar covert ways.
So rather than just blindly accepting the propaganda that you have been subjected to, and trying to palm it off in this community as fact, please use science to help inform your opinion. I am sticking with the vast majority of the most experienced climate scientists, until or unless they change their opinions. Which has not happened yet.
* Rather than your cherry picked example from over a decade ago, which may just be an example of poor filmmaking. Or more likely that they had difficulty getting people to appear on camera, because that is a way of getting attacked by climate sceptic extremists (be that online or physically).
The percentage of CO2 in the atmosphere is quantitative, not anecdotal, sir. Get your terminology correct.
You did not offer the percentage of CO2 in the atmosphere as a proof that climate change was not being caused by humans. You simply stated your opinion that the estimates were ludicrously over exaggerated. Therefore I used absolutely the correct term.
And congrats on judging the BBC special without watching it. I picked that one only because it was specifically being researched by the BBC to Corroborate and act as a companion presentation with actual scientists to Al Gore Jr.’s “An Inconvenient Truth”, but the BBC couldn’t find any climatologists who agreed with the premise.
There is plenty more evidence from actual scientists that the climate has always been changing. You’ve heard of the ice ages and the Medieval Warm Period, I presume? That wasn’t caused by all those Knights driving SUVs you know.
Try looking at BOTH sides of the climate instead of just believing any random piece of intellectual garbage being spoon fed to you by Bill Nye the Mechanical Engineering Guy and Albert Gore (Neither of whom are climatologists, in case you thought otherwise.)
Why would me, lacking years of training as a climate scientist, and likewise not having decades of experience in the field, somehow be able to ascertain an absolute truth by watching a video picked by a
flat eartheranthropomorphic climate change sceptic?No, I will instead continue to listen to the opinion of the thousand or so experts in the field and trust their collective judgement, and I will discount the minority inexperienced opposing conclusions, until they convince the majority of their peers.
I am not stupid enough to change a sensible survival strategy like that to falling into a propaganda trap.
However, for interest, I do follow specifics of both sides of the argument. Extensively. And the vast majority of the evidence I see does actually support the majority experienced opinion.
Incidentally why would you cite the Medieval Warm period as proof that anthropomorphic climate change is not a thing? We had already been farming for thousands of years, and there is a growing body of evidence supporting the fact that (and deforestation) had been contributing to moderate global warming even before the industrial revolution. The point is that we are adding to the naturally occurring variability (such as from volcanic activity) and making them more severe and happen at a faster rate. Far faster now we are making such extensive use of fossil fuels.
As for the ice ages they occurred over millions of years, giving life on Earth the chance to gradually evolve. Even the more recent fluctuations (since the last big ice age) occur between 40,000 and 100,000 years. Giving species plenty of time to gradually move, as their optimum habitable zone shifts.
Yet the biggest changes we have been causing have been since the invention of the internal combustion engine little over a hundred years ago!
If we had 40,000 years to go before our climate changed significantly I would not be bothered. Society could easily handle the changes needed on that timescale. What we are facing though is significant ill effects now and even worse in our children’s lives!
“Or more likely that they had difficulty getting people to appear on camera, because that is a way of getting attacked by climate sceptic extremists (be that online or physically).”
You don’t get many evolutionary biologists who care to engage with Answers In Genesis, for example. They’d rather just get on with their work and let the science promoters try to reach the sadly misinformed portion of the public.
By the way, the “It’s only a trace element, and plants need it anyway,” argument is so freaking stupid. The active compounds in my various medications are only trace elements, too. But if they doubled or tripled, my brain chemistry would be seriously impacted.
There are lots of other systems which will rip themselves to pieces if a tiny component of the system increases its effect by 40% or 50%. The term “cascade failure” should scare the shit out of you. I had the top half of the engine in one of my cars explode, because a relatively innocuous component was malfunctioning which wasn’t detected and replaced before the while system went critical.
*before the whole system went critical.
Freaking Swype typos.
So you consider the actual facts to be “Stupid?” Nice to see you have an open mind. CO2 is actually near a historic low in the atmosphere. It’s been much higher in the past without killing all life as your high priest Al Gore seems to think it will.
*sigh*
You’re going back to Al Gore? Seriously?
And it doesn’t matter if it was higher in the past. What matters is rate of change. Major evolutionary changes take place at a fairly slow rate. If you get major changes within a short period of time, shit gets wrecked, before everything can adapt.
You’re cherry picking meaningless facts and pretending that they mean something, and you’re ignoring the pertinent details. That’s what pretty much every flavor of conspiracy nut does.
Right, I’m out. I can’t deal with someone who throws out Fox News talking-points. You know that they promote Young-Earth Creationism, right? You might want to check your sources.
Elfguy said:
You need to re-watch the comedian you’re relying on for your confidence in the survival of humanity. Carlin’s message was indeed that the planet would be fine, because as Carlin put it it could care less about humans. His point was that we could go extinct and something else would come along to replace us eventually. Which may or may not be accurate as far as intelligence goes, but it isn’t the ringing endorsement for climate change not being something that humanity should worry about that you appear to think that it is.
Why am I not surprised at all that you could watch a comedy routine and still manage to selectively pull bits from it that you think support your position, but you’ve managed to screw even that simple little thing up and get it factually wrong?
Oh, yeah, it would be because anyone who believes that climate change isn’t a threat is ipso facto an idiot.
It’s higher now than in the last 3 million years.
Hell, let’s throw out a hypothetical in which the CO2 levels were twice as high as they are now, only a million years ago. And 2 million years ago, CO2 levels were half of what they are now.
If it had taken a million years for the CO2 level to go from half of our current level, 2 million years ago, to twice our current level, a million years ago … a million years is a long time for the extant species to adapt to the resultant conditions.
If the CO2 level is double in 2040 what it was in 1940 … well, 100 years isn’t very long for entire ecosystems to adapt.
And in a way, Yorp and I were wrong. Cherry picking usually means pulling specific, unrepresentative data from within the same category/set of data. What Elfguy is doing is worse than that. He’s cherry picking CATEGORIES, presenting us with categories of data that have nothing to do with the question at hand.
We are literally at the highest CO2 levels ever in known history.
Temperatures as high as 84 degrees are being recorded in the Arctic Circle.
Man-made climate change IS real, it IS an agreed-upon emergency situation by global scientifc communities, and anyone claiming anything else is objectively wrong.
Really? And before that? 3 million years is pretty recent, geologically speaking. Convenient that you would cherrypick THAT cutoff, since from about 4 million years and further back, CO2 was higher than it is today all the way back to the Triassic. You know, 245 million years? And yet life was doing fine. CO2 doesn’t drive temperature in any case. If you really LOOK at the data, temperature goes up first, and CO2 peaks 100=300 years AFTER temperature does. So as long as you’re willing to overlook the laws of cause and effect, by all means, live in your “Humans are significant” fantasy world, and I’ll rely on Goerge Carlin’s comments that the planet is fine, and we have worse things to worry about like atomic bombs and supervolcanoes.
1.) Rate of change matters
2.) CO2 drives temp change as a matter of basic physics [however/also] CO2 is not the [only] driver of temp. For example ocean depth and coverage affecring over all albedo has an effect
And here’s the weird thing. In the 1980’s ExxonMobil did a study on atmospheric CO2 and its effects on global temp. They were right to a fairly scary degree http://www.climatefiles.com/exxonmobil/1980-exxon-memo-on-the-co2-greenhouse-effect-and-current-programs-studying-the-issue/
The issue (one of at least) you gloss over is the rate of change. A (poor) example would be something like
Seattle gets 38 inches of rain a year on average. (True)
So if seattle gets 38 inches of rain in a week, thats still within the yearly average. (True, but missing the point)
@Elfguy
Was this in response to my previous comment in which I threw out random numbers for one million years ago and two million years ago? Those were NOT reflective of reality. They weren’t meant to be, and they didn’t have to be.
Those numbers were to set up a hypothetical case, which demonstrates my point. I think that everyone here got my point, except you.
You aren’t very good at basic comprehension, are you? It doesn’t MATTER what the CO2 levels were, at any point in the past. The life at the time was adapted to the environmental conditions of the time, and the conditions generally changed very gradually, over hundreds of thousands or over millions of years. The few cases in which massive, global environmental-change happened very rapidly, due to some sort of planetary catastrophy, we had the major extinction events.
Yet you ignore this and throw out data points about specific temperatures at specific points in the past. Those data points DO NOT MATTER, unless they demonstrate a rapid change of environmental conditions. They’re data points from a set of data that doesn’t factor into the issue at hand, which is rapid, anthropogenic global-warming/climate-change.
@Elfguy
“If you really LOOK at the data, temperature goes up first, and CO2 peaks 100=300 years AFTER temperature does.”
At last you cite a single good point, albeit taking it out of context and applying observations of a specific circumstance (the beginning of ice ages, which incidentally works the opposite way around, as it refers to decreasing temperatures) and applying it universally (which does not match observations, which do show correlations between increased CO2 and global temperature).
Firstly the conclusion you have drawn is not supported by scientists, only by non-accredited sceptics, such as yourself.
Secondly CO2 is not the only driver of global temperature change. Many other things can trigger a change in temperature. An example being the joining of North America and South America, cutting off the previous equatorial flow of hot waters through what is now Central America. That would have had a profound impact on the climate, totally independent of CO2 levels.
But what happens when CO2 starts to change too is that it magnifies the effect and causes a feedback loop (decreasing global temperatures cause decreased CO2 [for instance as plant species die off], which causes further decreased temperatures).
Here is an article which gives a well informed debunking of the issue. Based on scientific conclusions not sceptic generated ones.
This is why we need such non-intuitive information to be examined by experienced trained scientists, rather than uninformed members of the public. Isolated facts, in a complex system, so not prove how things work. You need to have a much better understanding of the whole climate, in order to draw informed conclusions.
https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn11659-climate-myths-ice-cores-show-co2-increases-lag-behind-temperature-rises-disproving-the-link-to-global-warming/
Narf – Engaging in mind-reading is unbecoming of someone who is pretending to support science.
If you have someone who SAID so, then quote them.
If not, then please stop making crap up and inserting it into other people’s heads.
I actually know one person who abandoned a scientific career near climate science about twelve to fifteen years ago because it was too politicized on the pro-global-warming side to do good science. There were plenty of other fields she could do good science in without worrying about political loonies. I’ve forgotten how many people she said had told her likewise.. but that would be hearsay anyway.
I’ll have to check in and see what she’s up to. At the time, it was electro-chemical reactions relating to glasses and certain rare earths, if I recall correctly.
Yorp, you’re killing me with laughter every time you write something so serious while still insisting that you’re a dog.
WOOF!
*Tosses Yorpie Snax(tm)*
Yummy!
Fanku!
Dogs’re still smarter than most humans. Look at Trump supporters. Dogs don’t follow someone who mistreats and fucks them over. They tend to maul them.
Unfortunately, that is not true.
Dogs will adore the persons who abuse them despite having their ribs kicked in, just as Trump supporters will continue to support him despite having his daily lies pointed out to them.
Yorp – the problem with that is the irreproducability crisis – published papers are more than 50% likely to be wrong, even in non-politicized subjects where leaders on one side have NOT been caught conspiring to prevent publication of their opponents, and on which millions of dollars have NOT been spent by governments that want to cause large transfers of funds in their direction.
The term “settled science” didn’t exist before this particular political nonsense started.
There MAY be something to global warming… but counting the number of published papers is a fraudulent game. Literally, in many cases.
Only if you consider the majority of scientists around the world to be conducting fraud. At which point we must wonder how planes stay in the air, TV works, and all the other wonderful things we get from science? Only taking their advice for things which you happen to agree with in the first place, yet discounting massively widespread majority opinion for things which you disagree with is fundamentally flawed logic.
And sadly it has been shown to be a part of human nature. You are behaving in a perfectly normal human way. And will doubtless ignore any counter-argument, as you are probably too entrenched in your beliefs to do otherwise.
Something which does explain how the Easter Islanders died out. It would have been easy for them to see that chopping down all their trees to feed their obsession with making and transporting their big stone heads would destroy their only means of fishing (i.e. making the boats necessary to get out to where the fish are).
Yet still they carried down that path because the naysayers clearly did not understand that pleasing the Moai was the only way to proceed. That is what the politicians and priests demanded, and to do otherwise was unacceptable.
RIP.
There is big difference between climate change and meteor strike: we can adapt to climate change. It may be faster than any change before that, but it’s slow in human terms. It’s definitely going to affect us, but if we are talking about survival of our species, I think we are safe. Meteor strike, meanwhile, can kill us all in hours or how long would it take for the wave to get on other side of earth.
Also, I suspect that at this point, we are more likely to destroy our civilization by trying to prevent the climate change than actually preventing it. I mean, it’s too late to prevent it, and so far the most visible effect of climate change prevention measurements is that their proponents got rich.
99.9% of climate scientists, say we have only a few years to stop climate change, that we are causing.
The deniers are getting more and more obviously stupid one year at a time. All I have to do is point out that the twenty hottest years on record all come in the last twenty-two years. Arctic sea ice is at its smallest extent in at least twelve centuries and likely much more.
That’s pretty firmly beyond the level of coincidence, therefore climate change is real.
Species are going extinct at the fastest rate EVER, right now – as best we can tell not even during major extinctions did this many species wink out this fast. Therefore ecological disruption is real.
We look to science for explanations, but the effects are absolutely clear. Idiots who argue that this explanation or that one may or may not be right and therefore the effects aren’t happening are failing to observe the world they’re living in. First hand knowledge is enough for this one.
The climate here isn’t the climate my wife grew up in here. The climate at my own boyhood home isn’t the climate I grew up in either. Both have gotten drier. Both have gotten more extreme. I’m not asking scientists whether it’s happening, I can see that it’s happening. I’m only asking them why.
That’s because it literally is their job to say that: that is all their job entails
Those same idiots are trying to stop cows from farting (and burping) methane into the air
No.
No.
No, you racist, ignorant fuck.
It is literally no one’s job to deny global warming except whose who take money to speak against the truth.
Climate scientists have been telling us we have only 10 years left to save the Earth for the past 40 years. At some point a rational person has to ask if it isn’t all just bullshit.
A rational person first asked that question 40 years ago
I’ve read this claim before. Is there any link to some 40 year old paper that says that we have only 10 years left?
What I believe to know is a bit different: That Shell commissioned a study to examine whether there is some climate change and what the causes are, and that it came back with the result that there is a global warming and that it is caused by humanity to some relevant extend – and that they then decided to set up the Climate Denier culture.
That was AFAIK back then in the seventies.
Actually, in the 70s it was some of the same guys hawking “the Coming Ice Age”… and they had all the same policy prescriptions. Such a coincidence.
But, I believe it was the early 90s they were saying we’d have 10 degrees more by now. Hansen’s 1988 hockey stick was the poster child for that generation of hype, I believe.
Shell, is helping to cause the rise in CO2, hardly a reliable source.
” The atmosphere isn’t a ‘chaotic system.”
If it was, then weather would be impossible to predict, yet we predict it with some regularity.
While this is not a professional statement. My IQ is `137, a near-genius IQ, well within 2.96%. Of the population!!!
No one is ‘predicting’ the weather, they are seeing weather patterns and comparing to similar patterns in the past and reliably deducing what will happen next, that’s why they get it wrong so often because of variables that didn’t happen last time
You may be intelligent, butt that doesn’t make you smart
Guesticus is neither intelligent nor smart.
I see you are not watching weather predictions. Anything more than 10 days in advance is comparable to pure guessing.
Gosh, don’t you read XKCD?
-> https://xkcd.com/1732/
Please follow the graph to the bottom of the page.
Damn this forum for not allowing a preview or edits…
Trying again.
Let’s go simpler. The atmosphere isn’t a ‘chaotic system.’ It is a known mixture of gasses. And we also know the amount of CO2 and methane that we are pumping and have been pumping into this mixture of gasses since the industrial revolution. We know how greenhouse gasses interact with sunlight, trapping and holding energy from the sun which would otherwise be reflected back into space. And we know via simple, measurable observation how this has been impacting our planet across at least the past ~100 years or so.
This is simple chemistry. Not chaos theory.
(As an aside, despite the apparent randomness within any given snapshot in time of a chaotic environment, such as the motion of a double-rod pendulum, the overall resulting motion is fairly predictable. In other words, while you can’t predict where the pendulum will be at any given moment, but you can predict what the ultimate path of the pendulum will look like. Comparing global warming prediction to chaos theory is just as stupid as some US Senator holding up a snowball in a session of Congress and declaring that global warming is a hoax because it snowed that day.)
And finally, as a software engineer and (hypothetically) a scientifically trained individual, you might be just a little less eager to try to disparage the works of other scientists whose fields only intersect with your own in the slightest degree. In other words, fuck off with trying to establish your credentials by claiming some bit of expertise that has absolutely nothing to do with the matter at hand. Just fuck off.
Yeah, nastiness is the scientific way to convince people that you’re credible. Good luck with that, Oberon.
The earth’s ecosystems are ENTIRELY a chaotic system. And that does NOT mean completely unpredictable, as you undoubtedly know. Chaotic systems like climate settle into “fuzzy attractors”… and if you know anything about chaos theory, then you have to know that fact and you had to know that you were presenting a false dichotomy as a prelude to your nasty ad hominem.
That’ s exactly the reason why I have no confidence in the pro-global-warming side. They seem to believe in scientism instead of science, and just make up whatever rationale seems to fit for the moment to make points. And then scream at their “evil” and “stupid” opponents.
If you guys really believed all that stuff, then you wouldn’t be preventing testing EVERY SINGLE WAY that anyone can think of to reduce global warming. You’d be all out for seeding the oceans with miocronutrients and iron to cause diatoms to carry carbon out of the air… and so on.
The only things that governments and NGOs and climate hustlers want to do is make big overarching agreements (easily cheatable, of course) that result in transfer of wealth… and that wouldn’t do the job, assuming the job really needed doing.
I don’t know whether it does… but I know I can’t trust the people who say it does.
You guys have EARNED that distrust.
I’m sorry, but not really sorry, that you find having your idiocy pointed out to you is difficult for you.
Good luck with that, Dal.
My ad hominem was in regards to you being an uneducated fuckwit expressing an uneducated opinion on a subject which your betters have stated and backed up with a pile of evidence which you are entirely unequipped to deny.
Now, if you want to sulk a bit and collect your thoughts and try to present your idiocy in a different light, well then that’s all up to you, you fuckwit. Being called a fuckwit doesn’t give you the defense of being called a fuckwit unless you can prove that you aren’t actually a fuckwit. Which in your case, unfortunately, cannot happen.
Bring a position which doesn’t prove ipso facto that you are a fuckwit and we might have more to discuss.
I can’t tell if you are a non-native speaker and simply do not understand the idiom, or if your reply was meant to be sarcastic.
“Extinction by our own devices” means we’re doing it to ourselves. By our own hands. No rocks are falling from the sky like has happened a few times in the past to provoke a mass extinction. We’re poisoning the well that we drink from by pumping greenhouse gasses into the sky with no thought for tomorrow. And that’s not the only crime we are committing against ourselves. We are wiping out species that used to live in vast abundance and which we rely upon for our very existence. I’m not talking about large food fauna which we are thinning down to extinction levels, like many fish species. I’m talking about the underpinnings of the entire chain of life.
There is no cave deep enough and no possible space habitat that can protect or save anyone long enough for another bee to evolve to pollinate our food crops for us once we wipe out the one that had been doing it for us for the entire lifespan of our species. There is no time for some replacement for ocean plankton to evolve after we have allowed the ocean acidity levels to rise due to dissolved CO2.
Humanity itself will cause the mass extinction event which wipes out humanity.
We won’t be made extinct be climate change. It will just kill most of us. Even if climate change kills 99.9% of humanity, then our global population will be roughly the same as it was in 1600.
You’ve missed the point entirely. Once we destroy the underpinnings of the ecology, no more bees to pollinate our crops, no more plankton to feed the fish we want to eat, we will all die out. Not 99.9% of us. All of us.
But if you’re right and I’m wrong and some huddled refugees from the ensuing wars manage to survive, I guess at least that’ll reduce the greenhouse gas production. But then of course the ash and dust from the nuclear bombs will bring about a nuclear winter winter which will help the planet recover from our stupidity. And perhaps that will put the final nail in the coffin of humanity.
The ecology might change massively into something much less hospitable, but look to Chernobyl to see what would happen within a generation. Once you remove humans, nature comes back pretty fast in temperate areas. Fast enough that the remaining humans could live a life style not far off from what Native Americans did in the pre-columbian days. The transition to that from modern day life and the 99.9% death rate would be the stuff of nightmares, but it won’t be exitinction.
And even if all the European Honey Bees die, they are hardly the only pollinators, they are just the ones we prefer. Unless all the algae in all the oceans and all the brackish lagoons and rivers dies (unlikely even if you add nuclear war into the mix) then algea will eventually refill the oceans and plankton will be there to eat it. The delicious tuna and adorable dolphins that we like might all be dead by then, but the earth isn’t going to die. Just the stuff we like. Fighting climate change isn’t about “saving the Earth ” it’s about “saving the current ecosystem that we thrive in”
It wouldn’t even be that bad, because we already have xeriscaping and aquaponics and so on. We shoudl be able to do self-supporting enclosed ecosystems within about ten years, if we get our butts up to the moon and Mars to make it necessary.
Oceanic acidification IS a problem, maybe eventually severe, but we are unlikely to be able to kill ourselves off completely without a grey goo scenario.
Yeah, that’s just kinda the entire point here… Once you remove humans, there will be no humans left to give a fuck about the idiots who removed the humans.
A race usually at least implies two or more active participants. This is nowhere near the case here.
Extinction by our own devices is going to happen if we change nothing, so that’s a no effort participation in this ‘race.’ Equate this to a couch potato’s typical workout: No workout, just watch some TV and do nothing all day.
Extra-planetary colonization on the other hand isn’t even in the near future, and would require a terrific amount of resources and effort, so it on the other hand is the workout of a gold medalist Olympian.
Compare the two, and then try to figure out which one is actually happening right now, in this ‘race.’
Well to be honest. No, it is a lack of human capacity.
If the species would get off their tribalistic high horse, remove all boundaries, and work as a world of one nation, one people (regardless of race and ethnicity), and work together. The resources would be drained less, the wildlife of the various endangered species would be less so, and the scientists of the world could work together, rather than bound up in bureaucratic non-sense.
But that is a reality that will never happen. At least in our lifetimes. Then of course you need to add in the following:
– Every major bit of scientific growth since the 60’s has been met with fear mongering, religious impositions, and other self-limiting acts that murder progress. Or stifle it greatly (Nano-Tech (and the thing on it growing and growing till it consumes all life); LHC and similar structures (and how they make Blackholes that will destroy the world); GMO (and how they are a crime against god, will give you super cancer, are dangerous to your health, etc.); and many others).
– Humanity both strives for better, and more interesting conveniences. But hates change and can’t even grasp the things it’s already made (by a massive amount of the populace (points to humans when it comes to understanding what a computer and a hacker can and can’t do (and how Hollywood version of Hackers isn’t reality.)).
and
– The things that in the early 1900’s – 1960’s that that Scientists thought we’d have by now. We don’t because we don’t share resources, scientific discoveries are stiffled / wrapped up in nonsense; and the bigger ones are being stiffled / having to fight fear mongers / notjobs / distrust of the new.
Yeah, a gray-goo scenario’s pretty unlikely. Self replicating nano-machines would necessarily be extremely susceptible to entropy, and you’d basically need some kind of external computer control to get them to interact meaningfully with irregular materials. At worst, rogue nano machines would cause a few cases of super cancer as they attempted to convert someone into Legos.
That said, I’d argue the greatest limiting factor beyond a cultural lack of respect for science and reasoning is greed. Everything passes through a filter of marketability and it can be ludicrously difficult to challenge saleable results. Just look at Yoshihiro Sato or the use of nitrates in curing meat.
Absolutely. We need to have another read of “The Sparrow” 1996, Mary Doria Russell.
Even without reading that, it should be obvious that without getting our gross human shit together we must never under any circumstances set foot on any other “occupied” planet, and neither should we allow any other extra-terrestrial visitors on our soil. Even arms-length trade must necessarily be carefully thought out.
Let me take from H. G. Wells, we have no defenses against any micro-organisms on a foreign planet–dammit we still have problems with our own, and DON’T get me started on allergies… And from Asimov, one of his Robot novels, would an exoplanet have the correct vitamins for us in its life systems?
We can also take a financial lesson from Brian W. Aldiss, “Helliconia”: the cost of sending the Observatory from Earth to Helliconia sank any thought of more stellar exploration. The GDP of this planet needs to be at least two orders of magnitude greater than it is now.
We are also not targeted by any of those hypothetical micro-organisms. Genetics works both ways. If you’re going to claim that we’re ‘defenseless’ against alien bacteria and viruses because we’ve never been exposed to them before, then you must also admit that alien bacteria and viruses are not evolved to attack us because they have also never been exposed to us before.
You do have a valid argument, that we could be as deadly to an exobacteria as it could be to us.
But I’m going to let somebody other than me do the field-wo\\exposure test. And in that thnking I’m in perfect alignment with NASA when they decided to plunge the Cassini probe into Saturn rather than let it contaminate Titan with microbial life forms from Earth.
It is simply much safer to assume the worst case and work up from there. We must never forget that bacteria and viruses can adapt themselves to us far more rapidly than we can to them.
Come on, man. You know what he meant. The processes that would result in one event or the other are both progressing at variable rates, dependent upon human activity at any given moment. The occurrence of one event will likely prevent the other, resulting in either a good or bad outcome.
It’s called a metaphor.
I dunno about the extension of the example set by earlier explorers. Up until pretty recently, a small group of explorers could just gather some supplies and wander off to check stuff out. We hit the wall on that sort of exploration being able to turn up anything interesting, quite a while back. At a certain point, further exploration requires far more coordination and expertise in a wider set of specializations.
You still need a few nuts at the wheel, but even they need to be somewhat socialized.
Am I correct that we aren’t engaging with Elfguy?
Engage away. Just don’t try to accuse me of “Cherry picking” like Mr. Yorp.
If you really REALLY want to see a wider selection of information, I have a more extensive playlist here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4zOXmJ4jd-8&list=PLCAED6A6D2002912E
Sorry man, but you’re cherry picking meaningless details, and you’re ignoring the details that actually matter. Yorp has the right of it. Not my fault if you’re constructing an invalid and probably unsound argument.
Like I said above, I’m out.
Propaganda.
I’m still chuckling a little at this response of his … I should probably get my meds checked.
“Engage away. Just don’t try to accuse me of “Cherry picking” like Mr. Yorp.”
In other words, “Engage away … just don’t point out the massive flaw in my arguments, the way that Yorp did.”
Sorry I missed all this. But yeah Elf Guy is pretty bad at giving a logical argument (only scrolled to the last comment because that’s all I needed to see for my brain to hurt.).
https://www.climate.gov/news-features/understanding-climate/climate-change-atmospheric-carbon-dioxide
https://www.co2.earth/daily-co2
You know rather than using Science. He ignored the fact that CO2 Levels were at an all time high. Not an all time low.
And the CO2 Levels have never been as high as they are now. So I don’t get how that guy lasted as long in his debate when all of science and all data shows that he’s wrong XD.
The argument of CO2 increasing “only” 35% always baffles me. There are some pretty innocuous-sounding molecules that would be fatal at 400ppm. And some of the bad actors are potent at MUCH lower levels. And try increasing the nitrogen content of your air “only” 15% – you better hold your breath!
Molecules do things. Whatever CO2 was doing, it’s obvious to me that it’s doing it 35% more now.
I took a college course not that long ago called “Math and Climate” from Ken Golden, one of the bigger names among proponents of climate change. His argument in favor of climate change was empirical, by which I mean it rested on comparisons to simpler systems or historical systems that may or may not have enough in common with the current situation for those comparisons to be meaningful.
That isn’t to say his argument was bad. The balance of evidence certainly leans towards some significant climate change happening currently, and the proposition that humanity is the catalyst for it is a plausible one. It’s even reasonable to worry about a climate catastrophe which will end all human life on the planet. The problem with all of this though is that the evidence for some of the more modest, reasonable claims is pretty strong (certainly strong enough to care about, if not actually to be treated as proven fact), while the evidence for the doomsday scenario is really a lot less so.
The simple fact of the matter is that the most strident opinions are the only ones people hear, and they’re the most divisive because they’re also the easiest to strawman. A reasonable stance on climate change is that pollution is bad and we should stop doing it. No speculative doomsday pronouncements or obsessive selective discrediting required, because it doesn’t ultimately matter what side is right, since the correct course of action is to minimize and attempt to reverse pollution, regardless.
None of that changes the fact that we are way more likely to develop the political will to get off this planet and colonize somewhere else if a climate catastrophe does happen than if it doesn’t, and in that sense, *not* taking care of a planet is less of a great filter than a great reason to become a spacefaring race in its own right.
“There is strong evidence that most trashcan fires don’t lead to the whole house on fire, while it is less conclusive that trashcan fires will burn the house down, ergo it is better to only treat the fire with the bare minimum of response”
The issue here is that if you look at it and say, hmm there is an 80% chance that 50% of humanity dies vs a 50% chance that 80% dies, people seem to go, i like those odds, lets prep for the 50% species death, i mean 1:2 chance i’ll make it.
It’s a super strange mentality, it’s almost like playing Russian roulette with a revolver and being offered the opportunity to check the number of bullets before you start playing, and deciding not to because “there’s only a 1/6 chance that all the chambers are filled”
It’s extra weird because we’ll spend huge sums of money and time to drop our risk of death by a few tenths of a percentage point for things like eating food, or driving to work.
But it’s also a little disconcerting to hear things like “Oh don’t worry about it, it (most likely) won’t wipe out “all” of humanity, it’s just more likely to kill a few billion people, (but in not my specific people group)”
It really feels a lot like an inverted version of Button, Button, or “The Box”
“If you [spend] this money [now] someone [won’t] die [Later], The person you save won’t be someone you know.
Which raises some pretty dark questions on how people view life outside the monkeysphere (Dunnbar’s Number)
@pidgey
I don’t think that many people are predicting a species-level extinction event for humanity. I certainly don’t think that massive environmental change/catastrophy is what will take us out. We’ll come up with engineering solutions that will save a good percentage of the human population.
What will happen as a result of unchecked global warming is suffering on a grand scale, loss of previously habitable and arable lands, huge death tolls in less developed countries and in poorer areas of more developed countries. Possibly increased incidence of famine.
Life will basically start sucking more and more, as a result. We’re already leaving our children with a shittier society, with less social mobility and a system that’s corrupted by the wealthy and enabled by the stupid and ignorant.
Let’s try to not leave them a planet that’s more broken than we’ve already broken it.
“I don’t think that many people are predicting a species-level extinction event for humanity.”
A good reason for that is because climate scientists have to conform to the dictates of politics. Human extinction IS on the bell curve of possible outcomes from our current policies (and slowness to enact even those which have been agreed upon). However anybody who dares to raise that prospect is shouted down as a doomsayer.
Just look at the teenage girl currently addressing the French parliament. She is citing good science which proves the possibility, and the fact that our failure to keep the climate under 2 degree increase has worsened it. Yet she is being verbally abused, ridiculed and MPs are boycotting her speech.
It is the Cassandra effect. Even though she is speaking truth (and saying so passionately, to try and carry the weight of her argument), she is saying things that they do not want to hear. So they literally block their ears to avoid listening to her.
And we are taking a big gamble, by doing that. Climate sceptics make big noises because of some scientists citing predictions at the low end of the bell curve (backed up by a confidence that ‘engineering’ can solve things*). If they are right, then fine, we will have been needlessly austere for a number of years, until that can be proven. But we will still be alive and will have learnt from the experience.
Whereas if we land in the middle of the bell curve, then failing to conduct that austerity will mean massive death, destruction, lost land (including many coastal cities and productive coastal lands), displaced populations, famine. But with the austerity we will reduce (but not eliminate) those issues.
End up at the top of the bell curve though, and by the time we can prove it, we will already have runaway effects which will render the planet uninhabitable by humans in a few short years.
Just how do you propose getting seven or eight billion people off Earth to somewhere safe? And where would that somewhere be? Please bear in mind that Venus is very much like Earth, but with a runaway greenhouse atmosphere.** If your ‘engineering’ solution requires building bunkers or the like, please model it for how they will protect people on Venus, and let us know if you can keep a viable breeding population going indefinitely there. With our current technology.
When it comes down to possible mammalian extinction, I prefer to play it safe. It is the one thing that we cannot learn from our mistakes and try again!
* A REALLY dangerous thing to promote and to rely on. World climate is not something that we fully understand. So tinkering to try and change it, like blocking out sunlight with orbital shades, can really eff things up big time. We often see human intervention going wrong when dealing with complex systems. Take introducing cane toads to Australia, to control a beetle problem. Which ended up decimating swaths of Australian wildlife!
Get it badly wrong ONCE and we could end up triggering that extinction event!
** And we have yet to prove that Venus was not a twin of Earth, which developed a fossil burning industry before we did.
A reasonable stance on climate change is that pollution is bad and we should lower it as much as possible. (We can’t stop completely, that’s impossible.)
Second reasonable stance on climate change is that burning hydrocarbons for energy is wasteful because those have MUCH better uses that burning. Seriously, all that argumentation about CO2 is not important: important is how many things we (and our ancestors) can make from hydrocarbons if we don’t burn them. Also, it’s not just fossil fuels: burning crop is just as bad. Maybe even more considering all those hungry children in Africa.
Also if we really focus on those two, it will be MUCH more effective than all that conflicts about the rest … but it will not allow certain influential people to get so rich, while the conflicts DOES allow people to get rich on BOTH sides of global climate change “debate”. Which is the reason why the conflict keeps running.
BTW, pretty sure Venus got global warming out of control before it developed any fossils for burning.
What are his credentials?
Specialist in geomathmatics with a career emphasis on sea ice.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kenneth_M._Golden
Nicknamed “Indiana Jones of Mathematics”
Basically the guy who converts reality into math then converts the math into models that predict reality
…once the existence of aliens is known, this prime directive silliness seems mostly like a formality. We’ve already seen that there exist smugglers – surely that’s the way most species in humanity’s (Terran humanity’s?) position must discover these technologies.
I agree it’s a bit of an odd bar to set for people joining the galactic community, especially in the case of supers. You’d have to treat someone like harem as a functionally different species. Cora’s human progenitor(s) could easily have been space-faring supers.
So how much cheese do you want for that warp drive?
All the Wensleydale from your moon!
Make sure to bring your penguins!
Are Penguin strips good for dipping in melty cheese?
And don’t forget crackers!
Again, everything Cora is saying, we have already seen it contradicted. Not only we have alien tourism, but we also have seen alien members in he twilight council, so not only the alien comunity have relationship with earth, but they have members in some of their governing agency. Also, FTL technology may be not widely diffused, but we have at least one super with FTL abilities (even if at short ranges, the portal lady) so it is not to exclude that there could be other supers with traveling abilities. In addition we have already seen two different instances of FTL technology in the hand of earthlings (Deus and Sidney) both of which are way, way, WAY more advanced of anything the galactic community even dare to dream. To all of that, we have to add anything Deus obtained from the eldritch vault, from his shopping spree on the Fracture, from the alari ship and from the mysterious alien temple he mentioned here https://www.grrlpowercomic.com/archives/comic/grrl-power-603-schtooping-with-the-frenemy/
Firstly this is a super hero comic, so one always expects there to be exceptions to the baseline in such a setting. Cora is expressing the typical galactic attitude towards pre-FTL civilisations.
Secondly Archon would not have facilitated this press briefing without giving Cora some ground rules. One of which would be ‘do not mention the presence of the Veil, nor anything concealed by it’. Cora would not take this lightly, as she will be privy to the fact that the Council take extreme measures (aka killing) against those who break that particular edict!
So she will not be mentioning the known exceptions to the rule. Especially as she does not want Sydney to be hunted for possessing what appears to be Nth generation technology! She certainly cannot mention Deus’s capability as neither she nor Archon are aware that he obtained any of it. Remember that characters in this story only have the knowledge of events they know of. They do not mysteriously know about things only known to the readers and other characters in the setting.
Opal does not have interstellar (or even interplanetary) range, as far as I know. Nor does Harem. So whilst they may be able to go FTL locally it is not a particularly pertinent exception when the issue is the ability to get to other star systems. And, yes, there may be supers who found some way to get to other stars (perhaps part of the next comics reveal), but unless Cora knows about it she cannot comment on it.
And finally characters can be mistaken. We have already had mutually exclusive comments about the nature of supers, coming from Peggy and Varia. However the latter was speaking her opinions based on her personal experiences. Whereas the former was passing on the official line given by Archon (internally). And we had a third viewpoint given by the Council (one compatible with Archon’s).
OF course it may turn out that Varia’s power is the Rosetta Stone that unlocks some of the mysteries of super powers, so we should not dismiss her opinions out of paw, as she has had life experiences that may have given her true insight. Although her lack of innovative thinking (compared to Sydney’s immediate observations) does somewhat weaken my confidence in her insightfulness.
Going off at a bit of a tangent, now that aliens are public knowledge Varia should start testing her gestalts with them (previously she was being kept out of the loop, along with the other cadets, barring Sydney).
“Going off at a bit of a tangent, now that aliens are public knowledge Varia should start testing her gestalts with them (previously she was being kept out of the loop, along with the other cadets, barring Sydney).”
Oooooh, I like.
Those are perfectly valid point, and I agree with all of them: I am just pointing out that all of Cora speech is just pr bullshit, and she knows it ( except maybe for the cheese part, who knows). I want also to underline the fact we could argue that earth already possess various form of FTL technology: in addition to what I have already mentioned, we heard about teleport, shadowstep and bloodtravel from the council, all of which seems FTL to me. It is just that most of normal humans don’t know about it.
About the supers with traveling abilities, what I meant is that since we know they CAN travel FTL, it is possible we could have (in the past or in the future) others with analogue or better abilities. Also, about harem we know she can teleport in known places, but I don’t remember about distance limitations.
Anyway, this will be a moot point in a couple of years, when Machina industries first, and other super tinkerers later, will develope and sell their own take on the alien technology
What you bring up coincides with one of my knee jerks on FTL, the idea every form of it is even and just having it means you can go anywhere and get infinite resources now. But there limits to range, power up requirements, resource use for the FTL portal or drive, carrying capacity, and duration.
Yes, you can make a portal to another dimension, alternate Earths, lock onto nearby gravitational bodies and link the graviton signals to form a 10th space bypass bridge between them or whatever. Of course the Star Gate is a huge limiter as you first have to reach another destination and THEN put a receiver there to open a portal; so not a quick process.
It almost seems more reasonable to open portals to alternate versions of your own planet than to try and use this same magic or tech to travel out into your own universe (better chance of finding the resources you want on alternate versions of your own world after all).
but yeah, saying all FTL gives you access to the whole galaxy is like saying all flying machines will get you across the Pacific.
After all this comic does differentiate between jump points, wormholes, and the Aetherium Causeway; power requirements, range, connecting to a point that already has a portal. Although we do have to wander the difference between the Brane Ripper and the Aetherium Causeway as both kinda seemed to bypass the limits of jump gates. But then again the Brane Ripper looks to have needed a lot of power back up to make its larger portal; but possible Nth tech not in use the Aetherium Causeway according to Cora normally takes a massive ship or breaking a lot of psionic types minds and bodies with the effort.
I have that book, https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1397303.A_Greater_Infinity
And
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/260985.Hell_s_Gate
In both humanity spreads via alternate earths rather than space
Weber (and whomever he decides to partner with next) is taking his/their sweet time with the next novel in the series… It is approaching A Dance With Dragons tardiness levels!
Harem can teleport to the East or West coast with ease (she has spots memorised on both) but cannot get as far as the Moon (Dave did give a ballpark figure, considerably below that, in some blog or reply to a comment, but I can’t recall it accurately). Her biggest limitation being that she needs to be familiar with or able to see the location she is teleporting to. So even though she can hop to another country, she is very limited in which places she can get to.
The various other points you are making though are about Earth, which being the home to supers is not a normal planet. I doubt though that Cora is an expert on the range of super human powers on Earth. Clearly in the next comic we are about to hear more about her. However what we do know about her is that she is the captain of a star ship, so we can assume that much of her time is not spent on Earth. Her area of expertise is the galaxy and the civilisations within it.
As such Cora is relaying their attitudes towards primitive civilisations like those on Earth. Namely that the rest of the galaxy does not care about the planet. Other than the (covertly existing) porn tourism industry and the (potential) entertainment exports. That is not PR. Cora has no axe to grind, nor hidden agenda. She is just saying hi to the local primitives, and checking out their leisure industries.
Perhaps Cora is doing Arianna a favour in ‘settling the natives’ by reassuring them. But I do not get the impression that she is spewing out scripted propaganda. There certainly would be no mention of porn, if that were the case!
Arianna is the one who does the PR spin, and you can see from her reaction in the final panel that Cora has gone off script.
She is reading old script.. the day the earth stood still.
That arc handed to her.. I am thinking
Apologies if someone has said this before, but there really isn’t any need for filters. The same immensity of space which makes it possible that tens of thousands of intelligent species exist also means it is multiple-lottery-jackpots improbable that we will ever come into contact with any of them, simply because of the absurd distances they’d have to travel in exactly the right direction before we could even detect them. One civilization finding another civilization within just the Milky Way is about as likely as one ant finding another particular ant somewhere else on the planet. Maybe, generously, the continent. But without any of the advantages the ant would actually have in figuring out where ants similar to itself are likely to be, since we have no capacity to assume that other lifeforms would even vaguely think along similar lines to ourselves. The bottom line is, they could already be here and we’d never know it, just because they communicate to each other on radio bands that we have no way of monitoring (to say nothing of science-fiction technologies we can’t even guess at the true workings of). Unless they were stupid enough to bring their spacecraft within visual range of a sensor-reading that suggests the possibility of intelligent life, they could easily strip-mine our wilderness areas of rare elements we’ve never discovered yet, and we’d have no clue they existed.
Most people who think about alien life aren’t thinking about how alien that life might be. Maybe we’re the only sentient species that externalized its progress, and all the other ones worked on self-development and travel space as astral projections, clairvoyant points of view, or collective entities composed of the souls of an entire species melded into one? Maybe other species are like some of the ones Larry Niven conceptualizes, like Puppeteers (perceived by humans to be cowards, but believing they have proven they have no souls, and so, from their point of view, sanely cautious about risking their lives, since they aren’t prey to aging), or Outsiders (living at near absolute zero temperatures, with no interest in what, to them, are deadly-hot, short-lived blips). Or the Marvel Cinematic Universe take on Asgardians (or “Who Mourns for Adonais?” (Star Trek) take on Apollo and the other Olympians): sufficiently advanced aliens are indistinguishable from gods. Or to take it up a notch, the Celestials from Marvel (comics and MCU): sentient hyperspacial energy matrices that are only perceptible to humanity because they build 2000 foot tall environment suits to let them interact with our level of existence. And that’s just a fraction of possibilities (some more likely than others, but who are we to say what’s impossible?)
There’s also the 3-dimensional thinking most people apply to the equation, thinking only in terms of space, and leaving out time. There seems to be an unspoken assumption that all of the intelligent beings would have developed at the same time. Science fiction abounds with Precursor tropes, but not everyone thinks with the flexibility of science fiction writers or readers.
It could be that we are very far away from a bunch of other non-FTL civilizations and we just can’t see each other yet. It could be that there was a buzzing mass of FTL civilizations a million years ago that all built Dyson spheres, and now we can’t even see their stars. It could be that there were Precursor races that died out half a billion years ago. Or we could be one of the Precursors, developing sentience millions of years before any other species in our section of the galaxy (or even our local galactic cluster).
Of course, as in the Dyson sphere example, there could also be a number of sentient beings in the universe who just aren’t aware of us, and vice-versa.
There could also be a number of sentient beings that are aware of us, and are actively choosing to avoid contact with us for any number of reasons. See “They’re Made Out of Meat” by Terry Bisson for a funny/sad example where aliens are squicked out by our . . . meatiness that they decide to pretend they never found us at all.
I have occasionally wondered if there is alien life who’s conditions are so different than ours that we fail to see them as life. IE: plasma based life on the surface of the sun. Life on Venus that uses molten iron the way we use water. Maybe the rarity is hydrocarbon based life.
Fire is considered a life form if you use the definition that also include viruses as life forms.
On Venus, the best bet is high atmosphere microbes in the sulfer clouds; honestly I’d be more surprised if there weren’t life forms in this stew pot of chemicals and relatively lower pressure than the surface.
carbon is one of the most common and reactive elements in the universe; thus highest probability to produce the building blocks for life.
But yes, an electromagnetic self contained matrix able to replicate and react could be considered alive; but even if sapient; the current scientific model would end up having to be altered in such a way as to accept robots and even computer networks as life forms.
it is a tricky fence to straddle when the life gets that much more exotic.
…um, no. That’s not a thing no matter how you define life, at least in any accurate way beyond “it reacts to oxygen and moves”.
It was in an older model of life, as well as a common example of the slippery slope when you start to loosen up the definition of life a little too far when you hypothesis more and more exotic forms of life.
needs to consume and replicates; it was a poor definition; that is why modern definitions don’t include it. It is just like how the definitions for animals used to not include things like barnicals and coral; we adjust these definitions with new discovery.
The possibility of circumventing the speed of light kind of nullifies the problem of the immensity of space. All of the species out there will likely have lots of explorers wandering around and about, figuring out which of the relatively small number of places that are worth visiting.
Space in so big that even with warpdrive you’d still spend months and years in transit.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f0z8PXpibII
That depends upon how good the warp drive is. We’re talking about such hypothetical technologies that we can’t even imagine what sorts of workarounds we might come up with to address the problems that arise when making use of that technology.
I remember one episode of Star Trek … I think TNG. Someone had just recently challenged one of the writers or someone else with the show, pointing out that the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle completely blows apart the idea of transporter technology.
In the episode I’m thinking of, there was some background scene in which someone in engineering was talking about how the Heisenberg compensators were acting up, and they needed to be replaced or something.
“Really? And how do those work?”
“They just work.”
I can’t imagine what engineering will look like in 400 years, and I doubt anyone else can, either.
Oh, and let me check out that video, when my kid takes his nap. At the moment, I’m playing his tunes on YouTube, so he’ll stop freaking the hell out. Two year-olds …
I’ll get back to you.
Something is freaking out here. I’m not sure what it is. Look down below a few comments, ai_vin, for my response to the video itself.
Lots of discussion on what possible forms any intelligent life will develop as. Now being bipedal we have a strong in not impossible to break bias for bipedal and will continue to do so no matter how often the Spiders From Mars attacks. But there is one very simple consideration when thinking about what aliens would look like, how they would act, etc: And that is the budget of your special effects department.
If our pop culture creations get marketed out to the rest of the galaxy they will have to come with disclaimers about what creatures depicted are real or fictional. They might think that we have 100 meter tall lizards that regularly stomp on out cities, and that some of those cities are underwater and are populated by talking sponges, starfish and squirrels.
The squirrels are in environmental suits though, what’s unrealistic about that?
Which is why I love comics and animation for science fiction: that doesn’t matter. You can have aliens that don’t follow the usual pattern of ‘humans with some latex and, maybe, body paint’ while still having them be people.
That’s an interesting video, but it’s a little arbitrary on the details. 10 times the speed of light is just a number they threw against the wall. The maximum possible warp speed could be 150% of the speed of light. Or it could be 150k% of the speed of light.
Hell, this shit isn’t even at the level of hypothetical physics. We just don’t have enough to go on to even begin guessing at the social and personal implications of warp travel.
For one thing, the kind of warp drive described in that video is still subject to relativistic time-dilation. I’m pretty sure that the problem of the Doppler effect turning electromagnetic radiation into ultra-high frequencies will still exist, too. At 60% or 70% of the speed of light, fatal radiation starts becoming a serious problem, and it just gets worse as you get closer to the speed of light.
Crap. Bad placement. What the hell happened there?
Crap, bad placement, somehow. I don’t know what went wrong there.
Or the minimum possible could be 150% the speed of light.
As long as we’re talking shit here…
The speed of light is the limit in this universe to information making its way around. There will never be a FTL drive because this simple rule can never be broken.
If we poor fools ever manage to go to the stars it will be done in the old fashioned way: slowly.
Let me guess. She is a “Human” because that is the way to translate what her species calls themselves.
I forget the root for “Human” but in theory it could refer to most humanoids.
The etymology of “human” could apply to any people but not humanoids that aren’t people (eg apes).
Apes aren’t human? Ham would be insulted; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ham_(chimpanzee)
From Online Etymology:
This is in part from PIE *(dh)ghomon-, literally “earthling, earthly being,” as opposed to the gods (from root *dhghem- “earth”), but there is no settled explanation of the sound changes involved. Compare Hebrew adam “man,” from adamah “ground.”
See also in OE, bridegroom: … Old English brydguma “suitor,” from bryd “bride” (see bride) + guma “man,” from Proto-Germanic *gumon- (source also of Old Norse gumi, Old High German gomo), literally “earthling, earthly being,” as opposed to the gods, from suffixed form of PIE root *dhghem- “earth.”
So it’s reasonable that any cognate of our English “human” would imply “{offspring} of the ground we stand on”.
Bipedal {planti/digiti}grade laterally symmetrical exo-humans? Others in this thread have voiced their thoughts already, but my thinking is “Why not?” Lady Nature tends always to take the most economically effective route, so barring perpetual earthquakes or violent winds or waters, bipedal is more effective In General for locomotion. It also frees up the arms/hands for tool manipulation and gives height for eys and ears. In “Unsounded’ (Ashley Cope) many non-humans refer to humans as “Spider-hands”… Just consider the complexity of Dabbler’s upper body, with two sets of shoulders and associated musculature. Earthly centaurs have a better design IMHO.
BUT, both Dabbler and Cora are indeed human. The only concessions we (and Lady Nature) need to make are for gravity and climate in considering the human form.
I’d laugh if this became a “I’m 1/16th Human” like white people in the US and Native American ancestry.
Actually, it is most Americans regardless of race. I’ve seen people from the Latino community do this, and even in the Black community there is a desire to know where in Africa (or certain parts of the middle east) their ancestors came from.
People across America (and the World) are growing more curious about their ancestry. It is a good time to be a Genealogy nerd.
Oh yeah genealogy is good, it’s just that way more people claim Native American ancestry than have it. That’s what I was referencing.
How is that funny to you, one of those mentioned.
Because everyone and their grandmother is claiming it, whether true or not, as though being white European is something to be ashamed off they will claim 1/32nd of something else to feel better (or lay claim to special benefits or treatment)
Has nothing to do with that, Guesticus. The Cherokee were highly civilized, and were highly successful in intermating with white people. My great3 grandmother, Anna Kerzee, was full-blood Cherokee. I’m not an enrolled member, and don’t really care, but I have the blood. Doesn’t matter, I’m native American either way. THere’s literally millions of us part-Cherokees.
Obviously wasn’t talking about those who are, and embrace it, more at those who claim mixed-race heritage to get special treatment, and then drop the mixed part once they get into political office
Keep proving you are a racist.
No one says this except for racists like you.
I am part American Indian, that fact must have gotten lost in transmission. (Hodenonsaunee/Iroquois)
Nope, haven’t forgotten, you have said it few times, usually when attacking White’s
She WAS born without limbs. Maybe there were complications due to a mixed parentage? I’m not claiming she’s a result of a human & an alien mating but genemodding might become a thing for populations of humans who find themselves in alien environments and two humans with different genemods who mate could still produce offspring.
That one below was supposed to be connected here. Thought I had it right. Whoops. Stupid mobile interface.
Or controlled hybridization … or polyploidy? Although I think the latter is only possible in plants, as far as terrestrial species go.
Obviously, direct mating wouldn’t produce viable … or any offspring, for that matter. The sperm would just swim by the alien gamete, confused as hell. On the off chance that a sperm somehow made it to and could enter (astronomical odds, I’m sure) the alien gamete, the chromosomes would do wacky stuff, I’m sure, once they got together inside of a cell.
That’s assuming that the alien DNA is even based upon GATC, which are NOT the only options for DNA, as demonstrated by RNA, even if other hypotheticals didn’t exist.
We the great progenitors inserted into various biological systems a complex prionic nanite that arranges local genetic sequences to produce the shape we want.
Another function is these prionic nanites are part of the “junk DNA” found in these species that is coded to become active once certain criteria are met (the desired shape and production of a large brain), these prionic nanites can when these distinctly separate species meet activate when they bread to adjust protein chains as needed to allow for what would otherwise be impossible hybridization and fill in the chromosomal gaps. Of course some unexpected mutations may occur.
Well sure, once you start fiddling with things with technology, all sorts of possibilities open up. I just meant those impossibilities in terms of the natural interbreeding of humans and whatever other species Cora is the result of.
Oh no, they’d never be able to breed naturally. But being humanoid with the same foot and hand shapes would be eyebrow raising enough, even different species in the same family are rarely that similar.
Heck even with a common ancestor, time and space can make them physically (genital shapes), emotionally, and of course chromosomally incompatible. Not that anything aside from emotionally would prevent an attempt…even creatively using toys just no reproduction would take place only hot freaky alien sex with lots of toys; and barring her species having a Succubi/Demon’s version of parasitic DNA (uses host more as template than actual hybridization); we are left to fall back on *Space Wizards did it*.
it could be a “you think you’re the only race calling yourselfs “human” out there
no you’re “teran humans” when it comes to translation
True, it could be a ‘Johnny only you can save mankind’ senario, but that kind of word play would make her statement that she looks Earth-human because she is human somewhat nonsensical.
Didn’t “Johnny” only appear at the beginning of the titles of the two sequels? Or was it added in a later reprinting?
Ah, I had started to theorise in the vain of ‘alien sate my homework/I lost my brain in dimension-X’, ie Atlantian colonists, in cryo-sleep, who returned to Earth to find all traces of their culture gone, so just went back to the stars and began integration/re-population.
But I guess that’s not the sort of idea you had.
That little widget under the warp drive is infinitely more concerning than the warp drive.
Well it IS a cross-dimensional portal generator, granted it keys to a very specific sub-dimension of another dimension and also acts as a signal to the residents there to show up once the portal connects. But is a cautionary tale when applied to Hellraiser Deader; if you are wanting to open a portal to the ever living undying eldritch horrors; best to make sure the portal generating McGuffin you have connects to THEM and not some torture demons instead (only way I can make sense of the plot of that movie is the Lovecraftian cultists mistook the puzzle box for Cthonic key so got screwed over once it opened rather than turned into eternal undead zombies or whatever they were going for.
Glad to see I wasn’t the only one worried about that little box. Maybe it’s just an intelligence test (puzzle)? Remember, blood magic is real – so many of the other kinds are likely to be real, too. Although we can hope that the realm of torture might be just a part of the realms where certain specialized succubi go?
boom!
we’ve had radio for what, 100 years now?
my guess is we will *not* have radio 100 years in the future, by then there will be no point in broadcasting anything, information will be transported by much more efficient means.
that means the “bubble” of our radio transmissions going out into the galaxy is only going to be couple hundred years “thick”, so besides rapidly diminishing to the level of background radiation it would only intercept another inhabited world for a span of a couple hundred years.
what are the odds those years will correspond to right when that world with intelligent life is looking for radio signals, as opposed to while that world had its dinosaurs roaming the plains or while its world-dominating AI computers were exterminating all non-AI life terminator-style?
I would hazard that guess to be wrong, but not for lack of having better means; and putting aside technological restrictions such as dispersal and selling point (why switch to the new when the old is working and so wide spread that the switch would be difficult and costly to accomplish)
No, there is another technological limitation. Physiological restrictions.
Humanity actually does know several much more efficient ways to transmit information than radio waves. Problem is…a lot of those cause cancer or otherwise are very hazardous for your health and/or destructive to the hardware or require so much energy to use that its not worth the cost (that last one more a fuel and cost restriction).
This is one of those things that has come up in sci-fi (compatible tech) and considered by scientists scanning the stars for possible alien transmissions; that our equipment simply used a different kind of Electro magnetic radiation than what the aliens use, or their signal is simply too weak or too strong, or they use a more direct method that could fry a satellite if they aimed it at it. Not even considering species whose audible range is off centered from humans’ *as in their lower pitch may fall into the infrasonic, and/or higher pitch into the ultrasonic ranges* as well as the inverse where human speech is off centered from theirs and they can’t hear some of what you say due to the low or high pitch and trying to adjust each other’s equipment to even recognize the whole thing as language distorts it too much. These sorts of things are also reflected in radio transmissions and the design of the equipment to pick up those transmissions. You or they just don’t get the whole message as the equipment is designed to filter out background noise above or below certain hertz or whatever; but some of what each other is saying falls into those ranges.
You fail to take into account that while we are still using radio waves and likely will continue doing so, the ENCODING of audio into those waves changed from simple modulation of amplitude or frequency to digital encoding, compression and encryption. Radio transmission consisting of MPEG3 over TCP/IP would be still recognizable as artificial (because of TCP/IP headers) but completely impossible to decode without lot of knowledge about human technology. Details like filters are irrelevant.
we also need make a distinction between other kinds of NON-intelligent life ;
1 ) blue green algae floating in the world ocean
2 ) grass & ferns on the land
3 ) fish in the ocean
4 ) small amphibains trying to live on the land
5 ) medium to maybe-large semi-reptialian creatures living on land
6 ) mammalian semi-intelligent creatures that try to use tools like monkeys
given that the dinosaurs had a 250 million year run before the asteroid apocolyapse wiped them out
– and given that supernovas and other great catastrophies can and do happen
there’s a lot of room for NON intelligent life to be out there.
antsy
That counts only CHON-based life anyway.
There is a theoretically possible SiS-based protein analogs under the condition of higher temperatures (think Venusian environment) – though they theorized to be significantly less suitable for abiogenesis due to inherent differences from CHON-base.
Also, methane-based creatures for more colder planets.
And that’s talking only about life as humans generally understand it. Some forms of crystals show ability to replicate under certain conditions, there are self-mending alloys already known to science – the mythical “living metal” if you will.
We do not consider them to be forms of life.
What about self-regulating metastable electromagnetic constructs? Or gas clouds with complex internal circulation?
Would we even be able to recognize something so different as a form of life – or accept it as one for the matter?
That number is actually based on a mathematical fallacy and is caused by a misunderstanding of how evolution works.
The famous example of ‘how long does it take for a group of monkeys to randomly type the works of Shakespeare’ is not whatever arbitrarily huge number is generally picked (and stressed that it is longer than the universe is expected to exist).
The evolutionary answer actually is: as many generations as there are letters in the collected works.
What you do is to start with a group of monkeys and teach each of them to type in a letter. If it is the right letter of the first word of the first work, they remain in the program, the other 59 out of 60 (or so) are set free.
Then the remaining monkeys raise a new generation until the numbers are back up to where we started.
Since they already passed the first ‘evolutionary’ hurdle, they start with the correct letter and are tasked to type the second one. Again the vast majority of the monkeys are set free but some remain in the program for the third generation and the third letter.
After a couple of million generations the entire works of Shakespeare will be completed, several times even.
Of course with living beings it is not as simple as getting one sequence right and then having it remain in the gene pool forever after, but basically this is how the improbable complexity argument does not apply to evolution.
Now, prior to sufficiently complex amino acids forming, there was just a (presumed) repeated cycle of concentrating and diluting of chemicals, which in natural conditions will produce some form of amino acids. Not perhaps the same ones that came to be the building blocks of life on earth but similar ones. With half a billion of cycles (assuming they are yearly and not, say, monthly) and trillions upon trillions of combinations attempted during each cycle, the ones that were too loosely connected dissolved again in the dilution phase. The ones that were too tightly connected became sediment. And the small fraction of the rest became the building blocks on top of which the next cycle could continue.
Experiments that mimic the presumed conditions on earth in the first billion years find that amino acids form quite quickly in those conditions. They also find that certain chemical structures that are required to form cellular life form naturally and quickly in those conditions. Just a result of basic chemistry, and this means similar conditions on other planets (and we now presume that these are fairly common throughout our galaxy) will lead to similar results of cellular chemistry with something RNA like thrown into the mix. Whether or not this results in /life/ is less certain. Or more specifically, the ability to reproduce is uncertain, but then that took about a billion years to happen.
Multi cellular life apparently is a lot harder and all but requires, among other things, free oxygen for the huge energy boost that provides to any chemical system.
So cellular life-like chemistry is probably quite common, short of ubiquitous (it requires a hot enough sun and liquid water plus the usual mix of atoms to get started)
Cellular life is a bit more complex but probably still quite common throughout the galaxy.
Multi-cellular life is likely rarer still, but still given the sheer number of planets should be expected on any planet in the goldilocks zone that is not otherwise inhospitable to life.
Intelligence is the real bottleneck here. The evolutionary advantage to start developing it is not that big, but the individual investment to support and reproduce intelligence is considerable, meaning that it likely rarely develops beyond the level of smart animal (which all of them have some degree of intelligence), or it gets extinct because the cost of supporting a massive brain is too high for the ecological niche.
Because we have only a single example of intelligence, we can’t put any meaningful number for this in the Drake equation. It stands to reason that any sufficiently advanced and specialised animal will also posses a limited intelligence (for problem solving) but the kind of general purpose intelligence that humans and some of the highest primates have might be sufficiently disadvantageous that it rarely remains in the gene pool. Or it may be the inevitable point of animals filling the same ecological niche as hominids do. We simply can’t know.
Well detailed. I do draw exception on one point however:
“Because we have only a single example of intelligence …”
This is incorrect. There are numerous examples:
Ouranopithecus macedoniensis, Otavipithecus namibiensis, Morotopithecus bishopi, Lufengpithecus lufengensis, Lufengpithecus keiyuanensis, Lufengpithecus hudienensis, Ankarapithecus meteai, Sivapithecus brevirostris, Sivapithecus punjabicus, Sivapithecus parvada, Sivapithecus sivalensis, Sivapithecus indicus, Gigantopithecus bilaspurensis, Gigantopithecus blacki, Gigantopithecus giganteus, Khoratpithecus ayeyarwadyensis, Khoratpithecus piriyai, Khoratpithecus chiangmuanensis, Pongo hooijeri, Pierolapithecus catalaunicus, Udabnopithecus garedziensis, Oreopithecus bambolii, Nakalipithecus nakayamai, Anoiapithecus brevirostris, Hispanopithecus laietanus, Hispanopithecus crusafonti, Dryopithecus wuduensis, Dryopithecus fontani, Dryopithecus brancoi, Dryopithecus laietanus, Dryopithecus crusafonti, Rudapithecus hungaricus, Samburupithecus kiptalami, Chororapithecus abyssinicus, Graecopithecus, Graecopithecus freybergi, Sahelanthropus tchadensis, Orrorin tugenensis, Ardipithecus ramidus, Ardipithecus kadabba, Kenyanthropus platyops, Praeanthropus bahrelghazali, Praeanthropus anamensis,
Praeanthropus afarensis, Australopithecus, Australopithecus africanus, Australopithecus garhi, Australopithecus sediba, Australopithecus deyiremeda, Paranthropus aethiopicus, Paranthropus robustus, Paranthropus boisei,
Homo gautengensis, Homo rudolfensis,Homo naledi, Homo habilis, Homo georgicus, Homo floresiensis, Homo erectus,
Homo ergaster, Homo antecessor, Homo heidelbergensis, Homo cepranensis, Homo helmei, Homo palaeojavanicus, Homo tsaichangensis, Denisovans, Homo neanderthalensis, Homo rhodesiensis, Homo sapiens idaltu, Archaic Homo sapiens and the Red Deer Cave people.
Here are some extant examples:
Bornean orangutan, Sumatran orangutan, Tapanuli orangutan, Western gorilla, Western lowland gorilla, Cross River gorilla, Eastern gorilla, Mountain gorilla, Eastern lowland gorilla, Chimpanzee, Central chimpanzee, Western chimpanzee, Nigeria-Cameroon chimpanzee, Eastern chimpanzee, Bonobo and Anatomically modern human.
Then, of course, we have the octopussies, doggies, pussy cats, elephants, whales and other cetatians, crows and other dinosaurs, plus more.
“How long does it take a group of monkeys to produce the works of Shakespeare?”
A couple of million years, and they weren’t even trying for most of it. Depends when you consider the evolving hominid no longer a monkey.
Yes, I know ‘monkey’ implies something that’s been following that particular separate path for all that time; a cousin rather than an ancestor. Biological accuracy taking a back seat to rhetorical impact!
This is assuming Earth is humanities original home world and not just the latest remote colony of an otherwise star spanning species that’s been wiped out a number of time enough to make cockroaches jealous?
Cora’s next comment is going to shed light on that possibility.
Nah, humans are descended from the Golgafrinchans.
Where did human life come from?
Humans were seeded into the genetic template of apes already present on Earth by the Qwie, a race of human like aliens who claim the vacuum of space in our galaxy as their territory and seed their genetic template with similar looking species on planets so they can come back later to claim them as colonies among the galactic community.
Where did the Qwie come from?
They are the mortal descendents of a splinter group that chose mortality and biological evolution as their true legacy over ascending into pure energy of an ancient race who has passed down its name only as “The Creators”. Some of which ascended, but others chose not to; the two groups having a brutal war with one another even developing anti-ascension weapons; the last remnants of the Creators were deep space colonies of experimentally simplified versions of themselves that became; yes, the Qwie.
So..where did the Creators come from?
The Creators didn’t originate from (this) universe; they were the survivors that fled their native universe when the people there created Dimension Bombs and tech to grab souls from the well of eternity to supernaturally power elemental tech weapons; bringing down first the observation then wrath of beings beyond comprehension. That was one partially reason why some Creators obsessed with ascension and others feared.
Wait, so the Creators came from another universe? Do we know where they originated there?
Oh, of course; that was the Earth of that reality, they naturally evolved there.
…no further questions…
Just out of curiosity, why assume that it’s Reapers that depopulate the Galaxy, why couldn’t their be the equivalent of a Intergalactic party bus that comes and picks up the races once they reach a certain level of Social Development, then terraforms the old planet and seeding it with new strains a bacteria to see what develops.
I guess my “Cora looks too human and nobody is gonna believe she’s not just a woman in makeup” comment last page was more on point than I thought.
I’m pretty sure that the Galactic Police are doing a pretty crappy job because someone constantly is stealing not only my socks regularly, but at least half of the socks of every person I know.
Our Galaxy Police detectives have determined that socks are being stolen by gnomes. As said gnomes are indigenous to the planet in question it is therefor a local matter and out of Galaxy Police jurisdiction. If you can prove the gnomes are actually aliens disguised as gnomes or originate from another dimension feel free to contact the Galaxy Police or Dimension Police respectively with your complaints. and have a nice day.
Human looking Aliens in popular culture says more about our biases than anything else; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i7H6uW2fb9Y
Or does it simply say more about the state of makeup technology when our space travel dreams first became easy to distribute via popular film?
Everything undiscovered, is greatly influenced by our bias, intentionally or not, because something unimagined has to be first imagined, and imaginations rarely form from nothing, they are influenced by our own ideas and ideals, and it’s simply easier for most people to imagine a variation on a human form, or another earth-based form
So, Corra is either dicking with them, having a translator error, or is from a line of ancient astronauts.
… Yes
Climatologists (cereally? that’s a real word? thought was making it up, was about to make a joke about how it sounds like ‘Scientologists’) have been carping on about how climate change is going to kill us all (forget the children Helen, who will think of the rest of us?), butt, what new forms of technology have been developed in that time?
New housing, to protect against both rising water and loss of water? Nope, nothing, still using the same crappy materials they have always been using (with the same crappy cowboy builders as ever)
New forms of transportation or fuel sources? Nope, same gas-guzzlers as ever, heck, they ever started a war over control of the source, and contaminated areas in the search of more
Off-world colonisation or resource acquisitioning? Nope, a few trips to the nearest satellite (that half the population don’t believe happened) and then nothing, except for a few failed attempts at neo-orbital pods (not even big enough, or sustainable enough, for long-term habitation, certainly no families or children). Forget traveling to other worlds, what about simply figuring out how to mine asteroids?
About the only advancement in technology, has been means of mass-media communication: cell-phones and the interweb (most of which is used to view cat-porn or bad singers who sound like they are being anally-assaulted by pygmy-rhinoceros… oh wait, that’s just Bieber)
Changing the weather and climate isn’t that easy to do, butt developing ways and means to adapt to the change should be, that is what humankind has prided itself on being the best at doing, it’s how they have managed to populate nearly every surface of the planet, from boiling deserts to freezing ice-fields
Butt now when we have the technology and supposed brains, all we can come up with, is watching clips of Bieber being anally-violated while we walk in front of a bus? o_O
Not all technological advancement is highly visible or widely distributed. The earth is big and we’re a long way from a type one civilization. A lot of short term or localized solutions to a problem only exacerbate an issue systemically, like having one dongo on the bus with a personal AC around his head stump. Preventing human induced climate change is less a matter of controlling the climate, and more a matter of controlling our impact on the climate before it becomes global. As you’ve noted, people are shortsighted and will cheerfully sell gas guzzlers to your neighbors or cigarettes to your children if it keeps them rich enough to afford that sweet, sweet climate controlled pontoon condo. People need to understand the real human costs that kind of self-serving negligence can have, and regulate it, before people (see: rich people) end up needing to adapt to their environment by building rapture style sea labs because the surface of the earth is on fire.
Lord Morlock for president 2047
That was kinda the point: this is supposed to be a Global catastrophe, and the scientists aren’t even sharing their knowledge unless they can get the ultimate recognition and their name only on the paper
425 comments, i doubt this will be read, as i skipped most of em myself.
Was thinking on that one have to add natural AND artificial life spreading.
Because even now, we could possible send out seed ships with basic building blocks for life and the like, sure we would not be around when they arrive, but that would not stop one from doing it if they wanted to.
Now considering the chance of life and civilization(dogma religion etc) variations, and the like, would not be far fetched to see many multiple sending “comet” like cargoes all over the place just because, even before faster then light travel.
And if you get some one with that, it is even more easy and likely to happen.
Heck accidental spreading of seeds on boots happen all the time on this planet, just having some one visiting from some where else may kick start a planets basic building block of life chain of event or skip that entirely and move on to something more advanced like virus or bacteria.
Then ofc there are the a hats who do the opposite because of spite or dogma/religion/fear/whatever.
And kill and “sterilize things” for some reason.
I wonder, as a civ gets more advanced, are there more and more filters?
Atm we got AI, nano, biological tinkering of virus and bacteria, war and outside things like asteroids and comets that could easy wipe us out in the not too far future.
When you add faster then light stuff, and perhaps things to generate those amount of power, there are more filters..
Heck who says that we all will survive the first “warp/whatever” drive being turned on by some scientist who do not have a clue.
Re: Guesticus
Outside of the USA though, all the research you are wondering about being absent, is in fact being conducted and implemented.
The Netherlands is developing housing projects that can, indeed, float with rising water levels. Most European countries are working on switching to primarily using renewable energy sources. E.g. the UK on a sunny day can supply all of its energy needs from renewable sources (mostly solar and wind).
Other countries are forcing car manufacturers to get serious about electric cars by setting out timelines where diesel (soon) and gasoline (a few years later) powered vehicles are forbidden from entering cities (and eventually will end up being forbidden entirely).
There are initiatives all around the world to reduce the amount of traffic. Oh, and housing codes outside the USA keep getting tighter and tighter when it comes to energy efficiency. Again in the EU there are countries that require by the end of next year that every new house will be a net energy producer (basically the principle that if you put solar panels on every roof in the world you end up with about half again as much energy (electricity that is) as the entire world is currently using from every source.
And even in the USA there are vast regional differences, with some states being very serious indeed about reducing carbon emissions to zero and switching to renewable energy, while others take their clues from the Orange One and his coal and oil industry handlers and seek to return to the age of burning the most polluting and poisonous fuels with wild abandon.
Thank you
Again, need to point out: NOT FROM THE USA!!
And do be remembering that it was Bush (from the Texas Oil Baron family of Bush) who wanted to drill Alaska for oil
It was still relevant to point out though, regardless of where anybody is in the world. Simply because the USA is one of the biggest energy consumers/atmosphere polluters in the world, yet has dropped out of the worldwide agreement to curb said pollutants. The impact of which will affect us all.
Not that we can do a lot about it mind. I suggest that we start composing messages to be put on monoliths, on the Moon, to tell the cockroaches about ourselves. I might go with:
“We weren’t all bad.”
You know, that would have made a real downer ending to Clarke’s ‘The Sentinel’. As written, it sent to places unknown the news that the Earth had finally, after unknowable aeons of evolution, developed a spacefaring species. But if it had been reporting ‘home’ to Earth…
Re: erianaiel
I’ll have you know that the Orange One is my second favorite large mass of hot gas in this solar system….a distant second, but still second.
The Jovians must be really ticked that we have not responded to their big red spot message yet. They have kept it up there for hundreds of years and we have still failed to signal back!
The Bo’jorps of a sub dimension have been sending a message to humanity for ages using a quantum entangled micro-wave pulse that is triggered to activate whenever humans artificially produce microwaves (or microwaves above a specific strength within the atmosphere to be more precise). This was intended as a *you can detect our signal therefor you are now worthy to speak with us*, however while they can tell the signal is being received and have been for decades; and MANY times a day all over the planet; they are confused why that is and why no human as sent them a signal in return.
completely unaware that their signal is being transmitted everytime humans cook anything in a microwave oven for more than twenty seconds. Their message of unity is being used to cook your hotpocket.
*glares angrily at hotpockets*
They ruined a perfectly good toaster!
Grrr!
I’m amazed this comment stream has gone this far without anyone mentioning Fermi’s Paradox: To paraphrase, given the size and age of the universe, intelligent life is inevitable. That’s just the odds. So why can’t we find any evidence of it?
Many reasons have been posited, mostly around the fact that spaceflight, while possible, simply isn’t practical. It always consumes more resources than it can provide. Faster than light travel is impossible and the odds of surviving a long interstellar journey at sublight speeds are infinitesimal. These ideas have merit but I think it’s because people shrink from acknowledging the real reason: Intelligence is not a viable species survival strategy because intelligent species inevitably destroy their environments and themselves along with it.
Think about it. Dinosaurs lasted for hundreds of millions of years, humans will be extinct before the end of this century. Once the climate reaches the tipping point our environment will collapse, mass extinction will follow in remarkably short order and it’s foolish to think humans will be exempt from it. Most people will just stand by and let it happen because facing that reality is just too daunting when it’s so much more comfortable to just keep whistling in the dark. It’s basic biology: all species reproduce and consume their way to extinction unless something else holds them in check. Once humans developed technology there was nothing to keep us in check any more and our extinction became inevitable.
So given that the total arc of human history from civilization to extinction will be less than 50,000 years and the total span from the invention of radio to extinction will only be about 200 years with barely 50 of those devoted to SETI is it any wonder we haven’t heard from anywhere else? Presuming these numbers are typical any intelligent life out there that’s not within 300-400 light years is already extinct. As for interstellar travel, how can one expect intelligence to survive on a spaceship when it can’t survive on a planet?
* checks previous comments page, finds 9 results for Ctrl+F ‘Fermi’, notes irony of searching for intelligent life and trying to communicate with it *
Significant aspects of Dinosaur brain anatomy is similar to higher primates and humans:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bird_intelligence#Brain_anatomy
Dinosaurs ruled the Earth for 165 million years. It only took 200,000 years for anatomically modern humans to go from an insignificant group of hunter gatherers (about 500 individuals at their minimum) to dominating the globe.
Yet we fail to see the same kind of devastation on the planet, or other signs of a civilisation, that humans wrought, during the dinosaur epochs. For which we conclude that no such existed.
Of course there is another possibility, namely that they evolved a strong social system, in parallel with their technological development. One which mandated only using environmental friendly projects, whilst having a strong ethic to always restore an environment to its natural state, once a development was no longer needed.
Mind you they rather dropped the ball when their nuclear pulse propulsion starship crashed just off the coast of North America.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_pulse_propulsion
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicxulub_crater
“In the cases where the more advanced race didn’t wipe out the less advanced one.”
Like pigs, dolphins, and other high intelligence “animals”? How many of the species that humans wiped out for one reason or another had intelligence? Some non-human species will probably join us in space as workers, others as pets. Some, like algae, won’t even be animals. (Not to mention the germs that will treat us as space vehicles.)
It seems to me that the most likely candidates for interstellar travel will travel with the biodiversity necessary for life.
Humans already treat spaceship Earth that way. If you measure land animals by weight, you will find that the majority of such is the food for humans, then humans themselves. Wild animals get relegated to a tiny proportion, by comparison.
https://xkcd.com/1338/
Butterkase! X’-D ROFLMAO!!!
What?!
Also, thumbs up for the reference to Great Filters!
The “Prime Directive.” The equivalent of a rich man finding a starving, orphan child and telling it to lift itself up by its bootstraps.
When oh WHEN will sci fi writers stop cribbing their fictional ethics off 50 year old greasy hollywood directors?