Posts by madestjohn 37 publicly visible posts • joined 11 Dec 2012
The fact that an emergent intelligence evolved, us as far as that goes, suggest that its possible it could happen again. This does not mean as so many seem to think that as soon as we have enough computers conected together it naturally will. There has to be a reason, a selective pressure(s), towards such intelligence and allot of luck invovled. Nature itself seems to suggest that intelligence is one of the poorest and least efficient solution to a problem. Far better to have a simple dumb method of resolving your issue rather than complex reasoned logic, the old if a bee was any smarter than it is it would cease to be an effective bee perhaps deciding to drop out of its oppressive society and go get high.
Outside of f king, eating, surviving, upper level intelligence of the type most people think of dosen't have much purpose in nature and as the civilized tool using society we claim is based on it seems to have only evolved once in almost 4billion years and may not last more than a million while crocodiles remain lurking in the mud unperturbed by its passing maybe we should be unsurprised if our skynet remains stubornly stupid.
No its not math .. Its speculation based on poor and limited data, ... You can not use single or double data points to predict trends, you say german china and Italy are well below replacement rate, ...
Have any of those countries had a reduction in population? ... No.
Do any of those ethnic groups have a reduction in population size world wide? .... No.
So, ... Reduction of replacement rate when multi generations households are common and expanding, more grandparents and great grandparents, is a meaningless number.
In all case each and every one of your examples has had a steady increase in population density, ... And predicting future behavior is extremely tenuous and arrogant ... Look at the recent boom in population growth in Egypt, do you deny that similar growths could be seen in any of the above if the political situation was to change? Do you think that political change in any of the above is unlikely?
You can pretend the numbers tell you that all is going to be fine, ... You can say that the great fairy princes of population will prevent continued growth, you can say the weather will be sunny on yir birthday but its all bull shit until you have some actual numbers to support it.
Population is growing, ... And its continues to grow ... And unless we are different from every other species on this planet it will continue to grow until it crashes .... Then allot of people will die, .... Its how it works.
Random chance,
... Nobody is that special or unique... Get rid of 80%, which would put us back at the first half of 20th century, there were enough people then for whatever discipline you choose to have enuf people skilled at it, by basic random genetics, so make it completely random ... And seriously, .. We'll be fine.
This idea that western societies are dieing out due to low reproduction is total satistical voodoo.
First let have a reasonable sample size of more than a couple of generations, you can take a couple of data points on a graph and declare a clear trend, so lets say since the 1950s..
Are there less people in any european country than in 1950?
I can't think of one, .. nope can't so lets say In the vast majority of cases no.
But oh, .. This is due to immigration you say, so while they're might be more people in germany than in 1950s allot of them are turks, and the germans don't like to acknowledge the turks, but this is bull as well as there's emigration as well.
Are they less people of germans descent world wide than there was in 1950? well no, and this stands for italians and greeks and the irish and scandinavians and even the basque. ... There is not a single major western national or ethenic group that hasn't increased it population base since the 1950s.
Yes ... Some areas in europe have a declining birth rate of the traditional population who stay there .. Why? Cause in allota places in europe there isn't much reason to start a family as pretty much all the land and allot of the jobs are already taken, ... So people move, and then have babies, or wait til thier grandparents or parents die and then have babies, .. Or just hang arround, ... And then have babies... Theirs an awful lot of europeans in the world, ... And that number has not been going down.
Ok ... So there seems to be alot objection to what i said, and to be honest I'm having a hard time understanding the specifics of those objections, so instead let me try again to clarify what i meant.
What i said was unless there is a mechanism within the process of greenhouse gasses that predisposes it to reach some stable equilibrium in the narrow bandwidth of conditions that allow liquid water to form in habitats ( be those habitats planets, moons, wandering brown dwarfs, or other) then it doesn't actual increase the likelihood of such conditions accruing.
While its arguable the greenhouse effect was critcal to our own planets ability to hold liquid water we also know it can lead to conditions that are directly contrary to the existance of liquid water, most theories have Venus possiblely having large bodies of liquid water before its run away green house effect vaporized them. There is no evidence or suggested mechanism that would explain it preferring one result over another.
Its one factor among many that allows the possibility of conditions allowing liquid water to form outside a narrow solar energy window, but speculation on the range of possible habitats has extended far beyond the orbital goldilock range for at least as long as Sagan's work in the late sixties.
There is a possible mechanism that predisposes atomspheres towards a equilibrium allowing for liquid water, the biosphere itself acording to the gaia hypothesis, but that doesn't infullance the likley hood of hospital zones for life to form in the first place, unless there is always life alla panspermia but that's a separate hypothesis.
My point is that there is nothing inheirant in the greenhouse process that increases the liklehood that it will result in a hospital place.
I do not see why that is so controversial.
Why do you have to assume that it is so just because you haven't heard of it?
Sorry ... But to be clear, ... You are saying that it is not random chance when the conditions that allow life to arise occur and that there are selective pressures that predisposes the universe to produce habitable planets ?
Ok ... That is a view, I don't share it.
Sorry ... You saying there is a prefrence in the universe towards producing hospital zones?
.. Second paragraph, what ? Sorry .. But it is very confusing. When did i ever state half of the planets are habitable?
As far as liquid water being on planets outside of the goldilock zone that been long assumed a possibily, we may have a moon orbiting a gas giant in our own solar system full of it. What i said is that while the greenhouse effect is a factor it does not preferentially select for hospitality. While it may push some habitats into the hospital zone it pushes other out.
My point was that yes, greenhouse effect is one of many factors that could be involved in allowing a planet to fall into the hospital zone, but the idea that this is a toggle switch between hospital and non that bothers me.
Look, if you have a planet outside of the hospital zone its not simple enough to say give it a greenhouse effect and it will be in it, you have to give it exactly the right greenhouse effect, 20degrees either way and it no use.
I am in no way denying that there are likely planets out there in the hospital zone due to the exact right level of greenhouse effect, in fact the only inhabited planet we know of, ours, is dependent on the greenhouse effect especially from very early on when the sun was much cooler.
What I am saying, and I don't know why people are so up in arms about this, is that there are more ways for the greenhouse effect to produce effects outside the narrow temperature range that allows for liquid water as there are ways for it to do so.
I know of no selective pressure to predisposes planets to develop the exactly precisely tuned greenhouse effect to allow life to form. ... So i have to assume its random chance. Greenhouse gas is definitely a possible factor, as are countless other things, but it has as many negative as positive effects. Its is not predisposed towards making a planet hospital.
In your lottery example i would say this is more like rather than issuing you a second ticket instead we add 3 to each of your 6 numbers, occasionally this might make a losing ticket win, occasionally this might make a winning ticket lose, most of the time no effect, net sum zero.
No, ... Its basic logic.
Unless you believe the universe aplies selective pressure towards the formation of habital worlds then any factor that can influence a habitat towards being life capable can also work against it being so.
Just take the three habital zone planets we know of, very crudely you could say Mars to little greenhouse, Venus too much, Earth just right. So that's one out of three.
Now if you believe the universe magically perfers habital planets then all factors will tend towards them forming, if on the other hand you think the universe is indifferent (or perhaps you just feel uncomfortable assigning motivations to existance) then there is no preference towards hospital zones. While its possible there are some selective forces that work to maintain the greenhouse effect within a certain range once a biosphere has formed this is not the questions being poised here rather the likely hood of it initial forming.
The hospital zone itself is a narrow band out of a much larger field of possibilities, basically there are far more ways it can go wrong than right. We define hospital zones basically as places where the natural formation of liquid water is possible, we have examples that greenhouse effects can easily form feed back loops that quickly past that point, again see Venus, so its entirely reasonable to then conclude that for as many possible worlds that are pushed into the hospital zones by greenhouse effects there are statistically as likely to be just a many where is pushes them out of it.
There .. Logic. ... Don't be scared
Where green house gasses might possible push environments into the hospital zone they're are at least as many where they push them out of it, cue venus.
It means that as the actual possible variations we can imagine that might produce habitat planets increase the amount of way this could go horribly wrong also increases, and at a much greater rate.
Really .... Until life in demonstrated to be likely, indeed until its likelihood is anything more than one versus every single thing we have ever looked at, we must assume it is extremely rare, ..l maybe then we'll treat it with a little more care.
And for example, like lets say if they were earth, we would have to being seeing them within a very narrow temporal window, (earth, for example, is roughly 4 billion years old, and has been potentially radio detectable for .. at the outside, just over a hundred years? And a hundred goes into 4 billion?,.. Ohhh ... Quite a bit. )
And then that brief period of time would spread out into the Cosmos at just below the speed of light in a ripple, an as yet unknown but likely narrow band of who knows how many light years thickness, .... To then pass over an likely equally brief area when and where some one might just be listening, ... It's a lonely quite place out there.
How will they size it? Those fat chubby 'murican nacho cheeze stained fingers aren't gonna fit in no european or asian sized holes.
And hopefully they float as well as being water proof, maybe with rfid tracking? cause parents are gonna be fishing them pretty regularly out of bowl after a intestinal voyage.
Was about to comment on the dry matter of fact style of this article considering its content. Content which seemed to suggest evidence of the first non terrestrial organism ever detected, a absolutely gobsmacking stunning truely historical bit of news that represents a major significan landmark in our understanding of the universe ... And the artical seemed so blah ... Ho hum, ... Then looked a little into it all and, Oh, its bullshyte ... ok, then ... Thanks for the let down
The idea that we should just colonize another planet as an insurance against something bad happening to ours is fairly simple minded.
It like think hey ... My house might burn down so i'm just gonna go live on an ice flow. .. Except the ice is dry ice, the water is radiation and the air, isn't
Yes we live on earth, and earth is a planet, ... This in no way implies that other planets are in any way suitable places for us to live.
Yes , i hope that eventually we will figure out a way for descendants of us to (semi) prementantly survive off earth its the idea that will will accomplish this by attempting to inhabit another planet that is just, well, ..silly
I hate talking to people let alone devices.
This isn't just being a bitter old man, part of my job is to tell a bunch of people what to do, (basic stuff like move that over there, point it that way, turn it on, now adjust it) and there is not a single instance where it wouldn't be far quicker, more effective, less stressful and just make me feel far more happy to just do it myself.
Try to do any complex task but only thru giving verbal instructions to another person and even if that other person is extremely intelligent, well trained, and highly motivated to help you will still very quickly curse the very air you breath.
Yes a voice comand device is useful for basic symple tasks or list, and can occasionally settle drunken debates, but real actual productive work its always simplier to just shut up and do t yir self.
Duct, duck, and gaffer are three different type of tape. Duck being a very popular brand.
Actually none of these should be used on airconditioning or heating ducts, as they all do no respond well to heat instead you should use the aluminium tape that designed for them.
earthlike? ...
nasa's pr department seems so focused on fulfilling american trekie sci-fi expectations and hence securing funding that it distorts it own findings beyond recognition, remember the mars fossils?
to call a rocky planet in a similar orbit of mercury earth-like is to call jack the ripper jesus like, yes compared to a deep sea squid they are similar but by reasonable understanding of the english language its ridiculous.
its an intentional and cynical attempt to distort and deceive, it only serves to devalue the very real and very important science they are actually doing and i wish they would stop.
The a or an rule is phonetic not text based, its based on the soft vowel versa hard consonant, hence while its an honest mistake to make we must present a united front against the creeping self righteousness of grammar nazis consciousness
So it depends on how you choose to pronounce LED
Besides it english, .... It wouldn't be half as fun if it actually made logical sense
As someone who works professionally (gaffer, film industry) with all different forms of lighting,( led, tungsten incadescent, hmi, flourencent, carbon arc, hell i even got the philips prototype oled luminblades) let me say this, they all suck but for different reasons.
Led have plenty of suck ... First led droop, ( which last time i looked no one had really figured out) the lost of effeciency as power levels increase mean there's a serious limit on how brite a single source led can be so you are required to stack them, basically stick a bunch together to make the whole brighter this causes tons of issues not only optically, rather than having a basic single source which you can then optically focus you are limited to a multisource array with muliple shadows, rainbowing, and plenty of other artifacts. This also it a major heat issue, while a single led is much more efficent than a incandescent per watt it is also much much smaller so has less surface area to disperse heat. When you start stacking dozens of them closely together this becomes a major problem. I always find it amusing how shocked people are when they see the massive heat sinks on the back of large professional led arrays.
There are even household bulb designs that are using liquid silicon to help deal with this issue.
When you combine this with the circuitry required to run them and the fact that most arrays are built as a single unit, so when you lose indivisual leds you can't replace them and eventually need to replace the entire unit, so while a 50,000 average hour bulb life sounds great when you realise what your really saying is a 50,000 average unit life not so good. I have units on my truck that i use almost daily that are almost as old as i am, i can be pretty certain that none of the led units i have will be functional a decade from now.
Then there is colour, and from reading the above comments almost everyone here need to brush up on their colour theory, lets just say like all non black body emiters leds are a nightmare when it comes to colour. Yes there is no such colour as white but the one thing white is is full spectrum. Led, fluorescents, hmi and other non fullspectrum all have had allot of effort and investment in getting arround the fact that they are naturally missing chunks of the spectrum and most are able to get thier cri (colour rendering index) up to the low 90 in optimum conditions, the thing is optimum conditions don't tend to stay optimum, and when you have a bunch of mixed sources and they all start going off optimum in thier own way on set, well, this is why gaffers tend to nervous wrecks.
Yes led can as a side benifit of having to be stacked have the option of rgb mixing, or for the better arrays rgbcow, but while this may work well as a wash across the back wall the human eye is very atuned to skin tone, especially green and red as its important evolutionarily i suppose to know when a fellow tribe member is about to attack or puke on you, and the limited bandwidth options with the indivusual elements of an rgbled has meant allot of overselling of the usefullness of this option.
Lets not even talk about the nightmares that can happen when dealing with frequency, most led dim by changing freq of on/off cycle rather than brightness which when mixed with the fixed freq. of camera, or the eye of a person who has trained himself to notice freq, can produce incrediblely anoying artifacts.
So yes, .. Led is an useful option, but does not in anyway replace the need and function of incadescent glowing tungsten wires of the basic classic bulb, not in quality or high output, and while led will always have function where it makes the most sense, and we have seen allot of improvements lately as the tech has matured, as we have recently with the more mature fluorescent - the new t5 and t4s are very impressive, it is not the best option in all situations and i actually am very willing to bet that it will not be the unit thats lighting your homes twenty years from now.
Now ... Radio activated plasma bulbs ... That I'm excited about.
things have changed allot in the last 150 years, but don't fall into the assumption that all that change is progressive or predictable, yes we currently take great care not to contaminate places like Mars and lake Vostok and we have some pretty solid logical reasons for doing so, .. but
how will we see things 150 years hence ? Honestly we can't say. While we think were doing the logically necessary things now, but so did those exploring 150 years ago, it pretty certain that we will be look back upon with the same "if only they knew better" distain as we currently do to those vandals, looters and grave robber, but the things they object to are things were likely not even currently aware.
Also its not necessarily so that beliefs 150 years from now will be a logical extension of our current ones, maybe looting and vandalism could be considered the new standard of good, maybe the idea of avoiding contamination rather than actively promoting cross pollination and hybridization would be considered ignorant and backwards to our future critics.
As far as an alien race having viewpoints, morals or ethics that we are able to deduce ahead of time is the hight of arrogance and folly.
yes in theory we could terraform a planet, and genetically alter us as it seem likely we would have to meet the planet at least half way, but why?
Ignoring the moral ethical objections of destroying an existing biosphere, lets assume this is a barren world, like maybe mars, there is still the fundamental question of motivation.
the technology and timescale involved in even the most optimistic estimations on what would be required are on the extreme end of any imaginable civilization scale. Were talking a project that from our current historical perspective would have been started by the ancient Mesopotamians and still not be half done.
Also any attempt of starting such a project would almost certainly preclude the ability of us to survive for extended periods in space.
So the mayor question is once we, assuming we actually do, learn to survive in space, in large habitats, hollowed out asteroids, or floating bubbles of nano-foam, why would we go back down the gravity well?
ignoring the immediate cost, would life on such a terraformed planet be safer?
I don't see how?
yes your buying yourself a large gravitational mass the hide behind and perhaps an atmosphere, maybe even a magnetic field if your very very lucky or clever, but in order to even start this project you already would have already had to solve the issues of survivability in weightlessness and space born radiation.
Resources?.. if our own solar system is an example it appears there are far more easily accessible resources floating around out side of planetary gravity wells than down them.
Does a planet buy you more security? I don't see how, ignoring seismic upheaval, atmospheric feedback loops, orbital permutations, and countless other issues planets have they also lack the one fundamental advantage of a space habitat ... the ability to get out of the way.
The best defence is to not be there to get hit.
Then we are back to time scale, were roughly halfway thru the estimated 1200 million year period that our planet is likely capable of supporting multi-cellular life on it surface at this distance from the sun, this is assuming things continue peacefully, that the sun doesn't burp us to a cinder that a local gamma ray event or supernova, or any other countless other thin we don't yet know about doesn't scours us clean.
If we were gonna spend millions if not tens of millions of years building a home wouldn't it be nice to take it with us when the neighbourhood went south? If were talking about civilizations with the technology and timescale of planning of doing such a thing I admit we have no idea of their motivation, they could just being doing it to watch it burn prettily, but this still seems unlikely.
The problem here is that we have certain tropes in our thinking, We live on earth, earth is a planet, there are other planets, we will live on them. The issue is that in order to get to them we necessarily undergo a shift in perspective, the amount of resources and effort to make planets livable is so huge and the advantages and reason for doing so becomes so small that once we have the ability to do so, if we ever do, we can't see the reason why we would want to.
This doesn't fit the amazing world of science fiction image we all grew up on, but very little we actually learn does.
no.
... seriously, you need to read twice before you respond, or at least need to work on yir reading comprehension
I said nothing denying the possibility other intelligence life, ... except they would have to be the result of the same series of unlikely events as we did.
The fact that we do exist proves nothing other than that it happen once, if it didn't we wouldn't have been arround to notice, what i actually did say is that even if we do find another planet with all the necessary requirements for life, (and one of those requirements for at least our particular form of life is the existence of previous life so it has a biosphere, and a long series of historic events that made this particular earth biosphere) and even if by an extreme coincidence it happens result in a biosphere that isn't toxic to us, (and according to our own earths history- the only one we have to study- such biospheres are rare, existing a few million ... maybe at a stretch a couple 100 million years out of roughly 4 billion + year history), and such a planet just happens to be in the right range that we could get there in the narrow window that such conditions continue to exist ... that even then,
.. and even if there wasn't already intelligent life, (which again going by the only history we have and considering we aint found ant dinosaur nuclear powerplants or fossilized cars seems likely), ... even then,
well,
.... even then,if would still be illogical, hugely impractical, and just plan wrong to colonize another world.
we are likely never gonna have the chance and even if we did we'd be idiots to do so.
as far as other culture having pets as smart as us, ... a kinda pointless attribute in a pet, yes?, ... why would that allow us to live on their worlds?
I don't see yir point at all
no new home for us, ..ever
we evolved on this earth after a long history of unlikely events, earth formed roughly 4.5 billion years ago within a billion years there was likely some form of life so ups for that but it took until roughly 600 million years ago for multi-celluar life to form and even more important during the vast majority of the last 600 million years earth atmosphere/biosphere was incredibly toxic to us. In 600 million more years the sun will likely be bright enough to reduce life back down to single cell lifeforms.
So, we humans/mammals/animalia evolved within a specific environment at a very specific time, that is the result of a long history of life/chemical and interstellar accidents .. even if we could time travel the vast majority of earth's history would be incredibly toxic to us, this includes the last 600 million years, and if even one of those historic accidents had rolled different results, the moon, purple winning over green photosynthesis, right handed over left handed molecules and so on to things much more trivial, we would not only not be here, but the here would likely be incredibly toxic to us.
So even if we find a planet roughly the same size and composition, and while were at it day/night rotation , orbiting a similar star at a similar distance, with a living carbon based biosphere that just happens to be in the incredibly small percentage of its existence where complex multiple cellular organisms actually exist and also by incredibly unlikely random chance have built a biosphere which is not fundlementally toxic to us, and lets just say not only does it meet this incredibly improbable string of coincidence but is close enough within our light envelop that actual travel to it is possible, and of course there is no "native" intelligent life-form which with all of these conditions is the only one thats likely , not only would it be likely credibly difficult and unpleasant to occupy but from any ecological biological conservational perspective morally reprehensible cause the one thing we've proven about us is that we can screw a biosphere up.
... * and breath
so basically ... beside uncomfortable cramped temporary lodgings in space, this is our one home, the only place we will ever, ever, be able to go about in short sleeves,
... and I think we broke it.
its our room, we should clean it up.
no new home for us, ..ever
we evolved on this earth after a long history of unlikely events, earth formed roughly 4.5 billion years ago within a billion years there was likely some form of life so ups for that but it took until roughly 600 million years ago for multi-celluar life to form and even more important during the vast majority of the last 600 million years earth atmosphere/biosphere was incredibly toxic to us. In 600 million more years the sun will likely be bright enough to reduce life back down to single cell lifeforms.
So, we humans/mammals/animalia evolved within a specific environment at a very specific time, that is the result of a long history of life/chemical and interstellar accidents .. even if we could time travel the vast majority of earth's history would be incredibly toxic to us, this include the last 600 million years, if even one of those historic accidents had rolled different results, the moon, purple winning over green photosynthesis, right handed over left handed molecules and so on to things much more trivial, we would not only not be here, but the here would be toxic to us.
So even if we find a planet roughly the same size and composition, and while were at it day/night rotation , orbiting a similar star at a similar distance, with a living carbon based biosphere that just happens to be in the incredibly small percentage of its existence where complex multiple cellular organisms actually exist and have built a biosphere which is not toxic to us, and lets just say not only does it meet this incredibly improbable string of coincidence but is close enough within our light envelop that actual travel to it is possible, and of course there is no "native" intelligent life-form which with all of these conditions is the only one thats likely , not only would it be likely credibly difficult and unpleasant to occupy but from any ecological biological perspective morally reprehensible
... * and breath
so basically ... beside uncomfortable cramped temporary lodgings in space, this is our one home, the only place we will ever, ever, be able to go about in short sleeves
... and I think we broke it.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2025
