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 Post subject: Re: Another random book plug.
PostPosted: Mon Jul 21, 2003 2:44 pm 
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Well, everybody else has pretty much made my points for me (namely, that we don't really have the technology to detect much in the way of potential sentient alien evidence, and even if we did, there's a good chance we wouldn't recognize it for what it was), so I'll just say one thing:

Yevaud333 wrote:
Star Trek: Voyager
HATE.

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PostPosted: Mon Jul 21, 2003 3:00 pm 
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I knew there were more reasons to support WI.

ZOLTAN!!

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 Post subject: It's my first post in this forum....please be gentle
PostPosted: Mon Jul 21, 2003 6:06 pm 
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MrWarMage wrote:
*edit: Additionally, we've only had an engineering control of electricity for less than 200 years. Consider that we had fire for some tens of thousands of years before we got any further. There's some guy out there that registers the knowledge of man in a unit called "Jesus" where one Jesus is representative of all the knowledge that man had acquired from the beginning of recorded history up until the time of the purported death of Jesus. We've been geometrically increasing the number of "Jesus" units since then, so in another thousand years, I'm not ashamed to say that we are completely unable to fathom what technologies we will create.


In a recent issue of Discover magazine....

Quote:
In the 1990S, some library scientists concluded that our total stockpile of information doubles every seven or eight years. A recent study at the University of California at Berkely found that between 2000 and 2002, the total information in the world doubled. In many fields, such as life sciences and space technology, knowledge is accumulationg at speeds that are impossible to keep up with...


The rate that human race acquires knowledge is ever increasing. My question is one that many have asked before....

Can and will the human race will survive itself long enough to reap from the harvest of its knowledge?

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 Post subject: Re: Another random book plug.
PostPosted: Mon Jul 21, 2003 6:35 pm 
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Yevaud333 wrote:
Sounds like Dragon's Egg and Starquake by the late Robert L. Forward. Though I don't recall the life forms described therein having proceeded at quite that feverish a pace, the idea is similar. Very nice books; they have stuck in my mind for years as few others have.

Also related in my mind is the Star Trek: Voyager episode "Blink of an Eye" which reminded me of the aforementioned novels to such an extent that I doubt the resemblance was entirely coincidental. Of course, the Star Trek version had all sorts of scientific inaccuracies and impossibilities woven in so as to be both palatable to the average viewer (who really seems to need aliens to be humanoid, for instance) and presentable within the one-hour-show format. (Please note that this commentary is not meant to bash on ST:V; lord knows there are enough people who do that without my joining in, however much I may prefer the other series. They did a good job with the limited palette they had to work with, given the above constraints.)


You should read some Stephen Baxter books, I think you would like them. He does science fiction with a very heavy emphasis on science.

SquaredBowl wrote:
The rate that human race acquires knowledge is ever increasing. My question is one that many have asked before....

Can and will the human race will survive itself long enough to reap from the harvest of its knowledge?


Good question; consider this. How much of that knowledge is put into creating things to end the lives of other humans? How much that wasn't intended for that purpose ends up being used in that way?

I am rooting for the dolphins myself.


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 Post subject:
PostPosted: Tue Jul 22, 2003 3:23 pm 
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How does the study define "knowledge"?

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 Post subject: Answers to the Fermi Paradox
PostPosted: Wed Jul 23, 2003 9:50 am 
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As I see it, there are thousands of possible answers to the Fermi Paradox.

~Why has intelligent life not contacted us?

--There is none.
--No other intelligent life has sufficient technology.
--The technology required is impossible to create.
--They consider us backward and/or violent.
--They're waiting for us to develop to a certain point. (à la Star Trek)
--Our radio signals haven't reached out far enough yet.
--It has, we just assume the contactees are insane.
--It has, we just can't unscramble it.
--It has, our government is covering it up.
--They're manipulating/using us somehow.
--They're bastards who enjoy watching us make fools of ourselves.

And so on.


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 Post subject:
PostPosted: Thu Jul 24, 2003 9:09 pm 
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Bit of a tangent here, but I'm personally just as glad no extraterrestrial life has contacted us yet.

Why? Because the fundamental patterns that govern biology are just as immutable as any other physical laws, and that includes Darwinian selection. Any species we encounter will have had to fight its way up the evolutionary ladder just the same as we have, and will very likely be looking for an advantage to be gained from us. Assuming interstellar travel is feasible on large scales (and, despite the energy requirements, I think this is a reasonable assumption), this could lead to several scenarios:

-We simply have nothing to offer that's worth bargaining for.
-A hypothetical alien species wants some kind of help from humans, but don't feel like giving anything in return. They try to enslave, subjugate, or intimidate our planet, or parts of it, into giving aid.
-Our planet's resources, for whatever reason, are considered massively more valuable than our species' potential intellectual or physical contributions. Aforementioned alien species decides to ignore our species and take what it needs (very likely causing severe damage to our ecosystem, civilizations, or both), or, alternately, decides to exterminate it in order to stave off possible future repercussions.
-A hypothetical alien species respects or fears ours enough to wish for (more or less) peaceful trade. Possible consequences run the gamut from our planet joining an interstellar network of sorts to some kind of settlers-and-Indians thing, in which the alien species' contributions massively destabilize our economy and/or have so little value on an interstellar scale that our species gets completely fucked over in the long run.

As you can see, only one of these possibilities is potentially beneficial to our species. Another is neutral. Perhaps I'm just being paranoid, but those don't seem like particularly good odds to me.

P-M


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 Post subject:
PostPosted: Thu Aug 28, 2003 1:37 pm 
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Even on earth there are life forms that live on sulfer instead of sugar.
You can't think that an ETI will be even carbon based. Think for a few seconds about the Discworld trolls; they are intelligent (when it's extremly cold) and they are made out of all kinds of rocks.

The catgirl planet idea makes me feel that there is a reason to live. There is hope for a better life.

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 Post subject:
PostPosted: Thu Aug 28, 2003 4:09 pm 
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Werewolfy wrote:
The catgirl planet idea makes me feel that there is a reason to live. There is hope for a better life.


You get some cool points in my book :)

Technically it has to exist somewhere in some dimension.


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