Search results

Once again, trying to divine the motivations of hypothetical civilizations is entertaining but largely irrelevant. In the universal laws of thermoeconomics, the conservation of energy and the conservation of momentum, we have all we need to understand the NECESSITY of resource maximalization...

As for "dyson spheres are hard to build" that's the the Malthusian end-point again. Basically that proposition says that civilizations would be overcome by the pressure to equalize energy distribution across all its constituents and eventually become unable to expand beyond their homeworld...

That's an expression of the Malthusian "homeostatic end-state" proposition for the Great Filter. I'm a fan but it's still anthropomorphic. Speculating on what motivates aliens is fun and entertaining but we don't need to indulge in the hypotheticals to understand the NEED for any civilization...

You're STILL grossly anthropomorphizing this. That's only "pretty insane" if you're contemplating it from the perspective of a human lifetime. The Hair/Hedman dispersion model's low range of 5 million years is for an aggressive species to colonize the ENTIRE GALAXY. Their base simulation...

Is that the fat chick from the first season of Fargo?

Yeah that's been covered. Basically it's not whether or not they WANT to come here, it would've because they HAD to come here since the rest of the galaxy had already been exploited. There was a paper a few years ago from a couple mathematicians that showed that any civilization that has...

Looks great but the only domes with access to sunlight would probably be for observatories and some hydroponics. The vast majority of the agriculture will be LED-lit vertical farms under several dozen feet of regolith to protect it from the harsh radiation. Blackbird Interactive (homeworld...

Cuz there was never any free will. Eve was a cunt from the getgo and she was pre-destined to get us booted from the garden and has sown discord for uncounted epochs since.

Nah, they're aestivating until the universe is cool enough for black holes to start evaporating so they use them as energy sources.

That's one of the potential Great Filters still outstanding yes.

Because "God" just wanted to rediscover a long-lost pasta recipe that was invented by a Sinocore hagiocypher in 2674 so he bootstrapped this simulation hoping it'll be ready before the end of the semester for his thesis paper. He's paying for it out of his booze allowance so to speed up...

LOL yeah, the people who have the most to gain from an alien invasion would conspire to HIDE the existence of a foreign enemy that would be worth tens of trillions of dollars to them. The Military-Industrial Complex built the space program and every ballistic missile and landed us on the moon...

Well it's supposed to be able to take 100 passengers around the moon at least (he's already got a Japanese billionaire paid into that so he has to make it) and it's supposed to go to Mars. The size and weight have to do with the much bigger payload obviously but also with the different fuel...

Are they still just testing the raptors at this point or the starship itself? There are supposed to be FORTY ONE of those things on the first stage of the BFR.... that's more than N1's 30 engines and an extra 11 possible points of failure.

He mad:

It's absolutely one of the requirements. Ironically, one of the arguments against Kardashev's scale is that he assessed human energy density in 1964---when the overwhelming majority of human energy production was from FOSSIL FUELS. So the question is what would emergent intelligences do if...

It could just be spores that survive in the vacuum of space. It doesn't have to be intelligent in a way we understand intelligent at all. There could just be a planet where the dominant species is a clonal colony of trees who evolved a way to let their spores float out into space and...

A key point is that the Fermi Paradox ASSUMES the mediocrity principle. It begins with the assumption that the conditions that allowed human brains to observe this universe IS NOT unique. It simply asks why there aren't other intellects. So answering it with a proposal built upon the...

Sure, but again we can't anthropomorphize the motives of hypothetical aliens. We can't assume their need for lebensraum or planets with liquid water or whatever. So the idea is to use systems that are universal to predict behavior. Things like how the laws of thermodynamics would apply to...

AGAIN it's not a matter of practicality, but NECESSITY. You're anthropomorphizing hypothetical civilizations which is what Kardashev successfully avoided. You don't need to imagine lifespans or biological limits, he simply measured the total energy production and consumption rates of any...

Scientists DON'T just factor in radio communications since we know our own high powered radio communications degrade over cosmic distances. As I mentioned earlier Shermer uses the infrared shift produced by urbanization, which could come from city lights to infrastructure to agriculture. Using...

Well the point is to inventory those circumstances that may explain the Fermi Paradox of "Where is everybody". In which case the extreme rarity of biogenesis WOULD qualify as a potential Great Filter. As he said, other components of the Drake equation's predicted factors have been observed...

That's the default state of the Great Filter hypothesis, until we get evidence of life on other planets, at which point the probabilities scale catastrophically against our favor. It's basically a probabilistic argument using bayesian inference. The fact is we have the empirical basis for the...

See that's the point! If everyone would just play through KSP on campaign mode with the realism mods, they'd understand that even a BASIC mission to Duna would require years' worth of iterating and perfecting the mission stack at MUN first. Getting the orbital docking ops right and then the...

Lol honestly the argument is moot. The prospect of iterating through designs and testing them directly on Mars is many orders of magnitude more expensive than testing shit like ISRU systems for fuel and automated mining/construction on the Moon first so anyone with a serious Mars program will...

More importantly there are actual economic reasons to settle on the moon, not just as a stepping stone to Mars. Noone suggested going there just for the sake of going. There's already the potential of the moon's proximity, lack of an atmosphere and low gravity for use as an observatory...

@Melvin is a fucking retard who tried to be a badass without reading the conversation he parachuted into and you're the dumbass who foisted the signal propagation argument without realizing that the Drake equation accounted for it back in 1961. Drake uses L to abstract the period during which a...

The Great Filter is just some cataclysmic condition all life across the universe succumbs to long before they can rise to the higher rungs on the Kardashev scale. Nuclear War, Climate Collapse whatever. An example would be: That's close to the Malthusian dead end that's my particular...

No dumbfuck, noone was having that argument at all. Drake uses L simply to factor in the emissions footprint of a theoretical civilization, measured in how long they're emitting them. It doesn't imply how that signal is carried over radio or as the ambient heat of a dyson sphere or whatever...

No, you fucking mongoloid, we were talking about his objection to the Drake Equation's role in the Great Filter Hypothesis and he proposed signal degradation over time as something that Drake had overlooked. Except signals propagation---not just RADIO but heat and infrared signatures from...

That's literally factored into the Drake Equation, dude. Its notation is L. It's the last variable in the equation and arguably the most important for SETI, the window of time wherein a sufficiently advanced civilization would transmit signals strong enough to propagate past its star's...

Yep. Anyways I'm more or less pro-Martian colonies myself but it's UNDOUBTEDLY more immediately useful to build telescopes/observatories on the Moon. Even the tiny telescope the Apollo landings put on the moon enriched human knowledge, confirming a couple theories about nebulas and the earth's...

Well if the costs came down enough it would be worthwhile for tourism and stuff. But otherwise yeah. Even putting a simple radio telescope observatory on the far side of the moon, where it's tidally locked away from terrestrial noise and has no atmosphere, is already more practical and...

No idea. They kinda added two and two fairly recently---recently enough that the author of The Martian wasn't able to put it into his book. Both Spirit/Sojourner found them and finally Opportunity has found it everywhere so the thinking is that it's everywhere in those insane concentrations...

What could possiby be unreasonabe about the Drake Equation? It's about as straightforward as you could get: That's all it is. Considering the rates of stellar formation, the ratio of stars in their main sequence, the ratio of those main sequence stars which would have rocky planets in the...

You're a fucking retard.

It doesn't assume that at all, that's just the OBSERVED STATE of the universe given everything we've observed. And so long as we don't see any evidence of alien life, the presumption that we are the first to survive the Great Filter will be the default presumption. It originated as a response...

And that would mean we. are. fucked. It would mean that we're NOT the first species to survive past the Great Filter, we're just the next doomed one up to bat.

It would mean we're fucked.