Ukerric
Bearded Ape
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And then you have Negative Energy and the "Big Rip" (google that and despair).
The Fermi Paradox -- Where is everybody?
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Sanrith Descartes
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Gavinmad
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just dont mix things up and search pornhub for 'big rip'
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TheBeagle
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khorum
Murder Apologist
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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 achieved the level of spaceflight we were capable of in 1969 could have colonized the entire galaxy in 5-50 million years. The range is how aggressively that civilization would have pursued expansion, with the 5-million range figure being super aggressive and 50 million years for diffuse/super chill delegated expansion via daughter civilizations.
They didn't even assume any significant improvements over our rocket technology either, even though we technically knew that solar sails would perform way better over time than propellant-based engines.
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Tholan
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The missing link between the soup and life is in my opinion the greatest mystery that we haven't solved. I mean, I can picture having very complex structures created during early earth, and you may even reproduce that in a lab, but at what point do these molecules start having hunger, or defense against other molecules, etc ? If we completely manufacture from the bottom a procaryote, will it suddenly lives ? or just be an inert mass of molecules ? That puzzles me a lot
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iannis
Musty Nester
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It's a real question. Carroll recently had a doctor actively pursuing synthetic life. I forget her name, but it should be easy to pick out. MIndscape podcast.
What we can do is take one cell, scoop out the nucleus, insert a new nucleus, and create an organism that way synthetically. What we have not done yet is build a functional cell from components. That's what she's working on.
If it doesn't work it opens up some very important questions of why not.
We expect it should work. Even I expect that will work while I hope it doesnt.
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Ukerric
Bearded Ape
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The definition of life these days is any self-sustaining structure/ensemble that can repair itself using energy from its environment or produce a reasonable duplicate of itself.
(the or is because you have organisms that are entirely sterile - like bee workers - that would not be classified as alive if you had 'and')
There's plenty of reasons why it would be alive and plenty of reasons why it would be a mess of molecules. There's nothing that prevents a duplicate set of molecules to behave exactly as what it's copied from.
But on the other hand, every organism on earth is the result of a long evolution process that relies on having ancestors. That is, everything alive today has adapted to the fact that it had living ancestor active to bootstrap its processes. As a result, it's extremely hard to have a modern organism (and by modern, I include the simplest ones alive, since they, too, have had 3.5 billion years of evolution until they were born/spawned) that can survive inactivation by freezing. If you stop the running chemistry, you have a hard time restarting it. That might not have been the case for the first organisms, but all modern life simply ends definitively if you shut down enough of its chemistry.
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Sanrith Descartes
Veteran of a thousand threadban wars
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There are days when I glad I'm on the other side of 50. At the rate our scientific knowledge advances I can see some amazing things coming in the next 50-100 years. Amazing and scary as fuck. Scary because I really have zero faith that we human beings wont take something amazing and turn it into something scary as fuck. I hope I'm in the ground when the really scary shit hits the fan.
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Cybsled
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Although when you look at those numbers, that is a pretty insane period of time for a species. Homo Sapiens have only been around for a hundred thousand years, give or take. Advanced hominids for a few million years. There are species on Earth that have been around for timescales like that (or longer), but nothing on the level of humans.
At a certain point, you have to imagine the species is going to evolve/change unless they use artificial means to regulate that. If there "great filter" was legitimate, it could be something as simple as a species changes to a degree where they don't want to continue expanding out into the universe (like Krypton in the Superman universe).
Julian The Apostate
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And then he chuckled and said to himself, “Let’s fuck with this one dude and make him feel like a woman LOLOLOL.”
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Vanessa
Uncle Tanya
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I'd love to reply to you two, but I promised Gavin I'd "fuck off to another thread". I'd hate to trigger him into telling me to kill myself, getting infracted, blaming mods instead of himself, and then fake-quitting again.
Please tag me in the atheism thread if you'd actually like a dialogue; or don't... whatever's clever.
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My personal theory is that intelligent species pretty quickly figure out that space is really fucking big, physical travel is hard, slow, and low-reward, and sacks of meat are resource-intensive and unreliable substrates for long-lived intelligence. They evolve/invent/transfer themselves onto more robust machine hardware and then sit around in super-efficient server farms on asteroids in the middle of nowhere living in whatever kind of virtual utopia they can dream up and have zero interest interacting with other species. We don't see them because why would they bother making themselves seen?
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khorum
Murder Apologist
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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 suggested that after 250 iterations a civilization with 1969 rocket propulsion would've colonized most of our light cone within 40,000 years.
That seems like a long time to someone who will probably die after 82 years but it's barely a blip in cosmic timescales. In fact, it's not even half the lifetime of the oldest land-based organism on Earth (Pando, at 80,000 years old) and it's a FIFTH of the age of the oldest ocean-based organism, a clonal colony of sea grass at 200,000 years old.
And once again it's pointless to imagine whatever motivations of feelings or aspirations might drive these civilizations to spread across the galaxy when the thermodynamic laws govern bioeconomics as well as it does the conduction of heat. They would've spread across the galaxy because they must. And with technology we achieved in 1969, the very first civilization to have emerged past the Great Filter had enough time between the time the majority of the Milky Way's stars have cooled enough to produce livable planets (roughly 5 billion years ago) to colonize the entire galaxy more than a hundred times over.
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Sanrith Descartes
Veteran of a thousand threadban wars
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Riddle me this Batman. If we have become this fucked up of a race in our relatively short existance, how fucked up must one of those billion-year old races be?
khorum
Murder Apologist
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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 to organize around maximizing energy and expanding to secure more of it. Everything from cellular structures to galaxies are governed by the same laws of thermoeconomics.
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Ryan
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Yeah what people don't get is the "they wouldn't be interested in us" type of explanation might work for some alien civ, but not for all possible civs.
Its an attitude people get from movies and "science communicators". In order to make the warp coil they'd have to master universal empathy and egalitarianism first. A hypothetical alien civ that gets to a point then becomes contemplative and declines to expand is irrelevant. They'd just be subsumed by those who choose survival.
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