The Fermi Paradox -- Where is everybody?

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Furry

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There is a million forms of insect that nobody understands. Anyone who thinks we undestand this world fully just has it wrong.
 

Mist

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Keep in mind we still have absolutely no idea how gravity actually works, and our models of how gravity works on either very small or very large scales is basically made up bullshit to fit our observations.

It is extremely likely that fundamentally, we do not understand the universe at all.
We haven't the slightest clue how inanimate matter gives rise to conscious experience so odds are the universe is a lot fucking weirder than we think it is.
 
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pharmakos

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I know where I am, do you know where you are? I'm working the equation. And these are the facts. And they are not in dispute.

It's pretty obvious that you did the research between this post and your last, so thanks for that. But don't do this BS where you blindly accuse the other person of the thing you're accused of, because I most definitely have done a lot of reading on this before I started running my mouth
 

pharmakos

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And if you cannot make your case in your own words, I am not interested in your argument Pharmakos. You are just pissed because I answered your data set question decisively. And now you have the sadz. That's ok. We all take a tumble now and then. Speaking of which, say hello to your mother for me.

And wow dude, calm down, I never even said you were WRONG about anything, all I said was "you're right but there's soooooo much more to it than this one thought you just had dude, try reading some if you think this is interesting"

And you got all butthurt

I'm starting to understand why so many people have you on ignore
 

Lumi

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We haven't the slightest clue how inanimate matter gives rise to conscious experience so odds are the universe is a lot fucking weirder than we think it is.

Those with more than half a brain know. Since we know cells can only come from pre-existing cells, life itself cannot have possibly originated from within the universe since life cannot arise from inanimate matter through natural processes.
 

Mist

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Those with more than half a brain know. Since we know cells can only come from pre-existing cells, life itself cannot have possibly originated from within the universe since life cannot arise from inanimate matter through natural processes.
Your mom goes to college.
 
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And wow dude, calm down, I never even said you were WRONG about anything, all I said was "you're right but there's soooooo much more to it than this one thought you just had dude, try reading some if you think this is interesting"

And you got all butthurt

I'm starting to understand why so many people have you on ignore

Some people like me. Some don't. On the "adulting" forums I would never joke around. But this is in general, so I likely get too irritating. You and I have had interesting exchanges in the past, so I would prefer it if you didn't put me on ignore ;)
 
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Ars usually does a good read. So the study says ... 36, in our galaxy. But then it says this is kind of a let down result.

Is it?? I mean: 36. And that's not slime molds we're talking about.

 
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Big Phoenix

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Seems pointless to speculate on something we have zero understanding of.
 
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Cutlery

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And wow dude, calm down, I never even said you were WRONG about anything, all I said was "you're right but there's soooooo much more to it than this one thought you just had dude, try reading some if you think this is interesting"

And you got all butthurt

I'm starting to understand why so many people have you on ignore

Well, it's that and the fact that he claims to be a teacher while performing regular shifts down at the ol' ER doing open heart surgery.

But yeah, that too.
 

Brad2770

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Fucking cliffs notes, who watches 15 minute fucking videos

If you want to put me on retainer, I’ll watch videos for you and give you a 1 minute run down for every 15 minutes I watch.
 
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Ukerric

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Hello wonderful person! I'm actually surprised Anton has so many subscribers.
He's good, but he's waaaaay toooo looooong wiiiiinded. So yes, his 15 min videos could be done in less than 5, usually.
 
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pharmakos

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Well, it's that and the fact that he claims to be a teacher while performing regular shifts down at the ol' ER doing open heart surgery.

But yeah, that too.

i don't post in political threads and he doesn't post in game threads, i forgot that part of his story lol
 

pharmakos

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@sheananigans genuinely glad you went back and worfed those old posts, at least one of those jokes should have gotten a laugh in the first place from someone, dammit :p
 

iannis

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He s talking about a mix of what Arthur called inward looking aliens, adaptation, and perfection of technology.

Three ideas that are not new, but maybe combining them in this way is insightful.

It doesn't answer the Fermi paradox. He basically answering "why don't we see Dyson spheres" with "because they are so inefficient that no one build s them." He does to a step further than that, to be fair, and promote an argument for why they are ineffecient. Why don't we see evidence of aliens? Because they do not want us to and have perfected their technology to be wasteless. But again... All of them? Th eres a problem with that, too. One of them is a fairly central tenant of modern physics, that no system is wasteless. We might be wrong, but as far as we know you're not allowed to just ignore entropy. And signs of that should be visible if there were a civilization that had harnessed an entire solar system. The nearer the approach to kardshev-3 the more undeniable.

but that argument existed about a day after Dyson supposed a swarm was possible. I mean at this point you might as well say "because they've enclosed our heliosphere in a giant holographic projector, because they know we're here and just want us to fuck off. Voyager will bump into it in 2143 and at that point the gig is up." Which i'm pretty sure is a plot in one of the Vernor Vinge novels. IF you can build a dyson sphere, if you allow that assumption, then a project like knowledge quarantine is less ambitious.

It's a fine argument and might be true. It's more of a philosophical argument though. I'm a fan of it in a different form, that the stable size of civilization is self limiting. Attainment in technological progress would be one factor among many, I would think. You don't get Kardashev 2 because while it is possible in principle, in reality it is selected against very strongly. So strongly that the nontrivial chances of it happening are on timescales longer than the projected lifespan of the universe... same reason all the air molecules don't just randomly pop over to one cubic foot volume in your room for a minute and then pop back to where they were. Kardashev is a very very 50's kind of idea. Or 90's. Remember Moores Law of computing and how we're supposed to have 50 godzillion hertz megacomputers in our wristwatches by now? That kind of thinking is necessary and wonderful, but it is only one mode. We could not have gotten to the moon without that kind of thinking.
 
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Harkon

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All I have to do is look at BLM today and realize how fucking hard it is to get into actual interstellar space.

You can beat all the odds get to "Intelligent" status and still fucking destroy yourself easily. Fermi was right, shits hard real hard and we probably wont make it thanks to Communism and Islam with their backers; not to mention the universe throwing random rocks at us...

Going to take Herculean efforts to work against that... but there's always some hope I suppose.
 
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