“Noam Chomsky, pondering the question of why our most powerful instruments can’t find any aliens, concluded that technology probably killed them off.”
That like saying stone tools killed them off.
The answer is socialism or broadly speaking, being delusional.
Roughly, socialism is let the government do things.
That’s pretty delusional, have you ever looked at what governments actually do?
“Maybe we got a sneak preview of the Great Filter from Wuhan. ”
Ah, yeah. What is Wuhan, but totalitarian socialism?
What is socialism without propaganda?
Now if doing a lot brainwashing, you not going get to rational, it’s not even fantasy, it’s dumb, delusional fantasy, or simply, delusion.
It seems the chinese virus, demonstrate that a government can get into lockdown, but can it get out of lockdown?
And if, NASA is suppose to explore space, will NASA actually be the agent, that will cause the Moon to be explored.
It seems to me that NASA needs an outside force to make them get involved with exploring Space.
And if NASA ever explore the Moon, then we hear decades of propaganda, about what fantastic job they did, which they were forced to do {kicking and screaming}, and left to own devices, would have never done it.
Think of all of the abandoned ruins we are discovering with modern instrumentation. Even from orbit we are discovering civilizations lost in the mists of time.
More technology and more places for humanity to prosper means that no one disaster in one place will destroy us so thoroughly that we are forgotten.
> no one disaster in one place will destroy us
Indeed, but it’s unsettling to think that humanity may fly off in all directions, never to be causally connected again (within reasonable communication timescales). I’m not sure there’s an “us” in that scenario.
Something to ponder.
But then again, I’m left to wonder: Is there really even an “us” now?
“Noam Chomsky, pondering the question of why our most powerful instruments can’t find any aliens, concluded that technology probably killed them off.”
Talk about being trapped in a narrative.
But to await salvation would be to expect more from technology than is reasonable. First, there are suspicions the pandemic itself may be the product of technology, of rogue experiments or bad lab containment.
Are we to base our choices and outlook on suspicions or on facts?
We are going to choose to prosecute, and we could find evidence that indicates that further prosecution is not warranted.
But it seems quite predictable that CCP will not cooperate and will continue to stonewall any justified global inquiry. And then CCP will pay a steep price for their really dumb decisions of how to respond something which appears to be a huge international war crime.
Since the Chinese have been lying all along, there are no facts to base it on.
What is a fact, though, is that genetic engineering tech becomes cheaper and simpler every day, and engineered plagues will soon be the kind of thing a pissed-off kid can create in his basement on a rainy Sunday afternoon.
When the history of the human race is written, it may turn out that Chinese Flu saved us by giving us a taste of what that future might bring, before it’s too late. And thereby allowing us to start making changes to minimize the impact of such diseases when they are released.
I really tire of invocations of the “Fermi Paradox” to bolster ideological positions of any kind. It isn’t a paradox, IMHO.
What kind of evidence of other space civilizations do we expect? There are only two types: radio signals and direct visitation.
As far as radio signals go, they would be restricted to a very immediate volume of space around us (about 100 light years’ radius) if we were to detect any signals of the type we used in the 1920s to 1980s. Those were the “high power years.” Radiated power levels are on a continuing decline. At the same time, we’ve increased our number of (much lower power) transmitters astronomically – something that can be done only by clever use of spectrum. Code Division Multiple Access is one good example. It allows millions of cell phones to operate within a small geographic area without any interference. And its signals are absolutely indistinguishable from noise to anyone not in possession of the algorithms, even if they could detect the (very) low power signals.
It took us only about 120 years to go from Marconi to the present day. How likely is it that we’d intercept a signal from a) within 100 light-years from b) a civilization which could have emerged at any point in time in c) a window of time just 120 years wide? I’d say the equivalent Drake equation for that would give a very long string of decimal zeros before hitting the first non-zero number.
That leaves direct visitation. If biology is inherent in matter, it should behave the same way everywhere. One of the many ramifications of that is that the life spans of organisms is finite. Given the fact (and it seems to be one) that the speed limit in the universe is the speed of light, that means that organisms capable of space travel would never do it outside of their own solar system. For one thing, getting a macroscopic object even halfway to the speed of light requires energy on a scale that is unavailable by any means other than matter/anti-matter interactions. What would motivate any living thing to devote all of the effort to develop the required technology, when a lesser technology could be used to transform the local star system into a paradise?
Sorry for my short-sightedness, but I just don’t see interstellar travel ever being practical for any living being. It doesn’t surprise me that we’ve had no visitors from beyond the Solar System, and I don’t think we ever will have.
There is also the possibility of using the gravitational lensing effect of a celestial body to get much better view of the planets of other stellar systems. The problem there is the location of the focal point — the Sun’s focal point is somewhere out in the outer solar system, and while those of the Moon and Earth are much closer, they’re still far enough away to be awkward. Travis Taylor included a bit about using the Sun’s focal point to view some possible candidates for life in one of his novels, IIRC Warp Speed.
There’s also the possibility of post-biological life. Even in the here and now we’re seeing ever more sophisticated prosthetics, which leads to the question of what happens when prosthetics become just as good as the biological ones, or even better. Assuming that consciousness can be run on a machine substrate, some segment of an intelligent species might well choose to abandon the frailties and limitations of biology altogether, in which case all kinds of interesting possibilities open, a la the game Eclipse Phase.
For one thing, getting a macroscopic object even halfway to the speed of light requires energy on a scale that is unavailable by any means other than matter/anti-matter interactions. What would motivate any living thing to devote all of the effort to develop the required technology, when a lesser technology could be used to transform the local star system into a paradise?
Alternately, if they could produce such power, would it only be from motivation to travel great distances or for violence. And if violence, might that be enough to cause an extinction? If not violence, then I think your scenario makes the greater sense: terraform the local system into a paradise.
Sorry, but that’s 1950s thinking.
Any serious engineering project by a society a few thousand years ahead of us should be visible from the far side of the galaxy. If they start building Dyson Spheres or dismantling stars, we’re going to notice stars disappearing.
“What would motivate any living thing to devote all of the effort to develop the required technology, when a lesser technology could be used to transform the local star system into a paradise?”
Assholes.
The motivation for the human race spreading across the planet was largely a desire to get away from assholes who would ensure your ‘paradise’ rapidly became your hell.
And we could colonize the entire galaxy in ten million years by accident, simply by having people spread out across it at 1% of the speed of light looking for new resources. There’s no scientific or engineering problem we know of which would prevent that.
Assuming we survive the next hundred years, it will happen because there’s no reason for it not to happen.
Interstellar migration is an emergent property of space colonization with no requirement for high energy transit or relativistic velocities. Once you have space colonies, it makes sense for them to be dirigible, so they can move between resource nodes rather than depending on an external infrastructure bringing resources to them. And once you have a civilization based on dirigible space colonies, they will inevitably begin to wander off into the Oort Cloud and beyond. If it takes a colony 10,000 generations to comet-hop between stars, so what? The people are living where they always did.
Isaac Asimov did a good workup of the idea in the 1960s, called “There’s Noplace Like Spome” (short for “space home”: because this was before O’Neill took over the idea). In fact it’s much older than that. Twenty years earlier, James Blish has people with gravity control uproot Manhattan and fly it away into space, in his “Cities in Flight” series. Part of the point was, if you live in New York, does it matter where New York is located?
“Noam Chomsky, pondering the question of why our most powerful instruments can’t find any aliens, concluded that technology probably killed them off.”
That like saying stone tools killed them off.
The answer is socialism or broadly speaking, being delusional.
Roughly, socialism is let the government do things.
That’s pretty delusional, have you ever looked at what governments actually do?
“Maybe we got a sneak preview of the Great Filter from Wuhan. ”
Ah, yeah. What is Wuhan, but totalitarian socialism?
What is socialism without propaganda?
Now if doing a lot brainwashing, you not going get to rational, it’s not even fantasy, it’s dumb, delusional fantasy, or simply, delusion.
It seems the chinese virus, demonstrate that a government can get into lockdown, but can it get out of lockdown?
And if, NASA is suppose to explore space, will NASA actually be the agent, that will cause the Moon to be explored.
It seems to me that NASA needs an outside force to make them get involved with exploring Space.
And if NASA ever explore the Moon, then we hear decades of propaganda, about what fantastic job they did, which they were forced to do {kicking and screaming}, and left to own devices, would have never done it.
Think of all of the abandoned ruins we are discovering with modern instrumentation. Even from orbit we are discovering civilizations lost in the mists of time.
More technology and more places for humanity to prosper means that no one disaster in one place will destroy us so thoroughly that we are forgotten.
> no one disaster in one place will destroy us
Indeed, but it’s unsettling to think that humanity may fly off in all directions, never to be causally connected again (within reasonable communication timescales). I’m not sure there’s an “us” in that scenario.
Something to ponder.
But then again, I’m left to wonder: Is there really even an “us” now?
“Noam Chomsky, pondering the question of why our most powerful instruments can’t find any aliens, concluded that technology probably killed them off.”
Talk about being trapped in a narrative.
Are we to base our choices and outlook on suspicions or on facts?
We are going to choose to prosecute, and we could find evidence that indicates that further prosecution is not warranted.
But it seems quite predictable that CCP will not cooperate and will continue to stonewall any justified global inquiry. And then CCP will pay a steep price for their really dumb decisions of how to respond something which appears to be a huge international war crime.
Since the Chinese have been lying all along, there are no facts to base it on.
What is a fact, though, is that genetic engineering tech becomes cheaper and simpler every day, and engineered plagues will soon be the kind of thing a pissed-off kid can create in his basement on a rainy Sunday afternoon.
When the history of the human race is written, it may turn out that Chinese Flu saved us by giving us a taste of what that future might bring, before it’s too late. And thereby allowing us to start making changes to minimize the impact of such diseases when they are released.
I really tire of invocations of the “Fermi Paradox” to bolster ideological positions of any kind. It isn’t a paradox, IMHO.
What kind of evidence of other space civilizations do we expect? There are only two types: radio signals and direct visitation.
As far as radio signals go, they would be restricted to a very immediate volume of space around us (about 100 light years’ radius) if we were to detect any signals of the type we used in the 1920s to 1980s. Those were the “high power years.” Radiated power levels are on a continuing decline. At the same time, we’ve increased our number of (much lower power) transmitters astronomically – something that can be done only by clever use of spectrum. Code Division Multiple Access is one good example. It allows millions of cell phones to operate within a small geographic area without any interference. And its signals are absolutely indistinguishable from noise to anyone not in possession of the algorithms, even if they could detect the (very) low power signals.
It took us only about 120 years to go from Marconi to the present day. How likely is it that we’d intercept a signal from a) within 100 light-years from b) a civilization which could have emerged at any point in time in c) a window of time just 120 years wide? I’d say the equivalent Drake equation for that would give a very long string of decimal zeros before hitting the first non-zero number.
That leaves direct visitation. If biology is inherent in matter, it should behave the same way everywhere. One of the many ramifications of that is that the life spans of organisms is finite. Given the fact (and it seems to be one) that the speed limit in the universe is the speed of light, that means that organisms capable of space travel would never do it outside of their own solar system. For one thing, getting a macroscopic object even halfway to the speed of light requires energy on a scale that is unavailable by any means other than matter/anti-matter interactions. What would motivate any living thing to devote all of the effort to develop the required technology, when a lesser technology could be used to transform the local star system into a paradise?
Sorry for my short-sightedness, but I just don’t see interstellar travel ever being practical for any living being. It doesn’t surprise me that we’ve had no visitors from beyond the Solar System, and I don’t think we ever will have.
There is also the possibility of using the gravitational lensing effect of a celestial body to get much better view of the planets of other stellar systems. The problem there is the location of the focal point — the Sun’s focal point is somewhere out in the outer solar system, and while those of the Moon and Earth are much closer, they’re still far enough away to be awkward. Travis Taylor included a bit about using the Sun’s focal point to view some possible candidates for life in one of his novels, IIRC Warp Speed.
There’s also the possibility of post-biological life. Even in the here and now we’re seeing ever more sophisticated prosthetics, which leads to the question of what happens when prosthetics become just as good as the biological ones, or even better. Assuming that consciousness can be run on a machine substrate, some segment of an intelligent species might well choose to abandon the frailties and limitations of biology altogether, in which case all kinds of interesting possibilities open, a la the game Eclipse Phase.
For one thing, getting a macroscopic object even halfway to the speed of light requires energy on a scale that is unavailable by any means other than matter/anti-matter interactions. What would motivate any living thing to devote all of the effort to develop the required technology, when a lesser technology could be used to transform the local star system into a paradise?
Alternately, if they could produce such power, would it only be from motivation to travel great distances or for violence. And if violence, might that be enough to cause an extinction? If not violence, then I think your scenario makes the greater sense: terraform the local system into a paradise.
Sorry, but that’s 1950s thinking.
Any serious engineering project by a society a few thousand years ahead of us should be visible from the far side of the galaxy. If they start building Dyson Spheres or dismantling stars, we’re going to notice stars disappearing.
“What would motivate any living thing to devote all of the effort to develop the required technology, when a lesser technology could be used to transform the local star system into a paradise?”
Assholes.
The motivation for the human race spreading across the planet was largely a desire to get away from assholes who would ensure your ‘paradise’ rapidly became your hell.
And we could colonize the entire galaxy in ten million years by accident, simply by having people spread out across it at 1% of the speed of light looking for new resources. There’s no scientific or engineering problem we know of which would prevent that.
Assuming we survive the next hundred years, it will happen because there’s no reason for it not to happen.
Interstellar migration is an emergent property of space colonization with no requirement for high energy transit or relativistic velocities. Once you have space colonies, it makes sense for them to be dirigible, so they can move between resource nodes rather than depending on an external infrastructure bringing resources to them. And once you have a civilization based on dirigible space colonies, they will inevitably begin to wander off into the Oort Cloud and beyond. If it takes a colony 10,000 generations to comet-hop between stars, so what? The people are living where they always did.
Isaac Asimov did a good workup of the idea in the 1960s, called “There’s Noplace Like Spome” (short for “space home”: because this was before O’Neill took over the idea). In fact it’s much older than that. Twenty years earlier, James Blish has people with gravity control uproot Manhattan and fly it away into space, in his “Cities in Flight” series. Part of the point was, if you live in New York, does it matter where New York is located?