hyzer
Veteran Member
Professor Dave spottedAvI Loeb tbinks everything that falls from the sky or is in the sky is an alien probe. AvI Loeb says he has found alien probes at the bottom of the ocean.
AvI Loeb is a fraud now.
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3I/ATLAS: Probably NOT an alien interstellar probe
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lpetrich
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Advancing to our present species of humanity, we as a species have been around for some 80,000 - 100,000 years 
Behavioral modernity though anatomical modernity is older than that. A feature that points to origin from a relatively small population is our protruding chins, which most easily spread through a relatively small population.
However, agriculture is much younger than our species, being separately invented in the early Holocene in several places: Vavilov center The previous interglacial was the Eemian, some 120,000 years ago, and we didn't invent agriculture back then. We also didn't invent agriculture at any time in between, at least not agriculture that persisted to the present.
What made a difference? Was Agriculture Impossible during the Pleistocene but Mandatory during the Holocene? A Climate Change Hypothesis - agorigins_2_12_01.pdf - cold, dry, and unstable - File:Aridity ice age vs early holocene vs modern.jpg - Wikimedia Commons
So could there have been similar difficulties elsewhere with starting agriculture?
Behavioral modernity though anatomical modernity is older than that. A feature that points to origin from a relatively small population is our protruding chins, which most easily spread through a relatively small population.However, agriculture is much younger than our species, being separately invented in the early Holocene in several places:
Vavilov center The previous interglacial was the Eemian, some 120,000 years ago, and we didn't invent agriculture back then. We also didn't invent agriculture at any time in between, at least not agriculture that persisted to the present.What made a difference? Was Agriculture Impossible during the Pleistocene but Mandatory during the Holocene? A Climate Change Hypothesis - agorigins_2_12_01.pdf - cold, dry, and unstable - File:Aridity ice age vs early holocene vs modern.jpg - Wikimedia Commons
So could there have been similar difficulties elsewhere with starting agriculture?
Jarhyn
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"Practical"
You realize that there is no real time limit, ya?
If you're cold and have sufficient ambianr energy for most of the trip, from your perspective time moves as fast or slow as you want.
It's not really a "long" game taking a hundred or a thousand or ten thousand years to get aroind.
What "short game" is there to force you into a short game yourself?
If you detect a planet, say, during an emergence of some primitive biochemistry (through atmospheric emissions spectra), that tells you you might have millions or even a billion years to get there and beach-head before spacefaring life can beat you to the Le Grange points.
What even is "practicality" when you have eternity?
Elixir
Made in America
If you step out onto Miami Beach, pick up a handful of sand and let it all run through your fingers until there’s only one single grain left, it is more likely that you are holding a tiny diamond than that 32/Atlas is an intergalactic or inter-stellar spacecraft built by intelligent beings.
Jarhyn
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Still doesn't change the fact that one of these days, we will be turning rocks like this into 'earthling probes' ourselves.
Over time that probability will increase exponentially, if only because we are the reason.
lpetrich
Contributor
Theoretical science is essential for doing interstellar exploration; it would be hard to do that with only craft knowledge, what we depended on for nearly all of our history and what we still largely depend on. Yes, one can go far with craft knowledge, but having good theories about underlying causation is essential for going further.
Theoretical science was invented only once, in ancient Greece and Rome, by the likes of Aristoteles of Stagira, more usually known as Aristotle (Richard Carrier, "The Scientist in the Early Roman Empire"). It almost got to where modern science is in methodology, but its development was cut short by the Crisis of the Third Century: major strife and economic downturns. Many Emperors did not last very long before they were deposed and killed by some rival, the northwest and southeast parts of the Empire broke away for a while, and the Empire's treasury financed itself by debasing the Empire's coinage, putting less and less silver into the Empire's silver coins.
When the Empire recovered, under the rule of Emperor Diocletian, interest in scientific inquiry was pretty much gone, and philosophers liked mystical revelation, like Neoplatonism. As RC notes, early Christian theologians had zero taste for such inquiry, considering curiosity a vice rather than a virtue. RC states that scientific inquiry requires these three values:
Scientific inquiry didn't revive for some centuries, but it was restarted in Western and Central Europe nearly a millennium ago with the rediscovery of the works of the likes of Aristotle. But the theologians ended up calling him "the" philosopher, making him into some Church Father, a much-appreciated early theologian, despite his great departures from a lot of their theology. A few centuries later, some people went further into full-scale modern science, and they were up against Aristotle-thumpers as well as Bible-thumpers.
I'd have to collect my thoughts before I discuss our current difficulties.
Theoretical science was invented only once, in ancient Greece and Rome, by the likes of Aristoteles of Stagira, more usually known as Aristotle (Richard Carrier, "The Scientist in the Early Roman Empire"). It almost got to where modern science is in methodology, but its development was cut short by the Crisis of the Third Century: major strife and economic downturns. Many Emperors did not last very long before they were deposed and killed by some rival, the northwest and southeast parts of the Empire broke away for a while, and the Empire's treasury financed itself by debasing the Empire's coinage, putting less and less silver into the Empire's silver coins.
When the Empire recovered, under the rule of Emperor Diocletian, interest in scientific inquiry was pretty much gone, and philosophers liked mystical revelation, like Neoplatonism. As RC notes, early Christian theologians had zero taste for such inquiry, considering curiosity a vice rather than a virtue. RC states that scientific inquiry requires these three values:
- Curiosity - trying to learn new things is a good thing
- Empiricism - observation and experiment are the deciding factors
- Progress - it is possible and desirable to learn new things
Scientific inquiry didn't revive for some centuries, but it was restarted in Western and Central Europe nearly a millennium ago with the rediscovery of the works of the likes of Aristotle. But the theologians ended up calling him "the" philosopher, making him into some Church Father, a much-appreciated early theologian, despite his great departures from a lot of their theology. A few centuries later, some people went further into full-scale modern science, and they were up against Aristotle-thumpers as well as Bible-thumpers.
I'd have to collect my thoughts before I discuss our current difficulties.
lpetrich
Contributor
As to why it was so difficult to come up with theoretical science, that may be how we tend to think. There is a theory about our evolution called the "social brain" hypothesis, that our large brains may be for keeping track of many social relationships. There is a sort of saturation number called "Dunbar's number" for how many relationships we can track of. It is about 150, and comparable numbers for apes and monkeys are smaller.
That means that one has to be mentally atypical to be proficient in the sort of reasoning necessary for theoretical science.
Biologist Robert Sapolsky has a theory about schizophrenia that I called the schizotypical-shaman theory, that it's good for some of us to be schizotypal, though RS does not seem to say what such people might be able to do that is helpful for people other than for themselves. My thought about this is acquiring certain sorts of expertise, but RS doesn't seem to say that.
That theory may also work for Asperger's syndrome: high-functioning autism.
That means that one has to be mentally atypical to be proficient in the sort of reasoning necessary for theoretical science.
Biologist Robert Sapolsky has a theory about schizophrenia that I called the schizotypical-shaman theory, that it's good for some of us to be schizotypal, though RS does not seem to say what such people might be able to do that is helpful for people other than for themselves. My thought about this is acquiring certain sorts of expertise, but RS doesn't seem to say that.
That theory may also work for Asperger's syndrome: high-functioning autism.
Elixir
Made in America
I doubt that any will EVER go intergalactic AND be detected and identified by any “alien intelligence”.
Contact me for an apology if it happens in the next 10 billion years.
steve_bank
Diabetic retinopathy and poor eyesight. Typos ...
Human Factors, can humans mentally take it without melting down.
pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
Then the Biosphpere experiment, an isolated self sustaining environment in a dome with a crew.
Oxygen dropped and CO2 rose due to unaccounted factors , plus I remember a crew soical breakdown. I think unaccounted for soil bacteria had something to do with it.
en.wikipedia.org
We are not built for long term isolation and restricted so0cial interaction.
Musk says he wants to colonize Mars. I doubt it would work.
As to seeding, our biosphere evolved over time. The Biosphere experiment tried to create a self sustaining system by design and it failed.
Transient gray matter decline during antarctic isolation: Roles of sleep, exercise, and cognition - PMC
Astronauts face significant stress in space, and understanding its neurobiological basis is key to assessing risk and resilience. Analogue environments, like the Antarctic Concordia Station, replicate isolated, confined, and extreme (ICE) ...
pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
Then the Biosphpere experiment, an isolated self sustaining environment in a dome with a crew.
Oxygen dropped and CO2 rose due to unaccounted factors , plus I remember a crew soical breakdown. I think unaccounted for soil bacteria had something to do with it.
Biosphere 2 - Wikipedia
We are not built for long term isolation and restricted so0cial interaction.
Musk says he wants to colonize Mars. I doubt it would work.
As to seeding, our biosphere evolved over time. The Biosphere experiment tried to create a self sustaining system by design and it failed.
Swammerdami
Squadron Leader
Transfer the momentum to other objects using magnetic force.
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On the topic of copying a human brain exactly for "teleportation", this might be quite difficult. Unlike duplicating a Flash memory cell, where either 100 electrons or 200 electrons encode '+1' and become indistinguishable after detection and amplification, the brain is analog and would be a challenge to copy exactly. Human brain contains many billions of neurons, many trillions of synapses (and over 100 distinct neurotransmitters have been identified). Roger Penrose thinks tubulins may play a role in brain function: there are several quintillions of those in one brain. (That's Quintillion with a Q.) Can this information be read out non-destructively?
You'll get holes in the sail but so long as they're designed properly that won't matter.
That's for a K2, not for us.
Shadowy Man
Contributor
Not sure you can say that because, unlike the situation with the sand and the Diamond, we do not have sufficient information about the underlying probability distribution of interstellar spacecraft to make a quantitative assessment of odds.
Figure that we are normal. The time it will take on some other planet will be within a factor of 10 of what we saw here. Anything that happened in tens of millions of years is probably inevitable, anything that happened in gigayears is questionable.
There aren't very many points in the past that were slow enough to be likely filters. Either we were extremely lucky in the past (which certainly could be--we got in just under the wire, even 10% longer on something like multi-cellular life and we wouldn't be here) or the filter is in the future.
Elixir
Made in America
Yeah yeah … the “odds” over the next billion years are effectively zero in either case. Diamonds are not known to occur in Miami’s beach sands whatsoever, but that doesn’t mean it couldn’t happen. After all, Namibian beach sands can yield up to several carats of diamonds per ton of sand.
Miami is a long way from Namibia, and earth is a longer way from any extraterrestrials manufacturing interstellar spacecraft.
Jarhyn
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Andromeda, a whole other galaxy, will be flying through before then.
Galaxies themselves are "intergalactic".
The question is whether we can "tag" an interstellar rock like this one on its way through with something that can soak up enough energy somewhere along its pathway to activate and hijack it, ride that out of the star's gravity well, and then when in a relatively gravitationally neutral environment, select a nearby destination somewhere in the cone of deflection given the previously collected energy, and then give the rock a bit of a kick, and doing some math/observation on the way to determine fine tuning on trajectory to get info, and maybe make a gravity acceleration or get more energy from the star.
Then when you pass through, you drop some absolutely TINY stuff off at strategic points to get a beach-head and in maybe a thousand years or more, repeat the process.
Repeat this as many targets from Andromeda pass through.
Life here took 4 billion years.
Even if propagation events happen only one every thousand years or so, a billion is a million times of that happening. In just one billion years, assuming anything survives The Tech Singularity and assuming a one in a million chance of detecting life in a system, that gives a pretty good odds of it happening after the first billion.
My expectation is that we will discover that life has a very similar mode of operation in this way because there just aren't many better options for spreading from a solar system: it's easier to hitch-hike.
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Elixir
Made in America
On whose dime?
Jarhyn
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Seriously? That's like asking "reproduce and spread on whose dime?"
Its do that or perish, over time.
By the time humanity is able to do that, we will be mostly "digital hybrids", assuming we survive at all. We will be existing at legrange points as pure computer hardware constructions. What else will there be to do but dick around in virtual worlds built as the encouragement for better simulation technologies, and do complex bio-engineering to accomplish spreading that way of life to new solar systems?
I can imagine over tens of thousands of years here, we will do much stranger and grander things, should we survive.
We exist at what may be the earliest possible time for life such as us to exist.
I find it ironic that for all the oldness of our universe disproves the Bible as perfect and inerrant, the universe IS rather young, and we have lots of time and as much "open sky" as we could possibly have hoped for.
bilby
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You may have eternity, but from the perspective of Fermi's "paradaox", nobody has had eternity. The universe is less than 14 billion years old.
bilby
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You will also get holes in the craft. Will they also not matter?
Or are you going with my earlier recommendation of shielding built from handwavium?