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3I/ATLAS: Probably NOT an alien interstellar probe

Shadowy Man said:
Elixir said:
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.
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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.
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I think it's a safe assumption that rocks greatly outnumber spacecraft in interstellar space, even if our best guess at the number of spacecraft is many orders of magnitude lower than the actual number.
 
Jarhyn said:
We exist at what may be the earliest possible time for life such as us to exist.
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Well, that's a glass 2/3 full kind of view, vs the glass being 1/3 empty, which blows my mind.
What have we been doing for the last 13 billion years? Sitting around not existing, waiting for some panspermia-bent mega-civilization to seed the area?
No need IMO - it's just the environs that change; species tend not to last billions or even millions of years, but I figure that anywhere in the universe that is not totally inimical to life, there is already life and it is evolving. Our sun is a third generation star, and the chances that the human species will be the one to survive its demise, is charming but silly. Our atoms will mostly scatter into a cloud of gas or be torn apart by black holes, some to re-form into fourth generation stars which may have planets that evolve intelligent life forms that make plans to survive to inhabit the fifth generation solar system ...
I'm really not going to miss those atoms of my body, if any, that get sucked into black holes. Other than that, I'LL BE BACK! It's just going to take a few.
 
bilby said:
Jarhyn said:
DBT said:
Still far too slow for practical interstellar travel. Thousands of years of travel time between stars would be playing an incredibly long game.....
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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?
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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.
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As I said, we're really early. It takes some time to get the ingredients for life all together.
 
Elixir said:
Jarhyn said:
We exist at what may be the earliest possible time for life such as us to exist.
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Well, that's a glass 2/3 full kind of view, vs the glass being 1/3 empty, which blows my mind.
What have we been doing for the last 13 billion years? Sitting around not existing, waiting for some panspermia-bent mega-civilization to seed the area?
No need IMO - it's just the environs that change; species tend not to last billions or even millions of years, but I figure that anywhere in the universe that is not totally inimical to life, there is already life and it is evolving. Our sun is a third generation star, and the chances that the human species will be the one to survive its demise, is charming but silly. Our atoms will mostly scatter into a cloud of gas or be torn apart by black holes, some to re-form into fourth generation stars which may have planets that evolve intelligent life forms that make plans to survive to inhabit the fifth generation solar system ...
I'm really not going to miss those atoms of my body, if any, that get sucked into black holes. Other than that, I'LL BE BACK! It's just going to take a few.
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We spent the time trying to become the thing ourselves.

Honestly, I really hope it isn't, but even if it is, we have likely thousands of years to punt whatever it is out of wherever it's trying to grow, and we have an insane home field advantage.
 
Jarhyn said:
As I said, we're really early. It takes some time to get the ingredients for life all together.
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13 billion years? I doubt it.
Jarhyn said:
Honestly, I really hope it isn't, but even if it is, we have likely thousands of years to punt whatever it is out of wherever it's trying to grow, and we have an insane home field advantage.
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Thousands of years ain't shit. We've only been a "civilized" species for a few tens of thousands of years that we know of, and only technological (that we know of) in the modern sense, for a few hundred. The long term viability of a highly tech-dependent civilization that is stupid enough to put a Donald Trump in charge of their affairs, is highly suspect IMO.
 
Thousands of years ain't shit. are not fecal matter.

If we are to be civilized about it.

I look at it in terms of 50 year end to end life spans.

Since 2000 years ago it has only been 40 end to end life spans. 40 people back to Jesus and Rome.

We are still in the same geopolitical economic religious conflicts as 2000 years ago.
 
steve_bank said:
Thousands of years ain't shit. are not fecal matter.

If we are to be civilized about it.

I look at it in terms of 50 year end to end life spans.

Since 2000 years ago it has only been 40 end to end life spans. 40 people back to Jesus and Rome.

We are still in the same geopolitical economic religious conflicts as 2000 years ago.
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Generation spans are only 20 years; people don't live end-to-end, their timeframes overlap and are highly variable.
We have yet to re-attain the level of "civilization" that is implied by the remains of the Gobekli-Tepe culture, in the informed opinions of some of the hands on researchers of that culture.
Fast forward 20,000 years, or a thousand generations later, we have AI, nukes and robots on Mars but a crude, backward culture of authoritarianism, tribalism and violence. Not much reason to hope for lofty goals to be met.
 
Elixir said:
steve_bank said:
Thousands of years ain't shit. are not fecal matter.

If we are to be civilized about it.

I look at it in terms of 50 year end to end life spans.

Since 2000 years ago it has only been 40 end to end life spans. 40 people back to Jesus and Rome.

We are still in the same geopolitical economic religious conflicts as 2000 years ago.
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Generation spans are only 20 years; people don't live end-to-end, their timeframes overlap and are highly variable.
We have yet to re-attain the level of "civilization" that is implied by the remains of the Gobekli-Tepe culture, in the informed opinions of some of the hands on researchers of that culture.
Fast forward 20,000 years, or a thousand generations later, we have AI, nukes and robots on Mars but a crude, backward culture of authoritarianism, tribalism and violence. Not much reason to hope for lofty goals to be met.
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We have no idea what that culture was actually like.

As I like to put it we are advanced screeching feces flinging chips with weapons of ass destruction,.

Were there peaceful groups? Probably. They wulod have lost to aggressive groups.

A derail into history.

The point is from the first recorded history human civilization behavior has been constant.

The idea that we will in then future become more of an ideal of rational wise behavior is not supped by history and current events,

Unless we find new science we are not leaving the solar system. I think colonizing Mars is a pipe dream. Imagine a million humans in a limited environment on Mars with no way to blow off steam.
 
steve_bank said:
We have no idea what that culture was actually like.
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Not true. They left many clues from which we can infer things - some more reliably than others, but it is not a total mystery.
steve_bank said:
As I like to put it we are advanced screeching feces flinging chips with weapons of ass destruction,.
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Zackly. Not sure about the "advanced" part though.
steve_bank said:
The idea that we will in then future become more of an ideal of rational wise behavior is not supped by history and current events
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And the remains of stone age civilizations makes clear that it's not in the cards for human to become more ... human. We may be becoming less so.
steve_bank said:
Unless we find new science we are not leaving the solar system.
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We're probably capable or can become capable of utilizing some of the rest of the solar system to extend our species survival a bit, but that's about it. When the going gets tough, humans attack each other. It has ever been so.
 
It doesn't look hopeful that we'll ever get over that sh*t. Self interest, division and conflict looks to be our business as usual.
 
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