UFOs are scouting our nuclear weapons stockpile

Scientists turn individual genes on and off. But creating an entirely new organ? Maybe if they steal it from another species.

Oh! Totally agree, no argument from me there.

I’m with Scott123 here, mostly. The most serious problems, and the ones that in my opinion are not going to be more solvable in the future, are social, cultural, and psychological. The engineering I’m willing to concede might be doable–I’m not an engineer, though I did spend a night at a Holiday Inn Express once, if that counts. I do know something about human beings in groups and how they act and react, and really, the whole generation ship/ark/season ticket on a one-way ride thing seems the most out-there idea of them all. Humans, like Homie, don’t play dat. Not now, and I’m pretty sure not later, either. By the time we contort ourselves into coming up with a way it might happen, we might as well just wave our hands and say “hyperdrive!” or something.

We evolved with brains and nervous systems focused almost exclusively on what is right in front of us, spatially and temporally. While this may change, and there is some evidence that it is changing, it changes slooooowly, and whether it could ever change to encompass galactic or even solar-system level travel and experience is somewhat questionable in my mind. Sure, if one day we woke up and all the Star Trek and Star Wars tech was right there in front of us, and we could travel to Alpha Centauri in a couple of days, yeah, the stars might be our destination (or if, like Foyle, we could just pop there). But barring that, I’m on the side of no sirree bob.

We’re not going faster than light; Einstein’s relativity is being used right now to coordinate positioning of satellites above the Earth: he was right.

It’s an interesting thought experiment to imagine travelling very near the speed of light, though, because you could theoretically reach anywhere in our galaxy in no time at all while the rest of the universe aged normally. Space would also distend in all sorts of funky ways.

t’ = t/(sqrt(1-(v^2)/(c^2))) and all that.

This is a particularly fascinating topic to me because, since high school, it’s become less about what we as a species can and cannot do and more about what the meaning of spacetime is.

Maybe there will be some sort of quantum discovery which breaks relativity, but things have been looking pretty good for the past 100 years or so w.r.t. special and general relativity (yes I am aware of the EPR paradox and Bell’s theorem).

I think its worth noting that relativity so far works at the stellar scale almost perfectly. It fails at the fundamental scale where Quantum theory works, again almost perfectly.

But they dont work at each others scales.

We have no universal theory which works at all scales and a lot of observational evidence that something is very wrong, galaxies should should not rotate the way we observe they do for example.

Its got to the point where the best model humanity has of the universe - says “we do not know what is causing 90% of the gravity like effects we see.” Thats not what I would call solved in anyway.

I am more than happy to keep an open mind about what is and is not possible, I just think its too soon to make the call.

This is what has always fascinated me about traveling near the speed of light. I’d kind of Ike to take off and zoom around for a bit then come back to Earth circa 400 years from now.

I very much agree. These kinds of questions hold a burning fascination with me; I was all set to pursue physics as a career before taking a left hand turn into geophysical science my third undergraduate year.

Now that it’s raining exoplanets I’m all but pulling my hair and stamping my feet as I find myself a business person of all things. It’s a necessity but not where my passion is.

I’ve thought of attempting to return to academia and going for a PhD but it seems so… risky and… uncertain? Maybe it’s enough just to smile at each new discovery as it arrives.

When I was in college two of my teachers were going for their MA on the way to PhDs. They were always terminally exhausted.

I had a friend who was a PhD in Astrophysics. I was a groupie for him and his other astronomy academics we went camping to conferences etc. I loved listening to them speak and learning.

Then one day he told me how much he earned and I told him how much I did. His income was at the time just above minimum wage. My compensation was roughly six times more than him. Now he also got university housing, but still. It was eye opening.

It shows in your games.

Thank you! Err I hope it was meant positively :)

Newtonian mechanics is currently used successfully for many, many more things, yet it turned out to be an oversimplification of reality.

But to believe that they can’t means you also believe that human-level artificial intelligence is impossible for us to create, since if it was possible, then it would by definition be capable of building itself.

Dennis E. Taylor’s Singularity Trap has an interesting take on this (mild spoiler): the 3 great filters. Either we destroy the planet, killing ourselves, we upload our minds into machines, ending biological life, or we reach the singularity and the machines kill us. Or we get interrupted before we reach one of those filters by intelligent machines who kill us all or by uploaded creatures who either kill us or recruit us into uploading.

Given how far back in time these observations look, that doesn’t seem that crazy to me. Sol isn’t that old as far as stars go, but there’s plenty of reason to suspect that you need a few generations of star formation and heavy-element seeding from super novas before you can have a good cradle planet, so it’s not crazy to believe that life is common, but not until recently.

Of course!

As it happens I do think human like intelligence in machines or computing devices is next to impossible. But my objections come more from the programming side of things. I put human-level artificial AI at about an equivalent level of probability as life being able to travel faster than light. But yeah its a good point. So far the universe is saying “nope” but we haven’t been looking long.

Thats a good point we are looking back to the early universe for many of those galaxies.

Although there is a view that there was an early golden age where life could have thrived very early on in the life of the universe, when the cmb and space itself was room temperature!

Wow, I hadn’t even considered that! Thanks for the link. A cool idea, but I don’t think it applies to the life we see on Earth. I mean, you need phosphorous for one thing, and I doubt much of that was created in the Big Bang. That said, if there were stars forming all very near one another and they were shining on balls of water with carbon and nitrogen floating around in them, then maybe? Still, our experience suggests you also need stuff like iron and copper and silicon to make civilization, and they took a while to be created.

Yeah I was surprised too! But yeah you are right we need those heavier elements in decent abundance. Still I think the fact we keep discovering things like this gives me hope we are missing something pretty big here. Either way exciting! :)

I believe - completely speculatively - that our intelligence comes from toolmaking. Like, 90% of what makes humans humans is a brain that evolved to make tools.

If you want an AI that’s conscious, it needs to be a toolmaking consciousness.

Definitely, weed is basically legal now.

Well then.

Tool making not tool using! That’s the transition.

Because you - that is, an animal - may well evolve the instinctive ability to use objects around the environment as tools.

But what tool making implies is the ability to conceive of, and i hate to use this phrase because i think it gets used far too often and implies too much - platonic ideals. That is, you come up with the “idea” of an axe, and then go make one.

You have a brain capable of imagining things that don’t exist until you make them. That’s got to be the big moment between humans and everything else. If you look around the world today it’s literally a world built by tool making monkeys, and virtually everything around you is literally starts in the imagination and works outward, and as tool making monkeys we love making things.

At some point we started getting selected (evolutionarily speaking) for tool making as fitness.