Matt O'Dowd from the web series PBS Space Time gives a 30 minute presentation on the possibility of escaping the Long, Slow Decline and building a galactic civilisation. The problems facing us are lack of drive, the energy cliff, and most importantly the ability to communicate.
His conclusion? If the speed of light is the absolute limit to communication then it should only be possible to sustain a civilisation over a few hundred light years before distances become too great and fragmentation occurs. The galaxy may be full of civilisation, but they are too far spread out to effectively communicate with one another.
Showing posts with label NASA. Show all posts
Showing posts with label NASA. Show all posts
Friday, June 23, 2017
Sunday, June 11, 2017
The Long, Slow Decline: The Kessler Syndrome
The Kessler Syndrome, proposed by Donald Kessler in 1978, is a runaway destruction of satellites in orbit by space debris. As each satellite is destroyed it produces more debris that destroys more satellites until space becomes inaccessible from the Earth because the planet will be surrounded by an impenetrable barrier of shrapnel for decades. The more rockets that are sent up, and the more decommissioned satellites that remain in orbit, creates an increasing probability for a cascading failure of low earth orbit. Currently there are no extant methods of reducing the amount of garbage in space. This represents yet another technological hurdle that humanity will need to solve in order to avoid the decline and pursue a spacefaring future.
Monday, September 28, 2015
Liquid Water on Mars
NASA announced earlier today that liquid water was discovered on Mars. For decades there has been speculation that there was water some indeterminate time in the past and that it was all gone. People speculated that other factors were at play with what appeared to be (and in fact are) features that change seasonally (remember, Mars has seasons because of its tilted axis just like the Earth does). Well, now there's no hedging bets, there absolutely is liquid water on Mars.
Hydrated salts were discovered in the Hale crater in dark streaks that change with the seasons. In the Martian Summer the ice melts and forms salt water streams that refreeze in the Winter. The high salinity keeps the water liquid at temperatures well below its freezing point. The minerals in the water are mostly magnesium perchlorate, magnesium chlorate, and sodium perchlorate.
Water, so far as we know, is a necessary condition for life, and even though that water contains strong oxidisers, who knows, there may be life on Mars. Those microscopic fossils might just be the tip of the iceberg.
Hydrated salts were discovered in the Hale crater in dark streaks that change with the seasons. In the Martian Summer the ice melts and forms salt water streams that refreeze in the Winter. The high salinity keeps the water liquid at temperatures well below its freezing point. The minerals in the water are mostly magnesium perchlorate, magnesium chlorate, and sodium perchlorate.
Water, so far as we know, is a necessary condition for life, and even though that water contains strong oxidisers, who knows, there may be life on Mars. Those microscopic fossils might just be the tip of the iceberg.
Saturday, November 2, 2013
Dreams of Foreign Suns
Walking around yesterday I thought about my second great love (my first being freedom), and one of the three original goals I set for my life: space travel. I got to thinking about all those books I loved reading and how the future is almost certainly not going to be like that. The future will not be like The Stars My Destination, Harvest the Fire, Starship Troopers, or The Zero Stone. The future will not be like Star Trek (except maybe Deep Space 9 which was boring and grim and I never watched more than a few episodes) or Firefly.
It has to do with a phenomenon called Dunbar's Number, and a disturbing trend seen with the rapid advancement in technology and the social order.
John Stringfellow in 1848 built a steam-powered flying machine that was the absolute apogee of steam technology. While it did fly it was not powerful enough to carry a person. On 17 December 1903 the Wright brothers made what is recognised as the first piloted powered flight in a heavier-than-air vehicle.
NASA became operational 1 October 1958. 20 February 1962, a little over three years later, John Glenn got into orbit. 12 September 1966, eight years later, Gemini 11 completed the farthest ever orbit of the earth, never to be exceeded, and successfully created artificial gravity with the Agena Target Vehicle. 20 July 1969, ten and a half years later, Apollo 11 lands on the Moon for the first time. Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin finally demonstrated that that light in the sky is a real place, and people can go there. 11 December 1972, Apollo 17 spent the most time on the Moon. Eugene Cernan and Harrison Schmitt spent three days there, and when they left they became the last men ever to land on another celestial body, and the last to leave low Earth orbit.
The past 41 years have been spent doing high school science experiments at 200 km above sea level (and the Russians tried to see if they could kill people by keeping Valeri Polyakov in space for over 400 days. I think he was crippled for about a year after he returned).
Also in 1969 plans were drawn up for Big Gemini, which was superior to the Space Shuttle in every way, but they were scrapped. In 1972 Pioneer 10 was launched. Along with Pioneer 11, and later Voyager 1 and 2 - launched in 1977 - they demonstrated the possibility of sending unmanned spacecraft outside the solar system (as of August 2012 Voyager 1 became the first, and so far only, manmade object to leave the solar system).
NASA had plans for a Mars mission set for 1986 with a colossal football field sized NERVA nuclear rocket, that was successfully tested on the ground (they were buried underground with just the tail spouting highly radioactive jets into the air. At least two men died and had to be buried in salt mines in multi-tonne lead coffins.). The mars mission was scrapped when Congress decided killing Vietnamese people was a better allocation of the $10 billion necessary to build and launch the full size NERVA rocket. There were plans to send manned missions to the moons of Jupiter by the 1990s and Proxima Centauri by the early 2000s using nuclear rockets that were built and successfully tested in the 1960s and 70s. These too were scrapped.
The technology to go to the stars existed 40 years ago and has never been used for political reasons. Yesterday I had the feeling that, like freedom, once the initiative for space travel is lost it can never be gotten back. We will probably never land escape Earth orbit again. (Although the Chinese have plans for a colony on the Moon, let's face it, China is over. The Chinese economy is a house of cards built in mid-air waiting for a stiff breeze and some common sense to knock it over. Without the hundreds of billions in government spending, building ghost cities in the middle of nowhere, the Chinese economy will collapse and then the hundred million surplus men will become the largest demonstration of pure anarchy in history, as, like the man who castrated himself this past week, they have nothing else to live for. It is impossible to build a civilisation on population control and sex-selective abortion that produces 9 males for every 1 female. Sure, the military may crack some skulls and force its way to the Moon, like pretty much everything the Soviets ever did, but the Chinese dreams of empire and space travel are made of gossamer and the dreams of children.)
But there's something bigger than that. A new direction society has taken that threatens the very idea of space travel. As I said earlier:
There is the interesting side question of modern Western society, indeed any extremely affluent society, as to whether it does, in fact, represent a diseased PBC and not merely an alien one. All extremely affluent societies throughout history have been plagued by extreme narcissism and apathy, which is displayed in declining fertility rate. Some societies, such as Japan, are so affluent that they are literally on the fast track to extinction because they simply stop breeding. A PBC that cannot[3] produce children above replacement rate (2.1 births/woman) has no survival value and would, by the above criterion, represent a disease. After the inevitable collapse whatever society that arises to fill the void would be made of individuals who possess viable PBCs. As I mentioned in "Affluence and Apathy", there is a healthy form of affluence, though it has never seemed common enough to prevent an entire affluent society from collapsing. It would be possible for healthy affluent to form a viable society, and so I would classify healthy affluent as alien, though it has never happened before and probably never will.
The United States is the most affluent society ever. One third of the population is obese, including poor people. And along with affluence comes extreme narcissism and apathy, but there is something more. Something that was engineered by the power elite during the Apollo program. The creation of the welfare state coincided with a fundamental shift in the perception of sex in society. Both happened together because the government was setting itself up to become the new parent. No-fault divorce, ever expanding welfare programs, and the shift away from sex for procreation to sex for fun changed the way people viewed their place in society (to be sure, people had sex for fun since the beginning, but men always wanted sons as a matter of pride and women always wanted men around to provide for their children, and in the 1970s there was a shift away from that to "we'll hold off having kids until we're 40, if ever, and just enjoy our permanent adolescence now!"). Now, with the redefinition of marriage away from providing for children to some vague conception of love/lust, the coup d'état is now complete.
The US Department of Education was created in 1979. Before that all schools were run locally, with education tailored to the needs of individual students. Since there has been a shift in a one-size-fits-all education policy, with "no child left behind." The DoE is a gigantic indoctrination program, and they're not even covert about it. Common Core is demonstrably indoctrination. School officials in Memphis provide breakfast, lunch, snack, and dinner to kids, and admit that if they had rooms for beds the kids would sleep there permanently. The government sees the only role of parents to be breeding. Once the children are born, they belong to the state.
How did this all begin? Urbanisation. Cities are a statist's best friend. It has to do with a fundamental limitation of the human brain. The human brain seems to be able to hold detailed interpersonal information on at most 150-200 people. There appears to be a correlation between the size of the neocortex of primates and the maximum number of individuals a primate can keep track of and maintain social relationships with. This is Dunbar's number. This is what kept population size limited during almost all of prehistory. (If humans have been around at least 200,000 years, and writing was invented only 5,000 years before present, then prehistory makes up 97.5% of humanity's entire time on the Earth. The earliest cities appear 12,000 years before present, 7,000 years before the start of written history, so cities make up 3.59% of the duration of prehistory. 94% of the time humans have been here was before the first city was built.)
When people live in small communities people care about one another because people can keep track of everyone living in the community. In a city of hundreds of thousands or millions of people this is impossible. People stop caring about the other denizens of the city, and the social structures that keeps a community together never form. The vacuum left over by the lack of a stable community is filled by the government. Private charity gives way to the welfare state, and education becomes indoctrination.
Technology isn't helping either. In 1980 the average person had 3 close friends. In 2011 the average person had 0 close friends. The advent of smart phones, social media, and people taking pictures of their sandwiches and posting them online has served to destroy human interpersonal communication faster than urbanisation ever could. People, for the most part, and especially the Millennials (the first generation to grow up totally under government indoctrination), are not connected to anyone anymore except the government.
Human sociality is necessary for space travel. Big giant space projects like the colonisation of planets require thousands of people working together, billions of dollars, and the support of entire societies. People stopped caring about space travel, and space programs died in the 1970s. Without all three elements of properly sociable, funded, and motivated people, then landing on Mars or going to the stars is impossible. We appear to have topped out: humans have developed to a certain point, but there is a definite limit to that development, and we're right about there.
Humans appear doomed to low Earth orbit. The future in space I dreamed of as a child seems like it may have evapourated along with the sex and welfare revolutions.
It has to do with a phenomenon called Dunbar's Number, and a disturbing trend seen with the rapid advancement in technology and the social order.
John Stringfellow in 1848 built a steam-powered flying machine that was the absolute apogee of steam technology. While it did fly it was not powerful enough to carry a person. On 17 December 1903 the Wright brothers made what is recognised as the first piloted powered flight in a heavier-than-air vehicle.
NASA became operational 1 October 1958. 20 February 1962, a little over three years later, John Glenn got into orbit. 12 September 1966, eight years later, Gemini 11 completed the farthest ever orbit of the earth, never to be exceeded, and successfully created artificial gravity with the Agena Target Vehicle. 20 July 1969, ten and a half years later, Apollo 11 lands on the Moon for the first time. Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin finally demonstrated that that light in the sky is a real place, and people can go there. 11 December 1972, Apollo 17 spent the most time on the Moon. Eugene Cernan and Harrison Schmitt spent three days there, and when they left they became the last men ever to land on another celestial body, and the last to leave low Earth orbit.
The past 41 years have been spent doing high school science experiments at 200 km above sea level (and the Russians tried to see if they could kill people by keeping Valeri Polyakov in space for over 400 days. I think he was crippled for about a year after he returned).
Also in 1969 plans were drawn up for Big Gemini, which was superior to the Space Shuttle in every way, but they were scrapped. In 1972 Pioneer 10 was launched. Along with Pioneer 11, and later Voyager 1 and 2 - launched in 1977 - they demonstrated the possibility of sending unmanned spacecraft outside the solar system (as of August 2012 Voyager 1 became the first, and so far only, manmade object to leave the solar system).
NASA had plans for a Mars mission set for 1986 with a colossal football field sized NERVA nuclear rocket, that was successfully tested on the ground (they were buried underground with just the tail spouting highly radioactive jets into the air. At least two men died and had to be buried in salt mines in multi-tonne lead coffins.). The mars mission was scrapped when Congress decided killing Vietnamese people was a better allocation of the $10 billion necessary to build and launch the full size NERVA rocket. There were plans to send manned missions to the moons of Jupiter by the 1990s and Proxima Centauri by the early 2000s using nuclear rockets that were built and successfully tested in the 1960s and 70s. These too were scrapped.
The technology to go to the stars existed 40 years ago and has never been used for political reasons. Yesterday I had the feeling that, like freedom, once the initiative for space travel is lost it can never be gotten back. We will probably never land escape Earth orbit again. (Although the Chinese have plans for a colony on the Moon, let's face it, China is over. The Chinese economy is a house of cards built in mid-air waiting for a stiff breeze and some common sense to knock it over. Without the hundreds of billions in government spending, building ghost cities in the middle of nowhere, the Chinese economy will collapse and then the hundred million surplus men will become the largest demonstration of pure anarchy in history, as, like the man who castrated himself this past week, they have nothing else to live for. It is impossible to build a civilisation on population control and sex-selective abortion that produces 9 males for every 1 female. Sure, the military may crack some skulls and force its way to the Moon, like pretty much everything the Soviets ever did, but the Chinese dreams of empire and space travel are made of gossamer and the dreams of children.)
But there's something bigger than that. A new direction society has taken that threatens the very idea of space travel. As I said earlier:
There is the interesting side question of modern Western society, indeed any extremely affluent society, as to whether it does, in fact, represent a diseased PBC and not merely an alien one. All extremely affluent societies throughout history have been plagued by extreme narcissism and apathy, which is displayed in declining fertility rate. Some societies, such as Japan, are so affluent that they are literally on the fast track to extinction because they simply stop breeding. A PBC that cannot[3] produce children above replacement rate (2.1 births/woman) has no survival value and would, by the above criterion, represent a disease. After the inevitable collapse whatever society that arises to fill the void would be made of individuals who possess viable PBCs. As I mentioned in "Affluence and Apathy", there is a healthy form of affluence, though it has never seemed common enough to prevent an entire affluent society from collapsing. It would be possible for healthy affluent to form a viable society, and so I would classify healthy affluent as alien, though it has never happened before and probably never will.
The United States is the most affluent society ever. One third of the population is obese, including poor people. And along with affluence comes extreme narcissism and apathy, but there is something more. Something that was engineered by the power elite during the Apollo program. The creation of the welfare state coincided with a fundamental shift in the perception of sex in society. Both happened together because the government was setting itself up to become the new parent. No-fault divorce, ever expanding welfare programs, and the shift away from sex for procreation to sex for fun changed the way people viewed their place in society (to be sure, people had sex for fun since the beginning, but men always wanted sons as a matter of pride and women always wanted men around to provide for their children, and in the 1970s there was a shift away from that to "we'll hold off having kids until we're 40, if ever, and just enjoy our permanent adolescence now!"). Now, with the redefinition of marriage away from providing for children to some vague conception of love/lust, the coup d'état is now complete.
The US Department of Education was created in 1979. Before that all schools were run locally, with education tailored to the needs of individual students. Since there has been a shift in a one-size-fits-all education policy, with "no child left behind." The DoE is a gigantic indoctrination program, and they're not even covert about it. Common Core is demonstrably indoctrination. School officials in Memphis provide breakfast, lunch, snack, and dinner to kids, and admit that if they had rooms for beds the kids would sleep there permanently. The government sees the only role of parents to be breeding. Once the children are born, they belong to the state.
How did this all begin? Urbanisation. Cities are a statist's best friend. It has to do with a fundamental limitation of the human brain. The human brain seems to be able to hold detailed interpersonal information on at most 150-200 people. There appears to be a correlation between the size of the neocortex of primates and the maximum number of individuals a primate can keep track of and maintain social relationships with. This is Dunbar's number. This is what kept population size limited during almost all of prehistory. (If humans have been around at least 200,000 years, and writing was invented only 5,000 years before present, then prehistory makes up 97.5% of humanity's entire time on the Earth. The earliest cities appear 12,000 years before present, 7,000 years before the start of written history, so cities make up 3.59% of the duration of prehistory. 94% of the time humans have been here was before the first city was built.)
When people live in small communities people care about one another because people can keep track of everyone living in the community. In a city of hundreds of thousands or millions of people this is impossible. People stop caring about the other denizens of the city, and the social structures that keeps a community together never form. The vacuum left over by the lack of a stable community is filled by the government. Private charity gives way to the welfare state, and education becomes indoctrination.
Technology isn't helping either. In 1980 the average person had 3 close friends. In 2011 the average person had 0 close friends. The advent of smart phones, social media, and people taking pictures of their sandwiches and posting them online has served to destroy human interpersonal communication faster than urbanisation ever could. People, for the most part, and especially the Millennials (the first generation to grow up totally under government indoctrination), are not connected to anyone anymore except the government.
Human sociality is necessary for space travel. Big giant space projects like the colonisation of planets require thousands of people working together, billions of dollars, and the support of entire societies. People stopped caring about space travel, and space programs died in the 1970s. Without all three elements of properly sociable, funded, and motivated people, then landing on Mars or going to the stars is impossible. We appear to have topped out: humans have developed to a certain point, but there is a definite limit to that development, and we're right about there.
Humans appear doomed to low Earth orbit. The future in space I dreamed of as a child seems like it may have evapourated along with the sex and welfare revolutions.
Monday, January 21, 2013
Moonshot
Here is a wonderful, brilliant, video explaining why it was not technically possible for NASA, or anyone, to fake the moon landing in 1969.
Sunday, August 26, 2012
Neil Armstrong In Memoriam
Neil Armstrong, Korean War veteran, test pilot, first man to walk on the Moon, has died from complications due to heart surgery. He was 82.
As the first of only twelve men to step foot on the Moon, Armstrong is a member of the most prestigeous group of humans in history. He lived his post-Apollo years semi-retired from public life, rarely granting interviews.
One of our greatest heroes, Neil Armstrong will dearly be missed.
Video of that one small step
CNN Biography of Armstrong
Friday, July 8, 2011
Why Democrats HATE Space Travel
Reflecting on the last shuttle launch I sit in dissapointment at the whole shuttle program. This is it? This is the best we can do? I came across the following article today from UD. Physicist Rob Sheldon explains that Republicans have been very good to NASA and the space program but Democrats HATE it because they can't get past partisan politics. They would rather turn America communist than explore space, advance science, increase national pride, and bolster international cooperation. He says:
Republicans have generally put US Space Policy or Foreign policy above politics, and have funded unpopular endeavors even when begun by previous Democratic presidents, recognizing that it takes 10 years to see a NASA program from start-to-finish, which is longer than the usual presidential double-term.
Democrats, however, believe that there is nothing more important than politics. Everything is short term. The future can be mortgaged. So for example George HW Bush started the Superconducting Super Collider (SSC) to follow on the very successful Fermilab “Tevatron”.
Unfortunately, he built it in Texas, which gave it a partisan air. The very first thing Clinton did, was to cancel the SSC, thereby handing the next 20 years of high-energy physics to the European lab CERN in Geneva.
He continues with a point on the space station. The idea for the space station was started by Reagan as a means to develop technology needed to go to Mars. When Clinton got into office he did his best to axe the program.
But under Clinton, the Space Station was scaled back as far as possible without defaulting on commitments made to the Europeans. This meant that the Russians were brought in to supply the Space Station rather than use US Space Shuttles. So when the commitments to Europe had all been fulfilled, both the Station and the Shuttle were obsolete.
As a boy I wondered why it seemed the greatest days of space exploration were behind us. Why did we have grand visions of going to the Moon by the end of the 60s (which we did) and go on to Mars before 2000 and eventually on to the stars, but now we kept launching those damn shuttles into orbit where the astronauts ate their tubes of mush and powered ice cream and nothing ever got done? And why were our first astronauts the toughest people on the planet like John Glenn and Buzz Aldrin, people you could really look up to (Buzz Aldrin still is my hero and I still want to be like him), and the new astronauts include people you've never heard of and the "astro-nut" who tried to kill someone and didn't want to be bothered with having to use the toilet so she wore a diaper while she did it. The answer is clear: Democrats. Democrats took all the fun out of space. They turned space travel into a vacation for adults who like to wear diapers and eat floating candy at tax payers' expense instead of the most challenging exploration of the universe imaginable.
Capital Bush even wanted to go back to the Moon. He tried for Mars but the socialists wouldn't let him so he settled for the Moon. He started late in his tenure and didn't get enough finished and then Zero took office and killed the Moon mission. Instead of exploring space and promoting world peace, Zero is "humanitarianly" bombing the crap out of Libya (it's not a war, it's "kinetic military action" and that means it's totally not unconstitutional like BOTH Republicans and Democrats in Congress are now saying) and spending the country into oblivion.
Fuck you, Democrats. Fuck you Zero. Fuck you very much.
Republicans have generally put US Space Policy or Foreign policy above politics, and have funded unpopular endeavors even when begun by previous Democratic presidents, recognizing that it takes 10 years to see a NASA program from start-to-finish, which is longer than the usual presidential double-term.
Democrats, however, believe that there is nothing more important than politics. Everything is short term. The future can be mortgaged. So for example George HW Bush started the Superconducting Super Collider (SSC) to follow on the very successful Fermilab “Tevatron”.
Unfortunately, he built it in Texas, which gave it a partisan air. The very first thing Clinton did, was to cancel the SSC, thereby handing the next 20 years of high-energy physics to the European lab CERN in Geneva.
He continues with a point on the space station. The idea for the space station was started by Reagan as a means to develop technology needed to go to Mars. When Clinton got into office he did his best to axe the program.
But under Clinton, the Space Station was scaled back as far as possible without defaulting on commitments made to the Europeans. This meant that the Russians were brought in to supply the Space Station rather than use US Space Shuttles. So when the commitments to Europe had all been fulfilled, both the Station and the Shuttle were obsolete.
As a boy I wondered why it seemed the greatest days of space exploration were behind us. Why did we have grand visions of going to the Moon by the end of the 60s (which we did) and go on to Mars before 2000 and eventually on to the stars, but now we kept launching those damn shuttles into orbit where the astronauts ate their tubes of mush and powered ice cream and nothing ever got done? And why were our first astronauts the toughest people on the planet like John Glenn and Buzz Aldrin, people you could really look up to (Buzz Aldrin still is my hero and I still want to be like him), and the new astronauts include people you've never heard of and the "astro-nut" who tried to kill someone and didn't want to be bothered with having to use the toilet so she wore a diaper while she did it. The answer is clear: Democrats. Democrats took all the fun out of space. They turned space travel into a vacation for adults who like to wear diapers and eat floating candy at tax payers' expense instead of the most challenging exploration of the universe imaginable.
Capital Bush even wanted to go back to the Moon. He tried for Mars but the socialists wouldn't let him so he settled for the Moon. He started late in his tenure and didn't get enough finished and then Zero took office and killed the Moon mission. Instead of exploring space and promoting world peace, Zero is "humanitarianly" bombing the crap out of Libya (it's not a war, it's "kinetic military action" and that means it's totally not unconstitutional like BOTH Republicans and Democrats in Congress are now saying) and spending the country into oblivion.
Fuck you, Democrats. Fuck you Zero. Fuck you very much.
Monday, June 29, 2009
Friday, June 26, 2009
I Might Not Be a Creep for Long!
The posts at UD seem to have culminated with this message from herb:
This seems to be a good end to the discussion.
-Dee
UrbanMysticDee,
“Debunking” is not and has never been part of science. Science doesn’t debunk, magicians and media skeptics debunk. 7% of the UFO sitings in Project Blue Book special report remain unidentified. If instead it were 7% of drugs tested had the potential to cure every form of cancer researchers would be doing everything they could to investigate those 7% farther, not saying “most drugs can’t cure cancer so we shouldn’t even try.”
Nice post. What I find most interesting about UFO’s is that just about everyone seems to have a story. Both my parents have had paranormal/UFO encounters, and I myself had a sighting which I can’t explain about 25 years ago. Whatever the cause, I think it’s clear something is going on, whether it’s aliens or some sort of government coverup.
This seems to be a good end to the discussion.
-Dee
Thursday, June 25, 2009
I'm Still a Creep II
More from UD.
From lamarck:
Urbanmystic,
I agree with you that aliens exist, I think they must have seeded us on this planet, looking at DNA alone. One interesting alien vid is the cell phone alien from mexico. Scientists visited the sight later and found high radiation levels at that spot alone. Another one is the dogon tribe’s astronomy predictions. One more is the race of small and odd looking people in eastern or southeastern asia, can’t remember their name. I’d like to see someone study their DNA, they look like aliens to me. Their caves were found which they formerly lived in and tablets were decoded, actually disc-like objects, which say they crashed on this planet in an emergency and they’ve been stuck here. I also know about the recent crop circles which are much different. If you know more interesting alien evidence please site some.
From JTaylor:
My Response:
-Dee
From lamarck:
Urbanmystic,
I agree with you that aliens exist, I think they must have seeded us on this planet, looking at DNA alone. One interesting alien vid is the cell phone alien from mexico. Scientists visited the sight later and found high radiation levels at that spot alone. Another one is the dogon tribe’s astronomy predictions. One more is the race of small and odd looking people in eastern or southeastern asia, can’t remember their name. I’d like to see someone study their DNA, they look like aliens to me. Their caves were found which they formerly lived in and tablets were decoded, actually disc-like objects, which say they crashed on this planet in an emergency and they’ve been stuck here. I also know about the recent crop circles which are much different. If you know more interesting alien evidence please site some.
From JTaylor:
UrbanMysticDee: “The 1% estimate is a gut feeling that I never said was scientific. I am able to criticize bad science without having to provide an alternate theory. And I never said my feeling was scientific. I extrapolated from what I’ve read and heard from first and second hand sources that there seems to be a number of different extraterrestrial species that have been witnessed and that they are obviously gregarious otherwise encounters wouldn’t have happened in the first place.”
But you do realize that your 1% means that 1 in 100 stars (just in our galaxy) would have to show signs of intelligent life? This is an enormous number. No offence, but I think you need to recheck your gut! Personally I think I would trust Drake’s equation than yours (or mine) gut, because it is based on sound suppositions rather than what I feel. Of course feel free to show how you extrapolated and calculated that number if you think otherwise. But right now your 1% is little more than an assertion and not all that helpful.
And, to date, about 350 exoplanets have been discovered (and I think this is “good” science) - and so far none of them look likely for life. According to your gut, we should have already found ~3-4 intelligent lifeforms. Of course maybe scientists have been unlikely, but according to your gut the galaxy should be absolutely teeming with life, and certainly there is no evidence yet that this is the case.
You assume incorrectly that I accept that extraterrestials exist. I do not find the evidence conclusive and much of it is too anecodtal (or based on hearsay) to be of any value (I would say it is about on a par with the evidence for ghosts). A large number of UFO settings have been debunked so I think it there is good reason to be very skeptical here. As to ‘extraterrestrial species that have been witnessed and are obviously gregarious’ you need to provide more solid evidence for such a statement before it can be considered seriously.
My Response:
lamarck (22)
For UFO evidence please see point four below, esp. the links.
JTaylor (21)
1. Again, I never said my 1% estimate was scientific! I never said it was helpful to anyone in any way! Besides, the Drake equation has seven variables of which we can make reasonable speculations of two; everything beyond that is a complete guess based on nothing. The only difference between my gut and the Drake equation is that my gut doesn’t pretend to be something it’s not - namely science.
2. I agree that our skill in finding other planets is increasing but it’s not like we can zoom in with three meter resolution on the planets surfaces and see anything. There might well be intelligent life existing in some form on those planets or their moons that current technology cannot detect or there might not. Right now looking at the gravitational effects on stars isn’t good enough to make any statements about the orbiting planets other than their potential distance and/or mass.
3. I never assumed you accepted that extraterrestrials exist, I said you didn’t up to the point of my posting deny their existence, that is, you did not openly argue that they do not exist. One is a positive statement and the other is a negative one.
4. “Debunking” is not and has never been part of science. Science doesn’t debunk, magicians and media skeptics debunk. 7% of the UFO sitings in Project Blue Book special report remain unidentified. If instead it were 7% of drugs tested had the potential to cure every form of cancer researchers would be doing everything they could to investigate those 7% farther, not saying “most drugs can’t cure cancer so we shouldn’t even try.”
More solid evidence other than the biggest government coverup in history (if no UFOs are extraterrestrial and they’re not national security concerns why doesn’t any government in the world besides Mexico come out and tell what they are? Why has the USAF come out with four different “official” reports of the Roswell crash, each one stating that the previous “official” reports were false misinformation campaigns?). More solid evidence than thousands of trained witnesses - pilots, retired military personel, police - who have come out with their reports to great personal risk of job loss, public ridicule, etc., who have nothing to gain by their testimony. If you want more evidence than that look into the trace cases. Potential landing sites with unusual chemical or radioactive properties, plants won’t grow in these areas even after decades when the surrounding areas are perfectly fine. Some people have gotten radiation burns from handling debris, sometimes leading to cancer and death. A supposed piece of the Roswell crash debris that has changed hands several times, each of the owners meeting with highly unlikely deaths (extremely rare diseases, improbable “accidents”). The website that was going to air a world-wide press conference revealing test results of chemical analysis was shut down, the server the site was on was stolen the night before, threatening phone calls convinced others not to cancel the conference.
Roswell Debris Videos:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gjQgqZ6eMP4
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q18VaAQneaU
More answers to UFO questions:
http://www.v-j-enterprises.com/sf-ufo-why1.html
-Dee
Wednesday, June 24, 2009
I'm Still a Creep
Sorry bout the video, it'll have to wait as the conversations on UD are heating up! Here is a reply from JTaylor, who is fully in on the Drake camp:
Yes, I agree that Drake’s equation is not “pure science” but it is an interesting exercise, and is based on some well thought out variables (and only two have been suggested as additions in nearly 50 years). And of course the data for at least some of the variables now is much better than it was in 1961. Reality of course is that since it is not yet testable and quite likely never will be, nevertheless it could provide some guidance into potential SETI research.
But UrbanMysticDee thinks it’s conceivable that 1% of the stars in our galaxy could host intelligent life (”which I do not doubt is the case”). That would mean
that there are some 1 billion stars in our galaxy with intelligent life. And if UrbanMysticDee is skeptical of Drake’s equation what is the basis for this 1%? Drake’s equation is not perfect, but is probably the best we have (other than pure guessing).
Yes, it’s true we may be “special”, but that is not the same as being unique or especially chosen. The honest answer is “we don’t know”.
“As far as I am concerned there is only consciousness - it arose from nothing but instead is forever preexistant.”
Where is any evidence for this? UrbanMysticDee complains that Drake’s equation is not scientific but makes an assertion such as this based on what? Agreed that consciousness may still be mysterious - but isn’t it a bit of a leap to say it is pre-existent? Where’s the evidence for that?
And my reply:
JTaylor
-Dee
Yes, I agree that Drake’s equation is not “pure science” but it is an interesting exercise, and is based on some well thought out variables (and only two have been suggested as additions in nearly 50 years). And of course the data for at least some of the variables now is much better than it was in 1961. Reality of course is that since it is not yet testable and quite likely never will be, nevertheless it could provide some guidance into potential SETI research.
But UrbanMysticDee thinks it’s conceivable that 1% of the stars in our galaxy could host intelligent life (”which I do not doubt is the case”). That would mean
that there are some 1 billion stars in our galaxy with intelligent life. And if UrbanMysticDee is skeptical of Drake’s equation what is the basis for this 1%? Drake’s equation is not perfect, but is probably the best we have (other than pure guessing).
Yes, it’s true we may be “special”, but that is not the same as being unique or especially chosen. The honest answer is “we don’t know”.
“As far as I am concerned there is only consciousness - it arose from nothing but instead is forever preexistant.”
Where is any evidence for this? UrbanMysticDee complains that Drake’s equation is not scientific but makes an assertion such as this based on what? Agreed that consciousness may still be mysterious - but isn’t it a bit of a leap to say it is pre-existent? Where’s the evidence for that?
And my reply:
JTaylor
1. The 1% estimate is a gut feeling that I never said was scientific. I am able to criticize bad science without having to provide an alternate theory. And I never said my feeling was scientific. I extrapolated from what I’ve read and heard from first and second hand sources that there seems to be a number of different extraterrestrial species that have been witnessed and that they are obviously gregarious otherwise encounters wouldn’t have happened in the first place.
Besides, you don’t seem to deny the existence of extraterrestrial life so any argument between us on estimates as to their quantity would be purely academic.
2.
A. As to your second question, I draw my assertion of the pre-existence of consciousness based on 40,000 years of experimentation from mystical traditions around the world and my own personal experimentation. When consistent data have been coming in for that long by that many people it seems more than reasonable to assume the data are good.
B. Consciousness cannot be reduced to anything physical yet can have effects on the physical world that are independent of time and space. Giants in the field of physics (David Bohm, Evan Harris Walker, John von Neumann, John Wheeler, Brian Josephson, Eugene Wigner, etc.) have proposed the primacy of consciousness and have produced very interesting experiments backing up their theories (observation theories, retrocausality, etc.)
C. Every single experience that can be had while awake can also be had while dreaming. All the senses can be present in dreams equally or to a greater degree than while awake. Waking appears to be of the same category of phenomena as dreaming.
D. Something has to be pre-existente, whether it be quantum laws or the multiverse or inflation fields or what have you, because the universe appears to have come from absolutely nothing - it is not eternal and it cannot be self-created. Reasons A-C have weighed the deck for me toward a non-physical, intelligent, concious entity of immense power.
But I'm a Creep (I Wish I Was Special)
I've been on Uncommon Descent talking about the issue of being special (like Radiohead did, only not as badass). The question, just about, is "Is the Earth special and is humanity special?" The Drake equation (A * B * C *......* Z = ET Will Talk To Us On Our Telescopes) and the SETI (Silly Excuse to Investigate) people say no. Commentator Denyse O'Leary, noted Canadian journalist and UFO critic, gave the same old UFOs are fake tripe to prove we're special. Here's what I said:
Even if one percent of the stars in our galaxy had life of comparable intelligence as humans (which I do not doubt is the case) I would still say we are special for the simple reason that we are here contemplating specialness. Any species that can move beyond mere existence into the realm of abstract thought would be special in my view. We are able to imagine what the world was like before we were here (highly speculative) and what the world will be like should we be go extinct for whatever reason (much less speculative). We can also plan ahead and develop technologies to spread to other planets, should the initiative be taken. If that is not grounds for special status then some people are in denial of their own specialness, which in itself is another special quality.
Boy howdy if you even consider the possibility of extraterrestrial life on UD you get hammered like I did when I brought up how the face on mars was the only one of thousands of photos NASA took that they ran through five seperate filters to reduce the image to a smear to cover up the truth. Here is the first unfair characterization of me by a commenter:
UrbanMysticDee: If the ability for abstract thought can arise through random chance mechanisms/events alone throughout our galaxy and the universe, I wouldn’t see it as special in the context of this discussion. Indeed, if it were that common, it would be, well, common - not special. Given that I don’t think sufficient evidence exists to support your confidence in the arise of consciousness, abstract thought, etc. through materialistic forces (not to mention the lack of any evidence to support the arise of the simplest of DNA-based life forms through random chance), I have no idea where your confidence comes from. Sounds like you, too, suffer from a philosophical approach to this issue rather than a scientific one.
Here is my reply:
mtreat
1. I never said or even implicated any connection to materialism or random chance in regards to myself or my views of life in the universe. I’m not sure I can give URLs here but if I can I suggest you peruse my little corner of the internet: http://theurbanmystic.blogspot.com/
* I don’t think consciousness arose through materialistic forces. I don’t even think there are materialistic forces. I’m an idealist. As far as I am concerned there is only consciousness - it arose from nothing but instead is forever preexistant.
* The same goes for life forms, simple or otherwise.
2. After studying the whole UFO/extraterrestrial visitation issue pretty much my entire life I am convinced the evidence is overwhelming that the Earth has been visited by intelligent beings from beyond our solar system and that the cover up of the best evidence constitutes the greatest misinformation campaign in history.
* I myself have seen such crafts.
* The SETI people are in denial about the above. They spent all this time and money on fancy machines and now have to justify the existence of the program by haranguing UFOlogy and repeat their mantra every night that ET will only contact them with their expensive equipment to keep their sanity.
* The Drake equation is based on pure conjecture and isn’t science no matter what the SETI people may say. Neither for that matter is many worlds, string/m-brane theories, and dark energy science as none of them can, by definition, be tested.
3. If one percent of the population of Earth had the ability to fly and see through walls I would still say that they are special just as if one percent of stars in the galaxy had intelligent life I would say such life is special. I think it is a sufficently small number to justify the special categorization.
I'll keep you updated as things go down (expect a video on specialness as the next post).
-Dee
Even if one percent of the stars in our galaxy had life of comparable intelligence as humans (which I do not doubt is the case) I would still say we are special for the simple reason that we are here contemplating specialness. Any species that can move beyond mere existence into the realm of abstract thought would be special in my view. We are able to imagine what the world was like before we were here (highly speculative) and what the world will be like should we be go extinct for whatever reason (much less speculative). We can also plan ahead and develop technologies to spread to other planets, should the initiative be taken. If that is not grounds for special status then some people are in denial of their own specialness, which in itself is another special quality.
Boy howdy if you even consider the possibility of extraterrestrial life on UD you get hammered like I did when I brought up how the face on mars was the only one of thousands of photos NASA took that they ran through five seperate filters to reduce the image to a smear to cover up the truth. Here is the first unfair characterization of me by a commenter:
UrbanMysticDee: If the ability for abstract thought can arise through random chance mechanisms/events alone throughout our galaxy and the universe, I wouldn’t see it as special in the context of this discussion. Indeed, if it were that common, it would be, well, common - not special. Given that I don’t think sufficient evidence exists to support your confidence in the arise of consciousness, abstract thought, etc. through materialistic forces (not to mention the lack of any evidence to support the arise of the simplest of DNA-based life forms through random chance), I have no idea where your confidence comes from. Sounds like you, too, suffer from a philosophical approach to this issue rather than a scientific one.
Here is my reply:
mtreat
1. I never said or even implicated any connection to materialism or random chance in regards to myself or my views of life in the universe. I’m not sure I can give URLs here but if I can I suggest you peruse my little corner of the internet: http://theurbanmystic.blogspot.com/
* I don’t think consciousness arose through materialistic forces. I don’t even think there are materialistic forces. I’m an idealist. As far as I am concerned there is only consciousness - it arose from nothing but instead is forever preexistant.
* The same goes for life forms, simple or otherwise.
2. After studying the whole UFO/extraterrestrial visitation issue pretty much my entire life I am convinced the evidence is overwhelming that the Earth has been visited by intelligent beings from beyond our solar system and that the cover up of the best evidence constitutes the greatest misinformation campaign in history.
* I myself have seen such crafts.
* The SETI people are in denial about the above. They spent all this time and money on fancy machines and now have to justify the existence of the program by haranguing UFOlogy and repeat their mantra every night that ET will only contact them with their expensive equipment to keep their sanity.
* The Drake equation is based on pure conjecture and isn’t science no matter what the SETI people may say. Neither for that matter is many worlds, string/m-brane theories, and dark energy science as none of them can, by definition, be tested.
3. If one percent of the population of Earth had the ability to fly and see through walls I would still say that they are special just as if one percent of stars in the galaxy had intelligent life I would say such life is special. I think it is a sufficently small number to justify the special categorization.
I'll keep you updated as things go down (expect a video on specialness as the next post).
-Dee
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