TheVat

People were writing speculative stuff on slow-haul generation ships as far back as the fifties (Brian Aldiss, IIRC) or suspended animation. As others noted, speed is not an absolute requirement. And there's also ground-based propulsion systems (like light-sails "pushed" by a laser) that aren't wildly beyond our technological horizon. Though deceleration might be tricky. The generation ship literature has touched many times on the ethical problems of generations whose purpose is to be ancestors to the colonists who set foot on the new world. There's often the idea that the young are indoctrinated in the sacredness of the mission... or it's hidden outright from them because they'll just accept the ship as their world. As Zapatos said, it's conceivable to live an ordinary life with all the usual trimmings, on a generation ship. (though restless young people wouldn't have any option, as they do in some restricted Earth societies like the Amish, of running off to the city to sample the alternatives).

105 is tomorrow's predicted high here, with a blood red sun from the wildfire smoke that's wafting from Oregon to Boston, so burning wood has lost some of it's fun and cozy feeling. The world doesn't need more polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons and PM 2.5 atm. Sincerely, the fireside Grinch

Jeff's, erm, rocket...

An obstacle for me as well. I've never been able to achieve any significant fraction of c. 😀 It does seem any ET that does arrive is part of a self-selecting group: the mere fact of their being here means they are cleverer than we are. Though I suppose, if one speculates wildly, it's possible to conceive of ETs who are actually technologically less clever but happen to have normal lifespans of a thousand years or the ability to hibernate for very long stretches.

G flat, above middle C. Hope that helps.

The section across Lakes Superior and Huron would have been quite the engineering challenge. Superior is 1300 feet deep in places. Never mind that we clever Americans have developed technology like ropes and ladders. It took us a while to catch up with the Mesopotamians, but we're very persistent people.

It seems unlikely that nations who themselves openly do GoF research (i. e. pretty much all wealthy nations) would have much basis for sanctioning other nations for doing it. Even if one nation were farcically incompetent at one of its labs, it's hard to see how a world policing body could bludgeon away incompetence, without some international accreditation/funding agreement that all the nations had signed onto.

The Atlantic recently had a piece on sorting out all the lab-leak and other scenarios... https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/06/lab-leak-trap/619150/

Help us out here. Are you comparing the experience of a student learning the history of slavery, race massacres, Jim Crow oppression, etc. to the subtle despair dogs feel when...what? Ok, I just have no idea what this is about. Woof.

Generally in a developed nations economy, as lifespan increases and families get smaller (the "demographic shift" as it's called) there's a trend towards full employment (smaller percent of population is of working age) and the value of labor rises. As labor becomes a scarcer commodity, companies pay more for it and offer more benefits and perks to keep workers. Of course, now we have wild cards like automation, immigration, and other trends that can tinker with that simplistic formula I outlined. But I don't think any of those will prevent labor, especially the services where we really prefer people to robots, from rising in value. Dropping fertility rates (thanks to both social trends and endocrine disruptors from plasticmaggedon) will see to it that we have a society top-heavy with older folks.

I am okay with investigation of anomalies, and sometimes spotty data can at least suggest a new hypothesis and path for research, but it's good to keep in mind that a sound hypothesis must be capable of disproof. This is Karl Popper's principle of falsification. But what set of observations can, in reality, falsify the ET hypothesis? It seems to me that, no matter how many negative results we have (the radar bogey was frozen pee, the silent light was Las Vegas reflected off the belly of an overweight goose), we can't really rule out that some stealthy ET has visited Earth. Watching the airspace and environs of Earth is not like watching a sealed room on CCTV. Things can be missed, others can be seen and remain unexplained because a sufficient amount of data will never be obtained. So I think a case can be made that ETs can only be a conjecture (which may at some point be proved to be right -- an alien lands and says howdy, a crashed spaceship is found not to be of this world, etc.) and not a scientific hypothesis. And inductive reasoning doesn't help much. If we look at thousands of observations and find that they have been, in the past, observations of new experimental aircraft or of optical effects of atmosphere or other terrestrial phenomena, and none of them has ever proved to be an ET, then we are left with nothing to do but apply Ockham's razor. We have no real empirical foundation of having encountered ETs to build from, when an anomaly zips by.

https://apnews.com/article/business-science-environment-and-nature-7844af19c7975f12c2a98cc5bd83fb60 Just offering as a sidebar to the discussion.

There does seem to be an innate aspect to such fears, and considerable variation between people. I never had much fear of reptiles or arachnids, always had the impression they were pretty shy and not bent on harming people. They seem like allies to our species, for the most part, snuffing pests. I have to wonder to what degree the "creepiness" is culturally learned. A fear of spiders didn't even occur to me until I learned about the poisonous ones and (Zapatos, you may wish to stop reading at this point)(j/k) I had heard about them biting people while they slept. If you're talking about a species that climbs in bed with you and administers poison, then, yes, fear is reasonable (not sure that could be termed a phobia, really). The genetics Nobel laureate Kary Mullis had a nightmarish encounter with poisonous spiders which he recounts in "Dancing Naked in the Mind Field. " Had me checking our sheets for months after reading that. Point being, I had to hear scary stories to really develop any spider anxieties. In terms of the most visceral insect fear, it would probably be ones that defensively swarm and attack humans (generally who've been unaware that they're close to a nest), like the Africanized killer bee or the Asian giant hornets which have been known to sting people to the point of kidney failure and death. Makes arachnids pale into insignificance by comparison.

I don't see why inquisitive intelligence couldn't evolve on a lightless planet. We are visual creatures, so we might be inclined to a kind of EM chauvinism regarding how brains may develop. I only mentioned dolphins as examples of a sensorium that can turn sonic information into detailed 3D representations of the environment, not as hypothetical dwellers on my Darkworld. A lightless planet would have a myriad of ecological niches just as a lighted one does, and wouldn't be analogous to just cave-dwellers. Indeed, a dominant acoustic sense that's greatly beyond ours might afford perceptive powers we lack, like seeing through walls and into the interiors of other bodies. Peterkin, I know that you write SF, so I would think your imagination is more than capable of imagining such worlds.

Are their fossils on mars? Are whose fossils on Mars? 😀

Hi, Geordief I was talking about animals that don't likely have a feeling of volition, that operate on instinct and stimulus/response. My sample thought (the almonds) was something I guessed a higher-order mammal or corvid could have. I would guess that a lizard avoiding almonds would just not eat them, out of an instinct hardwired by a long process of natural selection. It might not choose or reference past almond experiences. It just wouldn't see them as food. This is pretty speculative, I know, given how much we don't knkw about animal cognition.

I'm leaning towards the theory that this is a satire, riffing off some of the 19th century racial theories emanating from Europe and the US. Oh, and thanks for compasses, printing, and paper! (the gunpowder hasn't been so great though...) Now, off to my vacation in the harsh and bitter climates of Italy and Greece!

This is a vast topic. I agree that memory is a good starting point. Once an organism can form memories, it can start to assemble sensory data into a coherent narrative (which narrative evolves because it confers a selective advantage). Ate an almond before. Was bitter. Barfed. Not eat almond now. And that's actually a pretty sophisticated thought. Many animals avoid bitter almonds (which all almonds were until a few thousand years ago) through a more hardwired and unthinking process.

If we lived on a planet whose atmosphere blocked visible light enough to block stars, it's possible it would also block the primary, and we would evolve more towards acoustic sensing and less towards vision. You can have soupy atmospheres that support life and liquid water, but surface condition is essentially darkness. You can do a lot with sound, as any bat or dolphin would tell you (if it could), though the "sky's the limit" definitely applies here. If you developed technological civilization, and being curious creatures, decided to see what was up there, your departure from the atmosphere and entry into vacuum would be, to your senses, like entering utter blackness. Of course, if you had actually developed tech to that capability, you would have instruments that could detect the EM spectrum and convert it into auditory "images" for you, and your mind would be properly blown. But EVA stuff would probably not interest you so much.

Yes. There's an element of "what aren't they telling us" to all this. If it's microwaves, has anyone's lunch burrito been mysteriously reheated? Seriously, the "hearing a loud sound" symptom made me wonder if the attack could be acoustic, but then you would expect more effect in adjacent offices and something being picked up on audio recording devices in the building -- sound has a way of bouncing around.

(I did a keyword search, thinking this might already have a thread here, but found nothing. If SFN already has a thread on these apparent attacks on US Embassy staff, mod can fold this into it as an update.) https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/national-security/many-200-americans-have-now-reported-possible-symptoms-havana-syndrome-n1274385 There are aspects, regarding motivation, that are baffling. If they are deliberate attacks, what's the goal here -- removing specific persons that foreign intelligence doesn't want around? General harassment? Impeding embassy operations for some political goal? If it's some form of surveillance, why keep using a method that makes itself so obvious, so lacking in stealth? And which would likely prompt embassies to bolster their EMF shielding and move safe rooms?

The fact that all these issues are being discussed openly here suggests that any negative prejudices regarding trans people are likely to be reduced or at least made more conscious, if the unconscious aspect is a concern. A prejudice that one is conscious of is a prejudice who negative effects can be mitigated, in my experience. I think "phobia" is sometimes misused as a suffix. Many prejudices do not result in an incapacitating fear, but do result in a warped perception of others. It's worth looking at the DSM-5 to get a clear understanding of what phobia means, compared to other terms like aversion or bias.

To avoid insanity, it seems to me you would need developmental stages that would correspond to human infancy and childhood. And some kind of stable virtual environment with parental figures of some sort. In short, you would need a deliberate effort from humans at developing a sentient AI, which would be "birthed" with basic desires and an environment where it is motivated to seek the satisfaction and refinement of desires, growing in awareness as it does so. To have an entity that is, as Peterkin put it, "undirected" is to have something incoherent and possibly self-terminating. To have an "I, " it's likely that you also need "others. "

If Feynman had never written a book, his direct method of investigation on the Rogers commission, like dunking a sample of O-ring in ice water, would have still put him in the public spotlight. And his eponymous diagrams, QED, the path integral formulation, quantum computing, nanotechnology...call into question the OP setting him at a "lower level" than the pantheon of physics. Toss in bongo drumming, innate charm, wit, and the search for Tuvan throat singers and you have a personality that people would still have written books about, even if he'd never penned one himself. And, as MigL mentioned, his incomparable lectures.

And this, my liege, is how we know the earth to be banana-shaped.