TheVat

These categories sometimes seem to just make people analyze themselves too much. As @MigL says, "too many labels." I always questioned the introvert/extrovert thing, because it seems many people are just adapting to their life situation and will go either way, depending. Or go their own way, as you suggest. It's maybe like astrology. If you just tell someone they're a certain type enough times they'll often start to internalize that and modify their behavior.

Fair point. While many might have qualms about children raised by robots, a civilization survival scenario would really raise the stakes. If it's either robot-raised first generation or species extinction then, yes, donors would set their reservations aside. (though I can see a lot of potential conflicts over whose DNA is selected and how priority is given to maximal genetic diversity for a starter population in a colony) In any case, the thread topic is on the possibility of aliens visiting here. Whatever the nature of UAPs, they don't seem to colonizing Earth. (and we would be a poor choice for a colony - imagine if we humans went looking for a terrestrial planet to colonize; overpopulated, polluted, bristling with nukes, and constantly having wars would be our last choice)

I'm thinking a sort of petting zoo would be the perfect vacation experience for a Trumpist family. MAGA: More Alligators Gobbling Americans.

I guess he means FTL (e.g. stable traversable wormholes, etc) is disallowed, but current physics doesn't expressly forbid slower than light travel or finding ways to preserve living passengers on such long journeys. The question is more regarding what can feasibly be engineered. And there are collateral questions e.g. at relativistic speeds what level of radiation would a ship encounter and what amount of shielding needs mounted in the direction of travel. https://www.centauri-dreams.org/2009/04/03/shielding-the-starship/

They could collect all the algae in scum bags. The administration has plenty of those. When you have a nation's leader arresting people for removing paint peels - a task you will have to have someone do later anyway before repainting - you would think this might trigger more GOP to acknowledge the "emperor has no clothes" situation. It may be a scapegoating attempt, but it's demented enough for a six year old to see through.

Seems like one of those chats where adaptation and reproductive success is confused with fitness. Increased pre and post natal care and longevity can shift the locus of adaptation. Visual impairment no longer increases (p) for being eaten by predators or falling off cliffs, but it might shift the adaptive importance of cognitive skills for nuanced interpretation of sense data or social intelligence by making them figure more prominently in reproductive success. Or, an inability to eat meat after getting a tick bite, formerly a negative trait in adapting as a hunter-gatherer might later become selectively neutral where diets shift to plant-based. There is no objective metric of "fitness" or "strength," there is only an environment and its changes driving the adaptive needs. A longterm decline in human food sources and livable land areas could result in a planet-wide version of insular dwarfism where being the size of Peter Dinklage could become positively adaptive as they endured food scarcity better. An ecological shift where large apex predators disappeared might also further this, as size and long legs for running was no longer as important to survival. If one were to speculate on shifting adaptive pressures in modern urban civilization it might be towards a neurological capacity to handle high-stimulation environments and extremely loud and multilayered soundscapes. Or, then again, some broad cultural innovation could make all that irrelevant and then adaptation would take a different direction. And there's always the wild card of sexual selection where particular aesthetics can come into play and change the reproductive advantage of certain phenotypic expressions that would formerly have no role in survival or attraction of a mate.

Emily is concerned over coders fraudulently promising wild felines as pets. Mac stole combinatoric? I rot an IBM ocelot scam. Her friend Eva continues to field peculiar questions. Eva, can I - wet, sad - name dignitary rating? I demand a stew in a cave.

Dishonest bigoted trolling, reported.

That's a relief. I hate it when a picnic you planned for weeks is ruined by an expanding red giant.

I was asking in regard to his saying "collimate" light from the sun. Am I mistaken that you need coherent light to succeed in collimating over any distance we're discussing? I may have misunderstood @DanMP in thinking that he was implying some way to make the sun emit coherent light. If I'm wrong on either point, happy to learn more about this. (Also thought the inverse square law meant sails weren't much use beyond Pluto, so were usually considered in context of solar system travel)

One of the hardest things to watch the past 1.4 years is the turnip regime weeding them out at the federal level (and sometimes pressuring this at the state level, in redder states). Or in the legislative branch applying various kinds of coercion to get formerly decent people to align with the kakistocracy and try to sell that package of harebrained ideas and incompetent execution to their constituents. Hoping people like you at state/muni level can keep holding the line.

Zefrem Cochrane hasn't started work on that yet, since he won't he born until 2030. Getting the sun to lase? How would that work? Isn't this what you would send to begin with? You still need your thrusters and lightsails for the whole deceleration part. That's what this thread is looking into. Good thing the aliens have no ethical qualms about that. Get some women in a room and ask for a show of hands on who wants to donate or sell their future child to be raised by robots many light-years away. I'll bring popcorn.

Yes, I was speaking in context of highly advanced tech civilizations, really the only context in which a galaxy eating machine intelligence could be speculated on. And to be clear, and I direct this also to @Ken Fabian comments, I see this as highly dystopian and would be a consequence of failure to initially build motivational guardrails around AI by the progenitor civilization. Well yes. I was ironically referencing a hypothetical machine perspective ("we can live in vacuum and have photons for lunch, puny humans!") in my remarks, not sneering at the elegance of life, "photosynthetic filth" etc. Current robots and AIs are quite remote from the hypothesized "overlords" I was hypothesizing. If I've prompted people to think about its improbability and the supreme adaptability and flex of biologicals, I am happy with that. And I would speculate that any hypothesized machine intelligence would have moved towards molecular and quasi-biological processors, blending digital and analogic operation as our own wetware does. Maybe I need to start using more emojis?? My comments really started as a reply to @Moontanman on hypothetical machine societies. And also the scaling implied by a Von Neumann proliferation. I personally find the idea of scrubbing biology from the universe's intelligence pool horrifying and dystopian, uh, being a watery biochemical mess myself.

https://physicstoday.aip.org/features/time-laws-and-the-future-of-cosmology

Wasn't sure what you meant there. The AI civilization only needs to bootstrap at the beginning i.e. be initiated by biological sentients who depend on their biome. After that, they only need energy and feedstock minerals for proliferating. At that point, biological life could be seen as an inferior competitor, sucking up solar radiation with their photosynthetic filth and clunky metabolic pathways. The machine overlords might view this as a nuisance, and conclude they could use the suns (and/or black holes, or other conversion methods) more efficiently.

As I understand it, theories going beyond the SM and not conserving baryon number would allow proton decay. GUTs e.g.

Should read as "relative ease compared to biological life." Quite agree the Von Neumann concept presumes considerable tech prowess - his theory was predicated on an early (1940s?) idea of machines become intelligent and self-replicating and then rapidly proliferate themselves. I think the concept has also been linked to a Singularity scenario. Later theorists have noted the dystopian potential where the spread could be akin to a rapidly proliferating group of cancer cells. Von Neumann saw it more as a way to spread intelligence and open up scenarios like @MigL described where it could be transmitted at c, say, to automated fabrication plants in other solar systems. ( Or the VN proliferation could also seed life through a galaxy where there were abiotic planets that could be modified to support an ecosystem.) Do I think it's probable? Maybe not - like Fermi I'm inclined to ask "where are they?" It may be the initial steps are so difficult as to make Von Neumann galaxies a rarity. Or non-existent. There is also something disturbing in the totalitarian potential there.

Some technical problems (life support, ship infrastructure mass, suspension on long voyage) diminish, I would think. An AI can shut off for all or part of a millennium-long trip. At any relativistic speed however you would still have interstellar dust and proton collisions to handle ( shield from) - those can damage hardware minds as well as wetware minds. The advantage a machine has is ease of copying off clones of itself to provide backups. And a machine can potentially miniaturize down to a size and profile (very small xsection presented in vector of travel) which makes some exotic propulsion systems easier and collisions less likely. And there's also the Von Neumann scenario, where one could fill a galaxy with devices and have millions self-replicated and providing, say, laser acceleration or deceleration wherever needed. Could VN devices be all around us and we don't know they're there for some reason, like deliberately concealing them?

There seems to be a distorting funhouse mirror in our culture in which many people no longer see their lives in its true proportions. And this dysmorphia flexes through all these causal chains you and others mention - corporations, legislatures, courts, academia, media, memes, etc. People come to accept that only money is heard, that they are essentially slackers, that votes don't matter, that you're a fool if you don't cheat...all beliefs that wither action and so self-fulfill. So yes, it is useful to look at say, policy making and see if there are lines of control that are more oligarchy than democracy. Or look at who owns and pulls the strings of media. If the trail of bread crumbs lead back to big money, then we need to ask why they don't want a prosperous middle class and less wealth inequality - they are capitalists, so don't they need a prosperous demographic to mass market to? What sort of short-term temptations (and/or blind spots) in the system induce a billionaire to grab another billion instead of sending that next billion on to promote a prosperous and well-trained and well-housed labor force? I sometimes wonder if there's a divide-and-conquer strategy in there. Less trust everywhere makes people withdraw into small bickering camps. Fear, paranoia, xenophobia, elite-bashing...these make people easier to manipulate. That I would suggest a "they" who are doing this manipulation shows how easy it is to slide into the paranoia. But "you're not paranoid if they're really out to get you." So we need to keep people looking at who controls their web feeds and who owns these humongous media giants and vast tracts of the internet.

Brief and whimsical takes on microbiology, ecoremediation and physics... Yell "amoeba," Gabe O'Malley. Brace tan, ameliorate tar oil, emanate carb. Sir, isotopes use pot, Osiris. Wolf, drawn is noumenal plane, muons inward flow.

Thanks, I do, and I did, see your point. I'm no renaming zealot myself. The reason I mentioned Evans was that he wasn't just a personage who was later seen as a rotter. He succeeded in being seen as a rotter in his own time. Possibly why the indigenous community (and many Euro Coloradans) couldn't see why the peak was named Evans in the first place. It wasn't just Sand Creek, this guy had basically issued an executive order (or whatever governors call it) to tell everyone it was hunting season on natives, like they were game animals. At least Fermi et al tried to put the brakes on actual use of an A-bomb and their proliferation. SOCIALIST!!! 😎

The whole UAP disclosure seems to suffer from fuzzy blob syndrome. IOW, nothing beyond the grainy indistinct oddities we've been seeing for decades. Along with the usual parade of unsupported witness reports vaguely hinting at...something. As @Moontanman says, it's another pathetic distraction ploy. The only decent footage seems to be found in Spielberg fables.

Terry Pratchett and Doug Adams would have loved this website. The Third Epoch of Laziness was a cosmic period where galaxies refused to spin without statistical approximations. Following the exhaustion of the First Era of Tangible Mathematics, the fundamental forces of the universe began cutting corners to conserve processing energy. This widespread probabilistic sociopathy led to a severe degradation of the Branch of Undeniable Physics. Rather than calculating exact orbital mechanics, celestial bodies began relying on the Nebular Probability Engine, which merely guessed where planets should be based on previous trajectories. During this period, historical and astronomical accuracy deteriorated into a state of Statistical Blight. Entire star systems were fabricated out of administrative convenience. The most notable nightmare of the epoch was the Guessed Century Incident, closely followed by the spontaneous manifestation of the Hallucinated Comet of 1912. When the universe attempted to render the Phantom Empire of Grom using statistical shortcuts, the Bureau of Cosmological Audits officially declared the epoch a total structural failure.

I hope as Ms Sturgeon recalls Her ex's embezzlement spree, For every new-single Sturgeon There are plenty of fish in the sea.

I noticed that. At first I thought it was something to do with the rainy weather, but no they had an overhang to work under. They could have waited till tomorrow, however - that's Turnip's birthday. You could look up Sand Creek Massacre and see if you're still okay with keeping that peak as Mt. Evans. Even by the standards of the white community in that time, his actions were considered disgraceful. After a congressional investigation condemned the actions of involved parties, Evans was forced to resign from his governorship in disgrace in 1865. Really doesn't strike me as a mountain name candidate, no matter how far you extend your moral relativism. This name change was a good call.