ScentOfViolets

ScentOfViolets

  • Commented on On the Great Filter, existential threats, and griefers
    My stand is that we know so little about what will ever happen, that it makes no sense to choose. Chuckle. It's out in the open now. You want to pretend that we have equal burden of proof obligations. We...
  • Commented on On the Great Filter, existential threats, and griefers
    It sounds like you are saying that there are two possible positions. One is that we will run into definite limits, for example limits that will keep us from interstellar space. The other is that we will never run into...
  • Commented on On the Great Filter, existential threats, and griefers
    Cats. No, I am not saying that at all! That would be stupid. I said there was a no reason to believe technological progress could continue indefinitely. You said "We don't know enough science yet to predict what's possible" and...
  • Commented on On the Great Filter, existential threats, and griefers
    No, I am not saying that at all! That would be stupid. I said there was a no reason to believe technological progress could continue indefinitely. You said "We don't know enough science yet to predict what's possible." and "Believe...
  • Commented on On the Great Filter, existential threats, and griefers
    .We don't know enough science yet to predict what's possible. Hey, we don't know for a fact that the Sun will rise in East tomorrow. After all, we don't know everything, and science is incomplete. Do you see why this...
  • Commented on On the Great Filter, existential threats, and griefers
    As far as technological plateaus, I will believe it when I see a relatively long period of time without significant technological advancement. Really? You think there's scope for a material five hundred times as strong and hard as the strongest...
  • Commented on On the Great Filter, existential threats, and griefers
    Currently there is zero evidence for a technological plateau What do you think a technological plateau is, and what would you count as evidence for it? I'm curious. Seriously. Because you seem to think that, for example, there's such a...
  • Commented on On the Great Filter, existential threats, and griefers
    BTW, interstellar travel being hard for folks who are put together like us is not necessarily a bad thing. Look at our history of brutal exploitation. Look at how our species behaves towards our technological inferiors in classic sf (Hint:...
  • Commented on On the Great Filter, existential threats, and griefers
    200 years from now will be 2215. Civilization at that time will be far beyond our current abilities. In all that time we won't have figure out how to remove the co2 we put in the atmosphere or mitigate the...
  • Commented on On the Great Filter, existential threats, and griefers
    This will be my last comment as well. I suggest that you read this. Again. Carefully....
  • Commented on On the Great Filter, existential threats, and griefers
    Here's a nice little explanation from Matt Strassler's blog of the relationship between virtual particles and fields. I urge people like Jay to read this one....
  • Commented on On the Great Filter, existential threats, and griefers
    Sorry, no, you're making a common mistake. Let me ask you how electric charges interact. Is it via an electromagnetic field, or is it by the exchange of photons? There's a reason why these types of particles are also known...
  • Commented on On the Great Filter, existential threats, and griefers
    You didn't answer my question. What do you think gives elementary particles their mass if not for the Higgs boson? It seems like you are have some sort of conceptual difficulties here....
  • Commented on On the Great Filter, existential threats, and griefers
    The fact that it can exist is important to particle theory, but no actual quantity of existing Higgs bosons is required for matter to behave as it does. Boggle. So, millions of words to the contrary -- many of them...
  • Commented on On the Great Filter, existential threats, and griefers
    Sigh. No Higgs bosons means elementary particles have no mass. Your conjecture has been falsified by observation....
  • Commented on On the Great Filter, existential threats, and griefers
    All of which will work, but is likely to take thousands of years -- or longer -- and will result in a civilization that is virtually unrecognizable to us and is almost certainly uninterested in colonizing earthlike planets. Assuming those...
  • Commented on On the Great Filter, existential threats, and griefers
    The reason this topic is a strange attractor on Antipope is that we go through this as an educational process several times per year. Unfortunately yes. But if you want something truly horrendous, go to the sci.space.tech archives and see...
  • Commented on On the Great Filter, existential threats, and griefers
    You're right otherwise: resource extraction is a cost ineffective reason to colonize any other body in space. However, getting the right angle on a particular situation is well worth the cost. Let's assume that the asteroid belt is colonized the...
  • Commented on On the Great Filter, existential threats, and griefers
    And in any case the general idea of the Fermi Paradox isn't that everyone, or even most people, leave the home planet, only that some small subset with the resources and numbers to make a go of it elsewhere decide...
  • Commented on On the Great Filter, existential threats, and griefers
    The idea that intelligent civilizations are going to run out of energy is ludicrous. No, that's not the idea. The idea is that they are going to run out of the sort of energy that makes space travel possible. Rots...
  • Commented on On the Great Filter, existential threats, and griefers
    Uh-huh. Get back to me when you've got some sort of cost benefit calculation for this sort of terraforming. Again, you're not allowed to just say, 'what if?'...
  • Commented on On the Great Filter, existential threats, and griefers
    The whole idea of any life form traveling between stars is based on an unverified linear model of technological progress. The fourth option is that there's no there, there. The idea of colonization I think rests on the implicit assumption...
  • Commented on On the Great Filter, existential threats, and griefers
    That's answer 2: there are alien civilizations everywhere. Alien civilizations only have the possibility of jumping into space in a very small window, when they're fully exploiting their fossil fuel resources to make the huge industrial ecosystem needed to support...
  • Commented on On the Great Filter, existential threats, and griefers
    Actually, you only have to get out to about 550 - 1000 AU to take advantage of gravitational lensing by the Sun. I've heard of resolutions of less than a kilometer for Alpha Centauri....
  • Commented on On the Great Filter, existential threats, and griefers
    Yet another model for successful interstellar colonization: Bruce Sterling's Swarm. Again, once the planet-bound get off-planet and into the asteroids, they never really go back down again. And if once you've seen one asteroid belt you've seen them all ....
  • Commented on On the Great Filter, existential threats, and griefers
    There is nothing new under the sun; check out Hoyle's The Black Cloud for another take on where most of the intelligent life (naturally) resides. Notably, Hoyle's eponymous Cloud was also limited to speeds of ~1% of c. Not a...
  • Commented on On the Great Filter, existential threats, and griefers
    You have completely misunderstood my point. While I am no kind ofparticle physicist, I know quite a few of them, and do know something about that area. Actually, judging from your comments, no, you don't seem to know a whole...
  • Commented on On the Great Filter, existential threats, and griefers
    Haven't we already done this one before? And in the last couple of years? But very well: I submit that there is only one habitable planet in all the galaxy, Earth itself. Yes, there are uncounted planets where what we...
  • Commented on The Biggest Little SF Publisher you never heard of pulls on the jackboots
    Label people however you like, to their faces, if it's what you want to do. You can call somebody a misogynist and they call you a feminazi and you both go home happy, having proven your points to your satisfaction....
  • Commented on The Biggest Little SF Publisher you never heard of pulls on the jackboots
    John C. Wright quote: He regards the mere fact that I am a Christian as a threat against all he holds dear, and so to belittle me is the reasonable thing to do. Nope. It's the fact that he considers...
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