Outer Space Thread

[AWvsCBsteeeerike3]

How many planets are in the Universe? One website says 1x10^24. Okay. Assuming life can chemically form withing 20 million or so years after a planets creation...it just seems probable if not downright guaranteed one of them would have devised a way to communicate with outside world's. Look at what we've done and as a species were a bunch of dip [expletive]. We spend no money relatively speaking in science anymore blah blah blah. And we've sent probes into deep space. Humans...the same species that has made donald trump a presidential nominee...have space missions. I find it almost impossible to believe that a more powerful civilization with the ability to explore doesn't exist. And yes it's a vast cosmos, but it's not like we're hiding under a rock. We're filling our surrounding area with a bunch of noise

[jim]

I've spent the weekend trying to debunk his logic and it's impossible.

It answers most every question I've ever come up with:
Why no other life forms
How did this happen (honestly the odds of you being here have to be 10^10^10000 and probably more)
If humans survive, why no time travelers
If no God, how did the universe happen. People believe that God created everything and detractors kind of ask why can't it just be that the universe and mass and all that always was....yeah, that's great and all, but you're just believing that something was around forever and always will be. Is that more likely than something putting you here?

I could go on and on, but his answer makes more sense than I think we'd like to admit.

Actually, I take that back. It's possible by agreeing that humans kill themselves off before discovering the technology to create a simulation this complex (though, that still doesn't answer any of the above questions)

I don't get the guys argument at all. I think he's a smug [expletive] that I'd like to punch.

He makes some leap that there would be billions of consoles playing some game and therefore the odds are 1 in a billion? What if each console is playing a game, each in it's own universe? That means the odds are 1 that we are in a simulation.

What a [expletive] punchable douchebag this guy is. Hot tub my ass.

[Myles]

How many planets are in the Universe? One website says 1x10^24. Okay. Assuming life can chemically form withing 20 million or so years after a planets creation...it just seems probable if not downright guaranteed one of them would have devised a way to communicate with outside world's. Look at what we've done and as a species were a bunch of dip [expletive]. We spend no money relatively speaking in science anymore blah blah blah. And we've sent probes into deep space. Humans...the same species that has made donald trump a presidential nominee...have space missions. I find it almost impossible to believe that a more powerful civilization with the ability to explore doesn't exist. And yes it's a vast cosmos, but it's not like we're hiding under a rock. We're filling our surrounding area with a bunch of noise

An argument can be made on the other side as well.
They guess the big bang was 14 billion years ago.
Dinosaurs were around for around 150 million years. They never communicated with ET's.
So not only would the life have to be more than microorganisms or even animals, they would have to exist in the same times as us (200,000 years out of 14,000,000,000).

Also, our signals don't go very far.
http://www.planetary.org/blogs/emily-la ... /3390.html

[jim]

I don't know if I buy "singularity" stuff and this simulation idea kind of falls into that realm. We have been able to keep increasing computing power to this point but that doesn't mean it will go on forever. I keep thinking we will hit some limit, or get close to some limit and start to slow down. I know they are looking at other technologies to try to get around the limitations of our current computer architecture, but I guess we'll see. At some point there could be diminishing returns. Then there is the idea that our simulations will somehow gain consciousness. We don't even really understand what consciousness is, yet somehow an AI is going to get it. I think it could be possible for an AI to become nearly indistinguishable from a real person to us, but that is not the same thing as an AI simulation with billions of conscious entities running inside of it.

Caveat first that I really don't know what I am talking about here. I mean I've read about it, I attended a lecture, which on the internet makes me a fullblown expert but not really.

I think we maybe one giant technological advancement away from hitting some limit. Quantum memory, spintronic memory ... the type of technology that is tweaking electron spins and states to store memory will offer orders of magnitude speedup in memory transfer and storage that will allow who knows what. It's really impossible to predict for sure what creations based on this technology are around, and it's technology that will be introduced in my lifetime. But - once we do things like this, we are starting to use technology that simply is bound by the physical laws of the universe.

So yes, I do believe that there is a limit, I believe that it's possible that the limit is approached within 100 years, but in the meantime we will see major leaps forward.

[AWvsCBsteeeerike3]

Right, that's my point. On an evolutionary scale, humans are terrible. I'm surprised we've made it this far, really. But, we still have managed to do *something* regarding space travel/exploration. Is it a lot? Of course not. Look at how stupid we are.

We're smarter than dinosaurs, but that's not saying much.

If there are nearly infinite amounts of planets that are housing life forms, surely some of them are more advanced than we are. Would you agree with that? If they'd even checked out earth over the past couple hundred million years or so, they'd notice that there's life on it. And, if they're paying any attention at all, it's tough to miss it now.

I'm not saying lack of physical proof proves other life forms don't exist....I just find it troubling that no one has more or less come to destroy us yet. If that makes sense.

[AWvsCBsteeeerike3]

And, I'm certainly not saying I agree with Musk...I don't. I'm just saying it's tough to make a counter argument.

[jim]

The universe is so big with some severe limits in place on how quickly information can travel that I don't see it as a contradiction that there are other advanced civilizations in it that we don't hear. And if we did hear them, there is no way to practically communicate. Maybe the laws of the universe simply are not breakable, and just won't allow for civivilations separated by time and space at great distances to interact.

[thrill]

I don't get the guys argument at all. I think he's a smug [expletive] that I'd like to punch.

He makes some leap that there would be billions of consoles playing some game and therefore the odds are 1 in a billion? What if each console is playing a game, each in it's own universe? That means the odds are 1 that we are in a simulation.

I'm not watching that clip because who cares, but the argument that we're in an AI that I've always seen is based on the idea that an advanced society wouldn't make just one simulation. They would make many simulations. So there are more simulations than realities and in some of those simulations, it's conceivable that a simulation would create many many simulations and so on. Right?

[Michael]

I believe in the simulation argument, but that doesn't mean you have to believe we are in a simulation. Only one of these things has to be true:

(1) the human species is very likely to go extinct before reaching a “posthuman” stage;

(2) any posthuman civilization is extremely unlikely to run a significant number of simulations of their evolutionary history (or variations thereof);

(3) we are almost certainly living in a computer simulation.

http://www.simulation-argument.com/simulation.html

[jim]

I don't get the guys argument at all. I think he's a smug [expletive] that I'd like to punch.

He makes some leap that there would be billions of consoles playing some game and therefore the odds are 1 in a billion? What if each console is playing a game, each in it's own universe? That means the odds are 1 that we are in a simulation.

I'm not watching that clip because who cares, but the argument that we're in an AI that I've always seen is based on the idea that an advanced society wouldn't make just one simulation. They would make many simulations. So there are more simulations than realities and in some of those simulations, it's conceivable that a simulation would create many many simulations and so on. Right?

I would think so - but this smug douchebag who won't talk about it in his hot tub says no.