Some of that zooming in made me feel pretty damn uncomfortable. It really is f'ing massive out there huh. Makes me wonder what this is all about, I'm sure it's something, I wonder what. :)
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Is an ecosystem random? What happens when one outside force is added to an ecosystem? There's plenty of examples around the globe of this.
Life doesn't 'find a way' and balance. The ecosystem is damaged, and often times destroyed by adding a single non-native species. That doesn't seem random does it?
Randomness should have error correction, as it's random. Doesn't seem to though.
Randomness itself doesn't have error correction, but systems that generate or use randomness may have checks to ensure they function correctly. Error correction applies to data or signal integrity, which is a separate concept from pure randomness.
Many of my thoughts on randomness are seeded by David Deutsch's "Beginning of infinity" which is an interesting read FWTW
A deck only has 52 cards, but you shuffle it properly, it's essentially guaranteed that nobody in human history has ended up with the same order as you just did.
Of course it does. "Ecosystem" and "species" and "native" are human terms referring to categories we invented to make sense of things. Life itself is one ongoing, unbroken, slow-burn chemical reaction at planetary scale. It's always in flux, it's always balanced in myriad ways on some timescales, unbalanced in others.
Even without getting reductive to this degree, there's hardly a case an ecosystem was destroyed. Adding non-native species ends up rebalancing things, sometimes transforming them into something dissimilar to what came before - but it's not like life disappears. The ecosystem is there, just different. Though it sure sucks to be one of the life forms depending on the "status quo".
> That doesn't seem random does it?
Yes, it very much is random. If thermodynamics teaches us anything, it's that random looks quite organized if you zoom out enough and smooth over details.
But there are a lot of larger species that are at risk. Maybe I'm just species-ist, but I'm more concerned about things like various bird or mammal species than I am some bacteria.
But among myriads of possible outcomes the would be a lot of outcomes that you would describe as "non random" if you saw them. Maybe any of them will not look as random. If evolution have chosen one of "non-random" outcomes by a dice roll, would it be right to call its pick "non random"?
That fact still messes me up every time! Like, I know very well that 52! is a ridiculously huge number. And still, it feels like "but it's just 52 cards, give me an afternoon and I'll do it, how many combinations can there be?"...
+1. A big randomness, following the laws of Physics that are themselves possibly rooted in something.
With that big randomness, by some chance, intelligent life has happened that can wonder.
Where's more to be uncovered are in the laws of Physics (and why are they what they are), and thereby better matching the probabilities of the said randomness.
There is another theory which states that this has already happened.
- Douglas Adams
Using the term "error correction" incorrectly assumes there is some "correct" state to return to, but nature is indeed random and continuously evolving, and there is no privileged "correct" state, just the ever-evolving current state.
I think people are attached to the current state of life on earth, not realizing that it is transient. Life itself and the many forms it can embody is amazing, the exact form it currently takes is not that special.
But even then, if we knew what caused the universe to exist, we would then be looking at the cause of the universe and wondering what caused that cause to exist. And so I think we'd still be left wondering why anything exists at all at the end of the day.
They even got as far as describing God as "uncaused causality" centuries ago, which lined up pretty well with the translation of the name God reportedly gave one of their forbearers from a burning bush, "I am who am," or colloquially, "I'm the one who just is. I am being-itself, not contingent in any way, outside your concepts of 'before' or 'contingent upon.'"
We'd need to start cracking some kind of jumping/FTL/etc technology to have any hope of real exploration.
And I have heard it all before: worm holes, warp drive, etc pp. A fun exercise, but not rooted in reality at all.
All you can do is to appeal to completely unknown, unimaginable magical breakthroughs, which are inherently difficult to discuss, so I don't think this will be very fruitful.
I have heard intelligent people claim a good few times now, and feel like it's obviously unscientific. It seems faith-based. Sure, life on Earth has proven to be resilient and adaptable, but we've no way to be sure how the planet will develop in the coming thousands and millions of years.
Climates and ecosystems and geology change. Life on Earth has persisted through some wild misadventures and atmospheric changes, but it's a very complex system. Surely it's theoretically feasible that some surprising thing could set us off on a course towards ending up with an atmosphere similar to Venus or Mars one day? How can we know with certainty this won't happen?
To me it seems like "life-ism" rather than species-ism at that point. The idea that "life will go on, no matter what" seems so obviously intuitive to a member of the Life class. I fear it is a misguided - though romantic, and somewhat touching - sentiment.
What the Wright Brothers did was the easiest of the three: New engineering. It didn't contradict anything then known in accepted science.
Fusion energy is being studied now, and it's substantially more difficult than what the Wright brothers did because it requires New Science. But it doesn't violate any of the accepted fundamentals of the universe, so it will probably happen eventually.
Now we come to the most difficult of the three: New Fundamentals. Traveling to other galaxies falls in this category. For it to work we would have to discover some brand new principle that makes the universe work, and that principle would need to be so radical that it makes what we now know about the laws of physics wrong.
That's not likely to happen. By comparison, the Wright brothers' invention was for all practical purposes inevitable; people had been flying heavier-than-air craft like gliders and kites for hundreds of years. All that was needed was an energy-dense power plant.
Is anything possible? Sure.
Is anything currently proposed as possible likely to sterilize the planet? No.
We could get hit by a mini-moon sized asteroid tomorrow though that liquifies the crust, of course.
Caveats:
1. It's really, really hard to supply enough energy to go that fast, even with fusion power.
2. Your passengers won't be able to go home again, because by the time they get back everyone they've ever known will be long dead.
3. Even if you could go that fast, you'll eventually hit a speck of dust and disintegrate.
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/watch-live-house-overs...
Cleverness: I'm funny and I'm confident enough in it to risk doing it publicly
Status: The statuses of you and Bob allow you to play a joke on them. Often such jokes are a public demonstration of status, like children do more explicitly and often unconsciously in the schoolyard.
Empathy: 'I say suffering is funny'; it asserts a willingness to violate a taboo, be unempathetic, and therefore potentially dangerous
Personal power: I'm powerful and independent enough to do something on a whim
etc.
Can you elaborate on that? Do you mean if we clash with anything (even as small as a space dust) while traveling at a substantial fraction of c, it would disintegrate us?
At 1% the speed of light (approx 3000000 m/s) and a medium-mass dust (1x10-5 kg, stationary), not enough force or area to dent steel (350 N/mm^2), but over time, lots of dust could cause erosion (quick math/estimates).
So, despite the stigma attached to all things UAP/UFO, I think it should be upvoted and not downvoted.
I was thinking v would be more like 10% of c, which would mean about 1000kG (1 kiloton) of TNT, or about 1/20 of the energy of the Hiroshima atomic bomb. From a particle of dust weighing 10mG. You'd be toast.
It’s a whole class of shitty jokes where you mess with people under the entire purpose of doing it without them knowing. If Bob knows he’s being messed with, that’s something completely different.
I don't see where it's expressed above (?); no willfullness involved - I didn't even realize that you thought were having such a heated discussion. The other commenter also didn't pick up on it either.
Short of some extremely radical new physics, humans will never, ever reach these other galaxies. Maybe the Magellanic Clouds, and Andromeda (which is coming to us).
Even the most optimistic sci-fi like Star Trek balks at traversing intergalactic space and they have warp drive, wormholes and sometimes go to other dimensions!
The Wright brothers seem like a poor example. But consider the slowing down of time near mass, the tunnel effect, superconductors, super fluids... There are many examples of things that make absolutely no sense in the context of older theories. I don't think our theories are the final ones just because we can explain most things that we have observed so far.
Sure I find it hard to imagine how individuals could travel to another galaxy, absent something like usable wormholes. But some kind of giant world moving through space over the span of millions of years, why not?
The point of these discussions is not to find the correct answer about what will happen. It's just fun to dream and imagine the possibilities, precisely because nobody has the answer (and certainly not those who pretend to know what's possible).
(Or randomly and very seldom but often enough in vast interstellar space to give rise to dark matter like phenomenon?)
If I’m talking about a class of things explicitly defined by having attribute X and someone comes in and says “I don’t think that has attribute X”, that’s willfully if ignoring what is being discussed.
Also, don’t give a lecture about making up people’s state of mind and then pretend I think I’m having a heated discussion. It’s not heated, I’m just explaining in the simplest terms possible that there is a class of jokes where the subject does not know a joke is occurring. It just seems heated to you because you don’t like being told you’re missing the point.
If you say these are not changes, only actions, then the same can be said of the Universe: it didn't change, the rules of physics have always been the same, it just does things according to its rules.
I'm not going to pretend I have anything like the math or theoretical physics knowledge to grok the latest perspectives on whether the universe actually had a beginning or an end, or whether it goes through singularities, or any of probably a dozen other theories that I've vaguely heard of and are over my head, never mind all the ones I don't even know about. I'm not aware of any that posit the universe is truly unbound by time, though, that time is not somehow a constraint on the state of the universe such that it doesn't actually change, except from our own perspective. Is that even what you're suggesting? Or have I missed your point entirely?
But this can be done for any system just as well: instead of saying that the egg was broken to make an omlette, you could say that the egg has always been in the same state: the state where it is whole before the omlette, and broken afterwards. The egg itself is a timeless concept, but we just experience it differently as time passes for us. I don't see why this argument works for God and not for my egg.
So from our/Noah's perspective, that situation has come and gone, has changed, because we're bound by physics and the passage of time and cannot exist in that circumstance any longer. But from God's perspective, that world is always destroyed by flood. It may be the case that the criteria that categorize a world as "destroyable by flood" never exist in our experience of time again, and it may equally be the case that God knows this will be the case.
But God's willingness to destroy the world by flood under those criteria has not and will never change, because God's will does not change.