The idea that no other place than the earth can possibly develop even the simplest form of life seems to me to be logically untenable.
It is no doubt rare, but I should have thought that the enormous diversity of life that exists on earth points strongly in the direction of life - even the simplest form of it - having the inescapable character of continuing to develop.
I prefer the proposition that life is an inherent part of the Universe - and so must be sentient life.
Not at all, part of the original hypothesis is that single-cell life is extremely common. It appeared on earth just as soon as possible. It’s just complex life that’s rare.
yes yes yes!
That’s the rub. Pretty much everything we consider a thing is unique.
We are awash in a sea of over-generalization.
The good news: Have you met us?
Yes. The part of my comment that you quoted was in response to another comment which in turn was replying to my general comment on the misuse of the Drake equation. Sorry if we got a bit off topic.
I’m saying that unless we can break the laws of physics the trip will always be grossy uneconomical. And I mean that in the most general sense: the resources required could be put to far better uses.
Mars colonies have a similar but less extreme problem. They’re basically in the same boat as McMurdo station in the Antarctic: A place for a handful of researchers to survive as long as they’re sent regular supplies.
Once you have the fully independent self sustaining subterranean living habitat technology you can just use it on Earth and avoid the complications of doing it on another planet.
There’s something wrong with that logic. Eagles can fly anywhere, at least anywhere in the continent. So eagles must not exist, because if they did, some would be living in my yard, right? For that matter, if you existed, and could travel and open doors, you’d be here in this room with me right now, therefore you must not exist either, right?
This seems rather unlikely. I tried using an OTA TV antenna a few years ago and despite living in a populous area with several stations, the signals were few and weak compared to what they were years ago (before digital TV signals). A bluetooth signal doesn’t reach to the driveway and WIFI barely to the end of it if you’re lucky. I can’t imagine that normal radio and TV broadcast signals would reach far into space without attenuating so much as to be garbage. I suppose the static we see/hear on off-channels could be alien broadcasts, but we wouldn’t know because it just looks and sounds like random static.
I mean that the constraints of being biological are irrelevant in the long term. Possibly even within a couple of millennia ,nothing in the big picture , we could have engineered machines that could travel the universe unhindered by “regular supplies”, “extreme” conditions. long time spans etc. This is what will be travelling the universe. Not limited biological organically evolved creatures.
Well yeah. Except somebody won the lotto just the other day.
I am always a little bemused by the folks averse to the great technological filter… to the idea of a technological ceiling in terms of interstellar travel. My hunch is that neither faster than light, nor relativistic transit of humans are possible in this universe, and that von Neuman probes are ridiculously fragile in the harsh realities of the interstellar medium over interstellar transit distances and times. I love reading science fiction, was weaned on Star Trek and all that, but these tiny motes in space called stars are very far apart.
Or directed folks to Cixin Liu’s ‘dark forest’ theory in the eponymous sequel to The Three Body Problem?
I get what you’re saying, but isn’t it the same argument as Intelligent Design?
“This is so complicated it can’t have just happened” isn’t very far from “this is so complicated it can’t happen anywhere else”.
Such exposition presupposes that human intelligence is an accurate measure of emergent complexity, which seems like pretty circular reasoning to me since human intelligence is the measure of the quality of the argument.
Yeah, well, causality has it coming.
Interesting that you go straight to blaming the unions.
Read the article and then get back to me.
An accountant discovered the discrepancy while reviewing the budget for new train platforms under Grand Central Terminal in Manhattan.
The budget showed that 900 workers were being paid to dig caverns for the platforms as part of a 3.5-mile tunnel connecting the historic station to the Long Island Rail Road. But the accountant could only identify about 700 jobs that needed to be done, according to three project supervisors. Officials could not find any reason for the other 200 people to be there.
“Nobody knew what those people were doing, if they were doing anything,” said Michael Horodniceanu, who was then the head of construction at the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, which runs transit in New York. The workers were laid off, Mr. Horodniceanu said, but no one figured out how long they had been employed. “All we knew is they were each being paid about $1,000 every day.”
Exactly! And how many folks /didn’t/ win?
Not seeing any fault with the union here.
Did you actually read the article? That would be damn fast, it’s quite long. The cost plus contractor and the unions negotiate the contract, with the state, who pays, not at the table. The union requires people staffing obsolete posts like “oiler”, just because.
