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  • dpsloss88dpsloss88 Member Posts: 765 Arc User
    edited December 2014
    If we can barely get into orbit now what makes you think we ever landed on the moon? The logic of the people denying the moon landing has some pretty strong evidence, primarily the size of computer it would have taken to land on a .16 G planetoid with no atmosphere for a maneuvering buffer and the lack of fuel tanks it would have taken for it to escape the moon.
  • onehalfklingononehalfklingon Member Posts: 106 Arc User
    edited December 2014
    The Troll is strong with this one. Or he's dangerously ignorant. Either way...
  • lordkhoraklordkhorak Member Posts: 0 Arc User
    edited December 2014
    Anyone who thinks we had, or have, the ability to obliterate ourselves with nuclear weapons even during the most heavily armed height of the Cold War is buying into the ignorant hysteria. The end of civilisation as WE know it (presuming everyone here is in a modern society and not inexplicably on a computer in a mud hut)? Without any doubt. Extinction of the species? Absolutely no chance whatsoever.

    Nuclear winter, even in the worst, and later re-evaluated as rather erroneous, hypotheses is not an unsurvivable ice age. All predictions regarding the devastating effects of nuclear winter following an all-out nuclear exchange is from the point of view of maintaining or rebuilding civilisation as we currently know it in any sort of time frame that we, personally, would consider acceptable. It simply wouldn't have been possible to destroy the species. Scenarios for nuclear war often involved also launching upon other powerful nations even if they were not involved in the exchange, simply to prevent them being able to swoop in and take over what was left of the primary combatants.

    The nuclear age is in absolutely no way the great filter....at least when it comes to humans. Perhaps we are more hardy than other species. Regardless, nuclear war, even at its worst, had absolutely zero chance of destroying humanity, and thus acting as the Great Filter that would ultimately end our species.

    Hell, the biggest nuclear exchange we could possibly manage at our very best wouldn't even manage to destroy civilisation as a whole, let alone put the species in existential crisis.
    [SIGPIC][/SIGPIC]
  • dpsloss88dpsloss88 Member Posts: 765 Arc User
    edited December 2014
    lordkhorak wrote: »
    Anyone who thinks we had, or have, the ability to obliterate ourselves with nuclear weapons even during the most heavily armed height of the Cold War is buying into the ignorant hysteria. The end of civilisation as WE know it (presuming everyone here is in a modern society and not inexplicably on a computer in a mud hut)? Without any doubt. Extinction of the species? Absolutely no chance whatsoever.

    Nuclear winter, even in the worst, and later re-evaluated as rather erroneous, hypotheses is not an unsurvivable ice age. All predictions regarding the devastating effects of nuclear winter following an all-out nuclear exchange is from the point of view of maintaining or rebuilding civilisation as we currently know it in any sort of time frame that we, personally, would consider acceptable. It simply wouldn't have been possible to destroy the species. Scenarios for nuclear war often involved also launching upon other powerful nations even if they were not involved in the exchange, simply to prevent them being able to swoop in and take over what was left of the primary combatants.

    The nuclear age is in absolutely no way the great filter....at least when it comes to humans. Perhaps we are more hardy than other species. Regardless, nuclear war, even at its worst, had absolutely zero chance of destroying humanity, and thus acting as the Great Filter that would ultimately end our species.

    Hell, the biggest nuclear exchange we could possibly manage at our very best wouldn't even manage to destroy civilisation as a whole, let alone put the species in existential crisis.

    You are really living in denial. Whole galaxies are being destroyed. This planet is nothing more than a snow globe in a tornado. Eventually its going to go splat. Space within this galaxy is a very dangerous place full of big explosions and very hot gamma bursts. The human population was down to just 10,000 70,000 years ago. You can't get much closer to extinction than that and come back. Toba Catastrophe, look it up, though I doubt it was the volcano that wiped out the human race because of the lack of other species extinction.
  • slabbaconslabbacon Member Posts: 0 Arc User
    edited December 2014
    Once something is shown to be possible it can be. Solar sail can achieve 0.2 Perhaps 0.3 or higher. We will see this within 50 years.

    matter antimatter is a ways in the future. the cost of making antimatter has to come down. I think we will have this within 100 years, along with the engineering problem of controlling and containing it.

    It will take some commitment and desire from the world. We have shown some of this with large hadron. We need much more of this and to begin to move beyond nationalism. We'll see!

    good luck, to even get to antimatter state, we should try to figure out fusion first. and at this rate, we might be lucky to figure this out in the next 100 years according to this http://imgur.com/sjH5r
  • charononuscharononus Member Posts: 5,736 Arc User
    edited December 2014
    slabbacon wrote: »
    good luck, to even get to antimatter state, we should try to figure out fusion first. and at this rate, we might be lucky to figure this out in the next 100 years according to this http://imgur.com/sjH5r

    From what I can see that's US governmental funding only. Thankfully there is more than this country on planet Earth.
  • fmgtorres1979fmgtorres1979 Member Posts: 1,327 Arc User
    edited December 2014
    You know I was just thinking to myself yesterday about how all of humanity's strife is utterly irrelevant and insignificant in the grand scheme of the cosmos, and yet at our own level it's always presented as stupidly important. Nobody alive today knows who Phil the cave man was, or anything about his life or struggles or accomplishments, and 99.999999% of those alive today don't care who Phil the cave man was. Fast forward a few generations and we will all be Phil. Nobody will know or care who I was, or you were, unless one of us changes the world like Newton, or Genghis Khan, or Lincoln. We are all irrelevant specks on an irrelevant speck orbiting another irrelevant speck.

    -edit-

    If we're lucky and we don't annihilate ourselves at some future point, and doing succumb to a natural calamity like a gamma ray burst or asteroid, or get annihilated by alien intelligent life, some of us alive today might become part of the singularity and get immortal computer brains and live to see type II or III.


    I really don't like clich
  • edited December 2014
    This content has been removed.
  • tigrovaya13akulatigrovaya13akula Member Posts: 151 Arc User
    edited December 2014
    The terms Dyson Sphere and Shell can be a bit confusing - what STO and Star Trek depicts as Sphere is technically a Dyson Shell, and it's probably very impractical. For example - you may want to build a habitable interior surface - but that would require actually installing some form of artificial/simulated gravity because the shell itself will not provide you with a gravity force field pointed in the right direction.

    A Sphere just requires a lot of satellites placed around the sun to collect the sun's energy.





    I think the problem with a Dyson Shell instead of a Dyson Sphere is that the shell requires more building materials than even exists in a star system. So by the time you try to build it, you will need to be able to get materials from other star systems.

    If FTL travel isn't possible, such an endeavour would take decades and centuries. And that's even assuming that there are cost-efficient ways to get close to the speed of light. If we're stuck with speeds like the Voyager or our fastest probes could achieve, it might take millions of year. That's a project of a magnitude that is way beyond anything we can really imagine, it would take longer than our own existence on Earth.





    I think a future of that still beats a future of apes slinging sh*t, lions hunting antilopes and whales swallowing plankton or whatever. At least I know that humans sometimes try to find a purpose for their existence and seek to understand the Universe. Even if it's not everyone and all the time, and we're failing a lot.

    This reminds me of 2 of Larry Niven's novels: Dyson Sphere and Ringworld; and a quote mentioned in Ringworld and a scientific opinion I've read before -

    "Any civilization that is sufficiently advanced to actually build a feasible, working Dyson Shell ... Doesn't need to."
  • ashlotteashlotte Member Posts: 316 Arc User
    edited December 2014
    I spent hours studying this thanks to your link... I am in love with these theories. Even makes the world's religions some sort of... credence yet not disregarding evolution with the theory of Type IV~VI civilizations being possibilities.

    Also, I see your link and raise you : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kw8dcb8iKSM. Michio Kaku On Aliens On Physics~
  • mustrumridcully0mustrumridcully0 Member Posts: 12,963 Arc User
    edited December 2014
    At some point in history most people must have thought that running would be the fastest anyone could get anywhere. Then it would be riding an horse. And so on...
    Today we impose light speed to ourselves for comfort and "keeping it real" and scientific.
    Maybe the question won't even be an issue as we may well one day discover a completely different type of travel that doesn't use a scale of speed to happen.
    At that point in history, there were people that nbelieved they needed blood sacrifices so the sun would go up the next day.

    I hate to claim exceptionalism or anything, but today we're a lot less ignorant about the universe and understand a lot more about it. We actually have models that make accurate predictions.
    Whether you sacrificed something or not, the sun would go up, but if you ignore Einstein's relativity theory, your GPS doesn't work anymore.

    And those hypothetical humans that thought "fast running is as fast as it gets" - did they never encounter other animals that could move faster than them? I doubt that.
    People that thought human flight was not possible at least could see birds and insects that fly - so they knew that flight itself wasn't impossible, they just couldn't think of a way how to make humans fly, too.

    But we don't see anything moving faster than light.
    Star Trek Online Advancement: You start with lowbie gear, you end with Lobi gear.
  • mosul33mosul33 Member Posts: 836 Arc User
    edited December 2014
    ashlotte wrote: »
    I spent hours studying this thanks to your link... I am in love with these theories. Even makes the world's religions some sort of... credence yet not disregarding evolution with the theory of Type IV~VI civilizations being possibilities.

    Also, I see your link and raise you : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kw8dcb8iKSM. Michio Kaku On Aliens On Physics~

    Thanks for that link. More sciency awesome stuff :)
    But we don't see anything moving faster than light.

    But thats the thing, it doesnt matter. If you dont see it, it doesnt mean it doesnt exist. As mister Michio Kaku soo well said, now with quantum mechanics in equation, all bets are off. Look at quantum entanglement for exemple. The information DOES TRAVELS FASTER THEN LIGHT. You may not see it and its not a "thing", but it still travels faster then light.
    Everything starts to matter from what point of view you are seeing it. Like even those Fermi Paradox or Dyson Shell/Sphere or even the classification of type 2 and 3 civilizations.
    For Fermi Paradox check that video and see how its dismissed.
    Dyson Sphere/Shell designs are allready pretty old and where "invented" with newtonian mechanics in mind. But new technologies and knowledge are in place, thus with a new mind set, its starts to became doable or even obsolete just by taking in consideration nanite technology or zero point energy, wich would make harversting sun's energy pointless.
    And same with the civilization clasification. Why would you want to gather energy from solar system or even a galaxy when other types of extracting energy may prove far more efficient...
    All this is like, lets say a dreaming enginner around 1800-1900, when lots of great enginner projects were done (skyscrapers, bridges, Eifel tower etc), thought to make a huge bridge between Europe and American continents. An interesting but utopian project at that time, and maybe (huge maybe) doable today, but most importantly useless today when planes can get you faster and safer between those 2 continents.
  • mustrumridcully0mustrumridcully0 Member Posts: 12,963 Arc User
    edited December 2014
    mosul33 wrote: »
    Thanks for that link. More sciency awesome stuff :)



    But thats the thing, it doesnt matter. If you dont see it, it doesnt mean it doesnt exist. As mister Michio Kaku soo well said, now with quantum mechanics in equation, all bets are off. Look at quantum entanglement for exemple. The information DOES TRAVELS FASTER THEN LIGHT. You may not see it and its not a "thing", but it still travels faster then light.
    No, it does not. Read up on quantum entanglement. While the effect may seem faster than light, you cannot actually exchange information without using a signal that moves at the speed of light.
    Star Trek Online Advancement: You start with lowbie gear, you end with Lobi gear.
  • mosul33mosul33 Member Posts: 836 Arc User
    edited December 2014
    No, it does not. Read up on quantum entanglement. While the effect may seem faster than light, you cannot actually exchange information without using a signal that moves at the speed of light.

    Yes, you are right, classical information:P. I ment information as in its own state of entanglement. But that is happening faster then speed of light. And its still a new field of research and lots of promising experiments have been done in past years.
  • fiberteksyfirfiberteksyfir Member Posts: 1,207 Arc User
    edited December 2014
    You know I was just thinking to myself yesterday about how all of humanity's strife is utterly irrelevant and insignificant in the grand scheme of the cosmos, and yet at our own level it's always presented as stupidly important. Nobody alive today knows who Phil the cave man was, or anything about his life or struggles or accomplishments, and 99.999999% of those alive today don't care who Phil the cave man was. Fast forward a few generations and we will all be Phil. Nobody will know or care who I was, or you were, unless one of us changes the world like Newton, or Genghis Khan, or Lincoln. We are all irrelevant specks on an irrelevant speck orbiting another irrelevant speck.

    -edit-

    If we're lucky and we don't annihilate ourselves at some future point, and doing succumb to a natural calamity like a gamma ray burst or asteroid, or get annihilated by alien intelligent life, some of us alive today might become part of the singularity and get immortal computer brains and live to see type II or III.


    To quote a great man, we are all riding the cosmos on our tiny,blue dot
  • mustrumridcully0mustrumridcully0 Member Posts: 12,963 Arc User
    edited December 2014
    mosul33 wrote: »
    Yes, you are right, classical information:P. I ment information as in its own state of entanglement. But that is happening faster then speed of light. And its still a new field of research and lots of promising experiments have been done in past years.
    Well, what other kind of information is there?

    While it seems strange and all, the basic principle is - you make two "things" to something so one of the two things is either in state A or state B, and the other must have the opposite state. But you don't know what the state is on either of the two things. But once you measure the state of one of them, you know what the other's state will be in. But... if you send these two things in two different directions, you still send them no faster than the speed of light. You can't entangle stuff at distance. And then, when you measure one of the two things, you can tell someone on the other end what the state of the other will be - but to tell him, you still need to send a signal - which is limited by the speed of light. The real value here is more in quantum computing (knowing the state of an object without measuring it and by measuring it, altering the object again) then communication or transportation.
    Star Trek Online Advancement: You start with lowbie gear, you end with Lobi gear.
  • oldravenman3025oldravenman3025 Member Posts: 1,892 Arc User
    edited December 2014
    dpsloss88 wrote: »
    You are really living in denial. Whole galaxies are being destroyed. This planet is nothing more than a snow globe in a tornado. Eventually its going to go splat. Space within this galaxy is a very dangerous place full of big explosions and very hot gamma bursts. The human population was down to just 10,000 70,000 years ago. You can't get much closer to extinction than that and come back. Toba Catastrophe, look it up, though I doubt it was the volcano that wiped out the human race because of the lack of other species extinction.




    No, he's actually speaking the truth.


    So called "ELES" are, in large part, what novelist Dean Koontz called "scientific scares". Every decade/generation has a pet one combined with a few smaller ones. It tends to get overblown to the point of ridiculousness, when in fact, they tend to be remote possibilities with astronomical odds of ever happening. They can range from the small (Killer Bee invasion of the United States) to the large (Asteroid strike wiping out Humanity).


    Yes, the Human race was knocked back to low levels 70,000 years ago according to one theory that's currently in vogue. But Man bounced back from that with the primitive understanding and tools of the day. Modern man, despite reliance on civilization, has advantages that early man didn't.


    Modern man will not become extinct by any means short of something that completely obliterates the planet as a whole. We are an adaptive species with too many evolutionary advantages over most others to be killed off by the small stuff that science predicts could wipe us out. Our numbers would be reduced, and our technological level could be knocked back centuries, but we would bounce back over time.
  • fmgtorres1979fmgtorres1979 Member Posts: 1,327 Arc User
    edited January 2015
    At that point in history, there were people that nbelieved they needed blood sacrifices so the sun would go up the next day.

    I hate to claim exceptionalism or anything, but today we're a lot less ignorant about the universe and understand a lot more about it. We actually have models that make accurate predictions.
    Whether you sacrificed something or not, the sun would go up, but if you ignore Einstein's relativity theory, your GPS doesn't work anymore.

    And those hypothetical humans that thought "fast running is as fast as it gets" - did they never encounter other animals that could move faster than them? I doubt that.
    People that thought human flight was not possible at least could see birds and insects that fly - so they knew that flight itself wasn't impossible, they just couldn't think of a way how to make humans fly, too.

    But we don't see anything moving faster than light.
    You still have a lot of people that believe in the most ridiculous things. Even today people who believe in a single God look down on those who believed in several, and people (some) who don't believe in God look down on those who do. We are less ignorant to a degree but we become victims of our own perspective in believing we know so much more. In every era people think they are way better than those "idiots" that came before and that they are at the apex of knowledge. Then time passes, and it's the same story again and again.

    What if things faster than light can not be seen? What if in order to travel "faster than light" you need to cross different dimensions? How would you expect to see that in your day to day?

    But I am not saying you aren't correct. What you said is a possibility. Still, what I am saying is that time and time again the impossible is pretty possible and then common when enough time passes and we discover new things.
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