Does Life Exist

[JurijD]

Originally posted by Cirvol:
jurijd, communism didn't fail because of enemies 'abroad and within'...

it failed because it absolutely relies on the 100% trustworthiness of people running the system to not take advantage of it...

since humans are animals, this will not happen

in theory, there is no difference between theory and practice... in practice however, its HUGE

I stated 3 reasons why communism failed. Please read them before you post a reply confirming one of my reasons and saying I´m wrong when you really agree with me

1. human flaws (the reason you put up instead of my other two...)
2. enemies abroad (the western world who was afraid that their greedy capitalist ways would end..)
3. enemies within (stupid leaders who also got greedy)

You could put that up on a sign in the middle of Red square in Moscow and people would shake your hand...

[Taera]

yeah, with fungi lifeforms on it...

[JurijD]

THE SPINNING SHIP PROBLEM:

The 3 problems I saw mentioned here about using rotational inertia to replace gravity were:

1. movements of astronauts *inside* would "distabilize" the ship and cause it to stop rotating properly
2. as humans aren´t a point object as high school physics would like us to believe a thing called the Corelious force develops when you rotate them on the inside of a wheel like structure of a radious not big enough compared to the size of the person inside.
3. even though inertia gives us 1 g and minimum corelious force we still experience muscle atrophy and "back stress"

My thoughts on these:
1. If we look closely at Newtons laws of motion we see that every action as a reaction... so what could be the "worst" disturbance an astronaut could cause to a rotating wheel? The absolute worst would be for him to run in the same direction the wheel is spinning... that way his legs would push the wheel in the opposite direction on the spinning motion and tend to slow it down... but the funny thing is that the moment this astronaut stopped running the wheel would start spinning at the same speed as it did in the beginning because there is a little thing called rotational inertia conservation which states that in any inclosed system (a spaceship and its occupats) the rotational inertia of the whole system cannot be changed by internal forces of the system... you can bounce all you want inside but you won´t change anything.

2. The obvious solution to this issue is to build a wheel that has a radious more than 100x the normal height of a person (heeh... big, yes... very big) althugh this might be impractical and almost impossible to do now it might be in the future... but sadly its the only solution physics offers us for now...

3. I´m pretty sure this is the result of insufficient inertia and persisting differential (Corelious) forces in a wheel not big enough or not spinning fast enough. Because if we had a big wheel with almost no differential forces and a g inertial acceleration at the ouer rim... we would´t be able to set it apart from normal gravity. (it´s not only simulated... it´s exactly the same as normal gravity in all it´s affects... you just have to have a wheel big enough to eliminate the differential forces)

[narf poit chez BOOM]

theologically, i've heard that their are microbes in volcanos. so if god put life there, he probably put it on other planets.

250,000,000,000 planets in our galaxy and something like 300,000 galaxies seems like a great waste of space to me otherwise. i mean 75,000,000,000,000,000 stars, since ours is a medium galaxy...it's not if, it's where.

[ August 09, 2003, 09:32: Message edited by: narf poit chez BOOM ]

[deccan]

Warning: Potentially controversial and offensive material, especially to people with strong religious / spiritual beliefs.

It should be obvious that as a fan of SEIV, MOO, Star Trek, Star Wars etc., I enjoy the idea and fantasy of huge starships moving across interstellar distances. But I have to say that I don't believe that it'll ever be anything more than a fantasy. The immense physical / energy problems is one thing. The economic cost / benefit rationale of such an endeavor is another. But perhaps the most overlooked obstacle to such a vision is that humanity may not stay in its current form for every long.

At the very least, one would expect severe genetic / bionic modifications to function optimally in a spaceship, because the energy costs of genetically / bionically modifying a human being is so much less than the costs of moving a ship at respectable velocities. A good example would be the type of modifications described in the short story "Spirey and the Queen" by ALastair Reynolds. This surely puts paid to the Star Trek vision of future space travel.

But why be so conservative? It's likely that within the near future, we could have fully conscious, fully sentient artificial intelligences. Rather than being wholly alien and hostile, as in "Matrix" or "Terminator", I think that the likeliest scenario would be something similar to Walter Jon Williams' story "Daddy's World" , i.e. they'll just be like us, being our offspring. Once conscious software has fully legal rights, I expect that people will start designing, rearing and interacting with software children instead of biological children. A spaceship carrying conscious software has very notable advantages over one that must carry biological lifeforms. In Greg Egan's "Diaspora" for example, "polises" that are physically only about the size of a shoebox, but containing untold billions of independent software persons in VR environments, multiply backed up and constantly updated with similar units with old-fashioned EM communications, creep across the galaxy.

Instead of sending huge colony ships across the galaxy, how about sending non-intelligent software controlled robots to build the necessary sensory, power, construction and communications infrastructure on distant worlds, and then sending future humans to inhabit them in the form of encoded EM radiation. After all, if materialism is true, then person-hood is nothing but data.

[Atrocities]

If you rule out evolution and the religious factors, what could be some other possibilities for how we came to be on this planet?

I am sorry, I do not believe that we evolved from apes and monkies nor do I believe that we were "POOOOF" created. I think there is truth in both however, but no substantial answers.

If we did develop on this world, then yes it is likely, however remote, that life could develop on other worlds. I Subscribe the theory that we are a unique side effect of a lot of rare occurances that lead to our being. I do not believe that the universe is teaming with life and the evidence to date supports this depressing view.

But if we did not evolve on this planet, and were not magically created by some super being calling itself GOD (Government of Domocracy or General Operations Director) then a whole new avenue of possiblities opens. It is this theory that we came from somewhere else that holds the most hope for imagination and coversation for me.

[JurijD]

Originally posted by Atrocities:
I am sorry, I do not believe that we evolved from apes and monkies nor do I believe that we were "POOOOF" created.

You´re right... humans (Homo Sapiens) didn´t evolve from apes and monkeys but from lower primates. Apes and monkeys have a totally different evolutional branch than modern humans.

But since I get the distinct feeling that you really wanted to say that humans didn´t evolve from lower hominids in the way generally accepted by modern science:


Australopithecus Afarensis --> Australopithecus Africanus --> Homo Habilis --> Homo Ergaster --> (Homo Erectus) --> Homo Heidelbergensis --> Homo Sapiens


but rather came about by some other way... (not by a pooof as you say)... I have to urge you to reconsider because human origins are a most accurately researched field of peleoantrophology and a more recent proof of its correctness is that evolutionary trees drawn up by examining bone reamins and anatomical similarities are in complete agreement with the trees drawn by mDNA analysis and genome compression analysis. It is very very rare that two totally different methods give so very similar results; in affect confirming one another. So the human evolution tree is here to stay. We don´t need any aliens or gods to complete the picture, in reality there is no such thing as a "missing link" so often popularized by the media... we have all the important "links" already, now we just add a few "nodes" to the tree every now and then. but the general structure will only get more detailed and won´t change in any radical way.

P.S.: And for those who think humans are the pinnacle of evolution I have to add that about 1 million years ago there were about 3 different fully developoed humanoid races living on this planet. For the evolutionary line is not a linear thing as I drawn it up there but has many other branches and "tree tops" other than our own. More importantly not one of these other hominid species was better developed than the other, we just got lucky that our ancestors were able to drive the other two off their teritories and push them into extiction.


My Conclusion:
So if you consider our ancestors intelligent (some 1M year ago) than the other two races were also intelligent. So we don´t really have to look out there for signs of alien intelligence, we have a perfect example than it can (and did) happen more than once here on Earth and so I´m pretty sure it also happened somewhere else.


[ August 09, 2003, 13:46: Message edited by: JurijD ]