The Vent and Rant Thread

[GeoffC]

Originally Posted by devilsadvocate

There is also a ridiculous number of stupid people in the world.

Coincidence?

I hate to take a page from Recluse's book but really, we're apes with gunpowder. Seriously. Planet Earth is the Milky Way's version of a bad neighborhood:

Alien 1: "See that planet over there?"
Alien 2: "The blue one?"
Alien 1: "Yeah that's the one. Don't go there."
Alien 2: "Why's that?"
Alien 1: "They poison their own planet, kill each other over religion, and blow $&%# up for fun."
Alien 2: "Really? Why would anyone want to do that?"
Alien 1: "Beats me, but remember some of them are looking for us, too."
Alien 2: "Forget I asked."

That's why SETI has not found them ... they're all running away ....

[kennyc]

Originally Posted by GeoffC

That's why SETI has not found them ... they're all running away ....

Yeah, they've seen the Quentin Tarantino movies.....

[desertblues]

Originally Posted by kennyc

Yeah, they've seen the Quentin Tarantino movies.....

They run away, all humming and searching for the 'Little green bag' from Tarantino's movie

[devilsadvocate]

Originally Posted by GeoffC

That's why SETI has not found them ... they're all running away ....

I'm totally of the opinion that if intelligent life exists elsewhere which is capable of the interstellar travel required to get here, they are not only not visiting us à la Roswell, but they are likely doing their level best to stay the hell away from us.

Either that or, y'know, Independence Day.

[Freeshadow]

rather the ID scenario
keeping in mind how huge the distances are, I believe that all the effort needed to arrive at a different habitable system would only be undertaken if someones own habitat is completely fubar.

SETI - hmm just think about it:
they listened for that long time. the hardware's still there. so no new construction cost. with the distributed software and volounteering geeks they finally got an automatically improving supercomputer for analysis since people running the client byu new and faster computers from time to time.
and they STOP.

I think they stopped because they finally got somethink decipherable - and don't like it.

[devilsadvocate]

Originally Posted by Freeshadow

rather the ID scenario
keeping in mind how huge the distances are, I believe that all the effort needed to arrive at a different habitable system would only be undertaken if someones own habitat is completely fubar.

More to the point, if they were that advanced what use would they have for us?

Originally Posted by Freeshadow

SETI - hmm just think about it:
they listened for that long time. the hardware's still there. so no new construction cost. with the distributed software and volounteering geeks they finally got an automatically improving supercomputer for analysis since people running the client byu new and faster computers from time to time.
and they STOP.

I think they stopped because they finally got somethink decipherable - and don't like it.

Still going last time I looked...http://setiathome.berkeley.edu/

Got some hardware issues but everyone does now and again.

[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by GeoffC

That's why SETI has not found them ... they're all running away ....

The question is known as the Fermi Paradox. If there is intelligent life out there, where are they? They should have left traces we can see.

One novel solution I encountered suggested that intelligence was a temporary state. It evolved to handle environments that changed too rapidly for reflex responses to be adequate for survival, and may go away when that's no longer the case. Consider a species for whom quantum physics has become something handled by reflex. You might have a space faring civilization that is not intelligent as we use the term.

In SF, David Brin's Uplift series had a novel take: we didn't see them because Earth was in a section of the galaxy deliberately left to lie fallow by an intergalactic civilization, to encourage the development of species that might become sentient. In Brin's universe, the very first intelligent species to evolve in the local cluster were the Progenitors, billions of years ago. They developed FTL travel, went looking for other intelligent species, and found none because they were the first. They did find some species which could become sentient, with a little help which the Progenitors provided. The Progenitors disappeared, but their legacy lives on.

They started the tradition of Uplift, which at the time of the stories are the closest thing to a religion the galactic civilization has. When humanity encounters them, there is an intergalactic civilization spanning five galaxies, and every one of the thousands of sentient species has been Uplifted by a Patron, owing the Patron 10,000 years of indentured servitude in payment. Status in the galaxies is measured in part by how many client races your species has uplifted. Many species believe the Progenitors will someday return, and seek to mold the galaxies in the form they believe the Progenitors desired to see.

Along comes humanity, surprising everyone, and we've independently raised chimps and dolphins to sentience, with instant status. We don't seem to have had a Patron, which is anathema to half the galactic clans, who believe achieving sentience unassisted is a holy act only the sainted Progenitors could achieve. But if we had a Patron, they dropped the job in the middle and left. This is anathema to the other half of galactic civilization, for whom Uplift is a sacred responsibility you do not abandon.

So half of the galactic clans want us extinct on general principle, and the other half think we need 10,000 years of seasoning as someone's client species - preferably theirs. Meanwhile, a Dolphin crewed exploration ship may have found what happened to the Progenitors. Fun.
______
Dennis

[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by devilsadvocate

More to the point, if they were that advanced what use would they have for us?

That's roughly the question I have for the UFO bugs. What's so important about us that a species who could do so would bother to pay us a visit? Frankly, nothing.

Still going last time I looked...http://setiathome.berkeley.edu/

Got some hardware issues but everyone does now and again.

I don't think the program needs to find anything to be valid.

It accomplishes two principal things:

First, it validates the computing model. If you have enormous amounts of data to process, but it isn't time critical, breaking it up into small chunks and passing it around to be worked on in otherwise unused CPU cycles by many thousands of client machines is a good way to handle it.

The model is now being applied to other kinds of computation, like protein folding.

Second, it narrows the search area, and identifies areas to not bother looking at, helping narrow the possibilities.
______
Dennis

[dsvick]

Originally Posted by DMcCunney

In SF, David Brin's Uplift series had a novel take: ... Fun.
______
Dennis

Thanks Dennis, I like his books, but hadn't heard of these. Great synopsis, I know what books I'm adding to my list!!

[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by dsvick

Thanks Dennis, I like his books, but hadn't heard of these. Great synopsis, I know what books I'm adding to my list!!

You'll enjoy them, I think.

Brin loves to play with concepts. Like, he assumes that if it's possible to go FTL at all, there's more than one way to do it, and different species use different methods. For instance, the Tandu have a Client species called Episiarchs, who are bred for psi powers. A Tandu ship gets around because the Episiarch "pilot" denies the ship is in its current location so strongly that space warps around it, and Poof! The ship reappears somewhere else. Sometimes a Tandu ship goes Poof! and doesn't reappear, so other races don't use that method, but the Tandu are willing to accept the trade-off.

In a later book, we get introduced to a curious level of hyperspace, where it's possible to thoughts to exist, independent of minds to think them.

We also encounter life forms that breathe hydrogen instead of oxygen, and machine civilizations, with some really old entities that are the next thing to gods.

As mentioned, fun. The first three in internal chronology are _Sundiver_, _Startide Rising_, and _The Uplift War_, with several more following.
______
Dennis

[WT Sharpe]

Originally Posted by DMcCunney

That's roughly the question I have for the UFO bugs. What's so important about us that a species who could do so would bother to pay us a visit? Frankly, nothing.

It does seem they'd need a better reason than just enslaving Sasquatches, impregnating Earth women, and making pretty symbols in farmer's fields to risk interstellar travel.

[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by WT Sharpe

It does seem they'd need a better reason than just enslaving Sasquatches, impregnating Earth women, and making pretty symbols in farmer's fields to risk interstellar travel.

An old friend of mine was a UFO bug. He believed in things like Area 51, and that there were Things The Government Wasn't Telling Us.

After listening to him go on about it, I thought "You know, if we had been visited by UFOs, and I was the government official responsible for determining the policy we would take regarding it, I might just decide on a cover up, and the reason would be people like you..."
______
Dennis

[happy_terd]

All of nature is violent. why would outer space life be any different?

[pholy]

As mentioned, fun. The first three in internal chronology are _Sundiver_, _Startide Rising_, and _The Uplift War_, with several more following.

Thank you, DMcCunney, for pointing out these books which do not seem to be available a ebooks. THANK YOU VERY MUCH
rumble, rumble, mutter, mutter

6th of 6 on my library's hold list for Pbook
edit: mutter, mutter library book is missing ...
order from UK used books seller

[TGS]

Sometimes newspapers make me angry. In the UK a young woman was murdered just before Christmas and a man has just been charged with her killing. The Daily Telegraph, reporting the story, said this, (my emphasis):

Vincent Tabak, 32, a Dutch national, who lived next door to Miss Yeates in the Clifton area of Bristol, will appear before the city’s Magistrates Court on Monday charged with murdering the 25-year-old landscape architect.

He was arrested in the early hours of Thursday morning following a month long police investigation.

Detectives questioned the former PhD student for three days before announcing he had been charged with her murder on Saturday night.

David and Theresa Yeates yesterday expressed their relief following the latest development in the case and said they want to face Tabak in court when he appears.

Speaking from their £600,000 home in Ampsfield, Hants, Mr Yeates, 63, an IT professional said: "We don't yet know if we will go to Magistrates' Court…but we do want to see Vincent Tabak sometime.

What I want to know is WTF the value of the young woman's parent's house has got to do with anything - why is it necessary to included that in the report?