I recently watched all of Sagan's Cosmos series on Hulu. That was 13 hours well spent. I don't think there was any science in there that I didn't know from astronomy and biology classes, but his enthusiasm for the stuff is really adorable.
I haven't read the Hitchhiker's series since I was 12 or so, but I get a much bigger kick now out of Zaphod watching one of these simulations, intended to crush the soul forever, and realizing that he really is the most important thing in the universe.
I watch things like this and I'm amazed how much more we know about the universe we live in than anyone could have imagined a hundred years ago. Fifty, even.
Then I start to get depressed about how ignorant we still are, which isn't so depressing in itself, except that the process of learning more is so painfully slow.
The two seem a little contradictory.
What 2 said, but I never know what ego-death should mean. Save the world, save a life, go fishing:same difference when we are so insignificant.
Recent stuff I've read says we aren't ever gonna make it to the stars at less than FTL. More than FTL is impossible, say 1/10 Lightspeed takes too much mass energy to accelerate and decelerate. We haven't a clue how to sustain small closed societies for generation starships. Best bet is brains in vats or cyberlife sent in particle beams or something.
My theory as to why we have no contact, real or SETI, is that intelligent species don't last 10,000 years. All the SF is as bullshit as unicorns and dragons.
Shouldn't depress me, but it does. And in this century of SF I think maybe it is depressing the species.
When you have reached Fuck The Llama velocity, you are going very fast indeed.
Charlie Stross posted a thread on his blog, asking people how to sustain small closed societies for generation starships. There were about 500 comments and there were no good ideas, basically. Most of the suggestions were hideously authoritarian or based on a reversion to tribalism or both. Depressing stuff.
Making starships on/from which it's possible to build and launch comparable starships for people who wish to go on their own seems like it might help.
That's not pretty, and it's no powers of ten.
8: I think that's more a reflection of the sort of person who comments at Charlie Stross' blog than the feasibility of generation ship society.
We've been enjoying this Sagan/Sigur Ros thing recently. ("Enjoying" as in, C has made each of the children sit and watch it with him.)
9: And having a computer-controlled alcohol dispensary. You'd need to keep everyone just drunk enough that they didn't panic for sound "I'm 10 light years from any help in a ship built by a people who think American Idol is good TV" reasons, but not drunk enough that they try to have sex or fight on top of vital, fragile machinery.
15: Our babes'll wander naked thru the cities of the universe Cmon: free minds, free bodies, free dope, free music
You'd need to keep everyone just drunk enough that they didn't panic for sound "I'm 10 light years from any help in a ship built by a people who think American Idol is good TV" reasons, but not drunk enough that they try to have sex
I think you may be missing an essential part of the "generation ship" concept here.
17: I was more worried about the kind of sex like got the hooker killed in that one movie with Jeremy Piven. There'd have to be a room with no towel hooks or crucial air cleaning equipment.
I think you may be missing an essential part of the "generation ship" concept here.
If you don't have any other options, it's not incest.
5: The problem is that people are thinking in terms of the stars rather than right here in the solar system. There is no shortage of way cool shit within reach of plain old chemical rockets. The moon is barely explored, Mars is a surprise every time we send a new probe, and there are tens of thousands of asteroids knocking around, some of them closer in energy terms than the moon. The moons of the gas giants are still waiting for landers, the gas giants themselves could stand a few atmospheric probes, and there's all manner freaky ass weirdness out beyond Neptune we are only beginning to get a handle on.
20: Scientist: "These rocks are completely different from the type of rocks we expected."
Everybody else: "Call me when you get to green-skinned babes in tight clothes."
Also 5.3 is pretty much my assumption. If you think about the evolutionary path that leads from single celled life to creatures capable of destroying themselves as a species, there's no point along the way where good judgment about actions that potentially destroy the species becomes critical until the capability is already in hand. Once you have technology at the level needed to be picked up by SETI you have the means to destroy your planet, possibly completely by accident.
Hydroponic gardens and forests
Glistening with lakes in the Jupiter starlite
Room for babies and byzantine dancing astronauts of renown
The magician and the pantechnicon
Take along the farmer and the physician
It's the Byzantine dancing astronauts of renown that make this plan different from all the others.
20 for real. I have never been able to decide which moon of Jupiter is my very favorite, but I distinctly recall that was the moment in ASTR 201 when I got all interplanetarily lusty.
I think the best idea would be to send out one ship with everyone dressed Byzantine-sytle, one with everyone dressed like Vikings, one like the Iroquois, etc.
There are the oceans right here on earth too.
Ecclesiastes was serious when he wrote "nothing new under the sun." Change perceptible in a single lifetime is a novelty for human history.
There is a less apocalyptic explanation for the silence-- a species powerful enough to control the environment can distract itself into lethargy. This is what we are doing now, roughly speaking; science is a rounding-error activity at the margins of society because nobody pays attention. Geoffrey Miller came up with this
"Call me when you get to green-skinned babes in tight clothes."
We don't need to leave the solar system to find green skinned babes in tight clothes. We can dye our own skin green and wear tight clothes right here on Earth!
28: I'm holding out for custom gene therapy that lets me take a pill, go to sleep for a month, and wake up as a green skinned babe. I'll wear tight clothes, I promise. After a few months as a mutant cock tease I'll probably want to try being a spider monkey for a while.
30: They seem to have acne problems.
Re: the movie.
The thing is presented as one long swooping camera motion, but there have to be many real changes of perspective there. The outermost shot of a green sphere is supposed to be a representation of the structure of space time as seen from the outside, literally a view from nowhere. I'm not exactly sure where we are supposed to be imagining ourselves in the famous map with the two cones that represents the observed universe either.
And one more question. Is a sphere a decent representation of the topology of space time in any way. I understand that the universe is closed and unbounded, so that travel in any direction returns you to the same spot. But space time is also flat, no? The last time someone explained this to me, they said there were closed, unbounded, and flat topologies, like the side of a cylinder, but different.
Space-time is shaped more like a pony keg than a perfect cylinder.
The surface of a torus has zero Gaussian curvature and is unbounded but finite.
Whether the space we live in is curved or not is unknown, the measurement is to make inferences from light emitted by very distant objects.
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I'm feeling civically virtuous: I've just drafted, printed, and mailed off a detailed yet concise letter to my Senator as to why he should vote against Bernanke. Better odds with Casey than with Specter, I think.
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35, 36: Printing and mailing is probably wise. If you do e-mail, they send "legislative accomplishment" spam.
Anyway, the both ignored my "You aren't really going to give hundreds of billions to bankers who fucked-up everything without reform first are you, you fucks" e-mail.
Someone here claiming to be a staffer once said that phone calls were the most effective -- phone, then paper mail, then email.
39: I called Specter ~4 years ago about the Patriot Act, but we still have that, so it's on to the Post Office.
Honestly, I wonder why phone calls would be most effective - just as mindlessly multiplying as emails, less substantive and effortful than letters. IIRC, when I called, they just said "You for or against?" and that was it.
Whereas this letter's going to challenge Casey's very thinking on the issue. Man.
OT: If somebody wanted to buy a guitar in Pittsburgh (acoustic, six string), would anybody know where to go?
40: I think the deal is that email is perceived as minimal effort, and so is easily ignored. Phone and paper are both high effort, but paper is processed very slowly.
30: That's no moon, it's a space station.
The outermost shot of a green sphere is supposed to be a representation of the structure of space time as seen from the outside, literally a view from nowhere.
No, it's looking at the CMB temperature anisotropy (magnified by some huge factor and then color-coded) as viewed from Earth. The shape is a sphere because we've mapped it out in all directions relative to where we are.
I understand that the universe is closed and unbounded, so that travel in any direction returns you to the same spot.
There's absolutely no reason to think space has nontrivial topology. It could, but there's no evidence for it so far. (Astronomers literally do things like looking for the same galaxy showing up along more than one line of sight because of weird topology.) So for all we know, you can keep moving in one direction as long as you like without ever coming back to the same spot.
Space is quite flat, at least to within the precision of our best measurements.
41: There's a place on East Carson St. (Pittsburgh Guitars? on the north side of the street on iirc the 1400 block), plus Hollowood Music, which used to be in McKees Rocks but I think isn't anymore.
Astronomers literally do things like looking for the same galaxy showing up along more than one line of sight
Has it happened yet?
46: Thanks. Christmas shopping and all.
45: Huh. Is that a change in thinking in, say, the last twenty years or so? Not that I ever knew much of anything about cosmology, but I'd also vaguely thought that space was known to be curved in some closed kind of way as rob describes.
Has it happened yet?
No. (Hence "absolutely no reason to think space has nontrivial topology".)
"absolutely no reason to think space has nontrivial topology".
This is why Russ Meyer lost interest in science fiction.
45: Huh. Is that a change in thinking in, say, the last twenty years or so? Not that I ever knew much of anything about cosmology, but I'd also vaguely thought that space was known to be curved in some closed kind of way as rob describes.
People used to try to fit the universe to one of three simple options: open, closed, or flat Friedmann-Robertson-Walker (FRW) solutions to general relativity. Space is very flat, so I'm not really sure if there was ever a compelling reason to prefer the closed option. But it was definitely something people talked about. (It was the option that ended in a "Big Crunch", which some early cosmologists preferred for inscrutable aesthetic or philosophical reasons.)
Since the late 90s or so, there's been overwhelming evidence that the 3 simple FRW cosmologies don't describe our universe very well, because our universe has a cosmological constant ("dark energy"). So no one really uses the open/closed/flat classification anymore.
Hey, essear, I just heard about the CDMS result. Is this the thing you'd heard a rumor about? What's your take?
"dark energy"
How can something be energy and dark? Is there now energy that isn't on the spectrum or is there a part of the spectrum that doesn't get to Earth for some reason?
Also, if I'm on an windowless elevator being pulled through space, how do I know if the momentum of the elevator or gravity is holding me to the floor of the elevator? And are the 'Close Door' buttons on elevators actually hooked to anything?
53: Heh. Yes. The rumor started out at "discovery", made everyone go nuts for a while, and then got weaker over the course of the last two weeks. What they see has no statistical significance whatsoever. They now set very strong limits on a scenario ("inelastic dark matter") that was invented to explain why the DAMA experiment at Gran Sasso keeps seeing something when other experiments don't, but there's still a tiny sliver of hope that DAMA is seeing dark matter. Aside from that, it's not all that exciting. If the two events they see really are dark matter, they would tend to point toward a perfectly ordinary, conventional WIMP, not to something weird and unexpected.
Err, 56 was written ambiguously. In "If the two events they see really are dark matter", "they" means CDMS.
There is no dark energy really. As a matter of fact it's all dark.
54 Is there now energy that isn't on the spectrum
"Energy" doesn't mean "light". So, sure, all kinds of things are energy and aren't light. The mass or kinetic energy of an electron, for instance.
59: O.K., but moving electrons aren't "dark." That's how your TV lights up, if you haven't gotten a new TV in the past 5 years.
59: O.K., but moving electrons aren't "dark."
Right, because they're charged -- they can radiate or interact with light. Other things -- neutrons, say -- are pretty dark, because they're neutral, but they still have charged constituents (quarks), so they interact to some extent with light. Dark matter interacts very, very little with light, so it's pretty damned dark. (Hence really hard to find.)
"Dark energy" isn't really a great name, to be honest, so I won't try to defend it in particular.
61: Please feel free to discontinue the impromptu physics lesson, but am I correct in assuming that "dark energy" is just the the kinetic energy of dark matter?
am I correct in assuming that "dark energy" is just the the kinetic energy of dark matter?
No. That's one reason it's a terrible name; the mass and kinetic energy of dark matter are both energy, they're both in some sense "dark", and they are really nothing at all like "dark energy".
63: O.K. I'm going to go back to ignoring physics until it can bring me fusion electricity or aliens with green breasts.
56: Okay, thanks. I realize I'm supposed to be cheering for discovery, but in fact I would really strongly prefer the discovery to be made by the collaboration I'm tied to by marriage. Keeping an eye on the big picture, that's me.
And are the 'Close Door' buttons on elevators actually hooked to anything?
I think here in the States they're just placeholders, but I've been in elevators where the "Close Door" button really does work. All these elevators were in China, and said buttons were used quite aggressively.
66: "No, it's too late for us. I've found somebody new. Somebody with more inelastic dark matter."
68: "Someone who's not such a WIMP all the time."
69: "I'm working on a special theory of relativity. I'm trying to be related to more special people."
So no one really uses the open/closed/flat classification anymore
That's really too bad, because it provided a nice solution to one of Kant's antinomies at the end of the Critique of Pure Reason, where he argues that it is a priori impossible to know if the universe is finite or infinite.
I'm assuming that any shape I might have heard of counts as a "trivial" topology. Am I right?
71: I thought 'trivial topology' means basically flat excepting small local variations.
There's absolutely no reason to think space has nontrivial topology.
Rats. I was holding out for a Moebius bagel universe.
39: Someone here claiming to be a staffer once said that phone calls were the most effective
That may have been me, and it may be applicable only to one office, but: Phone calls get entered into the system right away (and for big issue days, the senior staffers might ask, "which way are the phones leaning today?"). Paper letters reflect some amount of effort, but there's a significant lag for them to get processed (they have to be scanned and then filed). So many of the emails are form letters from online petitions or whatnot, so they get quickly entered and sort of tallied up.
Really, any effort you make to contact the senator is taken into account, though. In the office I worked in, at any rate, they did seem to care.
Really, any effort you make to contact the senator is taken into account, though.
That's basically what my restraining order says.
Hey, whoever you work for, can you persuade them to kick Joe Lieberman in the shins repeatedly?
Unless of course you work for Joe himself. In which case, if you kick him in the shins, I'll crochet you a hat.
And I'll sleep with you.
I believe apo will, as well.
I can offer tips on shin-kicking.
http://www.savateaustralia.com/skills/low_blow.htm
Can't camelids kick pretty fiercely? Can we send Will's llamas to Washington?
45
There's absolutely no reason to think space has nontrivial topology ...
So the big bang doesn't involve starting from a point?
My naive view was the universe was (believed to be) the 3-d equivalent of the surface of an inflating balloon and the open or closed distinction was whether the balloon would keep inflating forever or at some point contract back to a point. Is this all wrong?
Shinkicking is a weak procedural liberal move. What Joe really needs is to be smashed in the mouth with a brick, unanimous consent or no.
It would also be very satisfying to be in an elevator with Lieberman hurrying towards it, him asking in that annoying drone of his for the door to be held, thus giving one the opportunity to ostentatiously mash the working "Close Door" button so the door shuts in his face just as he draws within boarding range.
Followed by cucumber sandwiches at the club.
Mitch, I keep thinking of this scene in Green Card where Andie MacDowell and Gerard Depardieu are in the elevator trying to keep the nosy little old lady Mrs. Byrd. She stuffs her pointy umbrella in the door to stop it from closing. You know that Joe would do the same.
27: Has science ever in human history been anything other than the work of a tiny proportion of people living? If anything, basic education and therefore appreciation for science must be much broader now than it was a few centuries ago. The same excess productive capacity that allows us the leisure to build and enjoy elaborate, resource- and time- intensive entertainments is what allows us to fund science as it, too, has become more resource intensive since the century when you could make foundational discoveries by rolling balls down a slope. There is no a priori reason to think that the fact that the presence of entertainment would interfere with the progress of science in any way and really, if a psychologist is going to get space in a magazine to pontificate, he might try introducing some data to support his assertions. I *strongly* suspect he has none.
The piece is also totally incoherent. He first claims "only a few curmudgeons" lament that people read more and have more kids (leaving unclear whether he's among them). Then he does seem to complain about decline in absolute levels of reproduction: "Our neurons over-stimulate each other, promiscuously, as our sperm and eggs decay, unused." But what does this have to do with whether we search for intelligent life? It's so obvious it hardly needs saying that decline in reproduction is quite localized--and probably largely to places that have the economic resources to do the work of science! What is he talking about? For that matter, is MDMA use *really* a causal factor in *reductions* in unprotected sperm and egg use?
And this, my God:
In 2005, most inventions concern virtual entertainment--the top 10 patent-recipients were IBM, Canon, Hewlett-Packard, Matsushita, Samsung, Micron Technology, Intel, Hitachi, Toshiba and Fujitsu--not Boeing, Toyota or Victoria's Secret.
Does he really think patents by IBM, Micron Technology, and Intel are unrelated to advances in physical sciences? They both stem from and enable advances in the physical sciences! Rather more, I'd say, than airplanes do (some further work on engines that use non-petroleum sources of energy would be nice--but work on technologies that allow collaborative work to proceed with less travel are another way of reducing energy expenditure!). And why on earth should Victoria's Secret be applying for patents?
If anything, one form entertainments take--like the one in the linked post--is superficial but eyecatching illustrations of scientific achievement that make the work of science more accessible to wider segments of the population.
She stuffs her pointy umbrella in the door to stop it from closing. You know that Joe would do the same.
That's when the brick option gets triggered.
66 56: Okay, thanks. I realize I'm supposed to be cheering for discovery, but in fact I would really strongly prefer the discovery to be made by the collaboration I'm tied to by marriage. Keeping an eye on the big picture, that's me.
OMG are you tied to XENON100 by marriage? Can you encode recoil energies in an Unfogged comment if they see something?
essear, drop me an email at the linked address.
85:I completely agree with your argument, cynique -- that article was very silly.
However -- this is just ignorant --
And why on earth should Victoria's Secret be applying for patents?
Are you unaware of the tremendous potential for breakthroughs in bra technology? Is there any area of research more likely to increase the sum of human happiness?
Is there any area of research more likely to increase the sum of human happiness?
Pot crapping dogs. Duh.
Pot crapping dogs. Duh.
New mouseover.
Pot crapping dogs
Good name for a band?
Hey, whoever you work for, can you persuade them to kick Joe Lieberman in the shins repeatedly?
Sadly, I no longer work for them, but I can call and ask, as a constituent, if they'd kick Joe in the shins.
What Joe really needs is to be smashed in the mouth with a brick
Repeatedly, until he can round up 60 votes to make it stop.
Bernanke has been too concerned with preventing the growth of an inflationary universe.
95: This is the problem with you hot-heads on the left. Always letting the perfect be the enemy of the good.
If the intelligent life elsewhere is also more interested in videogames, sonnets, or campaign contributions than in reproduction and exploration, it will remain parochial, hard to discover. This is a possible explanation for reconciling the silence we observe with an expectation of frequent intelligent life esewhere in the universe.
Miller looks at ways that adaptive impulses can lead to nonadaptive behaviors, sometimes more convincingly and sometimes less. He likes flashy topics-- I like reading him anyway. I expect that he would rub most people here the wrong way, since he takes "on the veldt" as a serious premise.
Personally, I think it would be more satisfying to happen upon a stuck elevator with Joe in it, pry the doors open just far enough to see the happy look on his face and then scream into the gap, "Preexisting condition! PREEXISTING CONDITION!"
Also, love the video. My undergraduate Astronomy professor likened the spherical shape of the perceived universe and the fact that everything in the universe seems to be rushing away from us in any direction we look to the perspective of a raisin in a pan of raisin bread. As the loaf is baked, it expands, and to every single raisin it seems that all the other raisins are rushing away from them in all directions.
This same class involved the professor riding around in a little red wagon and at one point a teddy bear on a length of rope being swung in a circle so I suppose caveats apply.
98: "What's the strangest place you've ever made whoopie?"
"Bob, that would be on the veldt."
99: McManly, that made me laugh.
98: There is no logical reason why a paramount interest in reproduction and an interest in exploration are bound, and no logical reason why the same person/e.t. life form cannot both work on science and make some extracurricular time for an occasional sonnet or video game, or why a society cannot divide labor so that some people build spaceships and others write sonnets. Space shuttles for some, miniaturized computer chips in video game consoles for others!
He's right that wealth and leisure make reproduction less attractive. He has neither empirical observation nor deductive argument to suggest that they make exploration less attractive. It's not a convincing explanation--or an explanation at all--if he doesn't mount an argument, and he doesn't.
His moralizing about failure to breed is frankly if anything destructive to ev psych, since its self-styled practitioners like to claim their work is descriptive, not normative.
Since today's DFH is too cowardly to hijack a starship for exploration -- back in my day, Hs walked 9 miles through driving snow for a DF -- the only hope now is overpopulation. And destruction of the earthly biosphere. So yes, reproduction is tied to exploration.
It's funny: he notes that after Hiroshima, it was popular to say that all the space alien civilizations blew themselves up. Then it was popular to say that they all destroyed their environment. Now he's saying they all wasted too much time on the internet. Its like he's not seeing the pattern that shows where is own explanation is coming from, even though, it is staring him in the face.
So yes, reproduction is tied to exploration.
Laydeez.
Are you unaware of the tremendous potential for breakthroughs in bra technology? Is there any area of research more likely to increase the sum of human happiness?
Bra removal methods?
105: And the brain works like a telephone exchange/computer/hologram/network/bagel&lox/ad nauseam.
Bra engineering will more likely result in a breakthrough to true happiness than articles like that.
