OT: Earth from a billion miles away

** The really cool thing is that, far as we know, WE are the only life forms in the universe that can do this.

Plus build neat spacecraft to take enormous range selfies and send them back.

Pointless BS is your speciality.

.... Phil

rms in the universe that can do this.

ack.

There's nothing particularly cool about not knowing whether we are the only life forms in the universe with a selfie-taking capacity.

Being in a position to speculate about whether there are other life forms w ho might have the technical capacity to do it, and the kind of pigmy intell ect that might bother, is definitely a step up from the slime mould, but we 'll probably need another billion years of evolution to get to the next run g on the ladder - though the next cell in the web is probably a safer analo gy, granting that evolution doesn't have a clue where it is going.

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Bill Sloman, Sydney

One of the topics we seem to have heated arguments over is just how to preserve the resources of this dot while living our lives. There is a spectrum of thought from one extreme to the other, but the part that is most interesting is the vehemence with which the views are held. It is an issue that clearly has no 100% correct answer and yet so many feel they are perfectly right.

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Rick C

** FFS Bill, my post was not about selfies. It was about the fact we are intelligent beings with advanced technology - AND the only ones known to exist.

Anyone who rates that of little importance is incapable of comprehending the value of anything.

The CD troll is one such - but you too ?

..... Phil

- AND the only ones known to exist.

the value of anything.

I was merely observing that with more advanced technology we'd probably be able to detect the existence of other intelligent beings with equally advan ced technology. The odds are that they exist, though clearly not within cur rent detection range. Presumably there are a lot more technologies to maste r, so that other intelligent beings with even more advanced technologies - gods from our point of view - are marginally more likely to exist.

With any luck they won't share the egocentric drives that prompt us to take selfies, or organise welcome-wagons.

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Bill Sloman, Sydney

Well as they say "It's a small world".

The odds are that they *existed*.

Extrapolating from a sample of one, it's apparent that civilization kills planets.

Because we don't have telescopes that can see through time to *when* they existed.

Clifford Heath.

eings with equally advanced technology.

It hasn't killed this one yet, and the planet survived the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal maximum 56 million years ago. The greenhouse gas pulse that pushed up the temperature then may have been a little slower developing than the one we are driving, but it was pretty quick by geological standards.

It's not altogether clear that anthropogenic global warming is going to be enough to destroy our civilisation. Ten metres of sea level rise is going t o be inconvenient, and the climate change may well produce a population cra sh, but it may merely be bad enough to frighten the survivors into being mo re careful.

We can see back to within a few million years after the big bang - those st ars are long way away. The Andromeda galaxy is 2.5 million light years away , so any information we get from there is 2.5 million years out of date.

The hypothesis that every civilisation is inherently self-destructive is cl early testable, but we haven't got any observational evidence yet, and the current experiment has yet to produce a result.

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Bill Sloman, Sydney

Dot is nice..

No, that is "dot-less", not "point-less">

A belief, and complete fallacy, often repeated. There is no basis to go on as to what the odds are - for or against - as we have little idea (but endless speculation) as to how life started on earth. For example, did it start with a couple of molecules coming together followed by a few more, then more after that? Or did it start with the most extraordinarily rare event of a dozen molecules being together in the right place at the right time, at the right temperature, with a hint of noble-metal induced catalysis, activated by a burst of UV of just the right frequency to result in a stable combination? Something which may

*never* occur again in the lifetime of this and any other universe. Or maybe it was something else even rarer?

And even then, having created "life", what are the conditions for it to be sustained? The first molecule of "life" subjected immediately after formation, to ionising radiation, free radicals, low pH, or something equally destructive, would mean the end of life.

And if it survives that, it needs to develop, and become intelligent enough not to destroy itself.

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Jeff

Estimated 20,000,000,000,000,000,000 planets in our universe. Just sayin.

Greg

Note that I said "kills planets", not "kills itself".

We've done (and will do) much more long-term harms than AGW. If it kills our civilisation to the degree that it takes ten million years for another one to start to emit EMI for a century or two, that's still a pretty intermittent signal. The next contenders won't have 500 million years of coal to help them get started either.

Right, but for a given distance, we can only see one time. We can't see Andromeda 3.5 million years ago, for example, when perhaps the intelligent life there was looking for us.

ion range.

You can work out - or a least approximate with useful accuracy - the parti tion function of any arbitrary collection of atoms that you like.

The favoured route for the origin of life is RNA catalysed RNA synthesis

It seems plausible enough, and not all that improbable. We know that life o f some kind existed on earth pretty much as early as the planetary surface was cool enough to let it survive, so the odds are that other planets will do as well.

So what? Random chemical interactions are going to keep on happening.

Evolution - imperfect copying with selection - does tend to fill all the ec ological niches available, and invent a few new niches as new abilities get generated. Intelligence, on its own, doesn't seem to be all that useful, b ut coupled with tool-making and good communications could provide a reprodu ctive advantage - which is one way of explaining the Flynn Effect.

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Bill Sloman, Sydney

beings with equally advanced technology.

cene Thermal maximum 56 million years ago. The greenhouse gas pulse that pu shed up the temperature then may have been a little slower developing than the one we are driving, but it was pretty quick by geological standards.

be enough to destroy our civilisation.

You did. It was - to put it kindly - hyperbole, and you seem to have missed the point that I was jeering at your fatuous exaggeration.

te

re

Don't be silly. There's a lot of planet, and we can only get at thin layer on the surface.

Our industrialisation got started with wind-mills. There nothing magic abou t steam power, nor anything magic about burning coal to drive machinery. Wo od works fine. There's not as much of it about, so subsequent civilisations will have to start off being more frugal about energy use.

e stars are long way away.

n we get from there is 2.5 million years out of date.

My suspicion is that genuinely intelligent life - and we clearly haven't go t there yet - will work out how to stick around for geological periods.

We haven't been advertising ourselves for all that long, and not in way tha t would attract visitors expecting to learn anything from us.

What kind of message would you send if it was going to take centuries to ge t a reply? Probably something voluminous enough to require a few years of d igestion.

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Bill Sloman, Sydney

With even far less accuracy than the Drake Equation. And you can only work it out if we know *all* the factors which are at play - which, of course, we don't. We are well into Rumsfeld territory here, that of the "unknown unknowns".

Plausibility, even scientific plausibility does not make it fact. Phlogiston was around for 100 years before it was proved invalid.

There you go again - "The odds are...". Whose odds? Based on what?

A total non-sequitur. We aren't talking about random chemical reactions; we are talking about that *one* reaction which leads to life.

You've gone off tack. We are examining the possible origins of life, not how it develops after millions of years.

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Jeff

I remember you now. You're the autistic asshole that attacked me here about 3 years ago for no reason. You call everyone else retarded and autistic when you are without question the best example of an autistic retard I have ever seen, and I have seen very many such examples in my praxis in Germany before I retired. As a fully qualified and highly experienced psychiatrist, I recognise your symptoms only too well, Mr. Allison. Only too well....

Don't be totally silly. The Drake Equation is unknowns from start to finish . For partition functions you need atomic masses (which are well known) and force constants which are pretty much defined by the atoms at either end o f the bond, and the type of bond (single, double or triple).

lay - > which, of course, we don't. We are well into Rumsfeld territory he re, that of > the "unknown unknowns".

You are, because you don't know what you are talking about.

Not a remotely comparable example, as you'd be aware if you had the remotes t semblance of a clue about the subject.

o-0306

We might be talking about the "one reaction" that lead to a successful ance stral cell whose genome seems to have stabilised roughly 2.33 billion years ago.

There would have been plenty of similar cells around at the time which were n't as successful, which had swapped DNA with the successful cell line in e arlier generations. Tree structures don't mean much until the DNA is neatly tied up inside the cell nucleus.

The earliest common ancestor of all human males seems to have lived about 2

50,000 years ago

but that doesn't mean that he was the only human male around at the time or that the other males don't have descendants alive today - just none throug h the purely patrilineal line.

You aren't. You are waffling on about a subject you know very little about, and getting shirty at being shown up as pig-ignorant.

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Bill Sloman, Sydney

We're using an ARPANet-era dinosaur technology that died out the better part of 20 years ago among the "general population" to have discussions through what amounts to e-mail (which nobody outside of the business world and old people in Korea use much anymore) to have heated arguments about technical minutiae that when I try to talk to my girlfriend or her roommate about it they look at me like I probably do need to be committed for thinking so hard about this stuff.

Just sayin', there are likely a lot of pots and kettles here.