Intelligent Design
- Thread starter AnandLeo
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Crispy
The following psytrance is baṉned: All
well it's always a trade off between how far you see and how well you can see isn't it?
This is the furthest we can currently see:
(click for fucking enormous version)
That's the Hubble Ultra Deep Field photo, or UDF. Even the tiny specks of light in that photo are other galaxies. The 'shutter' was opened for about 2 weeks I think. But the really staggering thing is that this little patch of sky is just 0.00002 degrees out of the full 360 degree sphere of visible space.
But we'll only ever see planets in our own galaxy, and even then the ones that are pretty close.
This is the furthest we can currently see:
(click for fucking enormous version)
That's the Hubble Ultra Deep Field photo, or UDF. Even the tiny specks of light in that photo are other galaxies. The 'shutter' was opened for about 2 weeks I think. But the really staggering thing is that this little patch of sky is just 0.00002 degrees out of the full 360 degree sphere of visible space.
But we'll only ever see planets in our own galaxy, and even then the ones that are pretty close.
Bob_the_lost
Elsewhere
*feels tiny again*
Crispy
The following psytrance is baṉned: All
depends. hubble's good for these long-range, tight focus shots. We can also use a 'wideangle' telescope to do more general searching. We certainly won't be seeing their planet and their little cities or anything. But we will be able to see a blurry speck that has some very interesting chemicals in its atmosphere if it's filtering out those speceific wavelengths of light. When we find one of those, then we turn all the pencil-beam telescopes on it and look really carefully.
Crispy
The following psytrance is baṉned: All
Yeah, but we wouldn't bother with looking that far away for life. We'd only be interested in looking at the nearby stars, and they're so much easier to see that we can scan the telescope across the sky and build up a complete picture pretty quickly.8ball said:
8ball
World is a fuck
Crispy said:It's a hunch both ways - it doesn't make any difference to anyone else if I reckon there's loads of aliens out there, so I may as well believe it if i makes me happy
Agreed.
It's just that I have conversations with some of my academic friends who regard me as a bit of a loonspud for my views on the likelihood of alien life and you're way more optimistic than me.
ViolentPanda
Hardly getting over it.
kropotkin said:Realisation of species' insignificance --> abandonment of anthropocentrism --> acceptance of scientific materialism == atheism
Welcome dwyer. Some said you'd never make it
But without any evidence of that, isn't that a bit of a big assumption to make? What makes you so sure that the conditions for the evolution of intelligent life occur even more than once in this galaxy?Crispy said:
Existential negatives are the default postion
8ball said:
It's all random as you like and they aint all that at all. They think we are really clever for example. I have several anecdotes that show this to be correct. I suppose those same anecdotes would prove that there's aliens and that beyond reasonable doubt ?
We all know that it boils down to sharing the same physical space with the wronguns.
You can make your own minds up but they have enlightened this poster not a fucking tiny bit but just scorned his simplicity and that !
Ok!
Jonti
what the dormouse said
But there is at least one instance. That means it's legitimate to look at how frequently the base conditions for that occurrence are likely to occur, given what we know about stellar evolution and the formation of planetary systems. There's about one hundred thousand millions of stars in our galaxy, so even if the chances of a (sufficiently) earth like planet are small, there would still be an awful lot of them.In Bloom said:But without any evidence of that, isn't that a bit of a big assumption to make? What makes you so sure that the conditions for the evolution of intelligent life occur even more than once in this galaxy?
Existential negatives are the default postion
And, crucially, there's no reason to believe the Solar System is so very unusual, so there's room for debate about the default position ...
kyser_soze
Hawking's Angry Eyebrow
In Bloom said:Has somebody wired phil up to a piece of fairy cake or something?
Shippou-Sensei
4:1:2.5
fogbat said:
i was using it to mean being suited to ones enviroment due to the process of natural selection. than to say that this Fx generation is more evolved than the Fy generation as it has reproduced significantly more times
but yes i do accept there are multiple ways you can use the term
kyser_soze
Hawking's Angry Eyebrow
There is an argument based on Schrodinger's Cat that says that because it's sentient observation that orders quantum chaos, that unless an alien species had the same kind of sentience as us to create the 'same' universe we inhabit, even tho there might be aliens out there we couldn't see them, and they couldn't perceive us.
Of course, that whole road leads to the question of was the moment of creation a fluke quantum instant where 'a' sentience was achieved long enough to collapse the probability wave of the pre-universe (i.e. the everything-and-nothing potentiality of the pre-bang universe) into the physical realm we inhabit.
Or something.
On the subject Fogbat is talking about, there is at least one species of rodent that has a speedier reaction to environment changes.
The concept of being 'more evolved' would suggest that a species has undergone and survived greater environmental changes, meaning that it's abilities to adapt were better - in that respect the tool making facility of humans is a kind of evolutionary pinnacle because via tool use (a human universal trait) the human basic model can exist in a variety of environments from temperate to cold/hot to the vacuum of space. A species with greater levels of physical evolution might be able to survive in more extreme conditions without resorting to external tools. In that sense the creature could be described as 'more evolved', if you take inbuilt adaptation ability as the main marker of evolutionary development.
Of course, that whole road leads to the question of was the moment of creation a fluke quantum instant where 'a' sentience was achieved long enough to collapse the probability wave of the pre-universe (i.e. the everything-and-nothing potentiality of the pre-bang universe) into the physical realm we inhabit.
Or something.
On the subject Fogbat is talking about, there is at least one species of rodent that has a speedier reaction to environment changes.
The concept of being 'more evolved' would suggest that a species has undergone and survived greater environmental changes, meaning that it's abilities to adapt were better - in that respect the tool making facility of humans is a kind of evolutionary pinnacle because via tool use (a human universal trait) the human basic model can exist in a variety of environments from temperate to cold/hot to the vacuum of space. A species with greater levels of physical evolution might be able to survive in more extreme conditions without resorting to external tools. In that sense the creature could be described as 'more evolved', if you take inbuilt adaptation ability as the main marker of evolutionary development.
ATOMIC SUPLEX
Member Since: 1985 Post Count: 3
AnandLeo said:
Don't be a fool. What makes you think we have stopped? It's a very very very slow process.
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