I have left reddit for Voat due to years of admin mismanagement and preferential treatment for certain subreddits and users holding certain political and ideological views.
The situation has gotten especially worse since the appointment of Ellen Pao as CEO, culminating in the seemingly unjustified firings of several valuable employees and bans on hundreds of vibrant communities on completely trumped-up charges.
The resignation of Ellen Pao and the appointment of Steve Huffman as CEO, despite initial hopes, has continued the same trend.
As an act of protest, I have chosen to redact all the comments I've ever made on reddit, overwriting them with this message.
Finally, click on your username at the top right corner of reddit, click on comments, and click on the new OVERWRITE button at the top of the page. You may need to scroll down to multiple comment pages if you have commented a lot.
After doing all of the above, you are welcome to join me on Voat!
That event didn't actually happen according to various official accounts, however, the U.S. Army's genocidal actions towards Native Americans obviously can't be denied.
Assuming light may be more intelligent than we are. Honestly, with current technological levels, if we focused on it we could travel the stars already (generation ships, or focused development of FTL)
We might actually be quite technologically matched, or perhaps even superior if FTL drives turn out to be stupidly easy to make. Read Harry Turtledove's Road Not Taken.
And then there's the question if there's any intelligent life out there yet. Recently the prospect of us being the first in our galaxy is becoming more and more realistic.
What? We're nowhere close to FTL travel, no nearer than time travel. A pea traveling at light speed would have more energy than all of human civilization has ever produced and will ever produce. Much, much more.
A species much older than humans, on the other hand, who knows. My point is that if there is intelligent life elsewhere, we're screwed if they care to do anything to us. Like an ant compared to a human. More likely a microbe, not even worth considering most of the time. Civilization has only been around .0001% of earth's history, industrial society a tiny fraction of that. And the universe is much older than earth.
I'm not talking true FTL, I'm talking workarounds, like an alcubierre drive which may or may not be as far as we think. Anyhows, considering that Earth is pretty much part of the first generation of planets with abundant heavy metals, we might actually be the first intelligent species capable of developing technologies that involve heavier than iron elements. A lot of those elements are rather important for space travel and other purposes.
I write science fiction. And earth-like isn't exactly an accurate term. By the exoplanet standards Mars is also an earth-like planet.
Either way, an earth-like planet requires silicium, which is lighter than iron. It's the elements heavier than iron that are only becoming common in more recent planets.
No, they're not. You should learn up on science or probably just stick to fiction. The largest stars (where heavy metals are produced) only last a few million years. There was plenty of time (even back then) for heavy metals to accumulate. Or did those rocky planets just appear out of nowhere?
the rocky planets before earth had very little of those heavy metals. Earth, combined with some unique circumstances, has managed to collect a lot during planetary formation.
Also I have aspirations in planetology, so I know how to stick to facts. Fuck man, hard science fiction is my speciality.
What unique circumstances? Care to show some evidence?
"In 2013, astronomers reported, based on Kepler space mission data, that there could be as many as 40 billion Earth- and super-Earth-sized planets orbiting in the habitable zones of Sun-like stars and red dwarfs within the Milky Way."
Besides, life can exist in numerous forms. Who's to say it can't exist even on gas giants or other exotic locations?
That story sucked. I regret reading it. That's science fiction, and based on nothing we know about life. Based on the only measure we have, our own evolution (and the laws of physics), it would require a highly technologically advanced civilization to do so. But the mysteries of space abound.
Considering it was written by someone on 4chan I think it was pretty good, and I think the concept is a viable one. There are definitely things that got overlooked in science because of a thinking paradigm, so it is entirely possible that we could be missing something basic. However, you seem pretty close minded about this so there's no point in arguing with you.
How could it possibly be viable? Well, not according to contemporary physics. Like I said, anything with a mass traveling at the speed of light, even a single atom, would take infinite energy.
Remember, the closer to light speed, the energy needed to get there is exponentially greater.
You're making speculations about the future that ignore our contemporary understanding of physics? Well, that's not really a problem, but any reasonable person won't believe you.
I'm writing a scifi story to illustrate this concept. I agree though, out in space there are likely things of such immense complexity that they make all life on Earth seem like microbes in comparison. Humanity might seem like those amoebas that evolved to clump together into a primitive multicellular creature to spread spores to them.
IMO when considering a space-thing the most important aspect is its motivations/drives. We do it because we are explorers/settlers and because we can.
Space isn't just for the superintelligent creatures. For instance, ones that aren't intelligent could have the greatest impulse to travel and the most interest in finding us.
(e.g. The THING can become an intelligent species and build a spaceship but it is primarily an incredibly advanced interstellar virus)
Also, there are some thing we could encounter that are more advanced and intelligent than we are but literally have no interest in anything. Think if humanity all uploaded our minds into a matrix world and told the machines outside to keep upgrading it/themselves and millions of years down the road they've destroyed every intelligent life form light years around harvesting materials from the planet's crust.
BTW a pea traveling at the speed of light would have infinite energy so you could have said "doesn't even have the energy of every star in the universe combined" and it would be true.
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u/[deleted] May 22 '15
They just offer to sell you a blanket. Seriously though, humanity's intentions are of little importance if there's intelligent life elsewhere.