There is no dark side of the moon

[phart]

26 minutes ago, Freeedom said:

You are being unnecessarily pedantic as per usual. Did you actually think I was suggesting individual atoms have consciousness? 

No idea, Panpsychism was a popular theory in the past.

I didn't know if you were a subscriber to it.

 

Edited July 17, 2022 by phart

[phart]

1 hour ago, exile said:

Yes it is subjective, I am just trying to get a feel for what people would think/feel was reasonable, normal, spookily few etc. What I mean is, humans tend to feel 'special' for being the only species to do this and that, on Earth and probably the solar system, but we might start to feel 'spookily few' if we were the only such species in the whole galaxy, let alone universe.

And yes we don't know the proportions of life/intelligent life, but I am just making some rough assumptions to see how the numbers would feel to us. 

Actually there is more than one dimension going on here as I have just convinced myself that one 'stargazing civilisation' per galaxy would feel spookily few, yet trillions of stargazing civilisations could make us feel chillingly insignificant. Which kind of accords with your point about our brains and being unable to handle big numbers.

If you subscribe to the Everett interpretation of Quantum mechanics there's a huge number of versions of ourselves occupying different positions in Hilbert space which we can't interact with.

Reality is really weird.

Edited July 17, 2022 by phart

[phart]

37 minutes ago, Orraloon said:

Frank Drake did this for you 60 years ago. No harm in you going through the same thought process though, to see if you come to similar conclusions. 

Most folk nowadays would agree that it's a far more complicated calculation than the Drake Equation might seem to suggest. He himself knew it was a very simplified model. 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drake_equation#:~:text=The Drake equation is a,in the Milky Way Galaxy. 

I've just been studying the GreenBank conference in 1961

[exile]

54 minutes ago, Orraloon said:

Frank Drake did this for you 60 years ago. No harm in you going through the same thought process though, to see if you come to similar conclusions. 

Most folk nowadays would agree that it's a far more complicated calculation than the Drake Equation might seem to suggest. He himself knew it was a very simplified model. 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drake_equation#:~:text=The Drake equation is a,in the Milky Way Galaxy. 

Never mind Frank Drake, this thread or board has probably already covered it 😉

But that wasn't the point of my question. My question wasn't about the probability of life/intelligence per se. It was about what number would make people feel chillingly insignificant or spookily alone in the universe.

Put another way. If there are a hundred million trillion stargazing civilisations in the universe that might make us feel chillingly insignificant. If there was just one (us) we might feel we were strangely alone and that our planet was unique, spookily so. But there might be a number in between that would feel 'about right'. So, what number would that be?

Edited July 17, 2022 by exile

[exile]

25 minutes ago, phart said:

If you subscribe to the Everett interpretation of Quantum mechanics there's a huge number of versions of ourselves occupying different positions in Hilbert space which we can't interact with.

Reality is really weird.

The philosophical implications are interesting. The fact that we couldn't have knowledge of other worlds (universes) could make us feel even more insignificant - except if we are not aware of them in the first place (unknown unknowns). We don't feel too alone thinking there is only one version of ourselves? Subjectivity again....

[Orraloon]

26 minutes ago, phart said:

I've just been studying the GreenBank conference in 1961

Me too. But only as far as reading this article. 😂

https://slate.com/technology/2013/09/green-bank-conference-seti-frank-drakes-equation-for-estimating-the-extraterrestrial-life.html

I'm guessing your studying has been a bit more in depth than mine. 😉

[Orraloon]

12 minutes ago, exile said:

Never mind Frank Drake, this thread or board has probably already covered it 😉

But that wasn't the point of my question. My question wasn't about the probability of life/intelligence per se. It was about what number would make people feel chillingly insignificant or spookily alone in the universe.

Put another way. If there are a hundred million trillion stargazing civilisations in the universe that might make us feel chillingly insignificant. If there was just one (us) we might feel we were strangely alone and that our planet was unique, spookily so. But there might be a number in between that would feel 'about right'. So, what number would that be?

I'm fairly certain that no number that anybody came up with would make me feel either of those things. 😉

 

[phart]

6 minutes ago, Orraloon said:

Me too. But only as far as reading this article. 😂

https://slate.com/technology/2013/09/green-bank-conference-seti-frank-drakes-equation-for-estimating-the-extraterrestrial-life.html

I'm guessing your studying has been a bit more in depth than mine. 😉

Not that much, the book cited in that article and Cox's Human universe go into it fairly well.

Attended (virtually) a lecture on exoplanet discoveries and Green Bank is always a good place for the talk to start.

[phart]

12 minutes ago, exile said:

The philosophical implications are interesting. The fact that we couldn't have knowledge of other worlds (universes) could make us feel even more insignificant - except if we are not aware of them in the first place (unknown unknowns). We don't feel too alone thinking there is only one version of ourselves? Subjectivity again....

Some of us feel relief (that's shared i'm sure) there is only one version of ourselves.

Personally I feel like there isn't enough info yet so hard to feel anything concrete. I've felt both sides of the coin at various points when considering it though.

[exile]

1 hour ago, phart said:

Some of us feel relief (that's shared i'm sure) there is only one version of ourselves.

Personally I feel like there isn't enough info yet so hard to feel anything concrete. I've felt both sides of the coin at various points when considering it though.

Presumably, to the extent we don't experience other versions of ourselves, either they don't exist (or the question is meaningless), or else, or since we have no way experiencing those other selves, we don't feel anything about it at all. 

Though it would be weird if there were other versions of ourselves out there, occasionally interacting in this world, like accessing our accounts and posting on the internet and replying to posts before we get a chance to do it ourselves. 

[phart]

3 hours ago, exile said:

Presumably, to the extent we don't experience other versions of ourselves, either they don't exist (or the question is meaningless), or else, or since we have no way experiencing those other selves, we don't feel anything about it at all. 

Though it would be weird if there were other versions of ourselves out there, occasionally interacting in this world, like accessing our accounts and posting on the internet and replying to posts before we get a chance to do it ourselves. 

Not meaningless in the sense it explains certain issues with the quantum model, like measurement problem etc. On a day to day basis yeah if we can't interact in anyway then functionally it doesn't really exist.

 

[Toepoke]

9 hours ago, exile said:

Though it would be weird if there were other versions of ourselves out there, occasionally interacting in this world, like accessing our accounts and posting on the internet and replying to posts before we get a chance to do it ourselves. 

Sounds like the Pie and Bovril politics forum...

 

 

Edited July 17, 2022 by Toepoke

[glasgow jock]

I would take (an uneducated) guess, that even using humans as the only example of conscious & technological species within our Galaxy (which I doubt) of billions of stars and planets.

Surely with their being billions of galaxies in the universe, then the cosmos will relatively speaking be teaming with life, with some perhaps, thousands or even millions of years way more advanced than ours (providing they haven't wiped themselves out) ??

[Ally Bongo]

6 hours ago, glasgow jock said:

 

Surely with their being billions of galaxies in the universe, then the cosmos will relatively speaking be teaming with life, with some perhaps, thousands or even millions of years way more advanced than ours (providing they haven't wiped themselves out) ??

Well the Dinosaurs lived on Earth for 165 million years and it took a catastrophe then the resulting chain of events to wipe them out

And Dinosaurs only came about because the life before them for hundreds of millions of years had also been wiped out

Maybe in other parts of the Cosmos there are planets with life that started the same time as us that didnt have any Extinction Events

Point being the Dinosaurs lived for ages and stayed the same way till they disappeared

Humans have only been here for 200,000 years and our dramatic advance has only taken place in the last 150

 

 

 

[Toepoke]

On 7/22/2022 at 6:00 PM, Ally Bongo said:

Point being the Dinosaurs lived for ages and stayed the same way till they disappeared

If only they'd had opposable thumbs, think what they could've done with all that time...

 

[phart]

19 minutes ago, Toepoke said:

If only they'd had opposable thumbs, think what they could've done with all that time...

 

Coming in with my pedantry...

Kunpengopterus antipollicatus had opposable thumbs.

I read about it last year.

https://cosmosmagazine.com/history/monkeydactyl-the-new-dinosaur-with-the-oldest-opposable-thumbs/

[phart]

All preliminary at the moment, the amount of crazy stuff being speculated on with just 2 weeks worth of data is mental

Scottish astronomers have spied what they believe to be the most distant galaxy ever observed, using the new super space telescope, James Webb.
The red smudge is 35 billion light-years away. We see it, as it was, just 235 million years after the Big Bang.
It's a preliminary, or "candidate", result and will need a follow-up study for confirmation.

Matching it with hubble also catching possible supernovas , even Jupiter information as well to explain the thermo-distribution of it's atmosphere which we don't understand fully yet.

Need to get an ultraviolet one up into space as well if folk willing to shell out for it.

[glasgow jock]

54 minutes ago, phart said:

All preliminary at the moment, the amount of crazy stuff being speculated on with just 2 weeks worth of data is mental

Scottish astronomers have spied what they believe to be the most distant galaxy ever observed, using the new super space telescope, James Webb.
The red smudge is 35 billion light-years away. We see it, as it was, just 235 million years after the Big Bang.
It's a preliminary, or "candidate", result and will need a follow-up study for confirmation.

Matching it with hubble also catching possible supernovas , even Jupiter information as well to explain the thermo-distribution of it's atmosphere which we don't understand fully yet.

Need to get an ultraviolet one up into space as well if folk willing to shell out for it.

Phart, i'm probably a bit thick here !!

If the universe is 13.8 (or so) billion years old, how can an object / cluster be 35 billion light years away ??

 

[Huddersfield]

12 minutes ago, glasgow jock said:

Phart, i'm probably a bit thick here !!

If the universe is 13.8 (or so) billion years old, how can an object / cluster be 35 billion light years away ??

 

I'm not claiming expertise but I think the analogy used is that of an ant crawling along a stretching elastic band. The ant itself is walking at a particular speed, but the stretching of the elastic band also adds distance at the same time. In much the same way, the expansion of the universe adds distance on top of the actual distance travelled by the object.

I think! Better qualified people than me can probably make that loads more complicated 😁

[glasgow jock]

Huddersfield I like the analogy (I think 🤣) so does this mean that the universe is expanding / inflating faster than the speed of light ? (hang on a minute I thought nothing in the known universe could travel faster than light (Eisntein ??)

Confused tae fuck 🤣🤣

[Huddersfield]

13 minutes ago, glasgow jock said:

Huddersfield I like the analogy (I think 🤣) so does this mean that the universe is expanding / inflating faster than the speed of light ? (hang on a minute I thought nothing in the known universe could travel faster than light (Eisntein ??)

Confused tae fuck 🤣🤣

Hey listen, my brain pretty much runs out of steam when I imagine the elastic band breaking & the poor little ant getting flung into the nettles.

However, no, the object is travelling lower than the speed of light & ditto the expansion. So, much as if you have 2 cars driving away from each other at 50mph; both are still doing 50mph but they are separating from each other at more than 50mph. I'm getting out of my depth from this point on though, so will await someone who knows what the chuff they are talking about to clarify things using science rather than twanging ants.

[glasgow jock]

34 minutes ago, Huddersfield said:

Hey listen, my brain pretty much runs out of steam when I imagine the elastic band breaking & the poor little ant getting flung into the nettles.

However, no, the object is travelling lower than the speed of light & ditto the expansion. So, much as if you have 2 cars driving away from each other at 50mph; both are still doing 50mph but they are separating from each other at more than 50mph. I'm getting out of my depth from this point on though, so will await someone who knows what the chuff they are talking about to clarify things using science rather than twanging ants.

I'm away back to the football threads 🤣🤣

[phart]

58 minutes ago, glasgow jock said:

Phart, i'm probably a bit thick here !!

If the universe is 13.8 (or so) billion years old, how can an object / cluster be 35 billion light years away ??

 

Not thick at all, it's a question everyone who gets this information asks.

The universe is expanding. Hubble's Law at about 70km/s per megaparsec (that's about 3.26 million lightyears) it's a speed per distance, not an actual speed.  So if we look at a galaxy  1Mpc away from us it will appear to be receding at 70km/s , 2Mpc 140km/s etc. It's not actually moving through space away from us at that speed though, space-time expanding is creating this effect.

That's why we have the term observable universe, cause eventually galaxies are so far away they're moving away so fast light can't reach us and we can no longer observe them.

Eventually every galaxy not gravitionally bound with each other will disappear over the horizon never to be seen again. Provided everything progresses as we currently assume.

Nothing can travel faster than the speed of light. However since space itself is expanding faster no information is being transmitted, like a photon of light for example.

[phart]

1 hour ago, Huddersfield said:

I'm not claiming expertise but I think the analogy used is that of an ant crawling along a stretching elastic band. The ant itself is walking at a particular speed, but the stretching of the elastic band also adds distance at the same time. In much the same way, the expansion of the universe adds distance on top of the actual distance travelled by the object.

I think! Better qualified people than me can probably make that loads more complicated 😁

To be fair i'd be very impressed if anyone in the board could claim expertise on general relativity and cosmological expansion. I've had a wee look at tensor mathematics and it looks like a total ball ache.

[glasgow jock]

35 minutes ago, phart said:

Not thick at all, it's a question everyone who gets this information asks.

The universe is expanding. Hubble's Law at about 70km/s per megaparsec (that's about 3.26 million lightyears) it's a speed per distance, not an actual speed.  So if we look at a galaxy  1Mpc away from us it will appear to be receding at 70km/s , 2Mpc 140km/s etc. It's not actually moving through space away from us at that speed though, space-time expanding is creating this effect.

That's why we have the term observable universe, cause eventually galaxies are so far away they're moving away so fast light can't reach us and we can no longer observe them.

Eventually every galaxy not gravitionally bound with each other will disappear over the horizon never to be seen again. Provided everything progresses as we currently assume.

Nothing can travel faster than the speed of light. However since space itself is expanding faster no information is being transmitted, like a photon of light for example.

Cheers Phart - Understood that explanation (mostly), when you say "Eventually every galaxy not gravitionally bound with each other will disappear over the horizon never to be seen again." where do these galaxies / clusters disapear to ??, do you think they just expand forever / infinity, or move over to another Universe ???