chapotraphouse

Don’t listen to this alien propaganda

People treat technology and science like it's some magic thing that will keep getting more advanced to the point it can do any magical thing. But sometimes the answer science gives you is "there is literally not enough matter and energy on our planet to ever do this."

I blame the Civilization games

Liberal capitalism too, but also the Civilization games

Incidentally, this is one thing I love about Shadow Empire. It's a 4X game that takes place on a randomly generated planet, all resource deposits are finite, and you have to tailor your economic and military strategy to the planetary conditions and resources available. If the planet's a lifeless rock, it won't have any oil reserves, so your motorized and mechanized forces will have to rely on biodiesel or electric engines. No atmosphere but lots of rare earth metals? Get your power from solar panels. Bone-dry desert world? You will fight all-out wars for an underground lake.

Bitcoin fixes this.

A space elevator would fix this.

Me if they send me to space

China’s single thorium reactor will take us there

Yeah you're doing the spaceflight equivalent of the great horse manure crisis. Earth-to-space technology begins with rockets.

Hydro-LOx (read: water) is one of the most efficient conventional fuels, and it's in use in NASA's Space Launch System powering the Artemis program.

Even if you assume somehow all the fresh water has disappeared, there's still solar-powered electrolysis to create hydrolox from sea water.

There are more resources in the solar system though

I think the Fermi paradox is anthropomorphic.

There’s an assumption built into it that “civilization” is the end point of life, the “highest” or “most advanced” form of life. But biology doesn’t work that way.

I’m absolutely certain that the universe is filled with organic chemistry and life but the idea that civilization is inevitable or stable seems anthropomorphic. Civilization has barely existed on earth for 5 or 10 thousand years, and it has only been doing stuff that would be detectable from far away for maybe 1 or 2 centuries.

From a sample size or 1 we can already see that is an uncommon state for life to exist in, and it already seems like an unstable niche to occupy.

Life has existed on earth for what 4 billion years, complex life for 500 to 1000 million, and civilization for 10,000 at most. There’s every reason to suppose that life is inevitable when the planet permits that kind of chemistry but practically no basis to assume civilization is inevitable when life exists.

Yeah, the whole thing assumes that the aliens would be using a communications technology that:

1. we can actually detect it with our current technology.
2. would still be identifiable as communications by completely different alien species.
3. wouldn't just become a garbled mess by the time it reaches its destination.

We've had radio technology for about a century, vs the 10,000 years or so of human societies existing. Even as recently as 200 years ago, we'd probably be expecting the aliens to show up on horseback with a handwritten missive to be read to us. We make a lot of assumptions that they would use radio waves to communicate, and would beam radio waves at us, when we could very well be using technology that these aliens abandoned for more advanced communications technology centuries or even millennia ago.

Yeah, my position as a biologist is that, from everything we know, it looks like proto-life started pretty much as soon as conditions on earth made it possible. The chance that there's no other life in the universe is pretty much just the chance that there are no planets substantially similar to earth (gravity not too crazy, has liquid water, atmosphere, magnetosphere etc) and that's obviously bunk.

The moment I found out that other planets, even with moons, don't have proper total solar eclipses I felt very privileged to be an Earthling.

We managed to escape our gravity well with technology from the 20th century.

K2-18bians could be at our technological level and still not escape their gravity well. I think a planet twice as big as ours would require rockets as heavy as the pyramids of Giza just to reach orbit, never-mind exiting their planet's orbit into deeper space.

it's gravity, yes, but also that this is almost definitely an ocean planet with no land. Good luck developing metallurgy underwater, to say nothing of fossil fuels etc

I thought it was essentially: the universe is really fucking big so there must be life, so why haven't we seen it yet?

I think Led Zeppelin tried this back in the 70s

You play KSP too?

The paper says it has a 3 sigma chance of life given the compounds assuming their methodology is good, scientific proof requires 5 sigma. Its a difference between 99.7% accuracy and near 100% accuracy, kind of important though when we're talking about shit we have no clue about and can't observe by conventional means.

It should be noted that the majority of the citations on the paper are the same guy citing himself. I'd take it with a grain of salt until other people can corroborate it. Most other papers say the planet is a hot, small mini-Neptune gas planet with rings probably, maybe a warm enough atmosphere for life. The compounds measured are basically related to farts and decaying plant matter in a hot environment, should smell like mexican food a bit. In a comparison, the planet should have about 20-1000x more plant-fart compounds than we do, some people argue this is evidence of early algal/bacterial growth like on earth's oceans.

If the other papers are right about the pressure of the atmosphere the water on the planet would behave quite differently than here. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supercritical_fluid