No, I don’t mean aliens who are like us lot, though that’s a strange idea. Maybe all the people who talk about aliens disguised among us are really talking about Alien Odds, coming here because they don’t fit elsewhere. But I’m so for sure not going there.
There’s been a lively discussion in the comments about the nature of aliens and whether it’s plausible that we are in fact alone in comments.
First I must say as Drak said that I hate and despise the idea of all aliens being more advanced and/or somehow standing in moral judgement over us. Yeah, maybe that’s possible, but it’s certainly not guaranteed, nor would be universal.
And then 11B-Mailclerk posted the following comment, which makes it actually plausible we’re the most advanced, or close to: Link.
Quote:
The prior two generations of stars lack sufficient “metals”, basically anything heavier than Lithium. Stellar Thermonuclear Synthesis forms elements up to Iron. When the stars flare up in their end states, they scatter elements for later accumulation in subsequent stars. The supergiant stars go supernova, producing further heavy elements that are net endothermic in fusion reaction, and scattering all the produced stuff vigorously for later re-accumulation. Further heavies are formed from less well understood processes, including, apparently, pulsar collisions in dual-star systems. I suspect black hole accretion areas eject a significant fraction of stuff that fell in and bounced off other stuff, more condensate and scatter for re-use.
Our Sol System is about a gen3 -3.5, so rather rich in metals. Earth, particularly rich in heavy elements. Thus lots of current state comments.
Hard to build an industrial civilization if one’s planet doesn’t have large surface deposits of metals. The “black iron ore” / “banded iron deposits” of Earth are hypothesized to be biological residue, from our earliest ocean of iron-saturated water. That ore is cheap to process, and yields relatively high-quality resultant metal.
You need that cheap Iron to get to cheap electricity, whereupon Aluminum goes from rare precious metal to cheap commodity. Thus to aircraft and spacecraft, thence other supermetals.
You also need huge deposits of easy to burn fuel. Wood works, but you run out of trees way too fast. Coal solves the problem. Almost as if someone knew we would need a 3000-5000 year pile of cheap fuel, and spent a billion-ish years growing vast swamps only to fold them under mountain ranges, heat for eons, and cook up solid-carbon-rocks. Also some choice liquid stuff for lubricants and fuels.
Kinda amazing the right stuff for civilization and its advance was just there all along for us to find and figure out.
And then some clever monkey looked at Uranium anew and said “thats odd”…..
Back to that early primordial H/He/Li mix. It is -very- difficult to initiate H-H fusion. A star has to be supermassive/hypergiant to light a pure H or H/He core. If there is even a small trace of Lithium, even a very small star lights early. We found this property out when one of our early Thermonuke tests went 3.5x yield. We thought only one isotope of Lithium would be fuel for fusion. Turns out, the other major isotope is also pretty good if you first superheat and compress it, like in an H Bomb or Star. The predicted primordial soup has -just- enough to get stars going easy enough and fast enough to get metals at Sol/Earth levels in the 13-14 billion years.
Another just-right “Goldilocks” value that makes or breaks a universe with Us in it, right about now.
(Omitting Goldilocks comments on gravity, the weak and strong nuclear forces, C, and a number of other phenomena that are oddly, coincidentally, -just- right for everything to work as needed to get to what is.)
Is this accurate? I don’t know, but it’s plausible. And it makes it entirely plausible that we’re the first to travel in space and/or the most advanced.
If you just recoiled at that idea, that says more about the culture of science fiction than it says about the odds this is true.
Which brings us to “the great white alien” (Pardon me!) in the style that natives in the 20th century referred to either the American president or the British King as “the great white father.” Beyond all probability of lack thereof, there is the fact that this cliche in fiction has become SO PERVASIVE as to make it ridiculous and boring. Just through repetition. As I said, Pratchett skewered it beautifully in Good Omens. If for no other reason than “booring” I’m going to oppose it. Just on the basis of being me and reading scifi.
It was new and refreshing when Heinlein did it — though note even his superior aliens aren’t MORAL or at least not moral by human standards! He was saner than that. Try for the same– but now it’s old and busted. Come up with something else.
In fact the idea that aliens are more advanced MORALLY is a complete non-sequitor. Surely morals are different depending on the species/world? What is life enhancing and improving for sharks isn’t the same as for humans. And we’re both children of the same world. How much more different would aliens be?
I will confess to a great now no longer secret love for “Humans are the old ones of the Galaxy” i.e. we were once the Lords of it all, carrying the Human Burden, as it were, until the colonies/satrapies/protectorates rebelled, and confined us to Earth. And everyone out there is terrified of our return.
I’m not a fool, I know the reason I love that so much I could eat it with a spoon is because it’s very flattering to us humans. And being a human I like us being flattered. But it’s also so countercultural in this culture of human-hatred that it is very cheering. If you do that, it might be as improbable as the “Great White Alien” but I will not chide you for it, because I’m too busy nom nom nom nomming it with a spoon.
The truth though is that if we have alien visitors of encounter aliens, we’ll likely never know. Why? Well, because aliens will be aliens. We have recently done studies on the cognitive abilities of things like octopi and elephants. And elephants at least might be close to our level. Just so alien and along such different lines that we’d never know how to communicate, not really. Or even how to evaluate their intelligence. Not really.
Now, I know Trump has promised to release anything about UFOs.
I could be wrong, but I expect it to be a giant nothingburger. There might be stuff about orbs and other unexplained stuff, but no aliens. I mean we know that Orbs occur. They occur in ghost hunting too. And that they often react as though sentient. What they are we don’t know. But they’re probably no alien. And I doubt they’re sentient as such. However we shall see.
Ultimately how we see aliens are a reflection of how we see ourselves as humans. And frankly I’m tired of us beating up on ourselves. And all in on us building ourselves up for a change.
It might be bad — both for Western Civ and Humans — to have too much self regard. It might mean we trample other ways of doing things for no other reason than being different. Maybe.
But it’s not nearly as dangerous as too little self-regard or oikophobia. THAT is deadly and will kill those who engage in it.
It’s time we stop it.
Yes Humans (And western civ) have flaws. But they are the greatest thing of its kind, from our own perspctive. i.e. if humans are destroyed, we will be too. And self-murder is repugnant. As for Western civ, again judging on the principle of fewest dead babies and long, healthy old age, it’s winning. And again, as a human I must support that.
Try not to live for the approval of some imaginary alien, and instead to support that which is good for yourself and your own species.
Aliens, if they exist, will take care of their own. They don’t need you to be their Great Human Savior.
Be for humans because you are human. What enhances humans enhances you. Anything else is nihilistic hubris.
According To Hoyt 
I am, frankly, just as dubious about humans being able to thrive on other planets for much the same reasons as the commentor believes it would be hard for alien civilizations to arise. (I could add Biblical reasons, but setting those aside for now….) This Earth is peculiarly perfect for human habitation and civilization. It’s highly unlikely that we’ll find other planets equally suitable for us to live on, let alone to build civilizations on. This doesn’t mean I’ll stop reading sci-fi – it’s an enjoyable genre, and scratches that explorer/adventurer itch. But in real life? Probably not going there.
LikeLike
It would be useful not to have all our eggs in one basket.
LikeLiked by 5 people
True. Though (speaking as a Christian) it’s also good to trust God, and he did say that “While the earth remaineth, seedtime and harvest, and cold and heat, and summer and winter, and day and night shall not cease.” (Genesis 8:22) And when the Earth no longer ‘remains,’ as it says in the end of Revelation, then God is going to build a new Earth for His people to live on! (I really look forward to that!) He’s always kept His promises, and I trust Him to keep that one.
Anyway, it’s fun to read sci-fi and speculate. And who knows, maybe in the New Heavens, when there’s a New Earth, we’ll be able to go exploring ‘up there,’ for real.
LikeLike
Consider, though, that we may be the tools that God uses to build that New Earth.
LikeLiked by 3 people
and to carry life elsewhere. PRECISELY.
LikeLike
This is the most important reason.
Plus which, the effort to get off this admittedly excellent and convivial rock would probably help us get better at dealing with extra-terrestrial extinction-level threats.
LikeLiked by 2 people
Or mundane threats. If the Church of Johnson and the Church of Branch Johnson decide to start slinging nukes at each other, those living in other colonies would be relatively unaffected. One advantage to not sharing your eco-system with crazy neighbors.
LikeLiked by 1 person
see, that’s a problem. how is mankind ever going to learn to live in peace when you can just evade your fellow man and his troubles?
There’s a Poul Anderson where space flight was deliberately sabotaged to trap us on Earth until then.
LikeLike
“…but ya dosent have ta call me Johnson….”
LikeLike
More likely we will learn to live without planets. O’Neil type colonies for example are not beyond our current technology and probably less challenging than terraforming Mars. Even mega structures are not unimaginable.
LikeLiked by 1 person
We would need to be able to live in space to get to the planet. Why then put your descendants back down in a gravity well to escape from?
LikeLike
Any space habitat short of Ringworld will have a planned and simplified ecology, and be surveilled and regimented to keep anyone’s unforeseen action from messing it up.
Descendants on planets are “free-range” kids.
LikeLike
Only if we can actually terraform up to Earth standards. It may be worse than the space habitat.
LikeLike
“Earth standards” might only have to mean “barely habitable,” as in “enough survivors for Darwin to work with.”
LikeLiked by 1 person
Or it might be amazing. Get y’all’s heads out of grunge porn. There can be enough challenge in a new, wonderful environment. I SWEAR from the seventies on they wrote sf to DISCOURAGE us from going to space.
Lift a middle finger and dream big. You don’t have to repeat the New Wave belly button gazing. GEESH.
LikeLiked by 2 people
Note that it is essential for space colonization that we first practice by colonizing Antarctica.
Few places on earth’s surface are less habitable for humans than Antarctica. Its almost a spacesuit environment. If we coudl colonize it, develop it, and thrive, it would be -outstanding- practice for Mars.
…
Note also then, why we have a global treaty to prevent exactly that essential work.
LikeLike
Yes, and that would make free-range children improbable.
LikeLike
I meant “free-range kids” in the sense of “humans running loose in an environment that weeds out the weak,” as opposed to “humans coddled and monitored For Their Own Safety” in space-habs.
I can NOT squeeze the author or title out of my brain: a novel from (I think) the 50s in which the Bad Aliens, badder and tougher than we, seize a ship full of humans.
Because plot, they don’t just kill the humans. Instead, they maroon them on a hellworld–too much gravity; too little oxygen; long, elliptical orbit for years-long winters, and short, killing-hot summers… the place sucks.
Generations later, the survivors are tougher than boiled owl scat, have a real cultural ‘tude about them Aliens, and they’re building spaceships again…
LikeLiked by 2 people
If the terraforming is that bad, they can’t be free-range on planet.
Off planet — depends on how modular they are. Perhaps the kid can have his own module to learn how to regulate it.
LikeLike
‘The Survivors’ by Tom Godwin. It can be found at:
http://baencd.thefifthimperium.com
on the ‘1635: The Eastern Front’ CD image. Open the main index HTML file, find ‘The Cold Equations’ (Yes, he’s that Tom Godwin) under ‘Classic SF’ at bottom right on the page, and ‘The Survivors’ is the first story in the collection.
The Gerns dumped 4,000 humans on the planet Ragnarok. 90% died within a few months, 99% within a year but those survivors…they learned, they adapted, each generation grew stronger and tougher, and they never forgot the Gerns.
After 200 years, facing a Long Winter that would force them to abandon their home caves and become nomadic hunter-gatherers, they built a hyperspace transmitter and lured a Gern cruiser to Ragnarok. They quickly defeated the crew, took the ship, used it to capture a Gern battleship, and plotted out their campaign to destroy the Gern Empire within 6 months.
LikeLiked by 2 people
Yes, why pay for it twice?
There is a saying often attributed to RAH that once you get to Earth orbit, you are halfway to anywhere in the solar system. That is not quite true but it acknowleges the fact that, absent some magical space drive, getting out of a gravity well is costly. Products made in space from materials mined in space will not have the pay that overhead. Products made planet side will. Yes, there are speculative ways to lower that cost but all I’ve read about would be very expensive to build in their own right.
Assuming mining the belt and the gas giants for resources becomes commonplace, gravity wells may become primarily one way elevators to drop products to the groundhog markets. Unless Musk’s (or Cameron’s :)) vision of autonomous robots is the future, that means people living and working in space so some kind of long term habitat is a certainty. Even a Stanford Torus could provide a small town sized habitat (~5K persons) for workers, support staff and families.
I am not a Cassandra so none of the above is a prediction. It is just speculation based on my knowledge of technology, engineering, and economics.
LikeLike
Yes. Why pay for it twice?
There is a saying often attributed to RAH that once you get to Earth orbit, you are halfway to anywhere in the solar system. That is not quite true but it acknowledges the fact that, absent some magical space drive, getting out of a gravity well is costly. Products made in space from materials mined in space will not have the pay that overhead. Products made planet side will. Yes, there are speculative ways to lower that cost but all I’ve read about would be very expensive to build in their own right.
Assuming mining the belt and the gas giants for resources becomes commonplace, gravity wells may become primarily one way elevators to drop products to the groundhog markets. Unless Musk’s (or Cameron’s :)) vision of autonomous robots is the future, that means people living and working in space so some kind of long term habitat is a certainty. Even a Stanford Torus could provide a small town sized habitat (~5K persons) for workers, support staff and families.
I am not a Cassandra so none of the above is a prediction. It is just speculation based on my knowledge of technology, engineering, and economics.
LikeLike
Add to that and shamelessly thread-jack, enough “just to see what’s out there” and a long enough time scale, we’ll find some really interesting/curious/weird/awesome stuff in the cosmos.
There are a LOT of planetary bodies out there. Mostly rocks and gas balls, sure. Very very mostly. But even with that caveat, there exists a realm of possibility. And as long as “possibility exists,” there’s humans: “So what I’m hearing is, there’s a chance!”
LikeLiked by 4 people
Well. I know NOW that I will never see space. The odds of my son pioneering into space, like my ancestors pioneered via boat west over the Atlantic, and further west via Conestoga wagon over the western prairies, is limited to none. The great and *great-great-nieces/nephews? Jury is still out.
(*) It is possible to have great-great-nieces/nephews. Hubby’s side, the oldest great-nephews are late 20’s to early 30’s. The in-laws children are late 50’s.
LikeLiked by 1 person
I don’t want humans to be the “Great White Fathers” for any intelligent life out there.
I’ll settle for “Don’t Mess With Us And We Won’t Mess With You”. [Grin]
LikeLiked by 6 people
I’m with Kipling. I’m all for “inflicting” our strange morality on other cultures. I remember the story of one of those rude English in India. When the local big wig explained that it was tradition to immolate the deceased man’s wife or maybe wives with the deceased, he replied something on the order of, “Our tradition is to hang those who do so.”
Sarah makes good points about our even being able to understand aliens at all as we can’t do with octopodes or elephants. Robert Silverberg once was dared to write a story about a true alien. He did so very successfully. The aliens’ actions and motives in the story were incomprehensible, and so the story was completely boring. You got what you asked for, Dude, now say you’re sorry for asking.
As for me, I agree with Maude in the movie Harold and Maude, “I love people. They’re my species!”
LikeLiked by 3 people
I was shown that movie in college, and the opening sequence is (dark) comedy gold.
LikeLiked by 1 person
I took my future wife to that movie on our first date. I had only heard the radio ads which were the most off-putting you could imagine. I mean, really, how do you describe that movie? It was recommended to me by a friend, and I was really squirming through the first few minutes, thinking “What have I done?” until Harold stuck his tongue out.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Honestly, I got the joke right away. But then, I’m weird.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Charles Napier
“Be it so. This burning of widows is your custom; prepare the funeral pile. But my nation has also a custom. When men burn women alive we hang them, and confiscate all their property. My carpenters shall therefore erect gibbets on which to hang all concerned when the widow is consumed. Let us all act according to national customs.”
He’s also purported — it might be a legend — to have sent the signal Peccavi, Latin for I have sinned, when he conquered Scinde in what is now Pakistan. One of my favorites. He had style.
LikeLiked by 6 people
Thanks for the proper quote. :)
LikeLike
That was Charles Napier: “Be it so. This burning of widows is your custom; prepare the funeral pile. But my nation has also a custom. When men burn women alive we hang them, and confiscate all their property. My carpenters shall therefore erect gibbets on which to hang all concerned when the widow is consumed. Let us all act according to national customs.”
LikeLike
Nor do humans right here; we already have One.
How He chose to manifest to others is one of those Mysteries we’ll only solve through observation where it happened.
I’ll settle for thwarting the Adversary here at home.
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2026/02/24/united-nations-launches-new-ipcc-for-artificial-intelligence-bernie-sanders-issues-dire-warnings/
LikeLiked by 1 person
While I have some qualms about the broad possibilities of AI, Bernie Sanders warning against it is an indication that it is most likely a tempest in a teacup. He seems to have developed quite a knack for being mostly wrong about most things that betting against HIM is a good way to improve your own odds.
LikeLiked by 3 people
Having the UN involved is the issue.
LikeLiked by 1 person
There are few things the UN can’t make worse. A dumpster fire with the dumpster floating in a sewage pond might be the one exception. Perhaps.
It is interesting to observe what the UN and WHO accomplished when the “global north” still ran things, as compared to the current organization.
LikeLiked by 3 people
You lack imagination! The UN would try to put the fire out, miss the dumpster and make the sewage overflow. Their every attempt to clean up the mess would make it worse.
LikeLiked by 4 people
A UN contractor would manage to dump radioactive Caesium on it, reigniting the fire. Then their security guards would step in it, and track mutant cholera all over the planet.
After all that, the UN would commission a study that would say nothing of use to anyone.
LikeLiked by 2 people
That “study” would cast blame on everyone who makes sewage, the in entors of sewage systems, everyone who uses fire, the scaremongers who warn people to stay away, … … … and everyone who keeps a pet or a gun.
It’s what they do.
LikeLike
So address the root cause: set the UN on fire and put it in the dumpster.
LikeLike
Yep.
LikeLike
Old fallacy. If our environment wasn’t ‘just right’ for us, we wouldn’t be here to wonder about it. We are what we are because of that environment. It’s like marveling that a pothole is an exact match for the size and shape of the puddle inside.
LikeLiked by 3 people
Er. I’m not marveling at it. I just dont’ want us to glorify other potholes.
LikeLiked by 3 people
I believe this is called the “lesser anthropic principle” . It is most certainly true that without those constants we wouldn’t be here, heck tweak some of the numbers and even star formation gets iffy, or stellar lives are so short that planetary formation gets highly unlikely.
The old chestnut for number of extant societies is the Drake equation ( https://grokipedia.com/page/Drake_equation note here I have used to denote subscripts so R(*) is R sub star)
where
I’m not sure R(*) is what we care about. We are more interested how many stars and how many have existed long enough for planets to form. What we are interested in is what is the soonest that life could form from the big bang our T0. 11B-mailclerk had a good point, we believe that life needs things other than Hydrogen and helium. These other elements (referred to as metals by astronomers, don’t tell a chemist that it really pisses them off, I know I’m married to one :-) ) come either from failed stars (called planetary nebula). nova, or Supernova (needed for anything past lead I think). And that stuff has to float across space to get into the accretion disk of a star like Sol when it was forming. The Population I stars (early from Big Bang) show NOTHING beyond helium in their spectra. Population II stars start to show “metals”. Also important would be galactic or cluster formation, singleton stars in the middle of nowhere aren’t going to get materials. You need groups of stars living out their lives in proximity to create the clouds of metals. Stellar lifetimes can be long. The larger bluer stars (Stellar types O,B and A) that are most likely to go supernova have “shorter” lifetimes, a couple hundred million to a billion years. You need a couple cycles of them before you can start to form smaller (F,G, K, Maybe M? ) with accretion disks that include metals like carbon (I told you the chemists go beserk…). So the answer to Fermi’s paradox might be that we’re first or nearly first.
As for Aliens travelling to earth, unless we REALLY don’t understand physics (and there are some vague hints this might be so), interstellar travel is VERY hard. There is the theoretical Alcubierre drive, but even with its power requirements reduced by a couple orders of magnitude by recent theory it is still way beyond anything we understand, and honestly not even as fast as upper end Star Trek ships were supposed to be (and they fudge their timescales ALL the time to make stories work). Our galaxy is immense, intergalactic travel is right out under any understanding we have.
There are some weird phenomenon, but I am relatively certain they are NOT aliens of any sort.
LikeLike
Iron. The elements after iron are formed in supernova explosions.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Some of them are essential for life on earth.
Are they essential for life in general?
We have no way to know.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Some people did a study on possible “Life Other Than Ours”, including “Non-Carbon Based Life”. (This was in one of the books that I have.)
From what they found, Carbon-Based Life seemed to be the most likely form of Life based on the other elements that would be involved with “Non-Carbon Based Life”.
IE: The other elements wouldn’t work out as well as the elements involved with Carbon-Based Life.
One aspect of their study involved the interesting aspects of liquid H2O as compared to other possible liquids.
Water freezes from the “top down” (ie ice floats) while the other possible liquids freeze from the “bottom up” (ie their solid state is heavier than the liquid form.)
That would cause problems with the development of life in non-H2O oceans which would be necessary for “Non-Carbon Based Life”.
Obviously, G*d may know some tricks that these authors didn’t think about. [Very Big Grin]
I’ll have to look up that book.
LikeLiked by 1 person
The most likely contenders for non-carbon-based life would be the other elements in the valence 4 column: silicon, germanium, tin and lead. Besides its simple atomic structure, what sets carbon apart is that carbon dioxide is a gas, while the other oxides are all solids. Silicon oxide is an insoluble solid. It’s much harder to get rid of a solid metabolic byproduct than a gas.
LikeLiked by 1 person
And He may have imposed more restrictions than they know.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Right water is a very odd chemical because of it’s hydrogen bonds (No I am not a chemist nor do I play one on TV but I am married to a PHD physical organic chemist). One of the features that comes from that is that the solid form (Ice) is less dense than the liquid form (thus ice floats). Water is also a very good solvent of polar atoms (i.e. those that tend to have a – and + charge end), I think life without H20 is REALLY hard to picture.
LikeLiked by 2 people
Carbon seems to be uniquely gregarious. It forms compounds with just about everything, and almost all large, complex molecules are structured around carbon.
So even if life based on other elements is possible, it’s likely that carbon-based life fills up the environment before any of the other types can get two steps past the starting line.
LikeLike
oh Lord. Forgive me, but this is what went through my mind: Carbon is a ho.
LikeLike
which gives rise to the entire field of orgasmic chemistry.
LikeLike
You have just earned yourself a Ballistic Carp. Pull! [Thwack]
Hey, at least it’s carbon-based! 🤣
LikeLike
“Fishin isotope”
LikeLike
That is a difficult question made even harder by the fact there is only one known data point at this time. My initial inclination is to say that life could arise in an environment with only elements below iron. This is because about 98% of living matter is made up of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, phosphorus, and sulfur. None of which are above iron (Fe) on the binding energy curve. However, I will not rule out a need for catalytic reactions involving elements like platinum, palladium, rhodium, or gold.
The short answer is, “I don’t know.”
LikeLiked by 2 people
The heavier (I.E, post Ferrous) atoms do seem to play parts in moderating some of life’s interactions as we know them. And of course if we posit pre ferrous atoms only then you only have Carbon or silicon in that column of the periodic table, Germanium at an atomic weight of 32 is heavier than Iron’s 26.
The other cosmological question I have relates to the amounts of the near iron atoms formed under normal stellar processes and their distribution. Normal processes don’t usually push you as far along the fusion chain, even Carbon Carbon fusion is rare and part of the process in certain supernovae. Without the supernova to disperse the materials you end up with many of the elements closer to Iron stuck in husks of dead stars waiting on some other rare catyclysmic event to disperse them. There are a whole lot of unknown unknowns here such that speculation wanders far more into fantasy than hard scifi :-) . Here I must stand with Parabarbarian in saying “I don’t Know” and possibly add I’m not even sure I can know,
LikeLike
Since we can see various elements in stellar and solar spectra, the elements are, at least in traces, close enough to the surface to blow off in stellar wind, flares, and eventual red giant flareup.
Traces.
Very small stars, red dwarfs, are highly convective, essentially lacking an isolated core. they churn almost 100%. This is also why their lifespan is measured in trillions of years. No red dwarf ever formed in the 14BY scenario is even in middle age yet.
Yes the Big Boys do most of the scattering. But even the supernovae of supergiants fail to explain the abundance of very heavy elements, such as gold. Those have been more recently explained as from collisions and resultant explosions/collapse when two pulsars merge.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Thank you, atoms above iron can fission, below can fuse. It’s been a while since I looked at that kind of thing.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Actually, that is a completely false comparison.
The universe -is-. It has a variety of properties. they are exactly balanced/correct/right to allow a whole bunch of things to work that are needed to get to complex elements, life, stars, gravity, etc.
A pothole is random entropy eating away at a made thing, because other made things beat on it repeatedly. Freeze/thaw may also be at work. Of course the puddle is pothole shaped. What does that have to do with the gravitational force being exactly right to get a start to collapse into a fusion state? The pothole is just wear and tear and fills with water because of all that other stuff that is just right, like water expanding when it freezes because it is a “bent” molecule and slightly polar, and life requires water to have such properties.
Either: it was all designed that way, or it all just randomly happened that way. The odds of that random are pretty far fetched slim. One can ignore that as one may wish, but something so highly unlikely is rather miraculous when it just so happens to facilitate me observing the toolmarks of a maker everywhere, or someone else saying “nah, just because” or some other view.
Or, the Creator started the clock 6000 (or whatever) yeas ago at some advanced set of construction, much as we start computer sims at an advanced state. No way to tell if the design includes the backstory, eh? (IE created an isotope ratio of uranium 235/238 at whatever we currently observe.) Both “young” and “old” earth views could thus be correct.
(If one insists I am wrong, all I ask is prove your preferred version please, stated as a positive not a negative. One cannot logically prove a negative. I am satisfied at my own interpretation of observation and Scripture. In a few decades or so I expect confirmation or rebuttal from an unimpeachable authority. )
I wont bother reading anything “Well, no it isn’t” without anything more than sophistry. C’mon. Be positive folks!
Timing: the apparent process took 14-ish billion years. “Life” popped up at about T minus 4B from current, right after the surface cooled below boiling temp of water. So based on “need metals for advanced civilization of technology”, no suitable stars existed more than about 5 billion years ago. So based on the most widely accepted Cosmological storyline, that’s the likely floor of any advanced civilization with technology. Or neighbors might be early corals, or whatever we will be in 500 MegaYears. Our stars are near twins that likely formed from similar circumstances
So the Hypothetical neighbors at Alpha Centauri may be about our age, but that might offset by half a billion years. 500MY is the approximate age to the “Cambrian Explosion” of multicellular complex life (generally accepted Terran timeline based on observations.) So even if the alignment is closer to 500,000Y, we are talking the difference between spaceflight and crude sentient-shaped rocks and pointy sticks. Even at 5000Y delta, they may have given up radio entirely, missing all our noise of the last hundred years of broadcasting. And with our own current radio telescopes, an “Earth Twin” at Alpha C would be totally obvious and readable.
Interestingly, “the Big Bang” was -opaque- until it cooled down enough for light to both exist and propagate. At which time there was then nothing generating light, much. You thus had a diffusion of vast deep clouds of “stuff” composed of almost entirely Hydrogen, with traces of Deuterium, Helium, and Lithium. That stuff had to condense for a -long- time into large clouds, into protosuns, into suddenly a bunch of very-giant stars all lighting off thermonuclear fusion almost all at once. And then there was a great shining of light separating from darkness. Can you imagine the view of billions of supergiant stars all close neighbors?
And oddly, that light separating from the darkness sure sounds like something I read somewhere.
Toolmarks.
LikeLike
[confirmation or rebuttal from an unimpeachable authority.]
After reading of the antics from the Ass-party* at the SOTU (didn’t watch; was setting up the new BiPAP machine and other fun stuff), I have a mental image of Omar and Tlaib screaming “Impeach God!”.
And the Lord said: [recites Maxwell’s Equations], and there was Light.
(*) Apologies to four-footed donkeys.
LikeLiked by 1 person
That argument, the anthropic principle, was stupid when I heard it thirty years ago, and it’s still stupid. It assumes the very thing it’s arguing about; it literally begs the question. The entire point of contention, the question being argued, is that the odds of intelligent life developing on a planet are fantastically low: it takes very specific conditions. And the anthropic principle says, “Ah, but we’re here, aren’t we? Therefore our planet, and the universe, must have had those conditions required for life, otherwise we wouldn’t be around.”
It’s like rolling a natural 20 on a d20, not just once, but seven times in a row. (This has happened to someone, at Gencon, during the “who can roll the most natural 20s in a row” contest they held just for fun. Unopened boxes of dice straight from the manufacturer, Chessex, handed out to each contestant. Roll the die. If it’s not a 20, you’re eliminated. Roll again. Not a 20, you’re eliminated. The last time I attended Gencon, over a decade ago, the winner of that contest rolled seven 20s in a row). And then after you roll those seven 20s, you say, “Well, it happened. Therefore this die must have been one that was bound to roll seven 20s in a row, so the odds of this happening were 100%.” No, you fool, that’s pure fatalism. You’re taking conditions now, where the past is locked into place and it’s 100% guaranteed that the past happened the way it did, and projecting those odds back to earlier, when it was not 100% guaranteed. If the guy rolling the die had tilted his hand a fraction of a degree to the left, the angular momentum of the die would have been different and it would have failed to roll a 20 at least once out of those seven times. Fate is not predetermined; what you do now will affect the outcome of tomorrow. You can not say “He rolled a 20 seven times in a row, therefore it was guaranteed to happen” and ignore the 0.0000001% odds against that event happening. Nor can you say “The universe is such that life on Earth is possible, therefore it was guaranteed to happen” and ignore the even lower odds against the conditions on our planet being just right for life.
But many people cling to the anthropic principle, ignoring everything they know about probability in real life, because if they don’t, they have to confront the question “Why?” Why does our planet have the conditions to support life, in the face of astronomical (literally) odds against all those conditions coming together perfectly in one place? If you believe in God, the answer is easy, so religious people are far less likely to fall for the begging-the-question fallacy inherent in the anthropic principle. But if you don’t believe in God, then the answer to “Why?” isn’t nearly as obvious, and the cognitive dissonance involved in that unanswered question leads many people to want to chuck the question altogether. So they abandon their reason and resort to projecting the present into the past in logically-untenable ways, just to avoid confronting the question that they can’t answer.
It was stupid thirty years ago when I first heard about it, it was stupid fifty years ago when the phrase “antropic principle” was first formulated, and it’s still stupid today. You can’t find a winning lottery ticket on the ground and say “Although the odds of this look like a million to one, it happened, therefore it was bound to happen and the odds were really 100%”. Nope. Unless someone put that ticket there for you to find, the odds really were that low.
LikeLiked by 1 person
IMO There’s an element in this of people NOT WANTING TO BELIEVE THAT EARTH IS SPECIAL, and thus Humans are special.
It leads to nonsense like ALL ALIENS ARE OLDER THAN/SUPERIOR TO humans.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Brin’s Uplift <del>trilogy</del> series was interesting in this respect: intelligent species don’t just evolve intelligence, they’re uplifted by older races. Who themselves were uplifted by someone else, and so on. Obviously there must be a first race, an un-uplifted uplifter (an unmoved mover), but whoever they were, they vanished so long ago that nobody knows anything about them. (This brings up an interesting philosophical point about origins, which I’ll get to later). Humanity, though, is a unique case. We have uplifted dolphins and chimps, so we clearly qualify for membership in the Uplifters Club, but nobody has any record of us being uplifted, which causes big problems for some of the club’s bylaws. Because if we were not uplifted, then we’re automatically the highest-status members in the club, being superior to every other race because our only status equal would be the so-long-absent-they’re-thought-a-legend Progenitors. So some races refuse to believe that humanity was not uplifted, and try to wage covert war on humanity to keep us down where we “belong” (in their snooty opinion).
Now for the point about origins that I mentioned. Since everything has a cause, and those causes have a cause, you can trace that all the way back to the beginning. But at some point there has to have been a first cause, an uncaused cause (unmoved mover). In fact, only one of two possibilities exist:
The Big Bang theory (“in the beginning, there was nothing, which exploded” as I recall Pratchett putting it) falls into category 1. The Big Bang-Big Crunch cycle falls into category 2, with the “something” that has always existed being matter in some form. And special creation also falls into category 2, with the “something” being God, a being whose nature is to not need a cause.
These are, of course, philosophical points rather than scientific, as it’s kind of hard to test out the “first there was nothing, then for no reason there was something” idea in a laboratory. :-)
LikeLiked by 1 person
The more you poke at this problem, the more you get things like orthogonal time dimensions and such, which really just increase the scope of the basic problem.
So best to just eat some chocolate.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Which is why a fairly standard trope is “Guy who puts the mad in mad scientist” goes back in time and sees the unseeable.
LikeLike
P.S. Those odds of rolling seven 20s in a row are not made up. I punched it into a calculator. 0.05^7 (0.05⁷ if you like) = 0.000000001 (rounded), which is the same as 0.0000001%.
LikeLike
Better than winning Powerball.
LikeLike
Yeah. I double-checked the math, and the odds of rolling seven 20s in a row are lower than 1 in a billion. Specifically, they’re exactly 1 in 1.28 billion (assuming the die is not loaded).
LikeLike
Sounds like warmed over pre-destination to me.
LikeLike
I used the word “fatalism” in my post, but yes, that’s exactly the concept I was trying to communicate.
LikeLike
The problem with oikophobia is not that it kills the practitioners, but that they kill so many innocents. It’s like the mass murderer that commits suicide at the end. “Why didn’t you just kill yourself first and save us all the trouble?”
LikeLiked by 4 people
A run of the mill suicide is just a statistic, outside of those directly affected by the event. An atrocious mass murder/suicide draws *attention*. It means that your existence mattered, if only in a horrific way.
LikeLike
I have to comment on this bit: (Omitting Goldilocks comments on gravity, the weak and strong nuclear forces, C, and a number of other phenomena that are oddly, coincidentally, -just- right for everything to work as needed to get to what is.)
Of course, everything in this timeline/parallel universe is exactly correct for life to emerge somewhere. Where they aren’t, life doesn’t emerge, so there’s nobody to ponder the question. There could be a million other parallel universes – a billion – where they aren’t right, and life doesn’t emerge. So there’s no one there to say, “Hey. That’s odd.”
LikeLike
Penrose spends quite a bit of time on this in “The Emperor’s New Mind.” The odds of things being as they are in our universe he calculated as 1 in 10^(10^123). This is ridiculously unlikely. Therefore, he suspects an underlying condition of spacetime has a thumb on the scale, so to speak.
Being me, I made a whole alien religion out of it. They think nothing exists and nothing matters, because the universe is 10^(10^123) unlikely. Proven mathematically. So their enslaved population spends all its time making pointless monuments to the fact that nothing matters.
I have a lot of fun chastising those guys. ~:D I gave them a real kicking.
LikeLiked by 2 people
Like Parmenides, who deduced that nothing exists except Pure Being, that change is impossible, and that the world of opinion, where we think there is change and particular beings, is a delusion.
LikeLiked by 2 people
Ah, but the ”awiens!” discussion here is at base triggered by the question “Where is everybody else?”
The absolute swarms of rocky planets discovered around other stars since we were technically able to start looking contributes to that question, as prior consideration had to include “What if rocky planets are really, really rare?”, but that one’s been mooted by astronomy.
11B-Mailclerk’s quoted comment in the post was part of a discussion about one possible answer being “There’s nobody else because we are the first” based on things like heavy element availability and stellar stability now vs. earlier.
And if we are the first, it behooves us to act like it, and go forth and populate the cosmos while littering everywhere, thus working hard to leave behind all sorts of consumer junk and candy wrappers and puzzles and toys and meaningless tchotchkes as well as really dangerous power tools so further spacefaring civilizations can build academic careers analyzing it all.
LikeLiked by 3 people
The idea of aliens being more morally advanced makes sense to me, because I think western civilization is more advanced and within it the US is the most advanced. Almost any kind of human-achievable morality would work for foragers, for the simple reason that we evolved to be foragers and any sort of morality that wouldn’t have worked for that lifestyle was selected out.
The choices for agriculturalists are narrower, roughly corresponding to what C.S. Lewis called “The Tao”. For example, believing that strangers have rights, at least until they prove hostile, is necessary in a polity that is big enough that you meet strangers who on your side. I think the choices for an industrial society are narrower still, and for one that can advance quickly, like the US, even more narrow. You have to have competition without violence, for example. It wouldn’t surprise me if what leads to alien flourishing at planet X also leads to aliens having the technology to visit us.
Civilization is not natural for humans, barbarism is. But we see civilization almost everywhere, to one degree or another, because civilization is much better at winning wars.
LikeLike
“…because civilization is much better at winning wars.”
Dude. War is the thing that moves Humanity along? Come on.
Civilization is much better at feeding people and reducing the uncertainties of life in nature. That’s what it’s for.
Western civilization is the best of all the varieties on offer so far. We do everything better than everybody else. (Except the French for some reason, exception that proves the rule.)
LikeLiked by 1 person
There is kind of a chicken and the egg issue here. You start to have folks living together as agriculture starts to win out over hunter gatherer. But as soon as you have stores of foodstuffs remaining hunter gatherers say “Hey hunting domesticated animals is WAY easier than hunting wild ones and stealing already gathered and gleaned grain is way easier than picking it”. So theft and raiding start. and defending against raiding makes technology advance rapidly. Once you come into the industrial age war really drives technology, Railroads, repeating rifles, Machine guns, aircraft all advance quickly due to wars. In 1903 the first aircraft went like a 120 feet at maybe 20 mph. By the end of WWI they were making 150MPH for pursuit (fighter) hardware with a couple hours endurance.
WWII hones aircraft, brings on jets and ballistic missiles (V2) and cruise missiles (V1) . also it brings on atomic power initially totally in the service of plutonium bomb production. The Cold War takes Ballistic missiles to their limits, and needs miniaturization of the electronics for guidance. Yes the Space race extends this, but like the rest of the cold war it is a proxy and starts from Atlas, Titan and the Russian R7 ICBM’s.
Of late the competition has thankfully been MOSTLY commercial but that commercial competition with US VS all comers has pushed things rapidly. War is ugly and total war (especially in a nuclear age) is a REALLY BAD thing. It is an odd dichotomy that war and warlike behavior drives much of our success.
LikeLiked by 1 person
“It is an odd dichotomy that war and warlike behavior drives much of our success.”
I’m going to make an argument here that I’ve never seen made before. (Doesn’t mean I invented it, just means I haven’t seen it. Yet. Some clever b@st@rd probably thought of it ages ago.)
War drives -some- of our success. Metallurgy for swords, armor, horse tack, all that, yes. Guns, aircraft, tanks, radio, internet, absolutely.
But which technologies changed the world of humanity? My short list:
clean water
clean indoor air
clean clothing
cheap food
cheap shipping
printing
germ theory of disease
Fellow nerds may add more, but that’s a decent starting point.
I’m going to go out on a limb here and suggest that war did not forward any of these technologies in a significant way, except shipping. Navies started out to defend against piracy and grew from there.
Even steam power, the automobile and electricity were not war-related in the beginning. Military planners and soldiers sized upon these technologies after they were already well along in development.
Cars ran on the same roads the horses did in the beginning, it took WWII to make the US Interstate Highway System (and the Autobahn etc.) necessary.
Railways similarly started out to save costs for farmers and miners shipping produce and goods to towns. Cheaper and faster than the ox cart.
Technological advancement during war seems to be mostly a matter focusing the attention of people who would otherwise be getting in the way. There are a million reasons that a 2nd Leftenant in the Air Force should not be allowed to screw around mounting expensive missiles built for jet fighters onto very expensive Predator drones meant for reconnaissance. Until there’s a war. Then all the million reasons get told to STFU and the 2nd Leftenant gets promoted to Captain in charge of arming ALL the drones.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Energy that does not depend on muscle power.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Cheap steel.
LikeLike
Warfare includes the adaptation to the existence of other uncontrolled (by you) persons outside of your own group.
There are two parts of agriculture that are essential to keeping the gambles (yearly crops and crops in different locations) net positive. The visible one we talk about is the laborers and decision makers on what to do when. The invisible one is the security forces which mitigate the barbarians who do not practice agriculture.
Nomads have wildly different property mores from sedentary agriculturalists. Nomads do not naturally intuit that wooden tools belong to other people, don’t burn them even if the aliens left them lying around, and they are useless to you.
Theft of crops is the obvious problem, but what people don’t realize is that relative peace does not tolerate nomads moving in and seeing the /laborers/ as easy meat.
Violence is a necessary remedy to possible diversity in humans, but customs which minimize costs and minimize collateral damage are necessary also as adaptations or improvements in a society that is advancing.
Modern critical theorists are internal barbarians, and often also savages, who do usually pose a danger to agriculture.
LikeLiked by 1 person
War is not the sole source of invention. Rather it (or it’s necessities) speeds things along. Bardain, Brattain and Shockley came up with the transistor at Bell Labs but it was refined into IC’s in about twenty years much of that coming out of a need to create precise low weight navigation hardware for missiles and spacecraft. There is a feedbeck loop to commercial uses too. The early microcomputers like the 4004 and 8008 got picked up by hobbyists and that feeds back into other commercial uses and then back around to military uses.
Look at the early age of aviation 1903-1914 Development is slow and somewhat impeded by the Wrights wing warping patents. Even six years after the first flight Bleriot’s aircraft is still crude and slow, the 21 mile or so flight across the channel is quite challenging. Now look at the development in the 3-4 years of WWI Compare a Bristol Scout with a late war Sopwith Snipe. The Scout had an 85 horsepower engine with a top speed of 97MPH. The Snipe had a 230 HP engine with a top speed of over 135mph a ceiling of 25000 ft and built in oxygen and heating for the pilot.
And yes somedays its the little guys making things happen. A great story is that of Paul “Pappy” Gunn as told by the Fat Electrician (language warning :-) )
LikeLiked by 2 people
Huh? That is clearly NOT the Fat Electrician
Just look on Youtube for Fat Electrician and “Most Gangster Dad” aor Pappy Gunn and you’ll find it. Ditting a B-25 Mitchel with 8 M2 .50 cal machine guns and learning skip bombing raises hell with Japans crew transports…
LikeLike
The Browning M-2 heavy machinegun in .50BMG is a most remarkable weapon. The basic design dates to 1918 in the last bit of World War 1. The modernized version dates to 1933, and was the basis for the variants used in WW2, from aircraft gun to ground vehicle MG, antiaircraft.
With only minor changes and improvements, we still use it as our primary heavy machinegun in 2026. Simple to make, robust, reliable, and absolutely knock-em-dead effective against anything but heavy armor. We have no serious plans to replace it any time in the next 20 years.
It is that good.
‘
LikeLike
And now it IS the fat electrician. If thaat was courtesy of someone with moderator privileges, thank you. Otherwise, it appears WordPress has some serious gremlins around video embedding. WordPress Delenda Erat
LikeLike
Evidence of raiding goes as far back as evidence of humanity. It can not be blamed on agriculture.
LikeLiked by 1 person
I can see that. A freshly killed critter or a pile of berries and nuts would be very valuable in the Stone Age. If robbing another group takes less effort than hunting and gathering your own food, raiding becomes a viable survival strategy.
Each group needs to learn how to defend themselves well enough that robbing them costs more than finding your own food.
LikeLiked by 1 person
That is true, even honest modern studies of stone age peoples (e.g. the Yanomami) show constant raiding, for a variety of reasons, food, women, territory, But organized planning and response to the raids seems to come out of the mindset that gets you the planning for animal husbandry and agriculture.
LikeLike
Just yesterday, I saw some video of the battle areas (and cities in the path) in the Ukraine, looking as though they are draped in miles of spiderweb. Turns out it’s ultra-fine fiber optic cable, because that’s how you can keep your commercial drone from being hijacked. These drones are pretty much single-use, so the glass threads just get dropped where they are.
And I don’t know how many drones have been employed in this, but “millions” seems to be a likely number.
Speaking of both war as a technological driver and a really bad thing…
LikeLike
Or, “When a man knows he shall be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates the mind wonderfully.”
LikeLiked by 1 person
Culture types are what win wars, not “civilization”. The Chinese dynasties were easily the most “civilized” group in East Asia, but usually lost (badly) when fighting their neighbors (particularly the proto-Mongols). The only advantage Chinese armies have ever had is a huge population to draw from, and even then they were still beaten by tiny Vietnam in their last war.
LikeLiked by 2 people
The mind-set of the Civilized Chinese elites was that warriors/soldiers were the lowest life-forms of their “civilization”.
That’s attitude is one reason why their neighbors won so often, especially when you consider that their border troops were often related to the invaders. 😉
Oh, it’s “interesting” how many fictional aliens had a low opinion of aliens who could fight wars. Several books had those aliens forcing humans to fight for them. [Very Big Evil Grin]
LikeLiked by 2 people
According to one of the profs who taught the early ’70s music appreciation course, Chinese musicians were pretty far down on that ladder, too. His impression of a barely sober musician playing a one-string lute-like thing was impressive. (I think it was an impression. OTOH, he wasn’t the prime lecturer.)
LikeLike
Yet within a couple of generations of defeating the Chinese, those former proto-Mongols become Chinese. Somehow, the civilization is self-replicating.
LikeLike
Silk, fancy pottery, certain spices, and other cool stuff came with Han Chinese culture, alas. And people wanted to be considered civilized, so the copied the package along with the stuff. Unfortunately for the Yuan (Mongol) and Qing (Manchu) Dynasties, the package had some flaws. Too, China had been the big dog in the region from, oh, 210 BC to AD 1200, then 1300 to 1800. So the Confucian et al world view and philosophy seemed to work and indeed be ideal.
Darn the round eyes and their technology, crops, organization, et cetera. And China hitting the ecological limits again, and, and, and …
LikeLiked by 1 person
“Yet within a couple of generations of defeating the Chinese…”
I’ve heard this one before as well. My theory is that the Chinese, en masse, didn’t have much to do with whoever was “running” the country and therefore nothing much changed when they got conquered. Mongols, Manchu, Qin, made no difference.
And you can tell if you look at farm implements, carts, tools of craftsmen and etc. They never change for over a thousand years. A bench from 100BC looks like a bench from 1890. Same damn thing.
To the point where they are STILL using the same peasant benches, trestles, baskets and all that stuff out in the sticks where most people still live, scratching away planting rice one seedling at a time, by hand, same as always. Except now some of them have cell phones.
80 years of Communism, the Great Leap Forward and 40++ million dead, it didn’t even make a dent. And really, I don’t know if I see that as a good thing.
LikeLiked by 1 person
What happened was that the new conquerors always left the bureaucracy in place, because it’s hard to run China without the bureaucracy. The bureaucracy has always been important to China, to the extent that when Sun Yat-Sen designed his Chinese constitution, he reportedly modeled it after the US Constitution… and then added the bureaucracy as a fourth branch of the government.
(while I haven’t personally read the constitution that he wrote, I have questions about how well it would have worked in the long run…)
LikeLiked by 2 people
My dad’s “win the lottery” dream was to go to the actual farmers all over the world, and talk to them about what they are doing, and what would make it easier, then provide that.
Because that’s what his grandfather did– they were farming, they got technology, they applied that technology to the work they were actually doing.
Top-down type rulers can’t get that.
LikeLiked by 1 person
No, they became Mongols. You’re likely only thinking about the Mongolian conquest of China. I’m looking at the *many* expeditions launched into the areas north of the Great Wall. For example, the first Han emperor, Gaozu (who had won the throne after helping to overthrow the Qin Dynasty, and then successfully winning the War of the Chu-Han Contention) personally led an expedition north that was estimated to have over 300,000 troops. But Emperor Gaozu found himself badly beaten by the proto-Mongolians living in the area. He survived only by the good graces of the people he was fighting, who allowed both him and the remnants of his army to return home in exchange for large tributes (including an Imperial princess).
If you look at Chinese military expeditions outside of China, this is a pattern that you see repeated over, and over, and over again.
Some Mongols later took over China and subsequently became Chinese themselves (the Yuan Dynasty). But others did not, and remained Mongolians.
Even when China finally conquered Mongolia, it was the Qing Dynasty, which was the Manchu (i.e. a “barbarian” nation from Manchuria) dynasty, and not a native Chinese dynasty. The conquest was completed within a few decades of the Manchu taking power (i.e. before they’d finished “becoming Chinese”, and much of it was accomplished through Mongolian tribes turning to the Chinese for military assistance against other tribes.
LikeLike
No no no, the Peoples Liberation Army achieved all of their objectives, then bravely advanced rearward back to the borders ante bellum as a goodwill gesture.
Just ask them.
LikeLike
Right, sorry… My bad…
*cough*
On a more serious note, if anyone’s looking for details about China’s invasion of Vietnam, and the reasons why the PLA engaged in a brave advance rearward to the borders ante bellum, there are worse places to start than this YouTube channel which I recently discovered. He covers the PLA over its brief history in general, and has short episodes on a wide variety of items within this topic, including the 1979 invasion of Vietnam. Watching just one recent video made it *very* clear why the brave advance rearward took place. The NVA probably thought they were in heaven after having had to fight the Americans (and other allied nations) for so long. Westerners mock the nonsense that the US military engaged in over there, but the PLA… just… wow.
Bleh… I tried to paste the link to the YouTube channel, but WPDE got stuck trying to do something creative with it, and wouldn’t actually type it out. I’m guessing WPDE saw the YouTube url, thought I was posting a video link, and tried to treat it like a video instead of a site link, causing some sort of error loop…
In any case, the YouTube channel is “Type 56: The Story of China’s Army”
The guy who runs it is @Type56_Ordnance_Dept
LikeLiked by 2 people
The Vietnamese are tough effers, and they apparently do not have “quit” in their souls.
The folks who quit, lose. The folks who don’t quit are called “Victorious”.
Thus “Never Quit.”
LikeLike
Thus why the US Army Rangers and US Army Special Forces cultivate their respective seemingly-weird cultures.
Because those cultures -win-, and reliably so.
LikeLiked by 1 person
I’m sure I’m not the only photography-trained person who snickers at the photos of “orbs” in haunted houses. It’s exactly the effect you get when a flash diffuses around floating dust motes. Funny, that.
LikeLiked by 1 person
“In fact the idea that aliens are more advanced MORALLY is a complete non-sequitor.”
This is that insidious and pernicious notion you find in the Ivory Tower that the only path to superior moral attainment is scholarship. Updated to technological sophistication in (I’m guessing) the 1920s. The peasantry can’t be trusted with freedom because they are ignorant. Only the Educated are sufficiently enlightened that they can run things.
So aliens who can cross light years of Space must be Really Super Duper educated and therefore super duper morally enlightened. Gifting us with tales like The Day The Earth Stood Still, the latest remake of which is so preachy it makes my teeth ache.
I’ve been having a laugh subverting this trope. Aliens are in it for themselves, and they are no better than they ought to be, despite their immense power. The failings of hierarchical social arrangements built on “efficiency” and “order” figure prominently. ~:D
Aliens come to Earth and discover that humans, although squishy, have four billion years of design depth in our biological systems, making us creatures not to be messed with lightly. We are also vastly entertaining to be around, so they all stay here for vacation.
Hilarity ensues.
LikeLike
aka “Teenagers from Outer Space” RPG. 😋
(which is heavily influenced by Urusei Yatsura)
LikeLiked by 1 person
“Teenagers from Outer Space”
Sound awesome. ~:D Urusei Yatsura is a classic.
In my latest book, Secret Empire, the main characters suspect the answer to Fermi Paradox, “where is everybody?” might be “Space Cops.” Everybody is being quiet and hiding from them.
So they find a ram rocket cruising along near Barnard’s Star, and drop out of warp next to it. Teenagers doing wheelies in front of the cops.
Hilarity ensues.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Teenagers from Outer Space is a rather silly and simple table top RPG by MIke Pondsmith. Yes, *THAT* Mike Pondsmith. His original games were anime-themed RPGs, with the mecha-focused Mekton RPG as his initial foray.
His MUCH more famous Cyberpunk RPG came later, in the late ’80s.
He still keeps trying to get back to Mekton, and deliver a long-promised overhaul. But Cyberpunk is where the money’s at. So that’s where his primary focus is.
LikeLiked by 2 people
“DAHLING!!!” *ZAP*
LikeLiked by 1 person
LikeLike
LikeLiked by 1 person
Ahem. I have no idea why that Jimmy Akin video popped up, never saw it before. I was trying to post Hot Rod Lincoln.
LikeLike
Okay I give up, wordpress delenda est.
LikeLike
I’m recalling a short story by Harry Turtledove. “The Road not Taken”.
A barbarian horde (roughly at the Viking level of technology) had (via handwavium and finding an “unconsidered principle”) achieved interstellar spaceflight. Whereupon, they attempted to invade Earth, and got their asses handed to them.
At which point, said principle got into our hands, and after some dented foreheads by engineers/physicists, we went to the stars.
Wiki has a summary: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Road_Not_Taken_(short_story)
LikeLiked by 3 people
Correction: Chamber pot and matchlock technology.
LikeLike
Let’s not forget that they basically had no way to circulate/refresh air.
LikeLike
It’s over here.
LikeLike
It’s worth noting that in that story, the usual course of technological development is apparently to develop interstellar travel at the technology level that the invaders were at. Earth is the odd one out in this situation, as we missed it, and scientific know-how that would have otherwise gone into refining the interstellar engines (the technology is apparently only good for that specific purpose) instead went into developing all of the many wonderful things that we’ve figured out since then.
The end result is an Earth that’s about to take its first steps into the galactic neighborhood, and is apparently much more advanced than everyone else in every area except interstellar engines.
LikeLiked by 1 person
My mother told me that the first time she was on a plane (1960’s? Maybe?) a ball of lightning wandered in the front of the plane, wandered down the aisle, and wandered out the back.
She didn’t tell me how anyone responded, but I thought it was interesting.
LikeLike
I believe that humans the oldest “child”, who are to go out to the stars and help the siblings out, and in the process finish growing into an adult race. This early adolescent phase we are currently going through is just rough.
I may look at the universe a few degrees off.
LikeLiked by 1 person
At least it’s interesting.
LikeLike
Speaking of aliens among us, S@m Altm@n’s Open LLM has just cut its cap-ex plans from $1.4 trillion to $600 billion. Given they have already signed contracts with CIsco and that circular transaction with NVIDIA, etc., worth about …. $600 billion that means they’re not planning any expansion at all. “EVeryone” has been waiting for the first cap-ex cut as a signal the LLM bubble is bursting, IS it? Don’t know, but tied with today’s Anthropic presentation, humanity is starting to look like a better bet than ghosts in the machine.
I’m right on the edge of a permanent smug face, hope, for me, it goes that way. For the poor suckers, well, not so much. And I might be the sucker, who knows.
LikeLiked by 1 person
I’m basically betting that I would not be better off quitting, and going to playing video games as a goal. With that is the assumption that automation changes what tasks are most valuable to tackle with human labor, but does not change that human labor has utility. (Flip side of the assumption that automation engineering picks low fruit, but their is always more fruit.)
A dude elsewhere is saying that the AI will go away by 2030, and I disagree. Neural net methods had a presence in the engineering scholarly literature before the hype, and will continue to have a presence.
I do think engineering scholarship will probably be hit by a broader repricing of scholarship, but I am wacky as an estimator there.
I do have reservations with the theory of investment in LLM.
I basically have broader reservations, like forward valuations in the PRC, modeling in the Draghi report, etc.
Two days away from that election for a seat in the UK parliament. (It was a fifty percent labour seat, we shall see if that holds.)
LikeLike
The scientific term for this is “knows economics”.
A dude somewhere is a blithering idiot pontificating about things they have no understanding of. Film at 11.
LikeLiked by 1 person
I don’t know about “going away”, but until it stops including fake legal citations when allegedly it has the “gold standard” of which cases have been recorded in the actual courts to check against, I will continue to entertain doubts about its’ actual knowledge.
LikeLike
It already made less mistakes and hallucinations than junior associates as of a couple years ago. And certainly makes fewer mistakes per dollar than the lawyer you have go over the final draft so you don’t have to pay for as many hours.
LikeLike
If (AI generates citation)
Verify citation against decisions in court records.
If (citation not present)
Don’t include.
endif;
end if;
The fact that this is not obvious to you tells a lot.
LikeLike
I have no idea how you get to your last line.
LikeLike
If humans are making up legal citations, that is called academic dishonesty, or fraud, and Steps need to be taken.
LikeLike
The point that seems to be overlooked is that unlike so many data sets, we already have a “single source of truth” to check against. If the cases recorded as final aren’t a single source of truth, then where does that leave “rule of law”?
LikeLike
Fingers crossed for A10s (currently ~$2k) and A16s (currently ~$3k) to drop to a price within my budget.
LikeLike
”Dahak, are you accessing the internet and feeding stuff into Sarah’s blog post idea queue again?”
”It is important to actively shape the memetic societal battlefield before this battle station is openly revealed to Earthly society. My interactions remain discrete and covert, so I contend I have not violated your order to ‘not dink around on those Internet forums anymore’”.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Um, having a username of “Dahak Biblophile” is kind of a giveaway, Dahak. We can see you, you know.
Wait, hang on, someone’s whispering something in my ear.
Huh? Drak? Oh. [EmilyLitella]Never mind.[/EmilyLitella]
LikeLiked by 4 people
🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣
LikeLiked by 2 people
So I learned about an EU population dataset that can be used to make claims about which cities are big. I do doubt it is accurate.
I also learned about the Global Financial Centre Index.
Several causes for doubt. 1. One of the two organizations involved is the China Development Institute. 2. Other sounds a little like they are financial socialites. They talk about events in London. 3. Methodology sounds to me like it can very easily be biased without much effort or obvious sign.
The top twenty does not look very obviously cooked in favor of the PRC, so I wonder what is really wrong with it.
Anyway, I have been learning about the Gatcha game Zenless Zone Zero recently, which is another basically PRC setting.
This eventually lead to me seguing through a cyberpunk setting in space, basically with some cities in other worlds which are vaguely inspired by some historic earth cities. It recently came to me that this was a Starship Troopers future. Politically, these cities are independent from the republican republic that uses them as part of the catchment/drainage area it recruits from, or something like that.
Anyway, people are still getting super offended at praise of imperialism and of colonialism, but that just means that the entertainment value of annoying them is going to fade soon.
So storytelling needs to be entertaining in its own right for positive reasons.
LikeLike
Because Jimmy just recently did this episode and totally not because I forgot to link it in the discussion on the other post:
LikeLiked by 1 person
I ought to note that I have been modded.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Some SF authors have explored the possibility of planets where metals were much rarer. Vance’s “Big Planet” and Silverberg’s “Majipoor” stories, for example.
LikeLike
Jack Vance also wrote ‘The Blue World’ about a planet with no accessible land. Survivors of a crashed prison ship established a low-tech civilization on gigantic lily pads.
LikeLike
Can you even have morality or what we know of morality without humanity? If there are aliens, I require proof so if, their morality won’t be ours. Nor will they see things as we do, because they are aliens. Much like the invaders from the rest of the world coming here, they are here to take what we have built because that is their morality. They don’t figure it out for a couple of generations normally, their are exceptions of course.
LikeLike
Life apparently originated on Earth the moment the planet cooled enough for life to survive (if you can call a few millions of years of quadrillions of simultaneous natural chemical experiments a “moment”). So life is probably pretty common throughout the Universe. But “higher” lifeforms may be rare; on Earth there was nothing more sophisticated than mat-forming algae until about 600,000,000 years ago, after life was already at least 3 billion years old. And though most people know about the “Goldilocks Zone” around a star, what is less well known is that there is one in a galaxy as well: too far in toward the galactic center, and the radiation level gets too high for life to survive; too far out from the center, and there aren’t enough heavy elements from supernovae to support complex organisms, much less a technological civilization. I doubt we will encounter an extraterrestrial civilization within the lifespan of our species; there probably isn’t one within thousands of light-years of us, and speed-of-light will always keep us apart.
LikeLike
Life on Earth spent 3 1/2 billion years developing into eukaryotic cells. Everything after that was trivial. 😛
LikeLiked by 1 person
You mentioned us as the Old Ones….
LikeLike
Folks here have previously mentioned animals (wild) seeming, when all is otherwise lost, to risk “bargaining” with humans like humanity has stories of the fae. At worst, nothing, or faster death, BUT… a chance of healing. There might be a price of captivity.. maybe temporary, maybe not. But a chance. After all, these impossible creatures have ‘magic’ (changed environment beyond imagination, travel at impossible speeds, oddly long life…). Risky, yes. But if you’re already nearly dead…
And if some life form(s) can figure out how to talk to humanity (and/or the reverse)…. well, things get Interesting. But that, if it happens at all, is likely a long, Long, LONG way off.
LikeLiked by 1 person
From a previous AtH post comment…
>>> I think the reason why we haven’t encountered aliens is that we are [will become] the wise elder race.
>> Is that comforting, or the ultimate horror?
>Yes
——-
A possible far, far future conversation….
“Uh.. you’re… human.. right? I’m curious about something… you didn’t make contact until after a lot of development… but it looks like you’ve been watching us for a long time. Are we in a zoo, or .. well, what gives? So many times we could have used a bit of advice. And you said nothing.”
“Every civilization we look at that we can talk with has the same question. That advice you think we could give? Is worse than worthless. We learned the hard way. The advised… learned it much harder. Recall the great arms race of your… 2100’s was it? Where you just barely seemed to get by, but did? Bet you wanted some help there. We used to try. Turns out that’s a really bad idea.”
“Could we talk with any of those civilizations, find out what…”
“Alas, no. We’d like for it to be possible, but.. none made it. After a dozen or so saddening failures, we went quiet… and found most figured it out themselves. A few still failed, but..”
“So you helped most by not helping at all?!”
“Yes.”
“Out of curiosity, how did YOU get past your version of the great arms race?”
“That system you rejected as mad? It was mad. For you. For the Glabsmok. For the Leekber. For the Fuh. For almost everyone. For us… amazingly, and perhaps uniquely, Mutual Assured Destruction worked – and we… well we got really, really lucky.. a few times over.”
“Monsters. You’re monsters!”
“No. Were we monsters, we’d have tried to ‘help’ you.”
LikeLiked by 4 people
The 10 most terrifying words in the galaxy: “Hello. We’re from Earth, and we’re here to help you!” 🤣
LikeLiked by 4 people
Humans can only observe, and study, what they know. We do know we don’t know anything about gravity, other than it’s a force, time is completely dependent on the point of observation, and the possibility of other dimensions can only be theory until a method of observing these dimensions is discovered.
Are there visitors from other dimensions? We don’t know, and if so, can those be where other species come to visit? Are these other dimensions shaped by forces we can’t observe? Are oxygen, heavy metals, and gravity completely different, and as important?
We’re like fish swimming in water, completely unaware what we swim in, and ignorant about what we can’t observe.
LikeLiked by 1 person
I donno. If you go by the concept that aliens are those who are not us, then most of the human race are aliens.
LikeLiked by 1 person
We have met the aliens, and they is us.
(Apologies to Pogo.)
LikeLiked by 1 person
Apparently back in ’57 – this is a true story – some American researchers conducted a test using plutonium in a chamber that was sealed shut by a manhole cover that was welded over the top. Due to one or more gross miscalculations, the plutonium went off with magnitudes of force greater than anticipated. The force of the blast was directed up through the chamber toward the opening, which was covered by the manhole cover. The weld had no chance. After some initial head scratching over the manhole cover that had seemingly disappeared, the researchers quickly figured out that it had been blown clear. The test was reportedly performed a second time, and this time a camera was aimed at the manhole cover.
The exact fate of the manhole covers is unknown. There was apparently enough force behind the blast to send the metal discs straight up at what may have been 130,000 mph. For comparison purposes, the speed of sound at sea level is a mere 761 mph. That could potentially mean that both of the covers are somewhere in the Ort Cloud right now, and still moving steadily away from our solar system. Voyager 1 would no longer be the American-made object that had traveled furthest from Earth. On the other hand, the discs would first have to survive their (very) brief trip through the atmosphere. Given the amount of atmospheric friction that would have developed, well…
Needless to say, having the covers melt or disintegrate during their atmospheric escape is the *boring* option. It’s the no fun option for party poopers. And apparently lots of people agree, because I found out today that there’s a sub-branch of HFY short story fiction in which one of the effectively invisible manhole covers ends up causing some aliens an unexpectedly very bad day.
LikeLike
If I recall correctly, the exact speed of the manhole covers is hard to calculate because they appeared on exactly one frame of the video. So you can get the approximate speed to maybe a couple significant digits, but the error margins are quite large.
LikeLike
It wouldn’t surprise me. I suspect the closest that anyone could get to calculating the speeds would be to take a look at the estimated amount of force propelling the covers up and away, and subtract the amount of force that would have been lost cracking the welds. But even then, there would be a lot of guesswork involved.
Regardless, it’s an amusing story both due to the inadvertently (well, the first one was) launched manhole covers, and the fact that there’s apparently a niche sub-genre of short story fiction focusing on them wreaking havoc on alien races.
LikeLiked by 1 person
“Time to leave these primitives to develop. Set course for our next system.”
“Prepare to activate hypershunt.”
“grid charging. ……. FTL in 16 15 14 13”
WHHHAAAAAAANNNNNNGGGG!!! (ship chaos and lurching)
“Alert alert ! Hull breach! Massive damage in engineering!”
“Shipleader! We have been fired upon by some sort of hypervelocity massdriver! Scanners how traces of ordinary iron doped with ….. superheavy elements …. and …. fission products?”
” -fission-?? Thats insane! We are practically in interstellar space. How could they hit us -here-? They havent even settled their own nearspace other than that one food-bin thing in orbit. “
“Shipleader, the wrecked us with -one- shot of … whatever that was. The next one and we are all ancestor-sprites. We may be those soon anyway.”
“signal them. We surrender. We have no choice. “
LikeLiked by 2 people
As to “Humans > Aliens,” I have a WIP in, just now (and expanding on a short I published a few years back), in which the sapient race of Planet X run the gamut from (so far) Stone-Age-Plus-Minor-Metallurgy up to Roman-Britain. And our (Terran) First Contact was with the Stone-Age end of the bandwidth.
And it was done specifically as a Trope Inversion, because the Mystery Tribe Out There is no more likely to be starfarers than the Mysterious Tribes Down Here are.
LikeLiked by 1 person
I believe there is more of a clue in the releases than most realize.
They changed the name from UFO’s to UAP’s recently. What’s different. Unidentified Flying Objects, vs Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena. Quite a bit different meaning, eh? Pour Qui?
Something else was slipped out with the most recent headline – these are inter-dimensional beings….
If you know a little about modern physics, specifically things like Quantum physics (and I’ve only ever studied at the university of Youtube on the matter), you understand what they’re saying between the lines. Alien isn’t the right word.
LikeLike
Eh, depends on which definition of “alien” you use.
I must say that alternate dimensions seem more plausible than FTL drives that leave no trace.
LikeLike
“….dang illegal aliens….”
LikeLiked by 1 person
One of the other theories is that phosphorus is the critical complaint for life. Basically every living thing uses ADP-ATP as it’s battery, and it’s a pretty rare element to always base everything on, unless there is literally no other way to do it.
And we’re apparently unusually rich in it.
In the far future, alchemists may be obsessed with making phosphorous instead of gold.
LikeLike