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Nachimir

The ASTOUNDING thread of science!

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Find us other science, Griddlelol :P

 

Incidentally, I've found the backlash against "I fucking love science" interesting recently. Seen comments ranging from "I fucking love facebook ad revenue" to this Cyanide and Happiness punchline.

 

I've noticed the same thing about IFLS, and it's just weird.  I don't spend much time on Facebook, so I don't know if the feed has changed at all, but it seems like most of the hate I see is just hating on it because it's popular and successful.  It's like a hipster got mad at being friendzoned.   "Oh, you fucking love science, that's great.  You know, some people fucking loved science before it was cool and on Facebook.  Some of us fucking hung out with science when no one else wanted to.  Now everybody loves science, but not really.  They just like science for now, they don't get science.  They didn't spend hours every night listening to science.  Understanding science.  Science will come back, just you wait."

 

 

Our galaxy, and the stars it contains, is BILLIONS of years old. This means that there has been plenty of time for civilizations to rise and fall, and explore and travel. It's not a crazy assumption to make that life could be exploring the galaxy for millions of years, providing that the lifetime of a technological civilization is long enough (again, the cynic in me looks at humanity and thinks: not bloody likely). Also, it's not required for a species to live for millions of years before it could reach the stars. I don't know what a species or civilization that lasts for a huge long time looks like, but given the sheer number of stars that could contain life, the variety should be enough that at least ONE of these species would be detectable by humans. Right? And yeah, alien civilizations could have explored the Earth in the distant past and we would never know. So, I understand your concern.

 

I haven't had enough coffee to intelligently science yet, but the tiny, tiny fraction of time we've been observing the universe makes me question how compelling the Fermi Paradox is.  I'll try to come back later and explain better.

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Again, I also agree that perhaps there are alien cultures out there that don't understand why you would want to communicate with aliens, but based on the sheer number of planets we are discovering around nearby stars, it's a pretty broad assumption to believe that EVERY ONE of them is keeping hush hush. Also, SuperBiasedMan, it's pretty weird to assume that their "technology" is incompatible with ours. Light is an incredibly abundant thing throughout the universe. It's a source of heat and energy, and it's the primary driver of life (as we know it, yes, yes). So, it'd be pretty wacky to assume that aliens wouldn't use light to send and receive signals. 

 

We have only been observing the universe in a tiny bit of time...but I think that it's still profound that we've gotten zero signals from anywhere. 

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Side note: I work in science, so I guess that C&H cartoon doesn't work for me. I spent plenty of time doing boring stuff. 

 

Oh, sorry. I didn't mean to make it seem directed at you, or anyone else here. I kind of just find it interesting that a bunch of cheerleading seems to indicate only a superficial interest in science among lots of people.

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(Also, please note that I am trying to be chipper and supportive here. Please read my comments in the spirit of interesting science discussion rather than jerk-ey science naysaying / cynicism)

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I was skeptical of the fetishisation of science before it was cool

 

I find it fascinating how quickly we've gone from thinking it'd be really cool to find alien life, to being really scared of either finding alien life, or not finding alien life.

 

Personally, I'm going with "it's pretty fucking hard to have a global civilisation advanced enough to actually spread because you've basically got one shot at getting it right" with a soupcon of "turns out warp drives are impossible". (Incidentally, I think it's funny how I've never heard of humans being a precursor race in science fiction.)

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(Incidentally, I think it's funny how I've never heard of humans being a precursor race in science fiction.)

 

The theme of humanity as precursor does pop up.  Not as often as alien as precursor, but it's definitely there.  The most obvious example would be Battlestar Galactica.  It manifests typically as humans discovering that they once were far more advanced, but something drove them back to the stone age and they are just rediscovering their past.

 

BSG practically has a double precursor story going on, humans as the precursors to the main storyline, and the main storyline being precursors to modern humans (the second one is closer to the traditional precursor type story).  It's not quite the magical alien tech precursor that's much more common, but you could see how that type of story could exist in the BSG universe.

 

Edited to add:

 

TVTropes to the rescue.  The entries Humanity's Wake, Advanced Ancient Humans and Precursor's all address humanity as precursor to some extent.

 

 

(Also, please note that I am trying to be chipper and supportive here. Please read my comments in the spirit of interesting science discussion rather than jerk-ey science naysaying / cynicism)

 

I'm definitely taking it as an interesting discussion, and not something more negative.

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Again, I also agree that perhaps there are alien cultures out there that don't understand why you would want to communicate with aliens, but based on the sheer number of planets we are discovering around nearby stars, it's a pretty broad assumption to believe that EVERY ONE of them is keeping hush hush.

 

I believe I addressed this in my "stay away from the crazy planet" theory.

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SuperBiasedMan, it's pretty weird to assume that their "technology" is incompatible with ours. Light is an incredibly abundant thing throughout the universe. It's a source of heat and energy, and it's the primary driver of life (as we know it, yes, yes). So, it'd be pretty wacky to assume that aliens wouldn't use light to send and receive signals. 

 

I'm kind of talking in super broad vague terms that are supposed to poke doubt at the paradox. I'm not that well read on this stuff so I was just dropping in thoughts.

 

That said, isn't it feasible that the usage period for light technology could be relatively brief? I mean, we've moved through different communications mediums quite fast. They've been mostly electromagnetic for a while now, but cosmically that's a blip. What if we find a new system that works outright better. We've proven in the past that we don't cling to technology except for slight posterity, so couldn't the systems basically fade after a time and require that periods of technological development line up with our own?

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When it comes to sending signals out into space, there is no more obvious, more simple way to communicate than through light. I think that you're right when it comes to how long we are going to broadcast light out into space, and I always roll my eyes when people talk about aliens watching our old television shows. But, I wonder what happens when we start blasting the first Earth-like planets with radio waves. Why aren't we the target of radio signals from alien life? Is it, as SecretAsianMan has supposed, because of the Prime Directive?

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When it comes to sending signals out into space, there is no more obvious, more simple way to communicate than through light. I think that you're right when it comes to how long we are going to broadcast light out into space, and I always roll my eyes when people talk about aliens watching our old television shows. But, I wonder what happens when we start blasting the first Earth-like planets with radio waves. Why aren't we the target of radio signals from alien life? Is it, as SecretAsianMan has supposed, because of the Prime Directive?

 

Isn't it conceivable that we just aren't capable yet of distinguishing "alien communication" from white noise? To me, it seems plausible that if there are space people out there communicating across vast differences, that they would probably be capable of disguising their communications from primitive species like ours. I mean, they probably know the first thing we would do if we heard their communications and figured out where they were would be to mail them a bunch of space nukes.

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When it comes to sending signals out into space, there is no more obvious, more simple way to communicate than through light. I think that you're right when it comes to how long we are going to broadcast light out into space, and I always roll my eyes when people talk about aliens watching our old television shows. But, I wonder what happens when we start blasting the first Earth-like planets with radio waves. Why aren't we the target of radio signals from alien life? Is it, as SecretAsianMan has supposed, because of the Prime Directive?

 

Will we blast them?  Observation is mostly passive, letting information come to us.  We'll only blast them in the hope that someone is listening, not because we'll get data back in our lifetime.  How long does a species do that, send messages in a bottle through space?  Once?  For a year?  A decade?  Eventually you stop, and on the galactic time scale, you probably only have brief windows to reach another species that has both the technology to hear you and the will/interest to be actively listening.

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What do you mean by "white noise"? When we send signals into space, it's most important that we differentiate our signals from completely random signals, or from astronomical sources, using math, generally. At the same time, when we look out in space, we can pretty much account for the majority of the light we see as coming from astronomical sources (I know that there are many individual examples of unknown sources, but these are rare). It wouldn't make sense for a civilization to use light emitted at a wavelength where stars emit a huge amount of light, generally you'd want to use the wavelength where your background is low (the radio offers a good example of that).

 

And Bjorn, I'd have to believe that we'd blast them for as long as we could. The discovery of alien life on a nearby planet would be the GREATEST SCIENTIFIC DISCOVERY OF ALL TIME. It wouldn't be crazy for a Paul Allen type to buy a radio emitter capable of beaming signals to this alien planet for hundreds of years. We have the money to be able to do this, easily. And he wouldn't be the only one. And, as we get better telescopes and understand the planet better, that would only increase our desire to communicate. I don't know if that's the likely limiting factor here. 

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What do you mean by "white noise"? When we send signals into space, it's most important that we differentiate our signals from completely random signals, or from astronomical sources, using math, generally. At the same time, when we look out in space, we can pretty much account for the majority of the light we see as coming from astronomical sources (I know that there are many individual examples of unknown sources, but these are rare). It wouldn't make sense for a civilization to use light emitted at a wavelength where stars emit a huge amount of light, generally you'd want to use the wavelength where your background is low (the radio offers a good example of that).

 

Point being that a species that is possibly millions of years more advanced than us would probably be a hell of a lot more clever than us. Is it really that inconceivable that the math these species might use to differentiate their signals from completely random signals would be advanced enough to allow them to send signals that are seemingly random to us?

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And Bjorn, I'd have to believe that we'd blast them for as long as we could. The discovery of alien life on a nearby planet would be the GREATEST SCIENTIFIC DISCOVERY OF ALL TIME. It wouldn't be crazy for a Paul Allen type to buy a radio emitter capable of beaming signals to this alien planet for hundreds of years. We have the money to be able to do this, easily. And he wouldn't be the only one. And, as we get better telescopes and understand the planet better, that would only increase our desire to communicate. I don't know if that's the likely limiting factor here. 

 

Yep, and there are plenty of billionaires on the planet who could be funding all sorts of incredible science adventures.  Some are, most aren't.  Allen specifically has dumped a bunch of money into SETI, but has said that he's not willing to fund something like that solely, even though he is capable of doing it.  I don't think the assumption that a philanthropic person will continue is a strong enough proposition to say that it will happen. 

 

As far as space communication goes, if something like quantum entanglement ever pans out, then for internal communications among a society, light would probably no longer be used.  Or we can imagine other technology that may or may not be feasible (warp powered communication devices, portal like devices for information, etc) that would explain the lack of light based communication.

 

 

Point being that a species that is possibly millions of years more advanced than us would probably be a hell of a lot more clever than us. Is it really that inconceivable that the math these species might use to differentiate their signals from completely random signals would be advanced enough to allow them to send signals that are seemingly random to us?

 

I actually find that to also be a poor explanation though, it's just a bit too much of a stretch for me to think they would care.  It's kind of crossing over into X-Files conspiracy stuff.  "The aliens are out there, but they don't want us to know."

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There may be aliens who do indeed wish to communicate using subspace/ansible technology outside our understanding, but that brings with it a lot of assumptions as well. I'm just proposing that the simplest possible way of alien communication: light, might be the way that they would attempt to talk with us.

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Think of it like encrypted radio transmissions, except the encryption is so advanced we don't even know it's encrypted.

 

That's a better explanation than just assuming they are purposely trying to mask their transmissions from us.

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I feel like communication with intelligent alien life involves a lot of assumptions, any of which break the Fermi Paradox. Are the aliens close enough to communicate? Even within our own galaxy, the space between stars is pretty damn wide and we've only been listening for a few cosmic seconds. Do the aliens want to communicate? Most of what we've been blasting out, assuming they decode it, is base-level entertainment media that focuses on sex, violence, and consumer products, none of which might interest aliens not just desperate to know they're not alone in the universe. Do the aliens apprehend the same physical universe we do? Light is the most obvious means of communication if you have eyes, but not if your primary sense is gravometric or something. Are the aliens sentient as well as sapient? As much as I hated his book, I've got to give Peter Watts' Blindsight credit for this, because it had never occurred to me that self-awareness is not necessarily a criterion for high-level intelligence. In fact, in that book, communication itself is revealed to be a hostile act to the aliens, because it overwrites one mind with another, albeit temporarily.

 

I don't know. I am pretty compelled by Occam's Razor in terms of why we haven't encountered alien life, but I also feel that it's a hugely conceited assumption that every alien species out there is just like us and dying to communicate in a way that we'll understand immediately.

 

I was skeptical of the fetishisation of science before it was cool

 
Yeah, I'm there, too. The commodification of scientific knowledge in a superficial way that privileges the mysterious and wacky is something I don't think it needs to survive and yet something that I Fucking Love Science feeds on exclusively. Then again, I'm the one that how the final episode of Cosmos spent a large amount of time ridiculing "petty ideologies that think they know everything that matters," then later described the Voyager plaques as using "the one truly universal language, science." Basically, I wish that modern Western society could talk about science in a way that i) doesn't fetishize science as some weird and mystical means of doing the impossible, and ii) acknowledge the limits of science without adding an implied "yet" after any admission of ignorance. But I know that's asking a lot.

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As a scientist / astronomer, I've had to really work on fighting my urge to hate this "fetishization of science." I do understand that it is really glossing over the most vital parts of science in favor of looking at pretty pictures and passing around 1 - 2 sigma detections as being hard conclusions. This is bad. But! I am glad that we are looking at science in a positive light at all. I spend a lot of my time talking to people about science in museums and planetariums, and those I Fucking Love Science people are passionate, and patient, and love to have their assumptions challenged. They're not always like this, but often they're the ones who would put preference on going to a natural history museum or an air-and-space museum instead of other things. And I want people like that. 

 

I want people to know that science is a thing that people, real people, are doing, and trying, and failing, and making progress at. It's not a mystic art (similar to what Gormongous said), but rather a fun tool we have to understand the universe around us. That's a pretty important personal goal. And it's why I just launched a website dedicated to trying to do this for astronomy, and I'm working like mad in the evenings and on weekends to try to get things out there for people to see. 

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As a scientist / astronomer, I've had to really work on fighting my urge to hate this "fetishization of science." I do understand that it is really glossing over the most vital parts of science in favor of looking at pretty pictures and passing around 1 - 2 sigma detections as being hard conclusions. This is bad. But! I am glad that we are looking at science in a positive light at all. I spend a lot of my time talking to people about science in museums and planetariums, and those I Fucking Love Science people are passionate, and patient, and love to have their assumptions challenged. They're not always like this, but often they're the ones who would put preference on going to a natural history museum or an air-and-space museum instead of other things. And I want people like that. 

 

I want people to know that science is a thing that people, real people, are doing, and trying, and failing, and making progress at. It's not a mystic art (similar to what Gormongous said), but rather a fun tool we have to understand the universe around us. That's a pretty important personal goal. And it's why I just launched a website dedicated to trying to do this for astronomy, and I'm working like mad in the evenings and on weekends to try to get things out there for people to see. 

 

Oh, I feel you. I definitely understand the desire for science to exist in the public mindspace as a positive force, even if it means being conceptualized as an arcane force harnessed by crazy techno-wizards who overturn our understanding of reality at least once a day. I just wish there could be the former without the latter.

 

Actually, I was going to post this in the Life thread, but it applies here. Public perception of different academic disciplines is such an odd balancing act. I got dragged into a Facebook argument about the relative dearth of religious belief in Game of Thrones. Eventually, some guy, who was way too invested in fantasy novels being able to do whatever they want in terms of world-building, asked me what effect Christianity had on medieval Europe that makes its absence so inappropriate. I responded with a careful explanation of the development of social orders, sacral kingship, agnatic kinship, and chivalry as fundamentally Christian processes that are used in Game of Thrones without their most important antecedent. What did he say to that? "No, I don't think so." When I tried to get him to elaborate, he refused, simply stating, "My opinion is as good as yours." None of my sources or credentials could persuade him that I had a better understanding than him of the subject.

 

So yeah, I'm a little envious of how marketable hard science is, but I think the risks for all academic disciplines in the end are the same. Either you present your work as esoteric and it gets fetishized (or ignored), or you present your work as common sense and it gets co-opted (or ignored). Having a bunch of Facebook friends thinking science is magic is probably better in the short term than a bunch of Ren Faire rejects thinking they're as good or better than professional historians, but I'm not optimistic about the long term for either. Our relationship with specialized knowledge in the age of the internet is... I don't know, difficult?

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I feel that the claim that science has been anymore commoditized or fetishized than it has been in the past is kind of a strawman argument, as shown by Rubixs' comment about IFLS people.  I think it's really hard to judge people's actual thoughts or attitudes based on Facebook comments or casual comments exchanged online. 

 

I don't want to mischaracterize what anyone has said here, what follows is not a specific reaction to any one post, but a general thoughts to the negative reaction to IFLS I've seen online. 

 

You could glance at my group of local friends and easily dismiss us as fetishizing science based on our Facebook interactions, which tend to be dominated quick stories, clever (maybe) remarks, amazing pictures, IFLS posts, and even a regular "Astro-porn of the day pic" (which is just about the most fetishized thing you can do).  But that group is also made up of a couple of scientists, grad students, a professor of tech writing and a variety of less academic laymen.  We can just as seamlessly go from shallow, doe eyed, hopeful discussions about the farthest reaches of what science might be capable of one day to a discussion about the nitty gritty mechanics of studying the terrestrial movement of bats and how to best gather research on that (something one guy has been working on for awhile now).  By dismissing things like IFLS as simply being shallow fetishizing, there seems to be an assumption that people's interest in science doesn't go any deeper than what is presented on Facebook, which I don't find to be true at all.  It's just harder to show that deeper interest on our current social media platforms. 

 

I'm not saying that my anecdotal group of friends is representative of the greater society, but I think the dismissal of people's interest in science as being fetishized, viewing it as mystical, or being incomprehensible is shallow reaction to a limited set of data.  It would be like someone glancing at the IT forums and claiming that we are obsessed with the robot revolution, to a near point of fetishizing it, which would completely miss the point of the whole robot thing in the IT community. 

 

 

And it's why I just launched a website dedicated to trying to do this for astronomy, and I'm working like mad in the evenings and on weekends to try to get things out there for people to see. 

 

Nice!  You should post to this thread as you get more features going on it.  Particularly if you get a podcast going, I'm always interested in more sciency 'casts.

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I feel that the claim that science has been anymore commoditized or fetishized than it has been in the past is kind of a strawman argument, as shown by Rubixs' comment about IFLS people.  I think it's really hard to judge people's actual thoughts or attitudes based on Facebook comments or casual comments exchanged online. 

 

I don't want to mischaracterize what anyone has said here, what follows is not a specific reaction to any one post, but a general thoughts to the negative reaction to IFLS I've seen online. 

 

You could glance at my group of local friends and easily dismiss us as fetishizing science based on our Facebook interactions, which tend to be dominated quick stories, clever (maybe) remarks, amazing pictures, IFLS posts, and even a regular "Astro-porn of the day pic" (which is just about the most fetishized thing you can do).  But that group is also made up of a couple of scientists, grad students, a professor of tech writing and a variety of less academic laymen.  We can just as seamlessly go from shallow, doe eyed, hopeful discussions about the farthest reaches of what science might be capable of one day to a discussion about the nitty gritty mechanics of studying the terrestrial movement of bats and how to best gather research on that (something one guy has been working on for awhile now).  By dismissing things like IFLS as simply being shallow fetishizing, there seems to be an assumption that people's interest in science doesn't go any deeper than what is presented on Facebook, which I don't find to be true at all.  It's just harder to show that deeper interest on our current social media platforms. 

 

I'm not saying that my anecdotal group of friends is representative of the greater society, but I think the dismissal of people's interest in science as being fetishized, viewing it as mystical, or being incomprehensible is shallow reaction to a limited set of data.  It would be like someone glancing at the IT forums and claiming that we are obsessed with the robot revolution, to a near point of fetishizing it, which would completely miss the point of the whole robot thing in the IT community.

 

I understand what you're saying, but I confess I am not surprised that, based upon a sample that is a group of scientists, academics and their friends, you conclude that the public's interest in science is more than superficial. That's certainly the case for the vast majority of my college and grad school friends, but I also have a bunch of friends from high school on Facebook, and guess which group more often just reposts I Fucking Love Science without any discussion or comment whatsoever?

 

I also kind of think that Thumbs do fetishize the whole robot thing too much. But I really don't want to go into that.

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I understand what you're saying, but I confess I am not surprised that, based upon a sample size that is a group of scientists, academics and their friends, you conclude that the public's interest in science is more than superficial. That's certainly the case for the vast majority of my college and grad school friends, but I also have a bunch of friends from high school on Facebook, and guess which group more often just reposts I Fucking Love Science without any discussion or comment whatsoever?

 

Actually, I have no idea.  I could see either group doing it.  Something I may not have made clear is how shallow our Facebook interactions are.  The good, more realistic discussions about science tend to take place entirely offline. 

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I should point out that by 'fetishisation of science' I'm far more concerned about things like Portal 2 and Dresden Codak that treat Science as an abstract thing to grease their fantastical plots than I am a Facebook page that posts facts.

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