re: Edinburgh/MIT scientists to announce evidence for life in Venus’ atmosphere

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Lol ok man I’m sure the scientists you read have no political leanings at all either, especially when it comes to questioning Darwin. We all know scientists don’t get funded in any direction by politics

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Dude, the guy in your video is so obviously biased. So much so that I can't imagine anyone taking his opinion (or the opinions of those he chose to interview) seriously.

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Lots of maybes in your reply.

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Yeah that's intentional. We obviously have no idea exactly what happened every step of the way. That's impossible to know. But by thinking about plausible "maybes" we can get a feel for the possibilities. Can you say that any of my maybes absolutely could not have happened? All of the maybes that pass muster can be included in whatever calculation you'd like to do regarding probabilities.

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People who believe in evolution knowing what we know about proteins, probabilities and time have more faith than the people learned scholars like yourself insult for questioning Darwin.

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Here we go. Evolution doubters and deniers inevitably end up using the "insult" that faith is required in order to accept that evolution occurs.

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acting like evolution is settled science

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There are a lot of unsettled or unknown details about certain processes and abiogenesis, but none of that "unsettles" evolution. There will always be more to learn, but everything that we do know (which is a lot) points exactly toward evolution. There is not even an alternative theory on the origin of species, because in order to develop one you would have to explain away mountains of evidence before even getting started.

The only competing theory involves magic, and that is not science.

A cool thread about potential evidence of life on Venus turned into a debate on creationism. Awesome work!

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He's been using a lot of words to basically say that exact thing. Might as well just come out with it, so we stop wasting our time engaging in a scientific debate.

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BUT THE MATHS DONT ADD UP!!

Not relevant, but I failed remedial math.

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RebelExpress38

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And now at 42:00 in your video they start talking about the damned "Darwinists" and how upset they get when you attack their "religion".

Like I said, ID proponents inevitably try to insult evolution by comparing it to religion. Does that tell you anything?

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What? You just need rotation. A centrifuge.

Every little traveling carnival around the world has a Gravitron.

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A centrifuge operates only in the presence of locally strong gravity. Place that Graviton in space and its occupants would drift away.

Constant acceleration is the only way to mimic gravity. Einstein showed this in his general relativity theory.

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False, as you use the new energy you gather to continue construction.

Set an AI on its way and check back with it in a millennia.

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I want someone to quickly do the math on how much raw material would be needed to create a sphere that has a diameter of about 195 million miles, and then compare that to the mass of earth.

That will show you one of many reasons why the idea of a dyson sphere is ridiculous. Not to mention we can capture just about as much energy as we need from the sun here on earth with better technology to capture sunlight and more of the surface of our planet covered in it.

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There are multiple ways to simulate gravity. One is by constantly accelerating. Centrifugal force is another.

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Centrifugal force is effective only in the presence of gravity. Otherwise, the contents of the centrifuge achieve the same speed as the container and float within it as if it wasn’t moving. Do the thought experiment.

We are protected from most cosmic rays on earth by our thick atmosphere and magnetic field. Some scientists think that shields of lead and water would work on a space ship. However, the amount of those materials needed would be so enormous as to be impractical.

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Even if we can’t travel at speeds fast enough to make an interstellar trip in a human lifetime, we may find a way to use some sort of stasis to extend our lives during flight.

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One of the main problems with human space travel is that we will have to take part of our environment along with us. That’s why a machine intelligence will be far superior for space travel.

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Ask yourself this: Do you think a solar panel can produce enough energy to build another solar panel? If so, it’s ridiculous to think the ROI isn’t there. Even if the net energy gain is marginal, once you get to self-replication it doesn’t matter. The larger issue with Dyson spheres is figuring out how to efficiently store/transfer the energy.

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Think of the scale. A DS would have to be at least the size of the earth’s orbit about the sun, 300 million kilometers not including the sun’s diameter.

It couldn’t be made of foil, either. Asteroids, comets, and other space objects would shred it quickly. It would have to be robust enough to contain the solar wind, too. Then consider what you’d have to do with the heat. I seriously doubt a workable DS could even be engineered, much less constructed.

The more simple solution, and one we’re fully capable of achieving, is machine life. If you consider all the variables and complexities involved, it’s easy to see that machine life is the next stage of evolution. Biological life evolved to the point that it can design artificial, or machine, life. We are at that point.

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It means the "great filter" is more likely to be ahead of us than something we miraculously passed through already

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Please explain as I’m not familiar with the “great filter”. I did google it and read but I’m not smart enough to get it. Maybe you could put it in laymen’s terms?

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Please explain as I’m not familiar with the “great filter”. I did google it and read but I’m not smart enough to get it. Maybe you could put it in laymen’s terms?

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The "great filter" is the idea that there is some barrier that prevents life from advancing past a certain point. Proponents argue that since we have not yet discovered evidence of intelligent life anywhere else in the galaxy or universe, then there must be something that prevents civilizations from developing the technology to colonize other planets/systems, or even announce their existence via signals.

Given the huge expanse of the universe and the enormous length of time that it has existed, it stands to reason that if life were at all common, then so should intelligent life far more advanced than us. We should see evidence in the form of signals in radio waves beaming from all corners of the universe, but we don't.

Why don't we? That's where the idea of a "great filter" comes in.

Maybe the filter is behind us. Maybe we have overestimated the probability that intelligent life will develop from simple life, or maybe we have overestimated the probability that life will develop from non-life at all. Against all odds, we have made it past the filter, and we are alone as the only intelligent beings in the universe. That sounds like a bleak and lonely future, but at least there is hope of a long-term future.

The other possibility is the filter is ahead of us. Maybe life is common, and maybe reasonably intelligent life like us is common. But, again, since we are not yet able to travel the stars, and we are not yet able to harness the huge amounts of energy necessary to send signals across the galaxy, there must be something in the future that prevents all or nearly all civilizations from progressing to that point. Maybe self-destruction is inevitable. Maybe the economics of harnessing the massive amounts of energy necessary to colonize or signal across a galaxy just never work out. Maybe cosmic extinction events happen at a frequency that outpaces the rate of advancement of life (planets and stars don't support life long enough for intelligence and technology to progress). This seems an even bleaker future, since there likely is no long-term future.


So the "great filter" is just an idea, a sort of non-answer to the question "where are all the aliens?" Because as far as we are able to tell, there are none. There must be something preventing life from advancing, because the math says it should be everywhere.

Personally, I still believe there are many advanced civilizations out there. If not in our own galaxy, then surely in some of the hundreds of billions of others.