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Missing sial, iron, and nickel explains Fermi paradox



 
 
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  #101  
Old August 7th 07, 03:08 AM posted to sci.astro,sci.space.policy,sci.astro.seti
Fred J. McCall
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Default Missing sial, iron, and nickel explains Fermi paradox

Einar wrote:

:
:Fred J. McCall wrote:
: Einar wrote:
:
: :
: :Fred J. McCall wrote:
: : Ian Parker wrote:
: :
: : If you want to discuss the Fermi Paradox, let me ask you a question
: : that is germane to that issue. If ETs exist, why haven't we already
: : detected them via radio?
: :
: :
: :If I reply to that one, it might be because they donīt use radio.
: :Personally I have never quite bought the argument that radio is the
: :most convenient technological communication method in all of
: :exchistence.
: :
:
: But Ian insists that they would develop just like us, so they must be
: emitting all sorts of RF.
:
:There are allmost infinite possibilities. Aliens, to name one out of
:all the possible, might not communicate through sound. It might be a
:form of visual communication, like colour patterns, hand, tentacles,
:leg waving in other words sign language, it might be smell or
heromons being emitted.
:
:Beings that donīt communicate through sound might not stumble on
:radiocommunication at all.
:

Sure they would. What else do you propose that they would use for
over-the-horizon communications?

Radiocommunication doesn't require hearing or sound at all.

: :
: :This is one of those question we probably have to accept to be an
: :unknown. Aliens might be out there, they might not. Our assumptions on
: :theyr behavior based on what we would do could all be false.
: :
:
: There are certainly answers, but they must violate Ian's sacrosanct
: "ET is just like us" assumptions.
:
:
:In addition, they might be some sort of hive beings, where the idea of
ersonal identity and rights might not exist. To such beings Earthīs
:societies might be completelly inconprehensible.
:

Whatever their culture is like ours is probably incomprehensible to
them.

Hell, American culture is apparently incomprehensible to Europeans,
given some of the assumptions they seem to come up with about why we
do things.


--
"It's always different. It's always complex. But at some point,
somebody has to draw the line. And that somebody is always me....
I am the law."
-- Buffy, The Vampire Slayer
  #102  
Old August 7th 07, 03:28 AM posted to sci.astro,sci.space.policy,sci.astro.seti
Fred J. McCall
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Default Missing sial, iron, and nickel explains Fermi paradox

Joe Strout wrote:

:In article . com,
: Ian Parker wrote:
:
: I think we should be quite clear about this. I believe that using a VN
: machine to construct a Forward accelerator would be a considerable
: advantage, but that is not quite what I mean. What I mean is this. The
: requirement is to send a gram or so to another star. An active gram
: that can reproduce and construct another Forward accelerator if need
: be.
:
: This is a VN probe.
:
:Not only that, it's a *nanotech* VN probe. Now you're assuming two
retty advanced technologies. And yes, that would probably work and be
:a sensible way to do interstellar colonization. My point is just that
:it's not the ONLY way. Even if nanotech and VN machines never happen,
:we could still colonize the galaxy.
:

And if nanotech happens, any sane species will first apply it to
medicine to extend their lifespans via cell-repairing nanobots.

If you have a lifetime measured in the thousands of years, why would
you expend all that effort to send a toaster when you can just go
yourself?

Funny how this never seems to occur to Ian.


--
"Some people get lost in thought because it's such unfamiliar
territory."
--G. Behn
  #103  
Old August 7th 07, 03:48 AM posted to sci.astro,sci.space.policy,sci.astro.seti
Fred J. McCall
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Default Missing sial, iron, and nickel explains Fermi paradox

Einar wrote:

:
:Alan Anderson wrote:
: Einar wrote:
:
: Beings that donīt communicate through sound might not stumble on
: radiocommunication at all.
:
: I don't see the connection. Radio isn't a form of sound. It's a form
: of electromagnetic radiation, modulated with a signal. That signal
: doesn't have to represent a sound. Indeed, the majority of radio
: signals today are modulated with signals that represent numbers. (That
: those numbers often themselves represent sounds is of only slight
: relevance.)
:
:Remember the very old devices say around 1890, which were tuned in
:using the hearing. Can you suggest an alternate method of tuning at
:that primitive tech. level?
:

Analog meter. The same way those old devices were tuned.

:
igital computers were a much later invention.
:

How's that relevant to anything?


--
"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable
man persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore,
all progress depends on the unreasonable man."
--George Bernard Shaw
  #104  
Old August 7th 07, 06:14 AM posted to sci.astro,sci.space.policy,sci.astro.seti
Matt Giwer
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Default Missing sial, iron, and nickel explains Fermi paradox

Einar wrote:
Matt Giwer wrote:
Einar wrote:
Matt Giwer wrote:
Somehow I am missing the connection to the paradox. It appears to lie solely in
the assumption that if there is no moon event the planet will be all ocean. That
does not compute unless we can explain the disappearance of the moon of Venus.
If Venus had had the same amount of water as earth, and there is little way to
explain a significantly different amount, there should be enough water vapor in
its atmosphere to 9000psi (600 At.) of pressure on the surface. But last I heard
there is negligible water in the atmosphere and clearly no such pressure.
We have no idea if there is a minimum amount of ocean needed to approximate an
ecology like our own however it appears reasonable that all else being equal the
amount of rainfall is proportional to the evaporative surface of the oceans. It
also follows as a reasonable assumption (but which cannot be supported in the
least, that the more life the faster evolution but we are not in a rush so a few
extra billion years does not matter.
However surface area only would be a factor in rainfall. Depth would not be. So
without a moon and nothing lost there is nothing prohibiting large and shallow
seas. The South China Sea with a depth averaging over a few hundred feet has all
the characteristics of any other ocean save it is warming at all depths. This
would speed evolution among the cold bloods.
Tectonic forces would still raise mountains and and volcanoes broad expanses
like the Deccan Plains. As long as the planet is large enough there is no reason
to suggest plates would not form and move. The only different would be the
longevity of the created land above the surface. Given Earth we find old and new
mountains in proximity such as in the US so we can expect there would always be
dry land. So maybe a world with shallow seas needs also have greater tectonic
activity requiring a somewhat more massive planet and the world average being
more like Japan. So maybe the funny thing about ET is if the ground shakes he
curls into a ball.
Am I missing something?
--
An entire cool summer is trumped by a warm day in January if you are a
global melter.
-- The Iron Webmaster, 3836
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Venus has no plate tectonics. However, it might if it had oceans.

Maybe I missed that too but I thought plates moved because of convection
current in the mantle.
I think itīs believed Venus' oceans evaporated, once the Sun warmed
up, and that the water left the planet altogether being blown away
into space. What remains is possibly the most hostile to life plase in
the solar system.

I see no way for water to preferentially be removed as at that temperature was
is a gas like any other.
--


Itīs a mistery actually how plate tectonism began on Earth.


What is the mystery? Radioactive decay heats the core. The core rises but
cannot rise uniformly every place. The first instability creates a convection
current. They continue until the core cools.

As water
is present in great amounts in the crust, it has been suggested that
it sort of acts like a grease on the plater, lowering the threshold
where bounds between rock brake apart.


Sliding and breaking are different things.

Itīs believed that water left Venus and was blown into space. Look it
up.


What is believed is not of interest without of physical mechanism for it to
happen preferentially to water.

--
The number of people required to be involved to keep the JFK assassination
conspiracy a secret makes it highly improbable. And that is why we all know
about it.
-- The Iron Webmaster, 3845
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  #105  
Old August 7th 07, 06:17 AM posted to sci.astro,sci.space.policy,sci.astro.seti
Matt Giwer
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Default Missing sial, iron, and nickel explains Fermi paradox

Einar wrote:
Matt Giwer wrote:
Joe Strout wrote:
In article ,
Matt Giwer wrote:
The more unique characteristics of a planet you consider the more of an
outlier it appears to be. But none of those apply to life on land which
we assume is a prerequisite to visiting us.
You don't know that. To take the point in this thread: without plate
tectonics, you get no land at all. Makes it a bit hard to get life on
land.

Of course we cannot know that. With a sample size of one we can't know anything.
The problem is simply no one has come up with a way to start a technological
culture in the sea. And short of teleportation by will alone we have no idea how
to leave a planet. Of course if anything is possible then in a universe this
size everything does happen and we have worse than Fermi's paradox.


--
The Iraqi government has not prosecuted a single Iraqi for killing American
troops. At least the government supports its citizens.
-- The Iron Webmaster, 3832
nizkor http://www.giwersworld.org/nizkook/nizkook.phtml
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Would they wonder at all about the universe if they wouldnīt be able
to observe it from underneath the waves?


Dolphins jump at night. Maybe those rolling jumps are to look up.

--
An entire cool summer is trumped by a warm day in January if you are a
global melter.
-- The Iron Webmaster, 3836
nizkor http://www.giwersworld.org/nizkook/nizkook.phtml
flying saucers http://www.giwersworld.org/flyingsa.html a2

  #106  
Old August 7th 07, 06:28 AM posted to sci.astro,sci.space.policy,sci.astro.seti
Matt Giwer
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Posts: 523
Default Missing sial, iron, and nickel explains Fermi paradox

Einar wrote:
Matt Giwer wrote:
Einar wrote:
Joe Strout wrote:
In article ,
Matt Giwer wrote:

Somehow I am missing the connection to the paradox. It appears to lie solely
in the assumption that if there is no moon event the planet will be all ocean.
That does not compute unless we can explain the disappearance of the moon of
Venus.
We can; Venus is too hot to have liquid water.

But the case for the Moon being responsible for continents is made
pretty convincingly in the book Rare Earth. IIRC, it basically goes
like this: without the impact event that blasted much of the Earth's
crust into orbit (forming the Moon), our crust would be too thick to
support plate tectonics (just like Venus, I think). So they would end
up a very uniform thickness, and the only mountains that would form
would be from volcanoes, and these would quickly be eroded back down,
leaving a uniform planet-spanning ocean. It's only because our crust is
so thin that we can have tectonics and enough variation to produce
continents and oceans.

Hm. I'm not explaining this very well, but check out the book, it
spends a chapter or two on this topic.

Best,
- Joe

--
"Polywell" fusion -- an approach to nuclear fusion that might actually work.
Learn more and discuss via: http://www.strout.net/info/science/polywell/
Hmm, plate tectonics does perform a pretty effective recycling of
materials. That means theyr availabilty is maintained for processes
abow ground. I have also heard speculations about effects of water
being present in the crust, about the precense of life and what
effects it may have on the crust.

It appears though certain that plate tectonics help the Earth staying
livable. Our planet really looks like an extremelly far out outlyer
variable.

The more unique characteristics of a planet you consider the more of an outlier
it appears to be. But none of those apply to life on land which we assume is a
prerequisite to visiting us.

Recycling sounds like something interesting but since the issue is life on land
how much dry land has been recycled since then? And I know of no variation in
land biomass based upon who long since the last "recycle." In other words, no
connection.


Think about it, carbon dioxide has a tendency to react with materials
and form carbonated rock. Oxygen also forms great many combounds with
materials. The resycling which occurs melts old rock and released its
constituent parts back into athmophere, back into nature. This aspect
may be really important.


The gulf between 'may be' and 'is' is so wide we can't hang any knowledge of
earth on it much less extrapolate. A full 1/3 of the earth's surface carbon
cycle is completely unknown. The amount of human CO2 release is about 10% of the
uncertainty in how much CO2 there is in the atmosphere. I see no way to for any
suggestion as to the importance of subduction just on the earth to be more than
speculation.

--
In time of war both sides claim to be defending themselves to the public but
in retrospect we know both governments wanted the war but the people did
not.
-- The Iron Webmaster, 4843
nizkor http://www.giwersworld.org/nizkook/nizkook.phtml
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  #107  
Old August 7th 07, 06:34 AM posted to sci.astro,sci.space.policy,sci.astro.seti
Matt Giwer
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Default Missing sial, iron, and nickel explains Fermi paradox

Rand Simberg wrote:
On Mon, 06 Aug 2007 05:38:32 -0400, in a place far, far away, Matt
Giwer made the phosphor on my monitor
glow in such a way as to indicate that:
Fred J. McCall wrote:
Ian Parker wrote:
:
:Rand Simberg and Fred Mc Call simply refuse to think rationally.
:
This is quite funny, coming from the guy who insists that ONLY an AI
probe is possible.

...
I don't mean to rain on parades here but a lot of this is based upon the most
American myth of a human impulse to explore the unknown. It is a wonderful myth.
It inspires. But there is not a single example of it.


If there were such a thing why, after the Louisiana Purchase, did Jefferson had
to pay people to explore it instead of just interviewing those who had indulged
the exploration impulse to explore it on their own?


He didn't have to. He chose to, so that he could get a good report.


As I said, why pay for it when he could have simply interviewed all the people
who had indulged their "natural impulse" to explore on their own.

Many people were exploring the west on their own at the time and
shortly after. They were called mountain men.


They called them fur trappers who were making a living by going there.

--
Until New York Jews ululate like Sephardic Jews in Israel and Sephardic Jews
do Russian circle dances like Russian Jews, and they all sing Hava Negilah
to the tune of Irving Berlin they are not an ethic group.
-- The Iron Webmaster, 3946
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  #108  
Old August 7th 07, 06:36 AM posted to sci.astro,sci.space.policy,sci.astro.seti
Matt Giwer
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Default Missing sial, iron, and nickel explains Fermi paradox

Fred J. McCall wrote:
Matt Giwer wrote:
:
: If there were such a thing why, after the Louisiana Purchase, did Jefferson had
:to pay people to explore it instead of just interviewing those who had indulged
:the exploration impulse to explore it on their own?
:


Because he wanted detailed records kept and wanted them back.


So why not ask all the people who had explored on their own? Why not advertise
payment for those soon to indulge their impulse as to the information desired?

--
The Iraqi government has not prosecuted a single Iraqi for killing American
troops. At least the government supports its citizens.
-- The Iron Webmaster, 3832
nizkor http://www.giwersworld.org/nizkook/nizkook.phtml
Blame Israel http://www.ussliberty.org a10
  #109  
Old August 7th 07, 06:54 AM posted to sci.astro,sci.space.policy,sci.astro.seti
Matt Giwer
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Posts: 523
Default Missing sial, iron, and nickel explains Fermi paradox

Fred J. McCall wrote:
....
If you want to discuss the Fermi Paradox, let me ask you a question
that is germane to that issue. If ETs exist, why haven't we already
detected them via radio?


Spread spectrum?

They switched to cable and wi-fi?

Everyone knows long baseline optical telescopes in orbit are the best way to
detect other civilizations?

No one close enough is going through the short phase of using radio?

In the grand scheme of things it is not worth "look at me" transmissions
because by the time radio contact is established most civilizations have
discovered the better way everyone else uses?

Everyone knows from a billion years experience to not bother with radio and
only use optical?

Everyone knows from a billion years experience that gravitons are the only way
to go?

--
One finger is all a real American needs.
-- The Iron Webmaster, 3838
nizkor http://www.giwersworld.org/nizkook/nizkook.phtml
flying saucers http://www.giwersworld.org/flyingsa.html a2
  #110  
Old August 7th 07, 08:52 AM posted to sci.astro,sci.space.policy,sci.astro.seti
Matt Giwer
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Default Missing sial, iron, and nickel explains Fermi paradox

Ian Parker wrote:
On 6 Aug, 10:20, Matt Giwer wrote:
Ian Parker wrote:
...
I suppose it is possible, just, that ET has vistited us and is in fact
hiding. That some of the dragonflies we say are in fact ET or more
accurately a part of ET. Just possible - but I do not think so. You
see ET would have come here for some sort of reason, and I think if ET
had really been here we would know about it. Anyway Occam's razor
explanation is simply no ET.

With a sample size of one we can know nothing. With a sample size of one we
have zero idea of probabilities or possibilities. As the vulgar say, we don't
know jack.


Every civilization is confronted with identical technological
challenges. If we can build 0.15 micron chips they can be built on
Alpha Centauri, If our technology is moving to molecular memories ET
is sure to have them (bearing in mind existence at all!). Yes we can
make reasonable deductions.


What can be done and what is done are different things.

To digress.

There is a new and somewhat credible theory that nerves in fact transmit sound
with the electricity as an artifact. (It has to do with no one knowing why any
anesthetic works.) The earliest frog leg experiment can be explained with this
alternative of the artifact being reciprocal.

Most of the original reason for studying electricity was that experiment and
the reason was it caused life. One expression of this was Frankenstein and
animating a corpse with lightning. Without this kind of interest it is unlikely
we would have electric lights today. So all it takes is life out there not to
have nerves using electricity so this experiment never happens and you have
something else coming first. Electricity may never come until there are better
things.

Depending on the order of things occurring the future is always different.
Without WWII the atom bomb comes long after GE and Westinghouse have built
hundreds of nuclear power plants because no one is afraid of them.

In another post one answer to why no RF detection is they use cable. The US
could have started switching to cable in the 1950s but there was a Supreme Court
decision against it. No technology but a vagary of a court decision.

A couple years ago there were reports that a chance discovery found a way to
refine titanium as easily and cheaply as aluminum. That is discovered before the
aluminum method and our world is much different. And if titanium had been around
as long as aluminum would the next Boeing be made of titanium instead of carbon
composite?

Genetic engineering is just a faster was of doing what breeding and selection
can do and does not result in anti-GM hysteria. Alcohol from weeds for fuel
could have happened decades ago with minor changes.

We do not have too many of these possible differences because many of them are
just being discovered. Very few of them are linearly dependent on everything
that came before.

We cannot predict what we will be using a century from now as even the best
thinkers such as Art Clarke have only gotten a couple things right and then only
a few decades before. One despairs to predict what a totally and completely
unrelated form of life with an unknown history might choose to do.

Saying anything definitive is folly.

It is clear to me that the Area 51 legends are 1950's SF. They cannot
be anything else. Either ET is flying tiny robotic spacecraft or he is
not flying at all. These are the only two possibilities that remotely
pass logic.


I did not mean to suggest Area 51 is SF per se. The problem with it is either
it is hopeless or it does not exist because we have gotten nothing from it.
Everything has to trickle out of the military in some form or other regardless
of classification.

While there is a lot to say for the tiny robots that also is an idea which had
not be tested so we really do not know if it is a good idea or not. Even if it
is we have no idea how long it will be the best until something better comes
along. And one of the reasons we like the idea at the moment is the redundancy
permit losing many units without loss of capability. If that is part of their
reasoning then closely examine all small stones that appear out of place.

Rand Simberg and Fred Mc Call simply refuse to think rationally.
Intersellar travel can be effected using a Von Neumann probe. It
cannot be done any other way. FTL is impossible.

I do not speak for anyone else. As to FTL being impossible, who told you that
and why did you believe them? Within special relativity there are several ideas
on how to do it which are merely grossly impractical to test at the moment. And
then who said SR is right? And as there is no general solution to the
formulations of General Relativity it might be already discovered simply not
solved as yet.


If you travel FTL you must postulate a favored frame of reference.


Who told you that and why did you believe them?

In
terms of General Relativilty solutions to the equations are possible
which are not physical. Let us take a particle. Let it travel FTL, in
onr FOR. In another FOR it is going backwards in time. We thus have a
situation where we are sending a particle and it is arriving back
before it was sent. We can always do this by adjusting FOR. This is
independent of technology, warp drive (warped where?) or wormholes. We
can postulate two wormholes each travelling at a different speed.


In terms of GR we do not have a general solution for any of them not just for
non-physical. The problem with time travel is the only thing we know about it is
that it can be treated as it is in relativity.

The problem with FTL travel is that if it were possible the place we stop would
still function as though it were at the leading edge of forward time according
to current understanding meaning we cannot have done what we did according to
SR. However until we actually do it we won't know what it will look like. Once
there the reason it was possible might be obvious.

Contradictions like this are resolved in Elementary Particle Physics
by the use of Feynmann diagrams. Elemetary Particle Physics is a very
bootstrap like discipline. You have quarks, there are 3 quarks to a
baryon. There are guage particles that quarks exchange. A quark is in
fact more massive than a baryon, but 3 quarks weigh less than 1
because of E = Mc^2. When we construct a Feynmann diagram for an FTL
transaction we find that the mass of a particle becomes infinite.


And yet the nagging feeling we are barking up the wrong tree with these
approaches because no matter how good the model fits the facts more different
types of particles appear. When a predicted particle is found something new
appears in the process. Sort of like early chemists trying to make sense of
things before the idea of elements was found to work. Maybe e=mc^2+charm
unattached to any particle. The characteristics conserve the particles rather
than vice versa. Energy has more forms than particles but oddly no
characteristics like strange and charmed. Why? I mean why not different types of
velocity and photons instead of assigning the differences to the particles?

I tend to believe this would be inflationary. Just as a free quark
will give rise to one or more baryons so this particle would give rise
to many other particles.


To achieve warp/wormholes we need negative mass. Negative mass was
thought (in inflationary theories) to have been present at the big
bang where matter inflated. Either we can't get negative mass or if we
do it would be incredibly unstable. It is after all the stuff of
Inflation.


If all you need is negative mass, that which pushes, just collect some dark
matter ... or would that be dark force? It is hard to talk about the dark side
of the force. But since dark matter hangs around light matter and Vger is
accelerating perhaps it is just the speed of light that is changing as it gets
further from the light/dark mass of the sun.

If we have FTL particles "tachyons", they are possible, whether they
exist is an open question, but if they do they are subject to Cosmic
Censorship. They cannot be used for routine signalling.


As with other particles, discover a tachyon and we will have an entire cascade
of new particles that don't make a lick of sense in the same discovery.

None of the above is to be taken seriously. Rather I only pose them against the
certainty given to a century old idea that cannot be fit into any unified theory
of everything.

I don't just say things, I look at the way human technology is moving.
ET technology will have traversed a similar route to the one we are
traversing. This is my central assumption. To me it is the only
assumption worth making. If technology on ET planet has moved any
other way an explanation of why terrestrial technology has taken the
route it has is clearly called for.

Why would you require an explanation for a sample size of one?


Because that sample tells us the technological possibilities.


The point being it can only address the scientific not the engineering
possibilities. And it says nothing about the human or inhuman paths to those
choices nor the decisions that will be made among them.

As to how human technology is moving, I can see one line of thought in that but
without disease being the punishment of god the biological revolution could have
easily preceded the industrial revolution and that would put us in a much
different place than we are today.


Interesting but wrong. Katrina (and 9/11 as well) was considered by
the likes of Pat Robertson and Gerry Falwell to be the punishment of
God.


But today few take them seriously and almost no one does outside the sermon.
The two ideas are compartmentalized today. It was not always so. Newton, being a
minister in all but ordination, did not compartmentalize. And most of his life's
work was on alchemy. Nothing like barking up the wrong particle tree.

One interesting point I am reminded of here. One thing that has
been discussed in this usergroup has been a sunshield to prevent
global warming. If you put it at the Lagrange point it is not
flexable. If hovever you are at MEO you could in fact think in terms
of controlling hurricanes. After all hurricanes are chaos. What is
chaos? It is to do with the eigenvalues of the system. Chaos happens
when we have positive eigenvalues that can grow. Damp them down and
there is no hurricane. Diffiicult, but not impossible.


Which of course depends upon that description being correct and a very correct
guess as to the right thing to control. One can hope but if math works it isn't
chaos but the engineer running the satellite is Maxwell Smart.

All civilizations, whatever their religious beliefs have given a high
priority to the advance of medical science. In effect the medical
profession have always told the religious leaders to "go to Hell" if
that isn't too much of a pun.


All OUR civilizations says nothing about anything else. The problem with
advances is it takes some skill to measure an advance to see if you have one. If
Pasteur had not had the drama of rabbis he might have been run out of the
profession as was the man who discovered handwashing would prevent birth fever
from killing 30+% of women. Pasteur had near 100% success whereas whathisname
only reduced it to about 10% and statistical tools were not standard medical
practice. But that was some 40-50 years before Pasteur. So have statistics
adopted by doctors before his time and we have the germ theory earlier. Or, as I
suggested in another forum, have him born two centuries earlier when he would
have his washing solution blessed by a priest and we get the benefits if not the
reason why centuries earlier.

Rate these 3 things. Sanitation/sewerage, Anathesia or DNA. Which of
those was more important. The general public says "sanitation", the
medical profession says "anathesia" and scientists say DNA. To build a
sewerage system you need industrialisation.


Rome didn't. In fact all of our systems are still based upon observing water
runs downhill.

Anathesia requires a good knowlege of chenistry.


But no one knows why they work. The funny thing is all the anesthetics, save
for the "stupefying" ones like nitrous oxide, have the same solubility effect on
the layer covering nerve cells and zero effect on electrical transmission.

DNA promises not only a revolution in disease
control, but also better mineral extraction, perhaps even a role in
producing hydrogen from sunlight.


So you would rate two in the bush over one in the hand. See my point on the
power of decision in determining the path of progress? You are aware the promise
of DNA has been around three years longer than the promise of fusion power?

Could a civilization have developed genetic enginnering before it
developed deep mining. Good SF, but I doubt it.


Just an example of course. Forget the name at the moment but some monk was the
first to develop the rules of breeding but was only discovered after someone
else was given the credit. Have the monk get published and the original credit.
Then scientific breeding begins a century earlier. GM is not much more than a
fast track to breeding. If you want a crop that can grow with less water you
find a strain that does and breed for it instead of finding a gene for it some
place else and inserting it.

If you want might have beens, assuming all else being equal a shift in gun
technology by a mere twenty years faster or slower would change the entire
character of the American Civil War as well as WWI and thus WWII. There is
nothing inherently preventing such a minor shift.


The wars might not have taken place at all.


Precisely. A major difference in civilization which shifts something like the
brass cartridge only a couple decades changes the development of the Bomb in
1945. And most of it was trial and error. One lucky working idea early on or it
not coming until much later and a non-deterministic process is entirely changed.

If ET has developed molecular memories. DNA (400 MB on a sperm or ova)
this would give an initial weight of a gram of less for a VN probe.
This is a matter of pure maths. I am not just saying it. It would seem
inconceivable to me that an interstellar flight would begin without
such technology.

Which is the paradox of the paradox. If we assume that we cannot say there is a
Fermi paradox.


Why not? This rechnology is perfectly possible to develop.


Because if you assume there is no way to tell if they are here or not then the
question, Where are they?, is meaningless. Without the question there is no
paradox.

About Fred and Rand - I wonder one thing. Are they professional
disinformers? Is there a reason why we should believe in UFOs in the
1950s sense. Are real UFOs black aircraft for which ET is a cover? It
would all fit. I can't of course prove it. I can only prove that ET
based UFOs cannot exist. I can't say what else does.

I am not aware anyone who has seriously considered the possibility of ET
visiting who is stuck in the 1950s which were little different from War of the
Worlds. There are still kids around but we don't take them seriously. I have
considered it from the mid-50s before I heard of puberty and I haven't thought
so simply since then.
Rand & fred. The Fermi paradox is far too serious a scirentific
question for the likes of you to muddy the water.

If by that you mean it do not leave it in the simplest and earliest form and
likely not the way Fermi meant it in the first place, remember it is only
someone saying what he remembers Fermi saying, then I admit to muddying the water.
However there is no water to muddy as this is a discussion of the idea not of a
particular formulation of the idea. If you want to discuss what someone remember
Fermi saying that is worthy of a separate thread that everyone taking this
seriously can ignore.


What I am alluding to is this. ET spaceships of whatever vintage are a
good cover for black flight. In fact when a stealth bomber was seen
over Phoenix the Pentagon pulled out all the stops and produced an ET
mannikin. This is what I am talking about. We need to discuss the
Fermi Paradox without the Pentagon flying steath bombers and blaming
ET.


Similarly unless all observations are really alien visitors any visitor can
expect natural phenomena to cover its visits and not need to take any
precautions. It would not take the first scout too long to discover people in
all history have been seeing things in the night sky even entire armies of men
on horses. In fact all the christian talk of heavenly hosts meaning angels it
properly translated as armies in the skies. In that time a flying saucer would
be a disappointment to anyone expecting to see something interesting.

--
In time of war both sides claim to be defending themselves to the public but
in retrospect we know both governments wanted the war but the people did
not.
-- The Iron Webmaster, 4843
nizkor http://www.giwersworld.org/nizkook/nizkook.phtml
commentary http://www.giwersworld.org/opinion/running.phtml a5
 




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