Missing sial, iron, and nickel explains Fermi paradox

On Aug 2, 12:03 pm, BradGuth wrote:
On Aug 2, 10:11 am, BradGuth wrote:

On Aug 2, 7:29 am, Joe Strout wrote:

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.

Besides the ongoing platetonics/(plate tectonics) and much of our
planetology's active geothermal considerations that's clearly tidal
forced, there's also the Arctic ocean basin via impact and the
subsequent antipode of those somewhat recent and thus razor sharp
mountains that happened as of 12,000 BP, and don't forget about that
little pesky establishment of our seasonal tilt, along with the matter
of fact that early humanity having all the necessary artistic skills
and rational capability as well as the best possible motivation as for
having to survive upon this fluid Earth, whereas they simply failed to
have once mentioned or otherwise having depicted or in any way
suggested their having utilized our moon's impressive illumination,
tides or for that matter of ever having to deal with terrestrial
seasons, much less having worshiped our closer and more earthshine
vibrant illuminated moon as of prior to 12,000 BP. So, where's the
counter argument(s) based upon the regular laws of physics and of the
best available science?

That moon is not made of Earth. Earth hasn't even similar impact
deposits of what's causing such terrific surface mascons to exist on
that somewhat salty moon of ours.

Why doesn't Earth have its fair share of bigger and better surface
impact mascons?

In other words, why and/or how did our salty old moon get so impact
mascon populated, and Earth somewhow having missed all the action?
- Brad Guth

In article ,
Hop David wrote:

ISTR a thread years ago where Anders Sandberg
(http://www.aleph.se/Trans/) opined a very high resolution MRI would
cook the brain. Does that sound right?

Cook it or vaporize it, yes. To get high resolution data out of thick
tissue (like an intact brain) pretty much requires using high energy,
some of which is going to be deposited in that tissue. There may be
tricks to get around this to some degree, but I'm skeptical that it will
ever be good enough to scan a living brain at the needed resolution,
without damaging it.

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/

Joe Strout wrote:
In article . com,
Einar wrote:

Note that you can arrange for this possibility even before uploading is
developed, by having yourself frozen upon your death (a practice known
as cryonics). Once frozen, your condition is stable, and there's a
chance that you can be uploaded and revived at some point in the future.

If one can be frosen without harming what´s to be recorded.

Right, that's a legitimate concern, and one the cryonicists always
worrying about. How much damage is done by the freezing process? Note
that under ideal conditions it's not technically freezing, but
vitrification (i.e. formation of a glassy rather than crystalline form
of water). But cryonic suspension never happens under ideal conditions.

However, the procedures are good enough that I think there is much room
for optimism. Cryoprotectant (which inhibits the formation of ice
crystals) usually gets pretty well perfused throughout the brain, and
what ice does form tends to be between cells. There is also cracking
due to basic volume changes. But both types of damage result in
separating tissues physically, but not mixing them up much -- it's like
a jigsaw puzzle where you start with the finished picture, then separate
each piece but put it back in basically the same position and
orientation it was in before. Reconnecting these separated pieces in
the computer is not going to be a very hard job.

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, well - what then remains is that one has to be sufficiently
financed

Einar

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.

Cheers, Einar

On Wed, 01 Aug 2007 20:36:39 -0600, Joe Strout wrote,
in part:

When you do, I think you'll come to
agree that a perfect copy of you *IS* you, in exactly the same way that
a perfect copy of Microsoft Word is Microsoft Word, or a perfect copy of
A Christmas Carol is A Christmas Carol (even if it's now stored on a
different medium). You are a pattern of information and functionality,
not some particular collection of squishy stuff.

Oh, I agree I'm not a particular collection of squishy stuff. But I'm an
*executing instance*, not just the program itself, in my opinion.

In fact, since such an "ultrastructural scan" *might* be beyond our
technological capabilities for *quite* a while, how about this: an
artificial brain made up of an un-programmed neural net, which gets
interfaced, say at the corpus callosum, as a third hemisphere of the
brain. So, over the *years* one has it connected, gradually it shares in
storing one's memories (since memory is a *bit* like a hologram) and in
one's thoughts, until, when one's flesh brain fails, the situation
becomes like that of a person who had one brain hemisphere removed due
to severe epilepsy or a brain tumor.

Yikes. No thank you! First, I don't believe this would be any easier
-- indeed, it appears much harder than taking apart a brain slice by
slice and scanning it in, which we can already do today (though far too
slowly to be practical, and with too high an error rate). Second, I
don't believe it would constitute survival, or at least, not any sort of
survival I would wish. Brain tissue isn't interchangeable, and not
everything that matters goes through the corpus callosum. This would be
a head trauma of a most extreme kind.

This is why I believe for it to constitute survival, the "third
hemisphere" would have to be attached to one's flesh brain for
*decades*. And indeed, other connections to the brain may be required.

I can't give a blueprint for the technology, but I think this *might* be
achievable in 50 years - rather than, say, 200 years, and it lowers the
technological bar considerably.

John Savard
http://www.quadibloc.com/index.html

Ian Parker wrote:

:On 2 Aug, 16:35, Fred J. McCall wrote:
: Ian Parker wrote:
:
: :
: :We have had surprises already. Accepted wisdom said that Jupiter and
: :Saturn were where they are because at their distance volatiles were
: resent. Jupiter could not be close than Mercury because volatiles
: :would not condense out.
: :
: :Wrong! - There have been many Jupiters found within the orbit of
: :Mercury.
: :
:
: Are you living in the same solar system with the rest of us?
:
:
:No, the whole point was comparative solar systems and extrasolar
lanets. Jupiter I have used to denote the generic gas giant. the
:whole point is we make theories of the Moon. With one solar system you
:can't draw conclusions. That is the point.
:

Cite for "many Jupiters found within the orbit of Mercury"?


--
"Some people get lost in thought because it's such unfamiliar
territory."
--G. Behn

On 3 Aug, 03:13, Fred J. McCall wrote:
Ian Parker wrote:

:On 2 Aug, 16:35, Fred J. McCall wrote:
: Ian Parker wrote:
:
: :
: :We have had surprises already. Accepted wisdom said that Jupiter and
: :Saturn were where they are because at their distance volatiles were
: resent. Jupiter could not be close than Mercury because volatiles
: :would not condense out.
: :
: :Wrong! - There have been many Jupiters found within the orbit of
: :Mercury.
: :
:
: Are you living in the same solar system with the rest of us?
:
:
:No, the whole point was comparative solar systems and extrasolar
lanets. Jupiter I have used to denote the generic gas giant. the
:whole point is we make theories of the Moon. With one solar system you
:can't draw conclusions. That is the point.
:

Cite for "many Jupiters found within the orbit of Mercury"?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extrasolar_planet

Remember when you click on the chart that Mercury has a period of 88
days.

http://www.obs-hp.fr/www/nouvelles/gl876.html

http://curious.astro.cornell.edu/extrasolarplanets.php

This explains "hot Jupiters" in more detail. In fact it may well be
true that a normal solar system is like ours. The statistics are in
fact skewed by observational technology. This site explains this
fully.


- Ian Parker

Fred J. McCall wrote:
Ian Parker wrote:

:On 2 Aug, 16:35, Fred J. McCall wrote:
: Ian Parker wrote:
:
: :
: :We have had surprises already. Accepted wisdom said that Jupiter and
: :Saturn were where they are because at their distance volatiles were
: resent. Jupiter could not be close than Mercury because volatiles
: :would not condense out.
: :
: :Wrong! - There have been many Jupiters found within the orbit of
: :Mercury.
: :
:
: Are you living in the same solar system with the rest of us?
:
:
:No, the whole point was comparative solar systems and extrasolar
lanets. Jupiter I have used to denote the generic gas giant. the
:whole point is we make theories of the Moon. With one solar system you
:can't draw conclusions. That is the point.
:

Cite for "many Jupiters found within the orbit of Mercury"?


--
"Some people get lost in thought because it's such unfamiliar
territory."
--G. Behn

You have not heard about discoveries of superhot gasgigants that have
been rocking the astronomical world the last few years?

http://www.nineplanets.org/other.html

"What may be the first discovery of a planet orbiting a normal, Sun-
like star other than our own has been announced by astronomers
studying 51 Pegasi, a spectral type G2-3 V main-sequence star 42 light-
years from Earth. At a recent conference in Florence, Italy, Michel
Mayor and Didier Queloz of Geneva Observatory explained that they
observed 51 Pegasi with a high-resolution spectrograph and found that
the star's line-of-sight velocity changes by some 70 meters per second
every 4.2 days. If this is due to orbital motion, these numbers
suggest that a planet lies only 7 million kilometers from 51 Pegasi --
much closer than Mercury is to the Sun -- and that the planet has a
mass at least half that of Jupiter. These physical characteristics
hinge on the assumption that our line of sight is near the planet's
orbital plane. However, other evidence suggests that this is a good
bet. A world merely 7 million km from a star like 51 Pegasi should
have a temperature of about 1,000 degrees Celsius, just short of red
hot. It was initially thought that it might be a solid body like a
very big Mercury but the concensus now seems to be that it is a "hot
Jupiter", a gas planet formed much farther from its star that migrated
inward."

Einar

In article ,
lid (John Savard) wrote:

On Wed, 01 Aug 2007 20:36:39 -0600, Joe Strout wrote,
in part:

When you do, I think you'll come to
agree that a perfect copy of you *IS* you, in exactly the same way that
a perfect copy of Microsoft Word is Microsoft Word, or a perfect copy of
A Christmas Carol is A Christmas Carol (even if it's now stored on a
different medium). You are a pattern of information and functionality,
not some particular collection of squishy stuff.

Oh, I agree I'm not a particular collection of squishy stuff. But I'm an
*executing instance*, not just the program itself, in my opinion.

Aha. So if you needed deep hypothermic surgery [1], you'd consider that
the patient who wakes up isn't the same person who went under the knife?
If that were your only option, you'd rather just die?

[1] for example,
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sites/en...ubMed&list_uid
s=9628370&dopt=AbstractPlus

how about this: an
artificial brain made up of an un-programmed neural net, which gets
interfaced, say at the corpus callosum, as a third hemisphere of the
brain.

I can't give a blueprint for the technology, but I think this *might* be
achievable in 50 years - rather than, say, 200 years, and it lowers the
technological bar considerably.

I disagree. I studied neuroscience and worked in neuro labs for a
number of years, and from that experience, I believe that interfacing
artificial devices with the brain on such a large scale will be much,
much harder than uploading itself.

But time will tell, I guess.

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/

In article .com,
Einar wrote:

[Re. cryonics]

Hmm, well - what then remains is that one has to be sufficiently
financed

Well, not really -- you pay for it with life insurance. If your income
is low, hopefully that's because you're still a student, and young,
which makes life insurance cheap. My wife and I signed up when we were
still in grad school, and the insurance cost about as much as a couple
of pizzas per month.

Sorry we've wandered so far off-topic here, but I thought this worth
clearing up -- who knows, maybe I've just saved Einar's life.

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/