7 ms·

How much subjective time would it take to visit say, 1/10th of those galaxies, if you were traveling at say, 99% of the speed of light? It seems to me that the

How much subjective time would it take to visit say, 1/10th of those galaxies, if you were traveling at say, 99% of the speed of light? It seems to me that the odds of encountering other life forms are vanishingly small, simply because of the scale of the universe, combined with the low odds of finding other life forms. Sure, it might happen, but we're alone until we're not. And we're incredibly likely to remain alone for a very long time.

vidanay 4y ago
“Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space.”
- gcanyon 4y ago
  For some reason I'm inspired to write: Time is short. You cannot imagine how vanishingly, briefly, disappointingly short it is. I mean, you might think you have all the time in the world, but to the universe, you're a fraction of a gnat's wingbeat.
colechristensen 4y ago
How long until a post-human consciousness will have a lifespan of a billion years? If never, why is that not a possible future? There's two scales you can change, yourself, and the tools you use to interact. So how fast can you make a spaceship competes with how long you can make your life.
- asdff 4y ago
  Post human conciousness on earth has already been around for what nearly 4 billion years? Life on earth represents a meta organism. It's a human bias to elevate the significance of the human species component above that of the greater meta organism. Ecology can be studied with similar tooling whether the frame of reference is a continent or your gut microbiome. If we wanted to, say, ship earthbound life to another planet, then lets consider the best form of earthbound life to make that journey across a hostile environment for an indefinite period of time. Chances are its not humans adapted to persistent hunting and gathering, but put some microbes or spores into a vial wrapped in gold foil, and you wouldn't even need a complex generational space ship to seed earthbound life across the universe, just a gun capable of firing the vial on a vector.
  - colechristensen 4y ago
    You and I are using different definitions for “post” and “conscious”, not sure how to move forward with such differences.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
asdff 4y ago
Why do we want contact? Leave these trees of life discrete. We deal with terrestrial invasive species enough ravaging our ecosystems. Imagine if we let loose some organism that is capable of outcompeting all other life on earth? It's happened before. The early history of life on earth is an assortment of dead ends out competed by the few who emerged from the primordial soup that beat the less fit forms for finite resources. We've lost a lot of variation along the way; we have regulatory processes that are conserved from humans to yeast because we all come from a common lineage. We are all a small part of the earth planetary meta organism. Introducing external life into that system may simply lead to quick extinction of that external life at the place its been introduced, but the worst possible case scenario is that life takes root, is more fit than existing forms, and displaces the planetary meta organism we currently are components of.
- sammalloy 4y ago
  > The early history of life on earth is an assortment of dead ends out competed by the few who emerged from the primordial soup that beat the less fit forms for finite resources. I’m not sure how true that is, and reflects a somewhat older view. There was a lot of cooperation involved, particularly in regards to symbiogensis, which the older generation still opposes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symbiogenesis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symbiogenesis > In her 1981 work Symbiosis in Cell Evolution [Margulis] argued that eukaryotic cells originated as communities of interacting entities, including endosymbiotic spirochaetes that developed into eukaryotic flagella and cilia. This last idea has not received much acceptance, because flagella lack DNA and do not show ultrastructural similarities to bacteria or to archaea (see also: Evolution of flagella and Prokaryotic cytoskeleton). According to Margulis and Dorion Sagan, "Life did not take over the globe by combat, but by networking"…
  - asdff 4y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Oxidation_Event https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Oxidation_Event This is what I am talking about. This perhaps predates even symbiogenesis or perhaps drove it. Anaerobic lineages died out in the oxygen rich environment that the first forms of photosynthetic life created. Cellular respiration using oxygen, as animals do, probably evolved after the atmosphere was already oxygen rich. There is a huge fitness advantage if you cannot make use of light energy, but can absorb cells that can and maintain them as photosynthetic eukaryotes do today through symbiosis of the cyanobacteria that became cloroplasts. What I like about this example are the parallels to modern times. The great oxidation event was an extinction event brought on not by external factors, but by a life form producing gas that changes the composition of the atmosphere and leads to dramatic effects across the planet. Not unlike us humans today with our CO2 production.
macrolime 4y ago
If you could travel with constant acceleration you could get very far very fast. Traveling with a 1G acceleration for a 100 years could take you to the edge of the universe, though billions of years would pass on earth. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_travel_under_constant_acceleration https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_travel_under_constant_ac...

vidanay 4y ago

“Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space.”

gcanyon 4y ago
For some reason I'm inspired to write: Time is short. You cannot imagine how vanishingly, briefly, disappointingly short it is. I mean, you might think you have all the time in the world, but to the universe, you're a fraction of a gnat's wingbeat.

colechristensen 4y ago

How long until a post-human consciousness will have a lifespan of a billion years? If never, why is that not a possible future? There's two scales you can change, yourself, and the tools you use to interact. So how fast can you make a spaceship competes with how long you can make your life.

asdff 4y ago
Post human conciousness on earth has already been around for what nearly 4 billion years? Life on earth represents a meta organism. It's a human bias to elevate the significance of the human species component above that of the greater meta organism. Ecology can be studied with similar tooling whether the frame of reference is a continent or your gut microbiome. If we wanted to, say, ship earthbound life to another planet, then lets consider the best form of earthbound life to make that journey across a hostile environment for an indefinite period of time. Chances are its not humans adapted to persistent hunting and gathering, but put some microbes or spores into a vial wrapped in gold foil, and you wouldn't even need a complex generational space ship to seed earthbound life across the universe, just a gun capable of firing the vial on a vector.
- colechristensen 4y ago
  You and I are using different definitions for “post” and “conscious”, not sure how to move forward with such differences.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

asdff 4y ago

Why do we want contact? Leave these trees of life discrete. We deal with terrestrial invasive species enough ravaging our ecosystems. Imagine if we let loose some organism that is capable of outcompeting all other life on earth? It's happened before. The early history of life on earth is an assortment of dead ends out competed by the few who emerged from the primordial soup that beat the less fit forms for finite resources. We've lost a lot of variation along the way; we have regulatory processes that are conserved from humans to yeast because we all come from a common lineage. We are all a small part of the earth planetary meta organism. Introducing external life into that system may simply lead to quick extinction of that external life at the place its been introduced, but the worst possible case scenario is that life takes root, is more fit than existing forms, and displaces the planetary meta organism we currently are components of.

sammalloy 4y ago
> The early history of life on earth is an assortment of dead ends out competed by the few who emerged from the primordial soup that beat the less fit forms for finite resources. I’m not sure how true that is, and reflects a somewhat older view. There was a lot of cooperation involved, particularly in regards to symbiogensis, which the older generation still opposes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symbiogenesis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symbiogenesis > In her 1981 work Symbiosis in Cell Evolution [Margulis] argued that eukaryotic cells originated as communities of interacting entities, including endosymbiotic spirochaetes that developed into eukaryotic flagella and cilia. This last idea has not received much acceptance, because flagella lack DNA and do not show ultrastructural similarities to bacteria or to archaea (see also: Evolution of flagella and Prokaryotic cytoskeleton). According to Margulis and Dorion Sagan, "Life did not take over the globe by combat, but by networking"…
- asdff 4y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Oxidation_Event https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Oxidation_Event This is what I am talking about. This perhaps predates even symbiogenesis or perhaps drove it. Anaerobic lineages died out in the oxygen rich environment that the first forms of photosynthetic life created. Cellular respiration using oxygen, as animals do, probably evolved after the atmosphere was already oxygen rich. There is a huge fitness advantage if you cannot make use of light energy, but can absorb cells that can and maintain them as photosynthetic eukaryotes do today through symbiosis of the cyanobacteria that became cloroplasts. What I like about this example are the parallels to modern times. The great oxidation event was an extinction event brought on not by external factors, but by a life form producing gas that changes the composition of the atmosphere and leads to dramatic effects across the planet. Not unlike us humans today with our CO2 production.

macrolime 4y ago

If you could travel with constant acceleration you could get very far very fast. Traveling with a 1G acceleration for a 100 years could take you to the edge of the universe, though billions of years would pass on earth. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_travel_under_constant_acceleration https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_travel_under_constant_ac...