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Is there an equivalent to the Drake equation that includes a factor that describes planets small enough to escape? Very depressing to me to think about how van

• nathanaldensr 3y ago
  [flagged]
  • HeatrayEnjoyer 3y ago
    They didn't say space authoritarians, they said space fascists.
  • jurynulifcation 3y ago
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    • Terr_ 3y ago
      If anything, it should be the opposite: The people who don't know history--such as the difference between an absolute monarchy or a tyrannical theocracy or a modern fascist state--are more likely to blithely want something terrible in the near future.
      • Terr_ 3y ago
        P.S.: I realize this thread already wandered quite far from the rocket equation, but I'm going to lean on the principle that quoting Deus Ex (2000) is always nice: > [Be Safe: Be Suspicious] How can you tell who might be a terrorist? Look for the following characteristics: > * A stranger or foreigner. > * Argumentative, especially about politics or philosophy. > * Probing questions about your work, particularly high-tech. > * Spends a greater than average amount of time on the Net. > * Interests in chemistry, electronics, or computers. > * Large numbers of mail-order deliveries. > * Taking photographs of major landmarks. > And those are just a few. If you're suspicious, then turn them in to your local law enforcement for a thorough background check. Better safe than sorry. You and your neighbors will sleep more securely knowing that you're watching each other's back.
        • CapitalistCartr 3y ago
          Hey, I qualify for every point on that list. I better keep an eye on myself, maybe have to turn myself in.
      • dTal 3y ago
        There was nothing to imply that the original comment held any misconceptions about the difference between fascism and authoritarianism (nor is it especially relevant in context) so the rush to "correct" it signals a somewhat disquieting obsession, hinting perhaps at an unusually personal investment in the fine distinction between fascism and authoritarianism.
    • black_puppydog 3y ago
      As unexpected this was to read for me as well, it's actually good to keep in mind. Because someone saying "but I'm not fascist" in a political debate may well be technically right, and still be authoritarian.
• szundi 3y ago
  Few lightyears is something like a hundred stars. Probably zero chance to nurture more than one unprobable life.
  • Retric 3y ago
    The upper limit on the size of the universe is infinite. So we can’t exactly rules stuff out for simply being improbable.
    • kuchenbecker 3y ago
      You can make a fairly strong statistical argument there are no spacefaring species in our galaxy. Even at 1% the speed of light a species could fully colonize the galaxy in 10 million years, 0.1% the age of the universe. That we see nothing implies intellgent life is rare, short lived, or we're early in the age of the universe. For example, red dwarfs will last trillions of years compared to the sun's 5B lifespan.
      • Retric 3y ago
        1% the speed of light is stupidly fast to colonize a galaxy. It only sounds reasonable in the same way startup claim if we can just capture 1% of the X market, while forgetting numbers much smaller exist. Let’s assume super tech they can build that somehow allows vastly faster speeds than we can today ~120 km/s worth of DeltaV. Half that is spent slowing down so we’re talking 0.02% c. Now let’s assume half the time is spent in flight and half the time is spent colonizing stars before launching ships. So now we’re down to 0.01% C. Suddenly 1 Billion years is a more reasonable estimate and even that takes super tech we don’t have any idea how to build and assumes nothing fails. Several more advanced civilizations could be colonizing the galaxy today that are still 10 billion years from finishing.
        • DennisP 3y ago
          Fusion rockets would be able to get over 1% c. I think the theoretical maximum for fusion is around 10%.
• HeatrayEnjoyer 3y ago
  Rockets are not the only way off a planet. If humans had spent space program amounts of resources on railguns or another method of locomotion there's real possibility it would have been successful too. Rockets are most convenient for Earth's variables so engineers optimized for them.
  • choilive 3y ago
    Railguns also become much harder in a larger gravity well. Bigger planets generally have thicker atmospheres as well. Your payload will end up disintegrating at the velocities required even on Earth.
    • avar 3y ago
      The Earth is larger than Venus, but its atmosphere is 90 times denser than ours. There's a lot more variables that just gravity.
    • contravariant 3y ago
      Balloon stage followed by a rail gun might work.
    • the__alchemist 3y ago
      Vacuum inside the tube?
• bell-cot 3y ago
  The Galactic Emperor is a monarchist, thankyouverymuch! And It treats all of Its loyal subjects quite well, with no discrimination against the water-based ones. Vs. if you have the misfortune to visit the Andromeda Galaxy...
• boringuser2 3y ago
  >fascist This word is wild. Very interesting. It basically means "evil bad guy".
  • somewhereoutth 3y ago
    For the record (and the GP is using the term somewhat out of bounds), there are definitions of fascism that are rather tighter than 'evil bad guy': https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ur-Fascism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ur-Fascism
    • boringuser2 3y ago
      That's a stronger definition, but it's still weak because it isn't primary source material. This guy isn't a disinterested political historian. Imagine taking as definition the views of Giovanni Gentile on Marxism. I wouldn't call any of these groups "fascist" except in the loose pejorative sense The closest governments to actual Fascism that I can think of are governments like modern China or even Singapore, and I don't mean that in a pejorative sense. They're just very fascist in character, i.e. national interest, social welfare, strong-arming of capital, etc.
  • wongarsu 3y ago
    If I had to describe fascism in one sentence it would rather be "take social darwinism 'the strong rule the weak' and add a pragmatic leader who helps your group crush those who hold you back and rule everyone else" You know, exactly the kind of ideology you don't want a neighboring nation to have, no matter how you judge their actions morally
    • boringuser2 3y ago
      That's definitely not even close to reality. National Socialism and Italian Fascism were all about the strong taking responsibility for the nation, in a philosophical sense. These were social welfare states that provided for the "people" far more than modern American liberalism (the standard operating produre for free economies of scale in the modern world), for example. Now, obviously I'm not saying this was a good system, but you're so far off base that it's ridiculous. The discourse around this complex historical movement is profoundly anti-intellectual. I know this because I grew up in the same society you did, the one where I also learned and used fascist as a pejorative without any further information. Now, as someone interested in having sophisticated ideas about systems, I'm not really in a mental state where I'm going to take appeals or emotion or shortcuts that shut down thought seriously. Regardless of the context, I still want to try and reflect reality as closely as possible in my minds eye. How many liberal, or even communist thinkers have you read? Personally, countless. As for fascists, almost none. It's a taboo, the works aren't translated, etc -- but it's there, and has intellectual underpinning that is more complex than mindlessly calling people you don't like "fascists". This can't be conscionable to any earnest intellectual. Imagine sitting here and tolerating people pejoratively calling people "communists". It's so stupid. Edit: I get in trouble here because there's something really interesting going on with controversial topics: all you need to do is make a choice and your model of reality is much more accurate than the presented model of reality. It's the easiest way to take Ws out of discourse, nobody has good ideas when the id has the reins.
• idlewords 3y ago
  I think mostly the Drake equation shows a lack of imagination about the forms life might take. Every time you add a term to it, you're baking in additional assumptions.
  • eru 3y ago
    Maybe. But you still have to explain the observation that the night sky is empty of signs of life. Keep in mind that human technology is pretty close to being good enough to detect not just foreign civilisations (via eg radio waves), but signs of life itself: studying the spectra of light reflected by exoplanets can tell you what chemical elements are in their atmosphere, so you can detect atmospheres that are far from chemical equilibrium, like earth's oxygen rich one. We emitted radio waves for only a few decades. But earth had oxygen for billions of years. So that widens the window of time of development that we could detect.
    • jvmboi 3y ago
      > But you still have to explain the observation that the night sky is empty of signs of life. It's really not that hard to explain. The last time I looked into this it was the case that we wouldn't be able to detect ourselves more than a light year out. The closest star is the red dwarf flare star Proxima Centauri at 4.2 ly. So, the question really isn't "where is everyone?" but "why is no one doing active SETI right now in a way that we can detect?". That's exactly OPs point, we are heaping assumptions upon assumptions and most people discussing this topic don't even know how mind bogglingly huge those assumptions really are.
      • eru 3y ago
        You are underestimating the Fermi Paradox. Active SETI is barely relevant. The first part: See how fast technology is developing, and especially the decreases in the cost of rocket launches. Within the next few hundred years humanity (or our drones) will have spread to countless habitats around the solar system. Within a few thousand years, we will have started building a Dyson swarm that will obscure a measurable fraction of the light of our sun. We don't need any new science for this, nor radically new engineering. For this confident prediction, we only need a few key ingredients: * Humanity doesn't blow herself up completely. (Civilisations blowing themselves up is one way to resolve the Fermi paradox.) * At least some humans are interested in space exploration. (The proportion of the total population can even go down compared to today.) A thousand years is nothing on cosmic time scales. It's not even much in terms of geological time scales. Even today's technology could detect the humanity of 3024 from countless light years away: just point a spectroscope at the star and notice a vast excess of infrared (the waste heat of our solar collectors has to go somewhere) and an corresponding deficit of shorter wavelengths. So we might not be able to detect ourselves at the moment, but we would be able to detect our 20-minutes-into-the-future selves already. The second part: As I already mentioned, our sensor are pretty close to good enough to measure the chemical make-up of the atmospheres of exoplanets via spectroscopy. Atmospheres that harbour life look very, very different from those of life-less planets. (Or to steelman that argument against nitpicks: there might be some forms of life that do not push the atmosphere of their planet out of chemical equilibrium. But for that to resolve the Fermi Paradox, that would need to be the vast, vast majority of biospheres. And I'm not talking about an oxygen-rich atmosphere necessarily. Just any sign of chemical disequilibrium.) So, yes, humanity couldn't detect ourselves right now. But humanity in a only few years could already detect signs of life hundreds of light years away while still at the equivalent of the Cambrian explosion. Strictly speaking my part two is not a problem right now in 2024, but I'm fairly confident in predicting it will become acute in the next ten years as our telescopes get better. Astronomers have already done some basic spectroscopy on some exoplanets. Their skills are only improving. --- You are right to warn about making too many assumptions about alien life. However, not all assumptions are born equal. For example, life is almost by definition associated with being far outside thermodynamic equilibrium. Being outside of chemical equilibrium isn't much of a stretch. Similarly, my first part assumes that humanity (or our alien equivalents) will keep multiplying and expanding. And again, that's not much of a stretch: yes, at any given time only some portion of life might be interested in these activities, but future generations will be predominately made up of those that showed the greatest interested and skill in multiplying.
• eru 3y ago
  > That might be cool from a space opera point of view but it'd probably end up being dominated by a space fascist enslaving everyone. Fascism already barely works on earth, and gets out-competed. See https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/FascistButInefficient https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/FascistButIneffi... Similarly with slavery. (See https://www.econlib.org/library/Columns/LevyPeartdismal.html https://www.econlib.org/library/Columns/LevyPeartdismal.html to go off an slight tangent.) In space, slavery is even less useful. That's mostly because humans are even less useful: we are already doing pretty much all of our useful space exploration with robots, and sending humans is just for bragging rights. Keeping space slaves alive costs you more than they ever could conceivably do for you. Of course, aliens might have biologies that are much better adapted to surviving in space, maybe?
  • deleted 3y ago
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