Let hear them conjects
I believe that life as we know it exists somewhere else in the universe .
Has anyone calculated like “the odds” of it probabalistically?
If you take standard cosmological assumptions (the universe is infinite and homogeonous) then the odds are 100% as everything that is physically possible happens infinite times.
unless you mean the observable universe, in which case we dont know, but given the vast scale of it is likely very close to 1. We cant calculate it without knowing how likely life is to form in the first place.
I’m not sure exactly how else you might calculate it, but, we know life is possible, so in an infinitely large universe, containing infinite stars with infinite planets existing for an infinite amount of time, the odds of life existing on another planet can’t be less than 100%.
The Drake Equation is a probabilistic formula meant to derive the number of civilizations which humans could potentially communicate with.
The fermi paradox does challenge the formula though, as it implies fi and/or fc are very small or zero.
What if the earth is a singular and universal outlier?
That’s just arrogant.
For life in general I would agree but for human level intelligence I’m not so sure, in our galaxy anyway. The number of things that had to line up for us to be the dominant lifeform on the planet is enormous.
Goldilocks zone. Life. Large outer gas giants. Complex life (someone correct me if I’m wrong but I believe this has only happened once in 4B years / all complex lifeforms have a common ancestor) Oxygen tolerant life. Hundreds of millions of years of evolution. Multiple mass extinctions. Planet habitable for enormously long periods. Evolution of large brains for the first time. Etc
Please subtract the assumptions and respond to specific claim. Life is a lottery. What are the equivalent chances of that in coinflips analogy and then give the response in the approximate amount of times that could happen over an eternity or minimally the “death of our galaxy or universe” context
I’ll break it down further.
We know life is possible, because we’re here.
Nobody knows the exact odds of life being created, but we know it’s >0. One in a billion? Trillion?
So imagine a trillion sided die. If you roll a 1, life is created.
If you get only one chance, you probably aren’t creating life, but if you are allowed to roll the die constantly from the instant of the big bang, until the end of time, you WILL roll a one. Now, imagine an infinite number of planets rolling an infinite number of trillion sided dice for billions of years.
Sure, it’s very unlikely for any individual roll to be 1, but it’s downright IMPOSSIBLE for NONE of them to EVER roll it.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not claiming that there are aliens flying around and probing people. I don’t believe that’s true at all. But there is life out there. Maybe it’s just plants or bacteria, or some form of living rock that we’ve never encountered before, but it’s out there.
I say it’s arrogant because Earth is a tiny insignificant speck in the universe, and assuming that only YOUR planet can randomly produce life is a very self centered point of view.
Bold of you to assume life on earth originated on earth.
We don’t have enough data about the frequency of life to say for sure, since we only have one data point (our planet). If we knew more about how life can arise originally, then perhaps we could make a prediction.
It was calculated decades ago. I remember Carl Sagan talking about it.
People are basically good
We are social animals that evolved to work cooperatively. We have deeply ingrained mechanisms that encourage pro-social behavior.
I agree. People are by default “good” and want happy lives within their communities. It’s when tribalism steps into the scenario that most problems arise.
Yes! Cooperative behavior can that result in kin selection, where the individuals of the community have similar fitness. However, selfishness and deception are exceptionally beneficial behaviors for increasing the fitness of a particular individual. That is just within the same species. Perhaps tribalisms are another form of kin selection?
Weird. I think the opposite.
Do you think (on the balance) its more nurture than nature to be shitty to other humans?
This question has gone back and forth a lot, and the data says: both! The overall development of organisms depends the sum of the effect of the genes, the environment, and the gene-by-environment interaction. In conclusion, to predict human behaviors and personalities, we need a new zodiac system that accounts for multiple hemispheres, precipitation, elevation, socioeconomics, pandemics, popular movies, climate change, and the genome.
“I was a Porky’s kid, born in the southern hemisphere, I ate well, was raised in good home, I had access to education, and it was back when climate change was still deniable. Most people did not know what a pandemic was. I’m genetically predisposed to hair loss.”
“Ma’am, you are, what we call, a Jaguar-5-hypercrab-superbear, and I’m going to have to ask you to go with the nice officer now.”
People are basically good, but criminally ignorant on average.
Just look at Asmond Gold’s recent ban. I doubt the dude would ever even think about shooting a Palestinian himself, but boy will he happily dehumanize an entire culture as easy as taking a sip of water!
Yes. I looked that up, it seems he said something very nasty on his Twitch stream and was temp-banned.
Do you think a fourteen day ban is an effective deterrent? Why?
I think he is at least in part rewarded with publicity. We are currently discussing him, right?
Dunno’. I hope so, but Asmond has proven to be a bit … uh… dense. Hopefully he at least learns not to use such negative language when he supposedly doesn’t mean the entire meaning.
"Sometimes the things that may or may not be true are the things a man needs to believe in the most.
That people are basically good; that honor, courage, and virtue mean everything; that power and money, money and power mean nothing; that good always triumphs over evil; and I want you to remember this, that love… true love never dies.
You remember that, boy. You remember that. Doesn’t matter if it’s true or not.
You see, a man should believe in those things, because those are the things worth believing in."
- Hub, Secondhand Lions (2003)
That global democratic socialism can work. Currently the only states successful in implementing it are oil-rich nordic countries, and I want to believe it can work elsewhere but it’ll be hard to prove.
Sweden and Finland have no oil, and if anything are even more “socialist” than Norway.
Back to the drawing board on your premise.
Sweden is fairly unique as it’s economy wasn’t destroyed by WWII, and it’s stance on banking, foreign exports, and foreign ownership has enabled it to make massive profits. But the economy is seriously struggling today. The average home loan takes 100 years to pay off.
Finland economy replaces oil with timber and an extremely educated population. Both of which are not sustaining the model well as the country is in recession. The timber industry isnt producing sustainable profits like it used to. The debt-to-GDP ratio is extremely high. The highly educated population is leaving and people don’t typically immigrate to Finland.
So arguably the model isn’t working anymore, without something like oil to fall back on.
Clearly no Nordic country is a panacea. But the issues you mention are relevant to a whole bunch of northern European countries, many of which are pretty “socialist” by American standards.
On the oil question, Norway is in any case the international exception. Most countries with oil are not socialist paradises but rather repressive police states. Or semi-failed, like Venezuela. Even before the climate crisis made it unethical, oil was a decent predictor of bad social outcomes. Norway aside, the world’s most successful countries, as measured by HDI rather than GDP, tend to have few natural resources. Or almost none at all, like Japan and Germany.
It irritates me that, even today, people keep mentioning oil as some kind of magic solution. It’s the opposite and always has been.
Norway being the only exception.
I’m not sure if people are suggesting that oil itself is a magical solution or if they’re suggesting that having exclusive access to an extremely profitable resource (oil) enables a country with a tiny population to make socialism work.
I have a strange feeling that if oil became worthless Norway would quickly stop doing socialism well
Not sure I understand this obsession with Norway. Its neighbors are doing just as well, and are just as “socialist” by American standards. The only substantive difference is that they don’t have sovereign wealth funds worth trillions. Because, all that oil money - Norway does not spend it. It keeps it for a rainy day. What makes Norway successful is not the oil money. The winning formula is human capital, not natural capital.
Denmark is as successful a country as Norway on pretty much any metric.
The point I was trying to convey is that the only democratic socialist countries that I’m aware of are rich off of either abundant natural resources or rent-seeking from more exploitative countries like the US. Is it a sustainable model for poor countries too? Historically they’ve fallen into autocracy. I want it to work everywhere because I believe in justice, but I can’t prove it with math or precedent.
Firstly, just know that the formula “democratic socialist” is itself almost an Americanism (although it’s true that Orwell used it). In the rest of the world it sounds suspiciously similar to what the former communist countries of eastern Europe called themselves. And they were most certainly not democracies.
Outside the USA the usual term is “social democracy”. That’s what the Scandinavian model called itself. Past tense intended.
For examples of successful, free, and equal societies, I would suggest that the best examples are indeed in northern Europe, with a handful of special mentions like NZ or Japan. The HDI is surely the best indicator.
Of countries that have historically used the word “socialist” to describe their political systems, with or without “democratic” thrown in, none are places that you would want to live.
I think the problem is that no system that gives equal weight to everyone’s opinions can survive a population that does not have a majority of good opinions. And if the populace does agree on most things, then it doesn’t matter much what system is being used. The best the system can do is incentivise certain behaviors.
My BS, unprovable hypothesis: The Golden Age of Piracy was actually a successful Socialist movement, with Nassau being a disruptively successful enclave of Socialism in action. The pirates deeply threatened the budding power structures in the US (not conjecture) and the entrenched powers in Europe. While some powers, most notably royalty, were willing to use pirates as mercenaries (privateers), there was an excess of democracy and human concern (somewhat my conjecture) among the Nassau pirates. The Nassau pirates had pensions, a form of worker’s comp, disability, democratic command structures at sea, and healthcare (such as it was given the era). According to the historical texts on the Nassau pirates, there were almost no written records, which strikes me as especially odd since they had so many long-running financial and governing processes.
The Pizzagate conspiracy was created to cover up any media coverage of the police reports from the early 90s when Trump was hanging with Epstein and dumping ‘used’ underage girls at a pizza parlor the next morning.
Either greed or religion has killed the most people before their time. One of them has to go.
That might be provable
I’ve mentioned them before and they’re semi-related, in a broad sense:
I believe the Congressional baseball game shooting was likely intended to benefit Trump.
I believe it’s likely that the Russian government has knowingly promoted interracial cuck porn, in some capacity.
Inductive reasoning. I don’t have any non-circular reason to believe that previous experience should predict future events. But I’m gonna believe it anyway.
That’s… huh. Yeah I guess you’re right
I think our model of cosmology is likely way more wrong than we think. I LOVE it when we get new data that challenges our accepted notions, which is why I’m loving all the “how are these ancient galaxies so big” stuff coming out of Webb.
My running theory is that what we call the universe is an inverse version of what we would consider to be the real universe, were we not stuck in this crummy inverted one.
We likely live in a simulation.
Assuming it’s possible to create a simulation, the odds of us being in a simulation is 50%
But if you can create one simulation, maybe you can create 1 million. Or maybe you can create nested simulations.
So even if the chance of creating a simulation is 1%, but the creation of one simulation means millions are created, the odds of us living in a simulation are above 99.99%.
Another theory is the Boltzmann Brain. Basically the idea that a brain can spontaneously appear in space:
By one calculation, a Boltzmann brain would appear as a quantum fluctuation in the vacuum after a time interval of 101050 years.
Which means if the universe lasts forever, but has already reached a point where worlds can’t form, there’s infinite time for something as complex as a brain to suddenly spawn. Which also means it’s more likely that you don’t exist and are just a brain that will last for a nanosecond before disappearing, and none of this is real. In fact, in a universe that lasts forever, the fact you are a brain that will disappear in a nanosecond is more likely than you being a human with a real past.
It’s been a looooong nanosecond.
That’s what you think!
That I’d be a fool to strongly hold a belief without equally strong evidence.
I believe that there are metaphysical aspects of reality and unfalsifiable truths science and mathematics will never be able to prove.
I know that this isn’t what you mean, but paradoxically mathematics has been used to prove that it can’t prove everything: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gödel’s_incompleteness_theorems
Gödel’s incompleteness theorem is one of the main things that I like pointing to when talking about stuff like this, thanks for bringing it up. Its a good supporting piece that helps show there are limits to logic and knowability. I think physics models will eventually have their own version that puts theories of everything in jepoardy.
I do think our current physics theories are inaccurate at the extremes. To quote Zach Weinersmith:
Now, we’ve basically got it all worked out, except for small stuff, big stuff, hot stuff, cold stuff, fast stuff, heavy stuff, dark stuff, turbulence, and the concept of time.
Likesuch as?Like consciousness being greater than the sum of its parts and there being spiritual aspects to the universe. Like emotions existing as non localized complex energy frequencies, and karma existing.
I used to be a hardcore scientific determinist athiest. The scientific method, mathematical logic, and unfalsifiablility were collectively my God. My version of the universe was a mechanical box our fates predetermined by an uncaring system. There was no room for magical thinking or maybe invisible unicorns. Thing either existed or they didn’t, yes or no, 1 or 0. Everything not absolute verifyable truth was worthless.
Then I had a psychedelics phase, astral projected, experienced ego death, had telepathic communications with divine / cosmicbconsciousnesses using plants as mediums, looked at myself from third person with nonexistent eyeballs, ect, ect.
I will never be able to prove to anyone my experiences are real, but what I experienced was real to me from my subjective reference frame in every way that matters.
There is a scientific method for spirituality. But it requires accepting that consensus reality is socially constructed.
This is very interesting but feels deeply uncooked, needs some time in the oven to cement itself a little bit more
It’s a manifesto. An introductory text. If you want more soulist theory applied to specific issues, I suggest reading My blog
https://medium.com/@viridiangrail
https://medium.com/@viridiangrail/did-trolls-go-extinct-commentary-on-partisan-realism-fa380ac4af4b
https://medium.com/@viridiangrail/the-commodification-of-myth-2e0e68b7f1ec
I’ve been reading through some of your blog articles, and I wanted to ask if there are any other platforms you’re active on? I wanted to have a more in depth conversation but lemmy might not be the best place for that. I still think that some extrapolations of the theory need work, but the core is pretty solid and fairly in line with my beliefs. Would definitely be interested in getting more context to better inform my path in life going forward.
What we know about the age of the human species, and other life, the earth, the universe etc. depends on so many guesses that we know essentially nothing.
Specifically, I think that elements and materials may have changed some of their properties and behaviour at some time in the past.
We do not know that. Most people just assume they have remained constant at all times. And we build quite many of our guesses on this assumption.
If, for example, C14 has changed it’s disintegration rate at some time, then quite many of our guesses would be very wrong.
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