Leaderboard

I'm sorry to need to post this but it seems we are enjoined to give time wasters what is, in my opinion. excessive rope. I put a deal of thought and effort into trying to offer help, at an appropriate level to one such who was a self confessd novice at science. After several tap dancing replies to my moderately lengthy explanations, I was beginning to smell a rat when this person decided to no only question what was being said, but also expound his own gospel of the laws of physics something he had already said he knew little or nothing about, all the while carefully ignoring simply prepared explanations, just for him. What other behaviour would this suggest, other than trolling? I further note that since I and other regular members left the thread in question, he has opened a series of increasingly far fetched new threads.

Being on the receiving end of this question a fair bit, I think the issue is not the question "Where are you from?" It is generally only an issue if the follow-up is "no, where are you really from".

Yes, and plus one to the whole post. I see this problem as part of a culture war, where people move away from conversations that are meant to find out what others are thinking (and how they got there) to agenda-driven conversations where the parties will comb over everything the other person says with a fine-toothed comb in hopes of finding something that could be spun as offensive. It's what partisans often do to politicians ("Hey, Hillary called us all deplorable!") and now it's become the tactic in more mundane encounters between ordinary people. The Antifa example you gave is a good one. Another is Social Justice Warrior. How could fighting for social justice be anything but good and desirable? So the term is twisted to be sarcastic, as if sarcasm is all you need to make a case. The Left sometimes will mock any use of the term "small government," closing off reasoned discussion of the concept. The Right will, in a similar vein, attack "socialism," mocking any top-down economic policy in advance by equating it with Stalinism or Nazis. A recent case regarding the question, "Where are you from?" struck me as one where the criticism of the questioner is often predicated on the assumption that they must be racist. No further examination of context or motivation needed. Guilty. I would heartily agree that the conversation between the Royal Household member (age 83) and a Black woman, recently recounted on BBC, revealed a rather rude and toxic cross-examination that was deservedly condemned. But not EVERYONE who has ever asked this question is being racist and rude. Many people in many places, where newcomers are prevalent, are simply taking a friendly interest in someone arrived from a different place and culture, their words meaning nothing beyond that. It was until recently a common question in many US university towns, because we have so many foreign students that come from all over the world and who enjoy talking about their adventures. Not everyone does, of course, and I have rarely seen the question followed up in a pushy way. Now, it's verboten.

The idea of "wokeness" has been distorted by conservative media to mean almost anything other than what it really means. This is understandable due to the conservative political agenda being mostly fear mongering and projection. Much like ANTIFA being labeled as some sort of organised terrorist group when all it really means is that a person is against Fascism. One more thing that conservative media has distorted into a bad thing but if you step back and think... How could being against fascism be a bad thing unless you were supportive of fascism? Sadly politics has degraded into you have to agree with me or you're anti american or or a groomer or some other bullshit that the media wants you to believe about the other side. Both sides use the idea of painting the other as extremists when in reality we all have far more in common than we think. Things like gay marriage or trans rights, or religion vs science are being used to divide and conquer us all. I often wonder what happened to minding our own business or defending those who are different. People need to remember that if something can happen to the other person it can also happen to you. Being smug because you aren't one of the others is a path to having your own rights trampled. Both sides seem to be engaged in a war of lies, deception, and fear against the "other" forgetting we are all the other to someone else.

The number of deaths is down, but the number of conflicts is up. One factor, I suspect, is economic. https://ourworldindata.org/war-and-peace Armies are smaller, but the cost of deployment per combatant is much higher than it used to be. Another is advances in medicine, which reduces fatalities and also has an economic impact, if one’s society cares for its wounded soldiers. So it’s possible one contributing reason countries avoid escalation is because they can’t afford it. Interstellar war would have a really large economic impact.

Here we go again. This is more time-wasting, by yet another sockpuppet of Theorist.

That's the important question. What I'm saying is that we are pre-inclined to guess that evolution will naturally produce an increase in their intelligence, but there is no reason to assume that. Our own increase in intelligence was driven by an unknown factor, and is freakish in nature. About nine million years ago, we had a common ancestor with chimpanzees. We diverged, and evolved many differences, but the Chimpanzees etc of today show very little difference from the last common ancestor. If they haven't changed much in nine million years, why would they change significantly in the next million? Intelligence in the form of a big brain has costs as well as benefits. It's naturally less robust, and uses a lot of energy, and causes a lot of deaths in childbirth, and needs an extended period of vulnerable childhood to develop. There are many good reasons why there should be an intelligence ceiling. Most evolutionary scientists acknowledge that our own case is extremely freakish, and the evolutionary benefit that caused our brain expansion has still not been discovered. In fact, up to fairly recently, our species struggled to exist, and were easily outnumbered by the hordes of less intelligent species. Study of our dna indicates that the population numbers of our ancestors dropped dangerously close to extinction levels, whereas monkeys etc were easily outcompeting us. If we HAD gone extinct, at one of those bottleneck points, our example of one civilisation would have been zero, and the argument that intelligence has a natural ceiling would look like common sense. Other hominid cousins with enlarged brains all went extinct, only our line actually made it, so the cost/benefit equation didn't work out for them.

Well, it would be like being confined to a perfect sensory deprivation chamber that is somehow able to completely suppress all external inputs. All that remains than are internal inputs, ie thoughts, memories, dreams, etc etc. Most people will probably consider this the highest form of torture. I can’t really answer these questions, also because this is not my area of expertise. Out of all the current attempts to explain consciousness, Integrated Information Theory seems to make the most sense to me, in which case the precise nature of the physical substrate underlying consciousness really isn’t relevant. Neurons are an extremely efficient solution, but in principle at least a network of machines that work in similar ways should do the job just as well. And yes, if IIT holds any water at all, then there should be degrees of consciousness, depending on complexity and structure of the network in question. In the future there might be ways to experimentally test this, but right now I think it’s pretty much all conjecture.

No, it is not. It is a phenomenon.

If each logical step of a derivation is written on a separate line, and preferably numbered, then it is easier to understand and discuss.

It's entirely your choice but I suggest you reflect on your method of discussion. You can see from Dima's tally of negative points that he has had difficulties here. I have had better success communicating since I found out he has to do everything both ways through a translator. Communication thus requires a deal of patience on both sides. But the end result of your spat with Mordred is that Dima seems to have abandoned his own thread. As to this thread, I have been here 10 years now and this is the first time anyone has ever called my efforts to help with post maths as trivial. In my opinion the IT industry could easily have offered the facility to directly type maths in, but chose not to do so for reasons known only to itself. So we are left with unwieldy workarounds for the situation, including learning yet another computer language or languages.

Not so. A god-like observer must rather conclude that particle falls into the event horizon in one reference frame and doesn't fall into it in another reference frame. No contradiction.

As far as the Fermi Paraxox goes, there's a factor that's not immediately obvious. Here as humans on Earth, we have a sample of one, and evolution has produced a being capable of science and industry. So it's tempting to assume that that will happen elsewhere. But the fact is, we humans are an incredible evolutionary freak. Take away the homo genus, and what's left? The highest form of intelligence is Chimpanzees, Gorillas and Orangutans. It looks likely that there is a natural ceiling for intelligence that we have freakishly blasted through, and as yet, nobody knows why that happened. Chimpanzees and Gorillas and Orangs have pretty much the same mental capabilities as our common ancestor had ten million years ago. They certainly seem to have hit a natural ceiling in the intelligence stakes. Whales and Dolphins are brainy, but nowhere near capable of any tech. So it might well be the same on other planets that have produced life. There might be millions or billions of Earth-like planets, but they might all produce nothing more intelligent than a Chimp. In any case, if the intelligent life came from water-living animals, I think it's very unlikely that they would be able to make stuff, in the way that we can. How could you progress to industry, without oxygen in the air, and fossil fuels in the ground? Earth might be a one-in-a-billion freak, in being suitable for developing technology, and humans might be a one-in-a-billion freak in the intelligence stakes. We just don't know, having just a sample of one to go by.

Fair points and I guess you are correct. "Both sides seem to be engaged in a war of lies, deception, and fear against the "other" forgetting we are all the other to someone else" I will admit, I certainly get caught up in some of the lies and deceit, mostly unawares.

Current thought would seem to favor the idea that radio leakage is constrained to less than 2 light years except for powerful sources like Arecibo or military radars accidentally sweeping over us as they probe objects nearby to them. Things like cosmic dust, gas, plasma, and magnetic fields would absorb any "EM Leakage" but we have seen sources that resembled military radar or radio telescopes being used to image objects that would be nearby to them. Then there is the problem of our own signals getting dimmer over time as the efficiency of the receivers becomes ever more effective requiring less power from the broadcast. We do this and there is no reason others wouldn't do it as well. But such em signals wouldn't repeat and so would not be considered candidates for intelligent signals. The WOW signal would be considered as such and other signals we have detected but never repeated. It is often said that Radio telescopes could detect a signal from across the universe or some such nonsense but that is assuming an intentional signal with very high power beamed directly at us. We have done that only twice that I am aware of and the signal was short and wasn't repeated and so if we had detected such a signal it would have been dismissed.

All these theories of planet destroyer aliens seem rooted in one particular human flavor of paranoia. As @Moontanman noted. I find the Bright Forest scenario vastly more probable, that civilizations that reach a high technology level rely on cooperation, curiosity, and a propensity for trade and intellectual exchange over annihilating. For all the bad chapters in human history, violence and warfare per capita have plummeted in the past few centuries (I think Stephen Pinker has a graph of this) and less warlike nations have discovered the mutual profit of peaceful trade vastly outweighing the gains of war. (Putin is notable in how much he is an outlier, and presides over a shrinking economy which will soon have the GDP of a third world country). Even very primitive H-G bands are now trading woodcarvings or orchid bulbs for cellphones and tools. If our human civilization manages to get through the nuclear weapons phase and the relics of xenophobia and ancient religious hatreds, we will emerge as a curious and friendly outpost of sentience that can actually assemble the brainpower and economic engines needed for starfaring if that's still seen as desirable. And I don't believe we will cling to the Stay Silent option, which is the belief system of a mouse not a human. I think Fermi's "where are they" relates to the limiting factors in the Drake Equation, not to a galaxy of trembling nervous nellies.

The list is extensive because humans tend to disagree most of the time on most things . In an ideal world , there wouldn't be any independent countries or nationalities . The world would correctly be viewed as being one place . The world wouldn't need armies , instead they'd just have world policing . This is probably impossible to acheive though because world rulers listen to feelings rather than common sense .

Why does maleness and femaleness matter?

Good news; you are wrong.

Great! Show me how it works, Professor! 😄 Oh my! It says some frames are inertial! Good job, Professor! You've demonstrated the faulty generalization fallacy! Some doesn't imply all! Nobody slings baloney like you do, Professor! 😋 Tragically, that's not officially allowed on this forum, Professor! You're still spewing nonsensical hogwash! 😲 Great lecture, Professor! Irritating indeed! It has nothing to do with this thread or any comments I've made, but I'm sure it'll impress lots of readers who don't realize it's all fake! 😆

Caun't understand you ? Thought somebody said it was electrical ?

Before I go you might be interested in this

I said "What do you think", meaning md65536. You directly and correctly answered the kind of question a stupid beginner might ask, which was completely different from the question I asked md65536. This is one of your favorite trolling tactics, Mordy. You ignore the question the person actually asked, and then you insult the person's intelligence by fabricating your own little fantasy question that involves the person not knowing basic things like definitions of vocabulary terms. And then you make your own retarded comments, like these: "all reference frames are inertial" "Equal free fall it is not the equivalent to a rest frame". "A reference frame is an inertial frame of reference." Not to mention mangled gibberish like "The above propertime that clock on the worldline". And you try to intimidate people by gratuitously throwing around advanced technical terms and citing your "Resident Expert" status in the forum. Go ahead, Professor. Keep replying to my comments. Or not. However you see fit.

What?? Are you feeling okay, Professor? What part of "md65536 said:" do you not understand? PS: You might want to try doing that yourself for a change. 😉 About another person's thoughts? That's quite a feat, Professor. 🙂

I already read the textbooks, Professor. You have no idea what you're talking about. The reference frame of a spaceship with its rockets blasting isn't an inertial frame of reference. The astronauts can tell that because they feel like they're being pushed into their seats. The reference frame of Earth's surface isn't an inertial frame of reference in general relativity. You can tell that because you feel like you're being pushed down onto the ground or your chair or whatever you're resting on. The reference frame of a merry-go-round or the edge of a spinning space station isn't an inertial frame of reference. People can tell that because they feel like they're being flung away from the center. You have no business posting on a real physics forum, Professor. You're a shameless, ignorant troll, and you're not fooling anyone except the most casual or uninformed readers. The part where it says "think", Professor. Speaking of kindergarten-level vocabulary terms, do you understand that thinking means having thoughts? You said you "directly answered this question and answered it correctly", and my question was about another poster's thoughts. Am I going too fast for you, Professor? Okay, great. Keep responding with more baloney, Professor, and I'll tell you what I think of it. 🙂