TheVat

Ha! Regarding abduction with medical exams, for yokels... the obsession in the USA is with the possibility of affordable healthcare. No matter who the provider is! Can't handle the co-pay on doctor visits? Just go stand on a lonely highway in Nevada....

I don't understand the title question. What exactly do you mean by someone "manifesting" their reality? Sidenote: have you tried stepping in front of a moving bus? I've heard that resolves the "reality isn't real" question for many.

Capitalism isn't dirty, just amoral. It's a purely economic system in search of a moral compass. Absent that, you get predatory capitalism and its stress on maximal worker exploitation, tumor-like endless growth, and cynical sneers for anything like ecological sustainability. And if you go belly-up, you're supposed to grin bravely and say "well, that's the free market, in its Darwinian glory." Regulation, then, is our attempt to impose some moral compass, and not have a dog-eat-dog free-for-all. (wow, so many hyphens) It's supposed to be a reminder that cooperation is as vital an element of human nature as competition.

Like many people (I suspect) my interest here is both in fair competition and in seeing all varieties of personhood given respect and dignity. I find any position that is simple to have a tempting allure, because it might mean we can all go home and concern ourselves no further. Yet a part of me feels this pleasant outcome only happens on Earth Two, while here on Earth One we continue to fight and bicker and litigate over dozens of tangential issues while occasionally wrestling someone to the floor and chewing off a foot or hand. Short form of above: the dust will only settle after many court cases and mind-numbing quantities of interpretation.

I think the generation ship was a bit of a digression - if anything, it addresses the extreme implausibility of the ET conjecture, for reasons you neatly outline. Yes, what species that was even marginally sane would form a mission along the lines of The planet has a race of aggressive and warlike bipeds that possess nuclear fusion bombs and few inhibitions about altering their biosphere in frightening and potentially lethal ways...let us mount an expedition of a thousand years and multiple generations in order to, um, hang out on the far side of their moon for decades while sending out patrols to coyly dance and flit around the fringes of their detection systems without really establishing contact, or an embassy, or anything that would facilitate actually knowing them or offering some help. Because the benefit/resource expenditure ratio is so poor in such scenarios, I guess that's what makes the "warp drive" variant more attractive. If the ETs are way up on the Kardashev Scale, then the whole interstellar travel scenario becomes less absurd, though still implausible. It's conceivable, I guess, that an advanced civilization could have "soft power" methods of influence and reform that would be invisible to us.

While I agree that the fan mentality can lead to grotesque behavior (Red Sox fans flipping cars, soccer hooligans, fans throwing bottles from the bleachers, etc.), and the whole urge to wear a particular color shirt and feel like part of a special group can be retrogressive, I think the problems with professional sports owe a lot to predatory capitalism in general, and the way businesses try to market an "identity" to sell their commodity. In that respect, Rollerball was rather prescient. I think many of us have those moments when we see modern sports and say "FFS, it's just a GAME! It's supposed to be about fun and the poetry of the human body in graceful motion...." Or just getting outside with some pals and enjoying some fresh air and exercise. As for singing the praises of "teamwork," well, all you need to develop teamwork is any group project. You can gather a group and go help build a neighbor's garage (lots of physical prowess will be developed, trust me on this....)

Due to our bitter winters here, it's hard to find houses that leak to that degree. If a house does leak that badly, selling off a family member to fund the renovation is usually considered. BTW, the snakes are sometimes called "draft dodgers" here in the States. The cheapest fast fix I know for draughts (I really prefer the Brit spelling, because it reminds me of enjoyable libations) is the window film you put on the inside, using double-sided tape, and then making taut with a hair dryer. This is okay for windows you don't plan to open in the warmer weather. The plastic will usually adhere pretty well for several years, and then you do it all over again. It's way cheaper than buying storm windows or getting newer triple-glazed argon-filled windows (which have grown insanely expensive lately, like a lot of other construction supplies). I realize this is straying a bit from the topic of chemistry. Argon gas doesn't even have much chemistry, being noble.

People were writing speculative stuff on slow-haul generation ships as far back as the fifties (Brian Aldiss, IIRC) or suspended animation. As others noted, speed is not an absolute requirement. And there's also ground-based propulsion systems (like light-sails "pushed" by a laser) that aren't wildly beyond our technological horizon. Though deceleration might be tricky. The generation ship literature has touched many times on the ethical problems of generations whose purpose is to be ancestors to the colonists who set foot on the new world. There's often the idea that the young are indoctrinated in the sacredness of the mission... or it's hidden outright from them because they'll just accept the ship as their world. As Zapatos said, it's conceivable to live an ordinary life with all the usual trimmings, on a generation ship. (though restless young people wouldn't have any option, as they do in some restricted Earth societies like the Amish, of running off to the city to sample the alternatives).

105 is tomorrow's predicted high here, with a blood red sun from the wildfire smoke that's wafting from Oregon to Boston, so burning wood has lost some of it's fun and cozy feeling. The world doesn't need more polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons and PM 2.5 atm. Sincerely, the fireside Grinch

Jeff's, erm, rocket...

An obstacle for me as well. I've never been able to achieve any significant fraction of c. 😀 It does seem any ET that does arrive is part of a self-selecting group: the mere fact of their being here means they are cleverer than we are. Though I suppose, if one speculates wildly, it's possible to conceive of ETs who are actually technologically less clever but happen to have normal lifespans of a thousand years or the ability to hibernate for very long stretches.

G flat, above middle C. Hope that helps.

The section across Lakes Superior and Huron would have been quite the engineering challenge. Superior is 1300 feet deep in places. Never mind that we clever Americans have developed technology like ropes and ladders. It took us a while to catch up with the Mesopotamians, but we're very persistent people.

It seems unlikely that nations who themselves openly do GoF research (i. e. pretty much all wealthy nations) would have much basis for sanctioning other nations for doing it. Even if one nation were farcically incompetent at one of its labs, it's hard to see how a world policing body could bludgeon away incompetence, without some international accreditation/funding agreement that all the nations had signed onto.

The Atlantic recently had a piece on sorting out all the lab-leak and other scenarios... https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/06/lab-leak-trap/619150/

Help us out here. Are you comparing the experience of a student learning the history of slavery, race massacres, Jim Crow oppression, etc. to the subtle despair dogs feel when...what? Ok, I just have no idea what this is about. Woof.

Generally in a developed nations economy, as lifespan increases and families get smaller (the "demographic shift" as it's called) there's a trend towards full employment (smaller percent of population is of working age) and the value of labor rises. As labor becomes a scarcer commodity, companies pay more for it and offer more benefits and perks to keep workers. Of course, now we have wild cards like automation, immigration, and other trends that can tinker with that simplistic formula I outlined. But I don't think any of those will prevent labor, especially the services where we really prefer people to robots, from rising in value. Dropping fertility rates (thanks to both social trends and endocrine disruptors from plasticmaggedon) will see to it that we have a society top-heavy with older folks.

I am okay with investigation of anomalies, and sometimes spotty data can at least suggest a new hypothesis and path for research, but it's good to keep in mind that a sound hypothesis must be capable of disproof. This is Karl Popper's principle of falsification. But what set of observations can, in reality, falsify the ET hypothesis? It seems to me that, no matter how many negative results we have (the radar bogey was frozen pee, the silent light was Las Vegas reflected off the belly of an overweight goose), we can't really rule out that some stealthy ET has visited Earth. Watching the airspace and environs of Earth is not like watching a sealed room on CCTV. Things can be missed, others can be seen and remain unexplained because a sufficient amount of data will never be obtained. So I think a case can be made that ETs can only be a conjecture (which may at some point be proved to be right -- an alien lands and says howdy, a crashed spaceship is found not to be of this world, etc.) and not a scientific hypothesis. And inductive reasoning doesn't help much. If we look at thousands of observations and find that they have been, in the past, observations of new experimental aircraft or of optical effects of atmosphere or other terrestrial phenomena, and none of them has ever proved to be an ET, then we are left with nothing to do but apply Ockham's razor. We have no real empirical foundation of having encountered ETs to build from, when an anomaly zips by.

https://apnews.com/article/business-science-environment-and-nature-7844af19c7975f12c2a98cc5bd83fb60 Just offering as a sidebar to the discussion.

There does seem to be an innate aspect to such fears, and considerable variation between people. I never had much fear of reptiles or arachnids, always had the impression they were pretty shy and not bent on harming people. They seem like allies to our species, for the most part, snuffing pests. I have to wonder to what degree the "creepiness" is culturally learned. A fear of spiders didn't even occur to me until I learned about the poisonous ones and (Zapatos, you may wish to stop reading at this point)(j/k) I had heard about them biting people while they slept. If you're talking about a species that climbs in bed with you and administers poison, then, yes, fear is reasonable (not sure that could be termed a phobia, really). The genetics Nobel laureate Kary Mullis had a nightmarish encounter with poisonous spiders which he recounts in "Dancing Naked in the Mind Field. " Had me checking our sheets for months after reading that. Point being, I had to hear scary stories to really develop any spider anxieties. In terms of the most visceral insect fear, it would probably be ones that defensively swarm and attack humans (generally who've been unaware that they're close to a nest), like the Africanized killer bee or the Asian giant hornets which have been known to sting people to the point of kidney failure and death. Makes arachnids pale into insignificance by comparison.

I don't see why inquisitive intelligence couldn't evolve on a lightless planet. We are visual creatures, so we might be inclined to a kind of EM chauvinism regarding how brains may develop. I only mentioned dolphins as examples of a sensorium that can turn sonic information into detailed 3D representations of the environment, not as hypothetical dwellers on my Darkworld. A lightless planet would have a myriad of ecological niches just as a lighted one does, and wouldn't be analogous to just cave-dwellers. Indeed, a dominant acoustic sense that's greatly beyond ours might afford perceptive powers we lack, like seeing through walls and into the interiors of other bodies. Peterkin, I know that you write SF, so I would think your imagination is more than capable of imagining such worlds.

Are their fossils on mars? Are whose fossils on Mars? 😀

Thanks, Swanson. Burp. Now the profile page shows the editable avatar pic, with the editing button on the bottom left as String had described. And thanks again, String. I logged on this session with a Windows desktop, and everything worked as described. All the trouble I was having was on a somewhat aged Chrome tablet, so I now wonder if the glitch was with me. Next lesson (which I hope to master through self-guided study): cropping that stupid monkey so it comes out right and you can all enjoy his terrific hairdo.

Thank you SJ. That doesn't work (and it's on the top left, on my photo) . That just allows adding or removal of the profile page photo. I wonder if this is a function restricted for newer members?

Hi, Geordief I was talking about animals that don't likely have a feeling of volition, that operate on instinct and stimulus/response. My sample thought (the almonds) was something I guessed a higher-order mammal or corvid could have. I would guess that a lizard avoiding almonds would just not eat them, out of an instinct hardwired by a long process of natural selection. It might not choose or reference past almond experiences. It just wouldn't see them as food. This is pretty speculative, I know, given how much we don't knkw about animal cognition.