TheVat

An interesting experiment (gedankenexperiment, at this point) would be to hook up a conscious volunteer to a device that transfers the function of each neuron and synapse (nondestructively, so that neuron stays alive) to a silicon analogous unit. After all neurons have transferred, you would then show something to the resulting silicon brain through artificial sensory channels, a set of images perhaps, while having a chat with it. Then you would have this silicon analog transfer its current state (of each neuron analog) back to the biological brain, shut it down, and wake the volunteer. Then ask them what they remembered. Would they have any memory of briefly existing as the silicon-based brain? IIRC philosopher Derek Parfit came up with a series of thought experiments like this. Mine is a modification of one of them.

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.

(Delighted to find a question concerning a field in which I have formal training) Measuring blood glucose will not be a reliable measure here. A specific food is usually a complex blend of nutrients which, as they make their way through the small intestines, are absorbed through the villi at different rates. Most nutrients pass through the mucosa layer of villi in the jejunum, however some minerals absorb in the duodenum. Coffee leaves the stomach in as little as ten minutes and is absorbed shortly thereafter, while ruminant meat might take several hours to leave the stomach and then as long as a day to be absorbed in the intestine. A white flour pastry with minimal oils could be absorbed in a fraction of the time of meat or fatty foods. Same for fruit juices. Whole wheat moves slower and absorbs slower due to high dietary fiber content. Whole rolled oats are also slower, with even slower mineral uptake due to phytic acid content. (Many foods have so-called anti-nutrients, which are chemicals that actually block complete digestion and reduce specific nutrient absorption.) There are also resistant starches, mainly polysaccharides, which due to various features (like amylase resistant cellular walls) are simply not digested by us, but nevertheless contribute to colon health and feed intestinal flora we need. Lentils, green bananas, dates, and many other foods have these resistant starches. Soluble fiber and resistant starch are quite similar, and there is some overlap. Anyway, point is, you have to look at what goes in to making a specific food, and learn how its components will be absorbed at different rates. The table sugar on that doughnut may absorb in under an hour, while oleic acid, an omega-9 fatty acid in the cooking oil, will take longer to access.

Yes. And the hope that prawn and fishing industries would have high motivation to pay in to seagrass pasture expansion and mangroves seems well founded. Potential billions for them. And IIRC seagrass is fairly hardy and handles water temp rises well. While land based solutions must also be implemented, they involve plantings that are more vulnerable to shifting rainfall patterns, wind erosions, increased wildfire, etc. Rainforest, for example, makes its own weather and so when its lost you have areas that no longer have enough rain to readily bring it back. There you are looking at generations before a forest can come back from scrublands and savannahs, and only with immense effort.

Has a St. Anselm feel to it, for sure. Unicorns always exist.

It is a bit scary how much one extreme band on the political spectrum seems to take every concept of social progress and infuse it with pejorative meaning. Instead of having a real conversation about what there could be to awaken to, the woke person is put on the defensive to counter the repressive Maoist caricature being painted over them. And I'm sure there are conservatives of integrity and conscience who get into similar defensive mode when they get painted as part of some monolithic cadre of racist misogynist plutocrats warming their fat hands over book bonfires. All the while we could be having real conversations about actual policy philosophies - when is small government useful, when is it a copout on necessary pooling of community resources? What's the difference between a natural right and a privilege? Who should determine what children are taught in school? What is the legitimate function of a national military defense? What are the pluses and minuses of a global economy with globe-spanning supply chains? How should state regulatory power be levied on a free market? How should freedom of religion apply to businesses that serve the public? Can quotas or targeted goals remedy historical systemic racism and if so how? And a hundred other questions. And one discussion we especially need in the US regarding systemic racism is to examine the difference between being responsible for a systemic problem and taking responsibility for it. I might not be personally responsible for something, but it could be that because of my advantages and privileges I should go ahead and take responsibility. If I see an old man fallen on some ice, I might stop and help him up and call for medical help if needed, even though I didn't personally cause the ice to be there.

Loan Sharknado.

Ben, I hope you are keeping up your debt payments because if you miss one, the boss is sending Vinnie over to adjust your kneecaps.

I don't wish to mar your bliss, but what exactly was it you appreciated?

Many do their best thinking in certain places. For some, it may be outside in an open space like a park or woods, for others, a quiet room at home, for others, a library or office. I know people who do their best thinking sitting in their car, or claim to. I would guess the general effect, indicated in OP, is that complex and dynamic environments like an urban street with crowds tend to call on the mind to direct attention outward to the immediacy of what's going on. Also, any setting perceived as unsafe. My experience is that lists are useful because, for example, modern supermarkets have 50,000 different items and it's easy to lose track of why you came in to the store in the first place. I go in because we need milk and potatoes and I come out with spinach polenta, pasta sauce, avocados, kettle chips, almonds coated with Himalayan salt, rice noodles with miso, turmeric gummies, mushroom goulash mix and....wait, why did I come in here? (If I don't have a list, I usually go to produce aisle, where anything I've forgotten is fairly visible)

So AI can now compose dull poetry. That said, the line discussions and debates that never end seems uncannily accurate! 😀

I would say more on the philosophic approach to mortality, but Seth has covered much of it quite well. I would add only that modern medicine has been a string of remarkable breakthroughs in treating conditions that either result in early mortality, or lives of suffering and reduced capacity/mobility. (it would be good to see these breakthroughs distributed more evenly throughout the human population - that would require a breakthrough in politics, I'm sure) For example, I am grateful for advances in nutrition and wellness routines that result in me suffering far less from the familial curse of joint problems than previous generations. In spite of the high noise-to-signal ratio of the Web, we have a society with access to far more information on how to stay reasonably vital and fit well into old age. Advances in holistic health have been nothing short of astonishing. (a quick thank you to those who worked out the anti-inflammatory powers of algae oil) Also advances in the replacement of failed joints, limbs, anatomical structures in the ears and eyes, and most of the internal organs. Surgery can now do amazing reconstructions on the most grievous facial disfigurements, and we are not that far from a fully functional artificial eye. People can run and do gymnastics with prosthetic limbs. Thanks to advances in blood pressure regulation, fewer people have their lives cut short by stroke and the average age for a first stroke has been pushed back a decade or more. These are all game-changers that have radically altered the experience of middle and old age for billions of people. And also the lives of young daredevils who get out there and shatter their bones and tear up internal organs on a regular basis. The most important task for a civilized planet would be to extend the fruits of these breakthroughs to the 2-3 billion people who were not fortunate enough to emerge from the right wombs and have access to modern healthcare. (this would also help reduce population growth, because people who are confident their children will live to adulthood tend to have fewer children - it's what population biologists call the demographic shift)

Interesting chat, which prompted a couple thoughts: One, an ET race that coldly calculates and affirms a high value on annihilating an entire planet of sentient beings...strikes me as very likely to be the sort of race that bombs itself back to the Amish farm level of civilization well before they make it into interstellar space. It's hard for me to see a fairly united planetary civilization evolving that would lack an ethical reluctance towards mass murder. I would think such an amoral perspective would lead more towards a planet of small balkanized states too busy feuding to be able to allocate sufficient resources to starfaring. As for "malevolence," I guess this depends on how one defines that term. Some might argue that a race that could justify such abhorrent acts as wiping out an entire sentient race, on a mathematical algorithm, would have a rather profound malevolence "baked in" to their character. And again, it's hard to see this character being one suited for longterm survival of an advanced civilization. My sense is that they would always be skating over very thin ice above a Hobbesian nightmare. (this is one reason I found the Klingons a rather improbable spacefaring race in the Star Trek franchise)

Like @studiot I've had a couple bloopers. One, as it happened, was me utterly misreading the phrasing of some innocuous post of his and reacting contentiously and stupidly. I wanted to deep six my post, but didn't even edit a correction in time. It was fortunate that someone else, @StringJunky maybe, alertly pointed out the misunderstanding. Blessed are the cheesemakers.

Good question. I don't know why we should assume B is male. Or that, another possibility, B could not be a female of reproductive age who had a child on her own using artificial insemination or IVF. As for deceased, my mother is still my mother though she is deceased. I hope the linguistic basis for this is clear: mother is a term that defines a relationship, even if it was in the past.

I don't see what can be determined about his bias solely from him being paid consulting fees (which is a common procedure when experts are brought in). Someone who offered to do it for free could also have an agenda. Arriving at conclusions like misidentification could result from the data that was available to him, and not necessarily personal bias. I will have to, as you suggest... ...before I would have any chance of discerning any special zeal on Menzel's part to debunk everything. What would be the best primary source to view all the reports? Re Dark Forest, I have doubts about that whole evaluation of probability, but maybe will address that in another thread (seems like we had one here in that topic, in the past year). As you note, the conquering or wiping out of a planetary civilization would be an enormous undertaking.

🤣 Admit I'm a little curious where there are all these forums that don't have time windows on editing or deleting. That would be a real gift to trolls.

Not that the DC sightings aren't anomalous, but inversion layers do distort ordinary celestial objects. I think "people were fooled by optical aberrations" is always a pretty strong hypothesis. (the meteor hypothesis, however, seemed weaker/ It was pulled from Scotland? Seriously, I recognize that people who are doing PR are not usually impartial and expert scientific analysts. It's worth noting that an astronomer at Harvard, Don Menzel, supported the inversion hypothesis. I respect his opinion more. And that fifties radar lacked digital filters and were prone to produce bogies from thermal inversion, birds, balloons, etc. When digital filters came in, radar reports of UFOs plummeted. Haha! One of my favorite Gary Larson drawings. I haven't followed UFO reports much in recent years, so am a little curious if data collection has improved on recent incidents.

I toss in jokes - the joy ride reference was more to popular tales of aliens playing cat and mouse with pilots, zooming around, etc and not to genuine reports of puzzling sightings. Those I do not ridicule and continue to take an interest in. Sorry if my jesting came across as ridicule. I actually spent some time in my youth researching various cases and learning some atmospheric science along the way. Ignore the dumb joke - I have a real interest in scientific anomalies and some of them can legitimately freak people out. Whatever they are, we benefit by turning on them every tool of science possible.

My analogies were not so clear or good, I'll admit. My point could be made just with the crop circles, like this: most cases have been demonstrated to be hoaxes. There is a small number where hoax wasn't proved. But this doesn't lead to "we shouldn't dismiss a possible alien origin to a few of them." We don't need to prove the negation (nor can we) to dismiss the alien theory. We just need the very robust sample we have and the very strong Inebriated Rural Men With Abundant Free Time theory. Same with the fairies. Most of the fairy sightings and photos were proven to be hoaxes, but not all. Should we then be "open" to fairies? Maybe you are saying we should? (FWIW, I am more open to the fairy hypothesis than I am to interstellar joyrides...🙂)

I lived in a college town for a few years where the sports team was called the Beavers. At that time, their main adversary team had some fans with a bumper sticker that read: Buck the Feavers. @swansont IIRC, your profile or something you posted mentions the town I refer to. We may have passed through at different times.

I'm not saying human apparitions are spirits of the deceased, I'm saying we cannot explain them and so they shouldn't be dismissed... I'm not saying tiny lights moving through the woods are fairies, I'm saying we cannot explain them and so they shouldn't be dismissed... I'm not saying humanoid reptilians that drain blood from goats are chupacabra, I'm saying we cannot explain them and so they shouldn't be dismissed... I'm not saying mysterious hieroglyphs carved in crop fields are messages from aliens, I'm saying we cannot explain them and so they shouldn't be dismissed... (Suggesting how this approach can impair one's sense of the most probable hypothesis)

I don't think one can rule out the third possibility of flaws in photo emulsion. Lens flaws would be repeated in many images, but it's quite possible for one spot in a long strip of film emulsion to be flawed. And such flaws could have a lenticular shape that looks remarkably like a physical object. That Costa Rica photo from the national geographic institute of CR survey in the 1970s, the one that looks like a hubcap or a pot lid, could just be a spot on the film. Consider this: out of a thousand film flaws, 995 might be so obviously film flaws that they are tossed and we never hear of them. So the five whose tonal variations and symmetry randomly happen to give a freakish resemblance to a flying saucer are the only ones brought to someone's attention. IOW, weird anomalies are self-selecting. (Want to thank my spouse, who has some expertise on old film processing, restoring, digitizing, for her helpful input on this)

I'd also suggest that citing one expert, Bruce Maccabee, as ruling out small objects, begs the question of how other photo analysis experts would interpret the pics. If this is like global warming, there could be thousands of experts, a vast majority, who would offer compelling reasons to reject Maccabee's analysis. I have no way to tell if Maccabee is a fringey guy on a similar footing with the GW is Myth crew. (plenty of them have PhDs, too, and serve as shining examples that credentials do not guarantee an unbiased and competent data analysis) I'm also unpersuaded of anything by sketchy reports of things falling off unidentified craft. There was a case near Omaha, when I lived in that area, of some sort of molten material dripping from a UFO that hovered near a reservoir. When recovered and analyzed, it was indistinguishable from terrestrial foundry slag. A case where both Ockham's razor and Sagan's Law seemed applicable.

I hear you on the dismissal out of hand, but my impression is that most investigators are simply evaluating evidence and sensibly applying Sagan's Law. They aren't asserting a negative, just saying burden of proof isn't met. I remain open minded, including to alternative hypotheses to the ET one, but like the old Jewish saying goes, your mind can't be so open your brain falls out on the floor. The eternal question with evidence is what is it evidence of. Especially when it's produced as evidence of something that millions of people really deeply want to believe. Desire is a big fat ol' mind-clouder.