Phi for All

! Moderator Note Just a reminder that if you want to post a video, you need to communicate with the membership about what parts are relevant. Expecting anyone to watch several minutes of video with no input from the poster is unrealistic, and also against our rules. Members should be able to participate without going offsite or watching videos. This is a discussion forum.

No. What swansont was saying is that Star Trek warp drive isn't a viable concept. He's a physicist with the US Naval Observatory, and iirc, he's consulted on Star Trek scripts in the past, so when he says nobody understands it, it's because it's completely made up and non-physical.

You get a link, Count Sensei. I can send it 500 times, if you like.

Send me a dollar and I'll send you a copy of How To Get $1 From Everyone On The Planet. Counting cards gives you better odds than the lottery. What are you implying here? I know Jeff is single...

Imagine how often you could play the lottery!

Not sure why, but this made me think that it might be easier to confuse us than we suspect. Imagine a technology that worked in an extremely non-intuitive way, like the use of perfluorochemical liquids in deep sea diving. You want me to inhale LIQUID?!?! What if the technology involved required you to lean forward when you want to stop, or step into thin air over a great height, or something else that seem antithetical to what we're trying to achieve?

Our species would have overrun the planet by now if we didn't die off. Building in our own obsolescence also helps the species evolve more vibrantly. This assumes two things. One, that this god wanted species from one system to interact with those from others. Perhaps it prefers keeping its lab samples separated? And two, you assume this wasn't a challenge we're supposed to overcome with our big old brains. Perhaps this god subscribes to the throw-them-in-the-deep-end school of thought? Because after all, don't the folks who overcome the biggest challenges deserve the biggest rewards? Maybe this god wants to weed out the ones who are just going to whine about obstacles.

I can't help but see it as anything but a relative relationship. Clarke, in his reference, made sure to include the words "sufficiently advanced". It implies that the technology is always incomprehensible to the humans you're referencing. Cavemen had no concept of a human voice coming out of anything but a human, so a smartphone would seem supernaturally powerful (magic?). But by the same token, there could be technology based on awful smells, or pain, or simply a vastly better grasp of gravity that we have no basis to suspect as such, and would therefore seem supernaturally powerful to even us. Put it this way, if a human is flying without wings or a plane, and we can't detect any implants or known physical reasons why it's happening, and all our tests show us this human is flying despite the predictions of our best theories, we would still believe (perhaps) that there was a natural explanation, but until we find a better way to test this ability, we'd have to call it supernatural.

Could you point to some supportive evidence that our intelligence has reached a point where we can't trust this platitude of Clarke's? What is it about us that makes us less able to wonder at things we can't figure out? I'm a big fan of our high intelligence, but I also recognize the limitations of not-knowing, and how our ignorance can leave us with nothing on which to base an analysis. I think you're making the mistake of thinking intelligence gives us more protection from a lack of knowledge than it really does. Mostly I think you're taking a personal view of something that was meant as an observation about humanity in general. Do you know how many people believe in the supernatural in the world today?

While I can appreciate your appreciation of our intelligence and imagination, I have to agree with Strange.

Well, no. Facts aren't wrong, by definition. It's Truth that is subjective, and seems to change between peoples, cultures, and other arbitrary groups. That's why I say truth isn't what you should be looking for, even though so many people put such store in it. Truth has too much emotion attached to it for it to be very useful in describing the natural world. Here's a fact for you. The Big Bang Theory doesn't leave any questions about what happened before, because the model for it doesn't start until slightly after inflation began. It's not a creation theory. It's a theory about the development and evolution of the universe from a previous extremely hot and dense state. Also, I'm fairly certain you don't know what it means to "lack the mathematics of how it always existed". How can we know anything about what happened BEFORE the universe was in such a hot, dense state? If you crushed the Empire State Building down to the size of a pea, how would you go about figuring out what it was before it was made so small and dense and hot? I think you're wrong also about the Truth keeping us searching. Think about it. What do you do when you think you've found an answer to something? You stop looking. That's why theory is more powerful, because we always refine and update our theories to be the best current explanations. I think you have a very emotional, romantic view of the Truth, and it's clouding your reason.

Salud, amor, y pesetas, y el tiempo para gastarlos.

Seems pretty clear then. DrP should go as Mike Pence. Scary.

Court them, then. "Exercise a little more care to retain the interest and participation of those individuals." Our judgement is being called into question about this, and our quality over quantity policy needs to be reexamined, it seems. The point seems to be that some of the membership is more interested in our decision-making process than we previously thought, and wants us to treat all ideas as viable for discussion. Personally, I think it makes us look terrible when our home page is full of nutter garbage, and I doubt seriously that courting crackpots helps us attract more desirable scientific sorts. But it seems important that everybody gets a chance to put in their two cents when someone like Ilige posts an off-the-wall idea, more important than our wish to keep conversations meaningful. I promise to be more careful in applying the rules to those who break them the way Ilige did.

The poster the thread was started for. The one who didn't want to give details on his idea.

You absolutely need to make a costume for this year. I suggest you put on Harry Potter glasses (do the lightning scar too), devil horns, carry a broom, and wear cloven-hoof boots. Go as Blasphemy!

I'm willing to exercise a little more care so we can keep more posters like Ilige, if that's what the membership wants. I think it's a fairly masochistic request. Obviously it means a great deal more than I imagined that we increase the membership by courting this type of poster.

This is where a formal education in science would help a great deal. Without a firm knowledge foundation, we humans tend to make things up so the patterns feel right. As soon as you start guessing, and then basing more ideas off the guesswork, you're filling in your ignorance with junk that makes PERFECT sense to you (because you made it up using limited resources rather than learning from mainstream science). Gaps in our knowledge should be filled in with trustworthy information. As others have mentioned, learning science from YouTube is pretty sketchy. It's as hit and miss as many popular science articles, where sensational concepts are exaggerated to gain readership rather than educate. If you knew mainstream science a little better, you wouldn't be spending ANY time on overunity devices and buckets of energy. The problem is you're obviously smart, and curious, and capable, but lack special knowledge that would focus your efforts. Without a path, you're floating on this weird stream of consciousness that will always agree with you, always tell you you're right, and always make perfect sense, but only to you. Does THAT make sense?

It's always existed.

This isn't even something a person could be skeptical about. What people usually define as miraculous isn't testable or repeatable ("God cured my aunt's cancer"), or it can be easily explained by natural means ("My toast has the face of Jesus"). Miracles are inherently supernatural, so science can't even consider them phenomena. Something else is ALWAYS at work, something natural and explainable. And btw, any time you find yourself saying "without any doubt", you probably aren't doing science.

For the same reason a Humanist might prefer to focus on humanity rather than invest in religious guesswork. Since nobody has ever successfully uncovered "the Truth" (as well as too many conflicting Truths everywhere), it might be more rational to focus on facts instead, and rely on the constant advancement of theory as the best currently available explanations for various phenomena.

The biggest problem with your answer, besides being observably false in multiple instances, is that you made it up to fill the gaps in your knowledge, your ignorance, if you will. We're all ignorant about a LOT, but hopefully we fill those gaps with trustworthy information. What you've done here is to cherry-pick things you think you understand to fill the gaps in what you don't. The result is you have an answer that makes absolute PERFECT sense only to you, because you designed the answer to fit your level of knowledge, rather than actually learn what many others have formally observed. It's caused you to join a science forum with the idea of teaching others, that's how strong and misleading this type of guesswork can be. You've become convinced that everybody else has it wrong, except you. I sincerely hope you'll do some formal study in physics, maybe through Khan Academy or something. Stop studying popular science as if it's a textbook. It's rotting your brain.

The last half of that sentence shows why the first half is false. Truth is too subjective, even though it's supposed to be the ultimate in objectivity. Forget truth. Science is looking for the best supported current explanations, and is constantly being challenged. Truths tend to be treated as sacred, and aren't questioned much.

But there was no mention of anybody else. There was only the mention of years spent studying, and several elementary physics mistakes which made it obvious it was self-study. It's a LOT more difficult to undo when someone has been washing their own brain. I understand and agree that we should try to help where possible. But I also think you're being overly rigid in your defense of principles that need more context in their application. It's caused you to go on the warpath against the staff riding a very high horse.

I'm disappointed that you don't seem to trust the staff to treat with the membership in the context of their behavior and subject matter. You seem to want a blanket policy about something that requires more nuance and flexibility. If someone has spent 13 years trolling sites like this pushing guesswork they made up because they can't be bothered to actually study, do you really think they're listening to people correcting them? I don't think so, but apparently my judgement is in question. It would be great if folks like that bothered to listen, but they're too busy trying to get others to listen to their mistakes. I have to say, I normally don't mind these "Why are the mods so X?" threads, but this one is starting to be pretty insulting.