Delta1212

That seems like a bit of a non-sequitur, since we were talking about whether industrialization was possible without coal, rather than whether urbanization was possible without industrialization.

I think you may be underestimating the types of circumstances that make intelligence really worth it. You don't need generalized intelligence to perform one specific complex task. A squirrel doesn't need to be able to understand calculus to judge the parabolic arcs involved in jumping between tree branches. You need generalized intelligence when life consistently involves a variety of complex tasks that may not be entirely consistent from one generation to the next. You won't evolve the ability to do complex problem-solving unless complex-problem solving is a survival trait. If the problem is very specific and never changes, you can develop and instinct for the solution and pass down the hard wired solution. You don't need to evolve the ability to keep working out the same answer anew every generation. Even teaching the answer is wasteful if you can just hardcore the behavior, which is entirely possible if the same type of behavior is always going to be successful. You need a changing environment with various potential food sources that require very different, and non-trivial, behaviors to obtain and with unpredictable access to any specific source of food at any given time. Then you might start seeing more generalized intelligence show up.

I'm not saying it wouldn't have been slower. I'm quite sure that fossil fuels allowed things to happen much faster than they would have otherwise. There's just a difference between slower and impossible.

I thought about that. I think the answer is: maybe. A lot of early industrialization used water power. The drawback there is that it limits the location of your machinery quite a bit. The advantage of coal is that it's (relatively) easily accessible, pretty efficient from an energy perspective and it doesn't tie you down to a being on a river. That said, there are other things we can burn besides coal, they'd just be more expensive in one way or another. And we were already monkeying around with radioactivity not long after the Industrial Revolution was kicking into high gear. Nuclear power maybe have been seen as a more viable source of power sooner. Ultimately, I think a lack of fossil fuels would result in a different course of development, possibly slower, and it would depend on the economics. It may not have happened in our world precisely when it did, and certainly not the way it did, without that cheap source of power, but that doesn't render it impossible given the right circumstances.

Ok, but flipping things around, an aquatic species building dry land on a water world makes about as much sense as humans who have never seen ice deciding to build a glacier to live on. I suppose theoretically we could. And a species that lives solely on glaciers would probably think it a good idea, and be able to come up with a whole list of things that would be much harder or impossible to do if you weren't on a glacier. But, never having seen a glacier before, being entirely unaware of any advantages that a glacier might provide in doing certain activities and being wholly unsuited to living on a glacier in any case, why would we build ourselves a glacier to inhabit? We could make far better use of the things around us doing other things than using them to build a glacier we don't see any particular need for.

How would you create dry land in the middle of the ocean, exactly? And if you'd evolved to survive solely in the water (there being no dry land when you evolved for you to have adapted to), why would you want to build dry land?

Some level of fine motor control seems like it would be necessary, but fossil fuels probably simply make things easier rather than being strictly necessary. There are other possible sources of fuel that would work in a pinch, they just either aren't quite as easy to obtain, or they aren't as efficient to use.

Chimneys... out of an underwater cave... Do you perhaps see a flaw in this plan?

What?

If for every world where you die, there is one where you don't, then for every world where you lose an eye, there is one where you don't. For every world where you lose your lover, there is one where you don't. On the whole, most worlds would probably have an average mix of positive and negative things happening to you. The longer you live, the more problems you will find in your life, true. But also the more positives that will happen. It's only to be feared if you fear life in general. Assuming it is true, which it almost certainly isn't anyway.

Given infinite space, there are infinite possible configurations, giving any one configuration, all things being equal, an infinitesimally small chance of arising. As such, even over an infinite period of time, none of the configurations have to repeat, let alone any specific one. There are an infinite number of real numbers, but the number 1 (the number, not the digit) never crops up again no matter how far down the number line you travel. In fact, every number only ever appears once. Infinity doesn't necessitate a cycle.

Yeah, that's why I'm confused.

Are you claiming this as a hypothetical abstract that you can write the math to describe if you assume a faster than light frame, or something that actually happens for speeds lower than c?

0.101001000100001000001... Infinite number of places. The string "101" occurs exactly once.

If I'm interpreting your argument correctly, you are right. There is no speed at which a rocket can travel so that it could not move any faster, regardless of how fast its exhaust is moving.

It's also important to note that you only need to push on something to start moving. Once you're under way, you'll just keep going in whatever direction you're already moving at whatever speed you're traveling at until you hit something. On Earth, most things stop after a short while because they hit the air and/or ground, and it slows them down until they're no longer moving (with respect to the Earth. In space, there's not a lot getting in your way, so you'll just keep heading off in whatever direction you're traveling in indefinitely, without needing to do anything or expend any energy unless you want to change speed or direction.

Base rain?

Yeah, you can't just add unweight odds like that. Let's say I have to flip a coin, and want to know what the probability that I will get heads is. First I have to pick which coin to flip from among four possible coins, one of which is a two-headed coin. So coin A has a 1/2 chance of giving me heads, B has a 1/2, C has a 1/2 chance and D has a probability of 1. If I add those the way you added 0 + 1/2, I would get : 1/2 + 1/2 + 1/2 + 1 = 2.5 And thus conclude that there is a 250% of my getting heads. The proper way to do it is to see that there is a 1/4 chance of picking coin A, and then a 1/2 chance of getting heads. There is therefore a 1/8 chance of getting a coin A heads. Same with coins B and C. Coin D also has a 1/4 chance of being picked, but a 100% chance of getting heads if selected, so the odds of getting a coin D heads are 1/4. That gives me 1/8 + 1/8 + 1/8 + 1/4 = 5/8 chance of getting heads, which is a little bit above 50%, or exactly what you'd expect when selecting from a group of coins that includes one double-head coin.

Assuming you mean a napkin traveling at just below the speed of light, since it cannot actually travel at the speed of light, the energies involved would be such that I'm not sure how much would be left of either napkin or wall.

And this is why I wouldn't switch anyway on principal if my company offered a better deal to keep me, because they all do it. There'd be no one to comfortably switch to to make a principaled stand. It'd be a bit like finding out my shoes were manufactured by children in a third world sweat shop and buying a different brand of shoes that were manufactured by children in a third world sweat shop in protest. Plus, they frequently give new customers deals that they absolutely could not afford to sustain over the long term because they know it's easier to retain someone you got in the first place with a seriously underpriced deal than to get someone to switch to a service with a consistently slightly better deal. Like offering three months free or free HBO. If people shopped around for the best deal at all times and switched whenever they found one, rather than only shopping around when they'd already decided to switch and then latching on to whatever the best special at that moment was, cable pricing would be different. But that's a hassle, so it's not how people shop for cable packages, and since that's not how people shop for them, anyone who tries pricing them that way is going to lose business, regardless of how many people say that's what they'd really like.

Ignoring the title and taking this sentence completely seriously: Probably. People have a tendency to kill themselves over big secrets, and governments tend to keep bug secrets. I'd be shocked if some people hadn't killed themselves over some connection to a secret being kept by the government at some point. I mean, there are historical examples across lots of different governments. They're probably generally not quite as exciting as what tends to get called to mind when someone says "a government secret that people have killed themselves over" though. People tend to kill themselves over quite boring and mundane secrets, like embezzlement and bribery.

Yes, depending on what it is you want.

Are you using a thesaurus? Because authorise really doesn't work as a synonym for "allow" in that phrase...

Well there's that, too, yes.

Why are you assuming that consciousness stands apart from the rest and isn't just another falling domino? One domino falls and pushes us to want to go to the moon, that in turn pushes us to calculate how to do it, and that domino causes the landing to be successful. We're not above it all watching the line of dominos fall and debating about whether we can really change anything about the pattern they fall in. We're standing in the line ourselves.