f13.net

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/forget-water-on-mars-astronomers-may-have-just-found-giant-alien-megastructures-orbiting-a-star-near-a6693886.html

As if I'm gonna summarize this awesomeness.

T- one week before we declare war on them.

Our declaration of war (if sent by radio waves) will take ~1500 years to reach them. Unless we are subtle about it and don't declare until our fleet of FTL warships is on their doorstep.

(https://c1.staticflickr.com/5/4094/4804019820_7c262848f6.jpg)

Dear space monsters,
We come in peace. We would like to talk to you about your oil reserves.
Earth.

Don't make the same mistake as Admiral Ozzel.

It's a rock... a weird rock that probably collided with the planet and spun off into an orbit along with the debris. Nice to let the imagination run wild though.

Star Citizen is going to be used to train our future generation of starship pilots who will pilot the ships by remote.

Well, that was the plan at least.

BEAT ME TO IT

(http://www.wearysloth.com/Gallery/ActorsC/3387.gif)

(https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/1739972/web-images/i-dont-want-to-say-its-the-aliens-but-its-the-aliens.jpg)

Double Apostrophe for the lose.

It's a carefully hidden complex alien structure.

Well, this is certainly interesting.  :-)


One should point out though that the research paper  (http://arxiv.org/pdf/1509.03622v1.pdf)this article was based on never mentions aliens. On the contrary, right in the abstract it states:

What's more believable? :oh_i_see:

I think you mean "What will sell more papers?"

Here's a tip to the general public from a scientist: If you see something in the news about a scientific discovery, it's probably inaccurate, over-dramatized, or both.

Hey, I am fantastic at parties!

 :headscratch:

It's Alien Grammatics.

We need a double apostrophe alien snake.
(http://resources3.news.com.au/images/2011/07/14/1226094/827067-two-headed-snake.jpg)

From what I have read this hypothesis has already been disproven.  The IR Readings show no amplification that is seen when looking at space dust, asteroid collisions or collisions from huge bodies.  Part of the reason this is so exciting is that the readings are also consistent with what would be expected from a dyson sphere. 

How great was our investment in Kepler?  I wonder if Dr. Seth Shostak has repositioned SETI's dishes yet.

Well, a partially constructed Dyson sphere, or some other stellar-scale construction in the liquid water zone. The official publications are very cautious, just laying out the natural cause explanations they have excluded. The fact that the evidence is consistent with certain unnatural explanations they don't even get near. If it is, they'll still be famous, if it isn't they won't join the Cold Fusion guys in the doghouse.

--Dave

So that vacuum cleaner dude was an alien? That makes a lot more sense now.

Great point on the dyson sphere, however wouldn't that be exactly what we expected in a sphere that was being constructed?  We wouldn't expect the entire sphere to be built immediately.  I think these guys will be treated a lot better then Stanley Pons and Martin Fleischmann.  The reason why is that the data appears to be beyond approach and unlike the cold fusion episode, many people have looked at this and we have gotten the confirmation. Even if its not a dyson sphere this is something incredibly unique and something we haven't really seen before.

This might actually be the most important scientific find of our life time.  We need to get another kepler up there, like yesterday.

Well, the point is that we wouldn't be able to detect a completed Dyson sphere at this point, it would be radiating in the infrared, well above background but not something we would notice to train the kind of instruments on that would actually see it. There are significant issues with trying to actually construct a full sphere (there does not appear to be enough metals in the solar system to build one by an order or two of magnitude, for example, even if we could strip down the gas giants and hoover up every floating rock), you need mass transmutation, interstellar rock hunting, or a ridiculously metal-rich system. It's unlikely that any species that could build a sphere would *need* one, they'd probably have easier ways of generating stellar-scale energy than gift-wrapping an entire sun.

But you could easily imagine a mature civilization above 1 on the Kardashev scale (IOW, using more than just it's own planet's energy output) that would be flying huge solar arrays (and smaller scale habitats, although 'smaller' in this sense means only planetary-scale), and those could look a lot like this.

It's all speculation, but once you drill through the extremely careful language, you can tell that a lot of the scientists involved are *really* hopeful this is going to turn out to be more than just a new form of natural stellar process.

--Dave

Personally, I think this is all a trick by the Starflyer.  I ain't going.

A literal Dyson Sphere would be physically impossible. It would collapse into the star as only the equatorial band would be travelling at orbital speed and no physically plausible structural material would be capable of supporting an object of that size. Dyson himself only discussed a band of disconnected satellites.

The solar wind would need a place to go, as well.

But... but... there was a Dyson Sphere in an ep of Star Trek TNG!!

AND IT HAD SCOTTY IN IT!!

A ringworld seems far more plausible and achievable than a Dyson sphere. Even if some kind of anti-gravity exists and was figured out, could it really somehow require less power than what you gain from the solar radiation you're capturing?  And I haven't done the math, but I'm not even sure there is enough matter in a solar system for a ringworld. That requires solid materials, not gasses, and I seem to vaguely recall Niven's Ringworld was something like a million earths in (inner) surface area.  That would require a lot of rocks, and gas giant material isn't really going to work!

But yeah, I have serious doubts it's aliens, like infinitesimally shy of positive, but the radio telescopes should be able to confirm/eliminate that pretty quickly.  But the universe is such a vast place in both space and time, and the collection of conditions and events that would seem to be required to produce intelligent life are so astronomically unlikely, that I really suspect humanity will never find even evidence of another intelligent species, much less make contact with it.  And if I'm wrong about the odds I really doubt such a discovery will go well for us, and I suspect actual contact would almost have to end up in an existential struggle to eliminate each other. Insatiable greed, selfish ambition, intolerance of the Other, paranoia, mistrust, and a ruthless compulsion to eliminate, dominate or absolutely control anything that might be a threat to us (or even just exploitable to our advantage) seem to be the survival attributes which have propelled us from a few thousand or tens of thousands of animals on the verge of extinction into the dominant species on our planet.

What amazes me is just how much information we are able to learn about places hundreds or thousands of light years away using optical telescopes gathering just a fantastically small number of photons. Planets and atmospheres even, it's amazing. Far from the science fiction visions of just 20 years ago where humanity would send out scout ships into the vast unknown where the only information we had was the age and class of star we were aiming at, it seems more likely that by the time we send the first scout ship to another star, we will already know about all of its planets of any size, their size, gravity, atmospheres, density, possibly even outer composition, temperature range, and whether or not there is carbon-based life on them. But we will have almost no clue what if anything lies between those two islands of light, our sun and the destination star, and amazingly we may actually have a more accurate catalog of all the outer bodies of the far system than we do of our own, even then!

Sadly this universe is such an incredibly deadly place and humans are so fragile and limited to such a narrow protected range of conditions, I suspect that we humans will never actually make it out of our solar system, and only our machine children will be able to survive to get out there to explore the wonders of the great beyond.

Well dyson spheres are possible so long as you don't require it to be a single connected structure(and you had enough stuff). All it really is is a set of rings, which would be series of satellites orbiting on the same orbital path, all orbiting on different orbital paths. You could probably set up enough orbiting satellites that the resulting structure would be more or less indistinguishable from a sphere. But really the bands would be at different distances and not interacting.

The paper states that its most viable explanation is in and of itself highly implausible (the comet fragment theory).  That's the whole reason the alien theory came to pass, once the paper was examined by other parties.  There is an element of "well, we dont really have a good explanation at all... so may as well toss in the artificially created theory."

A 20% reduction in brightness of a star 1.5 solar masses is a fucking HUGE quantity.  Chalking that up to a sudden breakup is foolish.  Realize, there is next to NOTHING in the data that supports the timeframes needed to produce this particular observation.  Basically, in order for those fragments to be there in the shape and configuration they're in, there would need to be a recent indicator.  There is not.

It could be huge planetary collisions, but the timing is absolutely impecable if they've observed it.  Statistically, it's about as improbable as finding aliens.
Point is, Optical SETI has and does need more funding.  Maybe this will help.

As for radiofrequencies?  Realize, any signal from there will be heavily encoded (just like ours are) and garbled by the distance.  Basically, they'd have to be purposely sending out an easily analyzed signal for us to see it.  The default situation of "listening" to an alien civ is next to impossible with our current state of signal processing.  That said, a LOT of work is being done to improve the odds...  though, it's not work that's easily funded nor sees a lot of people undertake.

Therein lies the rub.  Again, not enough people doing this work.  Not enough money spent on it.  Potentially, the most important find in human history and we spend more on complete nonsense here than we do general SETI research.

Look, I love them shooting around every idea they can think of. The media is just being dumb when they say, "Here's a finding". We have to figure out how to report on hypotheses and possibilities in the right way.

I agree, but you do realize that in order to have a completely factual, informative, rational and unbiased debate/discussion on ANYTHING it would require removing not only the media from the process, but all funding parties, people standing to gain or lose prestige, money or work based on the results as well as other special interests, and probably all humans.  So, again, not likely for humanity, but something our machine children may someday achieve.  :awesome_for_real:

That's because so far all of it has been a massive waste of resources.  We have MAYBE one signal from back in the seventies which has never been repeated.  No new tech, no new theories, no other discoveries or anything (except a few odd stellar phenomena like pulsars maybe which might not have been studied as intently).  You could have put all of that money towards determining the color of God's underwear and we'd have basically the same world today.

It's unlikely this time is any different. (http://www.forbes.com/sites/ethansiegel/2015/10/16/bizarre-star-kic-8462852-an-alien-paradise-or-a-catastrophic-wasteland/) And what exactly we SHOULD (or can) do if it were aliens is not an easy question to answer, either.

Massive waste of resources?  Don't be daft.  The signal processing and data-wrangling advances alone have been worth the effort.  This is the way science works.  Most times, you take a mundane if not completely useless proposal and turn it into something worthwhile, yet less glamorous.  That's just the way it works.

Realize, Kepler itself barely happened and was minimally engineered.  People thought it was silly also.  Now it's up there with Hubble as being one of the most productive scientific instruments ever built by man. 

There are some spin-off benefits to doing any science, sure.  But I have strong doubts that funding the search for extra terrestrial life was more beneficial to the field of signal processing than funding research in to signal processing itself would have been.

I want it to be aliens for a completely non-science related reason.

I want to watch religion implode on itself.

That'd be a good one.

But until we saw they weren't human religion would simply explain that those are other Humans, separated from us for "reasons."

Or simply that, "Man was chosen to be superior. Those Godless aliens weren't chosen and God doesn't love them like he does us. That's why they're not here on Earth which is awesome."

Like aliens would make that happen.  People are so invested in their belief in sky cake that NOTHING will change their beliefs ever.

The problem with both of your responses is you're applying this sort of down-home-country-bred-tornado-baked trailer trash argument to religion.

Aliens flies in the face of creation myth. While Cletus may still believe in skygod, aliens would signal the end of human-focused religion though it may take a bit of time.

Yeah... that's it.  :uhrr:

 :why_so_serious:

Sure thing, city-boy. Once again your steely-eyed clarity of thought has seen through things rather than made you a condescending dick about something he doesn't deal with.

Science flies in the face of the creation myth. What do we have? People who legitimately believe that fossils are tools of Satan or that the Flintstones was a documentary. The goddamn Creation Museum is a thing. People don't just go there as a lark, they go their out of absolute belief that it's true.

Little green men won't change that belief system at all. Create some more offshoots? Sure. It won't, however, make a human-centric view go away at all. Minimize it? Perhaps, but not until there's actual aliens on this planet.

The mistake every sci-fi movie has ever made is believing that enough evidence would do away with religion. It's as likely as praying away the gays.

It stands to reason within our lifetime or our kid's lifetimes, we'll get the answer as to which one of us is right. But to think that aliens wouldn't pave the way for putting a fork in modern religion is shortsightedness at best.

Religion over the last 40 years has been praying away itself. Hell, we can see it in presidential polls. There was a time when absolutely no one would vote for an atheist, and now we're seeing greater-than-majority penetration (58% I believe the last one was).

Besides, once organized religion is the minority there are other less peaceful solutions to dropping that baby on its head. (this is as reasonable a comment as your sci-fi movie example -_-)

Rather well-to-do and funded phDs have already theorized that within 50yrs the predominant faith will be non-denominational.  People do not really go to church/temple anymore... they're bleeding members exponentially faster than history has at any point. 

Aliens would just speed up the inevitable process.

You will be disappointed. The Jesuits run half of the worlds observatories and they (and the wider Catholic Church) have been operating under the assumption that Extraterrestrial Aliens exist for decades. The fundies might lose their shit but no-one else will blink.

http://m.christianpost.com/news/vatican-astronomer-says-alien-life-will-be-discovered-but-will-not-prove-or-disprove-god-126813/

Pope Francis mentioned Alien lifeforms in one of his sermons in may 2014 http://m.christianpost.com/news/pope-francis-talks-about-aliens-says-he-would-welcome-martians-to-receive-baptism-119630/

Hell St Augustine was writing that Genesis was an allegory for events that humans cant understand back in the 4th century. The Idea that the Bible is Symbolic is not a new idea at all.

So it wont destroy Religion, or at least not Catholicism. Sorry.

What damage could aliens do that dinosaurs haven't done already?

Laser damage. Unless you have Tyrannosaurus with frigging laser beams.

This is very funny and makes me consider reading more of your posts.

[ ] Not rekt
[ ] Rekt

• Tyrannosaurus Rekt

It doesn't change my opinion because it's kinda a space joke and Sir T, if anything, is a space man.

Let's not get carried away now.

 :ye_gods: You better see a doc about that concussion  :ye_gods:

The moment has passed.

You can't crush blind faith.  The final argument, when all else fails, is that the scientific record (carbon dating, etc...) that predates man was just created to look that way - either as a test of faith, as a trick of the Devil, or whatever.  God works in mysterious ways...?  After all, there is so much evidence that contradicts the basis of most religions now - why would a bit more make a difference?

SETI processes already collected data. They didn't build telescopes or even point them (I think they run maybe one or two arrays, one of which they closed). Radio telescopes generate really, really, really useful data. SETI just does a ton of mathematical processing in certain areas, looking for certain things. I think they've occasionally produced some hardware add to existing telescopes, which collected data wherever the owners of said telescope pointed.

Their biggest investment in the last few decades was setting up distributed computing systems (SETI@home) but again, their funding is ridiculously tiny overall (and the success of their distributed computing system led to stuff like BOINC) and literally 99.9% of what they do is doing math to someone else's data. (Which itself is fairly useful, as it can identify stuff that isn't aliens too).

SETI's basically funded by donations (it's last government support was ended in 1993, and was something like 0.1% of NASA's budget), and now runs on a budget of about 2.5 million a year. Not exactly a "lot of money", insofar as it's about half the cost of a Predator drone.

Worthless link deleted. - schild

I admit my ignorance here.  What kind of data are we expecting SETI to come up with?   It was my understanding of SETI that it was built to look for signals in radio waves.   I have been thinking about this in light of the news that Seth Shostack has aligned the Allen array towards the star in question.  The more I think about it, it seems to be to be a bit of a stretch to expect that a civilization 1482 years ahead of us and a potentially type two or three civilization would be sending information via radio waves.   So I ask because I do admit my own ignorance on this subject, how is it very useful exactly especially if they don't use radio waves to transmit data.

If we ever discover aliens, modern christian churches would just see it as another tribe of godless aboriginals in need of converting.

Stars generate radio waves. So do black holes, pulsars, galaxies....heck, it's how they discovered the CMB in the first place. It's just part of the EM spectrum (a rather big part, actually). They do all sorts of nifty tricks with it, and get really good resolutions and have discovered all sorts of interesting stuff. They do everything from measuring the sun to studying star formation with the things.

"Oh hey, an alien civilization might be leaking radio waves" is just a "Eh, maybe." It's not any more work to collect it, the work is all in the statistical analysis to dig it out of the data. (Which generally does discover other things, as it turns out most weird signals ARE something. Like we discovered the first pulsar because a radio telescope found a very clear, repeating pattern in the radio spectrum).

Telescopes all do the same thing -- they gather chunks of the EM spectrum and study it. Some stuff's easier than others through atmosphere. "Radio telescope" does not generally study the ham radio bands, for instance. :)

This thing here? They're thinking it's not big chunks of rock and debris because it's not radiating enough infrared -- there should be scatter that's not there.

So all those radio telescopes are out there gathering data on stars, galaxies, pulsars, a million things. SETI, by and large, just grabs chunks of data in a few bands they considered likely areas to find intelligent life cluttering it up, and analyze that. And the array they run does the same sorts of things -- whatever they're studying, they tend to share the data with anyone else studying that particular chunk of sky.

What they're listening for is purposeful transmissions that say "Hai guys!"  That's the only way they will find anything with radio-SETI.  It's really a fool's errand that plies hope on an alien species purposely transmitting at those frequencies in a particular way.  All other "ambient" alien transmissions will show up as noise.  

This is part of the reason Kepler was devised in the first place.  Scour closer to optical wavelengths and learn to look for anomalies.

Now, the tech. at the VLA may be different than what the ATA is doing.  As said, the key is how the data is parsed and crunched... maybe they have a better algorithm, who knows.  I do know, whoever learns how to pick sense out of the cosmic background to the point of actually being able to "listen" to planets is an instant Nobel laureate.

Sidenote:  SETI is also a small reason why gravity waves are so en vogue right now.  If you can see them, then that means just maybe cultures are using it for comms.  It's way easier to deal with a gravity signal, assuming you can see it in the first place.  e.g. the tougher the signal is to produce, the easier it is to pick up (if you have the tech.)

edit: I'm not a believer in Fermi's Paradox for the simple reason that it's more likely the Universe is a complete maelstrom of EM transmissions from countless intelligent species.  It's not a paradox, because the more noise in the 'verse there is, the more it seems like we're alone.  If there was one single hyper-intelligent species purposely transmitting in a sea of silence... we'd have found them by now.

One of the real problems for SETI is that the more advanced we get, the quieter we get. Even if we had colonies all over the solar system, we'd be aiming narrow signals not shouting across the sky.

And assuming someone can figure out how to cheat Einstein and make workable FTL, then it's certainly quicker to send messages via Pony Express (or, if possible, beamed through whatever FTL cheat) which means we couldn't hear it unless we learned how to cheat ourselves.

There's probably, assuming we're representative of the tech curve, maybe a hundred years or so where a planet radiates enough noise to be picked up even a couple hundred LY away. After that, we tamp down.

Now Dyson collectors, well -- that's something that might actually be built. Just tons and tons of big honking solar collectors. Doesn't need unobtanium to build, either. Just a lot of mass and a self-replicating factory.

Dr. Seth Shostack of SETI did an interview on the 26th, and he indicated that what they are looking for is noise above the normal background  with the Allen Array.  He is also using an array in Peru to look for pulsing light.  He said he should have data up for analysis in 11 days (11/7/15).

NASA thinks it's comets, apparently

http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.php?feature=4777

That's a crap explanation.  Boring.

Comets.   Blocked 20% of the light?  There's some missing data somewhere in that explanation.  I don't feel like parsing through it to find out though.

At least they didn't blame it on swamp gas.   :why_so_serious:

Big-ass swarm of comets? Perfect angle? Probably something like that.  A Van Neumann swarm would be awesome, but incredibly terrifying given how close it is...

Eggs. Its a hatchery.

Spawn more Overlords.

Daleks...

We require moar pylons.

A Von Neumann swarm wouldn't be terrifying if it was at alpha centauri . It wouldn't get here in a million years and we would be able to see it coming long before it even got there.

Depends on propulsion. It's not like they need to waste mass on life-support. Ion drives? Solar sails?

Self-replicating little bastards wouldn't travel as a swarm. They'd disperse like dandelion seeds from whatever system they were in.  Laser propulsion or electromagnetic launches (or both) and really all they'd need is to slow down on the other end.

The terrifying part is simple once they got here -- what on earth would we be able to do about it?

Geometric progression is a bitch, and the Oort cloud is...very large.

Yeah, um, if an advanced alien species showed up and wanted us dead frankly it wouldn't matter if they were self replicating robots or gelatinous cubes, we wouldn't last 10 minutes.  This does not really top my list of conerns.

Stuff at a certain scale simply doesn't matter because there is nothing we can do and I think will ever be able to do about it.

If someone tomorrow said, "In two hundred thousand years, our solar system will pass through a region of galactic space that will flood the entire solar system with deadly radiation", I'd say "Fine, that's the end for us, who cares, because even in 200,000 years there's nothing to be done about it. Elon Musk-level wankery about how we have to all live on Mars now!!!! because survival is stupid. It isn't the world that people like Musk are making. If they want to make collective decisions, build better systems for that first. If they want to be some fantasy ultrabillionaire from a fantasy novel who finances star colonization, build a dumb MMO, write a novel, something like that, because that's the only way to make that into something. You could give human beings a hundred millennium headstart on solving a world-ended problem and they'd get started on it in millennium 99.9.

Von Neumann probes aren't that hard to do. It's a pretty good proof of the Great Filter that our solar system hasn't been disassembled.

I'm seriously hoping it's behind us, but given the fact that it's becoming clear that Earth is the first planet we're going to have to deliberately terraform, we've got at least one big one barreling towards us.

Doesn't matter. Constant acceleration relative to us requires increasing thrust. Its impossible to carry enough fuel in order to achieve reasonable constant acceleration in order to make the distance. Solar sails do not provide nearly enough thrust and lose thrust as you get further away from a star.

Then, once they're in the OORT cloud they have to move between the asteroids, which we can minimize due to geometric progression but still takes a long time. Considering the 1g constant acceleration time to get to the earth from the oort cloud is about 2 years the doubling time in the cloud would be measured in years. Lets call it 1 year to consume the first million kilograms of the cloud. It would take 64 doubling periods to consume the cloud.[cloud is 3 x 10^25 kg, but lets call it 2x 10^25 for nice round numbers -> 1m kg is 10^6 so 2^n= 2 x 10^19 -> 2^n-1 = 10^19 -> n = 19 ln10/ln 2 + 1 = 64.11]

So if a Von Neuman swarm launched from Alpha Centauri right now at the absolutely ridiculous speed of 1g constant acceleration we all would almost certainly be dead by the time it reached earth.

And these are absolutely ridiculous numbers. The reason that Von Neumann's can consume galaxies is because the time scale relative to the universe is huge. Because if it takes 1 million years to consume a star system it takes 33 million years to consume the largest estimate of the Milky way which is 1/418th the age of the universe and that is enough doubling periods to consume a hilarious amount of galaxies. Indeed that number would be 6 x 10^125 galaxies and as known universe is estimated to be about 10^11 galaxies this would mean that at a 1 million year consumption time for a star system a swarm could have destroyed the known universe so many times over that the number isn't even comprehensible.

But of course at the same time, if we saw this swarm at Alpha Centauri that swarm would still be 1 million years away from consuming it and branching out, because that is how long it takes the swarm to move on. And/or if we saw the swarm here, in our oort cloud it would still take it a good deal of time to get to earth because it would consume the last half of the galaxy [assuming we are on the interior half by consumed mass] only in the last[inter system] doubling period which would put thousands of years between us and destruction at the minimum.

Am I the only one who doesn't understand a god-fucking thing written in the last ten posts?

What, this is stuff you learn in 6th grade. (or in Kerbel Space Program)

You are not the only one.

I went to public school. We were lucky to learn the color wheel by 6th grade.

Definitely had to Google a lot of it, but it's been interesting reading.

The sad thing is, if there ever is a Von Neumann Cloud in this universe, it will probably be created by us humans.  And probably not even accidentally, it will be by some twit who actually knows what they can do and thinks, for the short term at least, that it's a good idea! Go team!

Considering how long it takes such a structure to actually destroy a star system/galaxy (especially if designed as a probe) i can't really forsee a discounting rate which doesn't suggest that its an OK idea.

I mean think about saying "you do something now and get some benefit out of it but in a million years the human race might be destroyed as a result of your action" and then you figure say, .1% discounting. In 1 million years the amount of loss you would have to sustain to make up for the benefit would have to be hilariously massive (basically for every 1 unit of "benefit" now you would have to have 8 x 10^435 units of "loss" in 1 million years)

This is why I don't get along well with economists.

Who the hell is thinking discount rates over a million years? Nobody. When they come up with drones that can 3D print fully autonomous copies of themselves from whatever matter is on hand, it's either going to be to strip mine an asteroid without all the cost of getting there, or to fight a war without sending any people. Neither scenario really requires any sort of mandate that says "let's restrain the number of copies to, say, 10."

That's not the thing I'm worry about though. You can still reproduce bullets much faster than the things that fire them. And a self-replicating drone swarm you can at least see.

Nah, it's the grey goo scenario that I wonder about.

None of this in my lifetime though, nor any amount of descendents I care to calculate.

I think grey goo runs up against some pretty interesting physical limits. Power, for one. It's gotta have power. Where's it coming from?

Materials. I mean self-replicators are cool, but you have to actually make sure you're replicating with similar materials. It does no good to replicate something in plastic if it requires the strength and melting points of steel to work.

I mean we HAVE a pink goo situation here -- it's called "life" and it is everywhere, but it hasn't eaten the planet and it's had billions of years. It's a pretty voracious self-replicator with a real knack for adaptivity.

When economists talk about any sort of decision that happens over time we tend to lean towards discount rates since we want to be able to model the situation mathematically even if the decision may not actually occur in that manner. Such we tend to have to also accept some tenets of how the human mind works, one of which is that there is a time preference for earlier as opposed to later. Once we have that time preference we have discount rates in the math.

The point wasn't that people are going to be doing the math to figure things out but that the internal calculus for "impending doom a million years from now" has a hard time being weighted highly, given that humans have a preference for the present. Even amazingly small amounts of preference yield the idea that very few people should care about that far in the future.

Aaaaaaand the thread gets worse. :oh_i_see:

But what is the exact equation to measure the speed at which it gets worst?

(Speed of an African Swallow * Warp 9)/.5 past Lightspeed

I'd argue for green goo rather than pink.

That's where all the carbon in our atmosphere went, for example. By volume,  Venus has exactly as much nitrogen in its atmosphere as we do, but it's 3.5% of her atmosphere and 70% of hers. Carbon dioxide, on the other hand, is 96% of Venus' atmosphere and .0004% of ours.  All the earth's limestone and marble, for example, was once the shells of diatoms, but it was a relatively late development. Most of the minerals on the surface of the earth depended upon atmospheric oxygen for their creation, and life has been the primary source of that for billions of years. Not to mention organic chemistry.

In many places it's hard to see all the oxygen and silicon that makes up the crust because there's such a verdant layer of  of carbon compounds on top of it. Of the top twenty elements present in the crust only six (silicon, aluminum, titanium, barium, zirconium, and tungsten) aren't part of human biochemistry.

Like you say, the big limit is power. Most biomass won't work without access to the sun, and most of the rest eats things that can't work without access to the sun.

meanwhile, back in the solar system, pluto looks like popcorn and ceres has the salt!

Meh. You've seen one hegemonizing swarm, you've seen 'em all...

well, there really can only be one, right?

Eh, the universe is a big place and the speed of light is relatively slow...

Goumindong's posts here are extremely interesting.

The economy of the universe.
Speaking of which, how goes Eve?

There was some drama between us and Goons , but it ended exceptionally well: we're in Pandemic Legion and we successfully passed our trial period this week so we're having fun.

Despite my best efforts.

Nah, because like acid rain or plastic ocean waste or petroleum or whatever would be toxic and then BAM TRUMPED

Probably not aliens. Probably. (http://physics.aps.org/articles/v9/150)

Another hypothesis, also not involving aliens:

https://qz.com/884106/tabbys-star-alien-megastructures-and-planet-gobbling-a-strange-new-theory-may-finally-solve-the-mystery-of-an-alien-megastructure-that-has-confounded-scientists-for-months/

So, what's left over after the Vogon Constructor Fleet comes through?

Gah-Lak-Tus