Big questions, stretching the imagination and no answers

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I always think the other way, what if an electron is a planet, and on one electron somewhere their is life. Like ours but on a completely different scale.
 
They made a documentary about it, in 2000. Extraordinarily complex creatures, quite human-like.
 
It would be a pretty small planet but then it may have some very small life on it. Looks like selector is confessing to drug abuse in his youth, and could be of the right age as he lives in one of the reapers waiting rooms on the south coast !
 
“for all we know there could be funny little green men working in sheds with wood that we have never heard of“

If there are little green men in sheds on another planet, I reckon they all agree on how to sharpen their tools ;)
 
But there are proofs in math!! working through them let me know that I would stop my math degree after bachelor of science and leave the proofs to the people who could do them 4 times as fast as I could.
As far as I think I understand it... There are indeed proofs in maths. But tripping point comes in applying the maths to the physical world. At this point maths serves to become a useful algorithm for predicting and mapping physical phenomena. Newtonian maths was sufficient and coherent until Einstein and relativity came along. Einstein didn't say Newtonian maths was internally incorrect, but just that it wasn't a sufficiently detailed description of the physical world. Where, other than in the human brain (and its supporting systems of books and computers) does maths actually exist. It's a construct, a useful tool, nothing more.
 
On the subject of aliens, Iain M Banks suggested that to spot an alien, the best place to be is on Earth, during an eclipse. The fact that the sun and moon are virtually the same size as viewed from earth is incredibly unusual cosmologically, so there should be lots of exotourists coming to gawp at the rare sight. Next time you are watching a total eclipse, look at the people next to you rather than at the sky.

I bloody knew my neighbour was weird!
 
If there are little green men in sheds on another planet, I reckon they all agree on how to sharpen their tools
That is a human assumption that we are really clever but is it not possible that the little green men have vastly superior tools that never need sharpening.
 
The galaxy is about 13bn years old. 13,000,000,000 years!

Only in the last few decades have we got remotely close to understanding how physics, chemistry and the universe works. We may anyway be wrong.

In terms of the 24 hour clock we are a few milliseconds to midnight. A second is about 150,000 years. 25 times as long as writing has been around, and around 250-500 times as long since the renaissance signalled the start of the scientific age.

A second behind us and neanderthals would be competing with homo sapiens for dominance. A second ahead and a further 5000 generations will have lived and died (if we haven't anaged to wipe ourselves out through war, disease etc).

To assert that we have the remotest idea about our relative place in the universe, how other planetary systems may have evolved in very different ways is complete arrogant nonsense. We don't even understand ourselves!!
 
Am I the only one who gets annoyed at the billions spent of space exploration, which will do nothing for this planet (almost certainly won't offer us a bolthole for when we've destroyed this one). NHS? Non-polluting heating? Ditto surface transport? And so on.
Grumpy old git personified.
 
The galaxy is about 13bn years old. 13,000,000,000 years!

Only in the last few decades have we got remotely close to understanding how physics, chemistry and the universe works. We may anyway be wrong.

In terms of the 24 hour clock we are a few milliseconds to midnight. A second is about 150,000 years. 25 times as long as writing has been around, and around 250-500 times as long since the renaissance signalled the start of the scientific age.

A second behind us and neanderthals would be competing with homo sapiens for dominance. A second ahead and a further 5000 generations will have lived and died (if we haven't anaged to wipe ourselves out through war, disease etc).

To assert that we have the remotest idea about our relative place in the universe, how other planetary systems may have evolved in very different ways is complete arrogant nonsense. We don't even understand ourselves!!


When I was a kid, the universe was assumed to be 5 billion years old. It'll be interesting to see how that number changes over time.

I'm more interested in the life cycles of individual stars, though. The idea that we have stars around that are only a few million years old is somehow more interesting - maybe because they have a chance of doing something observable for us (like eta carinae).
 


This is an absolutely stunning and thought provoking video - imo one of the best I've seen in a while.
 
Feed, cloth, and house our own population.
Everyone should have a toilet, shower, hot and cold water, a comfortable bed.

Then, go find another planet to plunder...
But get this one right first.
Start by making politicians pay for inadequate spending of our money.

I was a star trek fan as a kid, I'm now 64.
My dad used to come home from the pub, drunk, and dung all over me for watching "this mindless rubbish. Do you believe, in that stupid mind of yours that anyone could ever talk on a phone without a f*#$in wire in it" *smack around the head, goes off to bed....
He is dead...
I gave him his first cell phone.
Still we ponder, what's out there!
 
If there is intelligent life out there, it will make sure it hides from us. We would plunder its resources, try to kill it, or attempt to use it as an ally to dominate other people on this planet.
 
Are there any really really simple inventions still to find, like the wheel, not complex.
 
Don't know if it is simple but given we are stuck in the age of the wheel (all our tech requires rotary motion at some point in its creation or use) and appear to have been for a very long time; I often wonder if there is a really simple obvious technology that we are missing that would allow us to do so much more. I do believe that as a species this is not the first time we have reached a reasonable level of tech but think we have maybe forgotten some major stuff in the past due to unimaginably catastrophic disaster in the past, given the existence of the Megalithic period and what was left behind.
 
Am I the only one who gets annoyed at the billions spent of space exploration, which will do nothing for this planet
I think they are hoping to find an asteroid that contains a lot of Lithium so that the dream of everyone running electric vehicles becomes possible.

Are there any really really simple inventions still to find, like the wheel, not complex.
There may well be but whilst we seem to focus on complication we will not see it, we seem to have lost the ability to deliver clean simple solutions to a complex problem, we now deliver complex solutions to a simple problem, more money to be made.

Start by making politicians pay for inadequate spending of our money.
As well as being accountable for spending they should also be looking at actually starting to do something to save this planet and not look out to the stars and hope there is a solution out there. Trouble there is they are so old they do not really care as they have had their lives.
 

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