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[Little Mac]

What if the "light at the end of the tunnel" we see when we die is the same light we see when we emerge from our mother's womb and the shock of that realization represses our memories from our previous lives.

 

[John Marston]

That belongs in the "Random thoughts" thread

 

[Rentahamster]

Or, nature is destined to evolve in this direction, and while there may be roadblocks in place to prevent it from reaching that goal, as long as that is the purpose of life/nature, if even a remote sliver of a possibility is opened, it will find its way like water through a crack in a foundation. May take many many years, but eventually it will reach that end.

There is no "goal". There is no "end". There is no "purpose" or "direction", aside from natural selection pressures. If an organism increases its reproductive fitness through increasing intelligence, it will get more intelligent over time. If it doesn't, then it doesn't.

Evolution follows the directions of natural selection or artificial selection (such as in the case of domestication), and traits are only useful until they aren't anymore. This is why animals can evolve eyes, then evolve to lose them, and why creatures that evolve from fins to legs to fins again like whales exist.

 

[Ulysses 31]

We were created by aliens. Earth is a lab experiment

Naw, we're all brains in a vat going through a simulation.

 

[DragoonKain]

There is no "goal". There is no "end". There is no "purpose" or "direction", aside from natural selection pressures. If an organism increases its reproductive fitness through increasing intelligence, it will get more intelligent over time. If it doesn't, then it doesn't.

Evolution follows the directions of natural selection or artificial selection (such as in the case of domestication), and traits are only useful until they aren't anymore. This is why animals can evolve eyes, then evolve to lose them, and why creatures that evolve from fins to legs to fins again like whales exist.

It’s possible. Sometimes I feel like there is no purpose. I don’t really have a strong belief one way or the other, just a bunch of random theories I explore. But sometimes I also wonder if there’s something more to life that we haven’t yet discovered that drives things forward.

 

[Crayon]

OP, you should check out Isaac Arthur's channel. There is a series on fermi paradox solutions that might help fill out your idea.

 

[lachesis]

Well some of us are so fat, we will produce a lot of fossil fuel for the future intelligent species for them to burn and pollute themselves.

I was thinking, how high in the intelligence level would we be in among various alien life forms? I mean, there must be ones that are just like amoeba and ones that are super intelligent... I wonder if we the human species would be at least in the "average" or whatnot.

Really some random thoughts as well...

 

[pramod]

Or we are just cattle and once we reach max population aliens will come and harvest us all.

 

[G-Bus]

Look how far we've come in the last 200 years. Look how much has changed in the last 100.

Universe is estimated at 13.5 billion years old or what ever. Hard to comprehend how long that is.

Personally think it's more of a size issue than a time issue. Space is unimaginably big, and that doesn't even do it justice.

 

[Rentahamster]

It’s possible.

It's possible because that's what happens. We have observed evolution and natural selection take place, and this is what we observe.

But sometimes I also wonder if there’s something more to life that we haven’t yet discovered that drives things forward.

There could be. However, there is no reason to think so without any observable or measurable evidence that demonstrates this to be the case. Conclusions are to be drawn based on the evidence, and our currently observed evidence points to evolution via natural selection as the best explanation for what's going on so far.

 

[Hawking Radiation]

We won't survive our time as pointed out in the OP. There's too many things that can go wrong that threaten our survival.

Advanced AI androids will be our ambassadors to the stars.
They don't have limitations human beings have. They won't age, they don't need food and water, physically they're not as fragile. Only issue for them would be consistent power source to be able to operate autonomously.
If we send out a ship full of these advanced machines, they'll be able to adapt and colonize habitable worlds in deep space.

Read this following original draft of the movie Interstellar to understand why my opinion is that way.

2008 script

The original script for Interstellar was written on March 12, 2008 by Jonathan Nolan for prospective director Steven Spielberg. The full script can be viewed on http://www.scribd.com/doc/186682938/Interstellar-Script. The printed script is 121 pages. The script opens up with a sequence featuring...

interstellarfilm.fandom.com

 

[DragoonKain]

It's possible because that's what happens. We have observed evolution and natural selection take place, and this is what we observe.


There could be. However, there is no reason to think so without any observable or measurable evidence that demonstrates this to be the case. Conclusions are to be drawn based on the evidence, and our currently observed evidence points to evolution via natural selection as the best explanation for what's going on so far.

But that's what makes talking about science so fun. There's much more left to discover than we have already, so there's always going to be room for new theories. The only sample is of what we have here on earth. Granted, it's the only sample we have, but we simply don't know how life on other planets, if those do even exist, have evolved. Doesn't mean it happens differently and our knowledge would change, but not having it doesn't mean it doesn't yet exist.

 

[Sosokrates]

It would be exciting if there were aliens.

But if they are in our galaxy they must be in a stage in there evolution where they have not created any form of radio signal, because if they did we would pick it up.
I guess theres a chance of an advanced species of aliens to far away for there signal to travel.

 

[winjer]

I don't think it's very likely that there would be another intelligent species showing up on earth.
There have been million of different species using similar adaptations, like teeth, hoofs, ears, eyes, legs, fins, etc.
But only one species that produced a big brain and the capability to create complex concepts, like fire, machines, math, advanced languages, philosophy, etc.
The main goal of life is to survive and pass on it's genes. But for that a big brain is not essential.
Chances are, we are the very rare exception in evolution.

 

[Wildebeest]

We don't at all how brain size is correlated with intelligence. Some of the most intelligent non-human species when it comes to tool use are corvids, and they are much smaller than dinosaurs. Octopus are supposed to be another one of the more intelligent animals when it comes to tool use, but one of their major things is that they absolutely hate other octopods and will not cooperate with them. One reason why we recognize Elephants as being cool animals is that they have a big social memory for who their friends are. Same with Corvids, actually.

 

[EverydayBeast]

The questions you should be asking is what side of the aliens are you on will you support them or let them make a mockery of our home, planet earth.

 

[Haemi]

DragoonKain you might like this video

Kurzgesagt makes great videos.

This one fits this topic too:

 

[FunkMiller]

It's all going to fine until the Tyranids attack.

 

[Days like these...]

Tl;dr you want an epiphany here is mine.
We're born, we grasp at straws, we die.

 

[MachRc]

The more I think about it, ..the more I grasp how insignificant we are..

The Simpsons already did it.

 

[Midnight Bliss]

aliens could be interdimensional also there could be things which happened before the big bang. Also there could be more big bangs and things outside of it. The universe itself could just be a precursor

 

[TonyK]

That technology buried millions of years of evolution will be dust for future evolved species.

 

[E-Cat]

Assuming there's a mass extinction event, meaning all humans, primates, mammals, etc. get wiped out, it will take at a minimum tens if not hundreds of millions of years for intelligent life to evolve again (and that's assuming evolving intelligent life is easy and not exceedingly rare).

In that time, all evidence of our civilization and technology will have vanished by geological forces. It will be as if humans had never existed at all. Perhaps geostationary satellites will still exist? I'm not sure.

Another thing, Earth is around 4.5 billion years old. In around half a billion years or so the sun will probably expand enough to evaporate our oceans and make life impossible. In other words, if intelligent life had taken just 10% longer to evolve, there wouldn't be intelligent life at all. And if we die, there may very well not be again.

 

[Rentahamster]

But that's what makes talking about science so fun. There's much more left to discover than we have already, so there's always going to be room for new theories. The only sample is of what we have here on earth. Granted, it's the only sample we have, but we simply don't know how life on other planets, if those do even exist, have evolved. Doesn't mean it happens differently and our knowledge would change, but not having it doesn't mean it doesn't yet exist.

Yes, of course. Absence of evidence is not the same as evidence of absence. I'm not saying that it definitely doesn't exist. I'm saying that we make sure we acknowledge that the fun hypotheses we might think up are still speculation, and that these are separate from the actual theories that are confirmed or supported by evidence.

 

[farmerboy]

Life is a dream in which we are dead, but it takes us a lifetime to realize it

Thanks mate, just the way to start my day - with a little existential dread.

 

[Jada_Li]

That is what is said: Meteors killed off all the dinosaurs but how do you know if that is fact or fiction? How would anyone know what they are being told is fact or fiction? Do you just believe because if someone says so then it must be true? And if they are a scientist or whoever you deem knowledgeable about the world, then it must be automatically true without any questioning for your own curiosity. Is it true evolution exists? Is it true humans came from apes, then why are apes even still here and why haven't they evolved with the rest of us? Do other animals evolve in the sense of how science explains or have animals always been the same like humans?

What about aliens, do they exist? Or is it a code word that has changed over the eras as to what they really are? Does religion exist or is it man-made? Does spirituality exist and if so what even is it? What is wrong and what is right? What is evil and what is good and does that even exist? Does God exist? Does angels exist? Does Satan exist? Does demons exist? Why are we here on this earth, where did we come from if anywhere at all? Who are we? What is the meaning, the purpose of life? Was there life before being born here on earth and will there be life again after our death? Is it possible that everything we were ever taught was a lie? Are movies as much fiction as we think it is or is the truth in plain sight, yet we are blind and deaf to it? The Matrix is just a fictional movie and has no real meaning...right? Is it true the Bible is just make believe and there is no real world connection to us and the events in the world? What about video games, comic books, tv series, books, commercials, advertisements, music, and so on, does any of it have a deeper meaning than initially realized?

Seek the truth and the truth will find you.
Seek the lies and deception will find you.

All will be revealed...in time. Hopefully, you pass the test or for those who fail it....

Spoiler

 

[saturnalian]

Edit, wrong quote

 

[Romulus]

Kinda wonder if we're some ant farm for another species. The Foo Fighter phenomenon in ww2 is simply incredible how consistent and sprawling the incidents were across all sides of the war. The amount strange orbs following bombers and fighters just defies every explanation I've heard. "Nazi tech bro" yet the Nazis were baffled by them. And if they possessed this incredible tech, why wouldn't they use it to win the war? I guess the Nazis had a heart, but only when it came to using their secret technology. Lol.
The one constant is they were clearly observing us, not engaging.
So if you look at the modern reports from fighter pilots, there's this incredibly long trail of historical similarities across dozens of nations. Eerily similar descriptions of the crafts themselves and more importantly their behavior. All these fighter pilots and radar techs are telling the same lies regardless of era and nationality? Doubt. Something has an interest in us. No idea what it is.

 

[DragoonWalker]

It's always fun to ponder this stuff. Personally I don't think our technology will be of any use to future species. If humans were wiped out and something else arises in our place, their culture, their biology, their way of thinking and ideas about progress could be completely different from ours in a way we can't even begin to comprehend. And therefore our advancements, our technology would be nothing more than a curiosity to them, that is if they can even figure it out.

Forget future species, we don't even make use of technology from our own species
centuries ago:

Antikythera mechanism - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

and we have trouble retaining or making use of technological information from mere decades ago:

https://www.cbc.ca/radio/quirks/blog/50-years-ago-we-flew-to-the-moon-here-s-why-we-can-t-do-that-today-1.4397053

I always think the ancients were more advanced then we commonly think. They built insane monuments that we would have difficulty building today and invented tools, machines, and mechanisms that both baffle us and continue to see use today. We might be more advanced than them in many other ways, but in truth we know so little about them. It's foolish to think our descendants, human or not, would want to/be able to continue civilization where we left off, be limited by the same roadblocks we face, or reach the same advancements in the same areas. After all, history didn't work that way.

 

[Elysion]

Nah dude. We're living in the last billion years of Earth's habitable expectancy, and it took over 4 billion years for us to show up in the first place. If we don't make it work then this party's over. No intelligent life will discover our technology, nothing will benefit from our existence, we will have truly achieved nothing, and the universe will not remember us.

True, if humanity doesn’t leave Earth, then our planet will be swallowed by the sun in a couple billion years, and it will be as if we never existed.

I’m often wondering if the ‘great filter’ behind the so-called Fermi paradox is simply material comfort and social liberalism. What if the reason why the universe seems so empty is that once civilizations reach a certain level of material comfort and prosperity, they just give up on expansion and exploration, because they see no point anymore? Or even if they wanted to expand into space, they simply aren’t capable anymore because they lack the internal drive and discipline required for such a monumental task, made worse if they adopt radical egalitarian attitudes like most of humanity has? Maybe they even become less intelligent because material prosperity and modern medicine have removed all forms of evolutionary pressure? The last part in particular is something that we might actually be witnessing right now, because there has been an observable drop in average IQ levels in industrialized countries during the last fifty years or so. That, combined with a general feeling of nihilism due to disenchantment and secularization might mean that our current civilization will never colonize space. The fact that after fifty years we’re seemingly still unable (or unwilling?) to return to the moon should tell us a lot.

Maybe we need another Cold War that incentivizes the world’s major powers to focus on space exploration? Maybe civilizations only achieve their true potential if they’re under stress and threatened by a powerful enemy?

 

[InverseAgonist]

True, if humanity doesn’t leave Earth, then our planet will be swallowed by the sun in a couple billion years, and it will be as if we never existed.

I’m often wondering if the ‘great filter’ behind the so-called Fermi paradox is simply material comfort and social liberalism. What if the reason why the universe seems so empty is that once civilizations reach a certain level of material comfort and prosperity, they just give up on expansion and exploration, because they see no point anymore? Or even if they wanted to expand into space, they simply aren’t capable anymore because they lack the internal drive and discipline required for such a monumental task, made worse if they adopt radical egalitarian attitudes like most of humanity has? Maybe they even become less intelligent because material prosperity and modern medicine have removed all forms of evolutionary pressure? The last part in particular is something that we might actually be witnessing right now, because there has been an observable drop in average IQ levels in industrialized countries during the last fifty years or so. That, combined with a general feeling of nihilism due to disenchantment and secularization might mean that our current civilization will never colonize space. The fact that after fifty years we’re seemingly still unable (or unwilling?) to return to the moon should tell us a lot.

Maybe we need another Cold War that incentivizes the world’s major powers to focus on space exploration? Maybe civilizations only achieve their true potential if they’re under stress and threatened by a powerful enemy?

These are widely regarded as anthropic concerns.

In the more broad scale of Fermi Arguments and the Great Filter as articulated by Hanson, it's a statistical argument over an ensemble that is huge. Sure, some or many may have this property, but there is no reason to believe that human psychology and economic concerns are universal.

Robin Hanson has made the excellent point, as usual, that even 'slow' growth is fast enough to produce advanced civilizations given the timescales involved. We're used to the current paradigm of exponential (or seemingly exponential) advancement, but it's wise to consider that even before the quantum and industrial and even agrarian revolutions, there was innovation.

He noted back in 2014 that a thousand doublings of the economy seems plenty to create a very advanced civilization. That's 10^300 increase in economic output. There are 10^80 atoms in the visible universe! Now, we can get into the more interesting conversation if you can decouple economic growth from material substrate (I like to think you can and that we already *have*) but just to give you a sense of the numbers.

Yet, we'll reach those levels of economic output -- at current growth -- in only 15,000 years! That's amazing to ponder, but consider Hanson's point though -- even at an agrarian society level of innovation we'd reach it in roughly 1 million years. That's nothing in cosmological time. At pre-agrarian, forager levels it would take 1/4th a billion years. But, still the universe is an order of magnitude older.

So, we should be seeing huge numbers of civilizations in the ensemble. The fact that SETI hasn't found anything (Wow! signal is the only potential) is just baffling and every fucking day that goes on the probability in our bayesian computation shifts more and more to being alone -- or as Hanson has recently switched his position to, just lucky and early on the cosmic scene.

I suppose I should apologize for being long-winded, but the explanations like yours which rely on facets of anthropic quirks or the many "zoo-hypothesis" all fail. We should be seeing even a few huge solar-system wide construction projects or universe spanning von Neumann probes or even background messages. In the ensemble, we assume a normal distribution, so even if there are some advanced civs out on the tail that communicate with advanced technologies or some quirk in quantum mechanics (or beyond physics) that our no-go theorems don't articulate, the vast majority in the middle of the distribution should be advancing along at all different rates.

 

[haxan7]

Anything related to technology won't even last thousands of years, let alone millions. The oldest remnants of humans today are stone ruins, which are already in awful shape, and those are measured in the thousands of years of age. If humans disappeared all traces of us would be gone pretty quick.

 

[InverseAgonist]

Anything related to technology won't even last thousands of years, let alone millions. The oldest remnants of humans today are stone ruins, which are already in awful shape, and those are measured in the thousands of years of age. If humans disappeared all traces of us would be gone pretty quick.

I vehemently disagree.

Voyager 1 & 2 disagree. Pioneer 10 disagrees. New Horizons disagrees. So do the Active SETI messages.

 

[haxan7]

I vehemently disagree.

Voyager 1 & 2 disagree. Pioneer 10 disagrees. New Horizons disagrees. So do the Active SETI messages.

I was referring to earthbound stuff which is what the OP was about there smarty pants.

 

[Tieno]

Most interesting technology is that which allows us to better pass on and communicate knowledge. Passing on information and knowledge that goes beyond what are own DNA, genes and culture is capable of, for the betterment of another unknown species of an unknown time might be our ultimate evolutionary use case. Planting a seed so another species can have a tree.

 

[InverseAgonist]

I was referring to earthbound stuff which is what the OP was about there smarty pants.

Thanks!

I was just illustrating the most obvious examples, but even terrestrially there are thousands of bunkers designed to withstand megaton range nuclear exchanges. There is the Svalbard Global Seed Vault that isn't going anywhere. Our cities, above and below ground are there. Civilization is robust.

 

[MarkMe2525]

They call these the great filters. I subscribe to a similar outlook to the universe. There may be intelligent life out there, but it's unbelievably rare and too far away to even concern myself with.

 

[Pegasus Actual]

Nah dude. We're living in the last billion years of Earth's habitable expectancy, and it took over 4 billion years for us to show up in the first place. If we don't make it work then this party's over. No intelligent life will discover our technology, nothing will benefit from our existence, we will have truly achieved nothing, and the universe will not remember us.

Ahh it's all this bullshit just on a different scale unless you can work around the heat death of the universe.

 

[PaddyOCanager]

Ahh it's all this bullshit just on a different scale unless you can work around the heat death of the universe.

We just need to find a way to shed our bodies and attachment to the physical. Who needs a spaceship if your consciousness can just float through space and time?