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Brian Fantana

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Posts posted by Brian Fantana

  1. 22 minutes ago, 956 Worldwide said:

    More fun with big numbers: About 4 billion species of cellular life have existed on Earth. One has become space-faring and invented a radio telescope. 

    There are other forms of life on this planet that are very close to being intelligent.  Dolphins have had millions of years to evolve into a technological species but haven’t. 
     

    There’s a buried assumption that evolution inevitably trends towards intelligence and complexity but it doesn’t. Make a few tweaks to the geological history of earth and maybe it never happens here. We never got a technological dinosaur after all. 

    Yeah, this is a big part of why it's all impossible to quantify. At least on Earth, species evolve to a level of intelligence that their circumstances demand. Dolphins, orcas, etc. don't need to be any smarter than they are. They certainly have advanced communication within their species with complex language/dialects, complex social structures, empathy, etc, but their morphology disallows tool usage, so there's no reason for them to evolve to be able to develop technology to augment that.

    As our ancestors started using tools, our brains started growing so we could develop more complex tools to solve increasingly complex problems, our children were consequently born with larger brains, which resulted in them being more and more helpless, which required increasingly complex social order.....and this evolutionary feedback loop resulted in a space-faring civilization.

    It's such an interesting "accident" of evolution to think about. There are numerous species on Earth now that aren't humans that have learned to use tools;, but the most advanced would probably be chimps, and they're barely beginning to use tools from an evolutionary standpoint. There's certainly potential for them and other species to eventually develop along a similar path as humans, but such processes occur on time scales that are impossible for humans to wrap our minds around.

  2. 12 minutes ago, Serak The Preparer said:

    Why do you understand that it's just about utterly impossible that we're alone in the universe as intelligent life? What are the assumptions you are making?

    Any attempt to quantify the probability of life involves literally guessing at key variables. We are trying to draw from an n of 1. There may be life, there may not be, any attempt to judge probability is just wish casting. And that's fine, it's super fun to think about speculate, but trying to draw probabilistic conclusions is pure fallacy. 

    Any attempt to quantify would obviously be almost entirely guesswork. Given the near infinite number of opportunities life would have to arise elsewhere in the universe, it seems extremely unlikely that Earth is the only place that it has occurred. It's estimated that there are what, 10^24 stars in the universe?

    At it's most basic, the probability of only one of those stars harboring life is basically nil. However, given the number of variables, the odds would certainly even out quite a bit, and there would be other things to factor in like how many of those hypothetical lifeforms actually evolve to be intelligent, how close are they to us, would we even recognize them as life and vice versa, would we even be able to detect each other given the differences in technology and perception, the list goes on and on and on.

    It's nothing more than a fun thing to think about, really.

    • Like 2
  3. 11 hours ago, ztejas said:

    I mean look, man. We've been visited. We are being visited. We're going to be visited. Any intelligent, rational individual born after a certain date (probably sometime in the 80s or 90s) that has been able to digest the info shouldn't arrive at a different conclusion. 

    I'm not trying to get into it again with all of the 50+ year old white guys here that have never actually done the research or aren't willing to open their minds to the idea - because their arguments are fucking boring and contrived and myopic - but there are mountains of evidence pointing to some sort of NHI presence or intervention and anyone thinking otherwise is fucking kidding themselves at this point.

    YMMV. 

    We aren't alone.

    They're here. 

    Let's see where this wild ride takes us. 

     

    1 hour ago, Serak The Preparer said:

    Can you tell us what research you've done besides watching YouTube videos? Any actual talking to witnesses? Any effort to answer either how or why? It's frankly laughable to see you be so dogmatic about something that can't be known right now (unless you truly believe that we have aliens somewhere and the government is hiding it from us).

    I think the large majority of skeptics in this thread (myself certainly included) have never said that aliens have 100%  not visited Earth, just that it is unlikely for a number of reasons. I am not certain that your observation that a bunch of 50+ year olds have less rigid thinking than 20 year olds is quite the flex that you think it is.

     

     

    Yeah I can't imagine how someone can be this absolutist about this murky a topic.

    I understand from a probability standpoint alone it's just about utterly impossible that we're alone in the universe as intelligent life, but the probability that extraterrestrial life has visited earth is an entirely different animal and that kind of secret would be unfathomably difficult to keep quiet.

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  4. 2 hours ago, Hank_Hill said:

    Oddly enough it looks like everyone is on board with Israel killing shitty people without harming civilians. Almost as if we’ve been saying that literally the entire time.

    Yeah it's super weird that the people he made up in his head don't actually exist.

    Actually, I guess that's normal for him.

  5. Biden is an old school Zionist and Trump is a Zionist because his base demands it. Some would say there is functionally no difference in these, but they're wrong. Biden at least seems to have been restraining Israel to the best of his ability, Trump would be infinitely worse for the people of Palestine.

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  6. 15 minutes ago, YGIFS said:

    You don’t even have to go back to 1000BCE.  Just in modernity, fall of Ottoman Empire, Sazanov Agreement, Sykes-Pico act, and then establishment of the modern nation-state of Israel.  I doubt most of those protestors know what most of those historically impactful events even are. 
     

    But to your point, I’ve noticed the British get awfully quiet when subjects like this come up.  You could fill up one of their stolen museums with the awkward silence.  

    Yeah I mean that was kind of my point. I don't really get why people try say this conflict is so complex and ancient (I mean, I do, it's a way to not have to think about it too critically, but that's another discussion). It's about as straightforward a geopolitical conflict as there is. Israel wants the land. Hamas gave Israel an excuse to take it in a more direct and expedient way than they've been taking land in the West Bank.

    • Like 1
  7. 26 minutes ago, tx 3 putt said:

    This is exactly what Abbott / Patrick / Paxton want ….

     

    UT is going to be become Abbott's mouthpiece for right-wing extremism. No one takes aggy seriously, so this is the route they're taking.

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