A4 Piece Of Paper

[Sunk]

[jim360]

Sources differ on whether she broke 7 times with A4 or not. It might need to be thinner than normal, but in any case it's surprising how often that which was reckoned to be impossible is, in fact, not.

[Zacs-Master]

Like light speed communication? ;-)

[Canary42]

Thank you sunk, that was very entertaining - mind-boggling in fact, and just a little terrifying.

[mushroom25]

Space is big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-boggling big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist, but that's just peanuts to space. Listen; when you're thinking big, think bigger than the biggest thing ever and then some. Much bigger than that in fact, really amazingly immense, a totally stunning size, real 'wow, that's big', time. It's just so big that by comparison, bigness itself looks really titchy. Gigantic multiplied by colossal multiplied by staggeringly huge is the sort of concept we're trying to get across here.
(Douglas Adams)

[Togo]

Just like on this site, "nothing is everything", and "everything is nothing". I tried to print it off and ran out of paper.

[Bazile]

Meanwhile , back at number 10 :-)

[ToraToraTora]

by the Drake equation I'd say alien life exists but the distances involved are so vast as to make any form of communication impossible.

[davebro]

and any chance of forming colonies on earth-like planets.

[ToraToraTora]

zero

[Togo]

//but the distances involved are so vast as to make any form of communication impossible.//

True TTT. Perhaps we will learn more about the effects of Gaussian curvature given time or an event so massive, and currently beyond our understanding, will occur that renders what we know as distance meaningless by altering our space time Gaussian point.

Spacetime tells matter how to move and matter tells spacetime how to curve. John Wheeler.

[Sunk]

// but the distances involved are so vast as to make any form of communication impossible. //

There is a wormhole in that argument :-)

[Zacs-Master]

Until we know what Dark Matter and Dark Space is, there is no proven scientific explanation of how the universe works, or whether it is in fact a universe or a multiverse. There may be civilisations who do Kronos what it is and are so advanced that they have harnessed it to create faster than light drives (and other things beyond our feeble imaginings).

[Zacs-Master]

Who do know (not kronos)

[ToraToraTora]

for any civilisation to emerge a 2nd gen star system is needed. The Drake equation predicts thousands of potential civilisations but they would all be similarly aged in the timescales of the universe. There are quite probably more advanced and less advanced civilisations but I doubt they'd have advanced enough to defy the know laws of physics. I agree the nature of dark matter and energy would be a huge leap if we could ascertain it, for now they remain mathematical devices that we use to make the numbers fit observation.

[jim360]

Conversations like this are always tricky because, basically, the future is unknowable, and what we don't know isn't knowable either (obviously). On the other hand, pointing out this out often seems to me to imply that all we need to do is wait long enough and what we think impossible now will turn out to be super easy, and barely an inconvenience, with future technology.

The best we can do is describe the present understanding, and emphasise that it is *only* the present understanding. Therefore, it's wrong to say "impossible", or "never", or "zero chance" or whatever, but it's also wrong to deduce from that that, in the future, all this is likely to be near-certain.

A separate point is that even making pronouncements about our present understanding are fraught with danger. I'm sure I'm not alone in having fallen for the "a little learning" trap, and make bold statements based on an incomplete understanding that turn out to be false. One example in this thread is the Drake Equation (DE). Put simply, there's no substance or predictive power in the DE at all: many of its inputs are based on conjecture rather than anything particularly solid, and in that sense the DE should be used not to resolve the debate about the existence or capabilities of alien life, but to stimulate it. In my opinion, then, TTT is misusing it by drawing any conclusions from the equation, or by stating that it "predicts" anything, or by using it to constrain the potential scientific achievements of hypothetical alien civilisations. The correct interpretation, in my view, is that the Drake Equation poses questions we need to ask, specifically:

-- how likely is life of any kind to form on a planet capable of supporting it?
-- how likely is it that intelligent life forms from that life?
-- how likely is it that intelligent life develops into scientifically-capable civilisations?
-- how long on average does a civilisation last?

There is not even a partial answer, that I am aware of, let alone a definitive one, to any of these questions. I'm minded myself to think that the stumbling block is question 2, but I don't think we have nearly enough information to decide at the moment.

I would still agree that, based on our current understanding, it is almost certain that we will be unable to converse with any alien life, and the physical barriers that appear to exist have to be understood. Our resident sceptic-in-exile tends to miss the importance of this point: whether or not it turns out to be possible and feasible to travel to and communicate with other stars, the challenge will only be overcome by accepting how difficult it is, and by building on our current understanding rather than ignoring it entirely, or rejecting it as irrelevant.

[Sunk]

What we currently know, and our technology may change in shorter time than we think.
300 years ago we couldn’t deliver a letter to the other side of the world. 250 years ago we could do it by ship and it took the best part of a year. Today we can do that almost instantly in a nano second.

[jim360]

That's true, and is part of my point: it's clearly hubris to impose hard limits on future understanding. Still, one thing I want to add is that there's a difference between an engineering difficulty and a theoretical difficulty. 300 years ago there was no theoretical barrier to how fast people or things could move; for example, Newton's theory of gravity allows for information to pass from one of the Universe to the other instantaneously, making it ironically easier in one sense to imagine interstellar travel. But there were obviously practical barriers, eg the lack of an adequate fuel source. Ever since Special Relativity, however, the speed of light has been set as the limiting speed for matter or information to travel. This isn't an engineering problem any more, but a fundamental one. There may be ways around that too, and perhaps in future we'll discover them -- or put on a firm footing present ideas of how to meet the challenge -- but the nature of the challenge is still different.

[Old_Geezer]

Are we absolutely sure causality is a reality, or is it just something we interpret/appear to perceive due to limited access to what actually is reality ? Maybe we're unaware that we've filtered our perception of whatever's out there, thus selecting the bits that make sense to us, in order to function/remain stable/thrive.

[jim360]

We can't be absolutely sure, beyond all doubt whatsoever, of anything, so in that sense no. Still, causality is a principle that is difficult to argue against, since it basically states only that an event can only be influenced by a thing that came strictly before it. The way out is that "before" is maybe difficult to define, and has already changed in sense at least once. Nowadays, the definition of "before" means "within the past light cone", as opposed to merely "at an earlier time". This leaves open the possibility that maybe there will be an updated understanding of "before", in, say, a new version of physics 50-100 years from now, but the principle of causality is unlikely to be abandoned altogether.

[Old_Geezer]

I wish I could recall the details, but on a number of occasions I've come across the claim that there are 3 trusted facts no one doubts (causality being one of them) but they don't fit together, so one (at least) has to go and it's anyone's guess which. Hope I can come across it again.