Friday, June 19, 2009

Ecocosmology

This page is now on the Ecocosmology Blog.

14 comments:

  1. Very smart!

    I hope that we do pass The Test one day. Unfortunately, do to our primitive reproduction patterns, I fear humanity will have to endure a few more plagues before we get any closer.

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  2. Interesting, and worthy of consideration.
    But I do take issue with your 3b criterion. I don't think it's logically required, and it's perhaps unphysical, to demand that FTL travel be necessary to achieve the goal. It can be done without that requirement.

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  3. It sounded good until the whole "races and creeds" diversity poster BS. For something of such cosmic importance, you'd think the rigid circumscriptions of the civil rights act with its limited assemblage of possible categorizations would be seen as, I don't know, a bit limiting?

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  4. "develop technology that produces space vehicles able to meet or exceed the speed of light;"

    Why? This isn't required for anything else in the list and seems gratuitous. Even beyond generation ships, a sufficiently long lived species wouldn't find non-relativistic interstellar travel that much of a problem.

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  5. I disagree with Fundamental Test 1. You can be at war with everyone on your planet but still have a thriving space program that sends your race/species off the planet in numbers enough to permit a successful colony somewhere else in the further reaches of your solar system or another one.

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  6. uncledan,

    Well uncledan, you need to "book em dano", read a little closer, because you cannot point to any case where anyone has done that. Your abstraction has no foundation in reality. Thus your hypothesis fails.

    Remember that all of the tenets are interdependent and cannot be considered alone, they must all be kept or all are violated.

    Consider that light speed space travel will be required to reach any habitable planet, which has not even been found yet, which will require a "new physics". Drill baby drill for more rocket fuel is for loser species.

    The secrets needed to be discovered, according to the tenests, are in all individuals of all species, etc. Warmongers are losers that will not survive.

    Your example violates several of the tenets and those space cowboys will not morph nor find another home world without getting decent with the rest of the ecosphere HERE first.

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  7. Mack the Mike,

    Correct, under our current understanding of physics.

    See note to ulcledan who seems to think this will be easy.

    It will take what religionists call "a miracle" for the human species to survive. If we make it that will be because we all worked together feverishly to see what it is we are missing.

    Not who can snuff who and run.

    The tenets read together, so if we cannot develop good enough space travel then we must morph.

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  8. Susan's Husband,

    The nearest habitable planet, or inhabitable moon of an uninhabitable planet, will be a minimum of hundreds of years away AT THE SPEED OF LIGHT. At the speed of our current space vehicles that would be millions of years.

    We are not going to survive as a species with the status quo, planet destroying thinking and doing we have deceived ourselves into.

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  9. tribalpremise,

    I can assure you that racists will not be a part of any species that passes the test.

    Their brains in general cannot even fathom the physics we have now, much less the physics that we must develop in order to survive in this cosmos.

    That is why they migrate to right wing religions "to get to heaven".

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  10. Joe,

    As pointed out to Mack the Mike above it is not possible at this time with our current understanding of physics or our technology.

    Millions of years would be required to travel to a habitable planet (where Kepler is looking) under our current methods of space travel (we can travel about 30,000 mph if gravity of a planet does not slow us down).

    The crude satellites like Pioneer we sent out decades ago are way, way off course and we do not know why. They are still in this solar system.

    We are bugs when it comes to space travel now.

    But we may have no choice if our current status quo thinking is not improved.

    But the chances of that type of space travel succeeding as will be required are exceedingly low.

    We can't even go to Mars yet, which will also be destroyed by the Sun at about the same time the Earth is destroyed by the Sun.

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  11. For those who read scientific propaganda more than actual scientific works, examples are given in many articles here and more are to come, about the application of the tenets set forth in this post.

    Please realize it takes more than knee-jerk reactions to solve the absolutely enormous challenges the human species faces in order to pass the test the cosmos has put upon us.

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  12. Dredd:

    You left one part out of the test: develop technology sufficient to survive mass extinction events.

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  13. Howard,

    Mass extinction in the past for the most part has been space debris in the form of comet and asteroid chunks.

    There is a watch for Near Earth Objects (NEO) and none are seen to be any danger at the moment.

    The Sun is the only object that will cause total and certain extinction of all species, and even the planet itself, in the long run.

    The space travel technology will solve that problem, but you bring up a major consideration for new home worlds, which is, they should be considered only if mass extinctions by meteorites is not likely.

    In the short term the greatest threat of mass extinction comes from our own WMD technology.

    It will be difficult for human civilization to give up those WMD won't it?

    That is part of the test for neophyte species that are in the phases of learning how to take care of their home world and their fellow inhabitants.

    If they can't pass that early phase they will never have to worry about the rest because they will not exist.

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