The Hectic World of Tim Minear

POSTED BY: NewsAdmin
UPDATED: Saturday, July 27, 2002 23:34
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ZICSOFT

Saturday, July 27, 2002 11:08 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by Shuggie:

Yeah but the lottery is a system set up deliberately to have a very unlikely outcome. The question is - what is it about the universe that makes life such an incredibly unlikely outcome?

Shug

Now that is a good question! Since we don't have a detailed theory as to exactly how life formed on this planet, it's pretty difficult to figure out how probable life is in principle.

But I'm not arguing from principles. I'm arguing from the universe we see out there right now. Which doesn't have any conspicuous signs of intelligent life. Either we're missing something (always possible) or intelligent life is rare. That might or might not be because life itself is rare.

ZICSOFT

Saturday, July 27, 2002 11:34 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by mojoeca:
Quote:
Originally posted by Zicsoft:
That doesn't follow at all. Even if you accept the speed of light as an absolute barrier, interstellar travel isn't impossible -- just time consuming.

I meant to say that. Without the fantasized shortcuts, interstellar travel is prohibively slow, discouraging widespread colonization.

I thoroughly disagree. It's not that hard to imagine vessels that could cross between star systems in, say, fifty years. If we ever get serious about exploring our own solar system (which I'm beginning to doubt), building a habitat that remains self-sustaining for 50 years will not be all that hard.

And that's assuming technology that's fundamentally the same as ours. If anybody ever succeeds in building a space drive that can continuously accellerate at 10 meters (about 32 feet) per second per second, you'd be able to accellerate moderately quickly to a close to the speed of light. That means time dilation kicks in, so the crew could travel hundreds of light years in a few subjective years. Of course, by the time they get back to earth, everybody they know will be dead, and even the countries they were born in will probably have ceased to exist. But that's not going to stop a lot of people from being explorers -- or colonists.

Of course, that kind of space travel wouldn't make a good TV series! But it has made some good books. See Poul Anderson's Tau Zero and Larry Niven's Protector.

Quote:

Study of geologic history and human history shows how much the world can transform in such a short amount of time. I don't know that an intelligent species can thrive long enough for such massive projects to be undertaken.

Well, I don't strictly agree with your vision of "history", but I do admit that the odds for our own species surviving to the million-year mark look pretty slim. And those odds probably apply to other species. But if intelligent life is something that happens very often, we're talking thousands, maybe millions of species. No matter how much the odds are stacked against them, by percentages, a species is going to beat the odds eventually.

The absence of evidence is thus itself a kind of evidence -- for the argument that intelligent life is extremely rare, possibly to the point of being unique.

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