Utopia Talk / Politics / K2-18b

Sam Adams Member	Wed Sep 13 23:18:20 Woa. This could be one of the bigger scientific discoveries in a long time, even if it just confirms what most of us suspected.
obaminated Member	Thu Sep 14 00:34:59 According to murder we will never be able to travel there so there is no point in knowing this.
murder Member	Thu Sep 14 09:43:28 murder thinks that it is completely unsurprising that a planet with the potential for life would be discovered somewhere in the visible universe. Especially since we're on one. I would expect that over time we'll discover thousands of them. No we will never visit or communicate with any of them. And yes we will eventually discover signs of actual life on other planets.
Rugian Member	Thu Sep 14 11:35:57 "No we will never visit or communicate with any of them." *We* won't visit them. In the far-far future, generation ships will hopefully colonize a great many of them.
murder Member	Thu Sep 14 13:02:39 Generation ships are nonsense. If a population can thrive on a ship for hundreds or thousands of years, then wtf would they need a planet for? To build more generation ships to continue their endless journey?
Sam Adams Member	Thu Sep 14 13:25:39 Yes. Because it is there. You might be born with low curiosity, but many of us like to explore new places.
murder Member	Thu Sep 14 14:27:48 Dude it isn't curiosity if you're never going to see the destination. It's just being an asshole. You're condemning generation after generation to isolation and inbreeding and aimless wandering. Until they ultimately rebel and everyone dies.
obaminated Member	Thu Sep 14 17:05:49 Murder brings up a point, it's a stupid point as per usual but id love to see him attempt to explain why it's a bad thing. Does Murder think it was unethical for Europeans to build colonies in the new world, subjecting future generations to toiling in fields for yet to be proven benefits? How many generations languished in the squalor of the new world while those in Europe had no such difficulties as taming frontiers, dealing with aggressive natives and wildlife?
obaminated Member	Thu Sep 14 17:07:10 Note - I purposely ignored his nihilistic "they'll all just rebel and die" comment because that was the edgy teen part of his personality sneaking it.
Rugian Member	Thu Sep 14 17:27:47 "If a population can thrive on a ship for hundreds or thousands of years, then wtf would they need a planet for?" Because a single planet can provide *billions* of people with *billions* of years' worth of habitability? This is like asking why people bother using cars to get to their homes.
murder Member	Thu Sep 14 17:38:28 "Because a single planet can provide *billions* of people with *billions* of years' worth of habitability?" They don't have billions of people. For hundreds or thousands of years they have controlled their population. Why would they want to massively expand?
murder Member	Thu Sep 14 17:39:58 btw the "generation ship" would be a safe environment ... why would they want to expose themselves to the dangers of a planet when they don't need to?
obaminated Member	Thu Sep 14 17:50:44 I don't think anyone is thinking "thousands of years" when they say generational ship. This planet is 120 light years away.
jergul large member	Thu Sep 14 21:52:36 Fastest craft we have can do 0,064% of light speed.
Rugian Member	Fri Sep 15 09:05:58 "Why would they want to massively expand?" Same reason we're doing so now...it's a fundamental human drive that ensures our survival as a species. Or do you think the human population has always numbered 8 billion?
Rugian Member	Fri Sep 15 09:17:52 jergul large member Thu Sep 14 21:52:36 Fastest craft we have can do 0,064% of light speed. And 250 years ago, the fastest a human could travel was at 0.0000082% the speed of light. Put another way, in just a quarter of a millenia we've increased our potential speed by 7,792x. If you had told King Christian VII back in 1773 that humans would one day be able to travel faster than the speed of sound, he would have called you a madman. Your and murder's doubts that we will one day be able to travel at even 10% of the speed of light demonstrates a similar lack of faith in the potential for human technological advancement.
murder Member	Fri Sep 15 10:17:08 "Same reason we're doing so now...it's a fundamental human drive that ensures our survival as a species." I've heard about lots of reasons for having kids, but ensuring the survival of the species really only gets mentioned by narcissistic nerds. Also all that travel would require population control which goes completely against that supposed drive. "Or do you think the human population has always numbered 8 billion?" No, but the agriculture was invented and we needed cheap labor until we invented slavery. And then crazy religions came along to tell people that they had an obligation to multiply. When people are happy and not insane, most will stop at replacement levels of reproduction or even less. "Your and murder's doubts that we will one day be able to travel at even 10% of the speed of light demonstrates a similar lack of faith in the potential for human technological advancement." Never said that. Unlikely though. But either way 1/10th the speed of light would still leave every other star system well out of reach.
murder Member	Fri Sep 15 10:36:01 Why even 1% of light speed is hard What’s holding humanity back from reaching 1% of the speed of light? In a word, energy. Any object that’s moving has energy due to its motion. Physicists call this kinetic energy. To go faster, you need to increase kinetic energy. The problem is that it takes a lot of kinetic energy to increase speed. To make something go twice as fast takes four times the energy. Making something go three times as fast requires nine times the energy, and so on. For example, to get a teenager who weighs 110 pounds (50 kilograms) to 1% of the speed of light would cost 200 trillion Joules (a measurement of energy). That’s roughly the same amount of energy that 2 million people in the U.S. use in a day. http://int...each-1-the-speed-of-light-ever
obaminated Member	Fri Sep 15 10:45:15 It's amazing that murder will dig in on this. The one things human consistently do throughout our collective history is innovate. Its so ignorant and borderline naive to say we have a problem currently and therefore it is a problem we will never solve. Look at history. Where is there a natural world's problem in existence that we haven't either solved completely or taken steps in that direction? We will never be able to get off the ground because of gravity. Nope places. We will never develop engines strong enough to get to space. Nope rocket engines. We will never be able to get people to the moon and back alive. Nope Apollo missions. Seriously. It's so ignorant and naive to come out and say we will never be able to do something when our history is fucking filled with humans finding a way over and over again. And it's astounding that this line of logic never lands with you.
murder Member	Fri Sep 15 13:01:34 It's not a problem that can be solved. Even if we had the technology to do it, we simply can't access enough energy to do it. "For example, to get a teenager who weighs 110 pounds (50 kilograms) to 1% of the speed of light would cost 200 trillion Joules (a measurement of energy). That’s roughly the same amount of energy that 2 million people in the U.S. use in a day." Take that example and start multiplying by the number of people you want to ship to another star system. Assume they are all 110 lbs teenagers. And then add the mass of the ship and whatever fuel you're powering it with. Science fiction is not science. It's just fiction.
Sam Adams Member	Sat Sep 16 10:41:44 "not a problem that can be solved." Murder, veteran physicist, explaining why space shuttles are impossible because they use so much more energy than coal powered ocean liners, 1908. Now don't get me wrong the engineering of interstellar speed is insanely difficult. But 747s and computers looked insanely difficult just a few generations ago.
obaminated Member	Sat Sep 16 10:51:30 There are variables and solutions out there we haven't figured out. It's a dumb bet to assume we never will. 100 years ago it was unfathomable to live the world we live in today. And technology is advancing so quickly it is genuinely difficult to keep up with it. Imagine going into a coma in 2003 and waking up in 2023. Ignoring the socials and focusing solely on technology, its a completely different world.
murder Member	Sat Sep 16 11:06:23 The fact that we used to be bound to the earth and now we can fly is not evidence that that there is nothing beyond our reach. There are limits to what is feasible. Even if we could harness antimatter and produce it at scale, it's still not happening. That's why people proposing this kind of exploration start gibberishing about hyperspace and wormholes and warping space and that type of stuff while never explaining the economic or energy cost of pulling off such magic tricks. There's always some magic discovery just on the other side of the hill that will allow us to do what is currently impossible, and you're not supposed to question at what cost.
earthpig GTFO HOer	Sat Sep 16 23:34:20 "Generation ships are nonsense. If a population can thrive on a ship for hundreds or thousands of years, then wtf would they need a planet for?" The massive ship with massive redundancy might not exactly be 100% intact after a few hundred years.
Cherub Cow Member	Sun Sep 17 00:38:30 [murder]: "They don't have billions of people. For hundreds or thousands of years they have controlled their population. Why would they want to massively expand?" [Rugian]: "Same reason we're doing so now...it's a fundamental human drive that ensures our survival as a species." And there it is, right there. Murder has no concept of the drive for life. Like many such leftists, he would identify more with a nihilistic self-destructive no-imagination movie such as "Aniara" (2018) {a doomed ship with no future} than the metaphor used at the end of "Passengers" (2016) {'doomed' as an error, with life changing a ship's trajectory}. To the leftist / to the doomed nihilist, a ship floating across space becomes a sarcophagus, because a leftist can only see within the walls of his self-imposed prison, freeing himself only with pathetic dissimulation. To a life-affirming person, a ship floating across space becomes Theseus' ship (not necessarily the pop-culture paradox): ever-changing and symbolic of the hero's voyage. The no-imagination suicidal leftist cannot conceive of a ship that would itself change and grow to affirm life during its very journey. Imagine, for instance, a ship that could collect interstellar medium it passes and assemble and rearrange it into new material, building itself ever-greater as it travels (solar panels and Star Trek replicators to the extreme). They could build a Warhammer ship and vow to purge whatever ghoulish ancestor murder-types had left behind. But people such as murder have no future, so they can conceive of no future for others or for humanity. A person like him would never even attempt such a journey, and such a journey with him as pilot would be doomed as also he is doomed. The chaotic edge which would take such a journey is resigned to no such weaknesses, and such weaknesses would be heresy against the Imperium of Man.
Seb Member	Sun Sep 17 07:30:09 CC: The scenario posited requires the population of the generation ship to have controlled their drive for life. It is a reasonable question: if your means of transport requires multi-generational suppression of the urge to procreate, it is inconsistent to invoke it to suggest it would then play a major motivation several generations later. In addition, empirically, we see falling birth rates here on earth associated with development. "Imagine, for instance, a ship that could collect interstellar medium it passes" Sure, lets imagine that. The density of interstellar medium is 1 atom per cubic centimetre, and it is pretty much entirely hydrogen. If you swept out a 100km2 cross section in passage all the way to k-12b (124LY) at 100% efficiency you would gather about 1e27 atoms of hydrogen. About 150 grams of hydrogen. Not enough to replenish environmental losses I would imagine.
Seb Member	Sun Sep 17 07:31:14 EP: If you can set up a colony, you can certainly mine asteroids and fix the ship up.
Seb Member	Sun Sep 17 15:37:11 Whoops, editing brainfart. That was for 1000m2 I started to change for 100km2 but thought that implausible. But let's say you had a magic ramscoop that would get you on the order of 100-1000 tonnes. Which is not very much spread over several thousand years. And it's hydrogen so unless you are doing some crazy nuclei synthesis you won't be building new spaceship modules.
Seb Member	Sun Sep 17 15:38:31 You won't be building Gloriana battleships with that.
jergul large member	Mon Sep 18 18:41:19 Why are you even doing generation ships? Send off frozen embryos. Reach destination, Robots build the habitat. Plug in AI caretakers to foster the poor abortions people did not want to have in their innards. Two birds with one stone!
murder Member	Mon Sep 18 19:40:53 Sometimes jergul is brilliant. :o)
Nimatzo iChihuaha	Tue Sep 19 01:55:27 “In addition, empirically, we see falling birth rates here on earth associated with development.” Empirically we have seen rising CO2 in the atmosphere associated with development. So many undeclared assumptions here. Cue the list of all the modern diseases. You need to be honest, that you have an axiomatic anti-natalist position, for this other stuff to make sense, “assosicated” with development, isn’t an argument.
Seb Member	Tue Sep 19 04:37:31 Nim: "You need to be honest, that you have an axiomatic anti-natalist" This is why it is impossible to take you seriously. You scour every statement for evidence of heresy to your own ideological framework. Not everyone else is driven by such rigidly reductionist ideological framework. Please take your emotionally driven pseudo-religious discourse to someone who cares. It is a simple fact that there is a correlation between economic development and falling birth rates. This tends to suggest that left to their own devices and all other things being equal, people do not have this strong inbuilt instinct and preference for large families that is being posited. That isn't to say in this scenario people might well want to leave the ship for a likely quite hostile terrestrial environment. But it does suggest it might not be the no brainer suggested.
Seb Member	Tue Sep 19 05:42:39 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income_and_fertility
Seb Member	Tue Sep 19 05:45:22 Specifically: HDI vs Fertility https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:J_Curve.gif "“assosicated” with development, isn’t an argument." It is an observation of a well known correlation. The *argument* is that it seems to be contrary to a hypothesis that Humans will naturally want to optimise for reproduction over comfort.
Nimatzo iChihuaha	Wed Sep 20 06:42:14 “You scour every statement for evidence of heresy to your own ideological framework. Not everyone else is driven by such rigidly reductionist ideological framework.” No they are very obvious. And they are not heresy towards an ideological framework, but gibberish in the context of data and facts and reasoned arguments. Something associated with another thing, isn’t an argument against a third thing because of that association. There is a value system behind your argument, that is assumed as universal and requiring no explanation. Because the framing could just as well have been that a negative side effect of higher HDI is lower fertility. Either you mindlessly look at these KPIs and think that anything downstream is a good idea, or you think the down stream thing (lower birth rates) is a good in it's own. Observations are like wise meaningless without context and models. And I think this is where I am getting as you now explicitly put on the "I am the neutral observer of things" performance. This faux "observer of facts" is what I am poking at. Look at HDI and look at fertility! Are you against higher HDI?! So many assumptions, confounding relationships. The most interesting maybe that there is this fatalistic causal relationship between X and Y. It is simply the price you need to pay! In this thread you assert HDI <> fertility, but the formula is the same. "This tends to suggest that left to their own devices and all other things being equal, people do not have this strong inbuilt instinct and preference for large families that is being posited." Left to their own devices (we are not in any society, shape or form, left to our own devices). people do a lot of stupid things, things they regret, all kinds of things. Not a great argument. Thing is, you either have a really bizarre religious conviction that lower birth rates is good (because you decided to have 1 child), or you are uncritically looking at these KPIs and thinking that everything down stream must be good. Either way..
Seb Member	Wed Sep 20 07:06:54 Nim: "No they are very obvious" There is no straight line bet citing a well known correlation between HDI and fertility that implies the person citing it must be an ideological anti-natalist. Especially when I had a conversation with you only a few weeks ago about the need for ... pro-natalist policies. You are a swivel eyed loon and I can't be bothered to continue with this nonsense further.
Seb Member	Wed Sep 20 07:18:16 Bottom line, I do not think there is a strong case that a society that has adjusted over multiple generations to living on a spaceship (and by necessity controlling their reproduction rate) would necessarily decide that the best thing to do on arriving in a solar system is to immediately decant to a planet (likely fairly hostile to life) because... babies... urge to life... somehow... no shut up you're a leftist! Evidence suggests that this drive for lots of kids isn't very strong - at least not so much that economic incentives and quality of life preferences overcome it easily. One thing to move to a new part of town or a new city to have more space for more children. It's not inconceivable. It's certainly possible. But it is also quite conceivable the population would be split on the issue. It is difficult to imagine what social structures would exist on a generation ship, but I suspect they would be heavily small-c conservative and collectivist. That itself might be a drive for some people to get away by any means - but again - a society optimised for maintaining a space ship may well look for a more incrementalist approach of making more space ship rather than jumping down the gravity well. Especially if they did not command the bulk of the resources of the ship. An alien planet is unlikely to have a biome, and if it does, it is not likely to be one that is benevolent to human life. I think they would likely look to make more space-ships using materials in whatever the equivalent of the asteroid belt or trojans are - it seems more likely planetary colonisation would likely come only after a resource constraints on the space based population lifted enough that a suitably large population of "pioneers" willing to try to live on a planet after X generations came to be.
jergul large member	Wed Sep 20 07:24:29 Nimi Lower birthrates are good by objective standards. If an ecosystem is overpopulated, then it will find an equilibrium with a lower population through one way or another. Lower birth rates is the least painful way of reaching equilibrium. Global warming etc are caused by overpopulation. We are making our ecosystems worse because there are too many of us. You seem to get it in terms of generation ships where you accept that rigid population control for generations upon generations is an acceptable thing. Well, just think of Earth as a generation ship moving through space at 200 km/s along with its attendant solar system. Not that I favour mandated population control, but rather that I recognize lower birth rates as as the best adaption to ecosystem pressures we can do as individuals.
Seb Member	Wed Sep 20 07:30:07 "Look at HDI and look at fertility! Are you against higher HDI?!" This is just such jibberish. You are incapable of conceiving that other people might look at something without a giant values framework behind it. Generation ships are a purely theoretical exercise with pretty much no imminent real-world implications. This is a discussion about what might motivate a hypothetical population in a scenario so hypothetical as to be a fantasy. Whether you regard declining fertility with HDI as positive or negative in the context of the world today is not relevant. It simply suggests that an assumption that people will optimise for space to reproduce* over comfort isn't a good one. Demanding that it be framed in a positive or negative light when that is supremely irrelevant is exactly the unhinged ideological perspective I am talking about. *it's also based on the false assumption that the best way to get space is down a gravity well. It may be every bit as difficult to create living space there as it is on a generation ship; with the complexity that it has all sorts of unknown challenges to figure out whereas this society would by necessity have become really good at maintaining and managing life in a space ship.
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