Does that mean you’re for or against teroforming Mars?

This has to be the smartest channel on YouTube. This guy accomplished some amazing feats!

It is frustrating how relevant philosophy of mind becomes in figuring all of this out. I’m more of an engineer at heart and i’d love to say, let’s just build it if we can. But I can see how important that question “what is thinking?” Is becoming.

Slow down… they may deserve the basic rights of living beings, not living intelligent beings.

Lizards have brains too, but these are not more intelligent than lizards.

You would try not to step on a lizard if you saw it on the ground, but you wouldn’t think oh, maybe the lizard owns this land, I hope I don’t get sued for trespassing.

Well, I used to have an area of expertise… Then we adopted a kid.

Kids are hard. Kids who had years of neglect and trauma… can be a lot harder. I love him very much, but he takes up so much of my time and energy, I just don’t have any time for my own stuff any more.

Also, my field (IT) has gotten weird as computers have gotten weird. Nobody uses computers any more, they use “devices”. And these devices all suck. They’re hard (or impossible) to actually back up, you can’t deploy software to them in an organized way, they’re a security nightmare, and the interface just isn’t as easy to use as a freaking mouse and keyboard.

And if you want to talk about actual computers, those suck more every year too. Oh the hardware is improving by the day, but the software hasn’t been cooperative in years. Always online operating systems, fake settings menus to keep the user away from the real settings menus… Actually, nevermind, I don’t even want to talk about OSs, they make me too angry.

And then there’s all the software packages that would rather be services than what they actually are, a product. Poor Adobe, just not filthy rich enough yet…

Anyway, it gets harder to do IT as computers get shittier, and I am falling behind, because I hate it.

I think you hit the nail on the head with reality bites!

My mistake, I thought you had said something to that effect.

Well for what it’s worth, we do seem to be early. Our sun appears to be among the first wave of “3rd generation stars” (stars that were born from the nebula of a supernova of a star that was born the same way, from another supernova). It’s thought that only those 3rd Gen stars will have planets with enough heavy elements to support life. All elements heavier than iron [26] on the periodic table, can only be created naturally in a supernova.

So yeah, the theory is, if we’re one of the first 3rd Gen stars out there in this galaxy, and if life formed on this planet basically as soon as it could have after the earth cooled enough, then we’re probably early on the scene for life.

This is hilarious, a win-win in my book. I get to laugh at the ridiculous claim about radio waves frying people’s brains or whatever, and at the same time, every day of stalling hurts an exploitive POS telecom company.

I’m rooting for the loonies! Protect our kids! You show those lizard people!

Yeah agreed, there’s no way we’re picking up alien radio broadcasts, not over the noise produced by a star.

On the other hand, if a civilization were creating a Dyson sphere, or other large constructions, we’d be able to see those unusual elements in the light spectrum coming off the star. So it is conspicuous that we haven’t seen anything like that.

I’m sure that’s the case. You can travel to other stars without ftl, it’s just a lot slower and probably one way. It’s really pretty limiting for society, for instance, without ftl an interstellar “civilization” is basically out of the question, you can’t govern another star system without at the very least faster communication.

We don’t know what the Great Filter is, but it must be pretty destructive for a civ. I just want to point out the fact that the Great Filter is probably still ahead of us and that we shouldn’t take our existence for granted.

If there is a great filter…

I mean, as you said, we’re pretty early to the scene. Why can’t we be the first in this galaxy? Perhaps planets like earth aren’t rare over the lifetime of a galaxy, but they are rare in these early years of a galaxy. In other words, earth just developed quickly, so now we’re here before any other earth-like planets have had a chance to develop intelligent life.

Xenoanthroplology. We’re obviously not crazy and our many cultures are presumably much different from theirs. There would be enormous amounts to learn from studying our differences and our similarities.

Unless they’ve already simulated alien life in computer models… Then there’s not a lot left to learn.

It’s simple. We’re the first intelligent life in the galaxy. There is nobody else yet in our galaxy.

Also, probably nobody capable of traveling the stars wants to settle a planet. Once you figure out how to make huge spaceships (which you’ll need to travel interstellar space) you’ve essentially learned how to make cities in space. Our solar system would support a lot of people if we just used the resources available for space habitats, and by “lot” I mean in the quadrillions. And it turns out that all you need to support that population is a star to provide energy, and some planets to source materials from.

So with that in mind, why bother finding another habitable planet?

No, it really isn’t.

Whoa! Juno is still transmitting?! I thought that spacecraft had a really limited lifespan, due to the radiation ring around Jupiter. Pretty awesome that it’s still working!

Well if there’s not enough sun, wind could be a better option. I don’t know much about the climate in slovenia, so either could make more sense.

As for these new kinds of batteries, I don’t have the hard numbers on hand, but I know the current installed capacity is really small. So as a product, they’re still really new.

Grid scale storage has come a long way. There are saltwater batteries and flow batteries in use now, those technologies are here, they’re just still being iterated on and improved. And as the renewables get increasingly affordable, the demand for storage will rise with it. Now we’re still mostly deploying expensive lithium batteries, but as more of that gets installed, the demand for cheaper storage will skyrocket. And production generally follows demand.

So what’s the battery chemistry? Also, do they actually have an aircraft design, or is this just battery news?

Yeah, it totally could be.

That’s true, it does assume interstellar travel is physically possible, but at this point there are forms of interstellar travel that we know are possible.

Solar sails for instance, we know those work, we’ve tried it. Now if you wanted to travel to another star system with a solar sail, it’s just a matter of scaling that proven technology way up. We’re not ready to do that today, and we won’t be ready in the next 20 years, but to think that we wouldn’t be ready in 500 years, I find that idea far fetched.

But a much better technology would be fusion propulsion. With fusion drives you could get your cruising speed up to a meaningful fraction of the speed of light (perhaps 5-10%). At that rate you can make it to the closest stars in less than 100 years. And that technology is not at all far fetched. We truly are approaching working fusion power plants, it’s extremely likely that we can eventually develop fusion propulsion, or at the very least, fusion powered electrical propulsion (ion drive).

As for if it will ever be economically possible, I’m not at all worried about that. The fact is, there are a lot of resources and opportunities right here in our solar system, just waiting for people to utilize them. So people definitely will start mining and manufacturing in space eventually. And as we start to operate more in space, we will naturally continue to iterate and improve our methods of getting around. In short, over time it’s going to get cheaper and cheaper to make space ships and we’re going to get better and better at doing it. The economic factors are likely to fall into place eventually.

And finally, will interstellar travel ever be possible socially? Hey, your guess is as good as mine. I don’t think we have any way to answer that…