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Nuttin` but cow fetuses out there ...

POSTED BY: KNIBBLET
UPDATED: Monday, August 9, 2004 10:17
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Wednesday, August 4, 2004 8:48 AM

KNIBBLET


This interesting little tidbit caught my eye :)

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/5594683/

Perhaps other than humans, the only intelligence out there is cow fetuses.

Actually ... thinking about it ... humans aren't overly blessed with intelligence. The ONLY intelligence out there is cow fetuses. Lucky for them, we're a peaceful race.

"Just keep walkin, preacher man."

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Wednesday, August 4, 2004 8:58 AM

EMBERS


Quote:

Originally posted by Knibblet:
Lucky for them, we're a peaceful race.



peaceful to whom? The cows?
Cause really...not so much.

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Wednesday, August 4, 2004 9:02 AM

HERO


Quote:

Originally posted by Knibblet:
The ONLY intelligence out there is cow fetuses. Lucky for them, we're a peaceful race.



I'm as peacable as they come, so long as they stay on their side of the fork.

H

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Wednesday, August 4, 2004 9:05 AM

KNIBBLET


Quote:

Originally posted by Hero:
I'm as peacable as they come, so long as they stay on their side of the fork.


*ROFLMAOPIPDFETYH*
rolling on floor laughing my ass off peeing in pants dying of exphixiation thank you Hero

"Just keep walkin, preacher man."

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Wednesday, August 4, 2004 10:07 AM

CORWYN


The article was remarkable content-free.

I suspect that Joss (of all people) is right on this (at least as applies to _his_ future history). We are alone now, and in 500 years when we are spread over 70-odd planets and moons, we will still be alone.

Given we don't have incontrovertible proof of alien life now, a few more star systems and a few more years aren't going to make much of a difference.

With a hundred billion stars in out galaxy alone there is just too much territory to search, and no reliable way of determining from afar (we can't tell if there is life on Mars and that is right next door).

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Wednesday, August 4, 2004 4:52 PM

RUE

I have a vote and I'm not afraid to use it!


deeeeep sighhhh.
Rare, maybe unique. It's too bad we're screwing it up.

Did you hear the one about the planet so loaded with CO2 it got hot enough to turn sulfate rock and water into sulfuric acid? That's Venus, and maybe Earth's future.

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Wednesday, August 4, 2004 7:27 PM

NOOCYTE


"Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence." SOURCE: "Demon Haunted World," Carl Sagan.

There's significant evidence that life begin to self-organize on Earth almost immediately (in geological terms, mind you) after the planet cooled enough to allow wildly complex chains of organic molecules to form. In other words, life began to form as soon as it was possible. Check out At Home In The Universe, by Stuart Kauffman for more on this...

This finding, if it continues to be supported by the evidence, would very strongly suggest that such a process is apt to burst forth anywhere else that such conditions prevail. My personal opinion is that the 'verse is teeming with life (finding primitive life in Mars' subsurface and/or in Europa's immense subsurface ocean would all-but cement this opinion into a foregone conclusion for me).

Now, the presence of sentience (or self-reflexive awareness, or 'intelligence,' or whatever) is a much more difficult issue, since it is pretty much a sequence of wildly improbable accidents which set the stage for its emergence on Earth. Some say that, had the K-T impact not cleared away the dinosaurs and allowed the ascendency of mammals, the intelligent species on Earth would have probably been a descendent of velociraptors. Intriguing, but impossible to demonstrate in any falsifiable way.

As it happens, it was the elimination of the dominant Class of organisms (dinosaurs) which allowed another Class (mammals) to fill the vacant ecological niches. Such a happy (for us!) sequence of accidents cannot be relied on to occur elsewhere with any great frequency.

There are those who would counter that the development of sentience gave such a tremendous adaptive advantage in terms of flexible, real-time adaptation to environmental changes (and molding of the environment to suit the needs of the species), "allowing our hypotheses to die in our stead," (Karl Popper) that its appearance was an inevitable result of the complexification of living systems through evolution. It's a flattering notion.

However, there are manymanymanymanyMANY species on this planet which are doing Just Fine without a hugely swollen bulb of central nervous tissue allowing them to run analogue simulations of the world between their ears. We must be careful to avoid the "anthropic principle," and presuming that we stand at the TOP of some kind of evolutionary pyramid. There are lots of factors which confer an evolutionary advantage to an organism, and sentience is only one of them (and, I feel compelled to add, the long-term viability of that adaptation is still in question...)

So.....

I believe as strongly as I feel comfortable believing in the absence of direct evidence, that a far-enough-ranging exploration of our galaxy will reveal MUCH more than cow fetuses. I rather less strongly (but still much more than a little) suspect that some kind of self-aware organisms have emerged somewhere in this 'verse of billions of galaxies (to say nothing of widening our search parameters to include any parallel 'verses which might lurk, say, between the molecules of my dog's eyebrows).

But Joss' vision of a colonized region of space (see as he deftly sidesteps the whole One/Many system(s) conundrum-dee-dum) which is vacant of intelligent aliens is quite plausible. They may be somewhere...but they needn't be here. And this lets him explore all those nice juicy themes of existential solitude.

Is it April yet?..............

Keep flyin'!



Department of Redundancy Department

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Thursday, August 5, 2004 2:51 AM

BROWNCOAT1

May have been the losing side. Still not convinced it was the wrong one.


Quote:

Originally posted by Knibblet:
This interesting little tidbit caught my eye :)

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/5594683/

Perhaps other than humans, the only intelligence out there is cow fetuses.

Actually ... thinking about it ... humans aren't overly blessed with intelligence. The ONLY intelligence out there is cow fetuses. Lucky for them, we're a peaceful race.

"Just keep walkin, preacher man."



Interesting article Knibs, but without planetary exploration it is only so much speculation. We would be highly arrogant indeed to think that we are alone in this vast 'verse.

Personally I think of the the, what, most likely millions of planets in the universe there are many other planets capable of supporting life, we just haven't gotten of this rock to go find them.

"May have been the losing side. Still not convinced it was the wrong one."


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Friday, August 6, 2004 7:35 PM

NOOCYTE


Quote:

Originally posted by BrownCoat1:
Quote:

Originally posted by Knibblet:
This interesting little tidbit caught my eye :)

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/5594683/

Perhaps other than humans, the only intelligence out there is cow fetuses.

Actually ... thinking about it ... humans aren't overly blessed with intelligence. The ONLY intelligence out there is cow fetuses. Lucky for them, we're a peaceful race.

"Just keep walkin, preacher man."



Interesting article Knibs, but without planetary exploration it is only so much speculation. We would be highly arrogant indeed to think that we are alone in this vast 'verse.

Personally I think of the the, what, most likely millions of planets in the universe there are many other planets capable of supporting life, we just haven't gotten of this rock to go find them.

"May have been the losing side. Still not convinced it was the wrong one."




Well, as for the "arrogant" part, I think this is only one of the attitudes which might accompany that belief, the other being "lonely." If there is no other life in the 'verse, then that places a GREAT responsibility on us, since that makes us, as Carl Sagan once said, "the universe made aware of itself." If anything, that makes me feel mighty humble and obliged to make a good account of myself, and to use this immeasurably unlikely windfall called consciousness to the best effect I can. After all (to quote "Angel"), "If nothing we do matters, then nothing matters but what we do."

As for the "getting off this rock" bit, I agree and disagree. I am a MAJOR supporter of moving out into the cosmos and seeing what is there (since, as previously noted, we are the only ones we know of who are actually looking). Where I diverge somewhat is in dissing the Earth so. This is one fabulously lovely planet we have here, and I think it would poison the stream of our explorations if our emerging mobility in space were to cause us to devalue our origins. I know that's not what you meant, Browncoat1 but, in case you haven't noticed, I tend to get hung up on the implications of even the most seemingly inoccuous words. I don't know about you, but the words, "Earth-that-was" fill me with tremendous sadness and loss. I suspect that this was part of Joss' intent. The characters of Firefly are people who can Never Go Home, and are adrift in a universe in which they lack the existential anchor which we take for granted. Heavy stuff...

In any case, the previously cited article spoke to the formation of extrasolar planets, which we are not likely to be jetting off, in person, to see for the next few generations at least (have to get out of low Earth orbit first, y'see!). Also, it pretty much spoke to theories which are advanced without much in the way of observation (since we have no scopes which can directly resolve anything around another sun [imagine trying to spot a candle next to one of those Hollywood spotlights at a range of a mile]). I think that article's tentative conclusions have to be taken with a bag of salt till we can gather more data. The one thing I can say with certainty is that we are going to be surprised by what we find.

Keep flyin'!!



Department of Redundancy Department

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Monday, August 9, 2004 6:18 AM

BROWNCOAT1

May have been the losing side. Still not convinced it was the wrong one.


Quote:

Originally posted by Noocyte:
Quote:

Originally posted by BrownCoat1:
Quote:

Originally posted by Knibblet:
This interesting little tidbit caught my eye :)

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/5594683/

Perhaps other than humans, the only intelligence out there is cow fetuses.

Actually ... thinking about it ... humans aren't overly blessed with intelligence. The ONLY intelligence out there is cow fetuses. Lucky for them, we're a peaceful race.

"Just keep walkin, preacher man."



Interesting article Knibs, but without planetary exploration it is only so much speculation. We would be highly arrogant indeed to think that we are alone in this vast 'verse.

Personally I think of the the, what, most likely millions of planets in the universe there are many other planets capable of supporting life, we just haven't gotten of this rock to go find them.

"May have been the losing side. Still not convinced it was the wrong one."




Well, as for the "arrogant" part, I think this is only one of the attitudes which might accompany that belief, the other being "lonely." If there is no other life in the 'verse, then that places a GREAT responsibility on us, since that makes us, as Carl Sagan once said, "the universe made aware of itself." If anything, that makes me feel mighty humble and obliged to make a good account of myself, and to use this immeasurably unlikely windfall called consciousness to the best effect I can. After all (to quote "Angel"), "If nothing we do matters, then nothing matters but what we do."

As for the "getting off this rock" bit, I agree and disagree. I am a MAJOR supporter of moving out into the cosmos and seeing what is there (since, as previously noted, we are the only ones we know of who are actually looking). Where I diverge somewhat is in dissing the Earth so. This is one fabulously lovely planet we have here, and I think it would poison the stream of our explorations if our emerging mobility in space were to cause us to devalue our origins. I know that's not what you meant, Browncoat1 but, in case you haven't noticed, I tend to get hung up on the implications of even the most seemingly inoccuous words. I don't know about you, but the words, "Earth-that-was" fill me with tremendous sadness and loss. I suspect that this was part of Joss' intent. The characters of Firefly are people who can Never Go Home, and are adrift in a universe in which they lack the existential anchor which we take for granted. Heavy stuff...

In any case, the previously cited article spoke to the formation of extrasolar planets, which we are not likely to be jetting off, in person, to see for the next few generations at least (have to get out of low Earth orbit first, y'see!). Also, it pretty much spoke to theories which are advanced without much in the way of observation (since we have no scopes which can directly resolve anything around another sun [imagine trying to spot a candle next to one of those Hollywood spotlights at a range of a mile]). I think that article's tentative conclusions have to be taken with a bag of salt till we can gather more data. The one thing I can say with certainty is that we are going to be surprised by what we find.

Keep flyin'!!



Department of Redundancy Department



You are right Noocyte, I did not mean anything disrespectful towards the Earth when I used that phrase.

Personally I love this planet, and it feels me w/ a sense of dread to think that we may render her inhabitable because of our foolish, wasteful ways. I would love to see some conservation programs and safe, clean, alternate energy sources found to preserve the natural resources we have now.

"May have been the losing side. Still not convinced it was the wrong one."


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Monday, August 9, 2004 7:16 AM

NOOCYTE


Browncoat1 wrote:
Quote:

You are right Noocyte, I did not mean anything disrespectful towards the Earth when I used that phrase.

Personally I love this planet, and it feels me w/ a sense of dread to think that we may render her inhabitable because of our foolish, wasteful ways. I would love to see some conservation programs and safe, clean, alternate energy sources found to preserve the natural resources we have now.



Right on, Browncoat. There is a bit of irony here, in that a determined push into space could play a large hand in our conservation efforts. Beamed solar energy, mining helium-3 for fusion (if that research ever gets properly funded, ferchrissakes!), extraction of raw materials (strip-mining doesn't bother me so much when it takes place on lifeless, ecology-less asteroids) and the like would seriously reduce the degree to which we ravage our fair planet in order to maintain our standard of living.

Now, I'm all aware that we're a loong way from having such efforts be sufficiently cost effective to compete with terrestrial industries on the open market. But you gotta start somewhere (and things like the X-Prize are a Very Good Start in bringing down launch costs, which are the main bottleneck here). But that's another thread...

Keep flyin'!!



Department of Redundancy Department

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Monday, August 9, 2004 7:57 AM

ANNIK


Quote:

Originally posted by Noocyte:
However, there are manymanymanymanyMANY species on this planet which are doing Just Fine without a hugely swollen bulb of central nervous tissue allowing them to run analogue simulations of the world between their ears. We must be careful to avoid the "anthropic principle," and presuming that we stand at the TOP of some kind of evolutionary pyramid. There are lots of factors which confer an evolutionary advantage to an organism, and sentience is only one of them (and, I feel compelled to add, the long-term viability of that adaptation is still in question...)



Woo hoo! Let's give it up for the bacteria, folks!

Single-celled organisms *rule*.

Cheers,
Annik
... my sister's a ship. We had a complicated childhood.

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Monday, August 9, 2004 10:09 AM

NOOCYTE


Quote:

Originally posted by annik:
Quote:

Originally posted by Noocyte:
However, there are manymanymanymanyMANY species on this planet which are doing Just Fine without a hugely swollen bulb of central nervous tissue allowing them to run analogue simulations of the world between their ears. We must be careful to avoid the "anthropic principle," and presuming that we stand at the TOP of some kind of evolutionary pyramid. There are lots of factors which confer an evolutionary advantage to an organism, and sentience is only one of them (and, I feel compelled to add, the long-term viability of that adaptation is still in question...)



Woo hoo! Let's give it up for the bacteria, folks!

Single-celled organisms *rule*.

Cheers,
Annik
... my sister's a ship. We had a complicated childhood.



Divide and conquer, baby, divide and conquer....

Department of Redundancy Department

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Monday, August 9, 2004 10:17 AM

DIEGO


Quote:

Originally posted by Knibblet:
This interesting little tidbit caught my eye :)

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/5594683/

Perhaps other than humans, the only intelligence out there is cow fetuses.




I'm surprised that nobody mentioned the follwoing point. Okay, the article is basing its conclusions entirely on estimates of the likelihood of earthlike planets based on a model of planet formation. But we don't know enough to really limit the conditions under which life (in some form) could evolve. I'm not seriously proposing that if most planets in the galaxy are gas giants that life would be common. I'm simply saying we don't know what hypotheses we can reject yet.

I still think Joss definitely chose the right path for both good scientific and artistic reasons (i.e. the theme of loneliness in the void and the fact that Reavers are far scarier than any alien race precisely because they are us). Sure there may be life out there, and there may be/have been/will be intelligent life in the 'verse but what are our chances of finding them? Besides he neatly sidesteps the problem of creating realistic aliens that has plagues all science-fiction attempting to potray ETs.

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