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CraigD

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Post and discuss interesting articles & videos about science and technology.

You don't need to be an expert - just interested in the wonders of modern science, technology, and the history of these fields.

Please keep it rational, and post articles from reputable sources.
Try not to editorialise headlines and keep the copy to just a paragraph with a link to the original source. When quoting excerpts from articles, I think the best method is to italicise the copy, and include a link to the source.

Have some fun with your comments and discussions... just keep the sources legitimate.

Other threads:
The Break Room has a number of other popular threads, so there is no need to post material here that is better suited to these other threads:

- Covid19-Coronavirus updates and news
- Conspiracy Thread Free For All
- The *religious* discussion thread


Please enjoy!
 
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The views expressed on this page by users and staff are their own, not those of NamePros.
"Drake states that given the uncertainties, the original meeting concluded that N ≈ L, and there were probably between 1000 and 100,000,000 planets with civilizations in the Milky Way galaxy."

And that's only in the Milky Way galaxy! Now thing about this:

Galaxies, explained

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/space/universe/galaxies/

"One 2016 study estimated that the observable universe contains two trillion—or two million million—galaxies. Some of those distant systems are similar to our own Milky Way galaxy, while others are quite different."

“Two possibilities exist: either we are alone in the Universe or we are not. Both are equally terrifying.”
Arthur C. Clarke ;)
 
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“Two possibilities exist: either we are alone in the Universe or we are not. Both are equally terrifying.”
Arthur C. Clarke ;)
I clearly bet for the second :)
Too many galaxies, too many stars, too many planets out there... I bet for the abundance of life out there! Even if we won't be able to see them, the odds are clearly favourable for life! :)
 
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I clearly bet for the second :)
Too many galaxies, too many stars, too many planets out there... I bet for the abundance of life out there! Even if we won't be able to see them, the odds are clearly favourable for life! :)

Life need not be little green men! 😉
 
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with the current technology be ready to be hibernating for thousands of years to reach a planet located 100 light years.

I think we will have more luck traveling inter/intra dimensionally before we master the ability to travel light years or 'wrangle' a wormhole into a stable 'highway'. Our 'ship' would simply stay in one place as we move from dimension to dimension...getting back to the starting point might be a problem. (just gave myself a headache thinking about it!)
 
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Life need not be little green men! 😉
Of course! Those would be even harder to see! :)
But although intelligent civilizations out there would be harder to see, I am sure there have been and there will be!
But those, would be only "visible" for a very very short time...
Just see what happens here on Earth. Dinosaurs lived during around 165 million years. We have been here around for just 300,000 years, the last 100 with substantial technology advances, and we are near to crush our habitat...
The main problem of intelligent civilizations seems right the power to destroy their own habitat.
 
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Too many galaxies, too many stars, too many planets out there

I've got no doubt the universe is filled with life...the building blocks are still being scattered all around the universe(s). Planets have been being seeded with the same stuff even before our humble little solar system was born (Sol is a second generation sun). All I pray is that the other life forms that buzz by our little rock on a regular basis don't suddenly decide we are tasty little treats. :xf.smile:
 
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Life need not be little green men! 😉
latest
 
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I've got no doubt the universe is filled with life...the building blocks are still being scattered all around the universe(s). Planets have been being seeded with the same stuff even before our humble little solar system was born (Sol is a second generation sun). All I pray is that the other life forms that buzz by our little rock on a regular basis don't suddenly decide we are tasty little treats. :xf.smile:

I always assumed Sol was a second generation star also, but I've seen some recent studies that propose it may be 3rd generation based on it's composition.

=======

The sun is relatively young, part of a generation of stars known as Population I, which are relatively rich in elements heavier than helium. An older generation of stars is called Population II, and an earlier generation of Population III may have existed, although no members of this generation are known yet.


https://www.space.com/58-the-sun-formation-facts-and-characteristics.html

=======

How can there be 1,000 stellar ancestors before our Sun?

Answer:

  • First generation - made from primordial big bang material.
  • Second generation - a star made only from the detritus of dying first generation stars, enriched in heavy elements but lacking in primary s-process elements.
  • Third generation - a star made from material already enriched in heavy elements and including elements that are produced in the s-process inside previous second (or third) generation stars.
Read the full answer in this well explained post.
https://astronomy.stackexchange.com...ere-be-1-000-stellar-ancestors-before-our-sun
 
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I've got no doubt the universe is filled with life...the building blocks are still being scattered all around the universe(s). Planets have been being seeded with the same stuff even before our humble little solar system was born (Sol is a second generation sun). All I pray is that the other life forms that buzz by our little rock on a regular basis don't suddenly decide we are tasty little treats. :xf.smile:

They have mastered interstellar travel. Most likely they will see us a primitive annoyance and leave us alone.



Hopefully.😁
 
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https://www.space.com/58-the-sun-formation-facts-and-characteristics.html

The sun is one of more than 100 billion stars in the Milky Way

Now multiply 100 billion by two trillion galaxies, and the chances for life in the Universe are quite high!

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/space/universe/galaxies/

"One 2016 study estimated that the observable universe contains two trillion—or two million million—galaxies. Some of those distant systems are similar to our own Milky Way galaxy, while others are quite different."
 
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https://www.space.com/58-the-sun-formation-facts-and-characteristics.html

The sun is one of more than 100 billion stars in the Milky Way

Now multiply 100 billion by two trillion galaxies, and the chances for life in the Universe are quite high!

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/space/universe/galaxies/

"One 2016 study estimated that the observable universe contains two trillion—or two million million—galaxies. Some of those distant systems are similar to our own Milky Way galaxy, while others are quite different."

That's a lot of chances for life in the universe, but I find it pertinent that in the last 4.5 billion years, life (complex life) probably only evolved once on Earth, although recent studies are making different conclusions:

Why complex life probably evolved only once
21 October 2010
The universe may be teeming with simple cells like bacteria, but more complex life – including intelligent life – is probably very rare. That is the conclusion of a radical rethink of what it took for complex life to evolve here on Earth. It suggests that complex alien life-forms could only evolve if an event that happened just once in Earth’s history [the eukaryotic cell] was repeated somewhere else.
https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn18734-why-complex-life-probably-evolved-only-once/


Life may have emerged not once, but many times on Earth
17 August 2016
Far from being a miracle that happened just once in 4 billion years, life's beginnings could have been so commonplace that it began many times over.
https://www.newscientist.com/articl...sily-that-it-started-not-once-but-many-times/


Complex Life Could Have Existed on Earth at Least Once Before
18 JANUARY 2017
Complex life might have come and gone on Earth long before the multicellular organisms we're familiar with today arose, a new study suggests. It's generally thought that the evolution of complex life was a rare, once-in-4.5-billion-years event. But new research suggests that conditions were right for complex cells to evolve and die off at least once - or perhaps several times - before our lineage even got started.
https://www.sciencealert.com/complex-life-could-have-existed-on-earth-at-least-once-before
 
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Complex Life Could Have Existed on Earth at Least Once Before
18 JANUARY 2017
Complex life might have come and gone on Earth long before the multicellular organisms we're familiar with today arose, a new study suggests. It's generally thought that the evolution of complex life was a rare, once-in-4.5-billion-years event. But new research suggests that conditions were right for complex cells to evolve and die off at least once - or perhaps several times - before our lineage even got started.
https://www.sciencealert.com/complex-life-could-have-existed-on-earth-at-least-once-before
I find them super interesting. On the last article:

"But let's backtrack for a second. Earth has been around for an estimated 4.5 billion years. Around 3.7 billion years ago, while the planet was still relatively fresh, two of the three kingdoms of life we see on Earth today - bacteria and archaea - arose.

It's thought that these simple, single-celled organisms survived for billions of years on their own, until around 1.75 billion years ago, when the third kingdom of life, eukaryotes, appeared.

The eukaryote family tree encompasses all complex organisms on the planet, including animals (that's us), plants, fungi, and protists.

It's still debated exactly how eukaryotes arose, but the most accepted hypothesis is that an archea swallowed a bacterial cell, and the two developed a symbiotic relationships that allowed them to work together to become more complex.

Eventually, the bacteria became the mitochondria we see in our cells today."

The moment the archea swallowed a bacteria and the two developed a symbiotic relationship, was the moment of the beginning of complex life in our planet.
And this moment took 2 billion years to take place!
This moment is again like winning a Lotto, a very very difficult one. But there were 2 billion years of time, for it to take place.
What I mean, is that even the archea swallowing a bacteria moment was a very difficult lottery to win, as it took 2 billion years to happen... finally it happened!
 
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I'm loving these articles, videos and discussions that you guys have been posting this week.

So much to think about!

A big thank you!

Unfortunately I have not been getting any work done ;(
 
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I'm loving these articles, videos and discussions that you guys have been posting this week.

So much to think about!

A big thank you!

Unfortunately I have not been getting any work done ;(
Same here! Thanks for the great discussion. To be continued another day! : )
 
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They have mastered interstellar travel. Most likely they will see us a primitive annoyance and leave us alone.



Hopefully.😁

“Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the western spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun. Orbiting this at a distance of roughly ninety-two million miles is an utterly insignificant little blue green planet whose ape-descended life forms are so amazingly primitive that they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea.”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
 
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Quantum Tunnels Show How Particles Can Break the Speed of Light

Recent experiments show that particles should be able to go faster than light when they quantum mechanically “tunnel” through walls

https://www.quantamagazine.org/quantum-tunnel-shows-particles-can-break-the-speed-of-light-20201020/

“Nothing travels faster than the speed of light, with the possible exception of bad news, which obeys its own special laws.”
- Douglas Adams, Mostly Harmless
 
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Asteroid sample leaking from Osiris Rex
 
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The Fermi Paradox — Where Are All The Aliens?
The universe is unbelievably big – trillions of stars and even more planets. Soo… there just has to be life out there, right? But where is it? Why don’t we see any aliens? Where are they? And more importantly, what does this tell us about our own fate in this gigantic and scary universe?



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Further information:

The Fermi Paradox: where are the aliens?
https://www.space.com/25325-fermi-paradox.html

An Explanation for the Absence of Extraterrestrials on Earth by Michael Hart - Royal Astronomical Society (RAS) Quarterly Journal 1975.
(Some say this is the first such paper to explore the Fermi paradox).
http://adsabs.harvard.edu/full/1975QJRAS..16..128H

The Fermi Paradox
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_paradox

Enrico Fermi - physicist and the creator of the world's first nuclear reactor
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enrico_Fermi
 
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Did Life on Earth Come from Space? Panspermia
How did life on Earth get started? Did life on Earth originate on another planet? Either Mars, or in a distant solar system? Could Earth life have spread to have seeded life elsewhere? Let’s see what modern science has to say about the plausibility of panspermia.

Another great video from Dr. Matt O'Dowd at PBS Space Time

 
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The universe is unbelievably big – trillions of stars and even more planets. Soo… there just has to be life out there, right? But where is it? Why don’t we see any aliens? Where are they? And more importantly, what does this tell us about our own fate in this gigantic and scary universe?

Although I promised I would not share this under penalty of being probed the next time 'they' came to visit me....

We, humans/earthlings, are being watched/protected by much more advance beings/races. Just like the remaining tribes on earth, that are less technologically advanced, that are being to allowed to remain on their own paths. The times we have intentionally interacted with the majority of them was to 'help' them is some way due to necessity (dam building, rampant disease, etc).

Considering we are a 2nd or 3rd generation solar system, there are many more advanced 'races' in our galaxy and surrounding known universe.

Of course I could be wrong and my medicinal marijuana may be a tad too strong. :xf.smile::xf.grin::xf.wink:

Uncontacted tribes: What do we know about the world's 100 hidden communities?

https://bigthink.com/scotty-hendric...-uncontacted-tribes-in-the-world-who-are-they
 
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Although I promised I would not share this under penalty of being probed the next time 'they' came to visit me....

We, humans/earthlings, are being watched/protected by much more advance beings/races. Just like the remaining tribes on earth, that are less technologically advanced, that are being to allowed to remain on their own paths. The times we have intentionally interacted with the majority of them was to 'help' them is some way due to necessity (dam building, rampant disease, etc).

Considering we are a 2nd or 3rd generation solar system, there are many more advanced 'races' in our galaxy and surrounding known universe.

Of course I could be wrong and my medicinal marijuana may be a tad too strong. :xf.smile::xf.grin::xf.wink:

Uncontacted tribes: What do we know about the world's 100 hidden communities?

https://bigthink.com/scotty-hendric...-uncontacted-tribes-in-the-world-who-are-they
health-beauty-rectal-rectal_exams-physical-yearly_physical-prostate-mbcn4324_low.jpg




I remember this case recently.

Man killed on remote Indian island tried to 'declare Jesus' to tribe
John Allen Chau’s diary suggests he knew the risks of going to North Sentinel Island.
The Sentinelese are estimated to number about 100 and are the most isolated of the four tribes native to the Andamans.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/nov/22/john-allen-chau-man-killed-by-tribe-north-sentinel-island-declare-jesus
 
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Far be it for me to convince anyone otherwise, but all pertinent evidence (scientific, naturalistic or otherwise) makes clear one point: we *human beings, are all one tribe. Just as the life giving water on our planet, however pure, polluted and/or divided, it is still H20. While the percentage of water in our bodily fluids may vary, so too does our gene pool, but the common denominator is - that we are all one.

Either through Socratic debate or Scientific proof, as a society we have become conditioned to think (or not to think as the case may be), that our differences make us who we are as individuals. This idea may seem radical, even revolutionary to some who would choose to believe otherwise. As an evolved race (or de-evolved as the case may be), we allow ourselves to accept the notion that we are different somehow.

However, if we remove ourselves from the ego, the inherited ethos and the bias of our programmed schema, we may find wisdom - thereby allowing us to embrace our commonalities - that which binds us together as we venture to understand and make sense of it all. Hidden within us is a common thread, that we, *spiritual beings having a human experience (not the other way around), live within and share a limited bubble of the biosphere that supports life on our planet. IMO, therein lies the only difference.
 
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About the wikipedia article, these would be my answers to the Paradox, if there's any paradox:
Right!
  • With high probability, some of these stars have Earth-like planets.[5]
Right!
  • Many of these stars, and hence their planets, are much older than the Sun.[6][7] If the Earth is typical, some may have developed intelligent life long ago.
Right!
That is assuming too much, in my opinion. One thing is having life, even "intelligent" life, and another thing is "developing interstellar travel" technology.
  • Even at the slow pace of currently envisioned interstellar travel, the Milky Way galaxy could be completely traversed in a few million years.[8]
Wow, so easy to do it, just a few million years! From when aliens see there's life on our planet, to when they arrive to planet Earth, humans very likely would be already disapeared a few millions years ago.
  • And since many of the stars similar to the Sun are billions of years older, the Earth should have already been visited by extraterrestrial civilizations, or at least their probes.[9]
Really, I don't get how did they come to this point. In fact, every point about space-time, the immense space distances, the immense amount of stars, the immense time, favours the fact that would be just very improbable, near impossible, to any extraterrestrial civilization to be able or even to want to reach our planet. Why should they choose our Solar System planet, between the 100 billion stars on the Milky Way? Supposing they have that amazing technology to make interstellar travels...
  • However, there is no convincing evidence that this has happened.[8]
I agree on this one :)
 
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