A few years ago I moved to a new place and needed to line up a new home for a very sweet stray cat who had turned up on my doorstep. So he went to live with my Mom in the country.

At first he was puzzled by his new surroundings, but eventually he figured things out. It took him about six weeks to go from playing with mice the other cat brought in, to catching his own and playing with them, to discovering they were edible. And much tastier than cat food. Crunch crunch crunch.

...laura

Doesn't really work. Even if you go to a small scale and download into very small computers, you can still do more with a larger computer. You can always do more with more computing power.

I bought a trackpad for my Mac earlier this year on a whim, and I love it. I know, drinking the kool-aid and all that. So sue me... :-)

...laura

Indeed. That will, eventually, kill YouTube far more effectively than intrusive ads or changes in terms of service.

I first noticed playback issues earlier this year. Everybody is complaining about it. The support forums are full of platitudes about updating plugins and flushing one's cache. None of which makes any difference: YouTube is broken. And if it doesn't actually work, i.e. deliver content, the advertising is going to be irrelevant.

My preferred browser is Chrome, BTW. If YouTube doesn't work properly with Google's own browser, we're in big trouble.

...laura

You cannot use quantum entanglement to transmit information. You can use it to make two people have secret shared data. You can't control at all what this shared data is. The analogy that may help would be if Alice and Bob have a magic pair of coins, and it is guaranteed that if they both flip them at the same time, both coins will turn up heads or both coins will turn up tails. They cannot use this to transmit information to each other. As to your claim that "Radio transmissions are WEAK, they're probably swallowed by the outer rim of the solar system"- there's no special barrier at the end of the solar system. If there were, we'd see it blocking radio astronomy.

I think your first point is the strongest, there may not have been enough time for life to evolve to any substantial intelligence in this state. However, I'd be more worried that given a few million years to evolve, the life could then survive in areas that are more harsh. Life could never have originated in the Sahara for example, but that doesn't stop there from being life that has evolved to survive and prosper there. The last sentence is interesting: do you mean that they wipe themselves out using nuclear weapons or do you mean something else?

We don't have a complete theory of abiogenesis, true. But we don't need it to see that our plausible hypotheses don't make life arising to be that unlikely. And we have empirical evidence as well: we have traces of life that date back to very soon after Earth became hospitable. The Late Heavy Bombardment http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Late_Heavy_Bombardment ended some 3.8 billion years ago. The oldest fossils date to around 3.5 billion years ago. See http://www.paleosoc.org/Oldest_Fossil.pdf This suggests that life can arise in under 300 million years. It is possible of course that life arose during the LHB, and we cannot rule out panspermia. But together with the fact that many of the basic chemicals (e.g. many amino acid) used in life are not much more complicated than those that occur through non-living processes, we shouldn't at all expect there to be some magic time period it takes before life can form.

As to your statement that "primordial soup experiment was bullshit"- I presume you are taking about the Miller-Urey experiments http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miller-Urey_experiment. Why don't I just quote from the introduction of that Wikipedia article.

You may want to look at the section "Other experiments http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miller-Urey_experiment#Other_experiments. So, yes by all means, please point me and others where to go to read up on how Milley's work was "bullshit" since I don't see it in any of the obvious places.

The issue isn't the use of radio waves as an incidental. Radio waves come out from deliberate attempts by civilizations try to set up beacons and say "Hey! We're here." I agree that are normal radio use is insufficient to be detected. Heck, even if you were at Alpha Centauri, telling that our radio transmissions are not natural would be tough. As to the large scale projects in question, simply calling them myths and saying "lol" is not a logical response, but essentially the absurdity heuristic http://lesswrong.com/lw/j4/absurdity_heuristic_absurdity_bias/. As to stellar lifting, you could instead of just declaring your ignorance spend a few seconds Googling or looking at Wikipedia. See here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stellar_uplift. And no, you don't generally do stellar uplifting to your own home star (unless you are doing something to extend its lifespan which seems dubious). You'd do stellar uplifting and similar techniques to get useful mass out of stars that don't have habitable planets near them (at least if you were remotely ethical from a human standpoint).

Radio waves aren't useful as much as a method of communication from incidental power. Indeed, even in the last few years, as our radio systems have become more efficient, Earth has become on many frequencies darker than it was in the 1960s. The key isn't use of radio waves as an incidental, but as a method a culture might deliberately use to say "hey! Look! We're out here!" As to Dyson spheres, they are one example of many possible large scale projects, but I'm curious why you consider them in particular to be "obserd[sic] joke"- they are if possible, an extremely useful way of using a large amount of available energy.

I'm curious why you think that given that for example a small Class A stellar engine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stellar_engine appears to be buildable with what we know about materials science. And this isn't the only example of such. The requirements are purely on the amount of resources that need to go in, not physical limitations. Yes, some specific suggestions would require materials that look impossible. For example, an inflexible single piece ringworld is likely to be impossible (the tensile strength among other requirements make it implausible). But many megascale structures aren't in that category.

No. Absolutely not. First note that tachyons and gravitons aren't "magical" there's a massive difference between theoretical particles consistent with the laws of physics. It is likely that tachyons do not exist, since they'd either allow causality violations (unlikely) or they'd not allow communication. Similarly, thinking that one could use something like gravitons to communicate is just silly since they'd be incredibly weak. I don't have any belief in some galactic fraternity, but your attempt to pigeon hole rather than read what people write is interesting. Concerns about the Great Filter arise specifically from there being no evidence of anything remotely like that. If there were any reason to think that was at all likely, we could breath a lot easier.

So, we're in complete agreement here. But the problem is what this leads to: it means that out of the civilizations, none of them are trying anything on a large scale, not even the few more ambitious ones. This suggests that once life gets sufficiently advanced, it gets wiped out somehow. The Great Filter is a serious problem: Nick Bostrom and his colleagues at the Future of Humanity Institute for example have given this a lot of thought. See for example http://www.nickbostrom.com/extraterrestrial.pdf. And this is very much the sort of problem where if it exists, pretending it doesn't won't make it go away.

Doesn't work. It isn't just a lack of Dyson spheres. It is a complete lack of any signs of artificial structure, or of use of the vast amounts of energy available from stars. As far as we can tell, everything looks natural.

This is pretty scary. One of the major unsolved problems right now is the Fermi problem- why we don't see any signs of civilizations other than our own, not just no radio transmissions but no Dyson spheres (and yes, we've looked http://home.fnal.gov/~carrigan/infrared_astronomy/Fermilab_search.htm, stellar uplifting, ringworlds or the like. Whatever is blocking this is the so-called Great Filter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Filter. Now, some of the Filter could be in our past. It may be tough for life to arise or for multicellular life to arise, etc. However, the more disturbing possibility is that it exists in our future: maybe civilizations before they can spread out manage to wipe themselves out with their technologies, such as through nuclear war, bad nanotech, engineered bioweapons, resource depletion, environmental damage, or something we haven't even thought about before.

Over the last few years, more and more evidence has suggested that a lot of the obvious filtration events in the past aren't serious filters. For example, we've found that planets are common. This is not only an example of more such evidence, but it suggests that if life got started it would have had billions years more to evolve, meaning that evolutionarily based filters will be substantially less effective. Worse, it undermines one of the easier ways to try and get around a filter, to suggest that the conditions for complex life didn't arise until recently. There are serious problems with that idea already (especially the fact that life on Earth spent hundreds of millions of years in near stasis), and this makes those problems even more severe. If this checks out, it will be strong evidence that a substantial portion of the filter is in the future. If so, it is likely that the Filter is something that is going to happen to us within the next few hundred years, since it gets harder to wipe out a civilization once they spread beyond their initial planet, and most obvious things that would do so are also more noticeable.

I use Chrome as the lesser of two evils. Face it: everybody who is in the browser business has an agenda.

I remember a flight (circa 1995) when I got an AOL trial floppy disk with my complimentary bag of peanuts and lousy coffee.

...laura

One of the strangest things about the hexagon is that other gas giants don't see to have anything like it. And it rotates with the same period as Saturn's natural radio emissions, which is not the period of rotation of Saturn itself. See http://www.sciencemag.org/content/247/4947/1206. Also, relevant SMBC: http://www.smbc-comics.com/?id=1930.

When Nelson Mandela turned 70 there was quite a bit of coverage in the news here. He was still in jail, so I called Cape Town information, got the number, phoned the jail and left a message ("Happy Birthday!") for him.

The man who answered the phone sounded like he'd been on the phone a lot that day. He was also very careful to take down my name and where I was calling from. I suspect that until the government changed there would have been little point in trying to get a visa to visit South Africa...

...laura