Large Hardon Collider

[Kaylia]

...surely you don't let practical action only be informed by 100% informed probability? i'm not reiterating again that a) aliens probably need resources, b) intelligence possibly consisting in, exactly, proficiency at obtaining resources, c) we have resources, so d) there's a good chance aliens would want our resources. better than 5% chance? better than 10%? i'm walking down the street and recognize certain actions that imply to me that the person i'm looking at might be dangerous. am i 5% sure? 10%?

you're looking at this all wrong. hawking is saying patently obvious things. you're overreacting like a biologist saying "BUT WAIT THEY'LL THINK OUR GRANDFATHER COULD HAVE BEEN A MONKEY, DON'T SAY THAT!" good chance = as good as anything else that makes sense.

edit: as for my 50/50 quantifying, i'm saying that they either can take our shit or they can't. we know 2 outcomes. we know nothing else for certain. what little we know (they can travel in space given the limitations of physics) points to "they can probably take our shit," but i generously even stipulated that consideration away. so, again, 2 outcomes, nothing pointing one way or the other. approximately 50/50 odds.

i have a coin in my pocket. 50/50 odds that if i flip it, i get heads. "but given how it's shaped and your tendency to start with it heads down and and and," won't be 50/50 odds after i know some of that shit, but i don't know it.

God exist, god doesnt exist. 50%/50%? (that's not how it works).

You're correct when you say that every day decisions aren't based on accurate statistics. However, it's not an "every day" decision, it's sciences, and that's not how you do sciences. If you -think- the probability is high...then go for it and state it as an opinion. If you say the probability is high, then please, explain why it is higher than the alternative. If you believe than any non nul risk is "high", then please state so because we are looking at a philosophical argument.


If you think I'm overeacting to the "content", you couldn't be more wrong. I don't give a damn about his conclusion, and he covered himself using "might" and "if". His statement isn't wrong.

His statement is, and every fucking comments posted about it on news website prove my point, very confusing for people who aren't familiar with sciences, and will lead to even more retardation. The purpose of sciences is to inform people, not scare them by showing them a small part of a big picture.


When a physicist talks to other (as a physicist), his objective should be to inform people, not to pass his opinion as fact


[edit]
fuck im tired..had like 2 typo per word.

[edit2]
ok, I think its readable now..i hope.

night.

[Max™]

Technically, his intent with the show was to entertain people by demonstrating to them that a guy who is probably the smartest person most folks could think of if asked "who is the smartest person on the planet", still thinks about silly shit, just like they do.

[Kaylia]

i wouldn't say nothing we accomplish "matters", but it's definitely good to question the naive assumption that raw extension of the duration of life (for a person or a species) automatically has value or is worthwhile (--to someone... 'worthwhile' should be transitive).

It was a general statement based the not so bright future of entropy.


You could use my argument against me here (since we don't know for sure), but if everything is destroyed (heat death or w/e), every bit of informations about us will disappears, making our existence kinda useless.

Technically, his intent with the show was to entertain people by demonstrating to them that a guy who is probably the smartest person most folks could think of if asked "who is the smartest person on the planet", still thinks about silly shit, just like they do.

Physics is super serial, it shouldnt entertain people.

He should instead solve shrodinger and einstein field equation for 60 minutes to tell your average joe how little they actually know about physics and the world.

[pahnphoenix]

God exist, god doesnt exist. 50%/50%? (that's not how it works).

no, that *exactly is* how it works if all you know is that God can exist or cannot exist. if you know other stuff, the odds change. you know very well that, barring a rather sophisticated argument to the contrary, we're not looking at < 1% chance that space faring race would take resources from us. why? because from what we know (which isn't all that far off from the situation where all we know is God might exist or might not) there's good reasons to think they might, and therefore a good chance they would. you don't seem to understand what i'm saying, but maybe it's because you're too enraged by a scientist speaking about imprecise things in public.

[Cochise]

FYI: there was a GOD and Heaven, but after the first month he closed it down because everyone became whining cunts.

[Mizango]

Oh sweet jesús, this will be the death of this fantastic thread.

[Kuya]

You saved many aliens that were bound to a cruel death...you don't have to feel bad.

I exist because other human existed before me, and I will probably reproduce because that's what my genes tell me to do, but I don't believe it's the "point of life". Just like a rock purpose isn't to roll down a cliff, I don't think we have any particular purpose...we just follow the flow of time like everything else.


I'm just playing the devil advocate here, but in all seriousness, manking being wiped off the surface of universe eventually isa fact just as much as aliens existing everywhere. Now that we know our species is bound to dissapears eventually, why do we wants to make it survive for as long as we can, when nothing we accomplish matter.

It's the efficient point of life. It's the point of life, because that's exactly what life does, attempt to preserve itself and reproduce; it's ubiquitous and it's one of the few things you can say for certain.

The same reasoning applies to you. You're going to die eventually, so are you going to choose to speed up that process just because? Just because we will all die, does that mean we should ignore trying to live for as long as we can considering that is what life everywhere attempts to do? Why would we do the opposite? To prove that intelligent life is in fact retarded when it comes to survival? There are a lot of absurd reasons why you would want humans to continue to exist, from the absurd idea that maybe somehow humans develop the way to bring back the dead or perhaps a more mundane reason, the one i mentioned earlier, because you feel attached to the idea of the human species. There doesn't have to be a single reason that is true for everyone for why you would want to maintain the species, what matters is the end result, but now i'm just rambling.

Anyway, life being meaningless because it will end eventually is a poor argument even on the individual level, just because life will end at some point, it doesn't follow that it's meaningless to attempt to extend it.

[Pirian]

Oh sweet jesús, this will be the death of this fantastic thread.

Lol! Exactly what I was thinking. "Are we really digressing to discuss the meaning of life when we just got pissed off at someone for derailing the science into the paranormal?"

[Chun Liroy]

So I have a question. Wouldn't it be a 1 in a billion trillion zillion etc chance for aliens to find us because they would have to go star system by star system? Because if they looked through their telescopes, they would see dinosaurs etc rather than intelligent life forms?

[Mizango]

Little green men, meet Mr. Oxygen. Enjoy your suffocation.

[Chun Liroy]

Hey sir, that serious question did not warrant a sarcastic reply.

[Mizango]

:D

[Kryssan]

Time for a derail.


This news story isn't really any breaking news or anything, its just a brief look at the side of the nuclear vision that people don't like seeing - the end of the cores.

Link

A Westinghouse-led consortium has been awarded a contract to dismantle the reactor vessel of Chooz A, the first pressurised water reactor (PWR) to be decommissioned in France.

The contract, awarded by Electricité de France (EdF) decommissioning arm EdF-CIDEN to a consortium led by Westinghouse, is expected to take six and a half years to complete. Westinghouse is partnered in the consortium by Nuvia France, and will also provide resources from its Swedish, Belgian and French locations.

Westinghouse will undertake overall project management, segmentation of the reactor vessel itself and of reactor vessel internals, reactor nozzle cutting, dismantling of the reactor vessel's thermal insulation, while using ALARA (As Low As Reasonably Achievable) principles to ensure acceptable radiation doses to personnel and providing a complementary water filtration system to maintain water clarity during the segmentation work.

Chooz A was a prototype PWR and supplied electricity to the French grid from 1967 to 1991. Westinghouse's regional vice president for France, Yves Brachet, said the decommissioning project would help to enhance support for the nuclear renaissance "by demonstrating that the safe dismantling of a reactor is possible."

Twelve experimental and power reactors are currently being decommissioned in France, mostly first-generation gas-cooled, graphite-moderated reactors. Chooz A is the only PWR on the list. However, a wealth of decommissioning experience is being built up world wide. In the USA alone, where a total of 31 power reactors have been closed and decommissioned, some sites have now been largely released for unrestricted usage.

[pahnphoenix]

Oh sweet jesús, this will be the death of this fantastic thread.

as you should know, this section of the thread will end as soon as someone posts more interesting news/hardon stuff.

[Neoscrilla]

Oh, my supervillain plans involve forcibly removing every government on Earth, while setting up companies offering private defense services to a newly opened market, and playing the role of universal threat, giving the people a common goal to focus on, to distract them from the social reform required to bring about a true anarchist utopia.

THEN I would go study stuff.

EVE Online anyone?

[Kaylia]

no, that *exactly is* how it works if all you know is that God can exist or cannot exist. if you know other stuff, the odds change. you know very well that, barring a rather sophisticated argument to the contrary, we're not looking at < 1% chance that space faring race would take resources from us. why? because from what we know (which isn't all that far off from the situation where all we know is God might exist or might not) there's good reasons to think they might, and therefore a good chance they would. you don't seem to understand what i'm saying, but maybe it's because you're too enraged by a scientist speaking about imprecise things in public.

You said it's 50%/50% because there is only 2 choice. What if we add a 3rd possibilities that aliens wants our planet, but can't really travel in space? The probability drop to 33%? What if we add a 4th possibilities that aliens can travel in space, but the risk of losing everything in a fight against another intelligent lifeform is a risk not worth it? Does it drop to 25% (it applies to them as much as it applies to us)?

Again, that's not how probability works in sciences. If you want to talk about hypothetical events, you do it like Drake's equation (a bunch of unknown factor lined up that produce an unknown number). It's the only rational approach that isn't based on a biased hunch.

It's the efficient point of life. It's the point of life, because that's exactly what life does, attempt to preserve itself and reproduce; it's ubiquitous and it's one of the few things you can say for certain.

The same reasoning applies to you. You're going to die eventually, so are you going to choose to speed up that process just because? Just because we will all die, does that mean we should ignore trying to live for as long as we can considering that is what life everywhere attempts to do? Why would we do the opposite? To prove that intelligent life is in fact retarded when it comes to survival? There are a lot of absurd reasons why you would want humans to continue to exist, from the absurd idea that maybe somehow humans develop the way to bring back the dead or perhaps a more mundane reason, the one i mentioned earlier, because you feel attached to the idea of the human species. There doesn't have to be a single reason that is true for everyone for why you would want to maintain the species, what matters is the end result, but now i'm just rambling.

Anyway, life being meaningless because it will end eventually is a poor argument even on the individual level, just because life will end at some point, it doesn't follow that it's meaningless to attempt to extend it.

You have to assume there is some sort of extension between your being and your race. You have to assume that helping our race is an universal truth like F=ma is. It's not something I can do in sciences. I've no issue with this if you mix my beliefs in it, but I can't work my beliefs into science.

You do bring a good point about future generation bringing me back from the dead. However, I would rather bet on a God than this. Even if they can bring me back somehow, I don't see why they would (would you bring back peple from previous generation when earth is already overpopulated?)

[Kuya]

Of course, an argument about the meaning of life or its value was never about science. And i assume that any human civilization advanced enough to bring back the dead should have probably already delt with overpopulation (which is not really the real crux of the issue, as i've argued with you before), and jocularly, they would probably only bring back the best and brightest, so you have some motivation in making sure you're valuable now.

And one thing i didn't mention is that you didn't really provide for why life or the preservation of the species is meaningless. It would seem that I assumed your stance that your point was valid and proven on its substance rather than calling out whether you have provided sufficient reason to doubt that that preserving the species has value. Considering the long list of reasons i can make up as to why making sure the human species continues to exist is the right thing to do, we should have questioned why i would even need to prove that in the first place.

[Max™]

EVE Online anyone?

Someone else said that about my insane anarchist babbling, something similar to the Shadowrun argument I think, but suffice to say those outcomes are improbable in the face of a populace which does not accept the ideology that political claims of power are moral, or justified.


Aaaaaanyways...


http://www.ohio.edu/research/communications/spin.cfm

ATHENS, Ohio (April 26, 2010) – Though scientists argue that the emerging technology of spintronics may trump conventional electronics for building the next generation of faster, smaller, more efficient computers and high-tech devices, no one has actually seen the spin—a quantum mechanical property of electrons—in individual atoms until now.

In a study published as an Advance Online Publication in the journal Nature Nanotechnology on Sunday, physicists at Ohio University and the University of Hamburg in Germany present the first images of spin in action.

The researchers used a custom-built microscope with an iron-coated tip to manipulate cobalt atoms on a plate of manganese. Through scanning tunneling microscopy, the team repositioned individual cobalt atoms on a surface that changed the direction of the electrons’ spin. Images captured by the scientists showed that the atoms appeared as a single protrusion if the spin direction was upward, and as double protrusions with equal heights when the spin direction was downward.

Very interesting... especially after seeing this:

http://www.mtu.edu/news/stories/2010...tory25874.html

The researchers made their different kind of computer with DDQ, a hexagonal molecule made of nitrogen, oxygen, chlorine and carbon that self-assembles in two layers on a gold substrate.
The DDQ molecule can switch among four conducting states—0, 1, 2 and 3—unlike the binary switches—0 and 1—used by digital computers.
“The neat part is, approximately 300 molecules talk with each other at a time during information processing,” Pati says. “We have mimicked how neurons behave in the brain.”
“The evolving neuron-like circuit network allows us to address many problems on the same grid, which gives the device intelligence," Pati says. As a result, their tiny processor can solve problems for which algorithms on computers are unknown, especially interacting many-body problems, such as predictions of natural calamities and outbreaks of disease. To illustrate this feature, they mimicked two natural phenomena in the molecular layer: heat diffusion and the evolution of cancer cells.
In addition, their molecular processor heals itself if there is a defect. This property comes from the self-organizing ability of the molecular monolayer. “No existing man-made computer has this property, but our brain does,” Bandyopadhyay says. “If a neuron dies, another neuron takes over its function.”

http://www.techshout.com/images/brai...e-computer.jpg

[pahnphoenix]

You said it's 50%/50% because there is only 2 choice. What if we add a 3rd possibilities that aliens wants our planet, but can't really travel in space? The probability drop to 33%? What if we add a 4th possibilities that aliens can travel in space, but the risk of losing everything in a fight against another intelligent lifeform is a risk not worth it? Does it drop to 25% (it applies to them as much as it applies to us)?

your pointless touting of "in science" is embarrassing. this is just good old reason. and no, the 3rd possibility (aliens want planet but can't travel in space) does not lower the probability. we're stipulating contact with these aliens. that's the whole fucking point. you don't say "what would happen if A? would B happen?" "no, B wouldn't happen if A because not A." that doesn't make sense. when estimating probability, if you have no reason to favor one outcome over another, raw number of distinct outcomes does determine probability.

your what ifs do not matter (unless they REFUTE in principle one of the claims the probability of which we're trying to determine, or there's tons of them). what matters is what you know. this is how you project probability about vague things. "but in SCIENCE we only quantify probability when--" no. no. stop. there's a stop light outside my house. it might be red or green. the chances, given my epistemological stance toward the stoplight (equivalent to true randomness) are 50% each way. if i know more, they skew. you don't need to take a single science class for this. "but hawking is a SCIENTIST so he should know better than to talk about--" no, he said obvious shit. yes, you can skew the likelihood of hostile aliens with speculative considerations, but in the whole context of estimating chances regarding aliens in the first place, the likelihood is high. 50% high? 20% high (given the risk, 20% is pretty high)? 90% high? i don't know. but it's obviously high for the broad, layman-accessible reasons that hawking noted (as layman accessible as the rough proof of alien life is in the first place).

it's fine that you think you know more than people because of your experience with physics. you probably do, and i'm sure you enjoy the rage you get when people don't know what you know, or stephen hawking talks about the predator. but not everything is caught in the net of stuff you know from education that others do not. not everything a physicist might say, even about physics, is caught in that net. with your constant "here in science we do real probability exercise" nonsense you're committing the same error about yourself that people were ridiculing a few pages ago re: the public's reception of hawking (or any respected intellectual). you expect the idiot public to misinterpret hawking's comment as scary predator stuff, but you're idiotically misinterpreting a very simple set of remarks ("good chance of hostile alien contact given [shit in previous posts]") as strong, contentious claims. you should take one minute and think about it, because it's not a very deep thing that's going on here, at least in terms of semantic content (certainly nowhere as deep and difficult as most physics, nor most philosophy or logic). re: attitude and forum dynamics, maybe there's more, but that's immediately boring.

[Woozie]

I only finished two exam questions and got them both wrong. I'll be very lucky if I get over 35% D: