Joined: Sat Oct 22, 2011 12:56 am Posts: 1474 Location: At the corner of unoriginality and boring
Re: The Lounge
I think the term 'life as we know it' better describes what scientist think though. The only way life as we know it can exist is on an Earth-like planet. that's not to say other forms of life can't exist, it's just we don't know how the ♥♥♥♥ it would work.
Contrary wrote:
That reminds me, does anyone else think we're being really naive with the way we go about looking for intelligent alien life? I don't know a lot about it but I know that we have radio dishes and ♥♥♥♥ sending out messages for aliens to pick up. Not only is that a huge waste of money as we're not even sure that it's likely any life exists out there, let alone intelligent in a way we can interact with; but also like, how do we not know they won't beat us up? The parallels to Earth cultures contacting each other is obvious- 99% of the time someone is getting ez'd and if the aliens are picking up our signal and coming to our town, we're probably the ones that are going to take the bruising.
Yeah, but with our technology our options are either to keep doing what we're doing, or stop entirely, and seeing as nobody wants to not see if there are aliens, we're going to keep on keeping on. Besides, if we stopped funding these kinds of things, we'd never advance that kind of technology
Fri Feb 07, 2014 3:22 am
Rajani
Joined: Sun Sep 11, 2011 2:23 am Posts: 222
Re: The Lounge
Foa wrote:
Religion: I prefer Gnosticism, and Buddhism. One is of Change, the other of Balance.
forgive me but all i can think about is how 'gnosticism' sounds like agnosticism for gnomes
sorry this is probably going to be so far off topic in term of whats being discussed right now, under a spolier for just such reasons
personally im not very spiritual at all, though i would like to be.. pantheism sounds like something i could follow if i tried, but i haven't. most of the people i look to online for spiritual guidance (however you define that) are into paganism, wiccanism, american indian shamanism, etc. and i find these types of spiritualities, along with eastern religions and philosophies (buddhism, taoism, hinduism.. all of that good stuff), the most fascinating, but thats all it does for me is fascinate me.
ive considered taking some of these practices up but i dont feel like, at this point in my life, that i would be taking it very seriously, so ive refrained from it because it seems kind of disrespectful to me to half-heartedly take on a spiritual practice without a full understanding of it. gotta read more into these types of things when i find the motivation.
hm hm while im rambling... ive never been an existential person, and i dont fear death. i fear dangerous situations of course and i dont have a death wish, but ive never really worried about what happens after death. i favor the idea of reincarnation, but im not sure id go so far as to say i 'believe' in it.
something i never understood the sentiment of, though, was literal immortality; or living forever in just one life. i dont understand what it is about this that attracts people. i think its really self-centered, for lack of a better word, to not accept your fair amount of time living on this planet. like, you gotta re-watch lion king dog, because it's greedy to expect more than your fair share of this planet's resources to go towards someone who will never repay the earth.
Fri Feb 07, 2014 4:10 am
TheKebbit
Joined: Sat Jul 04, 2009 10:24 pm Posts: 3939 Location: NORTH
Re: The Lounge
Foa wrote:
Also shook, Mars supports bacterial life, now. Something about gases being emitted from mountains giving them off. Look it up. It's something interesting for other people.
[reputable citation needed] [if I look this up I'm pretty sure I'm going to end up neck deep in conspiracy ♥♥♥♥ about NASA HIDIN THE ALIUMS]
EDIT: An inspection of the recent scientific literature reveals neither.
Last edited by TheKebbit on Fri Feb 07, 2014 4:19 am, edited 1 time in total.
Fri Feb 07, 2014 4:15 am
Rajani
Joined: Sun Sep 11, 2011 2:23 am Posts: 222
Re: The Lounge
speaking of conspiracies, has anyone heard of/witnessed the snow falling over parts of the US and canada that doesnt melt normally when held up to a flame? i argued with an 11 year old for like two hours because they were trying to make others believe it was the government controlling the weather.
Hmm, Gnostic, from GardenersGnostic, and the origin of the being, Yaltabaoth (*spelling) the Demiurge. It's pretty much a religion around the time of the birth of Christianity. The morals, and tales I get from it is that everything that doesn't change state gets ♥♥♥♥, those that do adapt. But that disregards that the lore of the religion is that the Demiurge is the failed child of the last child of the supreme creator, and sought to create another spiritual realm. It became the physical realm, and generally you can guess how the supreme creator feels about that.
At the very least, even the gods can be wrong, and they change.
Another I dislike is how the debates around which religious beliefs to follow tends to revolve around proving or disproving the existence of god or god(s). Having grown up going to Sunday school (actually mine was on Wednesday), I was never concerned that certain things didn't sound consistent with our modern understanding of physics; the issue for me was that God sounded like a ♥♥♥♥♥. Well maybe that's too strong of a word but if God wasn't "God" and just some guy I knew that happened to be omnipotent and omnipresent, I wouldn't have a great opinion of him. I found it a lot easier to sympathize with him in the sequel, but still a far cry from someone I would devoutly worship.
The point of monotheism is that you don't have to prove your god exists. He just exists. It's also called orthodox when you have to follow all of the dogmas and ♥♥♥♥ of a religion. Orthodox Catholics inherently see homosexuality as a sin. They also believe all sins are forgiven and people go to heaven.
This is one of many problems orthodox religions have. Don't get me started on Zionists who bullied a girl who got Hebrew text tattooed on herself even though she wasn't Jewish. ♥♥♥♥ fascists.
Fri Feb 07, 2014 5:39 am
Miggles
Data Realms Elite
Joined: Mon Jul 12, 2010 5:39 am Posts: 4558
Re: The Lounge
but you do have to prove it when you're polytheistic?
Fri Feb 07, 2014 5:43 am
Sothe
Joined: Thu Jul 21, 2011 4:34 am Posts: 2034
Re: The Lounge
Miggles wrote:
but you do have to prove it when you're polytheistic?
not necessarily. A lot of polytheistic religions are symbolic, playful, and satirical. But the whole God/Allah/Jehovah thing is pretty much srs business
I have a big problem with the assumption that only earth like planets can support life. Scientists looked at life on earth and what it needs to survive and then brightly came to the conclusion that what life needs to survive is earth like conditions. We've barely begun to explore the galaxy, but already they've made a conclusion about the entire galaxy.
It like looking at 1 square inch of your living room floor, finding life there and then concluding that life needs exactly the same conditions as that 1 square inch of floor to survive. Coming to that conclusion would be insane and yet scientists have no problem doing that when it comes to life in the universe.
And in galactic sizes that 1 square inch of your living room is more like the entire milkyway. So humans as a whole have explored less than 1/400 billionth of 1 square inch of your living room and then drawn a bunch of conclusions about the rest of your living room, based upon what they explored.
Until we've at least explored a couple of planets, hopefully another solar system all together, or beter yet, actually find extraterrestial life, I think it's way too early to make assumptions about what life needs to live.
I think this is a little silly. Life as we know it requires a lot of very complex, long-chain organic molecules, which wouldn't be able to stay sufficiently complex under harsher conditions, presumably those they're ignoring. Too hot, cold, acidic, basic, etc. and these molecules wouldn't react correctly if at all. There's the idea of silicon based life, but I gather that takes pretty cold temperatures for the silicon molecules to be sufficiently stable to form chains of any reasonable length and I don't know if they can get very long even near 0K, plus at 0K they probably wouldn't have enough energy to react much so it'd be difficult to form chains anyway. Outside of that, I don't believe there are any elements we know of that are covalently stable enough to form the complex molecules needed for life as we know it. Granted, new elements are being discovered and though they're ridiculously unstable I do recall hearing about a theorized stability plateau (probably the wrong terminology) where elements after some large atomic weight would be stable again so maybe some of those would be viable, though creating them, especially in nature, would probably be pretty difficult.
All that said, there may very well be life that we can't identify as alive, but if we won't be able to tell it's alive, it make sense to assume it's not and focus on searching for life that we can identify. So assuming that the only planets with life are those with conditions in which long carbon chains could reasonably form, i.e. those fairly similar to earth, seems pretty reasonable to me.
Keep in mind I'm only looking at this from a chemical standpoint, I know little about biology and physics and I'm sure there's more to it than what I have to say. I may be wrong, but a conclusion like the one you're against was probably pretty well thought through by quite a lot of people who have a good idea of what it takes to make recognizable life.
Fri Feb 07, 2014 7:06 am
Duh102
happy carebear mom
Joined: Tue Mar 04, 2008 1:40 am Posts: 7096 Location: b8bbd5
Re: The Lounge
Foa wrote:
The sequel?
Old Testament is the first book, New Testament the sequel in the analogy. OT God is pretty jealous, spiteful, full of vengeance, and all that jazz. NT God is pretty chill and all-encompassing in his compassion and things like that. This is, of course, in general, there's a whole lot of text in there and a lot of people say a lot of things, God included.
Have you guys heard of the Process Church of Final Judgement? It's an offshoot of Scientology that believes God and Satan are both equally important in worship and work together later on when the rapture happens or some ♥♥♥♥. It's weird.
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