"Matt Giwer" <jull43@tampabay.REMover.rr.com> wrote in message news:481ab9d2$0$5167$4c368faf@roadrunner.com...
Rob Dekker wrote:
Hi Matt,
How are things ? I have not been here for a while.
I miss the old exchanges too.
I feel like coming back to the water hole, but almost everyone is gone..
Where is everyone else ?
Don't know where everyone went. But I suspect BOINC works so smoothly the basic reason we were here, to gripe about S@H is gone.

Maybe, but most interesting discussions were not about Classic Seti or BOINC.
Any way, it's good to have you back !

"Matt Giwer" <jull43@tampabay.REMover.rr.com> wrote in message news:48197062$0$31748$4c368faf@roadrunner.com...
.....
There is at present liquid water on Mars. A few years ago I gave a link to a rover image of it. Your hope is in vain.
The amusing point about the image was that it is water until shown to be some other liquid yet NASA never even drew attention to
the image.
You mean this image, right ?
http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov/gallery/all/1/p/307/1P155450047EFF38EVP2557L4M1.JPG
That's the one.
Here is the press-release again :
http://origin.mars5.jpl.nasa.gov/gallery/press/opportunity/20041210a.html
It is rock called "Tipura", pictured on Dec 3, 2004 (sol 306).
It cannot be water, because it's freezing beyond belief there.
Do you think it is ice ?
It is something that was or is fluid enough to produce a flat surface. And it does not appear to be covered with dust to it formed
shortly before the picture. Less likely a dust devil cleaned it just before the picture.
Given those two facts I am open to any suggestion as to what the fluid could be. The only one I know of with even a remote chance
is water. I agree it is remote. I assume there are a mess of hydrocarbons that are candidates but that is even more interesting. A
better place to start for fuel than making methane from the atmosphere.
There are other photos of the other regions takes years apart that occasionally show what appear to be what form on earth after
flash floods. The official press releases note them so it is not due to higher resolution cameras.
You tell me. Any better guess?

I think it is very fine dust.

"Mike Combs" <mikecombs@nospam.com_chg_nospam_2_ti> wrote in message news:fvd652$bdk$1@home.itg.ti.com...
Bostrom views this much the same way I do. The only point I would add is that if Gerard O'Neill was right about orbital habitats,
technological races could colonize the galaxy far more outrageously and thoroughly than we can imagine when staying inside the
confines of the planetary assumption. Which means the lack of obvious visual indicators becomes even more problematic.

Hi Mike,

I think your assessment is correct if we talk about the lack of visual indicators in our own solar system.
Nobody has crunched up all our planets and turned them into O'Neill habitats.
But the same argument might not hold up for interstellar astro works :

Extraterrestial civilization could crunch up all their solid planets and turned them into a Dyson swarm of O'Neill habitats. But
when that is done, I just realized that it might be very hard for us to detect anything out of the ordinary. I did a quick
calculation : In our solar system, most solid matter are the 4 inner planets, Earth being the largest. If you add up all their
matter, you have 2.17e12 km^2 of material to build O'Neill habitats from. Assume that these habitats have at least a couple of
meters thick walls (so you can plant things in soil), and swarms spherical around the star between 1 AU and 2 AU, then the swarm
will block less than 0.4 % of the star's sunlight. So at best we can see a bit of dust/debrit in the IR spectrum around the star,
but that's it.

Yes but we don't even see that. Don't suppose there have been no
searches for IR radiation round stars. Beta Pictoris has some rubble
round it, but it is condensing asteroid like masterial, NOT Dyson
habitats.

As I think I have said before Dyson civilizations will have radio
teledcopes at least 4AU across and fragmented optical telescopes,
possibly thousands of kilometers across. Hence, if they are there at
all, they know everything about us. This is why SETI is such a
complete waste of time.

Rob Dekker wrote:
"Matt Giwer" <jull43@tampabay.REMover.rr.com> wrote in message
news:481ab9d2$0$5167$4c368faf@roadrunner.com...
Rob Dekker wrote:
Hi Matt,
How are things ? I have not been here for a while.
I miss the old exchanges too.
I feel like coming back to the water hole, but almost everyone is
gone..
Where is everyone else ?
Don't know where everyone went. But I suspect BOINC works so smoothly
the basic reason we were here, to gripe about S@H is gone.

Maybe, but most interesting discussions were not about Classic Seti or
BOINC.
Any way, it's good to have you back !

I never stopped reading. There were mainly only guthposts. Even I
have standards.

"Matt Giwer" <jull43@tampabay.REMover.rr.com> wrote in message
news:48197062$0$31748$4c368faf@roadrunner.com...
.....
There is at present liquid water on Mars. A few years ago I gave a
link to a rover image of it. Your hope is in vain.
The amusing point about the image was that it is water until shown
to be some other liquid yet NASA never even drew attention to the
image.
You mean this image, right ?
http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov/gallery/all/1/p/307/1P155450047EFF38EVP2557L4M1.JPG

That's the one.
Here is the press-release again :
http://origin.mars5.jpl.nasa.gov/gallery/press/opportunity/20041210a.html

It is rock called "Tipura", pictured on Dec 3, 2004 (sol 306).
It cannot be water, because it's freezing beyond belief there.
Do you think it is ice ?
It is something that was or is fluid enough to produce a flat
surface. And it does not appear to be covered with dust to it formed
shortly before the picture. Less likely a dust devil cleaned it just
before the picture.
Given those two facts I am open to any suggestion as to what the
fluid could be. The only one I know of with even a remote chance is
water. I agree it is remote. I assume there are a mess of
hydrocarbons that are candidates but that is even more interesting. A
better place to start for fuel than making methane from the atmosphere.
There are other photos of the other regions takes years apart that
occasionally show what appear to be what form on earth after flash
floods. The official press releases note them so it is not due to
higher resolution cameras.
You tell me. Any better guess?

I think it is very fine dust.

It does not appear in any manner to be dust of any kind. Make talcum
powder look like that. But first mix it with all finenesses of dust and
get the finest to rise to the top. In the real world the coarsest rises
to the top even if it is the heaviest. And there is no obvious mechanism
for separation by fineness. That is all done by sieves in this world
because it is not found in nature.

I have worked with powders down to 800, 1/800" on a side, and they
do not behave like fluids. In a jar it looks like sand dunes. The
smaller the more surface area the more friction.

It is not a powder. It has to be something that behaves as a fluid.
Powders only do that when vibrated at the right frequencies. Having had
just the right kind of earthquake to smooth it and taking a picture
before the first breeze disturbs it is a low probability event. There
are enough pictures of dust devils to show breezes are more common
although perhaps very uncommon compared to earth. A proper explanation
has to hold the picture is an average observation.

"Golden California Girls" <gldncagrls@aol.com.mil> wrote in message news:RmvSj.3908$lc6.788@trnddc04...
...
You are right. We cannot rule out that the Galaxy was already colonized before, maybe multiple times.
However, that brings up several questions. Two come to mind :

(1) Where are they now ? If they were so successfull to colonize the Galaxy (which took millions of years at a minimum), why did
they vanish ?
You are making an assumption that they are doing full body colonization. Not necessary. They may have sent out ships with their
DNA into star forming regions and simply dispersed it, knowing that eventually a comet would carry some of it down on a wet
planet. Absent FTL this may be the only way in which a planet could ever hope to get to another.


Can you show how DNA of complex lifeforms like us can sprout to life when 'simply dispersed' into an arbitrary ocean ?
Microbal, primitive single-cell organisms, yes. That I find plausible, and would also explain why Earth obtained life so rapidly.
But interstellar traveling life/DNA beyond a single-cell is not very likely to exist. Earth waited 2 billion years before such
'complex' lifeforms emerged.
Anything more complex than that surely would almost certainly need 'full-body' colonization or 'intelligence', including
terra-forming and possibly robotic nurseries, before it can successfully reproduce on a foreign planet.

(2) Where is the evidence ? They would have visited our solar system, but apparently did not crunch-up the planets, and even left
the great Asteroid belt along. Full of easy to harvest building material. Also, there is no sign of alien DNA in any of Earth's
lifeforms, so they apparently did not even stay on Earth and became one of us. They did not even contaminate our planet with any
alien bugs. So they must have been extremely careful, to the point where it looks like they were never here. Occam's rasor then
tells us that they probably never were here.
Again you assume they do full body colonization. We only have earth DNA to look at so far. It all seems to be related. You
assume it arose here without help. Once we have Mars DNA, if it is the same as Earth DNA then we know a game is afoot, different,
then they likely arose independently.

Again, if we are talking about proving or disproving panspermia, then I agree with you.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panspermia

But if we are talking about more complex (and preferably intelligent) ET life seeding on other planets directly (maybe without
full-body but at least in more complex form), then we really do not have any evidence that that has ever happened on Earth. We
should have seen more diverse DNA, or at least not the consistency in DNA that evolutionaries can trace back to common ancestors
billions of years ago...

Our future is indeed in our hands and the next 100 years will probably
be the critical period. If we survive 100 years we will probably
colonize the galaxy. 100 years is the real danger period for the human
race.
I would not be so sure of challenges to disappear after 100 years.
We humans are better in anticipating than most animals that roam the planet, but we are still pretty poor in long-term planning.
I agree. We may find that what we face in 100 years is nothing to what we may face in 50000 years. Frankly I suspect so perhaps
from some super bug standpoint. Think about GM DNA being taught in say grade school to our smarter children and some playground
fight and some retaliation.

The big challenge we face is learning how to live together and not each man for himself. knowledge is power and as we get more
knowledge we each individually have more power to do good or evil. In our past say after we discovered fire learning how to
control it may have been our actual greatest challenge. Perhaps we still face it with our atom powered fire of today, but don't
know it. I suspect our real challenge is in preventing an unstable person from putting his knowledge to the use of evil.
Terrorism in short.

I agree. And not just live peaceful amongst each other, but also peaceful with the other species on the planet.
We humans got to the top of the food chain not by playing mister nice guy. We terminate anything that's in our way.
We hunted species very similar to ours to extinction (for example the end of Neantherthalers coincides with the arrival of homo
sapiens in northern Europe. Coincidence? I think not), and our current actions results already in direct or indirect termination of
many species and are bringing eco systems to the brink of destruction. On top of that we use up fossil fuel accumulated in 50
million years and change the climate without us knowing the outcome. We are a pretty aggressive bunch...

...
b) They can be overcome by improvements in technology. As I have said
- cover the South West with solar panels and electoyse water.

When do we start ?
At what cost in energy to melt all the sand you need for them and all the toxic chemicals needed to keep them super clean while
you make them?

Well, I think they are just too expensive and too difficult to make, and other alternatives are cheaper.
But in defense of PV cells, they DO recover more energy over their lifetime than they cost to make.

And just tossing a wild hare out there, there seems to be a lot of missing matter in the universe. Now just what escapes a Dyson
sphere? Gravity.


I just posted in a side-thread that it will be very difficult to make Dyson spheres that block all sunlight. Their walls would have
to be less than 1 cm thick walls.
At least in our neck of the Galaxy you would not be able to find true Dyson spheres due to the lack of solid material.
The center of the Galaxy has more solid material, and it might be possible to build true Dyson spheres there.
Incidentally, to explain the current behavior of teh Galaxy, the 'dark matter' that is missing should be in a large halo around the
center.
So maybe you are on to something....

Golden California Girls wrote:
Rob Dekker wrote:
"Ian Parker" <ianparker2@gmail.com> wrote in message
news:00b6efe2-bd7b-433a-b991-7fa10bb5fcbe@t54g2000hsg.googlegroups.com...

On 30 Apr, 22:21, "Rob Dekker" <r...@verific.com> wrote:
.....
There is one other scenario we have considered, the "race" situation.
The civilization that develops first will colonize the galaxy. You
either ask "where are the aliens?" or alien colonization is a matter
of historical fact. I seem to recall that we have indeed discussed
this and come to the conclusion that if the Earth is to colonize the
galaxy, the nearest civilization will differ by about 50 million
years. This is the result of the tail of the Gaussian.

You are right. We cannot rule out that the Galaxy was already
colonized before, maybe multiple times.
However, that brings up several questions. Two come to mind :

(1) Where are they now ? If they were so successfull to colonize the
Galaxy (which took millions of years at a minimum), why did they
vanish ?

You are making an assumption that they are doing full body
colonization. Not necessary. They may have sent out ships with their
DNA into star forming regions and simply dispersed it, knowing that
eventually a comet would carry some of it down on a wet planet.
Absent FTL this may be the only way in which a planet could ever hope
to get to another.

Unlike in bad SciFi movies when your DNA falls on a wet planet it
either deteriorates or is eaten.

"Ian Parker" <ianparker2 at (no spam) gmail.com> wrote in message
news:ff257022-16d4-48d7-b7f2-77d62bb4e154 at (no spam) c65g2000hsa.googlegroups.com...

Yes but we don't even see that. Don't suppose there have been no
searches for IR radiation round stars. Beta Pictoris has some rubble
round it, but it is condensing asteroid like masterial, NOT Dyson
habitats.

How would you know the difference ?

It is something that was or is fluid enough to produce a flat surface. And it does not appear to be covered with dust to it
formed shortly before the picture. Less likely a dust devil cleaned it just before the picture.
Given those two facts I am open to any suggestion as to what the fluid could be. The only one I know of with even a remote
chance is water. I agree it is remote. I assume there are a mess of hydrocarbons that are candidates but that is even more
interesting. A better place to start for fuel than making methane from the atmosphere.
There are other photos of the other regions takes years apart that occasionally show what appear to be what form on earth after
flash floods. The official press releases note them so it is not due to higher resolution cameras.
You tell me. Any better guess?

I think it is very fine dust.

It does not appear in any manner to be dust of any kind. Make talcum powder look like that. But first mix it with all finenesses
of dust and get the finest to rise to the top. In the real world the coarsest rises to the top even if it is the heaviest. And
there is no obvious mechanism for separation by fineness. That is all done by sieves in this world because it is not found in
nature.

I have worked with powders down to 800, 1/800" on a side, and they do not behave like fluids. In a jar it looks like sand dunes.
The smaller the more surface area the more friction.

It is not a powder. It has to be something that behaves as a fluid. Powders only do that when vibrated at the right frequencies.
Having had just the right kind of earthquake to smooth it and taking a picture before the first breeze disturbs it is a low
probability event. There are enough pictures of dust devils to show breezes are more common although perhaps very uncommon
compared to earth. A proper explanation has to hold the picture is an average observation.

--
The only thing to negotiate between Palestine and Israel is the schedule for
Israel's withdrawal.
-- The Iron Webmaster, 3990
http://www.giwersworld.org/holo/nizgas3.html a4

Rob Dekker wrote:
"Mike Combs" <mikecombs at (no spam) nospam.com_chg_nospam_2_ti> wrote in message news:fvd652$bdk$1 at (no spam) home.itg.ti.com...
Bostrom views this much the same way I do. The only point I would add is that if Gerard O'Neill was right about orbital
habitats, technological races could colonize the galaxy far more outrageously and thoroughly than we can imagine when staying
inside the confines of the planetary assumption. Which means the lack of obvious visual indicators becomes even more
problematic.

Hi Mike,

I think your assessment is correct if we talk about the lack of visual indicators in our own solar system.
Nobody has crunched up all our planets and turned them into O'Neill habitats.
But the same argument might not hold up for interstellar astro works :

Extraterrestial civilization could crunch up all their solid planets and turned them into a Dyson swarm of O'Neill habitats. But
when that is done, I just realized that it might be very hard for us to detect anything out of the ordinary. I did a quick
calculation : In our solar system, most solid matter are the 4 inner planets, Earth being the largest. If you add up all their
matter, you have 2.17e12 km^2 of material to build O'Neill habitats from. Assume that these habitats have at least a couple of
meters thick walls (so you can plant things in soil), and swarms spherical around the star between 1 AU and 2 AU, then the swarm
will block less than 0.4 % of the star's sunlight. So at best we can see a bit of dust/debrit in the IR spectrum around the star,
but that's it.

Lets make an absurd suggestion, Dyson lived in the 10th century and had the same ideas and people thought about how to make them.

The first idea would be to calculate how much wood it would take.

That he was recent, even if so last century, we think in terms of we might be able to do with today's techniques.

It is not more reasonable to start with what what at least shows promise of working in the future? So we start with building it
from carbon fibers using organics from Jupiter and Saturn as the source of carbon. And not just the fibers we produce today but
the theoretical maximum so the volume per square foot is less.

And then why limit ourselves to just planets when the entire Oort cloud is out there? And I am in no hurry. So the project takes a
million years. But if it takes more than fifty years the technology will have improved so much that the method of manufacture will
be radically different. And radically different every fifty years thereafter. Radically different and better every fifty years is
about right for now in our major infrastructures like power plants, public transportation, water and sewage treatment and the
like. It is not the technology. It is scaling it up to infrastructure size that takes the time.

So what might start out looking impossibly huge and and take an impossibly long to accomplish will certainly happen faster and
sooner and by unimaginable methods. Consider the ocean liner companies in 1890 looking into hydrofoils for the next great decrease
in transit time. If you are a treehugger flying is a hugely greater cost in fuel per pound than a ship. But the total cost of
living at sea makes flying cheaper.

--
No one has done what they wish they had done.
No one has been what they wish they had been.
That does not mitigate the mythology.
-- The Iron Webmaster, 3987
http://www.giwersworld.org/disinfo/occupied-2.phtml a6

We have been extremely lucky so far, so lucky that we forgot how fragile we are.

In fact the only thing which could totally eliminate the human race is

As I think I have said before Dyson civilizations will have radio
teledcopes at least 4AU across and fragmented optical telescopes,
possibly thousands of kilometers across. Hence, if they are there at
all, they know everything about us. This is why SETI is such a
complete waste of time.

I fail to see how you can combine that belief with that conclusion.
If they know about us, then current SETI (searching for beacons and astro engineering) would make even more sense...

Because they will either find us first or they will be go out of their
way not to be seen. Either we wait for a good strong signal that does
not require much searching for, or we will look for a stealth
civilizaton which, as it is advanced, will be undetectable.

- Ian Parker

Ian Parker wrote:
...
Yes but we don't even see that. Don't suppose there have been no
searches for IR radiation round stars. Beta Pictoris has some rubble
round it, but it is condensing asteroid like masterial, NOT Dyson
habitats.

As I think I have said before Dyson civilizations will have radio
teledcopes at least 4AU across and fragmented optical telescopes,
possibly thousands of kilometers across. Hence, if they are there at
all, they know everything about us. This is why SETI is such a
complete waste of time.

The problem with what we think we would expect from a Dyson civilization is that it is based upon out technology today whereas by
definition a Dyson civilization would be unimaginably ahead of us.

There is no way we could possibly know what to look for.

Thermodynamics does not apply in the sub-atomic interaction of matter to energy. There is no reason to assume an energy to matter
conversion would generate any waste heat at all. So if they are converting unneeded solar energy back to matter by a fundamental
process even the IR radiation we not occur. It would be a sphere whose temperature would be 0 degrees. Or perhaps 4.7 degrees on
average.

"Rob Dekker" <rob at (no spam) verific.com> wrote in message news:XtISj.12889$GE1.8104 at (no spam) nlpi061.nbdc.sbc.com...

"Ian Parker" <ianparker2 at (no spam) gmail.com> wrote in message news:ff257022-16d4-48d7-b7f2-77d62bb4e154 at (no spam) c65g2000hsa.googlegroups.com...

Yes but we don't even see that. Don't suppose there have been no
searches for IR radiation round stars. Beta Pictoris has some rubble
round it, but it is condensing asteroid like masterial, NOT Dyson
habitats.

How would you know the difference ?

http://www.nidsci.org/essaycomp/gmatloff.html

--


Regards,
Mike Combs
----------------------------------------------------------------------
We must be staunch in our conviction that freedom is not the sole prerogative of a lucky few, but the inalienable and universal
right of all human beings... It would be cultural condescension, or worse, to say that any people prefer dictatorship to
democracy.

Ronald Reagan at Westminster Abbey, 1982

"Ian Parker" <ianpark... at (no spam) gmail.com> wrote in messagenews:da7aa5d9-d59c-4ccd-a7fb-441932d285bc at (no spam) w7g2000hsa.googlegroups.com...

....



As I think I have said before Dyson civilizations will have radio
teledcopes at least 4AU across and fragmented optical telescopes,
possibly thousands of kilometers across. Hence, if they are there at
all, they know everything about us. This is why SETI is such a
complete waste of time.

I fail to see how you can combine that belief with that conclusion.
If they know about us, then current SETI (searching for beacons and astro engineering) would make even more sense...

Because they will either find us first or they will be go out of their
way not to be seen. Either we wait for a good strong signal that does
not require much searching for, or we will look for a stealth
civilizaton which, as it is advanced, will be undetectable.

How can you wait for a "good strong" signal without SETI ?
There may be many strong signals out there, because we barely touched the (EM spectrum) surface with SETI.

Also, how 'strong' a signal is strong enough for you ?
Do they need to break into the dayly news to get your attention ?
Or, in case you don't watch the news, do they need to break into the next episode of Seinfelt ?

A strong signal is a signal of terrestrial broadcast strength. You are

Ian Parker wrote:

...

Yes but we don't even see that. Don't suppose there have been no
searches for IR radiation round stars. Beta Pictoris has some rubble
round it, but it is condensing asteroid like masterial, NOT Dyson
habitats.
As I think I have said before Dyson civilizations will have radio
teledcopes at least 4AU across and fragmented optical telescopes,
possibly thousands of kilometers across. Hence, if they are there at
all, they know everything about us. This is why SETI is such a
complete waste of time.

        The problem with what we think we would expect from a Dyson civilization is
that it is based upon out technology today whereas by definition a Dyson
civilization would be unimaginably ahead of us.

        There is no way we could possibly know what to look for.

        Thermodynamics does not apply in the sub-atomic interaction of matter to
energy. There is no reason to assume an energy to matter conversion would
generate any waste heat at all. So if they are converting unneeded solar energy
back to matter by a fundamental process even the IR radiation we not occur.. It
would be a sphere whose temperature would be 0 degrees. Or perhaps 4.7 degrees
on average.

Thermodynamics applies universally. Sub atomic as well as molecular.