There’s a lot of objects in the universe. At the most generous imaginable estimate, what might be the ratio of naturally-occuring without any kind of conscious construction, to those that might be made by even the largest sci fi civilizations?
I feel like so many people get their hopes up, they want to see something cool before they personally die of old age or whatever. So aliens and AI and all that crap need to be today, not in the future when our capabilities have actually advanced enough to deal with these things.
Sorry people, we’re middle generations. We probably all die right before the super cool shit takes off, like life extension. We’re the middle child of Earth’s human history. We don’t get the simple times of our elders, or the magnificent times of our descendents. We get … this. It’s fine. At least you didn’t get polio and you can casually fly in aircraft and you carry the internet in your back pocket. And frankly, we’re still figuring out the fallout from that shit, so maybe taking it slower isn’t such a bad idea.
Yet we are still here. No single civilization needs last forever, no single way of doing things ever will. But we will remain. Likely still technological, likely still modern.
It took civilization thousands of years to recover from that collapse. This is not something to be simply dismissed.
Also, in the case of Climate Change, it will take millions of years for Earth to recover once our civilization has collapsed, this is an even bigger hurdle.
No, people have been saying the end is coming soon for thousands of years. It’s also fun to research the oldest historical accounts complaining about “kids these days”.
This perspective that the end actually is soon requires some heavy cherry picking, where you ignore the evidence that it might not be. This is related to the perspective I was initially describing. People want to see something cool, maybe the end of the world even.
They’re probably not going to though, they’ll probably die of old age in a world that somewhat resembles this one.
Let me first clarify that I do believe climate change is real and something that we need urgent action on.
However in my 50+ years on this planet there has always been something to keep the people in fear and usually with cataclysmic consequences. In my lifetime the world or humanity should have ended already due to nuclear war, nuclear energy, peak oil, famine, over population, super weather (floods/hurricanes), acid rain, ozone layer depletion, y2k, ocean death, ice age (predicted in the 70’s), Yellowstone park eruptions, asteroid impacts, etc
The problem is when you have lived your entire life hearing that the end of humanity is near, you become desensitised to it and so when we do face a global catastrophe we are so apathetic.
Remember, iron wasn’t good enough to build the space shuttles. Iron comes down through the atmosphere, iron liquefies from the heat, forms a little droplet, falls into the ocean, cools down, gets hard again, gets picked up by scientist…
Knew who it was going to be before I opened the article. So, here’s the thing about Avi Loeb. He’s been very influential in the field being the chair of the Astronomy department at Harvard and serving on/leading several important committees and research initiatives. However, especially in his older age, he loves to spout any crazy theory he thinks up. Really, the majority of us in the professional astronomy field we just deal with him and mostly just ignore him. He likes to make outlandish claims which unfortunately can be very headline grabbing for the general public. Just put on your very skeptical goggles whenever you see something from him.
I’m not sure his being ignored is that respectful or much of a political courtesy at this point.
The claims are getting wilder and wilder.
First it was alien light sails as the most plausible reason for an oblong object traveling into the solar system, and now spherical metal in a meteor chemically consistent with the “sky iron” of antiquity can only be part of an alien spaceship?
He’s going to erode any legacy he once had by the time he’s done chasing windmills.
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