It would be almost ironic if one day we find out that the "great silence" happens because highly technological species are so self-destructive that they invariably destroy themselves before they can venture into space beyond their own solar systems or even reach a level of development that allows them to broadcast beyond a few light years of their own home planet.

I was looking at a video of how we are destroying our planet with plastic and how it's littering our oceans and I can easily see us going down the same path.

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/piling-up- ... f-plastic/

Bagaria added, "We cannot imagine life without plastics. But we cannot continue to lead our life the way we are.  It's not like, 'Oh, let's use this planet Earth, then we will move to another planet.' No, this is what we have. We need to take care of this."

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/the-great- ... 0-minutes/

https://www.cbsnews.com/videos/the-grea ... 60-minutes

https://www.cbsnews.com/videos/meet-wis ... n-the-wild

Seeing all those birds and fish dying with all that plastic junk in their stomachs is heartbreaking.

Even IF there are sentient beings out there who have somehow survived the inherent self-destructive nature, they will probably want to quarantine us to our own solar systems so we dont spread our greed to other worlds.

and then there's the opioid epidemic

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/opioid-cri ... 0-minutes/

A-L-E-X wrote:

Source of the post Even IF there are sentient beings out there who have somehow survived the inherent self-destructive nature, they will probably want to quarantine us to our own solar systems so we dont spread our greed to other worlds.

The Mote in Gods Eye.

A-L-E-X wrote:

Source of the post Even IF there are sentient beings out there who have somehow survived the inherent self-destructive nature, they will probably want to quarantine us to our own solar systems so we dont spread our greed to other worlds.

Greed is inherently meaningless in space. There is MORE then enough for one grubby little race of apes in the solar system alone. Also, what makes you think that other advanced space-worthy species (if they exist of course) would even care enough to quarantine a meaningless backwater planet like ours?  I mean, they are obviously advanced enough to have a interstellar presence. They would need to manage problems far different then ours, like mitigating supernovas and maintaining sociological hegemony across their colonies. Resources would be the least of their concerns when they can strip-mine entire moons or build Dyson swarms around their stars.

Stellarator wrote:

A-L-E-X wrote:

Source of the post Even IF there are sentient beings out there who have somehow survived the inherent self-destructive nature, they will probably want to quarantine us to our own solar systems so we dont spread our greed to other worlds.

Greed is inherently meaningless in space. There is MORE then enough for one grubby little race of apes in the solar system alone. Also, what makes you think that other advanced space-worthy species (if they exist of course) would even care enough to quarantine a meaningless backwater planet like ours?  I mean, they are obviously advanced enough to have a interstellar presence. They would need to manage problems far different then ours, like mitigating supernovas and maintaining sociological hegemony across their colonies. Resources would be the least of their concerns when they can strip-mine entire moons or build Dyson swarms around their stars.

It's an academic point since right now we aren't even capable of sending populated missions to other planets inside our own solar system let alone interstellar.  It's more of an idea towards would COULD happen in the future if humanity doesn't change its wasteful ways.  Humanity wont survive to go anywhere in space if it doesn't change, so the point of greed in space will be moot, if it doesn't change how it treats the planet we are on right now.
That might be the greatest of Great Filters and the main reason why we dont detect any signals from outer space.  According to the Kardashev Scale, it's the toughest transition, going to Level 1, and to do so, we need to learn how to be less wasteful.  Most civilizations may not be able to make this transition and die out without ever getting to Level 1.  After all, we are a part of the environment that we are destroying. Based on that, this may be the single most important reason why we haven't been able to detect anything out there.

Here is a complete overview of the much-discussed String Theory, for those of you unfamiliar with it. At roughly 50min of content, these videos are taking a light, but informative approach:

Stellator, take a look at the Cosmology thread for a sec, I posted a new article about Loop Quantum Cosmology (based on new research done at LSU.)

Ion-power has finally made it into our atmosphere, instead of operating beyond it.

PBS Space-time did a great review of the "Dark Fluid" paper claiming to replace dark matter and dark energy, which made the rounds on the internet recently, and which I also reviewed here.  tl;dr: Matt thinks the physics is cute, but rips it apart when it comes to matching observations.  The paper probably did not deserve the level of media hype that it received.

Watsisname wrote:

PBS Space-time did a great review of the "Dark Fluid" paper claiming to replace dark matter and dark energy, which made the rounds on the internet recently, and which I also reviewed here.  tl;dr: Matt thinks the physics is cute, but rips it apart when it comes to matching observations.  The paper probably did not deserve the level of media hype that it received.

Oh that sucks, unifying everything under a single umbrella is really attractive.  Also, I do hope we eventually discover negative mass and imaginary mass particles, because then we could do all sorts of neat things with space-time.
And even if they dont naturally exist, perhaps we'll be able to create them ourselves one day?  Like elements that dont naturally exist or microscopic black holes?

A-L-E-X wrote:

Source of the post Oh that sucks, unifying everything under a single umbrella is really attractive.

It's so attractive to us because our brains are literally hardwired to manufacture and maintain hegemonous mental-models of thoughtforms in relation to observed phenomena. We adore symmetrical and elegant explanations for what we see that conform to our subjective experiences. These have been tweaked unconsciously by our brains to create a false sense of congruency of our memories. It's a basic psychological fact that our brains routinely deceive us in order to avoid a state of cognitive dissonance - along with being wrong, this is a mental state our brains tries its best not to be in because it challenges our sense of identity. There are tons of articles and books illustrating this.

In relation to scientific principles, we always want an overarching concept of our unconformative universe that we can easily render and simplify. Something broad enough that it conforms to our brain's need to evolve and morph mental concepts. Unfortunately this universe operates on principles we can only visualize on abstractions like mathematics which cannot be influenced by our dishonest minds attempt to subvert it .  

Stellarator wrote:

A-L-E-X wrote:

Source of the post Oh that sucks, unifying everything under a single umbrella is really attractive.

It's so attractive to us because our brains are literally hardwired to manufacture and maintain hegemonous mental-models of thoughtforms in relation to observed phenomena. We adore symmetrical and elegant explanations for what we see that conform to our subjective experiences. These have been tweaked unconsciously by our brains to create a false sense of congruency of our memories. It's a basic psychological fact that our brains routinely deceive us in order to avoid a state of cognitive dissonance - along with being wrong, this is a mental state our brains tries its best not to be in because it challenges our sense of identity. There are tons of articles and books illustrating this.

In relation to scientific principles, we always want an overarching concept of our unconformative universe that we can easily render and simplify. Something broad enough that it conforms to our brain's need to evolve and morph mental concepts. Unfortunately this universe operates on principles we can only visualize on abstractions like mathematics which cannot be influenced by our dishonest minds attempt to subvert it .  

But the reason why it's intuitive to unify everything under a single umbrella is because the universe did originate from a single point, the big bang, cosmic egg, or singularity, or whatever you want to call it, if everything did truly evolve from that and our universe cannot be influenced at all by what is outside of it, then at the very origin of it all, everything was unified as one.
Now, if string theory or one of the other unifying theories is right, this might not be case since some things (for example, gravity) is seen as leaking in from outside of the universe (to explain why it's so weak compared to the other three forces.)
But if we just work with the one universe theory for now (or even if there are infinite universes but they are all self-contained) then everything that exists in our universe had to have a common origin from a single point.  Once we learn what that was and how to simulate it, we might be on the way to creating our own universes to our own preferred specifications (like perhaps ours was done eons ago!)

I posted my reply in the Totally off-topic thread.

Negative mass- the holy grail of physics!