Well, as for your second comment, that turns out not to be the case.
Under relativity, your speed increase is asymptotic, which is a fancy word for āyou can get closer and closer to lightspeed, but you can never reach it.ā
Your first comment is why physicists do not like FTL travel. Under relativity, FTL travel is exactly the same thing as Time Travel. And Time Travel destroys causality. With no causality, the scientific method collapses and destroys science.
Since physicists are scientists, they naturally have an aversion to anything that destroys science.
I must say i do believe that aliens exist. Although many people frown upon this statement, i think that extra terestrial life does infact exist in space
I think itās a big load. Show me the peer reviewed reports.
Itās a mistake to say we āchooseā to get rid of FTL. We donāt choose it any more than we choose for gravity to behave like an inverse square. It simply comes out of the equations, which is beside the fact that weāve been able to accelerate objects ever closer to the speed of light, and they behave exactly as we expect they would under the guidelines if relativity, which is to say there is some amount of experimental evidence to go along with the theoretical impossibilities.
Bugger, I didnt know thatā¦ I always thought of it as either linear or exponential, just wasnt sure. Kinda stuffs everything up then.
Hmmmmmā¦
Exactly, these things are always done by dodgy, unheard-of characters, they have no real proof, except a strange video and a few āspecialā words in a material report. :no:
If it was such a breakthrough, wouldnāt they get a lot more attention?
Ive not read all the threads. IāM GOING TO BED butā¦
I donāt believe this universe is the only one. I think there are infinitly many such universes at once
and our concept of time and distance is miniscule. I donāt think one explosion ends all and I believe that the universe rebirths at every end. Our problem is we are only human and canāt cope with infinism as a natural state! We need a beginning and an end. Hence the Big bang theoryā¦but itās pooh! Itās just one mere explosion after another.
I do think ET has come here.
Okay. You are judging Intel life from our planet. Itās all luck. Earth may have been very unluckyā¦or lucky. You just cannot tell! There are certain species of dinosaurs that may have developed towards lateral thinking but wiped out!.
Personally, I donāt believe there are intelligent alien lifeforms. Itās because of my literal-Bible worldview, which simply leaves no room for sentient non-humans.
Iāll leave it at that since this isnāt a thread on religion.
Very Diplomatic. Imagine Circle. Inside is all knowledge you know, and outside is knowledge you donāt know. And thereās beings represented by knowledge you know that you donāt know on the rings . . .
This is a very common argument, but one that I think is very thin. It can be reworded essentially thus: My brain is overwhelmed by the amount of material to consider, so I give up thinking logically and allow anything to be possible. This is actually the same thing that happens with evolutionary theory. You posit an incomprehensible long period of time and you think that anything could happen in that amount of time. This is not a scientific way of thinking.
I donāt believe in finite extra-terrestrial beings, because I believe that the drama of the universe was intended to take place here on this planet. Aside from the impossibility of ever meeting a being from another world due to the speed of travel (just because you see it on Star Trek doesnāt mean itās possible), the young age of the universe (6000 years according to eye-witness accounts) and the corruption of all creation (including distant galaxies) because of the actions of one man on planet Earth is incompatible with the idea that there are other morally responsible beings out there.
Itās called argumentum ad ignorantiam, or argument from ignorance, which is the logical fallacy of āI donāt understand this, so itās not true.ā This is also a straw man argument on your part. A straw man argument is one where you superficially restate your opponentās position and then criticize that restatement, even when it is not what your opponent said. I must say, you are guilty of both.
Youāre right, which is why youāll never hear a credible scientist say such a thing.
Well, given the numbers involved, one would think that there is life somewhere out there.
Now, given the same numbers, do you think there is Blender somewhere out there too?
Whatever numbers are involved, order cannot be created out of chaos. This is, in part, the second law of Thermodynamics, or the law of Entropy.
Within its own system, chaos increases.
So, however many millions of years, or zillions of stars, this means nothing unless the means of life is recreated on these stars.
For that, we would have to know what is the means of life and how is it created and whether it can be created more than once. (Or in a larger zone than our intelligence allows us to comprehend.)
Pondering probabilities is one thing.
Saying that something must be true simply because it has many opportunities to happen is another matter entirely.
Life happened once, on Earth. And there are many many other places that it could happen. This does allow for the possibility that life happened somewhere else.
But we have no idea what the creating factor of life is, and we have no other example to base our reasoning on.
So we canāt know whether more opportunities could make it more likely.
Probabilities are based on statistics, and a single example simply does not give a statistic.
Isnāt a better question, do you believe that mankind will ever acheive the status of inteligent life? Donāt you believe we should try anyway even if it is unlikely?
JF
they havenāt found a unified field theory yet, so the picture is incomplete. There is still a (very) slight chance that relativity as we know it could be ābentā to allow for FTL. Soā¦ not giving up hope quite yetā¦
the LHC project might possibly give us more insight? although I have a funny feeling that itās just going to confirm the Standard Model and lead to the end of particle physics research.
although, I think the next major breakthroughs in technology will be in bioengineering rather than physics.
Neonstarlight, I do get your point, I even get hardcore creatonist side of thinking and Iām not denying any of these completelyā¦ wellā¦ maybe the very hardcore creatonist explanation is something that I think is pretty unprobable. Still, Iām very open on things that are not facts and I like to ponder and balance the probabilities. I just had to question PneumaPilotās wording, since in my opinion, the common view on that first paragraph was a bit roughly simplified.
My view on this once more. I see it is more propable that life is common than it is not around at all. Even if there would be some higher being / force that is creating life, I still believe (no pun) that life is common in universeā¦ and by the word ācommonā, I donāt think that every star has a planet with lifeā¦ not even every otherā¦
I canāt remember this one, who was the one that said: āā¦otherwise it would be a terrible waste of spaceā¦ā? Einstein? Hawking?
Chaos is not random. Nitpick, but itās a pet hate
This is, in part, the second law of Thermodynamics, or the law of Entropy.
Only within a closed system
Within its own system, chaos increases.
A closed system, not itās own system. Very important distinction there.
For instance, ever seen ice? Order from chaos right there.
A planet is not a closed system. You may notice a large source of energy during the day.
Next, if you want to talk about life, then you need a functional definition of life, one which allows you to point at any object, thing or collection and definitively say if itās alive.
A gigantic problem arises when you do actually start computing probabilities where cosmology and biological evolution are concerned. Pondering probabilities would be more rational than the argument itself (i.e. āItās so big, there just HAS to beā¦ā), but if you did that then you would see that there is virtually no probability of our extremely ordered universe arising from an explosion (thus the speculation about ādark matterā to make computer simulations work half-way) or of life arising from a soup of amino acids. The last thing that supporters of these theories want to do is examine the probabilities.
Someone may say something like, āBut letās just say that evolutionary forces hit the impossible jackpot on this planet.ā Well, thatās not something that I believe in at all, but it would at least seem to cancel the possibility of it EVER happening twiceā¦(of course, if the Darwinian evolutionary theory were true, it would had to have happened a ridiculous number of times even here - the hitting the impossible jackpot, I mean)
