Re: Superhabitable planets - Bigger, better, more suited for biology

In alt.astronomy Caselli Luigi <[email protected]> wrote:
> Il 05/03/2022 14:16, Whisper ha scritto:
>> All completely different.  Humans can't survive long term off the earth. 
>>   We would be defeated by the effects of gravity/radiation and many 
>> other challenges etc.  Even if we could design transportation to get to 
>> an extra solar planet (100% impossible imo) we'd die before we got to 
>> 0.0001% of the journey.
>> Journeys to extra solar planets and contacting aliens are *never* going 
>> to happen so let's frame the discussions here within realistic 
>> boundaries.  This isn't a sci-fi group.
> If you assume that the current physics is right you are right.
> The only way to send something around the universe is using probes and 
> robots like the Voyagers.
> Men are to weak for long travels in the space.
> The only other possibility is a complete revolution in physics.
> Maybe someone unifying Gravity and Quantistic Mechanic and finding some 
> way to radically shorten distances.
> But for now this is sci-fi...
> Luigi Caselli

Even SF is too conservative compared with reality.

Larry Niven had a good argument about this. He likened the
thinking of the "man in the street" to a graph with a horizontal line on it.
Things stayed pretty much the same in the future as they were in 1800.

Scientists were a small step up. Apart from a few realists their thinking
was like a line on a graph with a modest slope on it. Like when you
make a graph on the side of your wardrobe as a kid showing how many
push-ups you can do each week.

SF writers were a bit more advanced. The slope on the line was a bit steeper.

Whereas history shows reality is an exponential, a curve that grows faster
than any polynomial.

But even pedestrian thinking shows in this case nothing special is 
required except some G.U.T.Z.

Space travel isnt for woosies like humans. Assume aliens are not
woosies. Every point in the galaxy is no more than 100kly from Earth.
There are 10^11 stars. They've had 14 billion years. At 1% of C
is only takes 1 million years to get anywhere in the galaxy.
Think of a good reason 100k alien civilizations have not made it here already,
all of them putting into the shade anything humans have accomplished in
the last million years. Human thought over the past 10k years
or science over the last 100 is nothing of consquence. Probably one of the
reasons they dont say much. 

You gotta imagine in the last 10 billion years a lot of them had cats.
(Or nearest equivalent). 
Cats -- even if they can figure it out -- refuse to do the smart thing. 
If there's a dumb way to do somethign a cat will try that first. 
You can see a cat sit by the side of the road and seemingly want to cross.
Waiting waiting waiting. When a car comes along THEN they will want to
run across in front of it.
Jump from the garage to the house over a distance of 3m? 
Sure. They will try it. 
You can shout yourself horse telling them to be reasonable. 
You cant make it, you might say.  
The cat wont listen. They dont understand distances. They dont understand
gravity. They cant see 10 seconds into the future or imagine what its like
falling 10m and landing on concrete on your head. 
Get out the shovel now.  You're gunna have to bury something in a few mins.
(And sure, it tried to make the jump, fell the 10m and ended up hitting
the concrete on its back and broke in half).

In 10 billion years "they"'ve just given up on talking to anyone at less 
than 10m years of continuous development.  So-called smart species almost 
never make the 2nd million let alone 10.

-- 
"Nothing in life is to be feared, it is only to be understood.
Now is the time to understand more, so that we may fear less."
- Marie Curie