Your video, Gravitational waves - the cosmic chirp, has made it into the Top 15 New Videos listing. Congratulations on your achievement. For your contribution you have been awarded 1 Power Point.

Well: http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/crux/2014/09/02/how-advanced-earthlings-cosmic-yardstick/

Anyways, we think at least...

This game is so painful. I really hope the SC team stops listening to the hate, I hope they can maintain their teams, maintain focus, creativity, I hope they have enough money to last another 5 years of development, I hope this game turns out great. I really hope this turns out to be better than Elite a game that I found unfortunately boring. Will revisit once Occulus comes out, smoke a fat one and go on a cosmic voyage.

SC was/is one centered around PC gaming and dreams - I spent $40.00 on this game, which isn't much in my opinion in order to help a dream, a dream that I also want to delve into. My hope is not diminished yet and I do not care about delving into the rumors, anger and frustration. It is just a motherfucking video game. One that we all hope will be unbelievably good...

Realistically, these guys have probably promised too much, hopefully all the different modules add up to something cohesive - even if they have to detract from open world shit. I don't mind if they scale back to focus on story & content as long as the crafts feel solid. The alpha the control of the ships suck ass. Hopefully, both the controls and FPS mode are tight. If they can't pull off a huge scale, open-world game... no worries, I think working it to something more linear if the game mechanics are fun. Open-world games have been shit mostly anyways, Witcher 3 is a masterpiece though.

Derek Smart is an OCD creep he can go fuck himself and his games are shit! I mean kudos to him for having a lot of talent to do it himself and get shit released even if the content sucks.

@ChaosEngine @newtboy

If the Universe was in fact programmed, it was intelligently designed. Therefore, intelligent design is a valid scientific theory. Intelligent design is not simply limited to biology, but it is applied (obviously) to practically every scientific discipline, from chemistry to astrophysics. The natural laws are studied, in much the same way as the cosmic rays are being studied, to detect design features.

So, if you believe that DNA was created as a result of a general condition of the laws of the Universe and was not specifically planned, that does nothing to disprove intelligent design. We can simply look at how the laws are finely tuned to allow for life, or if you think that is the result of the general condition of the laws of the multiverse, then we can look at their fine tuning, and so on.

I did shooms a couple times before the Emerald Dream opened up and welcomed me in. Also recommend doubling up on psychedelics if you're in it for more than just some breathing walls and lights flickering around.

People talking about its poor flavor in the face of cosmic awareness? Sometimes you gotta float out in the negative zone and wait your turn while the real shit gets done. But you need nega bands, motherfucker! You can't construct nega bands with 5 grams of some shitty questionable mushrooms. Complain after 3 times that, some weed, and I don't know, LSD? At least it's not peyote. Yuck. Shooms just taste like stale cheese crackers.

MASSIVE LONG POST WARNING: feel free to skip this

I usually like Vsauce a lot, but I disagree with just about every assumption and every conclusion he makes in this video.

Anthropogenic vs external extinction event -
I think the likelihood of an anthropogenic extinction event is low. Even in the cold war, at the apex of "mutually assured destruction" risk, IF that destruction was triggered I think it would have been extremely unlikely to make humans go extinct. The US and USSR might have nuked each other to near-extinction, but even with fairly mobile nuclear fallout / nuclear winter, etc. I think that enough humans would have remained in other areas to remain a viable population.

Even if ONE single person had access to every single nuclear weapon in existence, and they went nuts and tried to use them ALL with the goal of killing every single human being on the planet, I still bet there would be enough pockets of survivors in remote areas to prevent humans from going utterly extinct.

Sure, an anthropogenic event could be devastating -- catastrophic even -- to human life. But I think humanity could recover even from an event with an associated human death rate of 95% or more -- and I think the likelihood of anything like that is real slim.

So that leaves natural or external extinction events. The KT extinction (end of the dinosaurs) is the most recent major event, and it happened 65 million years ago. Homo sapiens have been around 150-200,000 years, and as a species we've been through some fairly extreme climatic changes. For example, humans survived the last ice age around 10-20,000 years ago -- so even without technology, tools, buildings, etc. we managed to survive a climate shift that extreme. Mammals survived the KT extinction, quite possible that we could have too -- especially if we were to face it with access to modern technology/tools/knowledge/etc.

So I think it would probably take something even more extreme than the asteroid responsible for KT to utterly wipe us out. Events like that are temporally rare enough that I don't think we need to lose any sleep over them. And again, it would take something massive to wipe out more than 95% of the human population. We're spread out, we live in pretty high numbers on basically every landmass on earth (perhaps minus Antarctica), we're adapted to many many different environments ... pretty hard to kill us off entirely.


"Humans are too smart to go extinct" @1:17 -
I think we're too dumb to go extinct. Or at least too lazy. The biggest threats we face are anthropogenic, but even the most driven and intentionally malevolent human or group of humans would have a hard time hunting down *everybody, everywhere*.


Doomsday argument -
I must admit that I don't really understand this one. The guess of how many total humans there will be, EVER, seems extremely arbitrary. But anyway, I tend to think it might fall apart if you try to use it to make the same assertions about, say, bacterial life instead of human life. Some specific species of bacteria have been around for way way longer than humans, and in numbers that dwarf human populations. So, the 100 billionth bacteria didn't end up needing to be worried about its "birth number", nor did the 100 trillionth.


Human extinction "soon" vs. "later" -
Most plausibly likely threats "soon" are anthropogenic. The further we push into "later", the more the balance swings towards external threats, I think. But we're talking about very small probabilities (in my opinion anyway) on either side of the scale. But I don't think that "human ingenuity will always stay one step ahead of any extinction event thrown at it" (@4:54). Increased human ingenuity is directly correlated with increased likelihood of anthropogenic extinction, so that's pretty much the opposite. For external extinction events, I think it is actually fairly hard to imagine some external scenario or event that could have wiped out humans 100, 20, 5, 2, or 1 thousand years ago that wouldn't wipe us out today even with our advances and ingenuity. And anything really bad enough to wipe us out is not going to wait for us to be ready for it...


Fermi paradox -
This is the most reasonable bit of the whole video, but it doesn't present the most common / best response. Other stars, galaxies, etc. are really far away. The Milky Way galaxy is 100,000+ light years across. The nearest other galaxy (Andromeda) is 2.2 million light years away. A living being (or descendents of living beings) coming to us either of those distances would have to survive as long as the entire history of human life, all while moving at near the speed of light, and have set out headed straight for us from the get-go all those millions and millions of years ago. So lack of other visitors is not surprising at all.

Evidence of other life would be far more likely to find, but even that would have to be in a form we could understand. Human radio signals heading out into space are less than 100 years old. Anything sentient and actively looking for us, even within the cosmically *tiny* radius of 100 light years, would have to have to evolved in such a way that they also use radio; otherwise the clearest evidence of US living here on Earth would be undetectable to them. Just because that's what we're looking for, doesn't mean that other intelligent beings would take the same approach.

Add all that up, and I don't think that the Fermi paradox is much cause for alarm. Maybe there are/have been LOTS of intelligent life forms out there, but they have been sending out beacons in formats we don't recognize, or they are simply too far away for those beacons to have reached us yet.


OK, I think I'm done. Clearly I found the video interesting, to post that long of a rambling response... But I was disappointed in it compared to usual Vsauce stuff. Still, upvote for the thoughts provoked and potential discussion, even though I disagree with most of the content and conclusions.

I can testify to the quote from one of those experimented on "the most powerful cosmic homecoming I have ever experienced."

To the religious, we are alone and we are it, and many are quite happy to drive nothing other than a stake through further human accomplishment by putting limits on those who would try. I think the discovery that we're alone would make that worse, but that's nothing to worry about because you can't prove that.... otherwise we'd have proof God doesn't exist. (Merry Christmas!)

There's another alternative that sits so uncomfortably with me, and that's if light speed is the limit and there's no circumventing it. The reason it doesn't sit well with me is that it means effectively intelligent life will always exist in isolation, the only hope being that civilisations pick up ancient transmissions from other civilisations. It is inevitable in my mind that there is life out there of some kind, but it doesn't necessarily mean that they'll be tangible to us. I feel like that would be a tragedy beyond shakespeare.. inevitable cosmic loneliness.

100% agreed.
These numbers are human inventions applied to a cosmic reality that is out of our reach anyways....

@Trancecoach @dag @blankfist @enoch @VoodooV @ChaosEngine

Not that I approve of his behavior if it is in fact true that Trancecoach downvoted Enochs videos out of spite (I think that is wrong)...but the same thing happened to me and nobody cared. I don't think the issue is the rules, I think the issue is that Trancecoach isnt popular with some people and they want to get rid of him.

As far as the video is concerned, I think it is amazing..even msnbc played it on Morning Joe. It may serve to turn the public against the ACA even further and may give the republicans more political capital..but ultimately, as Enoch hinted at, the game is being played on a deeper level. Yet, It is not the elites we need to worry about. It's a spiritual war that is going on and everyone is a loser when they play this game:

Ephesians 6:12 For we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers over this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places.

The first Mass Effect game had a fantastic writeup on combat in space, and why it was supposed to be a more anti-hollywood, incredibly boring event in that universe.
Most encounters could be resolved in seconds from hundreds of thousands of kilometers (well outside visual range), and it only took a single shot to end the encounter, either through instantly disabling critical systems, or overheating the heatsinks onboard (which were constantly venting excess cosmic and solar radiation as it was), causing any sort of energy shielding to be impractical for similar reasons.
Nearly all military encounters in space were ultimately stalemates, because things could be resolved so immediately and with such deadly finality, it forced the space-faring civilizations to ask questions first and shoot as a last resort. I can't remember the exact description, but essentially a "fight" in space was two or more opposing ships simply showing up and sitting around doing nothing until the situation resolved itself, or one side had clearly more guns than the other (but there may have even been reasons for why the latter result wasn't common either, but it's been so long I can't recall).
Regardless, I love that vision of space travel and hypothetical military maneuvers because it portrayed the reality of such events from a really hardcore scientific approach. Obviously the rest of the writing team was unable to work around those limitations, since the rest of that game and the rest of the series pretty much resorted back to the Star Wars formula almost immediately. I wish their writers had been as talented as the guy who constructed the universe and it's laws, because it was an amazingly refreshing take on sci-fi space travel.

• From a science and engineering perspective, 'faith', or a desire that something be true [oversight], does not enter the picture. Only the data, and my interpretations, subject to revision.

• Magic man in the sky? Get serious ... ;~)

• My current view of 'design' is in regard to biological evolution only, not Cosmic formations, and not from a Biblical perspective. Nor do I consider the 'atom level up' to be explanatory. Yes, the Cosmos has progressed, likely on its own, but I view intelligence to be the instrumental cause of biologic progressions, however lengthy. And not just 'one' inteligentsia, but likely many.

Way to cut the clip right before it gets good. Love love love hearing NdGT wax philosophic about cosmic connectedness. "We are stardust."

No, that would be literary device facilitating whatever the writers want. If it's not a hero or villain, it's an object of power or a dimensional force. Or some other meaningless pseudo-scientific babble. The concept of "cosmic consonance" and the forces which balance the Marvel universe use whatever means necessary to maintain it.

Our job in the 21st century is to dismantle our obsessive desire to take root in humanity's collective canon of B.S. You'd think internet savviness would usher in this understanding, but it seems to exacerbate the emotional attachment and selfish need to require "explanation" in a fantasy world where anything can be explained with anything.

(P.S. I love comics -- just not the tendencies it creates in the readers, who see comics as words of minor gods.)

http://bigthink.com/dr-kakus-universe/the-paradox-of-multiple-goldilocks-zones-or-did-the-universe-know-we-were-coming

"But today, I can view my second grade teacher's statement from a different point of view. Today, astronomers have identified over 500 planets orbiting other stars, and they are all too close or too far from their mother star. Most of them, we think, cannot support life as we know it. So it is unnecessary to invoke God.

But now, cosmologists are facing this paradox again, but from a cosmic perspective. It turns out that the fundamental parameters of the universe appear to be perfectly "fine-tuned." For example, if the nuclear force were any stronger, the sun would have simply burned out billions of years ago, and if it were any weaker the sun wouldn't have ignited to begin with. The Nuclear Force is tuned Just Right. Similarly, if gravity were any stronger, the Universe would have most likely collapsed in on itself in a big crunch; and if it were any weaker, everything would have simply frozen over in a big freeze. The Gravitational Force is Just Right."

The evidence shows the Universe is not an accident; the observation of fine-tuning leads naturally to the conclusion that there must be a FineTuner, much in the same way that the evidence of a painting leads us to the conclusion that there must be a painter. The favorable circumstances of the laws that allow life to flourish on planet Earth are by design.

Applying the principle of Occams Razor, postulating the existence of multiple unobserved universes to try to account for our favorable circumstances should be ruled out in favor of a theory of a Creator because there are fewer assumptions needed and there is greater explanatory power. Once the existence of even "apparent" fine-tuning has been observed, ruling out the theory of a Creator is illogical and contrary to reason according to the principle of parsimony.