@dannym3141

It just felt like a bait and switch. They feed you in with in fact very plausible concepts of time dilation and black holes as we best know it, then hit you with a deux ex machinima so implausible that it makes my brain hurt.

I mean, we're meant to believe that future humans, in order to effect their continued existence create an eloborate, highly risky and convoluted system like this 'tesseract library' thing, with the completely unfounded apparent knowledge that Mcconaughey's character will both willingly jump into it and somehow know how to use it to communicate with his daughter, who will pick up on highly cryptic and unlikely signals, and know how to interpret them?

And then Mcconaughey's character also gets saved. Obviously. Why not just convey the information in a far more direct way? And by the way, I will say that the argument that there is a paradox (future humans save themselves in the past) that the video makes is not strictly true given Hathaway's team survives and it's plausible that while Earth perishes, their team eventually redevelops human society.

To me the way that the story suddenly becomes ridiculous at the end when the first half is so rooted in real actual science makes it pretty clear what happened. Some producer decided to overule the script writers and insert in an ending that is happy, sees the characters reunited lest they offend the crucial female demographic.

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.

Paradox Interactive is killing me. Between this, HOI3, EU4, CK2 and V2, I could spend a lifetime in my mancave.

No they don't. Sort of. It's complicated.

I don't know about neutrinos, but I'm fairly certain they don't travel faster than light. There was an experiment a few years back that seemed to suggest they did, but as far as I know it is now thought to have been an error. It did make for an interesting paradox - I'm told the experiment was only possible due to very accurate GPS, which of course relies very heavily on both general and special relativity. The ftl result undermined their own methodology.

You are absolutely right, the results of elections in Greece do not create an obligation for fiscal transfers from other European countries.

But that plays right into what Varoufakis has been saying for years, doesn't it? The program over the last seven years has reduced Greek output by a quarter, and thereby its ability to service and reduce its debt. The troika is offering more loans, loans that cannot be payed back, in return for a further reduction in Greece's ability to pay back those loans in the first place. Extend and pretend, all the way. Nevermind the humanitarian cost or the threat to democracy itself.

It is either counter-productive or aimed at a different goal entirely. Greece wants an end to those loans, and all the loss of sovereignty that comes with it, while the Eurogroup in particular wants to stick to a program that only increased Greece's dependency to a point where they can throw the entire country into unbearable misery at a moment's notice (e.g. cut ELA access).

Take the privatisation demands as an example. The program demands that Greece agrees to sell specific property at a specific price. Both parties are keenly aware that this price cannot be realised during a fire sale, yet they still demand a promise by the Greeks to do so. Any promise would be a lie and everyone knows it.

Same for the demanded specificity of Greece's plans. After decades of nepotism, a fresh government made up entirely of outsiders is supposed to draw up plans of more detail than any previous government came up with. And they cannot even rely on the bureaucracy, given that a great number of people in it are part of the nepotic system they are trying to undo in the first place.

Taxes, same thing. The first king of Greece (1832'ish) was a prince of Bavaria who was accompanied by his own staff of finance experts, and they failed miserably. Greece went through occupation, military junta and decades of nepotism, and the new government is supposed to fix that within months.

Those demands cannot be met. The Greeks know it, the troika knows it, the Eurogroup knows it.

Zizek called it the superego in his recent piece on Syriza/Greece:

"The ongoing EU pressure on Greece to implement austerity measures fits perfectly what psychoanalysis calls the superego. The superego is not an ethical agency proper, but a sadistic agent, which bombards the subject with impossible demands, obscenely enjoying the subject’s failure to comply with them. The paradox of the superego is that, as Freud saw clearly, the more we obey its demands, the more we feel guilty. Imagine a vicious teacher who assigns his pupils impossible tasks, and then sadistically jeers when he sees their anxiety and panic. This is what is so terribly wrong with the EU demands/commands: they do not even give Greece a chance – Greek failure is part of the game."

Aside from all that, the entire continent is in a recession. Not enough demand, not enough investment, unsustainable levels of unemployment. Greece was hit hardest, Greece was hit first. It's not the cause of the problem, it is the canary in the coal mine. And Italy is already looking very shaky...

Misconception #8, regarding efficacy of the flu shot, is not so cut and dry:

http://www.cbc.ca/news/health/flu-vaccine-paradox-adds-to-public-health-debate-1.2912790

The flu vaccine may also not be as effective for the elderly:
http://archinte.jamanetwork.com/article.aspx?articleid=486407

I have nothing against vaccinations for the more serious illnesses like polio, etc - these vaccinations are effective and important. I'm just not so quick to buy into the flu-shot.

Some great points here.

I think it should be obvious that our assumptions about the frequency of intelligent space faring life in this region of space at this particular Eon are way off. Hence no signals and no first contact. The Drake equation is full of shit, so there is no Fermi Paradox.

He is understanding it, the paradox is, the earth is billions of years old,Our modern society is only a few hundred years old, but there should be civilizations out there who are millions of years old,its not that we should be "hearing' them ,but that they should be here..like flying around..they should have populated the galaxy by now..There should be many, many civilizations which are millions of years old..and they should be readily identifiable by the many signals filling our galazy....where the fuck are they?

Alternate universe.
Infinite parallel universes (multiverse). Try to shoot your grandfather, well you just shot him in a different universe. Paradox avoided.

Kalle, you fail to grasp that that is what happens when you mess with time travel. If anything, we might see some answers to the fact that the past terminator movies (and tv show) should have created such a ripple that there should be paradoxes all over, and that the original movies time line would be long gone. If at the least, we can use it to show that the T3 timeline never existed in the first place since this happened before then.

Hey, it reminds me of the Liar's Paradox. The logic is that someone who ALWAYS lies, will say "I never lie". It is a self-referenced logical proposition. I hope that is not the case here.

I would just like to say, there is an 'ignore' function.

Nothing you or anyone else says is going to reason this person out of their views. Because they didn't arrive at them from a point of reason in the first place.

That doesn't mean that everyone with an opposing point of view is wrong and should be shunned. But when you're confronted with a person like BK , you have to ask yourself, "Am I making things worse by responding?"

One third of the comments on this sift involve this troll. That sucks because this video is about a truly courageous man, but instead some jerk is getting off on your attention.

Yeah, I get the irony of making a post about him saying we shouldn't post about him. Paradoxical world we live in I guess.

Paradoxically, one of a sailor's biggest fears is fire...
Lots of combustibles; on the water, no where to go.

Headlines are a key source of *lies and truthiness

Jokes aside, calling out the paradox is a good job by Snowy.

I don't know if that's really a point missed. This paradox that we give up certain freedoms to live in a free society isn't new or controversial imo. The discussion, and the thing Snowden seems to be addressing, is that of a simple cost benefit analysis. I'd wager that a proportion of Americans might, given the revelations on the NSA, still opt for them to continue or even increase their operations in the belief it might make them safer. If they are convinced that not only does this collection of data not offer them protection, but it also comes at great monetary expense, then they might reconsider.