*promote

Promoting this video and sending it back into the queue for one more try; last queued Tuesday, April 12th, 2011 3:29am PDT - promote requested by geo321.

This is now my favorite TED-Talk.
Let's go Sift! Help educating the collective mind of this planet and share this talk with everyone.
Upvote !

I'm starting to dislike TED because it seems every talk now has to be a giant spectacle instead of just presenting ideas.

Apparently Nassim Taleb couldn't present his ideas from his book The Black Swan in a satisfactory way for TED so they cut him out. Not cool...that guy's ideas about improbably events, information, robustness, and fragility are some of the most important idase ever.

This guy is hand-waving so much about entropy, thermodynamics, complexity, etc. It really bothers me. It's such a reach to say that the second law of thermodynamics implies that complexity shouldn't emerge. I mean, obviously his own talk is exactly about numerous counter examples to this idea. But it's a straw man for him to set up in the first place.

Interesting, though I am not a man of pet peeves... he hit one of the few of them that I have. GIVE THE MAN SOME WATER, PLEASE!

TED jumped the shark years ago. This talk is crap if you understand the underlying science.

Not a lot of love in here for this one. As an avid physics and astronomy fan, I've got to agree this presentation was mildly irritating.

REMEMBER Entropy merely states from "orderly" to "disorderly" in physics terms. Order is pure energy, disorder being the lack of that pure energy or the energy in dissociated forms (other than the e=mc^2 connection of course). In fact when you look at all the structuring and completely different things OTHER than pure energy, you know entropy is very well at work.

It doesn't mean CHAOS!!! I hate this Tripe (<--capital T).
Complexity is inferred in an entropic setup with time pointing the same direction as ours. No magic, no hocus-pocus needed. It breaks down and changes the structure to more obscure or "different forms" than that first moment. This is the same reason that people who look at the past with the mindset of using "the past" giving rise to statistics; which are helpful if you ONLY know their place. The chances that we would be here in reverse ARE 100% like his egg(unless quantum mechanics throws out a oddity: i.e. a virtual particle where there wasn't one, etc...).

Also, nothingness can't exist as he states. If you could even label it then it wouldn't, couldn't be; which is why in QM we have the quantum foam (QED, Richard Feynman) or quantum spacetime and virtual particles. The term nothingness is as closely related to the term virtual in a physics sense. In other words that idea is "kaput".

He's teaching the audience old, outdated, and sixth/seventh grade'ish material.

/Isn't TED supposedly new ideas being shown easily, like Feynman. They've been falling the last 6 months.

But nonetheless he IS drawing a very intimidating picture there. I for one never realized so clearly the "place" we as a human race have in the universe. Besides the fact that he uses outdated or non-accurate scientific references as it seems. Please keep in my mind that this man is a historian and as I see it he doesn't base his whole argument on the laws of thermodynamics rather then his own abstraction of complexity and development.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but aren't many if not all of the facts he mentions about the first "steps" of the universe currently accepted facts/ assumptions of astrophysics, if one could say so?

His train of thought seems pretty straight to the point and his conclusion is absolutely true. We are indeed destroying the "goldi-locks-conditions" that led to our existence.

>> ^luxury_pie:

But nonetheless he IS drawing a very intimidating picture there. I for one never realized so clearly the "place" we as a human race have in the universe. Besides the fact that he uses outdated or non-accurate scientific references as it seems. Please keep in my mind that this man is a historian and as I see it he doesn't base his whole argument on the laws of thermodynamics rather then his own abstraction of complexity and development.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but aren't many if not all of the facts he mentions about the first "steps" of the universe currently accepted facts/ assumptions of astrophysics, if one could say so?
His train of thought seems pretty straight to the point and his conclusion is absolutely true. We are indeed destroying the "goldi-locks-conditions" that led to our existence.


I agree. Yet I wish he would also point out that in the last ten years we've found extreme life in places you'd NEVER expect. This might throw the "goldi-locks-conditions" partially out the window. This year we found life not based on carbon, but phosphorous (this is by rote memory, it may have been sulfur) and even arsenic! We may actually have quite a bit of extra-terrestrial life in our own solar system. Just not sentient (or lacking ways to create incredible machinations of the mind), yet.

What humans need to learn is that we will kill ourselves as WE need that, "goldi-locks-conditions", to live. Almost all current life except the kind I mentioned would be devastated by our actions. We WILL die, and be replaced for a good 4-5 billion years. If we get to one million I'd be surprised.

If you're talking grey-goo stuff though, then I'll give you that...as the most hilarious way to screw ourselves over... I'm just thinking of alien telescopes looking at our planet and wondering WTF is that!?!

/The last bit is my sarcastic bastard side showing through.