I remember the first time I saw the Ring Nebula through my Dobsonian and thought "man, that thing is really far away". Then I swung my scope to Cassiopeia's "W" and looked at the ghostly smudge of the Andromeda Galaxy. I tried to fathom the distance and came up lacking. My eyes were better then and I could see things in the mid-6s, but even with full night vision and using averted vision, I couldn't make out any detail; it was just a little wisp of light where the middle was a touch brighter than the edges.
That was the day I fully became an atheist. It made no sense that God would put a smudge of light 2.5 million light years away that was actually a trillion purposeless stars. I had no answer for that. Standing on that runway in the Sierra mountains, enveloped in blackness and looking at Andromeda, I felt a direct link between myself, time and the universe. I didn't need heaven anymore and I never felt the existential dread of death ever again. I understood that I was part of infinity and that was enough.

You mean a Brahma day? Close. It's around a 311+ Trillion year cycle, and hardly resembles astrophysics beyond the one hypothesis that the universe "bounces" in and out of existence, expanding then collapsing then expanding....forever....but most hypotheses disagree. Some claim the universe will not collapse but expand eternally, ending in a big freeze, some suggest collapse in 5 billion years from now. Until we understand dark matter/energy, we are in the dark on this question.

The lifespan of Brahma (creator god) lasts for 100 of his years. His 12-hour day or Kalpa (a.k.a. day of Brahma) is followed by a 12-hour night or Pralaya (a.k.a. night of Brahma) of equal length. At the start of his days, he is re-born and creates the planets and the first living entities. At the end of his days, he and his creations are unmanifest (partial dissolution). His 100-year life is called a Mahā-Kalpa, which is followed by a Mahā-Pralaya (full dissolution) of equal duration, where the bases of the universe, Prakriti, is manifest at the start and unmanifest at the end of a Mahā-Kalpa.[13][24][25]

1 day (12 hrs: Kalpa) of Brahma = 4.32 billion solar years (1,000 Mahā-Yugas) (14 Manvantaras + 15 Sandhyās)
1 Day (24 hrs: Kalpa + Pralaya) of Brahma = 8.64 billion solar years
30 Days (1 month) of Brahma = 259.2 billion solar years
12 months (1 year) of Brahma = 3.1104 trillion solar years
50 years (Parārdha) of Brahma = 155.52 trillion solar years
100 years (lifespan: 2 Parārdha) of Brahma = 311.04 trillion solar years
I see a slight similarity, but not a correlation.


Oh my god, that's what you call perfectly describing psychology? Ok, your standard of proof is clearly light years away from mine.

Good poetry outweighs crusades, dark ages, etc?! Not to me.

You can say that, it's just a tool and can be used for good or bad, but in reality it's a tool for controlling the masses and pitting different segments of the population against each other. As a whole, religion has done exponentially more damage to individuals, society, and progress than any estimation of it's real world benefits. Only by adding the infinite good of heaven can the scales be even close to balanced imo.
The same may be true of science, it's real world benefits, which are ubiquitous and undeniable, may be outweighed by it's side effects since making the planet uninhabitable clearly outweighs extending grandpa's expected lifespan by 10% and keeping his lights on.

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I am a fan of Alien Rez, not because of Joss Whedon's patchwork script, but because at least it had the familiar comedic elements of Jean-Pierre Jeunet and his usual returning ensemble cast (Ron Pearlamn, Dominique Pinon), as well as Sigorney Weaver being a badass mother.

Just my opinion. I love all of Jeunet's films; as wild and varied as the genres, his film style and character driven stories transcend the genre. City of Lost Child, Amelie, Delcatessen, Micmacs -- really excellent track record. Cool bit of science fiction in all of his films, even if just sort of a chaotic sense of fate and surrealism.

Ridley Scott is hit or miss -- but then again, Ridley Scott has far more a prolific film career so it's like arguing the planetary distances versus the intergalactic distances, we can't fully comprehend the multitude of influences involved in making a film and the secret to making it a good film, so what does it matter if it's 1 astronomical unit, 2 light years, or 26 billion light years, it's all beautiful art.

My kindness aside, his last 5 films: Robin Hood, Prometheus, The Counselor, Exodus, The Martian -- typical and BORING blockbustery movies. 1492 and everything after have been epic suck fests. Even Hannibal was a let down. They're all movies you're sort of excited about, if it weren't for the fact that he drags them out and adds little element of noticeable flair. Like Spielberg, hidden in realism. I want the stylistic elements of Alien and Blade Runner and Legend that PULLED YOU OUT of the movie experience to say loudly: This is art.

The soundtracks especially -- Ridley Scott replaced the original scoring of his movie Legend, which was a dazzling score by Tangerine Dream -- he replaced it with Jerry Goldsmith in rerelease... which sort of makes it all come full circle when you listen to the awful, typically EPIC score of Prometheus, minus all the atmosphere that the original soundtrack provided.

I'd congratulate you as well, but I think a head that is measured in 100s of light years is quite big enough.

The closest major galaxy to us is 2.5 million light years away, a light year is 6 trillion miles. So it would be 2.5 million x 6 trillion miles. The scope of the universe is freaking huge.

The speed of the expansion of the universe is known, its the hubble constant. And the further away points in space are from us, the faster they are accelerating away.
The closest galaxy to us is 25.000 light years away. A light year is 6 trillion miles. So, its 25.000 x 6 trillion miles. So,no,we are not gonna get there. And for sure not outside our local group.

What I can find said at 1g acceleration it will take just over 1 year (ship time, slightly longer to outside observers) to reach the speed of light.

That's 46 miles per second per megaparsec (roughly 3.2 million light years) not for the whole universe.

The local group is over 3 megaparsecs across....I can't find how far the nearest group is, but it's likely >thousands of megaparsecs away, meaning if it's just 1000 away, that's 46000mps (miles per second) added to a trip that would already take 3200000000years at the speed of light. 31,536,000 seconds per year X >46000mps= >14506560000000 extra miles per year X 3200000000years =>4.6420992e+21miles, or >789606940 light years, or >263 megaparsecs of expansion during the 1000 megaparsec trip (if I did the math right, and that's not compounded by the second as it should be, that would make those numbers far larger). This means if we only ever get to 1/4 light speed, expansion already is faster than we'll ever go, and every day there's more space to expand, so it's expanding faster.

Even if we somehow managed light speed and the excessively long trip, after well over 4 billion years at light speed, we would have long since ceased to be human and evolved into something else ....and that's the closest groups, farther away is already well out of reach even at full light speed.

EDIT: about the wormhole thing, 'could' means they haven't ruled it out yet, not that we do, or ever will have the ability, or even that physics allows it.

As he mentioned the problems are numerous and extremely difficult to solve. One of the problems he didn't mention was navigation. Stars are so far way that if the trajectory of the probe is off by even by a fraction of a fraction at the start of its journey it could miss its target by light years. Don't even get me started on interstellar radiation and the shielding technology we don't have.

Yes it is important the field you work in. You are going to spend something like 40% of your waking hours doing it. If you think doubleshifting manual labour under scorching sun and whips is somehow equivalent to 8 hours in an office environment where you answer phones or w/e, you've lost the thread.

You're right that not everyone can change jobs. You grossly exaggerate what is required to do so, however. Yes, changing between highly skilled careers that required a significant amount of specialized knowledge isn't available to all that many people. But you can't even see the miseries of slave labour from the desk of your first career, they're so far away.

You haven't thought too much about infrastructure and what it would mean to have it removed, have you? Of course infrastructure is a benefit to employers, but that's not relevant to how beneficial it is to the 'slaves'. I expect casual access to electricity, water, and world wide communication would have done a lot for slaves, to name just a few of the elements of infrastructure. I'm honestly starting to doubt your sincerity now.

Slaves had good healthcare? Holy shit. I never expected to hear something like that. I don't need to make a counter point here, as you've ridiculed yourself. American healthcare is shitty -- COMPARED with other developed countries. It is light years ahead of anything that has existed outside the jurisdiction of a government.

Yes, the influential have an advantage. Nobody is disputing that. It doesn't utterly negate your rights across the board. You can still travel. You can still educate yourself. You can still own property. You can still address many grievances by wielding your rights. This list goes on and on. ALL things a slave couldn't ever hope to do. I think the rest of your paragraph should have been moved to the protection from hostility section so I'll address it there.

I was addressing hostility from other slaves. You are probably right in that the tribalism it fosters can be very dangerous where countries clash. In a system without government, spats would result in undending blood feuds, all across the territory ruled by the anarchy, whereas under a state, if they happen across borders they can erupt into something far worse.

I don't agree with the way the US has handled the extremist muslim situation that they mid-wifed in the middle east. But are you going to tell me that you're less safe, now, even after all the alluded too transgressions, than some rural farmer in South Sudan, who is effectively living without any guaranteed rights?

I'm definitely for more compassion and socialism than seen in modern US policy, so I'm not sure what your point is. Are you trying to claim that policies on slave plantations were more generous towards the slaves than our current policies are towards us?

Let's just say that I'm loathe to accept an unsourced opinion than medieval peasantry lead better lives than the average government-laden citizen nowadays. I'm sure there are some points on which they did better. Superstition, sickness, famine, war, flooding. We honestly don't have anything that even compares to these in the modern world. If you could link it or something though, I'd love to read it. It sounds interesting.

These posts are getting too long.

Upvote for Galacduck!

My bet is that there's probably quite a lot of life out there. I'd be willing to put money on the possibility of life even within our solar system (Europa maybe?).

But equally, most of it is probably very simple. Evolution is an energy intensive process, and we are lucky that earth has an abundance of energy.

So let's say there 1,000,000 planets with life. It's quite possible that the chances of complex life arising are low, such that there might only be 10,000 planets with anything above single-celled organisms and maybe < 100 with intelligent life. So let's say that all 100 of these civilisations make it to our level of technology and a few maybe even beyond.
They would all probably be ~1000 light years from their next nearest neighbour.

Then there's the issue of timing. They might have evolved and died out a long time ago. It's possible that we will one day get a message from another civilisation that's already gone extinct and the message was sent millennia ago.

Given all that coupled with the incredibly brief period of time we've actually been listening, I'd be far more surprised if we had made contact.

Unless someone invents FTL, then everything changes.

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.

Well, taking into consideration that these appear to be stable and contained laser bullets, rather than beams, I think it wouldn't be far-fetched to assume that they could travel magic light years through space until they collided with magic, at which point they would likely lose some marginal magical momentum and also generate secondary or even tertiary magic. Also I guess magic.

Let's say, for argument's sake, there are 1,500 advanced civilizations within 1000 light years of us.

If only 1 of those civilizations -ours- gives a shit about anything beyond their atmosphere, then there's your problem right there.

Once you add the chances of life, then intelligent life, then intelligent life that actually thinks it needs a way to talk to each other over long distances, THEN develops radio, only THEN can we hear them.

What if they just never got to broadcast signals? Wire and fibreoptic may have been just peachy for them. Or maybe they just got to cell phones before trying short wave...

Maybe they react to radio waves. Like the few people out there who get headaches -proven by blind tests- from being close to radio emitters.

Worm hole = the worst bullshit fantasy since Star Trek.
This film looks WORSE than Mission to Mars.

To even postulate that the Earth or Humanity could be 'saved' by a multi-billion dollar mission light years away is so fucking ridiculous I can't even be bothered to write anymore.

This is way worse than even Inceptions 'a dream in a dream in a dream up your ass' crap.

Love the thumbnail for the video, McConaughey looks so dumb in his plastic toy space suit.