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[Arx]

I may or may not have missed something very important and I'm flipping out.

Edit: it's next week. Safe.

[King Kravoka]

I got a warning message on Kong for chat behavior.

Guess that's what happens when you spam all 3 CHAPETARS of BATTLE FOR YII.

[Spehss _]

I've been doing lots of reading tonight.

Spoiler: first (click to show/hide)

The Fermi Paradox of why there isn't contact with other intelligent life in the universe. Long story short, there's a theory of a "Great Filter" that stops most life from advancing to a type 3 level civilization. Either the human race has already passed this filter and is on the way to eventually achieving a stage 3 civilization, or we have yet to hit the filter and more than likely will fail to breach it and either stagnate and die out or kill ourselves trying to clear the filter.

Spoiler: second, longest read and definitely worth it, also most terrifying and/or exciting (click to show/hide)

Articles 1 and 2 detailing the "inevitability" of the creation of AI as intelligent as a human, and how quickly such AI will outpace us due to exponential advancement and achieve superintelligence levels and will basically be a like a created god that will either fundamentally change the human race or lead to extinction. Estimates for AI advancement place human level AI in the next 20 to 40 years, or sometime in this century. Note this also can be viewed as the "great filter" from the earlier Fermi Paradox.

Spoiler: last (click to show/hide)

Lastly, and most bizarrely, there's a theory that this world is nothing more than a hologram, ala Matrix, based on the way black holes are a conundrum of being a singularity and defying the theories of gravity and general relativity while also producing heat. Or something. My brain is still flummoxed form the AI articles and I mostly skimmed this. It's got lots of technical mumbo jumbo.

S-s-s-SCIENCE. My brain hurts.

[Sirus]

Science, why you so crazyawesome?

[Spehss _]

Science, why you so crazyawesome?

The AI articles were so cool it makes me want to completely change college majors and try to contribute to the AI thing. Also crazy to think it's some possibly huge world changing event which we may actually live to see. Suddenly I'm not jealous of future generations probably getting all the cool space travel and galactic colonization.

[Bohandas]

This is what I think of the Fermi Paradox:

http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=1776#comic

EDIT:
Another good analogy would be the enormous number of  (in retrospect) incredibly ignorant and nonsensical statements and speculations that Aristotle made over the course of his lifetime based on little or no data.
Similarly neither Dr.Fermi nor Dr.Drake were in any position to speculate about the relative likelihood of extraterrestrial life developing; the jury's still out on whether it was even likely that it devdloped here.


EDIT:

Consider this: Earth's earliest radio signals have only had the time to travel well under 1/100th of the way across the Milky Way Galaxy, not that it matters anyway as they were likely already far too faint to detect without having an array of radio-telescopes pointed straight at them long before they even reached the kuiper belt

[Bohandas]

Also, I've gotten the impression that just abput any explanation of the Holographic Principle simple enough to be understood by the average person withput an advanced degree in physics or math consist almost entirely of highly flawed metaphors, so I wouldn't put too much stock in them.

[Bohandas]

I've been doing lots of reading tonight.

Spoiler: first (click to show/hide)

The Fermi Paradox of why there isn't contact with other intelligent life in the universe. Long story short, there's a theory of a "Great Filter" that stops most life from advancing to a type 3 level civilization. Either the human race has already passed this filter and is on the way to eventually achieving a stage 3 civilization, or we have yet to hit the filter and more than likely will fail to breach it and either stagnate and die out or kill ourselves trying to clear the filter.

Spoiler: second, longest read and definitely worth it, also most terrifying and/or exciting (click to show/hide)

Articles 1 and 2 detailing the "inevitability" of the creation of AI as intelligent as a human, and how quickly such AI will outpace us due to exponential advancement and achieve superintelligence levels and will basically be a like a created god that will either fundamentally change the human race or lead to extinction. Estimates for AI advancement place human level AI in the next 20 to 40 years, or sometime in this century. Note this also can be viewed as the "great filter" from the earlier Fermi Paradox.

Spoiler: last (click to show/hide)

Lastly, and most bizarrely, there's a theory that this world is nothing more than a hologram, ala Matrix, based on the way black holes are a conundrum of being a singularity and defying the theories of gravity and general relativity while also producing heat. Or something. My brain is still flummoxed form the AI articles and I mostly skimmed this. It's got lots of technical mumbo jumbo.

S-s-s-SCIENCE. My brain hurts.

First one: There's also the possibility we're the first intelligent species, although this is INCREDIBLY unlikely.

On what do you base this estimate of probability. We have a sample size of 1, which is practically worthless.

[Arx]

It's not as improbable as us being the only intelligent species, but it still makes quite a large assumption. There are a ridiculous number of habitable planets out there in all probability, considerin the number of stars, so saying we're the first intelligent species is a very bold assumption.

[Lagslayer]

Science, why you so crazyawesome?

The AI articles were so cool it makes me want to completely change college majors and try to contribute to the AI thing. Also crazy to think it's some possibly huge world changing event which we may actually live to see. Suddenly I'm not jealous of future generations probably getting all the cool space travel and galactic colonization.

So, knowing it could just as easily kill us all, you want to actually make it happen faster?

[SirQuiamus]

The odds of there being other sentient lifeforms in the universe: Pretty close to 100%
The odds of humanity ever making contact with them*: Pretty damn close to 0%

*assuming that FTL travel/communication is impractical.

The Fermi Paradox is not much of a paradox, really.

EDIT:

Spoiler: second, longest read and definitely worth it, also most terrifying and/or exciting (click to show/hide)

Articles 1 and 2 detailing the "inevitability" of the creation of AI as intelligent as a human, and how quickly such AI will outpace us due to exponential advancement and achieve superintelligence levels and will basically be a like a created god that will either fundamentally change the human race or lead to extinction. Estimates for AI advancement place human level AI in the next 20 to 40 years, or sometime in this century. Note this also can be viewed as the "great filter" from the earlier Fermi Paradox.

Any article quoting Ray Kurzweil is bound to leave me amused and bemused, but not worried or terrfied in the least. He's been banging on about the impending "singularity" for decades, but so far he hasn't given me any reason to take him seriously. Now it's your job to prove me wrong and prove him right: become the Creator of our Machine Overlords!       

[Baffler]

Travel probably is, but there's some hope on the communication side of things depending on how quantum entanglement shakes out. As far as intelligent AI goes, I don't trust it. Pretty much everyone who talks about it talks about it like it'd be the solution to literally all of our problems, but it sounds more and more like a pipe dream to me the more excited people get about it. What would an intelligent machine come up with that a multidisciplinary team of scientists, or a dedicated group of experts couldn't?

[NullForceOmega]

Superluminal travel is likely impossible according to modern science, and that is like saying that travel to the moon is impossible according to 14th century science.  Superluminal communication is already theoretically possible, and has been verified by empirical testing, but currently serves no purpose whatsoever, as it requires two identical devices and we have no cause to manufacture them.

[reality.auditor]

Articles 1 and 2 detailing the "inevitability" of the creation of AI as intelligent as a human, and how quickly such AI will outpace us due to exponential advancement and achieve superintelligence levels and will basically be a like a created god that will either fundamentally change the human race or lead to extinction.

Multiplying bacteria is also exponential. One bacteria in some few weeks could achieve mass of entire planet. Scary! Except... it somehow does not happen.

This is how convincing I see this whole "expotential advancement of AI" crap so lovely spouted by various transhumanist groups that really should know better.

The odds of there being other sentient lifeforms in the universe: Pretty close to 100%
The odds of humanity ever making contact with them*: Pretty damn close to 0%
*assuming that FTL travel/communication is impractical.

You do not need FTL. You can spread around entire galaxy with speed << c in hundred milions of years. Considering galaxy is almost as old as universe - about 13 bilion years - this is a lot of time to be literally everywhere. So Fermi Paradox still stand. Why they aren't here?

My personal idea is variant of zoo hypothesis. We are in area that fulfills two conditions:
1. "Owner" of this space is pretty anal about respecting borders of his ownership.
2. "Owner" does not care very much for maintaining at least some parts of owned territory. And by "maintaining" I mean periodical genocide of anything that could potentially or actually be intelligent.

So owner will not interfere (at least not yet) and others will not dare to enter. And here we are.

[NullForceOmega]

The AI is actually limited by physical laws and energy requirements, by limiting its storage space and allowed power input, it would never achieve godhead.