Wednesday, April 28, 2010

Stephen Hawking- Physics in Slo-mo.

Why 3 Quarks daily is a daily read

3 comments:

mikey said...

The Drake Equation is a set of variables structured so as to normalize, or perhaps rationalize, the discussion about the likelihood of the existence of other intelligent societies in the universe. Of the 8 values included, it is the last one that has always fascinated me. That is the variable L, the length of time an intelligent society survives.

This seems to me to include the presupposition that when a species evolves intelligence, at that moment it becomes the greatest threat to it's own existence, and our experience with an admittedly tiny sample would seem to bear this out. After a mere 40,000 years of culture and the application of technology, and barely a century of electromagnetic signal radiation that might indicate our existence to nearby life forms, our resources are exhausted, our planet dying under the weight of our exploitation, and we continue to develop increasingly efficient ways to end our species existence.

I suspect this is the grand cosmic joke - once a society becomes sufficiently advanced to develop the technologies of communications, space travel and the power of the atom, it's days are significantly numbered, and while there might have been thousands of societies in our galaxy over the last million years, the odds seem to be that very few, perhaps only single digits, would exist concurrently in time...

Big Bad Bald Bastard said...

He still hasn't explained magnets!

ifthethunderdontgetya™³²®© said...

Nice counterpoint to the Limbaugh bloviation.
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