I think dash would be more intuitive to represent a range here.
Your comment about Germans intrigued me so I googled it. If you were referring to a comma as a digit separator, there's about 70 countries that use the comma as a decimal point: most of Europe, Africa, and South America, many more than just Germans :)
In South Africa, the decimal comma is the standard, but beyond school, I almost never see it used. The space is still retained as a thousands seperator (I don't think I've ever seen a comma thousands seperator in a South African context).
The widespread use of the decimal point in SA is presumably the legacy of cheap digital calculators that couldn't be localised effectively.
I wonder how other decimal comma countries have been able to stave off the decimal point.
> I wonder how other decimal comma countries have been able to stave off the decimal point.
Yes, I looked it up a while ago for some reason, and was surprised the comma was so widely used.
I'm also surprised SA uses the comma, because if there's any kind of pattern it seems to be former British Empire countries, or places where Britain had some historical connection, that use decimal point, and Continental Europe, or former European colonies, using the decimal comma.
Yes, German is so precise! (More precise than floating point.) I'd be surprised if there weren't long German words for different kinds of floating point numbers, that spell out the unabbreviated name of the IEEE standard and the exact number of bits used for mantissa and exponent.
Seven hundred seventy-seven thousand seven hundred and seventy-seven.
Whether it is written with spaces or dashes or neither is nothing more than an artefact of orthography. Extreme compound words can be created in English, too, they just look less like compounds (and they violate cultural aesthetics more than in German).
Actually the only difference with German is that a) some simple words are longer and b) compound words are always chained together in writing.
"Floating point number" is a compound word in English too but there are very few compound words which are chained together as in German (e.g. hardware, blackbird).
The parent of my comment was making a joke (I doubt he seriously thinks people say "floating full stops" in the UK) so I made a joke too, in the same vein. You know, period/full stop...
It may not have been the best joke ever but I don't think it deserved 3 downvotes. People can be really tiresome sometimes.
(I'm not saying to you BTW; I don't think you downvoted.)
Edit: Okay, I received two upvotes after writing this, so now my post feels way too bitter. I'll leave it because I do think the point still stands - people are sometimes way too ready to downvote posts here (I don't mean mine, but anyone's) - but I'll also say people here are really very nice most of the time too.
Sci-fi scenario: We find evidence of microbial life from billions of years ago, when Mars was briefly a warm, wet place. Decades hence, a researcher realizes that Mars still has microbial life, but that it has evolved as its environment has, so it's as arid and rarefied as its present atmosphere, wispy and almost not there. Sadly, she realizes that human activity has already doomed it to extinction.
Alternative dystopian scenario: we eventually find evidence of (sometimes extinct) life on all planets and moons that had encountered specific chemical conditions for a long enough period of time. We realize en masse (more than we realize now) that life isn't a unique snowflake, but simply a geological process, not that far removed from rocks and volcanoes. The realization causes a broad spiritual/existential crisis and irreversibly changes human culture, mostly for the worse.
I don't think you'd have to assume that's a dystopian scenario. The Copernican Revolution and associated existential crises -- that we're not in a privileged location at the center of the universe -- changed human culture mostly for the good.
My question was "what if we realize that life isn't special?" -- not "what if we realize that humans aren't special?". The fact that three commenters misinterpreted the former for the latter is only a proof of our anthropic bias.
We are not at all post-Copernican, strictly speaking. We value living things like we never did before. You occasionally hear discussion about granting rights to non-human animals: dolphins, apes, etc. That almost never happened in human history (save for a few cultures where certain animals are held to be holy). You are talking about moving away from anthropocentrism, while the scenario I'm describing is a bleak world where all life as such isn't valued. In that world, there isn't even any point of talking about "saving the planet," because "for whom are you saving it for? For polar bears? How are they any better than lifeless rocks: both products of geology?"
I think I can speak from experience, you mostly describe may way of looking at life. It's not without respect though. Even if life is nothing special in the grand scheme of things, it can still be very special from a subjective perspective.
For me the respect, and awe, for life comes from how each individual is the proverbial snowflake, as an instance of life, and an incredibly complex, emergent and dynamic one at that.
Take something completely lifeless like a stalactite as a reference. Tehy can take millenniums to form, but the process really isn't very special, just water dripping from the ceiling. Which most people realize, yet most people still feel a certain amount of awe when presented with one, and would be appalled if someone just decided to take it down for no reason. That would be disrespectful.
It's the same thing when we talk about species going extinct. Most of us has no particular connection to most species, and shouldn't be bothered. But still, every species has its own unique character and beauty, which will leave an emptiness behind of possibilities lost, so is a sad thing to loose for that reason alone.
So I think discovering more instance of living things would not make life less valued, on the contrary, more uniqeness would only bring more things to be in awe of.
Yes, we agree that living processes are special, but part of what makes them so special is because we believe them to be unique and rare. My whole point was, what if we discover, at some point in the future, that life in the universe is not rare, but rather an inevitable process of geology, like the stalactite you're describing? (that was a great analogy, btw.)
We will still think of species' as unique (identical biochemistry is exceedingly unlikely), yet life will become somewhat "commodified" in a sense, if you understand that comparison. Obviously, I took some liberty in describing a nightmarish "moral crisis" scenario; I am just surprised that my comment garnered so many responses, all of them misunderstanding my main argument in one way or another.
What is the alternative? That we actually are special snowflakes? I think that is the more terrifying eventuality - but of course, this is a decision anyone participating in the question has to make: are we special or are we not-special, and if either is true, what difference does it make? Answer: it really doesn't make any difference. If we discover life on Mars or not, we still haven't taken the time nor made the effort to talk to the dolphins and ask them what they think about it ..
For me that's a totally alien way of looking at things. It's like projecting caste prejudices to all living thing, that BTW seems much more anthropic biased.
The possibility of panspermia means simply finding that life won't, by itself, mean life is inevitable. It will simply mean it happened at least once in the solar system and might spread easily.
Finding microbial life through the solar system won't really make us any less special. Even if we find evidence suggesting microbial life is common throughout the universe, it does not imply that complex animal life is common or inevitable. I suspect the goalposts will just be shifted. :)
It's all selection, I think. Systems tend to seek energy minima (at least locally). Physics, chemistry, biology, information, etc. It's turtles, all the way down. And up, too.
Very tedious trilogy. It had great potential but just drowned the reader in unnecessary detail on subjects that had nothing to do with the theme of the books(s).
As the subject matter is very interesting to me, I started the series with great expectations and positive anticipation. I ended up very disappointed.
That wealth of detail was the best part for me. If one wants to be immersed in such a world/scenario, then it is a pleasure. It's much the same as savoring the paeans to nature in the Lord of the Rings trilogy books. There's more to some books than the plot and characterizations.
And what's wrong with that?
Martian life vs colonization is nothing more than an anecdote once we find signs of it it's nice and all but no one is going to go out of their way to preserve it long term if it means that colonization will be affected.
Eventually there will be life on mars whether it evolved "naturally" there or evolved just as "naturally" some where else and was brought there doesn't matter if it's a rocket or a comet on the cosmological scale both of those processes are just as "natural".
Heck if we find a planet inhabited by self replicating robots they would pretty much automatically count as life, the fact that they aren't made out of some arrangement of self arranging molecules doesn't make it any less "natural" in the grand cosmic scheme.
I'm glad it wasn't just me. That book had the largest gap between how much everyone else hyped it and how much I hated it that I've ever encountered. I think the main problem for me was that it introduced so many characters and it rarely (if ever) returned to them in later chapters, that I just didn't care about any single character at all. And that makes reading about them so tedious.
What's the point of preserving a lifeless environment or even one with bacteria and no intelligent animals, over giving humanity a second planet to survive on in case something happens on Earth?
After all, even here on Earth we haven't had such a concern for species that are not us. We drove many to extinction even without it being an existential matter for us.
I think the human sense of morality is largely dependent on how similar something is to us, to know if we are even hurting it. How can you hurt a lifeless environment that's the product of random, and sometimes cataclysmic, events?
The reason why the beauty is more prominent is political in my opinion: The people on Mars can relate to and see the changing environment in the later books. The possibility of Martian life is a mere academic motive.
Also some characters begin to spread earth life already in the first book. So if they would find Martian life after this event it could be just mutated Earth life...
Well if it was good science fiction she would discover that the microbial life on mars made it to earth after a meteor impact and by virtue of acting as a virus, infecting pregnant apes who gave birth to what would be recognized as humans. And that human activity on Mars doomed it to extinction, and human activity on Earth doomed humans to extinction, and so we not only killed off ourselves, we kill of our chance to evolve again on earth.
Similar idea, but the Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury touched on this heavily. Although it was humans and humanoid martians instead of microbial life.
This is a quite likely scenario since collective human activity has so far spelled doom to most species other than humans and our parasites, commensals and domesticated species.
If we are serious about researching or preserving alien life in our solar system, we would have to be very cautious with what we do. But most likely, economic forces will start to dominate our actions in space, as they have always done on Earth.
> But most likely, economic forces will start to dominate our actions in space, as they have always done on Earth.
Perhaps most advanced intelligence comes in the form of distributed hive minds, and something like a "civilization" is regarded by most sentients as something akin to a pack of wolves or an uncontrolled mob? Maybe we're the ultimate ethical dilemma: All of the bad qualities of a cancer, but you can't ethically kill us because every one of our units is an independent sentience.
Our neighbors are quietly watching us, hoping we'll choke in our own industrial effluents and kill ourselves off in the resulting ecological chaos, so no one has to taint themselves with the unpleasant task of sterilizing our system.
How could aliens have the ability to destroy us if they didn't have their own technological civilization?
Manufacturing spacecraft capable of traveling between the stars in any reasonable amount of time, if possible at all, would be an immense industrial undertaking, the pinnacle of not just scientific knowledge but societal complexity in order to coordinate the resources involved. Any alien race capable of doing these things must have also committed the sins that they're smugly damning us for, and to a far greater degree than we have.
> How could aliens have the ability to destroy us if they didn't have their own technological civilization?
Note that my comment specifically mentioned hive minds. A civilization has many cooperating/competing individuals. Most of civilization's problems are epiphenomena arising from this fact. What if most galactic factions aren't composed of many individuals, but are effectively one distributed mind? What if they regard our social pathologies as pestilential?
Maybe the individual galactic factions are hive minds, but what guarantees that those hive minds are in turn going to get along with each other and not just recreate individual human disagreements and pathologies on an interstellar scale? Perhaps the reason we've never picked up any transmissions from aliens is that all the hive minds have blocked each other on Interstellar Twitter for publicly thinking something offensive fifty million years ago.
Yes necessarily. You can't build an interstellar spaceship without an industrial base, and creating an industrial base is going to have the same effect on the local ecosystems that humanity is being damned for. At best, our alien hive mind is a giant hypocrite.
> You can't build an interstellar spaceship without an industrial base, and creating an industrial base is going to have the same effect on the local ecosystems that humanity is being damned for.
This only happens because a human being's short lifespan, limited mind, and constricted point of view mans that a human's perceived self-interest is very limited in scope. A planetary scale hive mind could have a much longer lifespan and a (literally) inherently more global view.
Externalities arise because of a limited scope of knowledge, and persist because of self-interests of tiny scope. We think markets are so wonderful, because the distributed computational power of many individuals can keep up with global complexity. What if a single hive mind could command the same number of neurons, without the disparate competing self interests getting in the way?
It could presumably accomplish great tasks more efficiently without the waste of individual human beings skimming kickbacks from the interstellar spaceship budget or arguing about what color the ships should be painted, but building them is still going to require a massive industrial effort that will have a significant effect on ecosystems, no getting around that.
Without giving away too much... there is some tension between scientists trying to use domes and gear to prevent contamination vs. colonists and miners.
Or in Thing Explainer-speak, "little rock fingers that stick out."
Its interesting that it was Spirit that detected this- big new discoveries are still coming up after driving the same robot around on the planet for years! Humanity has just barely scratched the surface (as it were) of understanding Mars.
