if the thing we have labeled "life" on this one planet, this one context on this one planet we use an example, exists anywhere else, and if this thing we can barely define in our own species as "intelligence", which we base entirely on one species as the default example of, has somehow arisen from that "life" somewhere else, and this "intelligence" uses anything like the same concepts as ours that would be able to recognize anything remotely similar to our concepts and symbols we use in our "intelligence" and they have some concept of responding to the electromagnetic spectrum that interact with this "intelligence", and they exist on any of these planets that has the possibility of ever detecting Earth, then sure, they may be watching.
This feels like way too cynical of a take. Intelligence in this context means the ability to develop the tools necessary to detect other unusual planets.
Anything at that level of development will of course be aware of the electromagnetic spectrum, just as how we can't see in the infrared and have developed tools to do it for us, or how we've become aware of gravitational waves and are refining our tools for listening to them.
They don't even have to be based on the same chemistry. The only conditions on them would be that they are slightly more advanced than us to be able to do exoplanet atmospheric spectroscopy en masse. Earth would really stand out for being oxygen rich without the temperatures to explain some sort of extreme activity.
GP didn’t strike me as cynical, only more of a call to broaden our expectations!
> Intelligence in this context means the ability to develop the tools necessary to detect other unusual planets.
What if instead of attempting to detect planets, they just spam the universe with their space-hardened eggs, and hope that eventually they’ll smack into something habitable? Seems a lot more productive than analyzing incoming UV rays for thousands of years, then spending who knows how long to figure out how to get to the ones we suspect are interesting.
We are concerned with disseminating our discoveries and keeping in touch with the folks back home. But a non-hierarchical intelligence (by whatever hand-wavey metric you want to use for “intelligence”) might be more concerned with simply existing in as many places in which it can survive in as possible, whether Mom and Dad know about it or not.
This isn’t science fiction: I’d estimate there’s 1e10 spore-producing mushrooms on Earth on any given day. (That’s only a couple steps away from a wild-ass guess, but hear me out.) One mushroom can produce over a billion spores per day, 1e9. That’s 1e19 “eggs” every single day, and that number hasn’t changed significantly for thousands of years. It’s a staggering number.
This is science fiction: Imagine mushrooms are aliens who originally came from a planet with a more turbulent atmosphere, one which promotes more ejections of tiny spores into space. Imagine that their spores are drastically more long-lived and more spaceworthy (the Earth ones already do pretty well).
This isn’t science fiction: Mushrooms (well, fungi) have a symbiotic relationship with an overwhelming majority of plants. They are crucial to forests; there’s a viable hypothesis that forests only exist because mushrooms “decided” to farm trees. That decision, if the hypothesis is correct, played a huge role in the development of humans and therefore big telescopes.
Even if they’re native earthlings (they probably are), could they represent an intelligence whose comprehension of their environment, existential goals, mode of communication, etc. is too far outside of what we are used to in order to recognize them as being intelligent?
To bring it back around to what GP wrote, fungi do pay attention to humans, an analogue for “watching” us. They “hear” our footsteps and send hyphae to investigate, because we often track tasty things from our shoes onto their rooftops. If we cannot even speculatively judge a homegrown lifeform’s intelligence, why do we think we’ll stumble across an alien species that makes more sense to us? Those odds seem even less in our favor.
Your mushroom overlords have taken notice of your words and shall ensure you a particularly cushy spot in the dirt mines after their peaceful takeover of Earth is completed.
I am writing to confirm that this was indeed my goal, and I am definitely not a Vermont forest mycelial mat that figured out how to use a RaspberryPi someone dropped on me, gauging the humans’ response to the idea of said peaceful takeover.
My mask is N95 in public, but my main strategy is to almost never leave my apartment, which I live in alone. I think when people start talking about mask efficacy, it also depends on what you're doing with that mask. Are you only going to the grocery store once a week, or are you going out every day, to work inside a building, and going in and out of buildings all day? When they talk about a poorly fit KN95, is that on a person who runs into the gas station for 2 minutes, or someone who works at a concert venue?
> my main strategy is to almost never leave my apartment, which I live in alone.
This is incredibly sad. How many years of your life are you going to lose for a virus that is never going away? (A virus from which you are extremely well-protected after vaccination.)
Now, I don't know you. Maybe you have some serious immune compromise condition -- like a recent bone marrow transplant -- that prevents the vaccines from being effective. But if not, what are you doing? Even if you're a 65 year old with multiple co-morbidities, your risk of serious illness after vaccination is in the 1-per-10,000 range, and death is in the 1-per-100,000 range. I'm not exaggerating:
I have diabetes, which makes it extremely dangerous to contract covid. I'm fully vaxxed and boosted, but Omicron breaks through vaccine protection. I also like my apartment and there's plenty to do here.
> I have diabetes, which makes it extremely dangerous to contract covid.
The paper I linked above covers diabetes. Please read it. In a population of 1.3M elderly (> age 65; aka "high risk") people post-vaccination, a total of 98 diabetics had a "severe" case of Covid (i.e. not just death). The adjusted risk factor was found to be 1.47, on a baseline of 0.015%.
In other words, if diabetes is your sole concern, it certainly qualifies as elevated risk, but in no reasonable world is a risk measured in hundredths of a percent "extremely dangerous". And remember: these are elderly people. Your risk is almost certainly dramatically lower -- if you're in the demographic of the typical HN user, divide this by ten.
I can't emphasize this enough: this virus is not going away. It will be with us for the rest of our lives. If you can't go outside now, you will never again be able to go outside.
I'm seeing things like this. I should have more specific. I have metabolic syndrome. With variants like Omicron that have higher ability to bypass vaccines, I'm not taking the risk. Covid of some sort will be with us, but hopefully it won't be at this level of risk for people like me always.
> "Our study found that if you have high cholesterol, high blood pressure, mild obesity and pre-diabetes or diabetes and are hospitalized with COVID-19, you have a one in four chance of developing ARDS, which is significant,"
This article is incredibly misleading. Please don't take it seriously.
First, note the dates: this study is pre-vaccine. You are vaccinated. This doesn't apply to you.
Second, note the wording: if you have X,Y and Z and are hospitalized -- that second part is extremely low probability, even if X,Y and Z are true. In other words, they're conditioning the statement on a rare event to make it sound like it's common for people with diabetes to end up with ARDS. It is not common. It's very rare (but maybe 30% less rare for people with 3+ risk factors.)
To be more specific, read this part carefully:
> Researchers from Tulane University, the Society of Critical Care Medicine and Mayo Clinic followed outcomes for patients hospitalized between mid-Feb. 2020 to mid-Feb. 2021...Researchers compared 5,069 patients (17.5%) with metabolic syndrome with 23,971 control patients (82.5%) without metabolic syndrome. They defined metabolic syndrome as having more than three of the following criteria: obesity, pre-diabetes or diabetes, hypertension and high cholesterol.
> Patients with metabolic syndrome were 36% more likely to develop ARDS, almost 20% more likely to die in the hospital, more than 30% more likely to be admitted to an ICU, and 45% more likely to require mechanical ventilation.
In other words, if you restrict yourself to looking only at the sickest of the sick (i.e. people who are hospitalized; a small sub-population of everyone who gets Covid, strongly skewed toward the elderly), then those with 3+ risk factors are slightly more likely to die than those who do not have 3+ risk factors.
That's all that this study says. The MMWR study I cited more relevant to your situation, if only because you are vaccinated. You are very, very well-protected against severe disease. Even with diabetes.
Hypothetically if it ever comes out that Covid was not the killer virus it was made out to be, would you regret wasting 2 years of your life not leaving your apartment? I find it interesting because I know many people who have lived life to the fullest in these past two years that rarely mask, are unvaccinated, and have travelled frequently. None of them became sick in any way. Obviously I know nothing about your age or level of health but I don't think prescribing isolation is the best strategy for the whole society.
Judging by the number of times I've read something similar, A lot of people lately seem to be imagining a civil war is imminent, but it actually takes more than angry people who hate each other. The overwhelming majority of people screaming at each other online would not actually put their life on the line for this rage. As bad as things may seem to them, they're still far too comfortable. The events of January 6, that are laughably called an "insurrection" represent the level that the small minority of people even willing to leave their homes to do anything are at, and it's nowhere near what's needed for war. There are small pockets of people capable of organized violence that can do small events of organized violence. They exist. Some are desperate and ready to die, but that number is vanishingly small. A civil war, even in just one city is completely impossible under current conditions.
I never once heard nor thought the matrix sequels were planned from the beginning. The first movie is completely self-contained. The feel of the sequels is of someone stretching out a completed story, because of the money made from the first one, not anything pre-planned from the beginning, and they also feel like 1 movie that was made artificially into 2 to get more box office money.
I've always suspected that the Matrix trilogy was pre-planned in the same sense as Star Wars had a planned 9 episode arc as George Lucas always claimed.
That is, sure, they had a general sense of the surrounding world and events and what might happen next. But when someone actually said "here's an unfathomably large amount of money, please make these movies" they had to actually come up with all the concrete details and probably moved a lot of things around while doing so.
I seem to recall from the time that the Wachowskis originally planned the Matrix storyline as a trilogy, but then they were forced into making a single movie, and so took all the fantastic parts of the whole trilogy and crammed it into one movie.
Then they had to turn it into a trilogy again, and, well, it's hard to unscramble an egg.
Lucas had a script, and A New Hope ended up being the middle of it. He was all over the place. He wanted an Obi-Wan story, a Wookie movie, etc. Empire wasn’t the original sequel, but it got so big they double downed and then he just rehashed the first plot for RotJ (in the original script the Wookies helped destroy the first Death Star, but Ewoks were better for Toys R Us).
The prequel trilogy then just made it “Anakin’s story” and in 2008 he was saying he was done and there was no thereafter. Given how bad those were, he would probably have not done much better than Disney for the last three.
One bit I edited out of my longer post above referenced Tim Berner Lee's original WWW proposal documents. And how eminently readably they are today. Mostly because all they are is text and semantic markup.
