What's on Your Mind

[Karl Rand]

Had a brief glance over your podcast. The heading ‘Does God want to be worshiped’ caught my eye. Putting aside for now any detailed elucidation of what God is, isn’t or how extensive his/her/it’s powers might be I often find myself wondering how any deity, purported to include all of existence, would want or need to worship itself.
Having let the cat out of the bag though I’m mindful my agnostic allergy to all organised religion tells me to stay out of any long discussion of such matters. OK, now and again I lapse when I feel the need to draw attention to the evils of organised religion but generally I try to avoid discussions of concepts few of us can fully grasp.
In case any of a Yogic discipline feel the urge to evangelise I should explain a decade of membership of Ananda Margi cured me of that particular practice and many of its kind.

[InbetweenDreams]

Had a brief glance over your podcast. The heading ‘Does God want to be worshiped’ caught my eye. Putting aside for now any detailed elucidation of what God is, isn’t or how extensive his/her/it’s powers might be I often find myself wondering how any deity, purported to include all of existence, would want or need to worship itself.

I thought it was an interesting concept that I picked up from somewhere, some article or blog post. One of the things is that we assume God, or whatever it is one believes, has some human like qualities, like emotions, feelings. How are we so sure god exists in such a way. I compared it to how we experience our senses. We have emotion, we have senses but they as much as they allow us to do they are also limiting, so why do we think God is limited by the range of emotions we have, the body we occupy and so on. I feel that if God exists God is far beyond our understanding of consciousness. I can't really answer much on the subject as I don't have as much wisdom as one might think.

Having let the cat out of the bag though I’m mindful my agnostic allergy to all organised religion tells me to stay out of any long discussion of such matters. OK, now and again I lapse when I feel the need to draw attention to the evils of organised religion but generally I try to avoid discussions of concepts few of us can fully grasp.
In case any of a Yogic discipline feel the urge to evangelise I should explain a decade of membership of Ananda Margi cured me of that particular practice and many of its kind.

I don't think there's anything wrong with discussing religion. Frankly, I don't feel I know all that much about religions in general. I had that one guy who was I suppose a Yogi. I don't think his intention was to evangelize as it was to sell his services.

[Chase]

Aliens need to land ASAP.

[Karl Rand]

Why? Are they short of protein?

[Chase]

Why? Are they short of protein?

I certainly hope so. Humans need to be moved to a human protection sanctuary on some megastructure in space before we destroy ourselves. We'll only take out every other species on Earth if they don't (except for maybe cockroaches, of course), so even if aliens have a very libertarian, laissez-faire, approach to other lifeforms, its only fair humans get moved to the intergalactic version of the straightjacket. I'm hoping it'll they'll move us to something akin to the "Culture" from Iain Banks's Culture Series, maybe we'll get plopped on some giant ringworld or planet-sized mega-ship. The aliens will strip us of all our weapons, have their swarms of drones stuff whatever we need down our gullets, and get one hell of a drone spanking whenever we misbehave.

[InbetweenDreams]

What makes you think that an alien species would be any better than us humans? Afterall, if climate change is going to drive us off Earth, it might be fair to assume they left their for the same reasons and perhaps their visiting us may very well be for nefarious purposes. It is a bit of an existential question, if the presence of humans is bad for the planet and the rest of the inhabitants, then is any form of life good? Seems that every form of life feeds on another, even a fungus can take over an ant's brain for its own survival. I'm not a fan of all the self-loathing. Humans do a lot of bad shit, we know this because we are human. I think we have just as much of a right to exist as any other creature that inhabits the planet. However, perhaps we humans are too clever for our own good.

[Chase]

What makes you think that an alien species would be any better than us humans? Afterall, if climate change is going to drive us off Earth, it might be fair to assume they left their for the same reasons and perhaps their visiting us may very well be for nefarious purposes. It is a bit of an existential question, if the presence of humans is bad for the planet and the rest of the inhabitants, then is any form of life good? Seems that every form of life feeds on another, even a fungus can take over an ant's brain for its own survival. I'm not a fan of all the self-loathing. Humans do a lot of bad shit, we know this because we are human. I think we have just as much of a right to exist as any other creature that inhabits the planet. However, perhaps we humans are too clever for our own good.

I don't assume aliens are automatically benign if they pass all of the great filters to become a space-ferrying species. One of the great filters is, however, not nuking yourself. An explanation as to why aliens haven't been so common as to make unavoidable contact with us is that intelligent civilisations will always inevitably destroy themselves with nuclear weapons. 

Sadly, humans will probably not pass this filter.

[Karl Rand]

It really is time you all grasped the bull by the horns and read Arthur Koestler’s “The Ghost in The Machine"

[InbetweenDreams]

filter smilter... Whether or not a species, be it humans or glorp glorps, space is insanely huge. Unless we have some breakthrough about space travel, it is unlikely the aliens will do us a favor and extinguish our existence, putting an end to the petulance and destruction we exhibit on this tiny weenus of a planet.

Oh I'd like to think we have a greater purpose, but given I can't seem to find my own, either there is no point to it all or we're oblivious to it.

[Chase]

With all due respect, you are misinterpreting what I meant by great filters, and missing many premises to hypothetical advanced alien civilisations that have been proposed.

"Filters" that block civilisations from becoming interstellar are biological, not metaphysical. They are atheistic. They have nothing to do with "greater purposes" whatsoever.

You also greatly underestimate the sheer potential of a civilisations- including humans - that can be possibly, whether breakthroughs in space travel are invented or not.

Without a sci-fi level breakthrough, humans (or any ET civilisations) could still:

Permanently establish an infrastructure in space that could support the entire species that would pay for itself. Break in down to money and economics - before it cost millions of dollars for every one person to get to space, thanks to reusable rockets, it now costs hundreds of thousands. If you understand the economics concept of economy of scales, you would know that mass scale immigration to space would cut this cost down. We can recycle the excess fuel of the rockets to get their with modern technology that is capable of extracting carbon dioxide from the air and turning it back into fuel.

Getting out of the gravity well of Earth is the biggest of obstacle, but doable. In space, it will be far more cheaper. For example, it take the same amount of fuel for a rocket to blast out of Earth's gravity well as it does to go from Earth's orbit to Mars.

Don't you dare say anything about radiation. I'm so sick of hearing that argument against space travel. It's become the anti-space equivalent of creationists saying there is still monkeys. We can hollow out asteroids, or beef up a space stations layers. Gravity can be stimulated through centripetal acceleration (spinning space habitats) or linear acceleration.

An Orion class rocket that relies on using small mini nuclear bombs for propulsion can propel a ship to reach nearby stars within a century.

A century is a blink of an eye to the age of the universe. With known science, humans could colonize the entire galaxy in hundreds of thousands of years. A blink of an eye to the universe.

What I meant by how nuclear annihilation may be a great filter that explains why we haven't been visited is that even though the universe is vast, it is still billions of years old, so even if life is incredibly rare, it would explain why Earth hasn't been visited by an alien civilisation millions of years ahead of us from somewhere else in the galaxy or nearby galaxies. Although, my speculation is that the reason is that space colonization in the form of a Dyson Swarm of a species native star would prove more economy as it can support trillions upon trillions of people.

That doesn't factor AI into the equation. Imagine a machine capable of mining asteroids and using the resources to either build something for its owner or a copy of itself. Such a machine is often called a Van Nuemann probe. These machines could turn into galactic scale locusts from their exponential multiplication. We could have them build space habitats the size of planets. We could cover a gas giant in a shell at the 1G level and make an Earth that is hundreds of times bigger than Earth but still have its gravity. All without breaking any known laws of physics (to my speculation, I do not claim to be a physicist or any other kind of scientist).

That is the tragedy of the human race. We could be living in a utopia that is beyond comprehension, but instead we may destroy ourselves.