.webp?h=8 "Top Hat (black) - Traditional. Classy. Elegant.")
To discuss your weekly readings of books, textbooks and papers.
I'm putting aside fiction for a while, I recently started "Chaos: Making a new science" 
by James Gleick, it's a pop science intro for Chaos Theory but a well-researched one which doesn't fall into quackery. Also thanks to our !mathematics friends for their textbook recommendations
@Aevann
pls
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Just started reading The Three-Body Problem (I know, a bit late to the party with this one), I'm at the part where we learn of the incoming Trisolaran invasion. I'm really digging the book so far but I still can't get over Ye replying to the warning message. I know she's nihilistic and angry at humanity for her dad's death and all the abuse she suffered and it's an act of rebellion but fricking heck, she straight up doomed her entire species to possible extinction and for what? Personal grievances? The possibility that the Trisolarans might be a peaceful civilization who will solve the chaos on Earth and all of our problems even though we just got a message from one of their own telling us to avoid contact with them? I'm enjoying the book but Ye's and Mike's characters are a bit infuriating even if I see what they're supposed to portray.
The second book is called The Dark Forest so I have an idea of where they're going with the plot so a question for dramatards. Do you think it's a good idea to make contact with alien civilizations? On that note, do you think we shouldn't have sent the golden disc within Voyager-2? Personally, I think it was an unnecessary risk even if there's almost no way an alien civilization could find us through the diagrams on the record. Thank God for whoever decided we should use pulsars as reference points.
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The most powerful message I got got from the book is that we need total and complete chink death
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She's a misanthropist, I can absolutely see people like /r/antinatalism and /r/collapse regulars adhering a doomsday cult for extremely petty reasons.
Space is immensely big and the Voyagers are slow for interstellar travel standards. It would take 70,000 years for Voyager 1 to reach the nearest star, Proxima Centauri. Finding them by chance would be like finding a specific coca cola bottle floating in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. If some Alien civilization find us it will be because of radio signals, though even powerful radio signals dissipate so much after a few light-years to the point they become just random noise.
The thing with Aliens is that we ran with too many hypotheticals. Alien life is one thing, complex life is another (billions of years until multicellular organisms appeared on Earth). So far we're the only Intelligent species this planet produced and even then "intelligent" doesn't mean they have advanced technology, plus interstellar travel within a lifetime (say just achieve 0.1c) is insanely hard and energy consuming. It's not impossible but so unlikely we shouldn't lose sleep over it.
!spacechads
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I genuinely hate the antinatalist crowd. Like fervent, genocidal hatred. They're the most pathetic "people" on the face of this god forsaken planet.
Yeah I agree. I think we're safe from any kind of interstellar threat thanks to the energy problem alone. While the dark forest hypothesis is interesting I don't think that is the case that the universe is brimming with intelligent life that is too afraid to make contact. I think the Fermi Paradox and Rare Earth hypothesis are, most likely, the correct answer.
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If I was an alien species my first contact protocols would be set up to deal with people like this, so even if one of them made first contact the fleet would show up and genocide only the doomers, then make peaceful first contact with everyone else to take advantage of the goodwill generated by getting rid of all the buzzkills
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Ma'am we've been over this before. You need to stop.
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She hated communists so much she wanted to destroy the planet to get rid of them
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Lmao
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I don't think it even matters tbh. We emit so much EM radiation that can be picked up from way out in space. We're like a bright shining beacon. Any alien civilization capable of traveling to our corner of the galaxy (or from another galaxy) can 100% find us. We're not hiding and we're not stealthy.
So I think we might as well attempt contact. If they were here to kill us, they'll do that regardless.
I haven't and won't read that book tho so maybe there's something else involved there.
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Let's say we were really lucky and found aliens 1,000 light years away. By the time we send a message and get a response humanity will have evolved into something we can't even imagine.
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