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Post by obsidalicious on Oct 23, 2016 8:14:15 GMT
I see your point, but I feel that the whole concept was rather unrealistic. I can't see a whole culture, especially not such a Utilitarian one like Alternia, would delegate such a standard fluid vessel shape as 'bucket' to that one specific role, nothing else and place such a taboo against it because of it. I think that A) The Trolls were just being particularly childish about the whole thing, like a human might be about someone eating a hotdog and/or B) It was just a throwaway joke by Hussie that lasted for a bit too long to still count as 'throwaway' and thus people mistook it for serious lore. I get your point, but they're aliens. Our school books contained things about astrology, but some of the facts were straight up fucking stupid. Example - the only planet that is 100% habitable is Earth, cause it has water. How do they know that aliens need water? For all we know, aliens might be in another plane of reality. Yeah, but the Trolls aren't Star-Teak-esque 7-Dimensional Tachyon-Chrystal Hiveminds are they? They are seemingly just another carbon-based, water-drinking, social, industrial bipeds. The way Hussie seemed to be trying to explain Black-rom at the end makes it seem that the insurmountable psychological differences between the species are very minor if there are any at all. So I reckon that comparisons to Human culture are perfectly valid. So just as Humans didn't, and couldn't place such a prudish taboo on anything long, hard and cylindrical because such a shape is too useful to not use, I think the same would go for buckets. In fact we know this is the case because we've seen cans and stuff on Alternia which are basically the same.
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Post by TrickleJest on Oct 23, 2016 12:08:28 GMT
I get your point, but they're aliens. Our school books contained things about astrology, but some of the facts were straight up fucking stupid. Example - the only planet that is 100% habitable is Earth, cause it has water. How do they know that aliens need water? For all we know, aliens might be in another plane of reality. Yeah, but the Trolls aren't Star-Teak-esque 7-Dimensional Tachyon-Chrystal Hiveminds are they? They are seemingly just another carbon-based, water-drinking, social, industrial bipeds. The way Hussie seemed to be trying to explain Black-rom at the end makes it seem that the insurmountable psychological differences between the species are very minor if there are any at all. So I reckon that comparisons to Human culture are perfectly valid. So just as Humans didn't, and couldn't place such a prudish taboo on anything long, hard and cylindrical because such a shape is too useful to not use, I think the same would go for buckets. In fact we know this is the case because we've seen cans and stuff on Alternia which are basically the same. You're probably right, it's just a childish thing.
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The One Guy
Rust Maid
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Post by The One Guy on Oct 24, 2016 15:18:59 GMT
Also Re: Chara/Frisk Gender Status. What is the correct term, if any, for what Trickle is describing if not Agender? Gender-irrelevant? I would go with "deleberately ambiguous gender." I honestly don't really understand religion all that well. I mean, some religious lore can be interesting to read a bit, but the whole gist of it just... doesn't come together, ya know? To many holes to fill out. The big bang is practically proven, yet the Bible (and other books) never mention it. Yet again, if this "Moses" really exists, and isn't delusional, he wrote the Bible really well. I mean, he speaks of a second coming, but he never clarifies when it will happen, meaning that Christians will always believe in it until the end of time, which we don't know when it will happen, because the author of the Bible states that the second coming may be in any given moment, so it always gives them hope that he will return. I am quite fond of this part myself, this was clever writing on the author's part, but I still don't get how with all of the modern sciences we have people still believe the primitive things in the Bible. Perhaps I'm treating it as an actual story or a book, which I shouldn't be doing, but religion just does not make sense to me at all. I don't claim to speak for all Christians (in fact I know I quite clearly don't), and I tend to go back and forth between Christian and Agnostic myself, but this is the way I think of it: The bible is a historical document. That's not to say it's nessesarily all true, but even most athiest historians agree that a man named Jesus existed and that he gained a following. Now if one person wrote of Jesus and all the miracles he preformed, it would be easy to dismiss as fiction, but the new testament is a collection of works from multiple authors, all of which detail Jesus preforming miracles, implying that there really was something going on there. It's hardly proof, but it's certainly something to consider. Do Equius' posters of nude musclebeasts count? Apparently, he didn't draw them himself, they're legitimately considered "fine art" in Alternian culture. And he even creeped out Dave with his erotic musclebeast poetry. Apparently trolls don't think that's weird. A lot of human art, particularly from the Renaissance era, includes "artistic nudes," and I'd imaging nude musclebeasts are somewhat of a troll equivalent.
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Post by amiabletemplar on Oct 25, 2016 8:39:15 GMT
I see your point, but I feel that the whole concept was rather unrealistic. I can't see a whole culture, especially not such a Utilitarian one like Alternia, would delegate such a standard fluid vessel shape as 'bucket' to that one specific role, nothing else and place such a taboo against it because of it. I think that A) The Trolls were just being particularly childish about the whole thing, like a human might be about someone eating a hotdog and/or B) It was just a throwaway joke by Hussie that lasted for a bit too long to still count as 'throwaway' and thus people mistook it for serious lore. I get your point, but they're aliens. Our school books contained things about astrology, but some of the facts were straight up fucking stupid. Example - the only planet that is 100% habitable is Earth, cause it has water. How do they know that aliens need water? For all we know, aliens might be in another plane of reality. In order for something to exist which could meet some definition of "life" at least plausibly like what life we've actually experienced, it would need to be able to perform a wide variety of chemical reactions. Warning: EXTREMELY LONG and somewhat technical discussion of why it's very, very likely that water is essential for life, or at least that most life will use and therefore need water. Chemical reactions are the fundamental physical basis on which all "life" as we know it depends. If you can't do chemistry, you can't have life--again, as far as we know. Sure, you can speculate that actually it's possible to have life based on the interactions of somehow-"durable" electromagnetic fields or something, but you'd be talking something so wildly speculative that it wouldn't mean anything.
So, we can say, fairly surely, that if we are to meet "life" that is even remotely recognizable as "life," whether or not it behaves as we expect Earth life to behave, it has to be able to do chemistry. Well, what kinds of chemistry? We can clearly see that chemical reactions occur on Venus or in Jupiter's atmosphere, but we don't see evidence that would indicate life exists there. Why would that be?
There are a few theories. And I use the term "theory" with reason: in scientific circles, a "theory" is a hypothesis that has evidence backing it up. It's not got so much evidence backing it up that it's considered uncontestable--that would be a "law," such as Newton's laws of motion, or the laws of electromagnetics, which are often called Maxwell's equations. But it's MUCH more solid than the colloquial definition of "theory." In science, the term that would refer to a colloquial theory, which could be defined as "hey this idea might possibly explain it, but I have no clue if it's right," would either be "conjecture" or "hypothesis," depending on how formal it is. Conjectures are usually informal, while hypotheses are usually formal--but both are speculative, formed before you have collected any data to test whether they hold water.
One of the main theories is that life needs very complex chemistry in order to do anything interesting. You need high variety, lots of different ways of arranging things. If there is only a very small number of arrangements, you can't get very many different results, and that means you'll hit a dead end very quickly. The problem is, most kinds of chemistry...well, aren't very open-ended. Most atoms on the periodic table are either much too heavy to react most of the time,* or can only produce 1 or 2 bonds--you can't get complex structures out of that.
However, elements in Group 14 of the periodic table are special. Due to the way electron orbits work around atomic nuclei, Group 14 has the rare property of being able to form 4 different covalent (electron-sharing) bonds. These bonds are weak enough that they can be broken without LOTS of effort, but strong enough that they won't fall apart by accident, over a nicely broad range of temperatures. These are traits which, while not individually unique, come together in a unique way with Group 14 elements--so these are generally expected to be the building blocks of life, from a chemical perspective. Of the elements in Group 14, some are just far too heavy to do much with. These are germanium, tin, and lead. They're so heavy that they really can't do covalent bonding anymore; they have to do ionic (electron "transfer") bonding almost all the time, and ionic bonds are simultaneously far too strong AND far too weak. This is because ionic bonds are almost impossible to break when "dry," but will undergo significant breakdown when put into the right kinds of solvents. Any life made from ionically-bonded materials would "dissolve in water," which is a very dangerous thing to do with one of the most abundant chemical compounds in the universe.
So, we need an element that is light, capable of making lots of different kinds of bonds, and doesn't bond ionically. We're left with either carbon or silicon. Carbon is ideal: it's so light, many of its compounds are gases even at very low temperatures, which makes it easy to move carbon around. And many of its other compounds are liquids at those temperatures, which is even better, because liquids are super important (as I will detail below). Silicon is harder to work with. Firstly, one of the most common silicon compounds--silicon dioxide, SiO2, the silicon equivalent of CO2--is solid until heated extremely hot, and a liquid up to much, much higher temperatures. Silicon dioxide is the main component of sand, and glass. That's a bad place to keep your "excess" building material, because that makes it very hard for creatures to *recover* silicon from their environment. Also, silicon has a higher bonding energy with oxygen than carbon does--if there were silicon-based "plants," they would need much more energy from their environment in order to generate food for themselves, and that's going to make it harder for silicon-based life to emerge. Secondly, most of the other compounds that use a silicon backbone, such as silane (SiH4), react violently with many other substances, and silane in particular is pyrophoric (spontaneously combusts) in the presence of oxygen. So, even though we've found two elements that could conceivably do what we want, carbon is so, so, so much better than silicon that it's hard to believe you'd see the latter and not the former. It also helps that, although silicon is quite common on the Earth's surface, carbon is much more common in the universe at large.
The second thing we need for making lots of chemistry happen is an environment conducive to many different kinds of reactions. Remember how I said earlier that ionic substances break down in water? Well, that's actually a useful thing...if we can have those ions interact with substances that don't simply break down in water. And carbon compounds let us do that! Carbon-based compounds play extremely nicely with water, actually--and some of them, such as ethanol, remain liquid at most temperatures where water is liquid. Having a liquid environment reduces the activation energy of many different kinds of reactions, in part because the things floating in the liquid can be fairly concentrated (so they get closer together than they would if they were gases), but at the same time still able to spin around freely (so they aren't locked in specific positions, as they might be in a solid).
Water is called the "universal solvent" in chemistry, and for good reason. It's one of the few substances that can dissolve damn near anything, at least a little bit. When paired up with some organic (carbon-based) solvents like ethanol, benzene, octane/etc., or oils, you get the ability to essentially dissolve almost any compound that can be dissolved at all. This is fantastically useful, as it allows the transmission of stuff from one place to another, it catalyzes many different kinds of chemistry, and it allows life the potential to self-regulate internal states in a way that solid or gaseous chemistry simply cannot match. Liquids are the best place to be because they merge the best benefits of both solids and gases, and can even carry a little bit of solid or gaseous stuff inside them, which is very hard for the other two basic phases of matter to accomplish.
Water is therefore an amazing solvent; it has an amazingly (and almost uniquely) broad range of liquid temperatures which happen to be perfect for making use of carbon chemistry; it's extremely light; and its components are two of the most common elements in the universe.
Therefore?
Yeah, it's possible that life out there elsewhere in the universe could work by rules so far removed from our experience that we would have trouble even realizing that it was life. It's also possible that aliens built the pyramids of Giza, and possible that our world leaders are actually reptiloids, and possible that the sun could rise in the north. But none of these ideas, including "life that is nothing even remotely like what we think life is," is particularly likely. Water, oxygen, and carbon are the key components necessary for having the complex, stable, persistent chemical reactions necessary for doing anything remotely interesting, so it is much, much more likely that, if life exists elsewhere in the universe, it is based on water, oxygen, and carbon.
*Consider metals: most pure metals should burst into flame on contact with oxygen, but they don't, because the atoms are so heavy and so well-bound to the solid block of metal that they can't break free; magnesium strips, if set on fire, will burn quite well because it's so small and the heat is enough to make the atoms form a temporary vapor. On the subject of religion: Anyone who tells you that religion is just about making you feel good, about giving you a sense of community, has failed to understand what serious religion is. Stuff that only exists to make you feel good about yourself is either magic or self-delusion. Serious religion is about giving you moral and ethical principles by which you judge your own behavior. You can read more about why serious religion (particularly, though not exclusively, serious Judaism and Christanity) is emphatically opposed to magical thinking in a way that even secularism isn't in this essay here, which is about how magical thinking infects both religious and secular ideology very, very, very easily. (To be clear: most professed "Christians" DO exhibit consolatory and nominal religion, which are both forms of magical thinking. Serious Christians are, unfortunately, a minority and have been for centuries. But many "atheists" exhibit consolatory religion as well!) On the actual topic of the thread: Homestuck is actually an allegory for accepting death. Every character must initially escape from their impending demise into a fantasy land of epic battles against monsters, where health can be restored with a nap or a nice meal. But then, in the end, in order to truly grow up and become what you were always capable of being, you have to demonstrate that you accept that you're going to die. The fantasy needs to be drawn away, even if for just a moment, so you can demonstrate: yes, I know death is real, and that it will come for me, one way or another. You could even argue that this process is repeated, as when the stakes go up, even the conditionally immortal find that they might die for a cause they believe in (whether it be selfish or selfless).
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Post by obsidalicious on Oct 25, 2016 9:29:34 GMT
Homestuck is actually an allegory for accepting death. Every character must initially escape from their impending demise into a fantasy land of epic battles against monsters, where health can be restored with a nap or a nice meal. But then, in the end, in order to truly grow up and become what you were always capable of being, you have to demonstrate that you accept that you're going to die. The fantasy needs to be drawn away, even if for just a moment, so you can demonstrate: yes, I know death is real, and that it will come for me, one way or another. You could even argue that this process is repeated, as when the stakes go up, even the conditionally immortal find that they might die for a cause they believe in (whether it be selfish or selfless). I don't actually think this is the case. Yes the characters die a lot and in some of those cases, acceptance is the appropriate response. However, throughout the story, the characters keep finding more and more ways to trivialize and devalue death. God Tiering, for instance. The act of accepting death is rather undercut and nullified when any competent player knows that the death is temporary and is, at worst, a mercenary gamble. The Retcon is also a big nullification of that theme. The whole premise of it was basically the Game Over survivors saying "no, I won't accept these deaths, I will undo them", and apparently that is the path that led them to final victory. Now I would have liked this theme to be a thing. Hussie's post-trickster speech about cheating seemed to be foreshadowing the failure of the retcon and would've nicely reinforced this theme, but alas, despite my hopes and theories, Homestuck appears to have settled on the Defiance/Cheating of Death as its moral-of-the-story. EDIT: In fact, if this really were the theme of Homestuck, then we could almost cast Lord English as the Hero(or at least Anti-Villian) as he is the only one trying to actually make Death the proper finality that it should, the only one who won't let people get away with cheesing their quest so easily.
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Post by TrickleJest on Oct 25, 2016 9:30:30 GMT
Homestuck is actually an allegory for accepting death. Every character must initially escape from their impending demise into a fantasy land of epic battles against monsters, where health can be restored with a nap or a nice meal. But then, in the end, in order to truly grow up and become what you were always capable of being, you have to demonstrate that you accept that you're going to die. The fantasy needs to be drawn away, even if for just a moment, so you can demonstrate: yes, I know death is real, and that it will come for me, one way or another. You could even argue that this process is repeated, as when the stakes go up, even the conditionally immortal find that they might die for a cause they believe in (whether it be selfish or selfless). I don't actually think this is the case. Yes the characters die a lot and in some of those cases, acceptance is the appropriate response. However, throughout the story, the characters keep finding more and more ways to trivialize and devalue death. God Tiering, for instance. The act of accepting death is rather undercut and nullified when any competent player knows that the death is temporary and is, at worst, a mercenary gamble. The Retcon is also a big nullification of that theme. The whole premise of it was basically the Game Over survivors saying "no, I won't accept these deaths, I will undo them", and apparently that is the path that led them to final victory. Now I would have liked this theme to be a thing. Hussie's post-trickster speech about cheating seemed to be foreshadowing the failure of the retcon and would've nicely reinforced this theme, but alas, despite my hopes and theories, Homestuck appears to have settled on the Defiance/Cheating of Death as its moral-of-the-story. Haven't you seen the [CREDITS]? Almost everyone survived.
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Post by obsidalicious on Oct 25, 2016 9:33:55 GMT
Haven't you seen the [CREDITS]? Almost everyone survived. Yes I have, what's your point? The high survival rates only reinforces the idea that True Death is trivially avoidable in Homestuck, which in turn counteracts the theme of accepting and working with Death/Loss/Finality/Whatever.
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Post by TrickleJest on Oct 25, 2016 9:41:43 GMT
Haven't you seen the [CREDITS]? Almost everyone survived. Yes I have, what's your point? The high survival rates only reinforces the idea that True Death is trivially avoidable in Homestuck, which in turn counteracts the theme of accepting and working with Death/Loss/Finality/Whatever. Sorry, I was aiming that post at the guy who made the giant theory.
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Post by amiabletemplar on Oct 25, 2016 11:30:30 GMT
Yes I have, what's your point? The high survival rates only reinforces the idea that True Death is trivially avoidable in Homestuck, which in turn counteracts the theme of accepting and working with Death/Loss/Finality/Whatever. Sorry, I was aiming that post at the guy who made the giant theory. I have said, several times, that I feel Homestuck lacks an ending, so I don't actually think this is a knock against my statement. The author dropped the ball-- hard--with the actual conclusion. I don't see how any of this belies the fact that all four of the main characters, even John, had to face death and were willing to "give it all up" at one point or another. John wanted to do the suicide mission to protect his friends, and it was only the powergamer Karkat that talked him out of it. Dream!Jade gladly gave her life--and didn't think she would get anything out of it--to save John. Both Rose and Dave went into the uncertainty of the Tumor's detonation knowing it would kill them, and having no illusions that they would survive. Yes, these characters did in fact survive these challenges, and even benefitted from them. But only in John's case was it motivated by self-benefit, and even there, he was deceived, because Vriska specifically chose not to tell him that he would need to die on the quest bed in order to ascend. In every other case, the death was an accepted consequence of action (though I suppose you could say Jade's second death was somewhat unexpected), not taken for reward but because the character had accepted that there was something more valuable to them than continuing to live. The fact that every Denizen appears to pose a life-or-death Choice for their player seems to fit with this intended allegory as well. Again: I do not even slightly deny that Hussie hardcore fucked up in executing this allegory. But "messed up on the very last part" doesn't negate all the progress leading up to that point. Correctly answering every question but the last, hardest one on an IQ test doesn't mean you're a dunce, it just means you couldn't ace the test. If you play 9 minutes and 30 seconds a particular 10-minute piece of music perfectly from memory, but screw up parts of the last 30 seconds, does that mean you didn't play the 10-minute piece, or that you played the 10-minute piece badly? Because saying "Homestuck isn't an allegory about accepting death" is the former--that because the final execution failed, the whole thing is a total failure, as opposed to saying that it was a good run with a bad ending.
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Post by mementovivere on Oct 25, 2016 15:05:03 GMT
Sorry, I was aiming that post at the guy who made the giant theory. I have said, several times, that I feel Homestuck lacks an ending, so I don't actually think this is a knock against my statement. The author dropped the ball-- hard--with the actual conclusion. I don't see how any of this belies the fact that all four of the main characters, even John, had to face death and were willing to "give it all up" at one point or another. John wanted to do the suicide mission to protect his friends, and it was only the powergamer Karkat that talked him out of it. Dream!Jade gladly gave her life--and didn't think she would get anything out of it--to save John. Both Rose and Dave went into the uncertainty of the Tumor's detonation knowing it would kill them, and having no illusions that they would survive. Yes, these characters did in fact survive these challenges, and even benefitted from them. But only in John's case was it motivated by self-benefit, and even there, he was deceived, because Vriska specifically chose not to tell him that he would need to die on the quest bed in order to ascend. In every other case, the death was an accepted consequence of action (though I suppose you could say Jade's second death was somewhat unexpected), not taken for reward but because the character had accepted that there was something more valuable to them than continuing to live. The fact that every Denizen appears to pose a life-or-death Choice for their player seems to fit with this intended allegory as well. Again: I do not even slightly deny that Hussie hardcore fucked up in executing this allegory. But "messed up on the very last part" doesn't negate all the progress leading up to that point. Correctly answering every question but the last, hardest one on an IQ test doesn't mean you're a dunce, it just means you couldn't ace the test. If you play 9 minutes and 30 seconds a particular 10-minute piece of music perfectly from memory, but screw up parts of the last 30 seconds, does that mean you didn't play the 10-minute piece, or that you played the 10-minute piece badly? Because saying "Homestuck isn't an allegory about accepting death" is the former--that because the final execution failed, the whole thing is a total failure, as opposed to saying that it was a good run with a bad ending. I do think accepting death is definitely one of Homestuck's themes that we see time and time again, but I don't think that's "what Homestuck is about" per se. It's a long work with lots of themes, not just one central one. Another major one, which we see in the Credits, is the importance of connections... friendships, families, romantic relationships. Hussie has said as much before, how Homestuck is about those friendships built over the internet, and we've seen those friendship evolve in so many ways over seven years. The format of the credits sequence could have just been a bunch of ordinary panels, but instead he made the very deliberate choice to use a medium of snapshots that are designed to be SENT to one another as they share their lives with each other. "Hussie hardcore fucking up the analogy" seems like another way of saying "I acknowledge that my proposed allegory doesn't completely fit this story, but I cannot accept that my premise is at all fallible, so instead I'm going to blame the author for not making a story that aligns with my theory." Maybe the end of Homestuck doesn't fit the theme of accepting death because that's not what the final takeaway of the story was ever planned to be?
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The One Guy
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Post by The One Guy on Oct 25, 2016 15:31:44 GMT
There are a few theories. And I use the term "theory" with reason: in scientific circles, a "theory" is a hypothesis that has evidence backing it up. It's not got so much evidence backing it up that it's considered uncontestable--that would be a "law," such as Newton's laws of motion, or the laws of electromagnetics, which are often called Maxwell's equations. But it's MUCH more solid than the colloquial definition of "theory." In science, the term that would refer to a colloquial theory, which could be defined as "hey this idea might possibly explain it, but I have no clue if it's right," would either be "conjecture" or "hypothesis," depending on how formal it is. Conjectures are usually informal, while hypotheses are usually formal--but both are speculative, formed before you have collected any data to test whether they hold water. Er, from what I've learned in school there is no such thing as a scientific law. A law would be something that is 100% proven, and scientists know that can't be done. The only reason Newton's laws and the laws of electromagnetics are called that is because they're using an old naming scheme, but they are, in fact, actually theories (and notably, Einstein's theories of reletivity show that Newton's laws of motion are not uncontestable). The other stuff you said there is true, though. I wouldn't put the idea of non-carbon based life on quite the same level as the other things you mention. The idea of non-carbon based life is extremely unlikely, just like the idea that aliens have visited Earth is extremely unlikely, but the difference is that Earth is extremely small compared to the universe as a whole. With Earth, we have a known, finite area for things to have happened in, but the universe is so huge that even the unlikely could have happened somewhere out there.
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Post by amiabletemplar on Oct 25, 2016 18:05:08 GMT
Er, from what I've learned in school there is no such thing as a scientific law. A law would be something that is 100% proven, and scientists know that can't be done. The only reason Newton's laws and the laws of electromagnetics are called that is because they're using an old naming scheme, but they are, in fact, actually theories (and notably, Einstein's theories of reletivity show that Newton's laws of motion are not uncontestable). The other stuff you said there is true, though. Actually, Newton's three laws of motion remain accurate even in relativity; it's Newton's equations, such as gravity, that aren't, though I guess you could say that the first law requires a slight tweak--but only very slight. That is, the first law states: an object at rest stays at rest, and an object moving in a straight line remains moving in a straight line, unless acted upon by an outside force. In other words, it's saying all objects have inertia. The issue isn't with the inertia--inertia is vital to relativity, so in that sense, the law remains 100% perfectly accurate. The only issue is that phrase "straight line." The universe doesn't actually have perfectly Euclidean geometry, so straight lines are actually almost impossible in nature. Almost all "straight lines" are actually curved due to gravity. However, if you consider a reference frame where a straight-line path is possible in the direction an object is moving, then the law again remains 100% accurate. The other two laws also remain true, they just require relativistic correction. The third law doesn't even need modification at all--pairs of forces are still required in relativity just as much as in Newtonian mechanics, there are just new kinds of force pairs, such as spacetime curvature. The second law, which is the one that comes with a baked-in equation, is the only one that requires "direct" modification...and even then, the basic concept remains accurate. The acceleration of an object remains dependent on its mass and the force exerted upon it (F = m*a), but because velocity cannot progress infinitely, the equation diverges as you get close to the speed limit of the universe, the speed of light. So, again, it's not that the law is wrong--it is completely correct, conceptually. The equation expression of that law, however, glosses over a bit that is completely unimportant outside of speeds close to c (roughly 0.1 c is where the corrections start to matter). Conceptually, all of Newton's laws remain correct. Similarly, Maxwell's equations really actually do define how ALL electromagnetic phenomena work, in the entire universe. e usually slightly reformulate the equations, now, to speak of fields that can be excited, rather than particles that exert forces, but the two describe the same phenomena. (Field theory just makes the equations simpler to work with.) It is not incorrect to say that all laws are theories, but that's a bit like saying all squares are rectangles. Yes, you would be correct, but you're doing so as though we should preferentially use the term "rectangle," even when "square" provides us with additional, useful information. We call some scientific theories "laws" because they have stood up so well, and are so pervasive, that they have earned a treatment which is different from a typical scientific theory. That doesn't mean we should be slavishly devoted to them, any more than we should be slavishly devoted to any of the laws of humankind. But it does mean that we recognize a difference in the degree of confidence we possess, just as (to pluck an example out of thin air) we can recognize that there is a difference in the level of murder someone can commit (e.g. first-degree murder is horrible, the premeditated unjust taking of a human life, while "fourth-degree murder" is another term for negligent homicide or involuntary manslaughter--still a tragedy, but not something we view should be punished severely). But see, you're arguing different kinds of probability here. You're conflating "the probability that rare event X could ever happen anywhere" with "the probability that rare event X could happen and we could observe it." You note that Earth is extremely small in relation to the universe. But by that same token, the regime of the universe which Earth can access is also extremely small. Even if we discover faster-than-light travel, there will always be a new hurdle to overcome. We won't be able to view every part of the universe simultaneously, and even if we could, we wouldn't be able to see all past events. Our scope is necessarily finite. Yes, in an infinite universe, literally everything is guaranteed. That's kind of how probability works; if you have an infinite number of trials, then as long as there are a finite (or at least countably infinite) number of possible variations, every variation that can occur must occur. This is, in mathematical terms, called "almost surely"--it's not "certain" in the sense that, say, it is certain that a rolled standard die must produce a number between 1 and 6 inclusive, but the probability of any chosen event occurring in an infinite number of trials is still 1. But we don't have access to the infinite universe, nor to infinite time. We have finite both. And when the probability of life occurring at all doesn't look high, AND you have two paths where one is both more difficult AND less likely than the other, which are you going to bother with examining? Which is going to have a reasonable possibility of occurring, not simply any possibility of occurring? Remember: life is subject to the pressure of evolution, and evolution is a harsh mistress. You survive, or die. Follow the path of least resistance to your goal. Carbon-oxygen-water, as a biological system, is simply easier, safer, and more likely to occur. We see the building blocks of carbon chemistry everywhere in our solar system. Consider Titan--so far from the sun, you can barely distinguish Sol from Alpha Centauri, and yet Titan is a moon with an atmosphere, and filled with hydrocarbons! The thing has more natural gas than multiple Earths combined. And that's (as far as we know) without developing life. Carbon chemistry is so easy, Nature does it by accident. You don't see silicon chemistry occurring in nature, even on planets other than the Earth in our solar system. Even on planets where carbon chemistry is very hard, like Venus. Why not? Because silicon chemistry is very difficult to do. Much more difficult than carbon chemistry, that's for sure. Even comets do carbon chemistry, for God's sake! Again: it IS possible that silicon life could occur, somewhere in the universe. It has a non-zero probability. But that probability is very, very, very, very small. And when you have a different path that is simultaneously easier, safer, and more likely...Nature is going to follow the path of least resistance.
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The One Guy
Rust Maid
Posts: 1,148
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Post by The One Guy on Oct 25, 2016 18:36:17 GMT
<Stuff about the Newton's laws still being correct> Ok, fair enough, relativity does not challenge them, but that does not change the fact that they are not laws. As with any theory, there's a possibility, however small, that they're wrong, and thus they cannot be officially called laws. A. The question of "does non-carbon-based life exist?" does not take into account what we know or will ever find. If it exists somewhere, then the answer to that question is true, regardless of if humanity will ever find it. B. I never claimed the universe to be infinite, only extremely huge. The universe might be infinate, but we don't know that. C. While still only a small portion of the universe, the amount of the universe we will be able to observe at some point in the future (assuming we survive that long) is still huge in comparison to Earth. Of couse, does that mean we'll find non-carbon based life at some point in the future? No, it's very likely that we never will, but I'd say it's more likely than us learning that aliens visited Earth.
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