Science Thread (now with 100% less religion)

Interesting that Webb has basically confirmed older data which gives contradictory results on the value of Hubble's constant. There's definitely something wrong here, between local and cosmological data and the odds that it's new physics and not just some measurement issue seem pretty good now.

So you are saying Eric Weinstein was right after all?

Eroc Weinstein has produced nothing of value on the subject that can be evaluated as right or wrong. Unfortunately for him science is not politics and a conservative affirmative action doesn't lead to actual researchers taking you seriously, unlike podcast lemming morons.

Well, Eric Weinstein does have a PhD in mathematics, for whatever that is worth to you. And his basic premise is that current physics paradigms, especially string theory, are completely inadequate dead ends. And for political reasons physics has been stuck pursuing dead ends for decades.

And it can be true that he is correct, and he has produced no true progress in the field himself; although he has made some attempts in an amateur capacity.

Yes I have a PhD in math from the same department as him and am also in finance. You've only heard of him because of the conservative affirmative action pipeline.....his audience has no ability to determine if what he is saying has merit and he's not really interested in doing any hard science, just anti elite anti intellectual political science to a largely uneducated white male bro audience.

The Webb Telescope K2-18 b bio signatures preprint is out after getting of ton press. My first job in undergrad was in a computational physics lab that wrote code to analyze infrared spectra for atomic/molecular signatures and determine composition. Was used in atmospheric/climate studies as well as looking at Neptune, Saturn and Jupiter. This was before exoplanets though so it's pretty amazing how much the field has advanced and how little data they are using compared to then.

https://phys.org/news/2025-02-exoplanet-...

-This new exoplanet is in the news as potentially having life. However, according to twitter the giant mass and gravitational pull of this planet would put severe limits on evolution of life (as we know it) evolving. It really is remarkable how uninhabitable the universe generally is, and how many things had to come together to make life possible here.

(as we understand it)

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Lol yeah. It's crazy how a planet must be exactly like Earth to support life if we start with the assumption that deviations from Earth like conditions make life impossible!

For all we know the odds of intelligent life developing may exceed the number of potential habitable planets in the universe and we're extreme outliers. Or it could be that intelligence is impossible sans some externality we're unaware of. That the Milky Way hasn't been colonized makes me think we might be it or we're missing a big piece of the puzzle. Even with our current/developing technology we could get probes to the galactic center in a few million years, which while a long time isn't much considering Earth's 6.54 billion years old age +/- 50 million years. So we're looking at hundreds of millions of potentially habitable planets that had hundreds of millions or billions of years of an evolutionary head start on us.

You don’t think alien intelligence has visited Earth?

I don't think so, I can't prove it though, but it's irrelevant to what I said, if they did they did it in a hidden way.

With "hidden" I mean a way that can't be read light years away by a powerful species as proof of intelligence.

The whole dark forest idea is predicated on the possibility that there are super intelligences scouting the universe (of course with a lot of practical limitations) and genociding competing possible future super intelligences before they become a threat to them.

So "hidden" means hidden from THEM

Not sure Webb can detect the same signals on an earth sized planet so this doesn't really matter. That said no reason intelligent life can't develop. They will be just stuck on it as chemical rockets (the first way any civilization leaves its planet) will never lead to what humans have done so far due to the lack of delta v

Dark forest seems improbable to me.

Why do you think it has?

Obviously the first intelligence didn't take that approach. The only evidence we have of intelligence in the universe is here. The rest is statistical conclusions based on incomplete physics and biology models. So that's the lens the first intelligence would be looking through as well. Then as their technology developed and they could better see potential threats or the lack in the galaxy, I could see the Nash. But I'd expect to see evidence of them. Anyone who can get to us can eliminate us, with zero fear of retaliation. So they have no reason to conceal themselves and likely not even to ability to do so if they're harvesting and colonizing the galaxy anyway.

Seems the most likely explanation is that physics is truly restrictive of intergalactic travel or that technological advancement to the point of breaking physics is incredibly rare

We've been blasting all sorts of waves into space for 150 years so if anything was looking for us it wouldn't be difficult to find us

Pretty much impossible for it to be that.

More likely that life is common as muck but were in the cheapo 'one civilisation' simulation toy gathering dust on some kiddies shelf

I think the simulation explanation is lazy and I hate that Elon Musk said that on Joe Rogan

If life is common and intergalactic travel is common then we would either be dead or part of an intergalactic coalition.

I think life is probably fairly common

Ignore musk, his scratching are are very late to the party. Mine is an extension of my old joke about god but it contains a logical point. Considering simualtions allows us to consider the logic of the situation. It doesn't commit to us being in a simulation in any way.

The biggest problem is we somehow think that our graps of physics/the universe is somehow close to the whole picture when we're just a few hundred years of science in. Imagine 'us' in the year 20,000 or 200,000 - they aren't going to be looking back at us thinking 'wow they really understood physicsand the universe back in 2025'

People tend to assume that visiting places like Earth would be a high priority for an alien intelligence. That isn't obvious to me at all. As far as we know, Earth doesn't have any resources that are truly scarce in the universe. Yes, we have biodiversity that is unprecedented, at least insofar as we have been able to observe, but there is no reason to believe that access to our biodiversity would be a top priority for an alien intelligence. If you have the technological capability to cross the vast expanse of space, then you probably have overcome your need access planets in what we would describe as a habitable zone.

Put another way, if an alien civilization detected an earth like planet 45 light years away, would it deem the trip worth the effort? Not necessarily. It may be that intelligent life is scarce and that an intelligent civilization's ability to travel through space negatively corrolates with its need and desire to do so.

Well, if an advanced human civilization detected possible life 45 light years away, they would probably be extremely interested no matter what; simply for curiosity reasons. And if they weren't curious in the first place, they probably wouldn't have been searching anyways.

You have this built in assumption that aliens wouldn't be curious for the sake of being curious. Which is possible. But if they didn't have this built in, they probably wouldn't be exploring the stars anyways.