The Fermi Paradox

What do you mean? Oxygen and water are both easily recyclable indefinitely.

Please provide any reliable, credible, source for your claim that water and oxygen can be recycled indefinitely in space.

The scenario i saw from what EB posited would be workable without longevity treatments if the would-be colonists produced children within their vessel during the journey. Once again, the problems are political, not technical.

max, I searched the web about the non-ending supply of oxygen and water (on a space ship), and you are correct. Learn something new 'every day.' Thanks for sparking my interest.

This brings to mind the shortage of water in California; it seems there are solutions to be had - if the politics can be solved.

Easy. We do it here. Earth has traveling been through space supporting life for 3.5 billion years with a limited supply of water and oxygen.

The methods that oxygen and water are recycled are very well understood by anyone who has mastered middle school science.

One of the reasons i liked EB's scenario is that i posits a closed system.

Now, you're diverting to insults. You're a ******* bore.

string "theory" are a set of theories because , so far the math works in each one(that's all its base ). It contains dimensional EQUIVALENCY and , in physics, equations may be solved interdimensionally. Thats what I was leading to. I can solve equations of heat flow, in terms of magnetism, or gravity by terms of radioactive decay, or in terms of drum-head theory. We call that "dimensional analysis" and it has really little to do with length/width.breadth/time/ .

It really becomes the solvable basis of "beaming us up".

, nd atoms were "indivisible" . I said that we will need to discover stuff that , at present, we don't even know that we don't know. BTW, I posted a search fpr a " non technical explanation of string theories"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Introduction_to_M-theory

I love irony.

The problem of "observability" is another one I think about from time to time. What might we observe in the Universe if other technologic intelligences existed? In our own case, we leak radio waves which carry information. Other than that, we are almost invisible. Working on that as a basis, we've looked for other "leakage" anywhere else in the Universe but have yet to find even a flicker. That alone is a paradox unless we start applying more restrictive assumptions, like technological intelligence being very rare, or short lived, or uninterested in radio (EM transmission) for any long period of time, etc.

About the only objects we routinely observe in the Universe are stars, so others have suggested that any "super tech" civilizations might build Dyson Spheres around their home stars, effectively "shutting them off" from our point of view. But as far as I know, we've never observed this either. Also it seems unlikely that a Dyson Sphere would be constructed over night even by an advanced technology, so the stars would more likely fade slowly from sight rather than simply winking out.

Beyond that, I'm not sure what we would even expect so see. Even if half a galaxy was over run by super-tech species involved in an interstellar web of commerce and activity, I'm not really sure we would see much of anything.

What I have heard is that SETI could not detect signals comparable to the TV and radio waves which we emit in every direction, but only signals which were either much stronger or else aimed directly at us.

I think higher levels of intelligence would require a relatively long life span. If there are other living creatures in other systems, we have to presume they'll contact us before we'll be able to contact them.

I think human perception has too many handicaps when it's about our environment and knowledge of it. We're still struggling with 'what is reality?'

What?
You agree with Frank?

Doesn't everybody?

Each individual perceives our reality in our own subjective ways. What is real and how we perceive it can differ by degrees. Just look at some of the most influential aspects of our lives; religion and politics. Why do you suppose there are so many different interpretations about just these two aspect of our lives - even by the different issues involved? We are exposed to them in many different ways, but how the individual perceives them are not the same.

Why is your belief in religion and politics so different from other peoples?

That's because our reality is also different.

Regardless of what we can "see," we're not really "looking." I posted a link earlier to an estimate of what we're "looking" at, and it's an infinitessimally small fraction of the observable "sky" out there. Additionally, radio and television might well only be "visible" for a short period in the history of technological civilizations, before they switch to directed beams and/or something like cable transmission.

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Equations are nice, and can be very elegant, without actually providing useful descriptions of the reality with which we will have to deal. I know of no testable predictions which the string hypothesis has provided. I also know of no good reason to assume that it will get us down the road at FTL speeds.

We are relatively crude life forms yet e think of the Solr System as "our backyard'.
I believe that, as we crack the codes that these several series of equations may suggest, we may stumble our way into the Milky way and beyond.
Is there plenty of EM energy all around to use and transform when we finally arrive at deep space travel.

My biggest concern is that we probably will get involved in propogating some huge man-induced "bottleneck" from our routine religious internescene street fights .
We will ultimately need to work together as a species since its only a billion years or three before the sun makes our " local neighborhood" uninhabitable.

We are relatively crude life forms yet we think of the Solar System as "our backyard'.
I believe that, as we crack the codes that these several series of equations may suggest, we may stumble our way into the Milky way and beyond.
Is there plenty of EM energy all around to use and transform when we finally arrive at deep space travel?.

My biggest concern is that we probably will get involved in propogating some huge man-induced "bottleneck" from our routine religious internescene street fights .
We will ultimately need to work together as a species since its only a billion years or three before the sun makes our " local neighborhood" uninhabitable.

I have an old roommate who is now a physics professor and, in my opinion, a very good physicist, who has long thought that string theory is utter nonsense.