/sci/ - Science & Math

What could we really gave them anyway? Coke? Jeans?
Being decent in roaming around in your little corner of the milk way gives you all you need. I guess at that point you're also quite good with simulating reality to that point of getting useful information out.

That's basically only thing we really have to offer. Data about a planet that born his unique life.

>>14738726
Ten feet outside of our observable universe. They're right there, but you can never talk to them.

Prison planet. Aliens do not visit or talk because our souls are contained here. We are dumping ground for criminal or disobient souls. Just like Australia

>>14738726
they're very far away

Are we really anything special? If another intelligent lifeform had the ability to travel such distances then they would have probably met other more advanced life forms before us.

>>14738726
>universe should be teaming and yet we receive nothing
Intelligent life is probably pretty rare, only a small fraction of planets are going to have life, and intelligence is a rare and difficult adaptation to evolve. Life has been on earth for ~4Gya yet anything close to our intelligence has only been around for 0.1% of that.

They're far, far away. As in, the next galaxy cluster over or something.

>>14738897
If this is the case then it makes us all the more special, and we should ensure our survival.

>>14738726
>We cannot be the only intelligent life in the universe
Why not?

>>14738726
Earth is flat and has a dome, not a ball spinning at sonic speed. Earth is 6000 years old not 4.5 billion. Aliens are just demons Hollywood indoctrinated you to see as another species. Your indoctrination to globe earth started when you couldn't even speak properly, the universe you fantasize about only exists in fantasy and CGI.

the universe is full of simple lifeforms but intelligent life is super rare
there might only be one race at a time in any galaxy and they could be millions of years apart from one dying out to the next gaining consciousness

>>14740177
I am a proponent of "the Great Filter" and I generally believe that all the big hurdles are behind us.

Given that the selection strategy of intelligent countries is already at a level I would dub "soft antinatalism," I believe the filter is that once consciousness reaches a certain level of sophistication it takes a long, hard look at life and decides to nope out. There are plenty of planets with "intelligent" life out there, its just self-awareness tops out at the level of "third-world street fair."

>>14740183
Because my soience fiction films said so, ok?

>>14740183
Induction. We can balance the odds all we want for various conditions, but they sort of break down in the face of us having one example, and then the possibility that conditions exist elsewhere, multiplied by insanely huge numbers, possibly infinity.

I've read both popular books on rare earth cover-to-cover and the arguments are just bad. Even the wikipedia article, as shitty as those are, easily shoots holes in their fundamental assumptions. Rare Earth stacks unlikelihoods like a motherfucker.

>>14740197
>>14740654
>muh billions of trillions of infinities
the earth is unique (not rare) and aliens don't exist
cope with this fact

>>14740667
>the earth is unique (not rare) and aliens don't exist
>cope with this fact

this is why people dont take christianity serious retard

>>14738726
They are just too far away. How is this so hard to understand ? Light speed is the great filter.

>>14740700
Well, just like christians are supposed to prove God exist, so should you prove there are intelligent life out there.

>>14738726
>We cannot be the only intelligent life in the universe
We can be. It's extremely unlikely, given what we know, but we also know that we are.
>and most likely we are not the most advanced civilisation
Why not? Someone has to be first.

>>14740315
I do genuinely hope so, it will bring me a lot of hope.
>>14741746
It would be a great honour if we are the first, but i doubt that we are really are. .

>>14738726
They could be a million times more advanced than us and taking the size of a walnut. They might not need to expand like colonies of billions of individuals and they might not need large amounts of energy to function. Consider the possibility that interstellar travel with creating mirrors of earth on other planets might not be what the universe is all about.

>Intelligent life on earth needed so many miraculous coincidences to occur.
>We have no idea how to begin quantifying this as a probability
>But just trust me that the probability of intelligent life showing is large enough that it HAS to exist somewhere.

I never understood why a reasonable, skeptical, rational person should accept this premise. Yeah the universe is big, yeah there's a lot of 'inhabitable' planets. But how does this translate into intelligent life forming? There are so many things that can go wrong and completely eliminate life in a planet or set it back to unicellular stage. Our very planet took roughly a third of the age of the universe to get us here.

The idea that intelligent life HAS to exist is just wishful thinking.

>>14740194

The southern cross constellation disproves this lmao. The entire flat earth belief is based on not understanding the heliocentric globe model and physics, while inventing reasons for why things happen on a flat disk and seeing if they stick on a wall long enough so they can be used to trick gullible illiterate retards. Like the moon producing its own light. Flat earthers then proceed to fall for propaganda pieces like documentaries from Hibbeler productions, which is composed of the biggest pieces of human waste possible that try to make everything sound dramatic and lie about literally everything and use books that are literally works of fiction as proof for some hidden continents beyond the ice wall. It's really depressing how easy it is to trick people by just telling them you will show them the real truth and "break" their programming.

Not even the most schizo religious people believe the earth is 6000 years old lmao.

The universe is teaming with life. Just not highly intelligent life. I believe that in our lifetime we will find life. Just not le quirky advanced aliens. Something similar to animals or microorganisms

>>14743800
>The southern cross constellation disproves this lmao
Go search what flat earthers have said about this instead of pretending there is no counterargument

>>14738726
Other life in this Universe hiding from us, is for a reason.

Blue Eisenhower November

>>14738884
WE CAN STILL USE GRAVITY SILHOUETTES.

>>14740315
>>14740177
IMO, the great filter is the jump from prokaryotic to eukaryotic organisms, specifically the development of mitochondria.

>>14738726
Consider the possibility of the following:
>we haven't been looking for aliens long enough to have a realistic chance of detecting them
>our instruments aren't good enough to detect aliens, and our ideas of easily-detectable megastructures are nonsense
>we're equivalent to ants in someone's backyard.. the 'yard' owner may have a 'fence' to keep noise out
>we've detected them, multiple times even, but don't know that we did
>civilizations advance past the usage of electricity and or light-communication
>we've detected them and recognized it's aliens, but it's kept it a secret for political reasons

>>14738726
the current most promising model of abiogenesis (jack stozsaks research he has a wonderful two part demonstration on youtube) implies that for life to start, it takes a huuuuuuge.. and i mean really fucking huuuuuuuge amount of various factors to be there, like clay and water and thunderstorms and all the chemicals and temperature and a bit of luck and so on and so on...

So you see, the rare earth hypotesis is becoming more and more real.

Yes theres a zilliom planets and suns and stars but considering the chances..
There might be like... 10000 planets with life.. And sadly, maybe just 3 intelligent civilisations with advanced human like life.

When you factor in astronomical data - it gets even more sadder. Fun fact - like 95 of observed solar systems have a completely different setup - the norm is to have around 5 planets max and to have gas giants first to the sun and rocky worlds behind - and they are usually giant rocky worlds with crazy gravity out of the habitable zone

So worry less about politics and be less spiritual and racist.. Before all you are human, you are life. And our goal, encoded in our dna - is clear as day - we need to survive at all costs, and the longer we survive the more mysteries of the cosmos we uncover, and only in the far future we might even encounter god aand he will congratulate us for solving the puzzle he gave us. To be spiritual now, its too early to claim anything

The belief that humans eventually will encounter aliens is based on two assumptions: (1) life evolves easily, and (2) interstellar travel is possible and practical. Neither of these assumptions is likely to be true.
https://bigthink.com/hard-science/we-are-effectively-alone-universe/

They’re waiting for us to get our shit together.

Right now they’ll catch a disease and die War of the Worlds style in exchange for a bunch of retarded monkies? Like, we’re over here about to destroy the entire planet so a couple of retards can have more money OR because we can’t decide which color monkey is “superior” when we are all the same.

I don’t even want to be here.

Why in the FUCK would any advanced civilization want anything to do with us aside for an emergency stop?

Mf’s prolly lock the doors when they get within a light year…

Yes, they're out there.
No, we'll never meet them, or communicate in any meaningful way (the distances are too great)
It's much more fruitful to quit worrying about ayy lmaos and start fixing our own shit on the one planet that has (a few) intelligent beings

non-physical

>>14738726
How exactly would we detect them when we struggle to even get to another planet in our own system?
If there was another civilization on the same level of development as us on another arm of the Milky Way we would have literally no way of spotting them.

>>14738726
When did you visit a savage african tribe?

>>14744630
I'm about 45 minutes out from Detroit so once or twice a year.

>>14740177
Now try explaining this to all the deranged psychos running this planet

>>14744630
Aliens possessing high technology ought to be rather curious, so I'm sure we would be a interesting to at least some of them, if its just a small faction of scientists.

>>14738726
space is fifth dimensional, that's why it looks black and we can't understand it really, earth (within the van allen belt) is artificially kept in the third dimension as we slowly evolve and come into becoming 5D beings, when humans start to understand dimensions and science merges more with spirit over time and peoples religions become less of a factor then we'll understand things like space and where they are

>>14743958

Would take you a few seconds to explain, here yet you are. The conterargument doesnt exist unless you believe in personal magic domes

>>14744855
I'm not spoonfeeding you

I genuinely used to think that intelligent life was rare purely because the scales of time in the universe are so great and the distance too big for inter communication. Interstellar civilisations may have popped up before, but the chances of it happening on one of the nearby habitable planets in the galaxy at the same minute time as us would be incredibly slim.

But now after looking at our species in overshoot that's constantly squabbling due to it's inherent tribalism, struggling to adjust to a world that's far far bigger than the one we adapted to, it's likely too self destructive to last too long. The intelligence may let it advance quickly, before it gets lost in a world of it's own creation, far removed from the actual real world, passing the point of the planet's natural carrying capacity and so utterly focused on a delusion of growth that it doesn't realise is unsustainable til it's too late.
We're here living at a time where the way we organise our species in this world has become utterly complex and far too interdependent and specialised, and it's starting to fray at the seams. Things are going to be interesting, yet we all cling to it and convince ourselves this fantasy world we've built is the real world.
Intelligent life likely is just a short term incredible phenomenon.

>>14745152
>tribalism le bad
i guess natural selection is only good when it doesn't make you iffy huh?

>>14745154
I'm not saying tribalism is inherently bad. I'm saying that this new world we've surrounded ourselves with is so completely different from the world we actually adapted to where we lived in small relatively similar groups and mainly evolved to deal solely with short term issues. It's no wonder we've gone a little crazy as our cultures and societies advanced far faster than we were evolving. Also find it absolutely incredible we can even fathom these things when there's been no selective pressures to force our minds to become capable of such abstract thought.
I'm just looking at us from an anthropologistic sense, not to judge but to see how so many of the issues that are commonplace now have roots in the past.

>>14745176
>I'm not saying tribalism is inherently bad. I'm saying that this new world we've surrounded ourselves with is so completely different from the world we actually adapted to where we lived in small relatively similar groups and mainly evolved to deal solely with short term issues.
I don't believe in the evolution mythology but when you say it like this it seems everyone can "go back" to this type of life, in fact the lack of it seems to be the major source of problems.

"Short term issues" are things that actually important in an individual's life (money health marriage etc), "small relatively similar groups" are just your family which if it's patriarchal it will be strong and you will trive along with your group

>our cultures and societies advanced far faster than we were evolving
Neither advanced, if anything they regressed, the only thing that "advanced" was technology

>there's been no selective pressures to force our minds to become capable of such abstract thought
Perhaps because evolution is pseudoscience which has never been proven or replicated (macroevolution at least)?

>>14738726
I think the grand filter is the failure to create population cap. Life, basically, has to overcome its primary instinct: be fruitful and multiply. If it fails to do so, it eats all local resources before it becomes interstellar.

Once you have a population cap, there isn't any need to colonize more than say two or three solar systems to ensure the longevity of the species. Being forward thinking enough to overcome the instinct to breed without limit, suggests you also realize that colonizing the entire galaxy is not sustainable.

Thus all the advanced civilizations in the galaxy inhabit but a handful of worlds, with maybe a million inhabitants a piece. They have no need for Dysons spheres or other power hogs that we'd detect, as there's just too few of them.

Our non-directional radio waves could only be picked up by our very best tech at a fraction of a light year away.

It's quite possible that any civilization that begins advancing towards singularity level discovery only uses EM communications for a brief period of time before switching to something else.

With those two factors in mind, there isn't any reason to expect that we should be seeing really powerful radio broadcasts in the universe.

So the paradox really comes down to not seeing alien artifacts in our solar system. The problem with this is that there very well could be/could have been such artifacts. If they're small objects in space, we're likely to have missed them. If they are buried on a planet or moon, there is no way we would have found them except by chance excavations on Earth. There is also the fact that even very advanced technology would still be likely to decay over millions of years, and so probes could have come to Earth and been destroyed. Nanotechnology would also be a way ETs could visit without detection.

If life is somewhat common, then our form of intelligent life that ETs might be interested in checking out has only existed for a few thousand years, maybe only a few hundred if only sufficiently advanced life is interesting, and so they haven't had time to come yet, even if they have solar sails, etc. that let them travel at relativistic speeds.

It's also possible that future technological developments and discoveries about physics kill the desire for exploration and colonization. Sufficiently advanced civilizations might spend almost all their time inhabiting virtual reality, or they might discover that virtual worlds are somehow as "real" as our space-time.

They might also be traveling through other dimensions, or Hilbert space to reach other realities without moving through what we call space-time.

Or life could be incredibly rare and intelligent life even rarer. Or we could be first. Someone has to be first.

>>14745221
Really not sure if I can take you seriously now. Are you one of these folk that believes your specific god created humanity in the last few thousand years?

>>14745382
There are older similar stats, but maybe life needs something more to start. We now know that comets and asteroids are rife with "organic" compounds. Perhaps a planet needs to be bombarded with organic compounds for life to start, and these in turn need to be manufactured on other Earth-like world's first, in order to get life started early enough for it to develop before the star dies and get to intelligence.

Or, if eternal inflation is true, and/or the multiple worlds interpretation, then there are tons of type I and type III parallel universes where only one form of intelligent life develops. These would be rare, but they would exist, so us observing one could just be coincidence.

I personally think aliens likely advance so quickly that they don't put out signals we would recognize. I also think they likely tend to collapse within a few million years, making it unlikely for many to exist at once.

However, I do think it's possible that we are missing a crucial step for abiogenesis that may make it so that we are among the very first to be self aware in our visible universe.

>>14745229
A Dyson Sphere is something we could imagine. None of our tech was imaginable just 500 years ago. I would guess their power sources are things we would assume are basically magic due to lack of reference.

>>14745405
The reason we imagine things like Dysons spheres is that we assume population growth is exponential and eternal, thus the need for such mega-structures both for power generation and living space.

But if you cap your population then you don't need to go around eating stars to survive.

Competition. It's a dog eat dog world out there. Technological advance spurs on ever higher levels of competition. Eventually one species will conquer a galaxy, then others.

They will likely be totally transformed by then. Individuals will be a new form of synthetic life. Brains the size of planets powers by Dyson spheres. This won't stop until the universe itself is swallowed up by a single consciousness, being knowing itself as its self, the coming into being of the Absolute. This being will feast on quasars for food and have a mass larger than galaxies in the end stages.

>>14745396
>Really not sure if I can take you seriously now.
Your group is a joke according to your own evolution mythology, we religious will outbreed you, it's irrelevant if you delude yourself and think you're the one who decides what to take seriously or not

>Are you one of these folk that believes your specific god created humanity in the last few thousand years?
Yes

>>14745500
Lol

>>14738726
>Seriously where are they?
We are here and we are all there is.
>We cannot be the only intelligent life in the universe, and certainly the only life in the universe, and most likely we are not the most advanced civilisation,
Why not? "muh big space" is not a reason. Numbers are infinite but theres only 1 even prime, no odd perfect numbers found, no fith Fermat number, etc. Inifinite size doesnt mean anything is possible.
>so where are they? Why is it so quiet out there? The fermi paradox haunts us, the universe should be teaming and yet we receive nothing, are they intentionally hiding from us? What is stopping them from coming here and saying hi? It's not like we are a major threat to them, we are probably but ants compared to what it out there, is it because of this that perhaps we are not even worth their time? But even then what is stopping some curious ones from coming by? Or are they observing us in secret?.
cope, cope, cope, cope

>>14738726
WHERE ARE THE HECKIN' AYYYYLYUMS? I HECKIN' KNOW THERE'S SUPPOSED TO BE TRILLIONS OF THEM ALL AROUND US BECAUSE IT'S JUST SCIENCE, OKAY??? I FUCKING KNOW THEY SHOULD BE THERE BUT THERE AREN'T WHAT THE FUCK IS GOING ON?!!?!? WHAT DOES THIS MEAN ABOUT THE NATURE OF EXISTENCE?!?!?! WHAT IS THE GREAT FILTER? THERE'S NO HECKIN' AYYYYLYUMS THEREFORE WE'RE ALL GONNA DIERINOOOOOO

>>14745500
Missed the link
https://www.conservapedia.com/Atheism_and_fertility_rates

>Michael Blume, a researcher at the University of Jena in Germany, wrote about the sub-replacement level of fertility among atheistic populations: "Most societies or communities that have espoused atheistic beliefs have not survived more than a century."
>Blume also indicated concerning concerning his research on this matter: "What I found was the complete lack of a single case of a secular population, community or movement that would just manage to retain replacement level."

Imagine believing in evolution yet failing miserably to be successful in it (survive and reproduce). I guess the religious brainlets are truly the master race of the humans.

>>14745520
>Imagine believing in evolution yet failing miserably to be successful in it
Evolution is not prescriptive, retard. It's perfectly happy with these people existing and slowly getting culled.

>>14745510
This, but unironically.

Seriously, either life and/or intelligent life is hella rare, gets snuffed out on the regular, or we're just the only populated server in the simulation.

>>14745533
>e-evolution is not prescriptive!
>NOOOOO YOU CAN'T TEACH INTELLIGENT DESIGN AND THE BIBLE IN SCHOOLS YOU MUST INITIATE LE HECKIN CHILDREN INTO EVOLUTION BECAUSE EVOLUTION ISN'T PRESCRIPTIVE YOU FUCKING BIGOT

>>14745539
You seem to be having a full-blown psychotic episode. How is your drivel even related to what I said?

>>14745547
If evolution is descriptive, it doesn't give itself a reason to be taught (specially considering since it leads to low fertility rates through atheism), but for some reason evolution believers were always all very keen in turning into an obligatory school subject (specially in white countries)

>>14745553
>If evolution is descriptive, it doesn't give itself a reason to be taught
Yeah.

>evolution believers were always all very keen in turning into an obligatory school subject
Yeah. What's the connection between the two? Don't get me wrong now, I see exactly how your 80 IQ "thought process" goes here, but explain it to me anyway.

>>14745573
>Don't get me wrong now, I see exactly how your 80 IQ "thought process" goes here, but explain it to me anyway.
No, not explaining shit to a midwit

>>14745580
>Math doesn't give itself a reason to be taught. There's not a single mathematical theorem proving that children need to be taught math. Why do those pesky libruls insist on indoctrinating our children with heretical infinitist dogma??

>>14745553
Sometimes I am truly astonished at the posts people manage to produce

>>14745606
Mathematics don't make people atheists thus lowering fertility rates, the opposite actually, hence why critical race theory wants to dumbfy maths while evolution stays intact

>>14745620
>Mathematics don't make people atheists thus lowering fertility rates
Neither does evolution, not that your retarded nonsequitur deserves a response.

>>14745620
You’ve outdone yourself. I kneel.

>>14745628
>Mathematics don't make people atheists thus lowering fertility rates
>Neither does evolution
I guess empirical evidence was always the weak spot of evolutionists huh, you just continue to ignore the real world

>>14745637
CRT is the new evolution, in fact
https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2021/07/20/when-opponents-decry-critical-race-theory-theyre-really-fighting-against-change/

>>14745640
Let’s ignore for a second all the other obvious problems with your logic, has it crossed your mind even for a second, that your quote didn’t prove that atheism makes you reproduce less, but instead it could mean that already below replacement level demographics (for example, academics) are just more likely to be atheist?

>>14745640
You are a literal subhuman. """Right-wing""" retards need to be shot along with their """left-wing""" equals.

>>14745520
Evolution isn't normative. Is an ant better than a human because there a far more of them and they've survived far longer?

Groups have essentially paid little more than lip service to religion throughout history and reproduced just fine.

If birth rates are a measure of success than Sub-Saharan Africa represents the pinnacle of human advancement. It just hit a billion people in 2015, but will have more people than all of Asia by 2100, despite massive out migration projected at .25-.5 billion. By 2100, mid-line UN projections have it that over 1 in every 2 children on Earth will be African.

Species and population go extinct or have population collapses from over reproducing all the time. The Earth is undergoing the fastest mass extinction event in history due to human over population. Climate change isn't even the largest issue. Rapid ocean acidification, also due to the massive release of carbon into the atmosphere, threatens to create an absolutely gigantic die off of ocean life. This in turn will cause population collapses across land species if it goes far enough.

A conservative policy would be to try to drastically reduce population growth as well as resource consumption.

Because growth isn't the only problem. While African populations are exploding, they're also becoming much wealthier and consuming more. People in developed countries consume many times the resources, and are responsible for many times the pollution as a single third worlder.

High living standards, long life spans, and long term technological growth would all be promoted by a radical curb on population growth.

However, slowing population growth temporarily reduces GDP growth, and it gives labor more bargaining power and tends to decrease inequality. So you get elites throwing a huge shit fit over it, and wanting to import more people to keep population growth going ever upward.

It makes no sense long term.

>>14745671
You're a far worse retard than he is. You are, in fact, the reason why he exists.

>>14745671
Less people = more resources per person. Technological development appears to suffer from congestion effects, where having 20,000 PhDs doesn't get you double the innovation of 10,000 in a field. There are a limited number of avenues to explore and the expansion of the literature pushed by publish or perish increases the noise to signal ratio in the sciences.

Here is the thing: we've seen countries experiment with very different responses to declining population. Japan has low migration and a more rapid decline. The US has high migration. Importing more people does seem to help with GDP growth and pension solubility (in the short -medium term), but does so at the cost of more inequality and less social cohesion. Japan didn't become a third world country because their population is declining.

We should be pouring defense level spending into foreign aid because richer countries produce less kids. Give women a stipend to have IUDs in. But libs will scream that this is rascist, and conservatives are instead pushing for contraception and abortion bans in the third world, and, despite their rhetoric, love mass migration because it keeps wages low and rents high. Note that Trump had both chambers of Congress and the Court for two years and didn't hold one (1) vote on reducing migration, not even token shit like deporting rapists. You got an ineffective wall for show, and to funnel money to loyalist elites, but fuck all actual policy changes.

>>14745674
Great argument

>>14745671
Transhumanism will pick up later this century. Genetically modified elites who are further enhanced through other means will simply become better at everything that matters economically. AI will also increase returns on capital, which have already been growing steadily as a source of all income. Labor will eventually make up less than half of all income.

At that point the problem will resolve. Drone armies will allow small populations to wage war against large ones. Post-humans will end up culling base model homosapiens. The population will stabilize with a much smaller number of post-humans and AIs, and a small human zoo/reservation population.

>>14745671
>Rapid ocean acidification, also due to the massive release of carbon into the atmosphere, threatens to create an absolutely gigantic die off of ocean life.
Nice fanfiction you and tour pals invented
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/08/04/great-barrier-reef-coral-recovery-climate-change/

>>14745693
LOL. Why do I need to argue with you?

>>14743603
I think it is very likely intelligent life exists on other planets. The great gap is distance and time of travel between starsystems. If an alien travels to earth traveling at lightspeed they are potentially leaving behind everyone they know and care about who would be dead of old age before they return. And if they go too far their country or civilization might not even be there by the time they get back. Add to that tye fact that they are unlikely to live on a planet exactly like earth, so why waste precious centuries or milenia going to earth when they would rather visit worlds near home that were already settled by their own civilization.

>>14745671
>If birth rates are a measure of success than Sub-Saharan Africa represents the pinnacle of human advancement.
Mind they are religious AF over there, kinda giving credence to his point.

>>14745073

Just say the proof does not exist and shut the fuck up already.

>>14738726
Because we were saved from the Final Days that consumed all other life in the universe, caused by waves of dynamis, when our planet was covered in a shroud of aether thanks to the noble sacrifice of those who came long before us.

>>14745671
Nothing attracts seethe like the truth.
Notice you get rebuttals in both the flavor of religion and transhumanism, because the two are similar expressions of the same delusion.

>>14745415
Sure, you can give yourself and your descendants a population cap. But if a faction exceeds that by even a 0.1% growth rate, then they are going to outnumber everyone else within a few hundred or a thousand years - and keep growing on time-scales that are peanuts compared to astronomical timelines

>>14747684
Simple enough to sterilize everyone at birth, and either artificially create replacement population via central authority or rig up a system that makes undoing the sterilization insanely difficult. Granted, you've probably already genetically engineered your society to be more compliant by this point. The only risk is that one of your hundred plus year distant colonies is defective and goes rogue before you can check in on them.

Not saying we should do anything of the sort anytime soon, but eventually we may not have a choice.