/sci/ - Science & Math

I stopped dreaming about it a good while ago.

On another note I just downloaded Planetes.

Something along the lines of the scene in Knowing.

>>2416588
CCM, I have my Kindle and read Mars Landing, and have started reading Accelerando.

Best. Purchase. Ever.

>>2416599

I was starting to wonder why you were missing for all these days.

mine is, something like, that we find out that there are ailens out there, and faced with an outside treath, all humans would unite under at Unitede world, wars would stop, people would stop hateing each other, the wealth, would be shared better, all would be good. and then we would face(or not) the ailens, and find out that they are not hostile at all, and all will be good

>>2416605
Oh, I got autobanned from /sci/ for seven days due to simply mentioning the name of the recently deleted racist board.

You'll get a 1 day ban for mentioning the derogatory name for an African as well. Which is strange, you'd think it'd be the other way around.

>>2416619

Oh God what the fuck.

My first contact daydream... I've had plenty. I want to believe humanity won't fuck it up, but I don't know how likely that is since we shoot at anything unknown. They'd come down, we'd draw some diagrams, do some math, get a feel for their understanding and exchange lingual symbols, show them hospitality, offer them plentiful foodstuffs, beverages, etc. It's basically just establishing a good method of communication first and letting them know we're not total dumbasses.

>>2416692
>show them hospitality, offer them plentiful foodstuffs, beverages
We'll give them a coke and it will kill their entire species.

I want aliens to show up right as we're entering the singularity. They offer us technology, we top it in six months.

Fuck yeah humanity.

>>2416881
Yeah, I was thinking about that. That's why communication is important. It's likely they have similar diagrams for chemical compounds and whatnot.

i think the U.N. established a team with some woman as head, designated to make first contact if aliens show up - read it somewhere, maybe was faux news

>people believing aliens will understand math

G
A
F
F
C

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tUcOaGawIW0

chances are the aliens are brutal imo, and I don't buy all this crap about them being enlightened and watnot. They most likely would be some form of super traveling slime without intelligence

>>2416979
>believing they won't
We live in the same universe, bro. Their math might have taken different paths, and CERTAINLY different notation, but counting apples is counting apples, no matter what base you do it in.

>>2417011
Soooo... you believe cooperation and intelligence are not favorable to the success of space-faring life?

Almost all speculation about aliens just reveals personal belief about the nature of "what works", and society in general.

>>2417007
Thank you for remembering what a good movie is. And that you for reminding me.

>>2417025
I know, always been thinking the same as you, but I feel something's not right about math. I fear it only works inside of our heads. Anyone know if any animals has been proven to understand even a slight bit of math?

>>2417042
Many higher animals can count.

If you have doubts about whether counting means anything... I think that's not a very stable belief to hold. Don't worry bro. Things exist, and you can count discrete things, and if I have three apples and give you two, I have one left. Every time.

>>2417058
Hm. I'm still unsure. Guess it'll make sense to me at some point, but in my current position, math seems like a human, or maybe exclusive to earth creatures.

When it comes to aliens, we have no possible reference apart from life on earth. We don't know what life elsewhere in the universe could be. Hell it could be anything.

Humans in general has this weird idea that aliens must look like humans or like animals. An alien can look like anything, period. Even a box or a bottle.

\begin{align}
y &= (x+1)^2 \\
&= x^2+2x+1
\end{align}

In my more likely, wishful fantasy of a first contact scenario, the first thing the aliens so is bomb everything that shines at night with asteroids. Then they land and we realize their ships are tiny, maybe a few feet across.... They are an intelligent, amorphous lifeform, similar to a slime fungus. The reason they have come is so they can slither up our eye cavity, eat gray matter and assume control of the somatic nervous system. Essentially use our bodies as impromptu vehicles while they construct a Krasnikov railroad for near-FTL travel in and out of our system. Their species conquers planets by sending fleets of small (10m or so) spaceships which contain many of their brains preserved for thousands of years of travel between systems. Once landed, they construct faster methods of travel which take only a few years in between system. In order to do this they must find planets which lifeforms that have evolved a sufficient body mass and capability (under their own gravity) to be parasitically controlled for the purpose of constructing interstellar infrastructure and performing mining activities for construction of more ships. Their main reasoning is the eventual colonization of their kind across multiple galaxies and harnessing the energy of many millions of stars in order to create a pocket universe which will survive the destruction of our own.

>In my childlike, wishful fantasy with the first contact scenario

In the far future a living starship of human descendant begins breaking maneuvers so that he can decelerate into an orbit around the binary system have has traveled to using a hydrogen-antihydrogen annihilation engine that produces thrust by heating reaction mass(usually water) with the matter-antimatter reaction and ejecting striped hydrogen and oxygen nuclei out the engine's exhaust cage. It was a journey like countless others that his ancestors had made in ages past. But this time as he began his deceleration 5 years ago he encountered something never before recorded in the history of his race, a repeating but terminating electromagnetic emission in the radio frequency. This would not have been an unusual thing, if not for the fact that the stellar system he was entering is not recorded as being colonized.

>>2419185
Even with all his computing power it takes nearly a year to decipher the first signal, for it does not correspond to any transmission format utilized by his ancestors. The transmission is simply jumbled inscrutable audio. As he draws closer to the origin of the signal, something changes and now an obvious visual signal is being transmitted with the audio. And he sees them, beings utterly unlike in contour and behavior from any of this own forbears. They are simple little things, with simple little machines. But his kind began in the same fashion. Indeed according to his archives, the first craft capable of interstellar travel was a nuclear pulse propulsion vessel based on a design drawn less than 60 standard years after the invention of radio. It is amazing what intelligent life is capable of, and it is even more amazing that even with the light speed limit interfering with communication between the disparate and often mutually hostile human colonies, no one has ever reported evidence of an existant intelligent species not descended from the venerable Homos sapiens sapiens. As these things are his kind once was. As he is now they might one day become.

>>2419199
Deep within his labyrinthine mind of circuits and wires an ancient protocol is activated. It is a reaction as old as his race, and so infinitely useful that it has endured the forgotten eons of evolution and redesign his kind have undergone. Sever thermonuclear detonations ring against his hull as his attitude adjustment system spins him. A few moments latter equivalent detonations occur to halt his tumble. He is once again aligned for a breaking maneuver. He increases the force of the magnetic confinement fields around his exhaust cage to further collate the plume of atomic nuclei his petawatt engine is about to emit. He does a final calculation to ensure that the plume with strike the planet that from which the transmissions still poured. He knew from the wars of his own kind that the plume would displace a portion of the planets upper atmosphere about 350 kilometers wide with the force of several megatons per second. Over the course of a minute the collated core of the plume would tunnel through the atmosphere and contact the planet's surface. He knew that the planet had a magnetic field and therefore a molten core. The plume would burn its way down to the asthenosphere, which would then explosively outgas and expel ultramafic extrusives.

His engine fired. For these beings were like unto men, and therefore were a threat to him just as all his own kind are. But they were not of his species and therefore that threat was not tempered by the desire to exchange information, designs, or genetic material in the tradition of his race. And more than that, he had no love the idea of sharing the stars with another species. For the stars of providence of Mankind alone.

>>2419217
Humanity Fuck Yeah!