extraterrestrial life
first, an apology. i haven't been posting much because i've been studying for the bar exam, which i will be sitting for in two weeks. hooray.
so, i just wanted to let everyone know i'm still alive and thinking, by submitting a theory, for your collective consideration.
it occurs to me that extraterrestrial life, whatever its manifestation, must necessarily be similar to ours in that it requires energy to sustain itself. this should be especially true in the case of anything we would call a "civilization."
also, it appears that nuclear fusion is the most efficient method of energy production possible. but even if nuclear fusion could be sustained without gravity, it could only use light elements, which would be relatively scarce on a planet that can support life. thus, the most abundant and efficient source of energy for a civilization, no matter how technologically advanced, would have to be its star.
that being the case, i would posit that if an alien civilization is significantly advanced, it would have arrived at a point where, in order to sustain its energy needs, it could not rely only on the radiation arriving on the planet, but would have to envelop its sun to capture energy radiating in all directions.
this leads me to wonder whether, in our search for extraterrestrial life, we may be overlooking such a civilization, because shielding would make it difficult to detect.
1 comment:
Speaking of your sister, I'm interning with her over here in Montana this summer. She directed me to your blog.
Anyway, I think that you are right that most sports fans are "absolutists" and even if they are not, they don't care so much about their "relativism" between former and present athletes as much as that all current ones (good game-ists). Regardless of that, I think you might be errant in your analysis of why sports fans don't like (and, consequently why leagues don't allow) certain modifications to equipment. I would say it stems from two reasons of varying rationality.
The first deals with team sizes, club limits, etc. As you pointed out, these are regulatory structures that allow the game to be played. Their modification is prevented (with a few exceptions) solely on the basis of a strong traditionalist view of the way a particular sport has been played.
The second reason is more germane to the discrepancy between gene doping and steroid use and corked bats. Let’s start with corked bats: These represent a modification to the structure of the game that does not constitute human achievement. What people actually go to the games and track teams/players for is to see human achievement. Since the earliest sports, this has been their draw. You hit upon this when you mentioned that pro games are more popular than the minor leagues or the little leagues. When you go out to see a sporting event, you actually want to see those that are better at the game than the average person and the more so the better. I don’t see too many crowded slow pitch softball games. Steroids, too, are likewise seen as an unnatural/unhuman modifier to performance (probably to a significant extent because they end up physically harming in the long run that which they built up for the short term).
However, sports fan are not absolute absolutists. The idea is not to see how far a ball goes or how fast a “thing” can run, but how far a person can hit a ball and how fast a person can run (or in racing, how well a person can drive rather than how fast their vehicle can go). I don’t see a large market or widespread acceptance of a robot that can hit balls out of the park on every pitch. This is also a critical component of the Paralympics debate over prosthetic limbs. The key is that people still want to see humans play, albeit very athletic humans.
Finally, I feel that the argument as to what constitutes a human achievement is the critical component of the debate over gene doping. I think you would find a strong correlation between those who feel that the accomplishments of “modified” humans constitute human achievement and whether those people would approve of gene doping.
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