Author: m1k3y

Let me throw out this specifically very creepy science fiction scenario for you.

When people in a zoo or in a preserve will try to raise a panda from a baby, or try to raise a condor from a baby or whatever they have ways they can convince the other, because they are so much more intelligent than the creatures. They have all sorts of tools for convincing the creatures that they are one of them. Like they will let you feed them … you can even make yourself look like its mother or smell like its mother. And out in the wild even, you know, in many cases if you can make yourself smell perfectly like another gazelle you can walk around the gazelles, and they’re so dumb … they can smell a lion and they know it’s a lion, and they know to be alarmed. …
So it’s easy to fool them that you’re one of them. In a way that’s it’s impossible for them to detect.

So, if there was another species that wanted to study us the way we study gazelles or the way we study rare birds or whatever,
if they are that much smarter than we are than we are to the animals, they would absolutely have ways to walk among us in ways that are absolutely undetectable.
Even we wouldn’t see them at all, or else we would mistake them for a fellow human.

But the way we portray them in movies, like the aliens are sort of clumsy in how they do it, like they don’t know how to mimic human emotion or that they don’t understand love or they’re very robotic … We’re kind of insulting the aliens when we assume that. They’d be smart enough to come here and they’d be of much higher intelligence, but they wouldn’t be able to mimic our social cues.

Ok, just like we can smear animal urine over our own bodies in order to pass among them, they would totally know how to imitate love and charisma and all of those things.

So I think if they were here and watching us, if they were that much more advanced than we are, we would never know they’re here. We would not be capturing their ships on freakin’ camera phones or whatever.

They would pass among us completely undetected and we would never know until they chose to let us know.

David Wong (aka Jason Pargin) on the Cracked Podcast

I recommend listening to the whole thing — it’s a pretty interesting conversation overall. This was just my favorite excerpt. 

(quote starts around 55:20)

This is on point for several reasons.

(via flavorcountry)

A++++

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fuckyeahdarkextropian:

Personal immortality in a physical body is impossible, since a physical body exists in time and time is that which ends. When someone says he wants to live forever, he forgets that forever is a time word. All three-dimensional immortality projects, to say the least, are ill-advised, since they always immerse the aspirant deeper in time.

…

A step toward rational immortality is to break down the concept of a separate personal, and therefore inexorably mortal, ego. This opens many doors. Your spirit could reside in a number of bodies, not as some hideous parasite draining the host, but as a helpful little visitor.

…

Cloning isn’t ego gone berserk. On the contrary, cloning is the end of the ego. For the first time, the spirit of man will be able to separate itself from the human machine, to see it and use it as a machine. He is no longer identified with one special Me machine. The human organism has become an artifact he can use like a plane, a boat, or a space capsule.

IMMORTALITY ~ William S. Burroughs

William S. Burroughs is actually a vampire. He doesn’t live in your attic though. No need to check.

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Such is Matt Taylor’s devotion to the cause he proudly wears tattoos depicting key ESA projects: “I had a tattoo done of a previous mission I was working on so of course I had to have one done of Rosetta.”

http://www.euronews.com/2014/04/25/comet-hunters-let-s-do-some-science/
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Götherström thinks there are a few possible explanations. One is that after humans left Africa, some flourished by becoming farmers and exploiting the fertile lands they found in the Near East. Others ventured further north, where they continued to rely on the wild animals they killed and the plants and berries they collected from the landscape. These groups were split into small populations that survived in isolation between the ice sheets.

The Swedish data shows some mixing between the two groups, suggesting that as the farmers later swept north they interbred with the hunter-gatherers they encountered and assimilated them into their cultures. The exchange seems to have been unidirectional: there is very little if any evidence that farmers were assimilated into the hunter-gatherers.

Stone Age DNA shows hunter-gatherers shunned farming
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When asteroids attack. When the sun glares. Ya gotta be ready…

To figure out where asteroids were hitting our planet, B612 used data from a worldwide network of instruments that detect infrasound, low-frequency sound waves traveling through the atmosphere. Such measurements have been used since the 1950s to detect nuclear bomb explosions and can…

Moar dark euphoria

FULL READ AT – When asteroids attack. When the sun glares. Ya gotta be ready…

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To climb straight back to the surface, without stopping to rig ropes and phone wire, would take them four days. It took three days to get back from the moon…

Casteret and Chevalier helped turn caving into a heroic undertaking, and the search for the world’s deepest cave into an international competition—a precursor to the space race…

“In the past, I’d lose twenty-five pounds on one of these trips,” Stone told me. “We can burn as many calories as a Tour de France rider every day underground.” Ascending Chevé, he once said, was like climbing Yosemite’s El Capitan at night through a freezing waterfall. To fine-tune the team’s diet, he’d modelled it on Lance Armstrong’s program, aiming for a ratio of seventeen per cent protein, sixteen per cent fat, and sixty-seven per cent carbohydrates…

Over the years, caving gear has undergone a brutal Darwinian selection, lopping off redundant parts and vestigial limbs. Toothbrushes have lost their handles, forks a tine or two, packs their adjustable straps. Underwear is worn for weeks on end, the bacteria kept back by antibiotic silver and copper threads. Simple items are often best: Nalgene bottles, waterproof and unbreakable, have replaced all manner of fancier containers; cavers even stuff their sleeping bags into them. Yet the biggest weight savings have come from more sophisticated gear. Stone has a Ph.D. in structural engineering from the University of Texas and spent twenty-four years at the National Institute of Standards and Technology, in Gaithersburg, Maryland. His company has worked on numerous robotics projects for NASA, including autonomous submarines destined for Europa, Jupiter’s sixth moon. The rebreathers for the Chevé trip were of his own design. Their carbon-fibre tanks weighed a fourth of what conventional tanks weigh and lasted more than four times longer underwater; their software could precisely regulate the mix and flow of gases.

Stone’s newest obsession was a set of methanol fuel cells from a company called SFC Energy. Headlamps, phones, scuba computers, and hammer drills (used to drive rope anchors into the rock) all use lithium batteries that have to be recharged. On this trip the cavers would also be carrying GoPro video cameras for a documentary that would be shown on the Discovery Channel. In the past, Stone had tried installing a paddle wheel underground to generate electricity from the stream flow, with fairly feeble results. But a single bottle of methanol and four fuel cells—each about the size of a large toaster—could power the whole expedition…

“Welcome to Hell,” one of the cavers told me, when I joined him by the campfire that first night. “Where happiness goes to die,” another added. There was a pause, then someone launched into the colonel’s monologue from “Avatar”: “Out there, beyond that fence, every living thing that crawls, flies, or squats in the mud wants to kill you and eat your eyes for jujubes. . . . If you wish to survive, you need to cultivate a strong mental attitude.” It was a favorite conceit around camp: the cloud forest as hostile planet…

“Where did the water go a million years ago? That’s what you have to ask yourself,” Stone said. “As a cave diver, you have to think four-dimensionally.” 

http://m.newyorker.com/reporting/2014/04/21/140421fa_fact_bilger?currentPage=all
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Kepler 186f: Is It Inhabited?

The SETI Institute has examined this star system using its Allen Telescope Array, searching for transmissions over a wide range of the radio dial, from 1 to 10 GHz. So far no dice, although we will surely keep trying.

But the fact that we’ve not yet picked up radio noise from this sibling world is hardly discouraging. To begin with, Kepler 186f is nearly 500 light-years away, which is a fair piece, even for astronomers. To detect radio signals with the Allen Array would require aliens wielding a transmitter of at least 100 million watts, mounted on an antenna the size of a football field. They’d also have to train the antenna in our direction.

But of course, they don’t know about Homo sapiens, so their incentive to beam signals our way is probably small.

Kepler 186f: Is It Inhabited?

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Everyone has the right to roam Finland’s forests and countryside freely, no matter who owns the land, thanks to a legal concept, unique to the Nordic countries, known as Everyman’s Right.

Everyman’s Right enables Finns and foreigners alike to explore Finland’s famous forests, fells and lakes – and also freely collect natural products like tasty wild berries and mushrooms, even where they grow in privately owned forests.

“The legal concept of Everyman’s Right has developed over many generations,” explains legal expert Anne Rautiainen from the Outdoors Association of Finland. “It’s not enshrined in any single law, though its scope is well defined in many pieces of legislation on different issues.

“The fundamental idea behind Everyman’s Right is to enable everyone to freely enjoy outdoor activities that have always been popular in Finland, like walking and skiing in the forest, boating, swimming, and picking mushrooms and berries.”

Free to explore Finland’s great outdoors – thisisFINLAND (via juhavantzelfde)

#civilisation #commonwealth

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