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| The official cliche list; What should we try and avoid perhaps? | |
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| Topic Started: Jan 21 2011, 12:18 PM (6,363 Views) | |
| Cephylus | Feb 14 2011, 07:51 AM Post #76 |
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Torando of Terror
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Well, the original meaning may be just being 'self-aware', but sentinence and sapience is now usually used to mean creatures that can do complex thinking, like the word 'penguin'. We are clearly talking about the species-that-do-complex-thinking-and-has-a-technology-civilization-culture-whatever-it-takes-to-be-considered-sapient kind of sapience here. And where did that god argument come from? |
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| Zoroaster | Feb 14 2011, 08:04 AM Post #77 |
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Fecund Fundiment
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The Masai do that every day - anyone ever seen that David Attenborough doco, three Masai strolling casually across the savannah, and a pride of lions bolt for the hills when they catch sight of the Masai. Yes I know the Masai have big human brains and weapons, but a baboon troop isn't that far removed from the concept of a group of australopithecines, looking out for one another, communal defense. And weapons, and tool/weapon use came fairly early in our development. To me, believing that we humans were somehow inevitable, is a cliche - no offense intended to others who might hold such beliefs. |
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The Speccer Formerly Known As Magoo... My exobio project(s) : Hormizd / Zarathustra ![]() | |
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| bloom_boi | Feb 14 2011, 09:37 AM Post #78 |
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What The?
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None taken I am strongly on that side. Sorry about saying "realists", I realised that by the time I had posted that.
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"You shall perish, whatever you do! If you are taken with arms in your hands, death! If you beg for mercy, death! Whichever way you turn, right, left, back, forward, up, down, death! You are not merely outside the law, you are outside humanity. Neither age nor sex shall save you and yours. You shall die, but first you shall taste the agony of your wife, your sister, your sons and daughters, even those in the cradle! Before your eyes the wounded man shall be taken out of the ambulance and hacked with bayonets or knocked down with the butt end of a rifle. He shall be dragged living by his broken leg or bleeding arm and flung like a suffering, groaning bundle of refuse into the gutter. Death! Death! Death!" | |
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| Space Gorilla | Feb 14 2011, 12:20 PM Post #79 |
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Primate Thinker
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Have you heard of the term provolution? Maybe you are more familiar with the term 'uplift'? I'm a huge proponent of that theory, and in some way its more logical than the 'God-made-us' belief. The other thing that makes no sense is the big bang. What exploded exactly? If there was nothing then how does everything suddenly explode? Even Einstein said that all life was too perfect to have happened by "accident". Like I said, to believe that all of the sudden everything exploded from nothing requires a lot more faith than the belief in an eternal cycle of God, Gods, and Heaven, that's simply beyond the comprehension of human beings. Actually, the Big Bang occurred creating this universe. The Multiverse has always existed, with smaller universes being created and others dissipating. New theories suggest that which it star that goes nova and in the process becomes a black hole a new universe is created. Thus, our universe might be a result of that. The Big Bang more specifically. So black holes might be considered as gateways to other universes, according to modern theoretical physics. Is it hard to consider the Multiverse as God? It created all that you see, even you, in some way. I think there can be some parallels between science and religion, as long as details are left aside. So you can be religious, yet still love science :).
You look at things from a black and white perspective. You can't even look at it from a shades of gray either. Try looking at things a bit with color. Things are a lot more complex than just good and bad. Afterlife? If it makes you feel any better you are not the only one with a spiritual side and with a belief that life doesn't end with our body dying, because I am as well :). Unless scientifically proven though, we can only hold it as a belief. Although trans-personal psychology suggests that there might be something more than just the brain-work that keeps humans going.
Friend, as much as I agree with your point above, you have to admit, sapient alien cultures make better sci-fi stories.
Oh my, I must be a hyper-saganist then. 700 spacefaring cultures in a 3D radius of 2000 light years, Milky Way alone. Too optimistic? lol |
Me on Deviant Art! ![]() Deus Max (Official) Deus Max (OOC) | |
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| Forbiddenparadise64 | Feb 14 2011, 12:36 PM Post #80 |
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Adult
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I see your point, with great honesty. I go lower than realist as a matter of fact. I remember in Lee Strobel's 'The Case for Faith' that a group at a university had done a highly up to date calculation on the conditions of early Earth, the building blocks of life on Earth, their numerousness and the likely hood of assemblage, with a supercomputer that the chances of a cell coming together by chance, even in perfect conditions, is 1 in 10 to the power of 60 at least, a number beyond what the human mind can fathom. And there really isn't anything in the multiverse theory to prove its existance, absolutely not even remotely a clue, it is a theory with very little physical foundation of it. Without right or wrong, anarchy would reign. They claim its an ideal society, but it never works in the end. Same with communism they thought they were making the perfect society, but they ended up with capitalist rules, a weak economy and leaders like Stalin. Yes, I think lagomorphs, rodents and carnivorous primates for dominance are incredibly cliche. I never thought of whale like birds as cliche though. I guess if its cliche, it's good? |
Prepare for the Future Walking with the future: Allozoic (pts 4-6)http://s1.zetaboards.com/Conceptual_Evolution/topic/3252142/14/#new
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| Holben | Feb 14 2011, 01:02 PM Post #81 |
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Rumbo a la Victoria
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It's going to be hard not to be rude, sorry. I don't think its an accident. I think it has occurred more than once, and all reliable data i can remember having seen backs my view up. It is easy to believe humans are the result of evolution, it is arrogance to think yuorself superior. Man is a co-operative animal, and there was no devolution. Slow adaptation. Apes have never been good against predators till recently, so what would they be devolving anyway? And we were killing our predators before we got our current brain size. Plus, we could run... Alas, the closest i have been is camping alone in a rather sparse area of britain. But look at modern tribes, in areas with leopards and crocodiles and snakes and sharks and... oh, it goes on. Humans have been clever while we were fighting those predators, after we came down from the safety of the trees. We were teamworkers before that. And we could run and hide. Antelope don't fight back, often. Yet they still usually escape. Humans are one of the best long-distance runners in the animal kingdom. remember, only half of people have those. Remember, they used to be smaller. Mustelids that wanted to tear their heads off? Hmmm... They weren't weak, really, anyway. Arrogance. How do baboons survive, hm? It doesn't derive from beleif. it derives from extrapolation. Red shift, CMB, and it's a far simpler explanation than goign against everything we know and making a 'god'. It wasn't an explosion anyway. 'Big Bang' is a misnomer. Oh, 'beyond comprehension'. I won't even bother with that. It is to our innate benefit to be co-operative and moral. It makes other people help us, and helps social groups function, so was selected for. Anarchy isn't just what you think it is. It can be peaceful, progressive, beautiful.Anyway, 'Now, if anything at all can be known to be wrong, it seems to me to be unshakably certain that it would be wrong to make any sentient being suffer eternally for any offence whatever." Staff, feel free to split this discussion and remove it from this topic. |
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Time flows like a river. Which is to say, downhill. We can tell this because everything is going downhill rapidly. It would seem prudent to be somewhere else when we reach the sea. "It is the old wound my king. It has never healed." | |
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| macgobhain | Feb 14 2011, 11:12 PM Post #82 |
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Adult
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Good points but I didn't want to put other arguments in there because I was afraid of my comment getting deleted. First of all, people aren't fast runners, at all, compared to other predators. I work for a Wilderness Rehab in the desert so you can take my word for it. If a cougar decides you're food out in the open and you're naked and stupid, you're food. I see that apes today are very powerful physically and have figured out some tools, but they can still scramble up trees if they need to and one hell of a lot faster than we can. Someone made the comparison to tribes, well tribes are intelligent... what would they do without that intelligence? Go extinct. Personally, with all the stuff we had running around back in the day and trying to devolve our physical strength and efficiency to make up for it with intelligence I think we wouldn't have survived... it's just an opinion based on experience. Second, you believe that right and wrong are evolved principles that serve nothing more than to help us function socially? I'm sorry, I really don't want to be rude but I find that very funny. So if that were true then right and wrong is entirely perspective and can change with evolution, right? Humans may evolve to accept pedophiles and people like Jack the Ripper into society because social rules change with time and evolution. lol. An 11 year old boyscout doesn't feel ashamed and dirty after his scoutmaster had sex with him because the rules of society tell him to. Even in times when this was considered socially acceptable kids were still damaged by these kinds of behaviors, i.e. the probability that Tiberius molested Caligula, or Hadrian's little lover boy committing suicide in the Nile. While culture has evolved and the perception of many things being right or wrong have changed enormously over recorded history, some things are constant. People like me believe there's a reason for that. And again, like someone else said, the "Multiverse" as you call it requires a great deal of faith. Evolution while being an eternal process in the sense of different things taking over different roles, and the role always appearing, things always begin somewhere, and end as well. A multiverse that's always been there does indeed sound like God to me, or at least a place where one would live. To believe that there is a physical explanation for everything is also arrogant, because that means that man in our sapient wisdom will ALWAYS be able to come to understand it. Religious people like myself believe that there are some things that are just beyond our ability to understand or begin to explain. Man will never be able to properly study the Universe he lives in unless he's able to get to the areas of interest, and right now we don't know how to do that so pretty much EVERYTHING is little more than the speculation on this forum. I think the ultimate cliche is the theory of Evolution when it accepts something like a Multiverse that is unexplained and eternal, like God. The simple fact is that you don't know, I don't know, and no one else does. All we can do is believe, or hypothesize based on what we have, which when compared to the infinite possibilities of universes full of worlds, is very little. Anyways, let's get off that because this could just erupt into a really really really heated argument... As far as evolution is concerned I suppose anything is possible, but probable is something else entirely. Conditions have to be right, and the question as to the necessity of something is most important. I think most of us in here are well versed enough in biology to know that certain things require steps and are impossible, like saber-toothed tyrannosaurs... Tyrannosaurus is a dinosaur, not a synapsid, and not a mammal. Could an animal evolve to have a bipedal dinosaur gait whilst at the same time have advanced teeth? Yes, but it wouldn't be a tyrannosaur anymore now would it? Could whales evolve to fly out of the sea? Absolutely, fish did it, so why can't they? Because the conditions aren't and probably never will be right. That niche is filled, and whales are in enough trouble as it is, so let's not kid ourselves. And in all realism, sapient-like aliens are probably unlikely, but again that's based entirely off of the speculation that life on another planet couldn't work the same or similarly to life on our own, which is an assumption as we have never come into contact with extraterrestrial life. If you're trying to be "realistic", I think that's a fair assumption to make tho. But as someone else said earlier, sapient-like aliens make for better science fiction. That would also be precisely why the animals are so convergent in the world that I've created for my book. I want readers to be able to compare the animal to something so as to get a vision of it in their heads, instead of trying to describe some totally bizarre creature that no one's gonna be able to grasp. |
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| Forbiddenparadise64 | Feb 15 2011, 01:49 PM Post #83 |
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Adult
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That is what I mean. I think Anarchism is far too utopian to come true, they are trying to change teh very fundamentals of society, which is impossible. The idea that if a government or monarchy is removed, everything will be all perfect is simply not true. No anarchist society has lasted long at all, because they have disorganised forces, especially against the communists and fascists during the 1930s and 1940s. Many anarchist groups still end up using statist, authoritan and capitalist attendancies anyway, so it is not real anarchy. even the very founders of the idea still admited that a group of judges and juries must still exist to deal with crime. The wya that anarchists treated Fascists in the Spanish Civil War ultimately shows that they are more like totalitarians. Revolutions are also very authoritan to do, as they organise all sorts of things and organise ideas. Trying to create a perfect society has been attempted and failed so many times before, why would it suddenly strike gold so soon? That is very true about man understanding things too. Man will never understand the way the universe works, trying to say that we will understand everything in time is simply not a thinking way. People have to realise that technology does not keep on going up and up forever, it does have limits. why are microchips barely getting smaller anymore? Why have we not prevented economic downfalls yet? Of course on matters of cliches, I don't really believe aliens exist, as life is ridiculously difficult to create, and everything has to be in perfect conditions. And even if something does evolve, it may be that we would prefer not to define it as life, in the same way many scientists don't consider viruses alive. While I love aliens in Sci-Fi and speculation, I have no faith whatsoever in their actual existance. And We all know that way more heated arguments have came in the past, ie with that creationist in Australia post that not only got locked, but deleted all together. |
Prepare for the Future Walking with the future: Allozoic (pts 4-6)http://s1.zetaboards.com/Conceptual_Evolution/topic/3252142/14/#new
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| T.Neo | Feb 15 2011, 03:21 PM Post #84 |
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Translunar injection: TLI
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Can we get back on topic, please? I thought that the rules state that religious discussions are discouraged... Perhaps it is time for factoring some numbers into the saganist/realist discussion; I created my own "complex life equation", to answer a similar matter to the Drake Equation. The details can be seen in this post. I got an answer of 1 349 946 000 planets with currently existing complex life. If we assume: ~75% of those planets have complex life which has the potential for intelligence, or is advanced life. ~ 5% of those planets evolve an intelligent species. ~ 10% of those intelligent species form some kind of civilisation. ~ 25% of those intelligent species develop industry. ~ 85% of those intelligent species become advanced civilisations. ~ Intelligent species are present for around 60% of the time that there is complex life present on the planet (intelligent species tend to be pretty resilient, once they are present it's unlikely they'll go extinct easily). In that case, we get 1 012 460 000 planets that have "advanced" complex life, 30 373 800 planets that have an intelligent species, 3 037 400 planets have intelligent species which have formed some sort of civilisation, 759 600 planets have intelligent species with some sort of industry, and there are 642 400 advanced civilisations in the galaxy. My original equation assumed 100 billion stars. If there are 100 billion stars in the galaxy, that is around 155 650 stars for every advanced civilisation. From this page, we get this equation for figuring out how large a sphere containing a certain number of stars is: Rly = cubeRoot(Nstars * 97) Rly = radius in light-years Nstars = number of stars, of course. If my math is correct, this means that going by the average, the nearest advanced civilisation to us should be ~250 light-years away. How close or far away that is depends on how big the advanced civilisation is. You could potentially have trillions of individuals living around a single star- so an advanced civilisation might indeed be "advanced", but there's nothing to say that they would be voraciously growing bubble-empires, that would colonise the entire galaxy in less than a million years. Single star systems can probably support far more people than one might usually assume, and any sane civilisation would learn to regulate their population anyway. Nevertheless, there are a lot of values that can be changed (remember: they are only badly half-educated guesses on my part, and nothing more). For example, the number of industrial civilisations that become advanced could be far higher, whereas the number of sapients that develop civilisation or civilisations that develop industry could be far lower- so could the amount of planets that develop sapient organisms. Edited by T.Neo, Feb 15 2011, 03:23 PM.
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| A hard mathematical figure provides a sort of enlightenment to one's understanding of an idea that is never matched by mere guesswork. | |
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| Holben | Feb 15 2011, 03:25 PM Post #85 |
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Rumbo a la Victoria
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Response to religious stuff Not evrything is possible! NOT EVERYTHING IS POSSIBLE! Even under the multiverse. Evolution does not foster possibility. It fosters perpetuation. Calling an animal anything does not make it something. If i call someone a blackguard, it does not make them black. Anyway, the defining feature of a tyrannosaur is not their teety, so yes it could be a tyrannosaur. Or, you could deus ex machina the whole shebang. What? Life on other worlds will be a way which fosters perpetuation, ie, when it can be a CHNOPS active multicellular it should be. And sapient-like? What's that? Sapience has no likes. To be realistic, from what we know, is to assume the existence of many sapients out there. I said that. And so do authorities on the matter. There is no plausible creature we cannot grasp. And put illustrations in if you want people to have a specific picture. Edited by Holben, Feb 15 2011, 03:26 PM.
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Time flows like a river. Which is to say, downhill. We can tell this because everything is going downhill rapidly. It would seem prudent to be somewhere else when we reach the sea. "It is the old wound my king. It has never healed." | |
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| Dark-Matter | Feb 15 2011, 03:29 PM Post #86 |
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Adult
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What about habitable moons and planet potentially could be terraform by other galactic cicilization. |
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| Holben | Feb 15 2011, 03:34 PM Post #87 |
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Rumbo a la Victoria
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Cliches have to be something we're sick of- simply an oft-used idea is not a cliche. Something i would call a cliche is GMing your creatures to make them work, or terrestrial cephalopods. Terraformed worlds i'm alright with, but they are often used. |
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Time flows like a river. Which is to say, downhill. We can tell this because everything is going downhill rapidly. It would seem prudent to be somewhere else when we reach the sea. "It is the old wound my king. It has never healed." | |
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| Dark-Matter | Feb 15 2011, 03:38 PM Post #88 |
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Adult
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Also what about stars with artificial planet like the ring world or those giant spaceship or artificial solar system that have a small star in the center.There could be countless of things orbiting a star that may or may not have life in it. |
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| Holben | Feb 15 2011, 03:45 PM Post #89 |
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Rumbo a la Victoria
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Those would be damn hard to make and maintain. I've never seen spec about one on this site, though. |
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Time flows like a river. Which is to say, downhill. We can tell this because everything is going downhill rapidly. It would seem prudent to be somewhere else when we reach the sea. "It is the old wound my king. It has never healed." | |
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| T.Neo | Feb 15 2011, 03:52 PM Post #90 |
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Translunar injection: TLI
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There are far more uninhabitable planets than there are habitable planets. Terraforming is a method by which those uninhabitable planets can be made habitable, and thus, can be inhabited. Terraforming may be cliche, but that's only because it makes sense. Ring worlds? Impossible unless you have unobtanium, and they don't make sense due to other things as well. Artificial solar systems- what? "Gigantic spaceships" that people live in- i.e. space colonies (they're more or less stationary as they only have an ability for stationkeeping and don't actually go anywhere other than their own orbit) are possible, but they have their own problems and it's not as simple as "big spaseship with milliuns of people lulz". |
| A hard mathematical figure provides a sort of enlightenment to one's understanding of an idea that is never matched by mere guesswork. | |
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I am strongly on that side. Sorry about saying "realists", I realised that by the time I had posted that.




It can be peaceful, progressive, beautiful.



2:29 PM Jul 11