Where are the ETs? And how to colonise another planet, the realistic way

There was a discussion on the Swedish radio the other day about why we have not seen any aliens since the Universe is so big with so many start and planets, and for all we know, if the right conditions exists, life do pop up.

To me the answers are mostly quite far fetched, and there is a much simpler one: To travel with the fastest vehicle the human race has created: the Helios-2 probe, travelling at 250 000 km/h relative to the sun, it would take a little more than 18 500 years to reach Alpha Centauri, the closest star system to the Sun. Conclusion: It is tricky to travel in space. Now lets' assume there is a moderate density of life in the Universe, say life in every 10th star system. Then it is not surprising that no one has come here; it is simply to much work to get here. There is for sure other intelligent life out there, and maybe they have worked out a way to move to other stars, but everything we know points at that this will be a difficult process, more aimed at preserving the human spices and exploring than a realistic replacement for Earth and the population living here.

If you were to send a crew to a new star system, with the purpose of using the planet(s) available there for expansion, and you can chose between a system which is already inhabited by a primitive race (us) or an empty one where you will not have to bother anyone else. Which one would you chose?

It should further be noticed, that no sensible communication will be possible once the new colony has been established: Signal propagation will take years and have very limited capacity. Thus, establishing a new colony will essentially be a permanent separation.

My take: to colonise a new exo-planet the steps needs to be.
1. Send a team of micro/nano-machines that can build larger machines that can build larger machines ... that can build large machines.
2. Terra-form or at least make part of the planet habitable.
3. Send human and other DNA (or the DNA information in some more robust form.
4. Grow life using the DNA and the machines on the foreign world.

Thus, one can send many space ships, cause they’re small and not so energy consuming. And maybe some will survive the trip. The immense time to travel will be less of a problem for the travellers since they will not be conscious.

När ska mobilnät ses som infrastruktur

Förr var televerket statligt och nu har man privatiserat det. Med den revolutions som internet och mobilitet har inneburit, borde det inte vara dax att fundera på en statlig nätverksleverantör igen. Där man, likt vägar, har en skattefinansierad leverantör av mobilt och trådbundet internet på samma sätt som annan vital infrastruktur?

Inflation theory

I am really a total novice in astronomy and should not even present ideas like this. I do not know what I am talking about, but I can not resist it, so here goes.

Regarding the accelerating universe. Maybe the acceleration is due to implosion "in the other end". Sort of like a bilinear transformation that takes everything inside the unit circle in C to the space outside of it. So maybe there is some force of gravitational type "outside of the universe"  that pulls it apart. This force might result in a crash "from outside". What do you think?

If the the force from the stuff that is outside of the universe space-time is larger than the gravitational pull, we would get acceleration.

Non-equilibrium thermodynamics and areoplanes

It is funny that creationists and others refer the simile with humans coming from an evolutionary process with scrap metal in a junkyard coming together to an aeroplane when in fact reality is even better: put mere metal ore in a rock and you get lots of different aeroplanes from evolution just by waiting. We are an evolutionary product which produce areoplanes, thus in extension, aeroplanes are evolutionary products. Thus, evolution produce aeroplanes!

Is dark matter imaginary matter?

I do not know (almost) anything about cosmology, QFT or those kind of things. Anyway I will post a wild suggestion here that just stroke me. Maybe we should think of dark matter/energy as imaginary matter energy, where imaginary is in the sense of imaginary numbers.

My point being, the real numbers set is not algebraically closed, while the complex set is. Thus, should not the word contain this symmetry is a more concrete way? The real numbers set is really not a very pretty looking thing, but the complex set really is! It is not only the closure thing. It is all the nice properties that follows with it, analytic functions, simple trigonometric identities and so on...

Or maybe is it antimatter we should view in this way?

Reasons for believing or not in God

In this post I will try to list the reasons for believing in God, and the reasons for not. The matter is quite interesting, and I would love to hear comments about the list and other reasons for or against you might find worth mentioning. The post is sort of ongoing, so I guess the list will expand in time. The arguments are sort of semi-formal. I'm trying to keep a fairly formal reasoning tone, but of course; I'm dealing with one of the worst defined concepts there is, so there have to be some hand waving.

By the way, I will also make a list with reasons I have come across that I find are not proper arguments for either.

Pros

• Classical mechanics is much simpler that quantum mechanics. This could be an indication that the creator of this world chosed to make it as comprehend-able as possible by creating it such that the emerging mechanics is simpler than the basis. This is otherwise counter-intuitive, one would spontaneously guess that the emergence is more complex, eg. as the popular theory of life.
• We are trapped between the extremely small and the extremely large. This idea is related to the above argument. I am for sure no expert in cosmology or quantum field theory. But as I understand it, science seem to suggest that there are limits to what we can explore scientifically. And this holds both for the very small and the very large. Thus "we" (humans, intelligent beings...) are trapped, we are really enclosed in a world where our reasoning can not escape. To me this looks like "someone" has put these bounds there to keep us in place.

Cons

• The Theodicy problem. This is to me a really hard one to crack if one wants to believe in a God that wants good. However of course, it is no argument against the usual guy with power.
• If God exists, why can't we communicate with it/detect its presence? To me this is quite problematic. If there exists a creator of the world, and this creator did have the intention to create humans, why is there no interaction with us?
• What created God? This is a crucial problem with the idea of a God as I see it. If we put in the concept of God "the creator of the Universe" (everything in some sense), what created God? Over-God? Not helping, what created Over-God?

Non adequate

• It gives comfort to believe in God. This is not an argument for or against God, it is simply a way to still a psychological need.
• There are so much in the world that we are not able to explain, someone have to have designed it. Just because we are not able to explain it, there is no reason to believe it unexplainable - look at all the thing that once were unexplained that we understand today.
• Intelligent design, the state of the marvelous humans and the animals must have been created by an intelligent being. These kind of arguments, hinting that someone must have designed us, or the world to yield us via e.g. evolution, since we have appeared so great is not an argument at all. For all we know, the processes of the world might have created us the way we are. And the processes of the world seem quite self-contained, not requiring any God for its existence. On the other hand, it might well be that the world actually was designed. We seem not to find any strong indications saying it absolutely can not have been designed. Thus, The argument indicate either pro nor con.

Wearable computers, the future

The discussions about Google glass continuous. My take: this is a great start, but wait for it. Is a few years we will have sterioscopic screens on both eyes and cameras on both eyes as well. Till will make possible sterioscopic (3D, that is) projections which can be used e.g. to produce the input mechanism to the system where the sterioscopic cameras will be used to receive gestures from the users. This will be the true 3D interface. It will render 3D TV obsolete, and combine it with true 3D sound, and you will have a new level of augmented reality.

But it won't stop at that, we will have IR sensors, active noise canceled sound, body mounted RF radar, millimeter positioning, you name it. And more computational power than anyone can imagine. This we give us new senses. Imagine a person using lenses with this capability. They won't be visible to anyone else, and they won't be annoying to wear, but they will make perceiving the world at 60GHz.

No point in complaining about this. It will happen, it is only a matter of time, and we will love it!