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• 02/19/2014 1:26 pm

• Level 52 : Grandmaster Modder

It's funny you say that, I strongly suggest reading this article:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/scie ... ke-us.html

But you're right, it's entirely possible they could require something other than Oxygen, and there's always the possibility that's been suggested that they could be Silicon based rather than Carbon based. Lots of possibilities.

The guy in the article though saying that it is suspiciously quiet, so he doesn't think anything is out there at all, is ridiculous. We're one planet out of billions. The argument that "if they're out there, we would've heard something" is absurd.

Discussions/General Are aliens real?

MadeBySix

• 02/17/2014 5:30 am

• Level 52 : Grandmaster Modder

SkaiaCrafti may have been a bit stupid there. let me straighten this out.
notice i obscurely stated that long number is the odds that 'a planet that could sustain life like the Earth'. well that conflicted with what i said before, 'there could be other perfect orbits with temperature and stability exactly the same as ours.' see, what i meant was, that number i mentioned is the odds that our first cells created themselves because of these perfect conditions. it is the odds Penrose has stated that life would be started out of nothing but chance. there would need to be that same number for the cells of life forms like us to ever be created out of nothing again.

my point is, if the theory of evolution is true, then there simply wouldnt be any aliens.

unless, you chose not to believe in evolution but rather in an intelligent creator... but you cant have it both ways and thats what a lot of people on this thread arent putting together. many scientists dont even believe in aliens because were taking impossible odds and making them even more ridiculous by saying it could happen again in another universe somewhere.

Well, in my research I found no such assertion by Roger Penrose. All I found was his discussions on the Anthropic Principle, which is to say that that number you provided is supposedly the odds of a Universe capable of sustaining life existing. Once one exists, the odds of life coming into existence are nowhere near that low.

Here's a direct quote from Roger Penrose himself:
"The argument can be used to explain why the conditions happen to be just right for the existence of (intelligent) life on the earth at the present time. For if they were not just right, then we should not have found ourselves to be here now, but somewhere else, at some other appropriate time."

The point being that the chances of a life sustaining universe are supposedly unlikely, but one exists. We're in it. If this one didn't, we would have found ourselves in another one that did eventually. But we're in this one, it supports life and we can prove that it does through observation.

However, no such formula exists for the likelihood of life coming into existence. As I said earlier, the mathematical data is actually much more generous than that. Given the size of this Universe alone (one that can already be said to exist in a life supporting state) and the amount of time it has existed, it is more than likely that through standard evolutionary means, life has come into existence multiple times. The chances of the conditions for life to be spontaneously created coming about in a life supporting universe just aren't that low. I'd be really interested if you could find any sources to verify the numbers you're arguing.

Discussions/General Are aliens real?

MadeBySix

• 02/17/2014 4:37 am

• Level 52 : Grandmaster Modder

Okay, but based on what factors is he giving that number? There is no evidence, nor believe from physicists that the chances of a planet capable of sustaining life are that low. It all sounds like conjecture to me. The only evidence we have for whether or not Aliens can exist is that we exist, and if the numbers you're citing are anything to go by (and I'm fairly certain they aren't) then our existence shouldn't be possible. Yet here we are.

In fact, based on our understanding of the Universe, and what we have observed thus far, the idea that the likelihood of planets able to sustain life existing is that low is just absurd. We have physically OBSERVED planets that are possibly capable of sustaining life.

This is a debate where you are fighting a losing battle. One the one side, you have the assertion that statistically speaking there are almost certainly alien lifeforms somewhere in the universe. On the other side, you have the assertion that there CAN'T POSSIBLY be alien lifeforms anywhere in the universe. Surely you must see that your side of the argument is just wildly unlikely?

Edit: In fact, I did some further research. The 'facts' on which you are basing your arguments are themselves invalid. What Roger Penrose said wasn't about the chance of the Universe having 1 planet like Earth, it was about the chances of a life supporting universe. Here we have it, a life supporting universe. Job done. You also ought to do some reading on the Anthropic principle, because it kind of ties in to the scientific theory that you're misquoting.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropic_principle

Furthermore, I found this one answer:
"Penrose starts with UNSUBSTANTIATED ASSUMPTIONS. If you challenge the point at which he begins his calculations, it all falls apart. It also shows his bias. You can look at the assumptions in a different way. What are the chances that life would evolve on planet earth? Why, 100%. What are the chances that a planet would be in an orbit where it gets just enough sunlight to allow liquid water. Why, 100%.

What are the chances of a planet having a 78% nnitrogen, 21% oxygen, 1% trace gas atmosphere-an atmosphere that supports our kind of life? Why, 100%.

You see where I'm going. The assumptions with which you begin will take your calculations in a particular direction. Penrose was attempting to prove that life on earth was a miracle. I'm thinking it was inevitable, based on the facts as the exist."

I also found other claims that he never said it at all, and that it was simply creationist propaganda to attach a credible source to their assertion that life on Earth was a divine miracle.

I have a question. Are you a creationist? Just because some of the things you have said thus far are starting to sound a bit creationist-y. I'll happily debate with anyone, but creationism? Come on. That's not even worth debating.

Discussions/General Are aliens real?

MadeBySix

• 02/17/2014 3:26 am

• Level 52 : Grandmaster Modder

Right, well I don't want to get too into this (we could talk about it for hours) but you have to try to think outside the box for a second. Never make the mistake of over simplifying the Universe, it is a very complicated place.

The limit of never being able to travel faster than the speed of light only applies to travel across three dimensions. Point A to Point B, as we understand it. Based on our current understanding/research, it is entirely possible that wormholes are possible. That is to say, creating a bridge between two distant points in three dimensions, across a fourth dimension that we can't possibly perceive. But it's almost certainly there. It's almost like space remains how it is, but there is an overlap on another dimension that you are able to pass through.

On top of that, there is a team being funded in the development of a prototype warp drive. Very interesting stuff, but it has already made it past the proof of concept stage. I won't bother trying to explain, because it hurts my head, but here's a link:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article ... -fact.html

Just remember, even if it's not these, it will be something else. People have been saying for centuries that different things can't be done, right up until they are. There will always be way for us to manipulate the laws of physics to our ends, it's just a matter of figuring out how.

halorules555
But the theory nothing can go the speed of life states that the faster an object moves the heavier it gets. Weight doesn't play a factor in zero gravity so please explain how this is not true. Also the nearest star is 4 light years and extra-terrestrials could go in cryo. And then they could have mastered transporting matter or some sought of slip space which is faster than light.

Yeah, weight and mass aren't the same thing. Weight is reliant on a combination of mass and the forces acting upon it. The faster an object goes, the higher its DENSITY gets, but the more its MASS decreases.

Discussions/General Are aliens real?

MadeBySix

• 02/17/2014 3:14 am

• Level 52 : Grandmaster Modder

To be honest, you're entirely over complicating it. Yes, there are a lot of variables, but that doesn't make the odds as low as you're making out. There's a reason that the majority of scientists agree that there absolutely MUST be other life out there. Saying that there CANNOT be other lifeforms without throwing away all sense is ridiculous, because if that were true, actual educated scientists wouldn't spend so much time and money trying to find them.

The laws of probability dictate that given enough time, everything that can happen will happen at least once. Now the Universe is over 14.7 billion years old (an incomprehensibly long time), and it's impossible to even comprehend how large it is. Now, given those circumstances, the probability of other life forming really isn't that unlikely.

The other thing you're getting wrong is this so called mathematical perfection. You're exaggerating it greatly. Regardless of other variables, the only important one is that the planet be habitable. That doesn't necessarily have anything to do with its orbit, it just means that as a result of every major variable, a planet must be capable of sustaining life (and that's just carbon based life as we understand it). From there it becomes just a case of waiting long enough for the right set of conditions to occur, which of course is fairly improbable on an individual basis, but as I just mentioned given the timeframe available (in the several billions of years) is sure to have happened thousands of times.

Are you familiar with the Drake equation? Frank Drake is an American Astronomer who founded SETI, and his equation (while virtually meaningless in any real applications) is simply designed to demonstrate the probability of life being able to occur by showing how many habitable planets there could be in the Milky Way alone. From Wikipedia:

There is considerable disagreement on the values of these parameters, but the 'educated guesses' used by Drake and his colleagues in 1961 were:
R* = 1/year (1 stars formed per year, on the average over the life of the galaxy; this was regarded as conservative)
fp = 0.2-0.5 (one fifth to one half of all stars formed will have planets)
ne = 1-5 (stars with planets will have between 1 and 5 planets capable of developing life)
fℓ = 1 (100% of these planets will develop life)
fi = 1 (100% of which will develop intelligent life)
fc = 0.1-0.2 (10-20% of which will be able to communicate)
L = 1000-100,000,000 years (which will last somewhere between 1000 and 100,000,000 years)
Drake states that given the uncertainties, the original meeting concluded that N ≈ L, and there were probably between 1000 and 100,000,000 civilizations in the Milky Way galaxy.

Anyway, there's a lot more discussion to be had. I also recommend reading about the Fermi Paradox. All of this is about intelligent life however, and some explanations for the Fermi Paradox are that for whatever reason, intelligent civilisations don't last very long. However, ignoring that, it's really really unlikely that there is NO life anywhere in the Universe. In fact, statistically speaking, it's more than likely that the amount of planets inhabited by at least micro-organisms out there somewhere is well into the millions.

Discussions/General Longest skype call you've ever been in?

MadeBySix

• 01/19/2014 12:19 am

• Level 52 : Grandmaster Modder

Like some other people have said, I literally have calls that exceed 10 hours on a daily basis. Get home around 4pm, go to bed around 2am, there's a 10 hour call. We stay up later than that all the time though (we're University students you see, we don't sleep).

Anyway, I'm just gonna leave this image here.

Click to reveal

Discussions/Gaming What Should I Get on Steam

MadeBySix

• 01/05/2014 10:06 pm

• Level 52 : Grandmaster Modder

Sorry, I really just had to post to say, Starbound is not made by the same people that made Terraria. They're made by completely different devs.

Discussions/General what do you think about nuclear fusion?

MadeBySix

• 09/12/2013 7:35 am

• Level 52 : Grandmaster Modder

Some of you guys are confusing Nuclear Fusion with Nuclear Fission. Nuclear Fusion (even the hot kind) is incredibly safe because it fundamentally does not involve large amounts of radiation. The only radioactive substance involved is very small quantities of Tritium (a radioactive isotope of Hydrogen) and calculations prove that if there were a breach of the containment of that, then radioactivity levels would dilute to below safe levels before it reached the external fence of the facility. There is no threat of nuclear meltdown involved in Fusion.

The biggest thing that could go wrong in the generator itself is that the reaction stops being sustained and just cools down. No margin for error.

Edit: As for my opinion of it as a power source, it has the most potential of anything we're working on at the moment, and the scientific community agrees. Based on current progress, they think they'll be able to have the first commercial generator up and running by 2028 or something. It's important to realise that Fusion has the highest efficiency (power output for power put in) of anything we're working on. One generator could power a small country.

The biggest thing standing in the way at the moment is sustaining the reaction. It involves heating hydrogen to millions of degrees celsius to achieve a plasma state. It's very difficult to contain something like that, however the theory is that through a magnetic containment field (for example) then the reaction would sustain itself.

The point is, if it works, we'll never have to worry about power again. It's estimated that on Earth alone there is enough Hydrogen for us to power everything on Earth for hundreds of billions of years. That's more time than the Universe has existed. Nuclear Fusion is the future.

Minecraft/Discussion Why java?

MadeBySix

• 08/14/2013 2:34 am

• Level 52 : Grandmaster Modder

Yeah, I think you're mistaken about a few things. There are plenty of popular games running java, Runescape being a prime example, and Java is certainly not limited. On the contrary, Java is an incredibly powerful language. The issues with Java are not what it is capable of, it is its technical limitations.

As for why, it's because Notch likes making things in Java. Everything he does is Java. Clearly it's just his weapon of choice.

Discussions/General Choclate rain

MadeBySix

• 07/21/2013 5:38 pm

• Level 52 : Grandmaster Modder

*chocolate

Discussions/Gaming Grand Theft Auto V Gameplay!

MadeBySix

• 07/09/2013 9:36 pm

• Level 52 : Grandmaster Modder

YES.

Discussions/General My family hates me! (FIXED)

MadeBySix

• 06/27/2013 9:24 pm

• Level 52 : Grandmaster Modder

This is possibly one of the saddest things I've ever read. Speaking from experience, we all feel that way at some point in our lives. It sucks, but it's true. Sometimes when we're young, problems seem so much bigger than they are, and we start to feel like we don't matter at all. I've been there, honestly.

The thing is though, you're only 10 years old. You've got a whole life ahead of you, and you can do whatever you want with it. Don't ever feel like you're not worth anything, because we're all worth something. Sometimes all it takes is being told you matter by someone else for us to truly see our worth. Everyone here sees your worth. You just have to try to talk to your parents and see if you can come to a solution, without your siblings being able to interrupt.

Discussions/General Extraterrestrial Life

MadeBySix

• 06/18/2013 9:50 pm

• Level 52 : Grandmaster Modder

Really it's just a matter of distance. There's no way to know whether we got life first or not. We find quite a few planets that can support life, but they're all so ridiculously far away that we can't get a close enough look. All we can say is that the universe existed for around 10 billion years before the Earth did, so there's a good chance that in that time a different planet had life. The Universe was old enough when the Earth was formed that thousands of civilisations could have already risen way past where we are, reached the stars, then collapsed into nothing. We'd never even know. It's kind of humbling when you think of it like that.

Woody239
One in a trillion planet have life...
4,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000/1,000,000,000,000= 4 Trillion
That's still 4 Trillion planet that have life. (According to what you said.)

You're right, and that's an incredible number. It's also not an unlikely number, so it's amazing when you think that there could be that much life right under our noses. But then you take a step back, and realise that finding the right 4 trillion planets amongst a sea of 4,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 planets is like finding a needle in a haystack. They could be there. But how would we ever know, with odds like that?

Discussions/General Extraterrestrial Life

MadeBySix

• 06/18/2013 9:38 pm

• Level 52 : Grandmaster Modder

A more accurate statement would be 'there are possibly civilisations out there more advanced than our own, there are possibly creatures our there less advanced than us. Without observing them, we can't know"

However, going back to your first post, whether you believe the big bang theory to be correct is distinctly immaterial. The fact is, through simple observation, we can confirm there to be billions of planets. It isn't assumption, it is simply estimating based on the observable universe that there are quite clearly billions upon billions of other planets out there, and statistically speaking when you're dealing with those kind of numbers it's more likely that there is other life than isn't.

It is, by the way, an easily confirmed scientific fact that the Earth is billions of years old. This isn't about what you believe or what I believe or what the OP believes. You may choose to believe otherwise and that's your choice, but the Earth certainly is billions of years old.

But you're right. We can't say that it's a fact that there is extraterrestrial life out there. It certainly could be fact, but until we know one way or the other, we can't say it is.

Minecraft/Discussion Screen refresh rate and FPS

MadeBySix

• 06/16/2013 9:48 pm

• Level 52 : Grandmaster Modder

1: It's a laptop.

2: It depends what specs it has, not all computers are designed to be used for games.

3: Asus are a VERY good technology company, so it's hardly surprising they've developed a great new monitor. Don't confuse an advanced high refresh rate monitor with a slow laptop, the two are literally completely different.

Discussions/General PS4 Vs Xbox One

MadeBySix

• 06/16/2013 8:47 pm

• Level 52 : Grandmaster Modder

I'm kind of surprised you have liquid cooling on that, it doesn't really seem necessary. What GPU are you using? I'm currently in the middle of building a new PC since my current one is about 5 years old now, and I'm waiting to play all of this years games until my build is done.

Anyway, I can't speak for everyone here, but at the very least a lot of them have already acknowledged PC's are better. I myself hardly ever turn on my old toyboxes, since I started PC gaming 6 years ago and PC gaming is obviously superior in every way. Plus, the "next-gen" consoles are worse by far than current gen PC's. That said, I do own both a PS3 and an Xbox 360 and as an external observer it's certainly interesting to note what the consoles are getting right and wrong. One can't help but notice that the Xbox is adopting all of the worst features of the PC without any of the huge benefits, whilst the PS4 is adopting a lot of what makes PC gaming great. In short, Xbox is digging itself deeper into console land, whilst the PS4 is actively improving itself as a gaming platform. It's certainly interesting to see what other people think too.

Discussions/General PS4 Vs Xbox One

MadeBySix

• 06/16/2013 8:18 pm

• Level 52 : Grandmaster Modder

coolkevin867
I got the hardware statement from Nvidia, which was actually able to look at the hardware.
"If the PS4 ships in December, as Sony indicated it will only offer about half the performance of a GTX 680 GPU, which launched in March 2012, more than a year and a half ago."
That is a direct quote from Nvidia

I think you misunderstood what they were saying. I looked up the quote you mentioned, because it sounded interesting (and hey, always do your research, right?)

What they were saying was that they fully support PC gaming because consoles are closed, can't be upgraded, and are incredibly underpowered compared to PC's. They were talking about why they declined to produce the custom chips for the next-gen consoles, and that even the one with the more powerful GPU (The playstation 4) doesn't even come close to current generation graphics processing, despite being half a year from release.

TL;DR

They were saying the PS4 is crap compared to PC's (which PC gamers knew anyway), not that it was less powerful than the Xbox One. It is most definitely a bit more powerful than the Xbox One.

Discussions/General PS4 Vs Xbox One

MadeBySix

• 06/16/2013 6:36 pm

• Level 52 : Grandmaster Modder

I'm not sure where you read that the PS4 hardware is actually worse than the Xbox One, but they're actually basically the same. There are two minor differences, the PS4 uses faster RAM and has a better GPU. The PS4 is actually the more powerful machine, even if it is EVER so slightly.

The other thing I wanted to mention - I don't know where you got the idea that PSN is much worse than Xbox Live and gets hacked "virtually all the time", but PSN is only marginally slower than Xbox Live because it's not currently a paid service, and got hacked ONCE. When it did, they spent the following three months giving out free games to everyone as an apology, and upgrading the infrastructure of the service so it wouldn't happen again. In terms of actual gaming, there are far more people hacking on multiplayer games on Xbox than on Playstation, because the code is far easier to crack on the Xbox 360.

Finally, there are actually very few worthwhile Xbox One exclusives that aren't going to be on PC as well, and for that matter there are quite a few PS4 exclusives that are on PC too. Most of the worthwhile console games are on both, with the exception of things like Quantum Break on the Xbox One (which will almost definitely make it to the PC after a year or so) and products from people like Naughty Dog on the PS4, which are some of the most impressive games of our generation.

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