For me this watch pulls off the challenging goal that the AVI just barely misses: it is faithful to the principles and codes of the original while not being a direct re-edition or re-creation. The colors are great, the sunburst dial pops, and the ceramic material of the bezel is both structurally robust and eye-popping.
And we definitely know that it was artificial in origin, and that's why it didn't show cometary tail because we produced it. The question is, who produced 'Oumuamua? And my point is that just like Blaise Pascal, the philosopher, argued that we cannot ignore the question of whether God exists, because Pascal was a mathematician and he said, okay, logically the two possibilities either God exists or not. And we can't ignore the possibility that God exists because the implications are huge. And so, my argument is very similar. The possibility that 'Oumuamua is a technological relic carries such great consequences for humanity, that we should not ignore it. Many of my colleagues in academia dismiss that possibility. They say we need extraordinary evidence before we even engage in such a discussion. And my point is requiring extraordinary evidence is a way of brushing it aside.
Great Expectations.avi
It's a matter of collecting evidence. But of course, if you are not willing to find wonderful things, you will never discover them. So, my point is, we should consider this possibility as real, as very plausible, as mainstream activity, just like the search for dark matter or the search for gravitational waves. We exist. There are many planets out there just like the Earth. Therefore, we should search for things like us that existed or exist on them. That's a very simple assumption to make, an argument to make, and to me, it sounds like this should be a mainstream activity. But then, I realize that my colleagues do not agree, and I failed to understand this dismissal, because it's a subject of great interest to the public, and the public fund science. So, if you go back a thousand years, there were people saying the human body has a soul, and therefore anatomy should be forbidden.
So imagine if scientists would say, "Oh, this is a controversial subject. The human body could have a soul. We don't want to deal with that, because some people are claiming that we should not operate the human body," where would modern medicine be? My argument is, if science has the tool to address the subject of great interest to the public, we have an obligation to address it and clear it up. Let's do it bravely, with open eyes. And by the way, there is an added bonus. If the public cares about it, there will be funding for it. So, how is it possible that the scientific community ridicules this subject, brushes it aside, claims, "We don't want to entertain this unless we have extraordinary evidence," yet fails to fund at a very substantial level the search for that extraordinary evidence? How is that possible in the 21st century?
It's not the mystery that should be unraveled by philosophical arguments. It's something that you can measure and get data on and reproduce with future experiments. And once we get that, we will have a clear view of what it means. And then, that's how mysteries get resolved in science. So, I would argue, for a scientific experiment that will clear up the fog. And the way that we would not do that is if the scientific community would ridicule these reports, and the public would speculate about the possible interpretations. That's the worst situation you can be in, because you're basically leaving a subject of great interest to the public unresolved.
I'm willing to go through all the hardships of arguing something outside the box of confronting these personal attacks against me just because it's a question of such great importance to humanity. If that was a minor question about the nature of dark matter, I would not risk anything for that. Who cares? If the dark matter is axions or weakly interacting massive particles, that has very little impact on our daily lives. It's not worth confronting the mainstream on that. And by the way, the response would not be so emotional in that case either. But on a subject as important as this one to the future of humanity, which is the title of your organization, there is no doubt in my mind that it's worth the extra effort.
If someone mentions an idea, how do we tell whether it's a Ponzi scheme or not? Bernie Madoff told a lot of people that if they give him their money, he would give them more in return, irrespective of what the stock market will do. Now, that was a beautiful idea. It appealed to a lot of people. They gave him their money. What else can you expect from people that believe a beautiful idea? They made money and gave it to Bernie Madoff because the idea was so beautiful. And he felt great about it. They felt great about it. But when they wanted to cash out, which was the experiment, he couldn't provide them the money. So this idea turned out to be wrong.
And it's not just the nuance of science to say, "Oh, okay. The recent experimental tests, but we can give up on this as long as we're happy and we feel very smart and we completely agree that we should pursue these questions and just do mathematical gymnastics and give each other awards and feel great about life, and in general, just make the general statement that experiments will be great, but we can't do them right now. And therefore, let's not even discuss them."
Lucas Perry: I think that's some great wisdom for many different parts of life. One thing that you mentioned earlier that really caught my attention was you were talking about us becoming technologically advanced, and that would unlock replicators, and that replicators could explore the universe and fundamentally change it and life in our local galactic cluster. That was also tied into the search for the meaning for life. And a place where I see these two ideas as intersecting is in the idea of the cosmic endowment. The cosmic endowment is this idea of the total amount of matter and energy that an intelligent species has access to after it begins creating replicators. So since the expansion of the universe is accelerating, there's some number of galaxies which exist outside of a volume that we have access to. So there's a limited amount of energy and matter that we can use for whatever the meaning of life is or whatever good is. So what do you think the cosmic endowment should be used for? 2ff7e9595c
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