politics
Welcome to the discussion of US Politics!
Rules:
- Post only links to articles, Title must fairly describe link contents. If your title differs from the site’s, it should only be to add context or be more descriptive. Do not post entire articles in the body or in the comments.
Links must be to the original source, not an aggregator like Google Amp, MSN, or Yahoo.
Example:
- Articles must be relevant to politics. Links must be to quality and original content. Articles should be worth reading. Clickbait, stub articles, and rehosted or stolen content are not allowed. Check your source for Reliability and Bias here.
- Be civil, No violations of TOS. It’s OK to say the subject of an article is behaving like a (pejorative, pejorative). It’s NOT OK to say another USER is (pejorative). Strong language is fine, just not directed at other members. Engage in good-faith and with respect! This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban.
- No memes, trolling, or low-effort comments. Reposts, misinformation, off-topic, trolling, or offensive. Similarly, if you see posts along these lines, do not engage. Report them, block them, and live a happier life than they do. We see too many slapfights that boil down to "Mom! He's bugging me!" and "I'm not touching you!" Going forward, slapfights will result in removed comments and temp bans to cool off.
- Vote based on comment quality, not agreement. This community aims to foster discussion; please reward people for putting effort into articulating their viewpoint, even if you disagree with it.
- No hate speech, slurs, celebrating death, advocating violence, or abusive language. This will result in a ban. Usernames containing racist, or inappropriate slurs will be banned without warning
We ask that the users report any comment or post that violate the rules, to use critical thinking when reading, posting or commenting. Users that post off-topic spam, advocate violence, have multiple comments or posts removed, weaponize reports or violate the code of conduct will be banned.
All posts and comments will be reviewed on a case-by-case basis. This means that some content that violates the rules may be allowed, while other content that does not violate the rules may be removed. The moderators retain the right to remove any content and ban users.
That's all the rules!
Civic Links
• Congressional Awards Program
• Library of Congress Legislative Resources
• U.S. House of Representatives
Partnered Communities:
• News
view the rest of the comments
The chances of winning a lottery is astronomically low, yet there is a winner every week.
Yes which is my point. There should have been a winner and there wasn't.
We are. We are the winner. The chances of someone winning the cosmic lottery is astronomically low. The chances that there is another winner nearby is (astronomically low)^2^.
Right so as I pointed out the distances don't really matter all that much. A galaxy infestation of sentients doesn't require FTL. A nuclear propelled ship could bring the nearest star systems within range in under a century. Additionally we are at the edge of the solar system which means it would be slightly harder for us than it would be on average for sentient life forms.
The 15k doubling time I gave includes travel time. We can make the numbers worse if you would like. Make it a 45k doubling time and it takes 1.5 million years. About 3 orders of magnitude more time than is needed. You would need a double time of roughly half a million years to break it. Which would mean that earth sends out a colony ship once every 50x the duration of human civilization. The first one goes out in say 2030 the next one goes out in 500,002,030, the third 1million 2030 AD.
You vastly underestimate the distances and the timescale. And as far as we can tell, you overestimate the chances of life emerging. Right now it looks like our situation is extremely freaky, and we were very lucky to get it. And the chances that there is another civilization of this type nearby (and a million light years is nothing compared to the size of observable universe, so even on non-relativistic speeds million or two years is a very small timeframe and milion or two light years is a very small distance) is extremely slow. So yes, we were very lucky, we won the lottery, go us.
Ok. Would you kindly revise my numbers based on what the true situation is?
I would like to point out that my 20% comes from the literature on the topic and the dataset that we have right now. What is the true number?
I am not sure the issue is clear here but I’ll put it another way.
If I roll a D100 and get a number - any number - there was a 1% chance I’d get that number. Whether that number has value to me, such as rolling a 100 for a good outcome or a 1 for a terrible one, is immaterial. Every single outcome is 1% likely to happen.
Should I discount the 1% chance outcome just because i got the exact outcome I did or didn’t want?