clms_chess wrote:
I coach students who are anything but nerds. For example one of my high school students who won the county high school chess championship as a freshmen curently plays Linebacker and benches 380 and looks like he could ripe your face off... if you got him angry lol.
I love people like this. Life is too short to live as a "brain", an "athlete", "a princess" or a "criminal" but instead we should embrace and cultivate all aspects of our intellectual, emotional and physical potential. In my opinion, the rich life is the life expressed in diverse ways.
TheGreatOogieBoogie wrote:
You mean refuting alien conspiracy theories... right? Physics, logistics, and probabilities all point to them never coming here or ever being here. Considering the odds of intelligent life evolving it'd be a safe bet to assume we're alone in the Milky Way or at least our section of it.
It's funny, because those who say intelligent life exists outside of earth give the reason that the universe is so vast as evidence that it's likely other intelligent life exists. So no one really wraps their brain around that probability. Everyone just uses it as their logic for whichever side they want to believe.
The only probability that makes sense to me is that, since we will have the computing power to simulate entire worlds within 50 years, and therefore a universe is computable, then given enough time we would convert to a virtual world where we live inside of a computer. In terms of probability, it's prohibitively unlikely that we would be living at the time when this conversion first happens. Therefore it is extremely likely that we are already living inside of a computer simulation. This seems like it would jive with science and religion very well. Now imagine the programmer looking at the simulation we are in, and laughing at how we calculated the "age of the universe", and all of these other hair brained ideas like string theory and dark matter. When you think of it this way, science and religion both require equal amounts of faith.
I, too, think Nick Bostrum is an interesting fellow.