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Cake day: April 28th, 2024

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  • AppleTea@lemmy.ziptoLemmy Shitpost@lemmy.worldJust in time
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    22 days ago

    Life has a tendency to spread when new environments are available, yes.

    But beyond this planet, there are no other environments. You might say the rest of the universe is antivironment. There is a wide range of possible conditions, of radiation and tempurature, gravity and molecular composition. Life requires a very very narrow and specific set of those conditions to continue.

    Going from one continent to another, within the same atmosphere, with the same underlying set of conditions, is not all that much of a change. Actually leaving the planet? Permanently? And without just dying in the attempt? That would require a level of organization, long term planning (like, centuries long term), and resource management that we as a species have yet to demonstrate.







  • I get these stories as a way of pointing out the inherant absurditity in a lot of every day things…

    …but also… life requires energy. Something’s gotta keep the metabolism going. Oxygen is both highly reactive and significantly more abundant than any of its heavier counterparts further down the column. If there is life out there with a metabolic rate anywhere approaching our own, it would be weird if it didn’t use oxygen.



  • The AI being hyped right now is not AI at all. It’s really important that we all acknowledge this, that the world is selling itself a multi-billion-dollar lemon: predictive text engines that have nothing intelligent about them. They’re giant sorting machines, which is why they’re so good at identifying patterns in scientific research, and could genuinely advance medicine in wonderful ways. But what they cannot do is think, and as such, it’s a collective mass-delusion that these systems have any use in our day-to-day lives beyond plagiarism.

    Goddamn, a gaming outlet saying what the serious grown-up press should have been saying from the start!





  • AppleTea@lemmy.ziptoScience Memes@mander.xyzobserves your slit
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    2 months ago

    gonna keep banging this drum every time this comes up:

    When physicists say “observe”, they actually mean “measure”. And to measure a photon of light, you have to interact with it somehow, there is no passive way to do so.

    The post’s header image implies that the interference pattern goes away just by looking at it. If that were the case, we would never see the interference pattern, never know it was there in the first place! In the actual experiment, they put a sensor at one or both of the slits. But to “sense” a single photon, you have to interact with it in some way. Otherwise you wouldn’t know it was there.

    Again, this is where the language trips us up. Rather than “sensor”, would really be more accurate to say they put a photon-touch-er at the slits.

    So, what we actually get is “Touching the photon changes the photon’s behavior.” The universe doesn’t magically infer when we happen to be looking at it, there is no spooky action-at-a-distance!