Science!! Fucking magnets, how do they work?

Almost there!

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=7jVsQToSfag

Isn't a 1,000 foot wall in the midwest sort of insane though? And isn't tornado formation still one of the unexplained mysteries of meteorology? I don't mean like no one has any idea about what's going on sort of mystery, I mean that the mechanisms involved are generally understood but not understood specifically enough for forecasting at the level those midwestern weathermen would prefer. Hence you get the crazy ass storm chasers which aren't just thrill seekers, they are actually contributing toSCIENCEin a meaningful way.

Skyscrapers are really fucking big. And you're talking about one long skyscraper. Maybe they could build it and sell office space / condos / retail. Make the worlds first Archoplex.

Call it Trantor.

Abefroman_sl said:

Looks like the solar road people have come up with another idea!

?A 1,000-foot high wall might be the key to saving the midwest from tornados

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The bad news is 3 men died high on the wall yesterday. The good news is we have 3 openings high on the wall today. Who wants to work, who wants to eat?

We wouldn't see radio signals, inverse square law would make them nothing by the time they reached us. And, as we are seeing given our own advances, societies probably wouldn't have relied on them for very long anyway.

But you're right, intelligent life is probably very rare--because intelligent life isn't the "apex" of evolution (I mean, it is, but it isn't.)...Evolution doesn't have an inevitable path--it just fills in the gaps left by the weaknesses of others. As we can see with the Dinosaurs, there are tons of other "apexes" that can happen. And, when we look at humanity, from what we know, the conditions that produced us were very, very weird (Though on the scale of the galaxy, I'm sure you'd find a few cases). But in our case, from what I've read, our intelligence only really prospered as a trait because (Ironically) climate change altered the weather quickly, but not in an ultra-violent manner. Kind of like a Goldilocks zone of environmental effects; just strong enough so that species which physically adapted died off during the shift but not so violent that our tools couldn't overcome it. Had it been anymore extreme and we would have died, any less extreme and we would have been out competed the moment another species fully adapted to it (And died.)

In those terms; it might just be that intelligence is super rare--and most planets are full of dinosaurs and shit instead. Who knows.

Big Phoenix_sl said:

Even radio sources from nearby stars would be indistinguishable form the cosmic background?

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From what I read, yes, we would not be able to see them, even from Alpha Centauri. However, this was based on someone looking with a standard earth bound radio telescope,andon signals that would be used for communication (Not deliberately sent.) So, for example, a TV or Radio signal, from earth, even if you had a giant radio telescope on Alpha Centauri, would not be picked up (So, no Contact where they watch the Berlin games)

However, if you had a city (Literally) sized radio scope, it might be possible (As it was explained to me; the tech for such a scope is beyond us). An orbital scope might change things or a radio signal specifically shot out into space, but I'm not sure on that--however, just TV signals? We'd never see them, given our current tech. (Even if we are looking, like with SETI--someone would actually need to focus something at us).

Ya what Lithose said. The radio signal argument is far-fetched and perpetuated by non-scientists that watch too much TV. Kind of like that dumb adage that humans only use 10% of their brain. Dumb memes from the 70's.

I = P/4*pi*r^2

As you can see the intensity of electromagnetic radiation is going to decrease dramatically and exponentially with distance. Throw in weak ass radio signals and cosmic distance and you get an idea how futile the premise is that we might pick up a few alien TV shows with SETI.

Did they not make you take a couple general Physics courses Big P?

Can't the alien races just boost the signal by taking power from the navigation system?

People are quick to think about the distance gap when it comes to other life, but there is also the time gap. Humans have only existed in our current state for just over 10k years in a universe that measures its age in billions. We could have easily had life close to us, but they existed millions/billions of years ago, or they won't exist for another billion years.

Big Phoenix_sl said:

Nah bra i took physical geography and planetary science for my science classes.

Physical geography is boring, dont ever take it.

So the SETI people are just kinda stroking their own egos or something? I just always assumed that seeing as how we can still communicate with the voyager probes with their pretty low power radios that some high power transmissions would at least be discernible from the background noise.

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Voyager is pointed exactly at us and we know exactly where to look and when to look. And ya SETI was at the height of our ability to just throw a bunch of money down a rabbit hole, "just in case", and it wasn't exactly staffed with our best and brightest either.

Still, there should be stuff left behind. Think aboutVon Neumann probes, even if it takes us another 500 years to build one, in about 1 million years we would have one on every major celestial body in the galaxy. You can multiply those time scales by 1000x and it still doesn't answer why we haven't encountered one yet.

edit : one answer could be thegreat filter.