How important are luck and good fortune in science?

A new book argues that our ignorance is so large, lucky discoveries are inevitable.

See full article...

 

[llanitedave]

I think the important part of the process is to recognise you've stumbled across something novel and/or interesting, and investigate further. Or at least publish your discovery.


[Edit for spelling]

Which is a pretty good rephrasing of the adage that "chance favors the prepared mind."

 

[llanitedave]

What we don't know about history could fill the ancient libraries ... wait, it DID fill the ancient libraries. All of which for the most part is lost to us.

All that lost history. All the lost inventions or almost inventions that I believe could STILL be changing the world around us even now.

If you don't know what was created before you, you don't know how much energy it will take to try to create it again. But first you have to have the idea again. And MANY ideas are lost to history and unless found.

Take the Antikythera device. We don't know when it was created, we can only guess. We don't know what else was known during that time because that library that would have told us was lost to history. How many libraries were list to history? What about the library or libraries in Babylon? We don't talk about the libraries of Babylon but it doesn't mean they didn't exist and if they existed we don't know what was in them.

How many civilizations do we not know about because the history of them is so far lost to ... history. How many inventions and ideas were lost to history because ... well those histories are lost to us.

How long did it take to recreate the functionality of the Antikythera device and yet we didn't even know about until maybe 2,000 years after it was lost. Just one of possibly MANY examples of things lost to history that we don't know about or didn't know about until a long time later, after we lucked into thinking about something similar again, and then went through all that energy and brain power to recreate something that earthlings had a long time ago.

No, I don't believe that beings from other planets are visiting us because water seems to be something that is invaluable to living things. And with earth and its water and all the water in the rest of our solar system just waiting for the taking, if beings from other planets knew about all this water, why aren't they here using up our water, sucking it up and taking it with them? Why? And yet we can't find one vehicle not of this planet that is doing so.

Do I think that beings on other planets exist? Well there literally ZILLIONS and ZILLIONS of galaxies, each with Billions of stars, each of which are averaging AT LEAST four planets from what we can tell so far, IF NOT MORE. And you are trying to tell me that beings that we wouldn't recognize and wouldn't be able to communicate through math isn't possible? There are literally more galaxies than there are grains of sand on all of the beaches of earth COMBINED.

So YES, there are beings that we could communicate to through math if nothing else. The problem is that the time it would take for us to get to them or them to us is so large a distance, and theirs and our life forms will be extinct before any meetings happens. The proof to me is that we don't see beings sucking up our water. It's that easy to me. Or we just aren't noticing it which would be one of the most scary things for me to imagine.

That and them getting ready to prepare to eat us if they thought of us as utterly stupid to the point that we might as well be cows and eaten like them.

I was there for it until you stumbled into Fermi's Folly... er, I mean Paradox. The fact that interstellar creatures are not currently populating the Earth does not mean that they are incapable of visiting us. It simply means that IF they exist, and IF they have the technology to travel between star systems, then they have no need to harvest the natural resources of Earth. They can get them far more easily, economically and abundantly from the small icy bodies of the Oort Cloud. If you want to prove that they haven't visited this system, then you need to survey those bodies close up, and determine that there is no evidence of extractive technology having been used on them. If you have sufficiently advanced technology, the the Oort Cloud is where the money is.

 

[llanitedave]

A serendipitous invention?...

The microwave was invented accidentally in 1945 by a self-taught engineer named Percy Spencer, who was leading a radar project for the defence giant, Raytheon. While testing a new vacuum tube called a magnetron, he discovered that a chocolate bar in his pocket had melted from the heat. He then began to experiment with microwaves to cook food, and eventually built a prototype microwave oven in 1946.

A good illustration of mental preparation. Had the same happened to me, I would have blamed my high body temperature, and simply kept chocolate bars out of my pocket going forward.

 

[llanitedave]

Selling time shares and prospecting rights in the Oort Cloud was there the money was.

Once the alien creditors realized that there is an intelligent species in the solar system that might challenge a claim, they had no choice but to invade, lest they lose all their profits or end up in Space Court.

The idea that there might be an intelligent species in the solar system totally escaped me.

 

[llanitedave]

Gathering from the Oort cloud is a massive waste of time and energy expended. The sheer scale makes it nearly pointless to even try. Even at the scale of "just" the solar system, people tend to vastly underestimate scale.

Time, yes, not so much energy. Since the gravitational pull of each Oort Cloud body is miniscule, very little energy is required to escape it and move towards another one. True, it takes a long time to get anywhere, but we're talking advanced technology here. A species that can move from one star system to another has already mastered fusion, for example. Biotechnology, including greatly extended lifespans, is a lot easier to achieve than fusion.