Asklemmy

43750 readers

1480 users here now

A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions

Search asklemmy 🔍

If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!

Open-ended question
Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
An actual topic of discussion

Looking for support?

Looking for a community?

Lemmyverse: community search
sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
[email protected]: a community for finding communities

~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_[email protected]~

founded 5 years ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

109

Do you believe in Aliens? (lemmy.world)

submitted 6 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

178 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Hey guys, what are your thoughts on the existence of extraterrestrial life and the potential involvement of governments in concealing or studying such entities.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (1 children)

My training is in applied mathematics, so I'm only conceptually aware of strange attractors. It's my understanding that they are chaotic systems that tend towards a stable state. As such I'm a little skeptical of the claim that the universe itself is a strange attractor, since it is broadly predictable and hence not chaotic, and it's expanding and thus not tending towards stability!

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 months ago

I'm referring to the laws of the universe, which have not always been consistent. A strange attractor can form states that are temporarily dynamically stable - and for something like the universe, we may not notice any small changes to 'constants,' as we are directly subject to them (including our tools of measurement). Aside from that, change is likely so slow that we may not even notice it.

Nevertheless, if the big bang is in any form to be believes, we must accept that the universe's basic laws can change, and yet they enter states where they do not noticeably change. If the pattern of the rest of nature holds (massive numbers of similar forms and structures distributed over time and space, where rough repetition along a common theme is a common theme), the universe will probably do similarly.

What would be incredibly odd would be:

something came into existence from nothing
that something happened for a while
that something basically stops happening due to even distribution of energy throughout space
end of story

no consistency whatsoever

Either of those seem unlikely. But, of course, I live in this universe, so I could be biased. :-)