11 minutes ago, martin-w said:

Wars were all over the globe and a way of life for many.

The only thing that has changed here is the weaponry.  It was my way of life for 26 years at various times on various parts of the globe.

Noel

3 hours ago, martin-w said:

Interesting... care to share why? 

A little bit and shallowly. I don't believe that their is life anywhere in the universe except on earth. My reason for holding this belief is analogues to say an atheist not believing in the existence of God. Continuing along the same analogy I'd say that the only intellectually honest position pertaining the the existence of life in the universe elsewhere is agnosticism. Beyond that you are into the realm of wishful thinking.

OK, you are now venturing into topics that we do not discuss here! 

3 hours ago, birdguy said:

The only thing that has changed here is the weaponry.  It was my way of life for 26 years at various times on various parts of the globe.

Noel

 

Nope, there are less wars and violence. see link. 

31 minutes ago, FBW737 said:

I don't believe that their is life anywhere in the universe except on earth.

 

Its about evidence, and probability.

There are some things that have a low probability of being true and that are based on no evidence.

But then we have life, and we know life exists, because it exists here on Earth. And we know simple life appeared with ease on this planet pretty much as soon as it could. So its logical to assume that simple life is a possibility in the rest of the cosmos. 

Now, advanced technological life is possibly much rarer and possibly non-existent. 

14 minutes ago, martin-w said:

Its about evidence, and probability.

Where is this evidence you are talking about?

 

14 minutes ago, martin-w said:

we know simple life appeared with ease

No we don't know that.

 

14 minutes ago, martin-w said:

its logical to assume

It's never logical to assume anything. The inferences you make from your supposition may be logical in that the conclusions you draw are either true or false but there is nothing logical about assumptions.

Edited November 15, 20223 yr by FBW737

17 minutes ago, martin-w said:

Nope, there are less wars and violence

Maybe less wars but modern wars are much more violent and kill many more soldiers and civilians.  The Romans never had fleets of bombers.  The Phoenicians never had aircraft carries.  Atilla the Hun never had tanks.  The Egyptians never had nuclear weapons.  Until 1945 none of them had the capability to destroy the planet.

It takes a long time to kill several thousand people with swords and spears.  Just seconds with the right kind of bomb.

And modern weaponry keeps getting better and better.  

And on the home front we have people with guns who in just a few minutes, or even seconds, can kill more people than Jack the Ripper could kill in a month of Sundays.  Jack the Ripper had five victims in a period of three months.  A schoolkid in a cafeteria could, and has, multiply that by 5 in less than a minute with an assault rifle. 

Noel 

53 minutes ago, FBW737 said:

Where is this evidence you are talking about?

 

You are talking to it. You see it when you look in the mirror. You see it when you see an ant scuttle across the floor. YOU are it. Its all around you.  😁 If life exists here, in this environment, then its possible for life to exist elsewhere in a similar environment. 

 

56 minutes ago, FBW737 said:

No we don't know that.

 

As soon as the Earth started to cool down, simple organic molecule's started to form, which eventually linked up to form RNA. In short, this vital stage for life, was set almost as soon as the planet was born. We went from a sterile ball of rock to the first single celled organisms very quickly. Furthermore, recent evidence is suggesting that even complex life may have formed as soon as 300 million years after the birth of the Earth, when the planet was still very young. This is from evidence in rocks. Now when we get to complex organisms like ourselves, with technology, that is a very recent phenomenon. Suggesting primitive single celled life is relatively easy, but technological life hard. Isotopic biosignatures of life have been found in rocks from 3.8 billion years ago. If you count stone tools as technology, then they were first around a mere 2 million years ago. Compare 2 million years to 3.8 billion. 

 

Quote

 

Our estimates for the prevalence of life in the universe depend on how quickly it arose on Earth.

https://nautil.us/when-did-life-on-earth-begin-236289/

 

 

1 hour ago, FBW737 said:

It's never logical to assume anything.

 

Of course it is. If there's enough evidence in an assumptions favor then its logical to assume. Nobody is saying its definitive fact.... its an assumption.

If somebody standing next to you is bittern by a venomous snake and drops down dead, then its logical to assume that the identical snake lying next to it might do the same to you if it bit you. Assumptions can save lives. 

 

 

1 hour ago, birdguy said:

Maybe less wars but modern wars are much more violent and kill many more soldiers and civilians. 

 

 True, but its the instigation of those wars that's the key,  the number of wars, what the propensity for violence is compared with the past. Read the linked to article. You have to compare like for like, and not primitive weapons to advanced weapons.

Quote

 

Where did you find evidence for how violence has changed over time?
For prehistoric times, the main evidence is from forensic archaeology: the proportion of skeletons that had bashed-in skulls, or arrowheads embedded in bones, together with archaeological evidence such as fortifications. For homicide over the last millennia or so, there are records in many parts of Europe that go back to the Middle Ages. And we know from documents of the era that crucifixions and all manner of gory executions took place in the ancient world.

For data about wars, there are many databases that estimate war deaths, and in recent eras, governments and social scientists have tracked just about every aspect of life, so we really can get a clear view of things like child abuse, spousal abuse, rape and so on.

How do you explain the decline in violence?
I don’t think there is a single answer. One cause is government, that is, third-party dispute resolution: courts and police with a monopoly on the legitimate use of force. Everywhere you look for comparisons of life under anarchy and life under government, life under government is less violent. The evidence includes transitions such as the European homicide decline since the Middle Ages, which coincided with the expansion and consolidation of kingdoms; the transition from tribal anarchy to the first states. Watching the movie in reverse, in today’s failed states violence goes through the roof.

Commerce, trade and exchange make other people more valuable alive than dead, and mean that people try to anticipate what the other guy needs and wants. It engages the mechanisms of reciprocal altruism, as the evolutionary biologists call it, as opposed to raw dominance.

I argue for the latter, although it’s not inconceivable that the former has taken place, that we have literally evolved so that the more pacific parts of human nature have been strengthened, at least over a span of centuries or millennia. I have a lengthy discussion in the book for how that could happen: it’s certainly biologically possible.

 

Why do so many people think we live in incredibly violent times?
I think there are a number of systematic biases, what I call “historical myopia” being one of them. The closer you get to the present, the better the records are, and I think this is a major distorter of our impressions of violence. We know about every massacre that has taken place close to the present, but the ones in the distant past are like trees falling in the forest with no one to hear them.

So you think that we care more about violence than we used to?
Yes. Forms of violence that would once have been off people’s radar are now characterised as violence. Capital punishment was just a part of life. Pickpockets would be hanged. Now the most vicious serial murderer is executed painlessly after an appeal process that lasts decades and you’ve got nuns holding candles.

Also the human mind loves to learn about violence. Blood sells. The media don’t report that yesterday in Buenos Aires several hundred people died peacefully in their sleep, but if five of them were blown up, that would be news. More generally, when conflicts peter out it never makes the headlines. Unless you systematically tabulate violent deaths as a proportion of all deaths or as a proportion of population size, you will be misled.

 

 

 

 

Edited November 15, 20223 yr by martin-w

Well I said I'd get into it a little bit and shallowly. There a lot of confirmation bias going on here. Just because one wants something be true doesn't make it true but wanting something to be true sure will make everything look like evidence of its truth. But heck I do believe that you are radically free to believe what ever you like. You might be right, you might be wrong. Sometimes that doesn't matter a hill of beans, other times the gains for being right are amazing. Likewise the consequences for being wrong are comparable amazing.

43 minutes ago, martin-w said:

You have to compare like for like, and not primitive weapons to advanced weapons.

Thet's silly.  No modern nation fights with swords and spears anymore.  And the better the weapons you have the more violence you wreak.  The American Indian wars are a perfect example.  The Indians with bows and arrows or just rifles suffered many more casualties than the American Cavalry with repeating rifles, Gatling guns and cannon.

My country has been at war continuously on many fronts since the end of WW2.  Here's the list:

https://military-history.fandom.com/wiki/List_of_wars_involving_the_United_States

The threat of war between Russia and China against the West, while not a hot war, is nevertheless a threat of violence like the ancient world never saw.  Indeed the modern world has never seen.

Add to that an instable nation like North Korea flexing it's muscle from time to time with the propensity of something going wrong like a missile fired over Japan but falling short could start yet another conflict.  And as the sides line up.

I served in the military.  My brother served in the military.  My grandson served in the military.  And I have no doubt my great grandsons will serve in the military.

Noel

 

1 hour ago, martin-w said:

You are talking to it. You see it when you look in the mirror. You see it when you see an ant scuttle across the floor. YOU are it. Its all around you.  😁 If life exists here, in this environment, then its possible for life to exist elsewhere in a similar environment. 

 

Don't forget all of the life we keep finding in places we once thought life could not exist: Near volcanic vents with scalding temperatures, creatures that live beneath the ice, creatures that don't even use air at all.....

Creatures living in environments that might as well be other planets, yet here they are, going about their business. If here, then why not on mars... or wherever.

40 minutes ago, HiFlyer said:

Creatures living in environments that might as well be other planets, yet here they are, going about their business. If here, then why not on mars... or wherever.

That's what makes the Europa Clipper and Europa Lander so interesting. 

To quote NASA:

"If we eventually find some form of life at Europa (or Mars or Enceladus for that matter), it may look like microbes, or maybe something more complex. If it can be demonstrated that life formed independently in two places around the same star, it would then be reasonable to suspect that life springs up in the universe fairly easily once the necessary ingredients are present, and that life might be found throughout our galaxy and the universe."

I hate to be the devils advocate but

1 hour ago, HiFlyer said:

Don't forget all of the life we keep finding in places we once thought life could not exist

Another example of something we though we had ample evidence for that turned out to be wrong.

and

1 hour ago, dmwalker said:

If we eventually find some form of life at Europa (or Mars or Enceladus for that matter)

And places in our neck of the woods, places more hospitable than volcano's were there is water and everything and we've have to some degree looked already and could envision living there ourselves and Nada.

 

4 hours ago, martin-w said:

we know simple life appeared with ease

And I'll revisit this one because I cant help myself. We can at the LHC reproduce the conditions near the beginning of the universe. We can split the atom. They can synthesize exotic mater etc. etc. etc. We can mimic nearly everything in mature including intelligence and yet we cannot do something simple like produce a simple living organism out of inanimate mater.

🤪🤣

Well we are all guilty of confirmation bias, even me, to support the thing we hope and believe are true but It's always good to at least try to rein it in, in the interest of not living in a fantasy world.

I've said it before and I'll say it again. There is ZERO evidence that there is life anywhere else in the universe other than earth. Zero!😋

Edited November 15, 20223 yr by FBW737

31 minutes ago, FBW737 said:

There is ZERO evidence that there is life anywhere else in the universe other than earth.

Should we stop looking, then?