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Evolution has produced a wondrously diverse variety of lifeforms here on Earth. It just so happens that talking primates with opposable thumbs rose to the top and are building a spacefaring civilization. And we're land-dwellers. But what about other planets? If the dominant species on an ocean world builds a technological civilization of some sort, would they be able to escape their ocean home and explore space?
A new article in the Journal of the British Interplanetary Society examines the idea of civilizations on other worlds and the factors that govern their ability to explore their solar systems. Its title is "Introducing the Exoplanet Escape Factor and the Fishbowl Worlds (Two conceptual tools for the search of extra-terrestrial civilizations)." The sole author is Elio Quiroga, a professor at the Universidad del Atlántico Medio in Spain.
We have no way of knowing if other Extraterrestrial Intelligences (ETIs) exist or not. There's at least some possibility that other civilizations exist, and we're certainly in no position to say for sure that they don't. The Drake Equation is one of the tools we use to talk about the existence of ETIs. It's a kind of structured thought experiment in the form of an equation that allows us to estimate the existence of other active, communicative ETIs. Some of the variables in the Drake Equation (DE) are the star formation rate, the number of planets around those stars, and the fraction of planets that could form life and on which life could evolve to become an ETI.
In his new research article, Quiroga comes up with two new concepts that feed into the DE: the Exoplanet Escape Factor and Fishbowl worlds.
[...] Quiroga's Exoplanet Escape Factor (Fex) can help us imagine what kinds of worlds could host ETIs. It can help us anticipate the factors that prevent or at least inhibit space travel, and it brings more complexity into the Drake Equation. It leads us to the idea of Fishbowl Worlds, inescapable planets that could keep a civilization planet-bound forever.
Without the ability to ever escape their planet and explore their solar systems, and without the ability to communicate beyond their worlds, could entire civilizations rise and fall without ever knowing the Universe they were a part of? Could it happen right under our noses, so to speak, and we'd never know ?
[Source]: Universe Today
[Also Covered By]: Phys.Org
An interesting conjecture worth pondering about !!
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday March 13 2024, @02:39AM (4 children)
As I understand it, Lyme looks a lot like syphilis under the microscope and a lot of Lyme carriers/sufferers were mis-diagnosed as having syphilis, and treated for it somewhat ineffectively...
I just call it a Dr. Google poster child because it wasn't until after the internet, and the "I have Lyme" believers community got some organization and data, that Lyme seemed to start being taken seriously by the mainstream medical community. Of course there's a whole bag of symptoms attributed to it that may or may not be causally linked - just like so much else out there.
Mainstream medicine has little to be proud of in terms of accurate Dx and treatment rates... so many people suffer from mis-diagnosis year after year until they finally luck into a Dx and treatment of what they really had and then "poof, magic, aren't we wonderful?" Well, yeah, cool that YOU cured my brother's plantars warts in a week, but those 8 other jerk-offs that blamed the symptoms on everything but plantars warts for nearly five years... yeah, not making the community as a whole look too sharp. Even scarier is: maybe he didn't have plantars warts, but the treatment for them worked on whatever he had... a lot of "practical practice" works that way.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Wednesday March 13 2024, @03:28AM (3 children)
Yeah, very aware of the problem of mis- or absent diagnosis. For 30 years I got "You're not overweight, so it can't be your thyroid." And then "You test in range, so it can't be..." BEEP, wrong...
Tho I'm croggled that anyone would fail to do a gram test and distinguish a bacterium's type before using a gram-specific antibiotic..Lots of crap can be hard to ID under the microscope; that's why we have these tests.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday March 13 2024, @03:15PM (2 children)
>I'm croggled that anyone would fail to do a gram test and distinguish a bacterium's type before using a gram-specific antibiotic
Had a friend who had a little white spot on her chest - not exactly under the bra, but close. In her regular checkup she asked her M.D. about it and he glanced, out of the corner of his eye from across the room, and pronounced "fungus." and wrote her a script for steroid cream. He wasn't wrong, but how often do they make those snap calls because "it's (almost) always fungus" or "Lyme is really rare, and has never been confirmed south of Vermont." or "I'm paranoid that my female patients may construe my examination as sexual abuse so I'm just going to guess" and they're actually wrong.
The AMA has put our M.D.s on a pedestal and trained them to think of themselves as infallible deities whose time is too valuable to be bothered with things like un-billed examination time or tests that might be called un-necessary (and low profit.)
As I understand it, the limited capacity of the residency program is their excuse for why they consistently under-supply our market with M.D.s - in my mind that's a serious structural failure that needs to be addressed. In their minds, that's keeping demand for (and self-worth estimation and compensation of) M.D.s high - which they seem to think is good. I'm all for the AMA looking out for their (self) membership, but not at the expense of the people they serve - and they've been progressively "boiling the frogs" abusing their patients more and more, for decades.
In the 1970s my pediatrician had a lab in her office, staff to culture swabs and tell you within less than a day if you had strep, mono, staph, or likely a virus, and prescribe antibiotics (or not) and rest/isolation recommendations accordingly. Ain't nobody got time for that anymore, apparently. Now if your infant has a mild fever (above the guidelines for vaccine administration) you're instantly given a script for broad spectrum antibiotics - nuke 'em from orbit, just to be sure. Side effects for the infant or society at large? Not considered, just gotta make sure we can keep those vaccines pumping in on schedule - wouldn't want to have to think too hard at the next appointment about how to adjust the schedule due to delays in earlier course administration.
>Lots of crap can be hard to ID under the microscope; that's why we have these tests.
Instead of (or at least in addition to) building machines to sample HVAC airstreams for bio-terror cultures, you'd think we would be working toward in-office culture ID machines - like the blood analyzers and similar that have been around for 30+ years. Instead, we've developed this central specialist infrastructure where your M.D. sends you to a lab-clinic where they do the blood draws / swabs / pee in cup / etc. (and, incidentally, you get lots of waiting room exposure to a broad spectrum of patients from all over town), and then that clinic ships your samples off to a central processing lab (no mixups EVER occur in that process) and they batch-process your shit and get back to you days later telling you: "Well, we are required by law to disclose this result to you immediately: you're HIV positive. Now, these results are frequently false positives, and we're escalating your case to a Western Blot analysis, but it's Friday and they won't read your samples until Monday and you'll get a confirmation or refutation of the HIV positive status next Tuesday or Wednesday at the latest, hopefully. Meanwhile, enjoy your first days post-partum experience with your new baby and your spouse now that we've planted these seeds of mistrust, doubt and uncertainty into your highly emotionally charged heads..." Yes, that was our post C-section experience with our 2nd child and, of course, Western Blot came back HIV negative, late Tuesday afternoon. Well, the hospital did the sample collection without sending us to a clinic, but I'm sure most US residents have experienced the lab-sample clinic more than once in the past 30 years...
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Wednesday March 13 2024, @04:45PM (1 child)
"As I understand it, the limited capacity of the residency program is their excuse for why they consistently under-supply our market with M.D.s"
To my understanding, it's because the AMA will only certify something like 470 new MDs per year.
Which doesn't begin to keep up with demand.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday March 13 2024, @06:14PM
>the AMA will only certify something like 470 new MDs per year.
That's astonishingly low, but:
Not all of those 28,753 go on to complete a residency, get licensed, get malpractice insurance, and actually practice... more meaningless stats from the internet at large:
that puts us at somewhat more than 339996563/33.5*.93*28753 = 380 residents per doctor on an ongoing basis (not accounting for M.D. em/immigration, which at present puts about a 10% boost on the number of physicians, or about 340 residents per doctor).
Random point of contrast:
for a ratio of about 200 residents per doctor.
Do you feel served? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/To_Serve_Man_(The_Twilight_Zone) [wikipedia.org]
83200000/421300 =
🌻🌻 [google.com]