Outis

@DeivonDrago My hunch is that stars like G or K may more often be stable long enough for this “hard step”, but the majority of suns, M-dwarfs are more hostile with tidal locking and violent solar flares. arxiv.org/abs/2106.11207

@DeivonDrago It took a long time, but may have been a phase transition as the computational complexity space of proteins narrowed. pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pn…

Eukaryotes (likely) originated from a fusion of archaea & bacteria. Somewhere in the distant past, an archaea engulfed a bacterial cell which become mitochondria. This formation of the first eukaryote with the ability to replicate the inner engulfed mitochondria was a very contingent event. It’s quite possible this is very unlikely to happen. #fermiparadox

Real 😂.

@CuriosityonX Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space.

If aliens really do exist, why haven’t they visited Earth?

@DavidReilly007 @hookskat More probable than theism, but deism still posits a disembodied mind. Every other known mind is associated bodily & physically. And minds are one of the most complex higher order features. Deism puts it at the base of reality. Totally backwards.

@hookskat As for Deism/Pantheism I think that cannot be disproven but is unnecessary, untestable, unknowable, and irrelevant.

It has been disheartening to see how many atheists need the label to be as clear cut as Christians do. I guess I am a “fake atheist”. 🤷🏻‍♀️ Is that better than being a fake Christian?

@michaelshermer Or the cost-vs-benefit of directed transmissions or interstellar travel rarely justify continuous investment.

LOL. An interviewer just asked me about my answer to the Fermi Paradox called "hyper-brief technological span," a phrase I have never used. I have made the argument that the "L" (lifetime of a communicating civilization) in the Drake Equation is likely short, on the order of 400 years (averaging the length of individual civilizations) due to many causes of societal collapse. He sent me this Gemini search. Is it hallucinating this phrase (although these are my arguments)?: Michael Shermer argues that the Fermi Paradox (the contradiction between the high probability of extraterrestrial life and the lack of evidence for it) is largely resolved by the "hyper-brief technological span" of intelligent species. He suggests that once a civilization develops radio technology, it only broadcasts for a short period of time (e.g., a few hundred years) before going extinct, destroying itself via technology, or transitioning to non-detectable communications. Therefore, the cosmic window for overlapping, communicative civilizations is statistically near zero. Shermer proposes that the "hyper-brief technological lifespan" is a bottleneck all intelligent species encounter, fundamentally limiting the survival of extraterrestrial civilizations. He calculates that once civilizations invent radio technology, their aggressive nature and propensity for mutual destruction drastically shorten their window of survival before they collapse. In his columns discussing this concept, Shermer draws upon evolutionary psychology to frame this dilemma: The Mismatch: Humanity (and potential intelligent alien species) is governed by evolutionary impulses—such as xenophobia, territoriality, and desires for dominance. The Existential Bottleneck: The period during which a species discovers destructive technology (nuclear weapons, bio-weapons) heavily overlaps with its primitive evolutionary state. The Collapse: Because our technological power advances exponentially but our moral and neurological evolution remains largely stagnant, civilizations risk obliterating themselves before they mature into space-faring societies. This premise serves as a powerful explanation for the Fermi Paradox—the glaring contradiction between the high probability of extraterrestrial intelligence existing and the lack of evidence for it. Shermer suggests that the lifespan of a technological civilization may only be a few centuries, making them too fleeting and separated by vast distances to ever communicate with one another.

New blog post: Does it feel any different to be reverse-chiral life? unstableontology.com/2026/06/18/doe…

@dagradix @GhostCoase

@GhostCoase He’s good at what he does, but I absolutely loathe Plantinga’s work. It’s so obviously about defending his religious beliefs, some of which are trash.

@ScottDavidGray @jeremykauffman papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cf…

@jeremykauffman Much of modern ethics rests on the idea that "intelligent, reasonable people will agree, if they all know all of the facts." The fact that this is demonstrably not true -- that different people very clearly want different things -- how not shaken this faith.

Both "sides" on any issue are allowed to just want it. That's the exact point. Most arguing is performative and worthless. Most people are not changing their minds. If more people would recognize this we could move towards more reasonable solutions.

If god wants relationship with man why make its existence debatable at all?

@JoelMCurzon “this generation will not pass away until all these things take place” “There are some standing here who will not taste death before they see the Son of Man coming in his kingdom."

Do you another cult full of failed prophecies that “created their own Bible”? Christianity. (More of a family of cults, but the point stands.)

@waldenpod The three valence quarks in protons and neutrons are evidence of the trinity

“The seven-day week is evidence for theism”

@VonVladimierV @mykael_yuddy

@mykael_yuddy The problem is what you define as well-established science. Of course we understand that as “Theory”, for which is well-established, and “Postulates” for that which is not. However we see even scientists twist that for political or financial gain. Eg climate change, nutrition…

People who reject well-established science - whether it's space exploration, the shape of the Earth, the moon landing, or evolution - aren't just uninformed. They're dumb as rocks. That's even an insult to rocks - because at least rocks have geological value. These ones are just plain stupid. Even early humans, despite lacking knowledge, were not actively denying reality like these idiots today.

@DerekPederson3 Local optimization might beat cosmic expansion in most fitness landscapes. Marginal gains may drop sharply beyond a planet or system.

@DerekPederson3 It probably requires extreme long-term coordination, high energy motivation, cultural stability over millions of years, tolerance for generational delay, willingness to invest in low-return, high-latency projects, or robust technological continuity.

Science fiction nerds are gonna hate me for saying this but the Great Filter is that interstellar travel is probably more or less impossible and there is no reason to come up with any other explanation for that.

A proposed mechanism for the formation of protocell-like structures on Titan cambridge.org/core/journals/…

Formation of Amino Acids and Nucleotide Bases in a Titan Atmosphere Simulation Experiment ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/P…

Simple mechanisms for the evolution of protein complexity onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/pr…

Big Mysteries Survey: Physicists' Views on Cosmology, Black Holes, Quantum Mechanics, and Quantum Gravity arxiv.org/abs/2605.11058

The Universe might not be flat youtu.be/Pd9P7CibbHc?si…