SMBC Comics Forum

I like to imagine a farmer tilling the land 300 years in the future finding all these pacemakers and dentures.

There are a couple of green burial sites near our house. I like the idea. I think either that, or donating my cast off husk to one of those research body farms where they watch you slowly decay to inform future episodes of CSI.

Liriodendron_fagotti wrote:I like to imagine a farmer tilling the land 300 years in the future finding all these pacemakers and dentures.

The pacemakers have to be removed in the UK. The undertaker gets a fee for it. If you don't remove them and get cremated they have a tendency to explode.

trickcyclist wrote:

Liriodendron_fagotti wrote:I like to imagine a farmer tilling the land 300 years in the future finding all these pacemakers and dentures.

The pacemakers have to be removed in the UK. The undertaker gets a fee for it. If you don't remove them and get cremated they have a tendency to explode.

All the more reason to leave them in! Gotta keep the crematorium technicians on their toes, after all.

The aliens are silent because they are all extinct

Well today in sad headlines.

Sundance viewers walked out on Daniel Radcliffe’s farting boner corpse movie

Today in fantastic headlines

The scary thing is, Daniel Radcliff can pick and choose his movies as he likes. He PICKED that one.

"Also, he apparently rides him like a jet ski." - I want to know if this is a euphemism, but also I don't want to know.

Edminster wrote:Sundance viewers walked out on Daniel Radcliffe’s farting boner corpse movie

Today in fantastic headlines

How does the Sundance Movie Festival work? Famous actors get to suggest movies?

Astrogirl wrote:How does the Sundance Movie Festival work? Famous actors get to suggest movies?

I just had a very brief look at this. Apparently anyone can submit a film they have made. They get up to 18,000 entries. Someone at the festival will watch the movie, if they like it they push it up the ranks, if they don't it gets rejected. Then they look at the upper ones and do things like reject all but one with a similar theme etc etc.

It sounds all very boring. But the film makers have to submit.

So what you're saying is, Dan Radcliffe's Farting Boner Corpse Bonanza: The Movie was the best of the myriad farting boner corpse movies which were submitted. Good to know.

smiley_cow wrote:The aliens are silent because they are all extinct

Well today in sad headlines.

I don't think that's necessarily true. I've thought a lot about the Fermi Paradox, and my reasoning boils down to 'well, if we haven't found them yet, why do we think they can find us?'

We're but an unimportant speck in an unimportant tendril of an unimportant galaxy. There's 10^22 stars out there - for every grain of sand on every beach on earth, there are 10,000 stars in existence. Even a conservative estimate of 0.1% of of those stars having an earth-like planet capable of evolving life (as we know it, Jim), it still results in at least a coupla thousand of possibly-sentient life forms currently inhabiting the Milky Way. They're having a whale of a time, solar-system hopping in their galactic Porsche Spyders like some sort of extraterrestrial planet-harvesting James Dean. We're nothing but a small patch of mould behind their grandmother's fridge; and she lives way out in a trailer in the sticks. James Dean never looks at mould behind his own fridge, let alone grandma's.

I crossed through the currently, as there's a 99.9% chance a.) they are extinct, b.) they haven't evolved to harness the power of interstellar colonisation yet, or c.) they have but we're too miniscule and irrelevant to their plans; we're as unnoticed as emokid2001's poem "She Can't Understand the Bleakness of My Soul" on DeviantArt. Or d.) they're a bunch of hyperintelligent crystalline beings, who can't move 'cause they're goddamn crystals. Or e.) they're already here, but exist on a plane that's out of our scope of perception, either by dimension or magnitude.

If they're at b.), and they're not at the not-killing-each-other-for-religious-reasons yet, then they won't be at the point of slithering out of the primordial soup for another coupla eons, give or take an epoch or two. Humans have had the tiniest window on time imaginable. After being in the evolutionary oven for a few billion years or so, in the Great TimeClock, it was only one second ago we discovered the moon revolves around the earth. Two seconds ago we were worshiping the sun god as he passed across the sky in his golden chariot, and three seconds ago we discovered fire (and celebrated by clubbing our neighbour and scrawling a poorly-drawn yak on a cave wall). Twenty minutes ago, the dinosaurs left the party. Suffice to say, the point in which humanity peaks is probably very unlikely synchronised with the point another civilisation does. However, the chance is increased by the fact we all began with the same starting gun - and that made one hell of a Big Bang - so there might be stronger synchronicity between our development and nonterrestrial civilisations - but it only takes a planet to cool or warm a few degrees more than us at a critical juncture in special development for the process to be expedited or retarded by half a gazillion years.

So they're not all extinct. We just haven't synchronised our evolutionary Casio watches with theirs. Half of them might be extinct already, and half might not be extinct until they discover nukes in a few million years' time. Or they get a four-mile meteor to the face in the year 20,162,016 A.D. Basically, the alien races out there--us included--might not have even hit The Great Filter yet. Or they have, and it wiped them out. Or they have, and survived. Or they have, survived, and thrived. Or they have, survived, thrived, and colonised the nearest inhabitable planet. Or they have, survived, thrived, colonised and expanded. Or they have, survived, thrived, colonised, expanded and now control the entire galaxy. And we're just the mould behind their grandma's fridge.

There is this long tumblr post with nice pictures http://greenskyoverme.tumblr.com/post/1 ... -the-fermi that lists several solutions/explanations to the Fermi Paradox.

Felstaff wrote: we're as unnoticed as emokid2001's poem "She Can't Understand the Bleakness of My Soul" on DeviantArt.

I'm having to restrain myself from looking up that poem.

Aliens could just be really far away.
http://www.express.co.uk/news/science/6 ... -telescope