ITT: We find random facts about humans that we dont think twice about but is actually probably really fucking badass to aliens
Starting
We literallt breathe rocket fuel, the one gas that is litterally the reason fire exists at all, which is also highly corrosive to basically all metals except platinum and gold, on top of being a key ingredient to water, probably the most soluble liquid that exists ever which tears appart crystals like fucking nothing
oh yeah, we drink that shit to. to survive. we cant live without it. yeah.
>>713572705
care to explain how air is "literally" rocket fuel?
>Bumping this shit
The thing we call "being alive" is literally just synapses happening thousands of times a second inside of a big squishy pink ball of tissue called a "brain". Nothing more than that really.
>>713572936
I'm not OP but I think he is saying that without oxygen, there would be no fuel to a flame. So when a rocket is fired, there is no way it would burn or continue to burn without its fuel source which happens to be the same thing we breathe.
>>713572705
we weld metal to our teeth if they arnt straight and bolt steel to our bones when they shatter.
Other animals are as fragile as spun glass compared to us. Oh and we recreation ally consume a range of poisons because we like how it makes us feel.
>>713572705
neither of those ought to be particularly impressive to aliens. I'm all for HFY but there's better stuff.
>>713573044
I also think he means solid fuels, like hydrogen or liquid fuels like oxygen
>>713572936
well like i said air is pretty much the only reason fire exists. at all.
we also can compress it into a liquid and let it expand into a chamber to combust like how we do with gasoline. except on ultra steroids. in the sky. to throw us out of the fucking stratosphere in a sealed tube.
>>713573044
>>713573132
It would be more of a catalyst then, a fuel to the fuel, right? I'm just disputing the use of the term literal
We hunted by chasing our prey. Not out running it, just following it. we never lose it due to how smart we are. we are always there, and we let it waste its energy. we just follow it like fucking terminator until it dies of exhaustion or heat stroke. There is no escape because we come from apes. so we can fucking swim and climb. we are always there. we just have to wait for our prey to die.
this is how humans survived back in the day and its why we are so good at marathons compare to other animals. we outrace horses in endurance runs easily. we lap pretty much anything that doesnt have wings.
>>713573351
fuck it, don't even gotta explain it, this is a cool thread I don't wanna derail it
This one my be a stretch but to some alien race that doesn't have the same morale values we do in regards to beings other than themselves it might be weird :
We have certain species that we keep in the same living area as us for literally no other reason other than to make their life nothing but pure bliss in exchange for what we feel is affection when in reality it is just the instinct of the animal to repetitively find a sort of likeness to another being that feeds it amd gives it nourishment.
>>713573351
a catylist speeds something up that would still happen otherwise. the reason fuel works is because it creates a chemical reaction in which heat is lost in the resulting molocules, and we use that heat for whatever. oxygen is pretty much always involved in that reaction with few exceptions. both are considered fuels.
>>713573530
And that's pretty cool that we just breathe that shit in like it's nothing.
>>713573402
It's pretty cool just how durable the human body is and all the fail safes in place that our body instinctively knows how to turn on when our well being is at risk.
>>713573581
>like it's nothing
It's still poisonous, it's just that not breathing it kills you faster.
We eat plants that contain a poison specifically designed to make us think our mouths are burning. For enjoyment. Because we like it. Theres pretty much no explaination for this, humans are one of the only animals that like spicy things because they are spicy. there are animals that still eat it, but they dont feel the spice. we do it because its fun.
humans.
>>713573530
Thanks for making me a little less ignorant, anon
>>713573853
Why have I seen this in like 10 different threads over the past hour?
>>713573928
this is a really autistic thread
>>713574047
How so? Do you not like exploring into existential knowledge?
>>713573351
liquid oxygen is INCREDIBLY flammable and doesn't need anything other than a spark.
it is a fuel however we do use it as a catalyst rather than a fuel.
The reason being liquid oxygen has a greater weight per unit than other fuels than accomplish the same thing.
TL;DR It is a fuel but because it weighs more than other fuels it is impracticable for actual application.
>>713574293
Time to go get lost reading wikis this is fascinating, thanks for the explanations anon
We dont hear about it much because we dont do it anymore, but did you know if you are bit by a human, even if you are a human, there is a good chance you will probably die as a result of infection if you arent treated?
think of the shit we eat. our mouth is a death sentence to anything that fucks with us.
We can track you even when we are blinded or cant see by detecting atmospheric vibrations both with our bones and sensory hairs behind a thin layer of tissue. this detection meathod is so accurate that there are several humans who can live their lives without assistance despite losing the ability to detect photons.
>>713574961
Read about a dude who can pretty accurately echo locate too after losing his sight, you got sauce on your info?
By the time the average human reaches the age of 10 years, every single cell in their body since birth has been replaced. Effectively meaning you're a different person.
Coincidentally, if you were to extract every microbe in your body and weigh them it would amount to almost the same weight as a small bottle of spices.
Human's as a species are incredibly violent and glorify death to the extreme.
We are constantly at war with each other and glorify and idolize it and its hero's
We play war games and combat virtual reality games on a massive scale almost daily.
We read about and watch death constantly for our pleasure and enjoyment. we cover our clothing in symbols of it. wear those symbols as jewellery. tattoo them on our bodies.
We are a civilization of death.
>>713574581
where i first read it to /b/ro
>>713572705
its because oxygen is highly corrosive that it works for us u shithead. The way water 'tears appart crystals' is the same
>>713575151
Big fuckin deal. You think you're the first pencil neck to put 2 and 2 together?
u can lift half a tonne if your life depends on it
>>713575132
another interesting one; remembering a memory is effectively your brain playing 'Simon' with it's nueral pathways, trying to recreate the experience.
>>713575352
>>713575205
I found the life of the party
>>713575352
hey simply pointing stuff out in the vein of the thread others may not take the time to notice.
Believe me i have no issue with the fact we do it.
I fucking love it.
and not to mention all of this shit someone at one point has pointed out before dickhead.
pic semi related
>>713575685
what is that?
>>713575442
that was actually pretty enlightening anon.
>>713575727
the inside of a sea turtle's mouth
>>713572936
air is composed of hydrogen and oxygen, 2 of the most energy-dense substances that are currently being used as rocket fuel for most major launch platforms
Humans have a combat drug installed in our brains when we get stressed enough. When employed, we become stronger, faster, react quicker, and last longer through sheer force of will.
Basically when we get scared, you should be.
>>713575775
You're more or less remembering the last time you remembered it, there's no bank of information it stays in. That's why people's memory of events get distorted over time
>>713575775
If only one person in the thread leaves with a grown appreciation of human biology or science in general i've done my job.
>>713575727
no idea sorry /b/ro maybe try a reverse image search?
another anon posted it up a while back in a creepy/fucked up shit thread.
>>713575785
thanks anon i always wondered.
>>713575902
4 AM is by far the best time to go to /b/. These kind of threads are fuckin awesome.
My dick gets bigger when I pull on it.
>>713572705
Rocket fuel is not entirely correct. There's oxidizer in rockets, but it's not pure oxygen, it's an oxygen compound that's a little bit more complex than just the O2 you breath in the air.
Theyll be astounded by our progreas only after discovering how stupid the average person is.
>>713573928
Someone probably read their first HFY thread on /tg/, /k/, /x/ or whatever subreddit someone has doubtlessly made to glorify misunderstood facts and shit that makes us sound cool. They pop up pretty regularly on those boards but they are much slower than /b/ so someone decided rather than wait they would post it on a faster board in hopes that someone will dump interesting stories or facts or pictures.
we risk our own lives for the very thrill of it we. The closer to the edge the better.
while some animals do the occasional similar we make entire careers and pass times out of it.
>>713575900
>>713575775
>>713575442
Every time you experience something, whether it's through a first time experience, memory, or reading about it, you make another copy of it in your brain.
Let me repeat that.
Every time you do, think or read something, you make another copy of it in your brain.
Every time you read something you make another copy of it in your brain.
Every time you read something you make another copy of it in your brain.
Every time you read something you make another copy of it in your brain
Every time you read something you make another copy of it in your brain.
We invented dogs.
We took wolves and befriended them, selectively breeding them according to which genes we desired from them - fast, cute, strong, long tails, short tails, specific fur colour etc.
All of the modern breeds of doggos today wouldn't be around without human intervention.
Unnatural selection.
>>713574293
LOX doesnt even need a spark... it is incredibly flammable
>>713576346
What i took away from your post was that i just wasted allot of space reading that.
>>713575849
How many animals is this NOT true for? I'd be willing to wager a bet 99% of all animals (or at least the land dwelling ones) have adrenaline or something similar. Otherwise they could just walk straight into a predators mouth and die.
>>713574047
go back to your dick thread bozzo
>>713576418
true, even a mild heat source to expand the liquid to gas fast enough
>>713574293
Diamond is the most
flammable metal.
>>713575442
I think aliens would have
memory as well or they
wouldn't have tech.
I think a species living on
the surface of a planet
might surprise them.
>>713576430
That was half the point. The other side of this I didn't mention was that your memory is incredibly vast and dynamic. You may have just made six copies of that fact in your brain, but odds are your brain will condense it into long term memory if it finds it significant, or mostly forget it if it finds it insignificant.
All you faggots are getting boners because you think you're deep, but you're all actually just retarded.
OOO I BREATHE ROCKET FYUL
>>713576892
>>713575807
Also oxygen gas might be pretty
rare in gaseous form everywhere.
Bones might be surprising
>>713576480
Yeah but aliens are probably racist. Like us with fantasy/alien races, they would take these traits common to all animals and make them seem a mysteriously unique feature of humans.
>>713576122
Yeah, the aliens would
probably have microscopes
>>713576179
/thread
>>713572705
Here you go op..
>>713577010
>Yeah but aliens are probably racist.
Are there any aliens here?
>>713576400
>Unnatural selection
Or is it?
>>713576735
Diamond is crystallized carbon, not metal
>>713572705
But it isn't rocket fuel.. it's an oxidizer.
Also chemistry isn't as simple as that. Sodium is one thing, chlorine is another, sodium chloride is an entirely new object with new behaviours and properties.
It's easy to think it's like mixing sugar and cinnamon in a bowl but it's not like that. It's entirely new.
That's like saying when you drink water you "literally" drink the sun because hydrogen is involved.
>>713577331
I do literally drink the sun you are a pussy
>>713577144
Realistic probabilities say no. So what? This is all hypothetical anyways. The only way they wouldn't be is if they're all clones, and have long forgotten what it was like to not be a clone, or if that somehow was their natural state of things.
>>713577331
>Implying I don't drink the sun
>>713576346
I run deduplication processes every night bitch.
>>713577431
/thread
>>713577195
You are an idiot.
See below.
>>713577318
Now kill yourself.
>>713577512
You beat me to it man...
>>713576400
We invented puppers AND beer. Universe rightfully deserved. Thankyouverymuch.
>>713577574
sorry mate
>>713576853
You're absolutely right and that statement can more than likely be made about just about any fact posted in this or other HFY threads
>hurr durr breathing rocket fuel
Lightweight reactive gases are perfect for organic life to use as energy sources
>hurr durr we drink super corrosive liquid for sustenance
Corrosive polar solvents are the best media for organic molecules to float around in recombining until basic life can form. Also water is best media for life because solid H2O floats on liquid H2O, insulating the liquid water from the cold so that the entire ocean doesn't freeze and kill any potential life forms every winter.
Also see posts like >>713577010
>hurr durr humans have combat drugs in their brain
Competition gives way to complexity as life forms need to be able to compete in order to continue adapting to changing environmental conditions. Any physical life forms in the universe would almost certainly follow a similar pattern (unless we have completely misunderstood life sciences on an extremely fundamental level) so they just as likely have their own "combat neurotransmitters" as vestiges of their species' evolutionary path.
It's not badass it's just how any life would work (physically at least. Don't know if it would necessarily work the same in other realities).
>>713577512
>>713577535
Screw you guys
>>713577678
You seem like a swell guy
but you seem to have made absolutely no point whatsoever other than saying that what we are talking about is common on earth
thats the point.
its common on earth despite the fact it easily might have not been.
for example, processing oxygen in either photosynthesis and respiration was a quirk that came up randomly and just worked.
we could have easily all become thermal reliant organisms or been silicone based, or have arsenic as the backbone of our DNA.
just appreciate it man.
>>713578029
>that came up randomly and just worked
The first instance was random.
The fact that it stuck was that
natural selection colliding with
the laws of chemistry.
This is why birds, fish
aquatic mammals are
all streamlined. They
hit on the same idea
and it stuck.
>>713578029
You are confusing correlation and causation. Water, carbon and oxygen are the best and most abundant chemicals in the universe for sustaining life. Their unique properties are what allow life to grow from them.
We don't happen to exist on a planet rich in H2O, O2 and carbon by chance- we exist on this planet BECAUSE it has H2O, O2 and carbon. If it didn't have these things life could almost certainly not arise- we know what other planets' chemical compositions are, and we know how those chemicals interact, and because of this we can say that most planets in the universe are incapable of sustaining life, and the ones that are most capable are the ones like ours.
>>713576179
Not knowing we are the players of a massive alien-sims game, they have been playing since the beginning of life as we know it.
>>713579647
Well shit, I can't even hold an interest in most games for even a few hours if the action doesn't pick up soon. They must have great attention spans to have sat through the first few billion years of life not existing. Longest intro movie ever.
>>713573437
But pets started out as useful companions
>>713572936
Oxygen. Of course, being an idiot OP doesn't realize that you need some sort of oxidizing agent for life to exist in the first place, and oxygen happens to be both incredibly common in the universe as well as being a pretty great oxidizer, so it's almost guaranteed that whatever lifeforms we find elsewhere in the universe will breathe oxygen as well.
Shit, we can't even breathe pure oxygen, only a diluted solution, so the analogy doesn't even work in the first place.
>>713579805
that's because they basically made us, they made us impatient. The aliens are our counterparts.
>>713572705
Our stomach acid can break down nearly anything if given enough time.
also
The mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell.
>>713573817
>retarded or b8
>>713578488
I'll just leave this here.
>>713579897
While what you say is largely true, I feel the need to point out that life on our planet didn't originally start out needing oxygen. In fact oxygen was largely poisonous to them. This was way back when life was mostly if not entirely still unicellular though so I'm not sure if "respiration" is the right term exactly, but the main takeaway is the same- oxygen was anathema to life, until the first unicellular creature adapted in such a way to be able to use oxygen as a fuel source- the first of what would come to be photosynthetic life forms- which was originally mainly comprised of CO2, and vented O2 as a waste product, killing the anabolic life by filling the atmosphere with all the O2 they vented. Then from photosynthetic cells, another type of cell arised- one which worked on the opposite principle of using O2 as fuel and venting CO2 as waste, and the carbon cycle as we know it today was invented.
>>713572705
1. Oxygen isn't the reason fire exists
2. It's not highly corrosive, at least not as far as most of the periodic table is concerned and definitely not in the short term
3. Crystals are extremely easy and insignificant to tear apart
Aliens would be impressed by how much of a faggot OP is
The power of ethos. One man may have the power to donate a billion dollars to improve a part of the world, while another man may speak with enough conviction to sentence millions to death.
Really fucking wild when you think about it.
>>713580276
Are you
>implying
that I'm suggesting that intelligent design is necessary somehow? Because if you think critically for a moment you will realize that I never implied that H2O, carbon and oxygen aren't incredibly abundant in the universe. So no, it's not as massively unlikely as it might sound that lots of planets in the universe will have these chemicals (and the other factors which contribute to life such as having a magnetosphere and being the proper distance from their star).
>>713580150
>also the mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell
mitochondria are in the cells of every animal, not just humans.
But what the fuck does your statement have to do with this thread anyway?
Autist currently taking high school biology detected.
>>713580673
yes.
>>713580837
Well you'd be wrong. Now, obviously, it is fairly unlikely that many planets will have the proper chemical composition and whatnot to maintain life, but it's not so rare as to be impossible without the help of a creator.
Do you ever get tired of being so wrong or is it something you get used to after a while?
>>713581032
I known I am right because
the bible tells me I'm right
>>713581105
>Humanity, Fuck Yeah
>Talks about Bible
You're that guy who posts traps in straight porn threads because he insists they're women, aren't you?
>thread derailing in 3, 2, 1...
>>713581105
stop trolling
>>713581341
Traps don't belong in any thread because they're not people
>>713572705
Well its not exactly "fuck yeah" per se, unless you're a dorf lover, but humans it from the would most likely be the Dwarves of the galaxy (Tolkien dwarfs that is, not, just mundane midget type dwarves), at least height wise. Our planet's gravity is almost high enough to be to the point that we would be incapable of escaping our atmosphere with chemical fuels- after a certain point even the best fuels would weigh down a ship to the point where adding more fuel actually makes it harder to reach escape velocity (as the energy from burning it is less than the energy needed to move it due to the extra weight caused by the gravity) until it gets to the point that you would need an infinite energy generator to be able to leave the planet. Since we exist on the upper end of the gravity well we will likely be shorter and burlier than most alien races as we would need more muscle and higher muscle density to thrive on this planet. It's one of the few things the Avatar movie got right.
Some people also theorize that this would also lead to us being more dextrous as well but I'm not sure if that's actually true. If so it'd be another similarity to Tolkien-esque Dwarves we would have.
The part about being raging alcoholics might be true but we don't really have reason to suspect that we would be the only species who enjoys being intoxicated.
>>713575403
Humans function at about 40% of the capacity of their full strength. This happened over generations of evolution to better fuction socially, so basically we wouldn't do things like crush each other's bones when we shake hands, and also because we no longer needed the excess strength since we had developed new means of survival through agriculture and animal domestication. Functioning at 100%, a person could easily pick up another person, and throw them against a wall with enough force to kill them. Getting a rush of epinephrine when you're in a dangerous situation and the flight or fight response is engaged, gets your body functioning at much higher than 40%, but not quite 100%. Using drugs that induce strong psychosis, such as pcp, then engaging the fight or flight response, can get you up to 100% which is why people high in pcp who police are attempting to arrest (thus engaging the fight or flight response) will severely break their wrists to get out of handcuffs, keep running on shattered leg bones, and overpower 2 or 3 officers with relative ease.
>>713572705
Congratulations you found out that the human body works like an engine.
How the fuck should it be otherwise? We are chemical based life forms and need energy. And there is only one way of using chemical energy, through reactions that loose energy. For example oxidation. And oxygen is one of the most common elements in the universe. So breathing oxygen is just the most logical kind of engine to power our body.
In fact it's pretty unlikely that there exists complex life that is not breathing oxygen (plants doesn't count, they can't act and therefore don't need a lot of energy)
>>713582256
Neat fact: most primates have jaw muscle 10x stronger than ours due to a protein in the muscles whose gene became nonsense-mutated. These weaker jaws actually helped us become what we are today- the weaker TMJ muscles meant that we couldn't flex our jaw hard enough to cave in the front of our skulls whenever we ate, as happens with other primates.
This caused our skull cavity to be much higher and also forced us to stop subsisting mostly on nuts and tree bark and forced us to become more reliant on being carnivorous. This helped our brains become more dense (as saturated fat and proteins are what help brain development much more than the carbohydrate rich plant matter we would have been eating) as well as more voluminous as I had mentioned earlier.
HFY is kinda bullshit compared to the much more fascinating nature of actual biology.
>>713582699
This caused our skull cavity to be much larger*
Not sure why I thought higher was the right word to use there.
>>713581105
People like you should be shot
>>713575902
science is garbage though.
You cannot know anything through science as it is a system of destruction.
every experiment is an attempt to prove a hypothesis wrong, and you can never prove a hypothesis correct.
The hypothesis formation is an act of creativity, and unscientific in itself. When we observe phenomena and invent a reason why we think that that phenomena is as such, we aren't doing science. The science comes later in attempting to disprove that hypothesis.
So science lets us know, nothing.
You might say that we know what isn't true, but that isn't true either.
Because science can never prove a positive, because of it's structure, it can how ever prove a negative you might assert.
Well every negative implies a positive. If you say "It is not the case that there are 2 apples on that table" which is a negative statement, it implies the positive statement of "it IS the case that there are not 2 apples on that table"
Science is a destroyer of knowledge. That is it's modus operandi.
Human creativity is the source of knowledge that science gets credited with.
>>713573819
Eating spicy food releases endorphins in our brains giving us a slight high. But yes, we do it for pleasure, others dont.
>>713575151
As compared to other species being at peace with each other or even within their own species? This is not unique in humans. Every species fights their own kind.
>>713583270
you don't know to proove something is wrong as long as it works in all known cases. And the fact that you are using a computer proves that it works
>>713583270
gr8 b8 m8
>>713577013
This is why i still come to /b/.
>>713579647
I've thought seriously and extensively about this before around 5 years ago.
If this is true, aliens must be some weird perverted fucks for making me do such strange things to my ass while jacking off.
>>713583270
It's true that nothing can be proven without a doubt but that doesn't mean it's a worthless pursuit- you can still make educated guesses about how something will work based on how it's always worked in the past and use that to your advantage. Like gravity, it's impossible to prove 100% but given that it appears to exist in every instance someone has tested for it, we go ahead and design all of our inventions around the idea that they will work in our specific gravity and so we get more useful tools.
It's like saying you can't prove China exists- sure everyone could be pulling your leg Truman-Show-style but but we live our day to day lives quite confident that it does in fact exist since billions of people have been there and work there and trade with people living there, etc.
>>713583451
What a piss poor argument. Ancient engineers built bridges and aqueducts without understanding even the basics of gravity. They build tall buildings without understanding the complex science behind making those things work.
later they built catapults and trebuchets without understanding the science behind them.
having something functional does not imply an understanding of the thing. If I handed you a strange mechanical device, and you did not understand or know the principles on which it works, that doesn't make it stop working.
That and all the fundamental principles that allow computers to work, from basic EM to computer science, is all a fruit of CREATIVE works from CREATIVE geniuses.
there is no scientific way of hypothesis creation.
It is primarily a creative work. Creativity is not science.
>>713583507
not an argument.
>>713582228
I think OP meant drinking water, not alcohol.
>>713573078
Please shut the fuck up.
>>713583668
Inductive reasoning can never lead to knowledge.
How do you know that a ball will fall when you drop it? Because it's done so in the past? sure. But how do you know that the future will be similar to the past? Because in the past, the future was similar to the past?
Thats begging the question. This is another fatal flaw of science is it's inductive reasoning.
Another problem with science is their use of probabilities.
they might say "oh we are 99.94% confident in this hypothesis" or "we're 99.9999999% confident in this theory"
But how did they calculate those probabilities?
At some point they had to make assumptions or they would have a problem of compounding uncertainty.
Let me demonstrate.
Suppose you claimed that there was an apple on your desk, and you can see the apple, and touch the apple, and blah blah blah.
So I ask you, how confident are you in the statement "there is an apple on my desk" and you give out a reasonable 99.99% certainty.
So then I ask you, how do you know there is an apple on your desk? And you say "I can see it and feel it"
so I ask you how certain are you that you can see and feel it? and you say 99.99% and this compounds the uncertainty you see.
So then I ask how you know that what you are seeing and feeling is reliable data. and so on and so forth.
any claim of knowledge requires justification, and any justification is a claim of knowledge because you cannot build knowledge on something lesser than knowledge. You cannot know something because of a 'gut feeling' or something.
and every claim of knowledge is uncertain of course. So there is 3 cases here.
1.)Either there is an infinite regression of knowledge claims, each adding additional uncertainty.
2.) there is some sort of circular set of knowledge claims, in which each knowledge claim fundamentally rests upon itself. Which has problems that should be obvious to you.
3.) the knowledge rests upon an assumption or assertion. Which has no certainty.
>>713583788
I think you misunderstood me slightly, when I had said "the part about being raging alcoholics" I wasn't referring to part of OP's post, I meant it as in "The part of Tolkien-esque dwarven mythology that says that dwarves are raging alcoholics compared to the other races." Because while the short, dextrous, industrious nature of Tolkien's spin on dwarves is actually similar to how we would likely be compared to alien races, we don't have any reason to believe that we would like getting drunk- or otherwise intoxicated- any more than any other alien race would, so that part of Tolkien dwarf mythology might not fit us as well as the other parts
>>713577195
>>713577318
Lurk more newfags.
>>713573437
Dogs get sad when we die you cynical fuck
>>713584340
how do you know
>>713577512
>>713577535
Looks like you've both got D on the brain....Sunny D,
>>713574663
Googled it and it's 10-20% infection rate per bite. I imagine proper nawing on someone's forearm mught be about 300% more infectious than scraping your knuckle on soneone's tooth tho, which actually counts as a bite in said statistic.
>>713584145
I understand the basic tenants of nihilism, thank you. And it's true that we can never know anything 100% for sure. But we can still act under reasonable certainties, such as the certainty that gravity will continue to act as it has been, and thus these reasonable cetainties can help us use science to continue to predict and improve on things we can continue being reasonably certain of.
If reasonable certainty is useless as you seem to claim then why is everything we have created so far (with the exception of things made for space travel) made under the assumption that gravity does and will continue to exist in the same way it has up until this point?
If you think reasonable certainty is worthless then nobody would bother creating things under the pretense that gravity will never begin acting differently than it has up until that point. Allow me.to sell you these tools I designed to work optimally in zero gravity conditions- since you're lacking the reasonable certainty that gravity in fact exists they should be quite useful to you, should they not?
>>713575151
If you can't fuck it......kill it!
You have enough raw HDD space on your brain to store memories for 10,000 years.
The human eye and brain can work in consort to capture and process visual data at higher than 4K and about 50 frames per second.
>>713572705
colors dont exist outside of the human brain.
the brain named itself.
>>713584924
You havent actually addressed what I said.
Firstly, I pointed out that we have had functioning technology, even very complex technology, BEFORE we had science. We can have, and have had results without science.
People built bridges with the presumption that things will fall towards the ground, before they had ANY idea of gravity. Many never even considered why things fell, that was just 'how it was'.
So pointing to results is not evidence of the merits of science.
Additionally, you have not addressed the problems with science as an epistemology that I've pointed out.
All that said, I do appreciate that you correctly identified that I am a nihilist and not some religious kook. I criticize many things from a nihilist perspective, but when I criticize science, is when I get the most backlash, and part of that is a characterization of me as some sort of radical christian or something of the like.
And I also appreciate the time and thoughtfulness of your responses, and their civil nature.
>>713577144
Alien here, fight me you stupid pink cunt.
Fuck i hate humans, the herpes of the galaxy
>>713585277
It's okay, honestly I'm not well enough versed in philosophy or such abstract concepts so I'm probably not really explaining my thought process well, and I'm definitely not in a position to criticize others' thoughts on the matter. I mean I know the basics of different philosophies but I couldn't argue the specifics terribly well. I guess the crux of my argument is that the merits of science are in the results themselves. Like it's true that we always invented tools and objects that accounted for the obvious effects of gravity, even before we understood how it worked but that's not exactly what I'm getting at. Let's put it in terms of something we have more recently gained useful information from- DNA for instance. We knew the basics of heritable traits long before we had ever understood how DNA itself functioned, and we could use what basics we had known to our advantage, breeding useful traits in dogs and such. But the more we learned about DNA the more we learned to manipulate it to our advantage, and now we can do all sorts of things we would never have been able to do if we had stopped at learning about DNA at the level that it was used by people like Mendel in artificial selection. So a progress in our understanding of biochemistry has lead to a quantifiable improvement in the quality of life now that we know specifically how DNA and other organic molecules work.
I'm not sure if this really answers your question, as I said I'm not exactly well versed in stuff like philosophy, so I apologize if I'm still missing your point. I'm definitely glad to see that /b/ still has some intelligent people left and isn't just all shitposters at this point. Been a while I've even seen a discussion above a middle school level around here.
>>713585524
>the herpes of the galaxy
Don't you mean, "space herpes"? Ha! Liar detected you are not really an alien.
>>713583859
Hi kill yourself fag. Thanks.
>>713572936
liquid oxygen is used in rocket fuel
>>713585277
Okay so after re'reading your argument a couple of times and thinking about the response I think that my response here >>713586662 vaguely answers your question, but to specifically answer it I need to reword some of my ideas and ask for some clarification on yours:
If I understand right, your idea is that, as we have always invented things accounting for gravity as we experience it, our actual scientific understanding of how gravity works on a subatomic level is purely academic and has no functional benefit to us. As long as we understood "how it always worked" to us and how to create and build things already taking our planet's gravity into consideration, any further understanding of gravity was useless.
But I think that using gravity as your example is maybe not the best thing- because if you stop and think about it, all of our inventions have been made to account for our planet's gravity because all humans live in identical gravity and, as far as we know, it's not possible to directly manipulate gravity to our advantage. But taking spacecraft into example, we might benefit now from advanced understandings of gravity, such as taking advantage of gravity wells to slingshot spacecraft through the universe- if our scientific understanding never progressed past Newtonian concepts, we probably would not have thought to do such a thing.
>>713589425
>cont'd for long ass post
Similarly, my example using DNA and biochemistry illustrates that even though we always had vague ideas of epigenetic principles, such as "parents pass down traits to their children" that helped us to begin using artificial selection was the equivalent of your argument that we always took gravity into account before we knew specifically how it worked, because we had known even back in pre-civilization days how to breed dogs, we understood that heritable traits were simply "how it always was" and therefore any other information about how DNA actually works on a chemical level would be useless to us since we already bred animals in a way that took advantage of "how we always knew it worked," but stopping here doesn't work in the biochemistry example the way it works in the gravity example, since the more specific ideas behind gravity were moot at that point until we reach a point where we can live in multiple different gravity environments.
We reached an impasse in physics where more knowledge isn't useful until we reach a level of technology where we can manipulate gravity and other physical forces the way we can manipulate biochemical forces such as DNA. Our knowledge of biochemistry, by contrast, has not reached that point and thus we can point to that as an example of how more scientific knowledge has, and still is, directly contributing to useful inventions. If we had stopped caring about how heritable traits worked once we realized the basics of "how it always worked" we would not have discovered things how things like DNA and proteins and whatnot can be manipulated to far greater effect than now-antiquated Mendelian artificial selection could ever have done for us.
>>713589693
>cont'd again Jesus Christ I didn't mean for this to be so goddamn long
Essentially, we reached an impasse in physics where more knowledge isn't useful until we reach a level of technology where we can manipulate gravity and other physical forces the way we can manipulate biochemical forces such as DNA. Our knowledge of biochemistry, by contrast, has not reached that point and thus we can point to that as an example of how more scientific knowledge has, and still is, directly contributing to useful inventions. If we had stopped caring about how heritable traits worked once we realized the basics of "how it always worked" we would not have discovered things how things like DNA and proteins and whatnot can be manipulated to far greater effect than now-antiquated Mendelian artificial selection could ever have done for us.
So while it's true that your example of gravity works when applied to sciences that are currently purely theoretical, you are failing to take into account other sciences, specifically the applied sciences, where our pursuit of scientific knowledge is still giving us results that are bettering our quality of life.
Would you say this is at least roughly a correct understanding of your thoughts and at least somewhat answers your question? Or have I still been sort of misunderstanding the argument you're trying to make?
>>713584449
my dad used to give me the D every morning before school it's how I would start my day. Your parents must not have loved you
>>713573402
like the predator...
>>713589425
>>713589693
>>713589762
Not the one you're debating but I see what you're saying and yes, nihilismbro's example about gravity is flawed, since gravity and other physical forces cannot be manipulated to our advantage. Therefore any further knowledge about how gravity works specifically is useless to us, at least until we can invent a way to bend the laws of physics- if it's even possible. If it isn't then the specifics of why gravity works the way it does i.e. how gravitons or whatever theoretical other subatomic particles might account for gravity don't really mean anything relevant if we can't use that knowledge to our advantage. At that point science basically becomes a pointless, essentially masturbatory endeavor.
But his argument is only true of theoretical sciences, and not of applied sciences where we are learning not just how and why things act the way they do but also how to manipulate them, as you pointed out with your example of how our research into biology and organic chemistry is still yielding applicable results the more we learn about the science.
>>713591308
>since gravity and other physical forces cannot be manipulated to our advantage. Therefore any further knowledge about how gravity works specifically is useless to us
what are satellites and space stations currently in orbit trebek?
just saw your post from front page, so may have taken it out of context, i would just argue that our knowledge of gravity and how it works led to us being able to take advantage of it in order to put satellites and other objects into orbit that are far from useless.
>>713591308
Not the other guy, but claiming you possess knowledge by how fine you can manipulate phenomena you might as well not grasp at all is inductive reasoning, which, again, according to the other guy, serves as no basis for such a thing.
At best, it demonstrates how disconnected from actual knowledge and how materialistic or instrumentalist science is.
>>713591308
Nihilist here.
I also critiqued the very epistemology of science, and how it cannot prove anything, and it cannot give probabilistic certainty either.
This applies to all sciences, social or otherwise, theoretical or otherwise.
>>713591661
read the entire conversation.
>>713589425
>>713589693
>>713589762
this only addresses the part about the application of science that I talked about, and not the more foundational epistemological critiques of science.
That said, the gravity example may have been a bad choice. But there are dozens of other examples. I gave one of catapults and trebuchets. Humans built those without understanding the science behind them, through simple trial and error. This implies that science is the only method of producing results. It also demonstrates that results such GMOs based on our new understanding of DNA and whatnots, does not prove the merits of science, and it does nothing to solve the epistemological problems of science.
Which to give a brief reminder, are...
>that it's based on inductive reasoning
>It cannot prove any positives, and to prove a negative implies a positive, so it cannot prove a negative either.
>it cannot give probabilistic certainties in place of proofs
Also I would like to reiterate my very first point, that hypothesis generation, is a creative process that is unscientific. we observe, we create a story to explain, and then science comes in to 'test' that story which is in practice, attempting to destroy the story. Stories that last become theories and are broadly accepted. But this doesn't change their nature. They are still stories. We observe things fall to the ground, someone creates a story that bulk attracts bulk, and this is tested and it lasts. But the original story, the hypothesis, is a creative work, not a scientific one. Does anyone triumph the creativity of this process? No, they attribute it all to science, the destroyer.
>>713584396
I left work this morning and my cat was calling after I closed the front door. He wasnt trying to get out.
>>713592402
So you KNOW how dogs FEEL an emotion, something subjective and unobserved, because your CAT did something?
So you're fucking retarded then. Right on man. Much rigor. Very thought.
>>713592615
I was just adding to the discussion. It was the only post I made ITT
Cats are real independent yet people still keep em around
>>713592700
I think that this is one of the coolest things that humans can do
>>713592368
yeah just went over and read the conversation
like i said most likely took your post out of context so my bad /b/ro
also in order to actually contribute to the thread
i would think they would find our inability to evacuate our nostrils, throat, and asshole simultaneously to be a bit odd. i mean why can't we shoot the phlegm from our donglecavities while also clacking our gribblets to remove any schnizz stuck in our schnoogledangles all while creating methane from our sphinctopies
feel like they would think it's alot like watching an organism that can't multitask it's bodily functions, obviously inefficient in their eyes.
>>713592700
sauce pl0x
