I am a little dazed by the confident statements from Diplomat (aliens) and Thucy (goats) about the nature of the thought lives of other species. How the heck would we know?

As to your question, Thucy -- I do define neighbor as broadly as you would hope. To treat him equally with myself? Well, it of course can't mean that. I do think it means to try to value his interests as much as my own, though. Obviously there are subtleties here, and some common sense never hurts, but it also doesn't hurt to err on the side of helping him.

By the way though (still @Thucy), I've answered your question, but you never answered my last one.

Thucy, I guess you are completely ignorant of these facts.
Since 1955,
Life expectancy is up 1/3.
The population increase rate is down 50%
Global inequality, comparing the worth of poor countries around the globe to the rich ones is declining steeply.
Poverty rates around the globe are declining steeply.

Now these are the facts Thucy, not your deranged and totally false fantasies.

You can read about all of this, if you borrow money from a productive individual of course, in Matt Ridley's great book, "The Rational Optimist."

You can also watch an hour long video presentation of his book at C-Span.org
http://www.c-spanvideo.org/program/294058-1

Just go to a public internet source that someone else's money provides for you and you can watch it.

Statistically speaking there are aliens, it's near impossible that there is no other life besides that on our own planet..

@Lopt: (a) That is irrelevant.

(b) It is also false. The probability of life arising remains inscrutable, so we really can't evaluate that. It is safe to say there are no reasons for supposing the probability to be high.

Well, pretty much the entire Astrophysics community fully expects alien life to exist, so I'm going to have to disagree with you, semck.

@ Thucy

I define neighbour along much narrower lines, being the people who live near you or you come into contact with. Defining the whole world as you neighbour is a lovely thought, but that way madness lies. The danger is that you get overwhelmed by the suffering across the world and are driven to a state of despair fueled inaction that does no good to nobody.

Far better to focus on your own small corner of the globe. Take on a task that is achievable and do it well. It doesn't take too many people to adopt this attitude for the effects to spread quickly across the world. Humanity has more connections than is commonly believed.

@Octavious, that's hardly true. That is controversial to the highest levels of the astrophysics community. Astrobiology, maybe, but that's hardly surprising.

Moreover, if one looks at the arguments supporting the position of those astrophysicists who do believe that intelligent life exists elsewhere, one finds little or nothing convincing.

@ smeck

Not very contraversial. Universities are structuring their lectures on the basis that alien life is a likelyhood. The great space agencies and designing missions to prove alien life exists. The idea that alien life doesn't exist is frankly mind boggling if it were true.

@Octavious, if and when you offer an actual argument apart from an appeal to authority, we can discuss it. For now, I can only shrug (and point out that the space agencies are _looking for alien life_, not designing missions to _prove it exists_. It is just an open question. Also recall we're talking about _intelligent life_. Finally, that something may be mind boggling.... well, whatever. This did arise out of a discussion of QM.)

http://www.vhemt.org/

Good God, semck, ESA is spending a small fortune on flagship missions whose primary purpose is to look for evidence of life. It wasn't so long ago that alien hunting got a piggyback role at most. Look up Exomars if you like. It's exciting stuff. And where on earth did QM come from?

Look, do you know how big the universe is? The chance alone that there are planets out there that have almost gone trough the same stadiums as our planet is VERY big, let along how other variables might have created other live.

We live in a solar system, there are millions of solar systems in our galaxy, we live in a galaxy, there are millions of other galaxies in the universe, we leave in a universe, there might be more universes in whatever we live in...

@Octavious, Yes, ESA and NASA and others are spending lots of money looking, and that's fine. The point is that you seem to have confused looking for something with evidence that it actually exists.
The QM reference was just to point out that "that's too weird to be true" is not a very good argument in modern physics.

@Lopt: yes, I realize the universe is big (I actually DON'T know HOW big -- nobody does -- but very big, anyway). The problem is, you're multiplying all these numbers on the resources side, but we don't know the probability on the other side. Consider the following argument, for example, supposing it had been made in 1905:

"Of COURSE there's another physicist as brilliant as Einstein! He's just one person in Switzerland. Do you even KNOW how big the world is? There are millions of people in Switzerland, and it's only a tiny proportion of the population of Europe, and that's only a small proportion of the population of the world!"

The problem of course is, none of that matters if you don't know the probability that any particular person will be like Einstein. Turns out, it's pretty low. Low enough that there (arguably, I'll grant) haven't been any repeats.

So with life on earth. Maybe there are 10^1000 earthlike planets in the universe, but if the probability that life starts (or becomes eukaryotic) is 10^(-100,000), then big deal. And we just have no grasp on those probabilities. We are completely in the dark about the mechanisms, so we're just talking through our hat when we say this or that is crystal clear or overwhelmingly probable.

@Octavious, by way of parallel, consider the LHC. Many countries spent untold billions of dollars constructing that to look for the Higgs Boson, supersymmetry, and more. This is not because we knew there was a Higgs Boson (etc.). It's because we DIDN'T (though it was widely assumed there should be, and many courses were taught about it).

Right now, it's looking pretty bad for the Higgs Boson, and downright terrible for supersymmetry. I mention this as an example of the difference between spending money to look for something, and evidence that it exists.

@ semck

Nononono, I'm not saying that ESA and NASA spending hundreds of millions of dollars looking for proof of alien life is proof that it exists. I am saying, however, that ESA and NASA spending hundreds of millions of dollars looking for evidence of alien life is a pretty damned good indicator that ESA and NASA are convinced that the evidence is there to be found.

@Octavious, no it's not. Of course, it's true that many are so convinced. And others aren't. Spending the hundreds of millions is just evidence that NASA and ESA want to find out who's right.
(Admittedly, certain people in NASA do occasionally emit highly humorous statements expressing their unbounded enthusiasm for and faith in the existence of alien life).
Also, you still haven't given me an argument. If NASA and ESA are so dang sure, why are they so dang sure? Presumably they haven't hidden the reasons away in a file somewhere? Presumably, since you share their certainty, you've seen it? So what is it?

@ semck, no it's not.

Spending hundreds of millions is not evidence that ESA and NASA want to find out who's right, because the missions that cost hundreds of millions cannot, for obvious reasons, prove that alien life doesn't exist. They can either prove alien life does exist, or prove nothing at all. And they would not spend a vast fortune looking for something that they didn't think was there.

@Octavious, yes, it's true they could never prove that alien life wasn't there, but they could find out who was right about the presence of somewhat-easily detectible evidence.

As for your last point -- "And they would not spend a vast fortune looking for something that they didn't think was there" -- that is well refuted by a cursory knowledge of the history of science. Most recently, as I have already pointed out, consider the LHC: sometimes, they just don't know, and they want to know better.

@Octavious, more fundamentally, you still haven't offered a single argument that is not an attempted appeal to authority. If they believe it, WHY do they believe it? I'm certainly not going to just believe something NASA says just because NASA says it anyway, without knowing why they think it; so go ahead and stop wasting your time and tell me why they (and you) think this, if indeed you have an independent intellectual reason for doing so.

@ semck

Yes, lets consider the LHC. The bit designed to look for the Higgs Boson was bloody expensive. The search for the Higgs Boson has been at huge expense using funds that could otherwise been invested in other areas of science. The thing is, the search for HB pretty much bears fruit no matter what happens. Either you find the damned thing, and all sorts of fun ideas that particle physicists get excited about are justified, or you don't which in this case means that stuff doesn't exist quite how we thought it does. It's a bit like smashing open a camera to see how it works. You expect to find a lot of clever machinery, but there's part of you that thinks there could be a little imp living inside that paints pictures of what it sees through the hole. Either way you learn something, and the expense is justified.

The search for alien life is rather different. Finding nothing doesn't get you anywhere. Not finding Higgs where you expected it to be is profound. Not finding life on Mars is meaningless. The only reason so much money is invested in looking for the evidence of life is because we believe the evidence is there to be found.

They believe, semck, because the universe is bloody big and contains countless numbers of giant hot things that pump energy on to orbiting rocks very similar to the one we're sat on that is crawling with life. What is your argument for the idea that in all the universe only this infinitely small corner has life on it?

@Octavious, well, first of all, it's hardly true that people only spend money on unknown propositions if they can prove a proposition either way. Look at all the money we pour into measuring the curvature of space. We can never really hope to show that it's flat for sure, yet we keep spending vast quantities of money to rule out ever better that it's particularly hyperbolic.

As I've said, though, I'm kind of losing my interest in discussing what NASA believes, since the reasons for believing something are a lot more interesting. So let's move on to that. First, I am not claiming that there is life only on earth. I'm only claiming that we don't know, and don't have any reason to say it's overwhelmingly likely that there is intelligent life elsewhere.

So, on to your reason:

"They believe, semck, because the universe is bloody big and contains countless numbers of giant hot things that pump energy on to orbiting rocks very similar to the one we're sat on that is crawling with life."

OK, well, here's the thing. We don't know whether life being pumped onto a planet is sufficient to create life or not, or what the probability is that that will happen if you pump life onto such a rock. We have no scientific idea better than a guess, actually, as to how life started here, so we don't even have a credible surmise as to the probability. So we're familiar with exactly ONE such planet where life does exist, and from this you want to deduce a law? Based on what? It could have been the most improbable thing that ever happened! Its improbabilty might precisely balance how many planets there are. Ditto for eukaryotic life, etc., etc. None of this stuff is understood.

Saying "We don't know" about stuff that we haven't observed and don't understand is just good science. We haven't observed intelligent alien life, we don't know how life arose here or what the probability was (or how that compares to the number of planets), so we just have no way of calculating the probability that it exists elsewhere.

I think that atomized it would be a bit less than $5

wrong thread for alien debate.

anyway - i am do not despair over the disasters that occur abroad, tough i do wince. i do despair over knowing how many people actually dont give a shit, such as yourselves, my dear forum-ers

i really thought we were better than this. youre telling me "neighbor" is only people you know. so you *actually* don't care and don't do anything if you hear about, say, police brutality in New York or Houston, or government oppression in Syria, or an earthquake in Chile or Japan, or floods in Pakistan, or bombs in Afghanistan, or starvation in Somalia, or poverty in Liberia, or unemployment in Portugal, all because you don't know them?

That's a damned shame.

I did not say that, Thucy. I think only one person did.

yeah i know it was oct

but for you semck i am confused as to how you can say that phrase from jesus does not mean treat others equally with yourself. it seems self-evident to me

what was your question i didnt answer?

Thucy, it was just a technical point mainly, and probably not appropriate to the context. Equality is an extremely broad term, and there are certain notions inherent in the concepts of "self" and "other" that make it simply impossible to treat the two the same. For example, you do not have the same access to the mental states / desires of others, etc., etc., so I just wanted to rephrase it in a way I felt was more precise.

The other caveat -- "common sense," etc. -- meant just that, I guess. If everybody maximally treated the concers of others as coequal with theirs all the time, then both they and others would have virtually no self to care about in the first place, and everybody would probably starve to death. Then I added the next sentence to suggest that while this was true and should be considered, it is not a valid excuse to escape from uncomfortable implications of the command.

I hope this clarified.

My question was about evolution as a basis for your ethics, and how your argument could distinguish among / privilege different evolutionarily instilled instincts (e.g., self preservation vs. empathy). Perhaps it was off topic, though, hence your lack of response.

It's not often I will say this, Thucy, but you are being an arse.

Loving you neighbour doesn't mean you don't give a damn about anyone else. I don't recal the quote being "love thy neighbour as if yourself, but fuck the Samaritans for they art foreign". What I see it as meaning is that your neighbours (being those you come into contact with in your life, not just people you know. I thought I'd this quite clear...) are the people over which you have a direct responsibility and duty of care. I do not, for example, have a duty to help a Somalian starving in East Africa. I did, however, have a duty to help the Somalian I was working with in Manchester after he got into a fight at 4am on a Sunday morning and needed back up. (I'll never forgive him for that... It was a beautiful dream I was having...).

I will be totally honest here. You have clocked up over 80 games on this site, Thucy, each demanding a good few hours of your time. You could have instead got a part time job to raise funds for the starving. You did not. If you truly loved these people there is not a chance in hell you would have stood back playing Diplomacy while they starved to death. Either your definition of love is sadly lacking or, like myself, you do not love them. Like everyone else you feel sorry for them, but frankly you have other things you'd rather do than help them. Be honest with yourself. Don't try and be someone you can never hope to be. Recognise your limitions as a human, give yourself realistic goals, and then you might end up making a real difference to the lives of your neighbours.

If everyone did that the world would be transformed.

http://www.oneplusyou.com/bb/cadaver

There ya go.