Universalis Project Goals

[tuto99]

basically what you're telling me is, you can pick a certain initial state (just one, here's the determinism) - which would allow for a continual sustained rain over blaland

No - no - no...... Just no, I never said that.
For example thermodynamics says if you put two separate gases together, they tend to mix and gain the same temperature, because a well-mixed state with a uniform temperature is far more probable than them staying separate with different temperatures, there are many more possible uniform, mixed states than unmixed states, but the laws of physics don't fundamentally prevent them from staying separate, it's just very unlikely. The same goes for water molecules over Blaist Blaland.

What???

[Darvince]

the universe of universalis is a closed system though so you can still pick an initial state which works

not if we want it in this universe - aka we are straying into complete fantasy now

[vh]

think of it like this tuto -- if you flip a hundred coins, some will land heads up and some heads down. very rarely, you'll get all 100 heads and no tails.

now imagine each hundred-flips as a universe. even though in most universes, blaland is a desert, in some, blaland is waterful

[vh]

the universe of universalis is a closed system though so you can still pick an initial state which works

not if we want it in this universe - aka we are straying into complete fantasy now

but if you can pick an initial state which generates lifeforms so similar to humans then you can also pick an initial state that generates whatever weather you want. at least i think that's the argument

[FiahOwl]

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[Darvince]

yes in some universes if we are dealing with numbers larger than graham's number

humans are vastly, vastly more likely than blaland's climate anomalously being cold and forested for thousands of years, because humans have not only already arisen once - but the factors to create them (a creature with the body structure of an ape, a savanna with harsh competition which favors continual growth of intelligence, language development, hairlessness) are all trivially easy compared to the enormous towers of exponents required to make a wind wall requires for blaland's wet existence

aka we should just move blaland

[tuto99]

so. . . If Blaland can have water over it just because it /must/ exist in some Universe out of the infinite possibilities. . . am I allowed to pick an initial state that ends up with the Aeridani becoming pure desert?

Yes.
Let's also make Kolokia an ogre swamp plzz.

[Darvince]

blablablablalblabal bich kolokia is an orge swamp

[FiahOwl]

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[Darvince]

no it is truly a swamp of ogres

[tuto99]

oh so now we're back to making fun of people again instead of arguing. . .

well I had to bring a little fun to this argument. It was too serious

[Darvince]

i feel like we're trashing the thread we should let bla give a sensible reply

[Bla]

that actually helps to explain your point but-

universalis is not a closed system, so there's this thing called advection that is caused by insolation - which causes parcels of air to move and circulate. the circulation of your non-diffusing water-saturated parcel is dictated by the entire planet's circulation flow which is not beneficial to having it sit above blaland indefinitely

As vh points out again this will be flawed as long as you continue to use determinism based on macroscopic terms which are, at the fundamental level, not determined from the concepts you use. Pressure, temperature, ... can never hold the information necessary to describe the motion of 10²³ molecules.

so. . . If Blaland can have water over it just because it /must/ exist in some Universe out of the infinite possibilities. . . am I allowed to pick an initial state that ends up with the Aeridani becoming pure desert?

Is this the icecap thing again? Not that I really care. But remember this came out of the discussion where you called water over Blaland magic and said human life wasn't. Now I showed how it wasn't magic but just very improbable just like the human life. So there's no need to create a new argument.

I like how I even offered to reconsider Blaland's location in the reply but now this was fully ignored.

yes in some universes if we are dealing with numbers larger than graham's number

humans are vastly, vastly more likely than blaland's climate anomalously being cold and forested for thousands of years, because humans have not only already arisen once - but the factors to create them (a creature with the body structure of an ape, a savanna with harsh competition which favors continual growth of intelligence, language development, hairlessness) are all trivially easy compared to the enormous towers of exponents required to make a wind wall requires for blaland's wet existence

Humans are more than just those simple body structures as concepts, they consist of more than 10²³ molecules and are the product of interactions with all the other life forms, their body is marked by vestiges from when they were oceanic and every period of their history, the continental plate and climate history of Earth. To recreate all that on our planet I think that too would require somthing like Graham's number - and certainly if we include all the other Earthly life forms.

Anyway... Should we just get on with considering the possibility of moving Blaist Blaland, now that I offered it...

[atomic7732]

i would be fine with that

As vh points out again this will be flawed as long as you continue to use determinism based on macroscopic terms which are, at the fundamental level, not determined from the concepts you use. Pressure, temperature, ... can never hold the information necessary to describe the motion of 10²³ molecules.

this doesn't make any sense, i'm not using these in a scalar sense, i'm using them in a gridded sense, with whatever resolution you'd like for accuracy. the likelyhood that blaland's weather would act in such a way as you had previously proposed is, quite literally more preposterous than a second human evolution because of the fact that it would require your diffusion to act in the right direction (for optimal wetness) most of the time, for thousands of years, with each iteration stacking further and further exponential improbabilities. it's very possible that your blob of moist air would move out of blaland on the order of weeks, unless the water was diffusing backwards into the newly advected air with >95% of the water preserved and not lost. the only solution would be to capture another blob of moist air (from where?), also stacking exponentially each time this occurs. especially since its effects would range world-wide and would not be a neat gradient. so if you could explain this?

[FiahOwl]

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[Darvince]

remember when we actually had sentient ponies

[Bla]

Yet where do we stop when things become very improbable? Are you going to use the same reasoning to justify the fact that your lakes aren't realistic? Am I going to be allowed to use this argument to justify Aeridani having sentient ponies?

We both know we haven't written any rules for that, but please just admit that your magic-argument was wrong. The difference between the two is you consider it legitimate to cherry pick in the biology statistics but not the climate (and geology ones). I don't see any way we can simply define "where to stop" because there are vast areas where we could always be more realistic and the project just can't contain all of them. Me saying climate isn't inherently less valid than you saying biology. There's nobody who's actively trying to design an as unrealistic nation as possible so it's not necessary to bring in all the sparkly ponies.

[atomic7732]

The statistical improbabilities your example entails are huge. Evolving humans in comparison, is easy. (see my above post also i didn't feel like editing it) Once you evolve a sexually reproducing animal, you're probably going to keep producing sexual animals. That's how sexual reproduction works. Once you evolve humans, which only need a certain range of macroscopic conditions, and some random probabilistic dna mutations, it's easy to keep them, because that's how life works. human sexes a human, get another human. as long as conditions stay favorable. The probabilities after a certain trait in a living organism is randomly developed and selected for decrease significantly once it has been introduced into the gene pool.

Weather is not life. It would be constantly trying to equalize, and a "sustainable" wet blaland would require statistical improbabilities indefinitely stacking as long as you want to keep blaland wetter than it would be realistically. Having one <time period>, let's say "generation" of wet blaland does not make the next generation easier.

So yes, they're both improbable. But one is far more improbable than the other. Probabilities for the former act more like 1-1/x (where x > 0) while the latter acts more like x^2 where x = time.

[FiahOwl]

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[Bla]

So yes, they're both improbable. But one is far more improbable than the other.

Humans aren't just some simple blobs defined only by concepts like "they have sexual organs" "they can respirate" etc. You ignore all the traits humans have from their past, when they were aquatic, etc., all the details in the eyes, how the lungs function, the liver, bladder, intestines, how their surfaces fold, the heart, etc. etc., all of this only happened because humans were surrounded by the exact conditions on Earth and all the other continually evolving species on Earth, and its evolving climate and geology. Yes, it's not impossible other conditions could just happen to lead to the exact same outcome while spawning many other Earthly life-forms, but it is cherry picking in its most extreme form. In either case the probabilities are going to be something like Graham's number and you can't just say one is magic and not the other.

You have a species of animal called the Rog. The Rogs can have many colors, such as green (grassland), yellow (desert), etc. The Rogs live in a desert. The Rogs that are yellow are more likely to survive eagles that prey above. But you want the Rogs that are green to dominate the desert, just as you want Blaland to remain a grassland. Even as the various factors (eagles) work against your grassland-coloured Rogs, you still want to cherry-pick a path that can lead to green Rogs dominating the desert.

Humans, on the other hand, were not selected by cherry-picking a specific path that leads them to survive. They were selected because they were the best adapted to surviving. Even if we cherry-picked a path, there is no doubt that that path was the best path to cherry-pick, making it legitimate.

That was the case on Earth. The reason we selected them on Universalis isn't based on anything like an evolution simulation running along with the planetary history though. It's basically because "humans are so much easier so let's not bother with that".

[vh]

i do think humans are more likely that this weather anomaly. though i'll make a longer post later

[atomic7732]

skirt can probably do some mathemagic with fermi approximations and stuff

Humans aren't just some simple blobs defined only by concepts like "they have sexual organs" "they can respirate" etc. You ignore all the traits humans have from their past, when they were aquatic, etc., all the details in the eyes, how the lungs function, the liver, bladder, intestines, how their surfaces fold, the heart, etc. etc.

I don't ignore these intricacies, just like you used "et cetera" to refrain from listing a complete catalog, I didn't mention them because I figured semantics could get it across that I'm talking about all of the different things that evolved. Evolutionary traits compound. All they need is some "activation energy", that being, the right probabilistic changes to create them. They will resist change much better because they were evolved for a specific environment which will only continue to tweak them. This is fundamentally different from the changes of weather probabilistically not changing for optimum entropy... every single second. They're off by magnitudes, not factors.

[Bla]

i do think humans are more likely that this weather anomaly. though i'll make a longer post later

I also do but I don't think either is within Graham's number-like order of magnitude, so I don't see how it's really relevant.

[atomic7732]

That was the case on Earth. The reason we selected them on Universalis isn't based on anything like an evolution simulation running along with the planetary history though. It's basically because "humans are so much easier so let's not bother with that".

of course ignoring the fact that it is assumed that humans did evolve on Universalis, and that is the case on Universalis.

Ok then yes, humans are for convenience. Everyone can relate to humans, they know a lot about humans. If we tried to come up with a different species, it would either resemble something Earthly (say saguans), or be entirely unrealistic as there's no way we'd simulate a whole 4 billion years of reasonable evolution

and that is why the probabilities are disregarded in that specific case

[tuto99]

I say we stop bickering and move blaland more south to achieve optimal climates.

[FiahOwl]

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[Bla]

I'll introduce a new point then: humans are for convenience. Everyone can relate to humans, they know a lot about humans. If we tried to come up with a different species, it would either resemble something Earthly (say saguans), or be entirely unrealistic as there's no way we'd simulate a whole 4 billion years of reasonable evolution

and that is why the probabilities are disregarded in that specific case

But this whole thing was a response to the magic thing so why introduce even more pointless discussion? I agree humans are more convenient and I don't even want it changed.

They're off by magnitudes, not factors.

I don't think magnitudes are really relevant to numbers on that scale. Neither is realistic at all, it's as simple as that, but neither is magic either.

I acknowledge that it might be different between Universalis and Earth, however the end result is different. The environments of Universalis and Earth are so similar that the end result of having humans is stable, because humans won't constantly be selected against by the environment.

The end result of Blaland's climate is not stable because it's constantly being selected against by the environment, and we have to keep selecting for the climate until infinity or we decide Blaland can revert to its natural state.

I don't really see how that's relevant either, the history of Universalis and Blaland's climate doesn't have to span until infinity and I never gave any specific period on how long it should have a certain climate or whatever, only designed how it was now. It doesn't make the biology case more probable either.

And this will be my last comment on the magic issue. I think neither is realistic and neither is magic. The end.

[FiahOwl]

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[vh]

no you don't need to constantly select for it. you only need to select for it once.

think of it as finding the coefficients to a million degree polynomial so that it passes through a million given points. each point is different -- the function, or weather, changes over time. but once you select the million coefficients that work, you never need to do it again.

[tuto99]

my question is, exactly what part of blaland is foresty? south part? all of it?