I thought the name looked familiar. I'm not a doctor and I only googled for 10 minutes. I tore my achilles last year. I would never take this drug. I hope I'm off base.
It's key to include false starts and promising paths that dead end. Learning to explore unknown solution spaces and refine the domain of the problem itself are critical skills in any open ended problem.
Spending an entire school lifetime being taught to "solve" "problems" and then being confronted with a world where problems aren't defined and solutions are ad-hoc and piecemeal is a rude awakening.
The strategies that made us a good students and made us feel good and smart in school aren't the same strategies that make for a good employee and those strategies set new devs up to fail when they can't "see the answer" to the current jira ticket they are tasked with.
It clearly did me in. It made me very sad that I could not write code to problems I have not seen before. I still haven't learned the mental skills necessary to face open problems with a curious mind. My first reaction to new problems is fear and anxiety to the extent I had to leave development entirely. I now do production support which is not what I intended to do. I wanted be a great developer.
Presuming we're not in a simulation then I think it is unlikely that we're alone in the Milky Way.
There are too many stars and too many close enough galaxies that could contain life. If they've been spacefaring for even ten thousand years longer than us then they're almost certainly able to monitor us without our ability to detect it.
But if we're doomed to a great filter in the near future, like nuclear war, then it still doesn't mean we're alone. It just means that out there in the sky there are others kinda like us. Searching for meaning before hitting a technological explosion of one kind or another that wipes us out. But just because we don't have contact doesn't mean we're alone, even if we're only present in each others respective imaginations.
It seems like you're assuming the difficult part about creating self-assembling replicators capable of sustained, error-free exponential growth across interstellar space and billions of years is merely coming up with the idea.
It's entirely conceivable that every space faring civilization which has tried has failed simply because the odds are so stacked against success, even once, at every step along that process. Just because the math is simple, doesn't mean the application is simple.
Hell, we don't even know what the odds are of becoming a space faring civilization to being with, and it doesn't seem axiomatic that every such civilization would even want to seed the galaxy with self-assembling replicators to begin with.
I've been mulling this over: given the constraints of information travelling at lightspeed and physical objects travelling at a lot less, what if it simply doesn't make financial sense for any actor in a market economy to colonize the galaxy?
What if the ROI of space colonization even at multi-decade or multi-century timescales is negative? Then why would anyone do it?
But what if that happens once every, say, 2 billion years on average? What is the likelihood we exist in a time close enough to that happening for us to be able to find ruins of it? That is the point the article made. There is an assumption that, if that happens, the colonization is permanent. Maybe that's not a good assumption.
How much of the leading edge of astronomy is ground based, vs space based? Are they complementary or is space based going to eventually assume any and all roles ground based could?
Radio is firmly ground based, because you need huge dishes and potentially many (thousands) of them, at very precisely known distances.
IR is mostly space based (with SOFIA and ALMA the notable exception) because of atmospheric absorption.
Optical is firmly ground based, due to much lower cost for large telescopes. (See https://doi.org/10.1117/1.2031216 for the factors that affect cost). The notable exceptions are Hubble and satellites monitoring the sun such as Stereo and SDO.
X-Ray is space based again due to atmosphere.
Gamma-ray telescopes are an interesting mix between ground based air cherenkov telescopes (IACTs such as Hess, Magic and Veritas) and water cherenkov detektors such as HAWK and space based Fermi (with relatively poor sensitivity and low upper energy cut off, but very wide field of view).
Neutrino detectors are firmly ground based because the need huge detectors (the cubic kilometer of icecube is basically the lower limit).
So they are very much complementary. And some things will probably never moved to space, even if launch was free.
If we are talking about visual light astronomy (the wavelengths where black satellites could help), a majority of astronomy is ground based. There exists just a single capable space observatory in visual light, the Hubble telescope, which will be going out of service in a few years. There's some metrics here[1] which show that about 10% of the most cited papers use Hubble data, which is still quite impressive. This is dated though, it could very well be that Hubble is becoming less relevant with recent advances in technology.
Electron hate is an entry in the genre, "modern software is inefficient and bloated because devs are lazy"
This genre will never want for new entries because, devs will keep getting things done and critics will keep complaining.
Electron hate is a moral argument, "devs are wasteful." It's not a technical argument. People confuse their ability to conceive of software which has the same behavior as shipped software, but improves on arbitrary figures of merit, excepting "date of RTM."
Modern software is inefficient because this is a cost-effective approach to building software. Wherever you can't pretend you have infinite resources, this attitude instantly evaporates. In other words, bloat matters to users, but not to whoever directs development (spoiler: that's rarely developers).
Your mileage may vary but the most helpful commentary I have gotten in my life is usually couched in that format: when I am asking for X, but had not considered Y enough, or at all, and someone replies suggesting Y instead, and then I realize new possibilities.
You are right that it does not answer OP's question. I stand by my words, it is still the best comment I have seen. Sometimes it is right to "dont X, X is bad", as it is an opinion which people may freely communicate. I will happily accept my text turning grey for expressing my opinions.
