May the force be with her

[Mario F.]

I felt a bit chocked up when I heard of Carrie Fisher's death. Not exactly because I'm a fan. I sort of liked the original trilogy when I was a kid, barely took notice of the prequel and completely ignored the sequel. I'm just not much of a fan of the type of space opera fiction of Star Wars.

But you see, for some weird reason, after what is certainly more than 20 years, I started yesterday watching the original Star Wars again. Today, around an hour after I finished The Return of the Jedi, I read about it in the news.

And it definitely got to me in a strong way. RIP.
Debbie Reynolds must be inconsolable.

[Epy]

The original SW trilogy had a significant impact on me as a kid. It really got me into space, lasers, tech in general, etc. I wasn't nuts about her character specifically, but I enjoyed her in the trilogy, and also in The Burbs, and The Man with One Red Shoe. Also feel for / relate to her as someone spending a lifetime fighting mental problems. What made the whole thing worse is that the news came out a few days ago about what had happened on the plane and that she was okay. Then all of a sudden this morning, dead.

[whiteflags]

I've quickly realized, in this ........ty year for celebrity deaths among other things, that I'm not from this generation. CARRIE FISHER - WHITE GENOCIDE - FALSE DICHOTOMY POLITICS - YouTube

[swgh]

Great actress and a terrific person through and through. How can we ever forget her most iconic scene in the gold bikini? Such a sad loss to the world of cinema and in general. My most deep wishes of sorrow to the family and her close friends. She was - and always will be the brightest star in the galaxy from now on.

[Mario F.]

Indeed it was a sad year in so many aspects. Celebrity deaths being one of them. And no doubt Leonard Cohen being the one that had the biggest impact on me.
The quick rise of the politically correct that the Atheist mentions in that video is another sad highlight. It should be the cover of the TIME magazine on this new year for how it finally made it into the legislative bodies. Particularly in Europe where some laws in France and Spain have passed that are perhaps the biggest attacks on freedom of speech since wartime.

Strongly associated with the politically correct is the strengthening of the notion of intolerance-intolerance, or intolerantinism. In the defence of a number of human values we all should rightfully consider inestimable, certain groups are appropriating themselves of these values, wanting to champion their cause and inverting them into a twisted form of speech on which zero tolerance to intolerance takes the form of extreme radicalism. In particularly on the left. I'm thinking, for instance, exactly of some radical and anti-freedom notions that are coming from a sector of the all-powerful LGBT community. And side by side we also have witnessed a troubling rebirth of the sort of populist movements that characterized Europe before world war one and that have all the makings of another troubling period of worldwide tension and that risk undermining decades of always weak, but important and with some results, attempts at worldwide stability.

We are not in fact from this generation. Well, I believe I am not. I'm 47 and essentially starting to watch the imminent sunset of my life. My generation is not at the forefront of many of these happenings. With my living habits, it is even probable that I don't make another 20 years. Despite still feeling well alive and seemingly having inherited my father's immunity to any sort of disease or age related maladies, I do nurture some bad habits with consequences that may be just around the corner. Besides, people like my father tend to go pretty suddenly and without warning, as surely he did at the age of 75 when he seemed like 50. There's no reason for me to believe with my added baggage of smoking and bad eating habits that I am not to face a similar fate at a younger age.

Over the years I have been insulating myself from much of these happenings by trying to cultivate a moderate self-serving nihilistic approach to my life. A sort of egotistical nihilism, if I may, on which I try to function normally as a member of society, but am privately aware of the futility of it all. All just for the purpose of trying to shield myself from the sickness of the human mind, without having to negate my responsibilities to those who care or depend on me. I understand that nothing matters when individually we represent just a infinitesimal blink in the life of the universe and spend 99.999...% of its time in a non-existing form. I haven't mastered this "philosophy" by no means. I am still a well of contradictions. But have made some progresses and this has allowed me to sit as both an observer and critic of all that is happening, while refusing at the same time to participate as a member on either side of the arguments. Because, frankly, I don't care what happens to the world or the people in it, and so shouldn't everyone else. Which is a powerful thought when we remember that the worst things happen exactly by the hand of those trying to fix it.

[MutantJohn]

I love how poetic European men are.

Mario, you're wrong. You're literally part of the result of billions of years of stellar synthesis and universal evolution. Do you have any idea how rare sentient life is in this universe? The fact that you exist and we're communicating via tools our species designed is nothing short of ****-your-pants fantastic.

Yes, people are stupid and will continue to do stupid things. We survived the Cold War. We may not survive the future. But we've survived in the past and gosh darn it, man, get yourself together! You have quite a bit to live for! Life is precious and fleeting. We're a universal miracle.

[Mario F.]

Mario, you're wrong. You're literally part of the result of billions of years of stellar synthesis and universal evolution.

Stars have a rough time producing iron too and life is likely a much less complicated process than the one required to produce tantalum and a much more enduring one than Astatine.

Do you have any idea how rare sentient life is in this universe?

Being special as a consequence of being rare is only possible by philosophical agreement. But for the sake of argument let me agree on it. So, lets check the math, shall we?

We can make a rough estimate of human life on earth as being so far 108 billion. That's just a hair above the estimated number of stars in our galaxy (around 100 billion) and as you may agree doesn't really impress in terms of rarity. Meanwhile we recently moved the estimate of the number of galaxies in the universe from 200 billion to 2 trillion. That makes human individuals 20 times more rare than the number of galaxies at the present time. Because new galaxies take just a little more time than 9 months to be formed, and humans breed like rabbits, you can imagine how much lower this ratio will be in 1,000 years from now. And we haven't factored in yet any other intelligent life forms in the universe. Depending on your level of optimism about this unknown, suddenly you may start getting the feeling that there's nothing rare about life in general and intelligence in particular.

So, in relative terms the numbers don't impress at all and humans are as common as any universal plague should be. But because the scale of the numbers is so large, in absolute terms humans may indeed look rare. Especially because we are all concentrated on a planet that represents roughly 0.04 light seconds in diameter and the observable universe is around 93 billion light years in diameter. That make us occupying a space roughly 4.01e-16 of the universe. In other words, in terms of space used our planet is to the observable universe what a proton is to a meter.

The fact that you exist and we're communicating via tools our species designed is nothing short of ****-your-pants fantastic.

You'll find I'm not sensitive to heliocentric views of the universe. But in keeping with the argument, communication is a tool available to the universe and shared between non-intelligent life forms and even non-life forms. Meanwhile, while we humans may build our rough tools, the universe transforms matter and even shapes it into life without even knowing it is doing it. I think the universe beats humans to the punch and its achievements will make you *** your pants and those of anyone around you, leaving you with a lot of explaining to do. And if by any chance you are a fan of science fiction, you'll find plenty of material there to imagine other alien civilizations with enough achievements to put modern man at the same level of a chimp collecting ants with a stick. Not special.

You have quite a bit to live for! Life is precious and fleeting.

As much as this may pain you to hear, we have a lot more to die for.
You and I have been dead 14 billion years before we were born. And when our time comes, we'll be dead again for who knows how many billion years before the universe starts contracting again into a singularity and space-time ceases to be. If that is its destiny. More likely we are heading to either a cold or hot death of the universe, which, to make it short, means we will be dead forever and the amount of time we spent alive will grow towards infinitely small.

[Epy]

Well this thread got even more depressing

[MutantJohn]

Interesting...

Well, I'm afraid there's nothing left to do.

Mario, my friend, I think the only thing for you is to get laid and smoke a joint.

[whiteflags]

Debbie Reynolds too, now. Debbie Reynolds, mother of Carrie Fisher, dies - CNN.com

[Mario F.]

Oh!
I learned yesterday she got admitted in hospital with a stroke. Very sad to hear.

Well this thread got even more depressing

I don't know. I don't look at it that way. There's a beauty to the way matter transforms itself. Consciousness is perhaps its biggest and most magical achievement. But the lack of it is our more natural state and to think that we all will inevitable find that existential peace is rather comforting.

Mario, my friend, I think the only thing for you is to get laid and smoke a joint.

Now, we are talking. Get the best of it while it lasts. Have fun, and don't care so much that you end up making other people life miserable.