I think it’s a thought experiment that hits with the general public. Scifi writers put it in their work because it sets up great stories without being overly technical. Physicists talk about it and use it to get research grants to work on things that sound far less sexy.
Do most people want to hear a scientist talk about searching a teeny tiny patch of space for a particular wavelength of light or do they want to hear about Dyson Spheres and Von Neumann probes and 2001: A Space Odyssey.
I’m going to go watch an episode of 3BP on Netflix now.
I believe that science, math, are more inextricably linked to philosophy than people tend to think.
While my idea is particularly half-cocked, the Great Filter theory is an important question for us as a species to answer. If evidence ever came to light that there is some challenge awaiting us that could wipe out our species, it would behoove us to at least be aware that such a challenge exists - even without necessarily knowing any specifics.
I gotta admit, I really wanted to like 3BP on Netflix, but imo they added way too much “personal drama”. It’s like they intended to sprinkle it on and the lid came off the container lol. It was worth it just to see the ship though.
Fyi, math and science is philosophy. Science is how philosophy started to actually get answers to the questions it was answering(the scientific method) and math is one of the languages it did it through. The Cult of Pythagoras was a group that believed all answered could be found through numbers and math.
Agreed. I was never a “math kid”, so when I got to university, I was very surprised that a large part of what I learned in my math courses was actually philosophy.
That shift in paradigm instantly made me interested in math, weirdly enough. Turns out I love math, I’m just not a fan of numbers, haha.
I think it’s a thought experiment that hits with the general public. Scifi writers put it in their work because it sets up great stories without being overly technical. Physicists talk about it and use it to get research grants to work on things that sound far less sexy.
Do most people want to hear a scientist talk about searching a teeny tiny patch of space for a particular wavelength of light or do they want to hear about Dyson Spheres and Von Neumann probes and 2001: A Space Odyssey.
I’m going to go watch an episode of 3BP on Netflix now.
I believe that science, math, are more inextricably linked to philosophy than people tend to think.
While my idea is particularly half-cocked, the Great Filter theory is an important question for us as a species to answer. If evidence ever came to light that there is some challenge awaiting us that could wipe out our species, it would behoove us to at least be aware that such a challenge exists - even without necessarily knowing any specifics.
I gotta admit, I really wanted to like 3BP on Netflix, but imo they added way too much “personal drama”. It’s like they intended to sprinkle it on and the lid came off the container lol. It was worth it just to see the ship though.
Fyi, math and science is philosophy. Science is how philosophy started to actually get answers to the questions it was answering(the scientific method) and math is one of the languages it did it through. The Cult of Pythagoras was a group that believed all answered could be found through numbers and math.
Philosophy helped birth both of those fields.
Agreed. I was never a “math kid”, so when I got to university, I was very surprised that a large part of what I learned in my math courses was actually philosophy.
That shift in paradigm instantly made me interested in math, weirdly enough. Turns out I love math, I’m just not a fan of numbers, haha.