SunlitZelkova

I saw an interesting article about space-based missile defense. Because it includes some political stuff, I'm just copying over the engineering parts. That 2004 report also has some content that kinda pushes the boundaries of the forum rules, but if you're interested, just Google "Report of the American Physical Society Study Group on Boost-Phase Intercept Systems for National Missile Defense: Scientific and Technical Issues," and it pops up. So looking at the numbers here, USSF would have 780 ICBMs to intercept from... the other two big guys (326 + 454)... by roughly 2035 or so. That would require 741,000 satellites, and it requires the assumption that every single interceptor will work perfectly, because there are no backups. Curiously, that five-year lifespan is the same as a Starlink sat. But Starlink is planned to have 42,000 satellites at most. With... let's just say, the smaller guy... some estimates put the number of ICBMs he might build at maximum at roughly 60 or 100. Of course, who knows, he might build more. But if that is the maximum capacity he has, 95,000 satellites would be required at maximum, and 57,000 at minimum. That's actually not that bad at all, and might be doable. Still, it requires every satellite working perfectly. No "volleys" or "salvos." Ignoring the political aspects of the system, I'm very interested to see how advocates for this are going to approach the engineering and economical challenges. If it doesn't work out I'm hoping that "Iron Colander" catches on as a nickname for the system like "Star Wars" did for SDI

@ColdJ You are free to believe what you wish to believe, and free to think what you wish to think. I say that to reiterate my point in my post that you copied over that I am simply sharing my own views, not for the purpose of convincing others to begin espousing my views. There is one thing I feel a need to directly respond to in your reply. After that, I am going to expand on a subject you brought up in your reply, but not as a direct "counter" or "reply" to your own conceptions of the subject, but rather on the subject in general and how it relates to my views on violence, as an addendum to what I already wrote for the purpose of perhaps providing some understanding of how I was able to write a sentence comparing living things to basketball hoops, or rather, some understanding (even if there is still disagreement with) what a person who does write such a sentence thinks like. My own conception of violence leads me to a different conclusion. I feel that efforts to gauge the "prevalency" of violence tend to mischaracterize the problem. As much as the modern, data driven mentality of the average human being tends to prefer characterizing problems in the form of a number ("how much money do I have," "how many apples do I have," "what are the values on the stock market right now," etc.) I don't think this approach is desirable when talking about violence. "Violence" is not like "apples." If one transports apples in an open-top truck, one can lose a few a still say they got all the apples to the market. To say there is "less violence" and that is somehow good misses the point of what violence really is: a spacially miniscule event involving an interaction between a small number of people. "Less violence in the world" is not a good thing for someone actually encountering violence: because if that person is killed, their world is completely over (and in a metaphorical sense, so is the "world" over for anyone who loved that person). I don't look at my region, which was once the site of settlers attacking the indigenous people who lived in the area, and think "there's less violence, and that's great and is an improvement" because from the point of view of someone being murdered there has been no "improvement:" they are about to die. I'd also like to point out that ratios are a poor tool for gauging the "severity" of the problem of violence. One might argue that when compared to the ratio of those killed with the total human population 10,000 years ago compared to the ratio of those killed with the total human population in the present day, "less people are dying" but that's not the point. Not only are the hopes and dreams of scores of individuals still being snuffed out, technology has allowed it to occur on a massive scale unimaginable to people 10,000 years ago. The number compared to the total population is meaningless: larger numbers of people are dying than ever before, and therefore in my view, the world is a much more violent place today than it was before. ------ I will now turn to a subject raised in your reply, but try to deal with the subject in general rather than as a direct response to your reply. It may sound like I am responding to your reply, but the subject you have raised is used by many people when talking about the issue of violence, so if anything it is a reply to you as well as the tens of thousands, if not millions of people who think about violence in such a way, but I am commenting on the subject itself, not on the choice of others to think about the subject in a certain way. I'd like to reiterate: all are free to believe what they wish to believe, and free to think what they wish to think. A second disclaimer is that I am going to be talking about violence within the "explanation arena" that people spar in to try and figure out the causes of violence. Sometimes, I will deliberately forgo my own reductionist view about the cause of violence to examine other explanations and point out flaws in them (and to a lesser extent, merits). When talking about violence, there is a tendency to dehumanize those who commit it in a myriad of different ways. At its most extreme it can mean reducing people who commit violence to literal demons or monsters, and at the most casual level, it can take the form of deriding such people as "sick." To me, this is one of those explanations that is filled with pageantry and is quite satisfying from a personal point of view. It works well as a coping mechanism for dealing with living in a world where even when living in a peaceful area, images and reports of violence are transmitted via radiowave directly within earshot or "eyeshot" of an individual. What it does not work very well as is a method of thinking about violence for people who are actually charged with "stopping" violence. This can mean leaders, but also any concerned individual trying to help others in their community. For one thing, this type of thinking leads to an extremely narrow set of imagineable options for how to "stop" violence. If one declares the person they are dealing with to be "sick" or "have a disorder" (mental or genetic), there is only a limited set of actions that can be taken to stop them, because the person is inherently going to act in a certain way and "can't be changed." Second, this type of thinking exemplifies the person or persons trying to "stop" violence. If the person they are dealing with is "sick" or "is a monster," the people dealing with this person are automatically cast as "doctors" or "heroes." This type of self-glorification is not conducive to problem solving because it forms a major barrier to self-introspection if something doesn't work out, and at worst it can lead to the would be problem-solvers declaring that anything they do must be correct and cannot be wrong, because they are "sane" and "heroic." I am highly skeptical any attribute of human biology can be attributed as a cause of violence, because the average person indeed has a propensity for violence if pushed in such a direction. The common thought experiment used to think about this is the trolley problem. A trolley is approaching a rail junction, and in either branching line, a person is tied to the tracks. A third person does not have time to untie either of them, and so must switch the tracks either way. This is a good way of framing the issue, because while the third person makes the decision with the intention of saving a person, even if the third person does not consciously recognize it, he is simultaneously making a decision with the intent of killing a person. People hurt other people because they thought they were doing good by doing so. Obviously (although sometimes not to the perpetrator), they were not doing good for the person they were harming, but they were doing good for someone else or themself. At the highest level, this might mean a leader starting a foreign conflict or beginning an internal purge because the benefit to the nation and/or themself outweighs the value of human life, and at the lowest level, this might mean a person killing another one because whatever they feel will arise out of that for themself: self-gratification, the slain person's valuables, not having to deal with them, or whatever: outweighs the benefit of leaving them physically unharmed and trying to find another solution. Any person is capable of making such a calculation in favor of violence. If placed into my "mama wolf and cubs vs. bear" example I mentioned in my original post, I believe that virtually every single person, if placed into such a situation with human children, is going to make the decision to kill the bear (who would also be a human). That's still violence. It isn't anymore justifiable, excusable, or "right" just because the individual being slain is "sick" or "a monster" or "a sociopath," or a "psychopath." I feel that trying to fit those who commit violence and those who don't into different categories just creates cause for violence, as I said in my original post (this is why my explanation eliminates categories and boils the cause down to a simple, uniform choice for all individuals). This is because what defines a "sick" person or "a monster" is very relative, if not indefinable. Especially as it relates to killing, violence is violence. It isn't a problem that can be weighed in numbers, as I said in my direct reply to ColdJ. King A is no less monstrous than King B because even if one side's actions resulted in fewer casualties than the other, individual people on both sides of a conflict are dead. Their worlds are over, and so are the worlds of those who loved them. The effect is equal, no matter what scaffolding or pageantry is used by those outside of the act of violence (the king, or people who don't know and really care about the deceased individuals) to explain why it was "justifiable" or is "good." This is compounded by the fluidity an individual can ride when making these definitions. Arguments for attacking a specific group of people, when seriously examined, have just as much nuance and sophistication as arguments for categorizing "bad" people (like people who commit violence). In the former case it is just blatantly obvious that all of the logic and reasoning given as justification for violence against a specific group of people don't correspond to reality at all, even if the words are placed into grammatically correct sentences and the subjects are discussed in a logically coherent manner. The main reason that is so is because people who aren't involved in the drafting of such justifications obviously aren't going to agree with the views of those who did draft them. But when these people draft their own justifications for their own solutions to problems: like, say, defining violent people as "sick:" they are just as immersed in their own view as people who draft justifications for attacking specific groups of people. That is to say, it has no correspondence to reality. It simply corresponds to the way the people drafting it see the world: whether their way of seeing it is actually in line with reality or not. If the guideline people use for deciding whether something is "moral" or "ethical" is A) if it is written in a grammatically correct, official sounding way and B) if the proposed solution to the problem makes sense and sounds viable, virtually anything becomes acceptable because anything can be made to sound moral or ethical if given enough effort. A dramatized example of an extreme attempt at this can be seen in the film Conspiracy (2001), in which the word "evacuation" is used in place of killing. This can't be boiled down to genetics, upbringing, material wealth, or anything else. One can not explain a decision that doesn't make sense, because there is no sense in the decision. If there is no sense then, how was the decision made? It was a simple choice, regardless of the pageantry created after-the-fact to explain it. After-the-fact pageantry is perfectly fine as a personal coping method to explain violence. It is also the chosen method of the average present day human for thinking about those who commit violence. But it is important to note here that none of this plays any role in addressing violence before it happens. If the goal of an individual is to make themself feel better "about violence" then these "categorizing" methods of thinking are great. If the goal of an individual is to "stop" violence, I don't think they are useful, because such categorizing is the very method of thinking by which people often choose to commit violence. When such a method of thinking catastrophically escalates, it results in fighting violence with violence, which is nonsensical and if taken seriously results in the total failure of the individual to "stop" violence. "Categorizing" methods of thinking are useful, I would like to emphasize that. Individuals are sometimes more likely to cope better with a situation or event with their own personalized explanation for it. But "categorization" is basically just a scientific sounding alternative, or option, in a series of choices that includes blaming demons. All are equally divorced from reality and are not a reliable means of formulating solutions to "stop" violence; they are a reliable means of thinking about violence after it has happened but can not be counted on to prevent it.

I think the issue at hand is why anyone would actually need to go back and forth between stars in the first place. Realistically there will be no resource worth transporting back to the Solar System. When creating worlds, I have begun to assume that any attempt at interstellar travel will be a one way affair. A despotic far future USA attempts to do this in one world I have made. They collide with a wormhole a couple hundred AU out and wind up at a different star... 500,000 years in the past. This causes shenanigans in the future when they find their way back to the Solar System, no longer human.

The number of countries that has nuclear weapons is so small that their actions can't be said to be representative of humanity, assuming humanity is defined as all human beings and not "this subset of human individuals arbitrarily designated as humanity." To make a statement in such a way is very inaccurate. Much in the same way that the behavior of countries with nuclear weapons is exaggerated to represent all of humanity, encapsulated in statements like "humanity points nukes at each other," one could also exaggerate the number of countries that have signed the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (a majority of them!) and say "humanity does not point nukes at each other." Neither statement is accurate, but the former is extremely common for some reason. It's very dramatic and not very observant, IMO. I have grappled with the issue of violence for a while. The second line in your quoted reply is correct. I never stated that lack of empathy for non-human animals is what made hunting a sport. The third line in your quoted reply is also correct, but confusing to me, as no one here has claimed that humans killing humans is a sport. The reason my example was so blunt is because in dealing with the issue of violence, specifically killing, I find that people tend to use too many euphemisms that hide what they are actually doing. Take nuclear war for instance. Both academic and layman's discussion of the subject is littered with words like "countervalue," "deterrence," "force multipliers," and "strikes." Only in very limited instances is the actual, specific concept of killing ever brought up. The attitude of people to nuclear weapons would be very different if people were to use different language. I prefer to talk about it in terms of toddler killing, as I was very affected by the story of Tetsutani Shinichi. Obviously, no nation is going to give its enemy a heads up it is going to massively use nuclear weapons and give them days or weeks to evacuate children. Because one of the subsets of targets for nuclear weapons referred to as "countervalue" involves bombing places where civilians live, using nuclear weapons inherently is going to involve killing "some" toddlers. There is no nuclear strategy that involves solely targeting remote areas and even then these areas aren't really that remote. Civilians will die. Taking into account that that is what "nuclear weapons use" really is, that anyone might go "but..." and still advocate for such weapons gives a much better idea of what kind of problem nuclear weapons are. It has nothing to do with the physical weapons, it has to do with people. An ICBM does not launch without someone (technically two someones) to turn the key(s). I'm going to set aside the issue of nuclear weapons because my method of thinking about them is so morbid it might violate forum rules if I expand on it in length. ------ I will instead turn to my own thoughts and beliefs about violence in general. I do so not to convince anyone to change their opinion, but simply to shed more light on why I was able to create the sentence "Like shooting hoops, but the basketball is a bullet and the hoop is the body of a different species." Violence is a very vague term. An action that might be violent in one context can be "peaceful" in another context. Take for instance pinning someone down and injecting them with a tranquilizer. A random person doing this against a random person would be regarded as violence, but a paramedic using specially designed techniques to do so on a person in danger of harming themself would be regarded as "peaceful" (or at least, beneficial to the "victim" in a way the former example does not possess). Violence is thus not really a specific set of physical actions but rather a conceptual action. This conceptual action is use of physical means to change the state in which someone else is in. At its most extreme, this means changing the state of a living person into that of death, but more commonly it involves attempting to inflict less-than-lethal pain on a person so that they will change their behavior in one way or another. People who commit violence and people who aim to stop violence have existed for thousands of years. They have come up with hundreds of thousands of explanations as to why either they themselves commit violence or, why those who do commit violence "actually" do so, as part of an explanation as to how violence can be stopped. Explaining violence in either way raises some issues. For one thing, it involves splitting the whole human population into "violent people" and "non-violent people." This is bound to make any explanation wildly inaccurate because it involves trying to simplify the behavior of billions of people. There is no "violent people club" or "non-violent people club" where everyone gets together and makes a final decision on whether to act in either way. Individuals are making their own decisions, using their own methods of calculation, weighing their own values, influenced by their own personal perception of the world, which is influenced by a myriad of varying factors. This of course just isn't satisfying. No one sees an act of violence and comes out of it unchanged, not now wondering about why such a thing would happen. Some might fall back on their preconceptions about violence and say something very simple like "Oh yeah, that's just the way the world is!" but on the other end of the spectrum people will be left spending their entire lives trying to decipher why such a thing happened. Trying to explain "bad" things and "good" things in the world is a massive subject that encompasses much of the intellectual heritage left behind by now deceased generations of humans. Some explanations catch on and spread around the world, in rarer cases people come up with their own explanations. There is no true, concrete explanation for such things. Although one can put much pageantry into their explanation, in reality it is all just individuals doing their own thinking about the question and then settling on one answer and declaring it to be true (although it may not be true, because they themselves made it up). I will share my explanation, or rather understanding, of the questions: Why do people commit violence and can it be stopped, and if so, how? I shall answer the first question first. I have spent much time racking myself over the question of why people commit violence. My understanding of various subjects does shift as I gain new information, but my current understanding is that violence is just a choice and nothing more. This is best explained using two examples. The most classical explanation of why the situation in Example 1 evolved the way it did is that "Person B is evil" or "Person B has no ethics," while the most classical explanation of why the situation in Example 2 evolved the way it did is that "Person D is good" or "Person D has ethics." Such classical explanations come with very, very dangerous implications. "Ethics" are implied to be the reason, or logic, that should govern an individual's thinking about things, including (and sometimes especially) violence. Ethics dictates that it is not right to kill someone to get their shiny rock. Seemingly unbeknownst to champions of ethics, this explanation just justifies violence. If the only reason someone should not kill someone is because "it violates ethics," that implies that it is okay to kill someone if it does not "violate ethics." Now let's illustrate how this is dangerous by putting our alphabetical characters into a single scenario, Example 3: Ethics, or rather, "reason" and "logic" are somewhat like violence in that they are concepts, with the sole difference being that violence reflects a concept put into physical action committed by an individual, while reason and logic don't automatically dictate the physical action an individual might commit. Reason and logic can be used to explain physical phenomena happening outside of the individual's control, or might dictate what an individual does not do. This can be as extreme as dictating that a person not think in a certain way, rejecting entire lines of thought (in fact it might be said this is a characteristic of "reason" and "logic," to sort out what should be thought about and what should not be). Although differing, "reason/logic" and "violence" are both alike in that they are simply ideas in the mind of the individual. On average, people will tend to think about these very basic concepts in a grandiose fashion. As I said earlier, people like to put a lot of pageantry into their explanations about the world. Even without this pageantry, in reality, "reason/logic" and "violence" are just thoughts in an individual's mind. Lack of reason/logic, or "ethics" in individuals is not a credible explanation for why people commit violence, because reason/logic, or "ethics" can be used as a justification to commit violence. Because of this, my understanding is that violence has nothing to do with what people think about it. It is simply a choice to move one's appendages about in a manner that can be causally connected to the death of another individual. Asking "why" people commit violence is not a question of what their "reasoning" was, or whether they had "reasoning" at all, but if it is even a question to be asked at all, it can really only be truly answered in terms of physical phenomena ("why is the duck not moving?" as a literal question of what is going on in the duck's body that is causing it not to move). Because any "reason" that one finds is completely made up by whatever individual being is examined. It doesn't have any correlation to reality. So now for the second question: Can violence be stopped, and if so, how? The answer to the first question is disheartening. If there is no true reason why people commit violence, if it is all in the heads of individuals, surely it can never be eliminated? "There will always be wars," "History is just a long saga of people knocking other people over the head," etc. etc. Is that all we are left with? No. I don't believe that. Violence can be stopped by interrupting the process that it is. What does that mean? Recall my definition of violence: Does anything in this definition lend credence to the conclusion that violence is "inevitable" or "can't be stopped?" "Use of physical means to change the state in which someone else is in" is essentially what violence is. That is two objects: 1) use of physical means 2) changing the state in which someone else is in. It should be obvious, but there is nothing "inevitable" or "unstoppable," or even "natural" (as many who try to downplay the problem of violence will claim violence is) about "changing the state in which someone else is in." This may seem hard to fathom. Isn't it natural for humans to try and control each other? Whether we do it out of hubris or for genuine protection, it is a human trait! Such an assumption does not lie within reality. Humans do not try and control each other as a matter of course. After all, rarely if ever does the guy over on the other end of the counter at the sandwich shop pester you to the point of inflicting violence on you so that you put ketchup on your sandwich. At a much more lofty scale, in the present day humans do try and control other things other humans do: how they go about getting food, how they go about thinking about the world, and so on and so on. But like the choice of condiment to put on a sandwich, these things are not "actually" important. They aren't real. Or rather, the idea that one person ought to decide how other people should engage with these topics is not real. It is simply something that someone thought of. This again, may seem hard to fathom. So much of the present day world is built on people trying to make everyone else think or do things a certain way. Looking back into history can help to understand how such a trend is not inherent to human behavior. Archaeological evidence has revealed that the "revolution" of agriculture did not consist of hunter-gatherers throwing down their bow-and-arrows and planting roots (literally and figuratively). In many cases, it involved people simply leaving these communities for different places where they could live the way they wanted to (that is, subsisting off agriculture instead of hunting and gathering). The first serious farmers did not feel the need to threaten their neighbors into also adopting the same way of life lest they kill them, and likewise hunter-gatherers did not feel a need to kill those who desired to go somewhere else and cease hunting. Early farmers and hunter-gatherers existed alongside each other in Europe for thousands of years. That's not to say the past was a utopia of respect and civility. Because hunter-gatherers occupied the most bountiful parts of the environment, in some cases farmers would inadverdantly settle in poorer areas that couldn't indefinitely sustain their communities, resulting in their collapse. Hunter-gatherers did sometimes raid farming communities. But this death and violence was not caused by people hurting each other specifically because some of them wouldn't act the way others wanted them to. Early farmers did not settle in bad places because hunter-gatherers literally forced them to (told them to or threatened them to do so), and neither did hunter-gatherers raid farming communities "because they were farmers." It should also be noted I am not talking about a universal "war" of farmers and hunter-gatherers, I'm just citing examples of how bad stuff still happened despite the main topic (physical coercion over thoughts and ideas) not being a factor in it. I'm not trying to paint a picture of a happy State of Nature. Anyways, how exactly does all that translate into stopping violence? What it means is that humans do have the capacity to not attempt to "change the state in which someone else is in." There is no "law" or "behavior" that dictates that humans must do that: it is an idea and a choice, and nothing more. Unfortunately, most people are completely unaware of this. They feel they "have" to do things, or they "have no choice." This is in fact a common explanation cited by those who do commit violence about why they did it. This goes both ways however: not only do those who might commit violence have a choice to "not change the state in which someone else is in," but so too do those who do not commit violence have a choice to "not change the state in which someone else is in." Wait, what? People who don't commit violence have that choice too? Yes, they do, particularly those who don't commit violence and also oppose others doing it. Because "opposing others doing something" is also an attempt to "change the state in which someone else is in." This goes back to what I said about trying to use "reason/logic" to justify non-violence or explain why people shouldn't commit violence. That is an example of trying to "change the state in which someone else is in." At best, further attempts to "change the state in which someone else is in," even when advocating for people to not do something like commit violence (which in theory should "give people the right to be in the state they want to be" and thus be good, right?) further propagates this "culture of control" that makes people think they must control others, and thus results in individuals thinking they "must" do things or "have no choice." At worst, it can escalate into trying to "change the state in which someone else is in" using physical means... maybe using restraints, but most catastrophically, using violence to "stop violence:" in which case people just end up committing violence and forfeit their original goal. All of this is not reason/logic explaining why one should not commit violence (and of course, also not explaining why they should commit violence!). Violence is a simple choice. The only way violence can be stopped is by individuals making the choice not to commit it. Nothing more, nothing less. Taking away a weapon and making up grand narratives about why violence should not be committed will not stop violence. Because human appendages are weapons and we can't ban arms (pun intended), and individuals have their own minds they can use to make up their own narratives. Prologue This all sounds very incredible (in the sense of "not credible") from a secular point of view. I'm basically saying that unless people who do commit violence choose not to do it, they can't be stopped, and that the "correct" way for anyone to stop violence is to not commit it. This implies sitting back and letting others commit violence. Using animals because I'm getting into territory that for the forum, is too morbid to talk about using humans... Should a mama wolf let her cubs be killed by a bear so that she can "stop violence?" is perhaps a question that might be posed to counter my understanding. I know because I posed myself this question. Personally, I still am not convinced that committing violence to stop violence is worth it. This just propagates the "culture of control" and obsession with "reason/logic." At the very worst, trying to categorize between "good violence" and "bad violence" can lead to all sorts of nasty ideas like dehumanizing categorizing between "valuable people" and "targets." I am aware this is simply viscerally unacceptable to the average person. I believe my conception of how violence ought to be stopped is not so much an obvious "fairytale for children" as a lot of moral arguments tend to go, but more so an enormous challenge for the individual. I myself can only take my own belief so seriously and sincerely because separately, my understanding of reality and the nature of life and death is radical and wildly incongrous with present day mainstream conceptions of these subjects. As I said, only individuals can make the decisions needed to stop violence. Not a subset of individuals making decisions for other people or ordering them about. The power to figure out one's own path to peace with all individuals, not just "nice guys" to the exclusion of "bad guys," only lies in their own minds. Not in someone else's "reasoning" or "logic." EDIT- And I'd like to share that for me, that means valuing and holding in high regard even the people who do fail to find that path or have already failed to find that path. EDIT 2- Just to reiterate, this is intended to shed light on how I was able to write the sentence "Like shooting hoops, but the basketball is a bullet and the hoop is the body of a different species." I hope it is of use in providing some understanding of my thought processes.

That doesn't really have to do with humanity as much as it does a small number of humans though. You also don't see people talking about the state of humanity when it comes to other countries that have the ability to kill millions of people in the span of an hour. In fact, it tends to be them against humanity. Whatever humanity is supposed to be defined as in such discussions, I don't know. Err... hunting is a sport. Or rather can be. It just has to involve two people competing for kills. Like shooting hoops, but the basketball is a bullet and the hoop is the body of a different species. I don't think having a culture of hunting has that much correlation to crime. I've been reading about the Fertile Crescent about 10,000 years ago. Up in the highlands of what is now Turkey there were some people basically treating human remains in the same way as they did animals, which they hunted. These were very violent people, and their art attested to this. But down in the lowlands, you had people living much more egalitarianly (at least in the sense the male reproductive organs did not symbolize power...) and raising some domesticated animals, but still retaining a value of hunting. Homes were decorated with elaborate monuments to a person's hunting prowess, using bones of the slain animals. Yet they did not do the same thing with human bones. The average dead died natural deaths, and were honored (albeit in ways very different from 21st century humans) rather than being regarded as part of the hunt's yield. I don't think any particular weapon has any connection to crime either. At the end of the day, if someone really wants to hurt someone they are gonna find another way to do it. As an example: Japan still has murder, and sometimes even attempts at serial murder. People just use knives to do it. Japan's low murder rate* has more to do with the way Japanese people tend to think about how a person ought to be treated than what weapons they have or don't have physical access to. *It should be noted crime statistics in Japan are somewhat unreliable because of general, institutionalized incompetency and deliberate skewing of statistics on the part of its police and justice system. Note that all this is coming from someone who doesn't hunt and was raised in a suburb by a family with little to no interest in hunting. EDIT- Also @Nuke is from Alaska and Fallout-level ridiculously high super market prices are real! Not sure about the southern part, but at Utqiagvik a pound of ground beef is like $60 dollars a pop (at least it was when a couple motorcycle YouTubers rode/flew up there a couple years ago). In Oregon it's 1/10 that price.

That was cool. A couple reactions: 1. Given its location, I propose its official name be The Ring of Fire. 2. I'm sure my dad would enjoy being able to just drive to the coast and go directly to Japan instead of having to transfer through SFO or LAX

I don't know why it took me this long to notice, but it is quite sad to see people dreading the state of humanity in regards to the situation in the USA, when the USA represents 4% of humanity. That says a lot more about the statistically small number of people who do grieve about it using communications technology more than it does about what is actually going on in humanity.

In terms of 21st century CE English linguistics yes, but if you define "everything" then you could have more than "everything." For real though. "40" used to be the byword for "a lot" in Hebrew. There is no issue with defining "everything" as only some things because "everything" is in itself a made up concept. If one was to regard the true definition of everything as everything, there would be no way to talk about everything. Because the very words and vocal chords being used to speak of everything are part of everything. You could not weigh everything against something else, because something else is part of everything. Thus the true "everything" is incomprehensible to human beings and cannot be described using their language. YOU ARE EVERYTHING.

I know you replied to DDE but as a Gen Z guy I just feel obliged to respond. The entire population of Gen Z, or a majority of it, has not been involved in sharing videos of brutal murders, nor violent pornography. You are zeroing in on the most fringe parts of society, and then a fraction of that fringe, and then extrapolating that to two and half billion people. Children have always been hard to control. Indeed, you are correct about such trends. My aunt is a kindergarten teacher here in the US and has said her classes in recent years have been the worst she remembers. But what does this have to do with these people as adults? If you looked at the youth history of any wide subset of people, especially from their first decade of life, everything they do is probably going to make you say "this generation is going to destroy the world." Indeed, there are records of people dating back thousands of years saying such things (or rather, writing about them). But they always turned out fine. Older generations are always complaining about younger ones, but it doesn't have to do with reality. It's just a way of looking at the world and nothing more. It has no relation to how things actually are. That's true, but tending to use a smartphone instead of a PC, not knowing the "official" method of touch typing, and not knowing what a website is has nothing to do with computer literacy. You're wanting people who will spend their day filling out forms and replying to emails to carry a burden that should be the IT guy's. Yes, but none of what you have written indicates this is a specific problem with Gen Z. Higher levels of drugs in sewage systems don't indicate what age group is using them. Studies in the US, Canada and Europe do indicate that the majority of cocaine users are young adults (as of 2025 "young adult" exclusively refers to Gen Z). However, this only applies to the US, Canada, and Western-ish Europe. Furthermore, just because the majority of cocaine users are from Gen Z does not mean that Gen Z itself has a drug problem. We are still talking about a tiny fraction of the two and half billion Gen Z people who walk the Earth. Gen Z is also not the only age group to comprise hard drug users. This youth heavy drug use is also not prevalent in other countries. This has less to do with "Gen Z" and likely more to do with the very specific societal conditions in countries where such a trend can be found. The whole of Gen Z is not inherently more interested in drugs than any past generation. To be honest, I don't really see where your fears are coming from. For one thing, "psychotic" individuals, which I assume is the term you are using to refer to people with schizophrenia or bouts of psychosis, or other mental health issues, don't tend to be a nuisance to society and instead are far more likely to harm themselves. At worst, the developed world's already high suicide rates will get higher, but we aren't going to be dealing with an increase in crime because of "psychotic" people. The majority reason for any increase in crime is probably going to fall on healthy people making bad decisions. Quite frankly, if a society is already in a state where more people are using hard drugs than before, its public health is not in a good state to begin with. Instead of dreading over the future state of public health, why not get out there and work with organizations that are trying to solve the existing public health problem using data and hands-on response? Because the vibe I get from your posts is that "These people need to stop doing these things." Emphasis on the period, too. That's not how a drug problem is resolved. Drug use can be reduced but it requires civil society and government working together, not expecting the users to suck it up and quit their bad behavior, especially when the users in question are young people. Guess who makes up that civil society and government that has the responsibility and sole power to create a solution? Gen X and Millenials for the most part (with boomers thrown in too of course). People do not just wake up one day and decide to use drugs, except in very rare cases. The conditions they live in drive them to do that. And the young people, who do not hold positions of power and have no control over the world they are in, are not to blame for their actions if the world is in a certain way that then drives them to commit those actions. It is the older folk who for reasons unknown are still regarded as wise and solely worthy of power despite that distant, ancient trope having long since been shown to be not that great as a universal measure of qualification for leadership. One last thing... (Again, it was in the reply to DDE but as a Gen Z guy I feel inclined to reply) "Gen Z" consists of individual human beings, with different abilities and proficiencies in those abilites. It is not, in fact, a model of android produced by the Rosen Association. When I argue that Gen Z is not degenerate and unintelligent, I am not saying they are superhuman specimens of perfection, I'm saying they are normal people. There are people that will be thought of as dumb and there are people that will be thought of as clever. If the Gen Z people around you seem horrendously unintelligent, aside from extrapolating your own personal experience to billions of people, why not consider other options? Maybe the education in your specific district is low quality? Maybe the profession you work in where you encounter Gen Z has just begun to attract less than competent individuals? Maybe your standards are unrealistically high for an entire generation of human beings? Maybe you are just tending to remember bad experiences with young people more than good ones? And expanding on that last point, maybe people are only interesting in trying to figure out problems to the extent that they are ignoring everything good about Gen Z? Generations are really just a way of positioning a species temporally. In extraordinary cases, you might be able to assign physical traits to them (Japanese people born since the 1990s are notably taller than Japanese people in say, the 1920s) but they can't actually be used to categorize behavior. Because especially among humans, behavior is a wildly varying thing that for the most part has nothing to do with a person's physical state.

Perhaps a bit less philosophical than most shower thoughts, but I just got out of the shower so here it goes. The Life of Pi is a great movie. Something I find very eerie about it though is the carnivorous island that Pi encounters. Not so much because of its carnivorous nature, but because of its isolation and mysteriousness. The thought of something so small being adrift in such a vast world is somehow unsettling. Perhaps it is the same effect that drives "lost in space"-type flicks (which I've never understood the appeal of). It also might relate to my interest in ghost ships and abandoned man-made objects. The Brazilian battleship São Paulo is a real life object that, if a forum user from the Pacific War history forum Tully's Port is to be believed, is the theme of a legend among history enthusiasts, sailors, or both. In 1951, the battleship was due to be broken up, but was lost while under tow. It was never observed sinking, because of the weather at the time it was lost. Eight men were onboard it when the tow cable broke. The British investigated and concluded it would have sunk within an hour after the tow cable was lost, but according to this forum user, a legend exists that it is still out there, drifting amongst the shipping lanes. Kinda eerie, IMO. Just the thought of going transoceanic yachting and then suddenly coming across a massive, rusting hulk of a warship is frightening for some reason. The forum user said his personal name for the date the ship was lost is Cinco de Maybe. Perhaps @Lisias could shine some light on whether this legend is true or not?

That's kind of a problem with how ubiquitous computers are. Is an M1 Abrams gunner "training the gun" or "using a computer?" When my grandparents make coffee with their Keurig, are they preparing coffee or "using a computer?" Because computers are tools, people just tend not to care how they work. Just think of the number of people who don't know how their car's combustion engine works, compared to the number of car geeks out there.

I mean, it kinda does really seem that way. If I switched out the words and names of the generations this might as well have been boomers talking about millennials. Where are these Gen-Z people you’re encountering? And just to be clear, we’re talking about the same Gen-Z, right? Gen-Z is anyone born between 1997-2010 (sometimes 1996). I’ve seen older individuals thinking that Gen-Z is just a byword for teenagers, and that’s not the case. Also, what exactly is the problem here? Apart from “not knowing what a website is” none of what you mention seems to be that big of a deal. And even then, I highly question whether millenials are truly that savvy. About the only people who might remember what a website is are people who go on to become actual web designers or enthusiasts. I was taking Intro to ICT at a university in the Fall. Even as a guy born in 2001 surrounded mostly by people born in 2006, people were averaging 40-50 words per minute despite not knowing how to type. I myself do not know how to type, and I was in that range too. Sure, typing is useful… the one kid who did know how to was getting like 80 words per minute, IIRC… but I don’t think it’s the end all be all. We’re not decoding the 14-part Message here. “Experiencing Internet through a keyhole viewport in their smartphones with applications which tailor their experience online.” What does this even mean? Did millenials “experience information through a keyhole viewport in their PCs with programs which tailor their access to it” instead of living in the glorious world of filing cabinets and typewriters? Responding to a couple more specific points… What mistakes are you talking about? If smartphones are the problem, one mistake becomes the Internet, which made iterating basic mobile phones into smartphones a viable investment. In which case the opportunity there was to learn from this mistake would have to come from watching millenials use the Internet… but you claim that was a good thing. This is literally basic “old man yells at cloud” dialogue. I’d like to note that equally drug-interested millenials are now working at retirement homes and taking care of boomers just fine (in the US). In Japan it’s the same case, and there’s a whole market for innovations in senior care because of the growing elderly population. I think you’ll be fine. The state of generation Alpha is wildly overblown by click-bait YouTubers and memes. At worst, wanting the tablet all the time has replaced wanting the toy all the time. It should be noted the preteens, children, and toddlers are not at fault for how they are: it would be the parents’ fault. And mind you, Gen Alpha was birthed, and is being raised, mostly by millenials. If there does end up being some sort of society-wide malaise in the future, your generation (and mine) will have no one to blame but ourselves. I’d also like to note that the kind of policing of behavior and strict education that would be required to prevent people from “making mistakes” and “retaining empathy and basic knowledge” is probably not a recipe for a societal Golden Age. The closest thing to what you and other advocates for a stricter, “proper” society want is Japan. Japan still has the same social norms, manners, and so forth it has had since the 1960s, all in the name of upholding Japan’s “enlightened state” and “correct way of living.” Its economy has not only been in stagnation for over 30 years, it is a shell of its former self when it comes to technology and is currently facing a looming demographic crisis similar to the one that helped kill the Soviet Union. I’d go as far as to say that it is because enthusiasts who “know what a website is” grew up, and continue to grow up, to enter the IT sector that Japan’s government websites look like they are from 1999 and despite finally ridding itself of floppy disks, the government still uses fax. And all that uniformity and properness generates just the same kind of attitude you have about much more free societies but in reverse, towards the strict one. I chatted with a girl three years younger than me at the university one night and she said the prevailing attitude among Gen-Z in Japan is that the country is “over” and that China and the Global South are where real opportunities lie. (To any fans of Japanese sociology, yes, she said China. This aligns with surveys indicating younger people tend to have a neutral or even positive view of China, with only older generations having mostly negative views of it. And yes, young people are indeed fleeing Japan in large numbers every year and this is part of what is contributing to demographic decline, together with the low birth rate)

One thing I’d just say is that I am not really saying “we” have been doing such things. Individuals are just doing individual things. Some agree here and some disagree here. I wrote over in a thread in the Lounge that I think “humanity” is a pretty loony concept, and that anyone can only make truly accurate statements about our immediate surroundings. People are free to do as they wish, as much as one subset of quantum theorists and philosophers might say otherwise. I think trying to control people and prevent them from doing things is just as messy as “letting” them do whatever they want. But given such a hard choice, I prefer letting them run wild. Even if it does lead to a bad ending. I’d also like to note that I think you’re right about that. There will be no digital Nag Hammadi, IMO. More unfortunately, we can already see the effect you predict for the future in the present day. Not only are there all sorts of cool ideas that indigenous populations most certainly had but were lost due to their preference for purely oral transmission of ideas, but it is almost certain that distant ancestors of all humans had their own unique conceptions about reality, morality, etc. etc., not only in terms of cultural differences but individuals ones too. There is no way we will ever know about these things. Future anthropologists will probably look at the rotten masses of discarded gaming PCs and think about all those who lived just prior to the “Digital Age Collapse” the same way I think about the Paleolithic.

To be fair though, this is already happening. No one really does anything on their own. We are told we have to do this at the office, we are told we have to go to the office, we are told we have to do such and such here and there. The structure of society was actually "done" a very long time ago by the people who first did it, and everyone has just been "copying" what they did ever since rather than doing their own thing. Today's AI is just a natural development of that behavior. People are leaping from "I'm gonna do these activities for the rest of my life that someone else came up with" to "I'm gonna let someone (something) else do the activities in my life that someone else came up with." The Eloi are already here, and they are the humans of today. The number of things in the world that people say "are natural" or "have always been that way" despite us now knowing that we in fact don't know about the majority of human history is evidence of that to me. On the contrary, if the Internet or whatever other technology was taken away I don't think it would make them helpless. It would make them helpless if you hold them to the standard of late 20th century human behavior in the developed world, but as humans, with no assumptions or expections... they'll be fine. People don't literally need the Home Depot to function and survive, so to speak. Nor do they need prior knowledge accumulated by past generations to succeed per se. A lot of evidence is being found that the Neolithic Revolution was not really a revolution at all, but people deciding to put knowledge they had already had both culturally and individually for a long time prior into action (people had already "discovered" agricultural long before, but chose not to do it). Office buildings, cars, books, and spaceships are not what make us human: they're conscious activities individual people choose to do, and just as one can choose to sort of "play" with all of those things, so too can people choose not to. But that's fine, in the way that it can't be said that 9-to-5 at the office is somehow a more "correct" way of life than that of the !Kung San who spend much of their day more or less lounging around. Of course if we are talking about hard physical problems... like, without the food production and distribution system of 2010, local environments can't support the massive populations that exist today and they will all die... There's gonna be a lot of hurt there. When it comes to such a conundrum, I'm often reminded of a sort of parable from my 6th grade science teacher: "If the foxes die, then there will be too many rabbits and they will eat all of the berries, and when the berries are all gone they will all die." But the issue with posing that as a problem is that death is not an inherently negative thing. People choose to think it is negative, just as they choose between either the 9-to-5 or doing nothing at their parents' house. But this choice is a personal choice, not one that the entire species as a whole must somehow make. Some say this is because humans are "evil," and in the past I toyed with the idea that humans aren't really conscious. They say they are, much like how any of today's AI might somehow be programmed to say they are self-aware, but in reality they aren't. Now, I believe this is more so because cultural conceptions about lofty subjects like life and death have not evolved to take into account the discovery of distant species of other animals, and the realization that they went extinct. Quite literally, people who found dinosaur fossils in China thought they were dragon bones; dragons, of course, being very real parts of the finite world. I often imagine a dramatized version of the discovery of the first dinosaur skull taking place in the 1600s, in which crusty miners unearth an astonishing "dragon skull:" oblivious that the Earth is in fact much older than 6,000 years and different animals were once at the apex of the world. In virtually everything; from philosophy to law to morality to subsistence; all humans do is based on the underlying assumption that the world will always be the way it is and can never "run out," and that even if it does, we (also commonly: a deity) will make a new home for everyone in the sky. Even the most self-proclaimed adherents to secular thought, who proclaim to reject superstitions of the past, rely on conceptions about reality and society birthed long before modern science came about. No one really believes humanity can go extinct, because apart from seeing the fossils and talking about them, we still use thought processes developed based on the assumption that nothing can go extinct. As I said, there's choice in all of this: it's up to the individual to decide whether all this is really bad or okay (or even good). Me personally, I just enjoy the pictures on the Golden Record like living paleoart pieces, and like observing all of the animals around me before they become impressions in the dirt. What I'd give to be able to see J. Monesi, might as well take the opportunity with Holocene species while I have it. On another note; all of this is why I have toyed with another theory: that the so called "advanced" state of humanity over all other forms of life is actually a defect. Alien paleontologists will treat the past 10,000 years of human history like the apparent drop in biodiversity in dinosaurs observed prior to the K-Pg extinction event. In fact, that's just what it is: for the other few million some years prior, humans (and I'm reducing the term human to the same generality as gorilla, not specifically related to sapiens) varied in shape and size (relatively). But the competitors are gone, and now the rabbits feast on the berries unopposed. I still think it will be thousands of years before the rabbits and berries both disappear though, rather than the dramatic 2100 deadline Hollywood has used in recent years.

Human-assisted MSR has been floated since the mid 1960s when contractors and think tanks were pumping out mission concepts to try and figure out what the next best steps for NASA would be after Apollo. At the time it was not at all clear that NASA would fall into such a seemingly disgraceful state. Although it was realized budgets would be smaller than Apollo, because the infrastructure for Apollo already existed, most assumed the equipment would be adapted and continue to be used. It wasn't until after the Apollo I fire that the process of throwing out a perfectly good industrial base began to crystalize. Mars flybys and human-assisted MSR were products of pragmatic views about expected funding. Mars flybys were examined in both the USA and USSR as cheaper alternatives to full-scale landing missions that would provide an opportunity to gain data about human health in space with the added "cool" factor of them journeying beyond the Earth-Moon system (essentially like a space station but for deep space, as it more or less orbits the Sun). Human-assisted MSR was examined as a possibility due to the low reliability of computers of the day. Although by the 1970s, the USA and USSR had overcome the huge amount of robotic spacecraft failures they experienced in the late 50s and early 60s (albeit with the USSR trading it for a still large number of only partial successes) the institutional memory of those failures loomed large. Having humans do it was seen as a way to avoid those risks while also having those "solar space station" benefits of a flyby. Curiously, Soviet confidence in their robotic spacecraft, which was elevated by the successes of their lunar sample return missions and lunar rovers, was high enough that they continued to develop an MSR plan as late as 1979. In the end it was Soviet docking technology that was deemed to be the biggest risk: the final MSR plan required three near-simultaneous Proton launches and all three spacecraft docking together, and at the time the Soviets had a similar institutional memory of the numerous failed dockings during the uncrewed development phase of Soyuz. So it was cancelled. I would argue both piloted flybys and human-assisted MSR still make sense in the present day, but only in an environment of the traditional government contract system. Notably, NASA was actually considering both piloted Mars flybys and orbital missions as late as 2019 with their concepts for the Deep Space Transport. However, now that it is becoming more and more clear that Starship/Super Heavy is going to become a mature launch system, it doesn't make sense anymore. The rocket is no longer a "colonization fantasy" or "a grain silo hovering for 5 seconds" (two opinions I myself held of the rocket, more out of pure disbelief it could work than derision at the idea). Starship more or less does away with the need for "austerity" in space mission architecture. Even if Starship itself proves to have insurmountable challenges in being a self-contained Mars Transfer Vehicle and lander, the launch vehicle alone will likely be cheap enough and have a high enough cadence that it could easily allow for the accomplishment of a 4-5 launch surface expedition architecture, as proposed in 1969 as part of the Integrated Program Plan and later envisioned in 2005 for the Constellation Program (I love DRM 5.0 and Constellation btw, it was the last American traditional human spaceflight program that made reasonable sense before NASA delved into the SLS abyss that gave us Asteroid Redirection Mission, etc.). It is important to note that Mars flyby missions were never considered ideal and were always a product of finding opportunistic ways to do exciting things with extra money on hand. The proposals always came from lower level institutions, and the big visionaries like Sergey Korolyov and Werner von Braun never had much interest in them, considering only a landing worthwhile. In a sense, Boeing's proposal does make sense: do a (seemingly) exciting thing for as little money as possible. But SLS is inherently too costly to ever do anything for as little money as possible. The only other alternative SHLV at the moment is Starship, and its characteristics make it so that flybys can be forgoed and a surface expedition is feasible, not unlike how the Integrated Program Plan dropped the flyby concept because it intended to restart Saturn V production (whereas 1960s flyby proposals assumed that the number of available Saturn Vs would be finite).

I think this is true in some cases and less so in other cases. The funny thing about nations and cities, or really any big "cultural group" is that it is all imaginary. I live in Portland, but I might as well live in the Paleolithic. If I only really know ten people in total and just briefly interact with the millions of other people living around me, I'm basically living the same experience as a small Paleolithic hunter-gatherer group. Except instead of running into people who I briefly interact with after traveling hundreds of kilometers only relatively infrequently, I do it after traveling a few kilometers every day. So has there been any change in that kind of interaction at all? Basically none, IMO. Where there is a change is in the "charismatic warrior" community; the people who make grand ideas about the entire world and then shout from the highest peaks that it is that way (and often that they are the apex of the world). To a big extent this involves having a sort of psychotic (as in, being in a state of psychosis) view of the world. Big assumptions and big omissions need to be made to create these grand ideas, because of course, in reality, these people have that same Paleolithic-level interaction (really only knowing a number of people in the tens). One would kind of have to take the humans out of humanity and make it a sort of "mass of jelly" to even make an assertion about the entire human race. Because realistically one can't know every single person, something required to make a truthful statement about what the human race is really all about. Enter the Internet. Not only do "common folk" (I honestly kind of miss the term peasant, like as a real classification and not with negative or positive connotations) have the ability to "communicate" with "people," they also have the ability to gain all sorts of "information" at the press of a button. But people don't communicate with each other over the Internet. Realistically, it is more like a high pace exchange of letters. Pen pals are great and all, but you don't really know someone just by exchanging letters (I wouldn't go around saying I know yall even if I knew your real names). And yet a lot of people think they can discern all sorts of things about other people based on what they see them do on the Internet. And then there is the "information." Again, it isn't some all-knowing repository. Information is as fallible as it ever was. The Internet is like a high pace trip to the library. One will find all sorts of things there, from the silly to the outrageous. A better comparison is the "town crier." Before the printing press, some dude just comes into the town and shouts about whatever happened in the neighboring one. It's just a dude. He might be wrong. But because the Internet is believed to be a tool that makes it easier to find and/or register information, it is believed to be somehow "enlightening" or herald an age of "more accuracy." But it is just a bunch of dudes, all of whom might be wrong or inaccurate. Growing up in the late 2000s and early 2010s, we were constantly told by teachers and librarians to "not believe everything you see on the Internet." The issue is that this implied you can believe everything you read or *watch* (or that at least printed and televised material was generally accurate)... but lo and behold, print and television is rapidly disappearing in favor of the Internet. So a person is left with either not believing anything (societal malaise, indifference to the world) or believing anything (again, those dudes who could be wrong and inaccurate and whose "information" may be anything but that). And even what remains of print and television is defective, because the people who write it are forced to use the Internet to find information. Maybe going off the rails so to speak, but I don't really like this idea of "lessons" from history. Trying to glean lessons from history is essentially just mythmaking. But instead of Coyote or Raven, you swap them out for people who actually existed. But the purpose is the same. "This bad stuff happened in the days of yore, see how terrible it is and don't do it again!" Of course, the problem with myths is that no one really cares about them. Tales of the Great Flood did not stop people around the Mediterranean from doing the sorts of things that supposedly led to the Flood in the first place. Perhaps the only place where myths have some degree of an effect on people are children (when used as an aid in child education) and a very small amount of adults (the type of people who have the moral conviction to stand back and die rather than fight and take a life). IMO, the only way people are ever gonna change is by... changing. Which means actually thinking about the decisions they make and the problems before them, not "Daddy did it this way so I have to too" or "Granddad said this is how it is, so it has to be this way." Or "the Grand Duchy of Fenwick has said it and therefore it is true!" I don't think other people ought to espouse this opinion, but personally, I honestly think there is nothing to be learned from history about how to deal with societal issues in the present. Opening up a history book in this day and age is about as useful as opening up the Nihon Shoki. Of course, this doesn't necessarily need to come in the form of a sort of "scorched earth on the world of ideas" as it might seem I am alluding to... it could just mean dropping some connotations and being a bit more creative here and there, being a bit more respectful and humble over there. But the bottomline is that it comes down to personal choice. Not "adding a new ingredient" to the imaginary "mass of jelly" I mentioned above. No one can make anyone do this stuff. I think this is why kingdoms fall and great monuments fall into disrepair. There was no Roman Empire, it was just a bunch of people happening to agree with all sorts of different things (and of course those who disagreed dying or being otherwise excluded from the group of agreers). Generations change and so do opinions. They do different things. "The Roman Empire falls" or less dramatically, "Town A starts doing its own thing, Town B starts doing its own thing." "Group B goes off and does its own thing over there." "Group A stays and does its own thing." In a sense, we hear the dramatic description more often because of a bias towards talking about what was lost. For every person who died in the fall of Rome there certainly was another, if not perhaps another four or ten, who lived on and prospered. But it's hard to talk that way; most people don't talk about a natural disaster and go "Look at all that new real estate for development!" In a sense this is sort of inevitable, not in the dramatic sense of destiny or fate, but because of that hard limitation on real human relationships. "The Captain" can declare he rules over all of his subjects, loves them or is a tough father or whatever, but in reality he still has that group of people numbering in the tens that he actually knows. He doesn't know everyone else, even people he works with every day, which is why he might adopt those traits supposedly inherent to charismatic warriors (like paranoia and suspicion, fear) when in reality that's just what humans do towards people they don't know. I am equally suspicious of the guy in front of me in the line to use the bathroom as a captain might have been of his rivals. On a final note: that's an example of one of those "decisions they make" that humans can not so obviously make a change on. The feeling the captain and I get is the same: suspicion (it doesn't become "polsuspicion" or "supersuspicion" just because a captain does it). Yet I think about it (even if I think what I think is common sense and not really thought) and decide I don't need to be openly hostile to the guy in front of me. Meanwhile the captain might do something different (either himself or tell someone he equally doesn't really know to do something about it, probably with a weapon).

Idiots will always exist as long as there are those who declare themselves geniuses and others idiots. Which is to say idiots don't exist. Nor do geniuses. In the end, rats and corvids will jointly dig in to the last human corpse. And it will be like all of the others: it drank, it ate, it made waste, it rested, and it reproduced. And then it died. The infant made for good eats too.

Originally I joined to get tips and advice when I first began playing KSP in 2020. I encountered the Science & Spaceflight section and admittedly got hooked on the “sense of community;” everyone sharing news and discussing it. Some discussions taught me a bit about arguments and debates (my main takeaway is it isn’t really worth doing). As a consequence of that lesson, I also don’t really find that section of the forum a nice place anymore. Beyond a source of news and reading other people’s posts (quite a few people have neat credentials and insight when it comes to being a space fan) I don’t see much reason to participate. I do check it every now and then and make a post here and there… but it isn’t a place I frequent all that much compared to before. On the other hand, the Lounge, which at the time of my intense interaction with S&S I ignored, is still a neat place for funny stuff, cool artwork, and getting and providing advice. Another thing this forum has taught me: if you have a question and you’re a beginner, it has probably been answered in a previous thread. Luckily I didn’t embarrass myself by doing that, but did see others ask such questions and now know to just use the search function (or Google) 99% of the time. EDIT- To be clear, I find the S&S section not a nice place. Not the people in it! That kind of discussion is just not my cup of tea anymore.

I’ve finally gotten around to reading A City On Mars and I’m quite shocked at the attitude of a lot of pro-space colonization members of academia to the whole “society” part of people living on Mars. The… dedication and compassion… I sense in advocates for that sort of thing is kind of scary. The authors of the book point out something important: when it comes to biology and to lesser extent, big-scale engineering, we just don’t know if space colonization is really possible. But what if it isn’t? I do not sense that space colonization advocates know how to stop. I get the vibe that they will do anything to “spread consciousness” and “make life multiplanetary.” I thought I’d get ahead of them and start thinking up ways to make that happen, so called “biological challenges” and “ethics” be darned. Because we need to save the human race! And life! “Some of the greatest evils in history have been committed in the name of love”- Tom Hanks as Robert Langdon in Inferno (2016)

Space colonization for “stock” humans will not be possible, because of the following two reasons: 1. Humans are animals. They live in the wild. Humans may have created the opposing concepts of “civilization” and “barbarity” but these are really only in their heads. Skyscrapers are just a really complex version of the longhouse, and eventually one needs to leisurely stroll the forest. Building a Mars colony is essentially like locking people in a skyscraper for the rest of their life. It isn’t feasible from a behavioral perspective. 2. Space colonization requires the colonists to care deeply about the space society and take care of it, given it is entirely artificial and can implode if the atmospheric management guy decides to lock himself in his office and “end the world.” But by default, anyone who chooses to leave Earth for space permanently doesn’t care about society. Therefore sooner or later these latent traits will surface and result in destruction. However, it may be possible for humans to colonize space by “modding” them. Most importantly, one would need to get rid of the pesky high consciousness. That way less than performing individuals can be evacuated, ideal breeding pairs can be combined at will, and individuals can be worked as needed without having to attend to “personal” needs. Much like other animals. Of course, it would cost billions to conduct such research and may not even be physically possible. The solution? Pretend you have invested this and found the solution, and declare people who undergo the “procedure” (really just a couple hours under anesthesia) to be unconscious. No one would be able to tell if they are conscious or not anyways, so there is no issue. But because they are not conscious, there is no issue evacuating them or forcing them about even if they scream and kick. Because they aren’t really feeling it, or at least not like a (true?) human. Yes it might be painful to watch, but it is for the greater good of the human race. All one needs to do is forget they are really conscious. (C) Vault-Tec Corporation ——— What is this? An exercise in just how far the imagination can go to achieve a goal. If this is what I, who doesn’t have an interest in Mars colonization, can come up with, I’m quite frightened to see what people who do want Mars colonization (or “survival of the human race”) at any cost can come up with.

I don't find the term "manifest destiny" to have particularly negative connotation, 60s Apollo presentation materials sometimes compared it to Columbus' voyage, with the LM to the rowboats and the CSM to the Santa Maria and my first reaction on seeing these was not "the poor Lunites!" As much as the original use of word caused a lot of harm, a lot of progress resulted from it too; it's neutral through and through IMO. I think there is a lot of thinking about how a society is structured that would need to happen before a successful Mars colony is built but parsing language is not going to contribute to that. Back to Isaacman himself... If the second Polaris mission happens while Isaacman is administrator, that'd be pretty wild. No active NASA administrator has ever flown in space. Alternatively I'm sure he has trusted acquaintances who he could appoint to replace him as commander for that mission. Although, it kinda seems like the point of Polaris is for Isaacman to be commander on every flight?

Space isn't a country, it's... space. Like the ocean more or less, as AckSed pointed out. Future economists, IMO, won't classify iron mined from an asteroid as "space iron" it will just be American iron or Chinese iron or whatever country's iron. Cool detail is that it comes from space, but that doesn't have much consequence in how a buyer would look at it. Lots of caveats involved of course. Asteroid mining would somehow need to become cost effective enough to be both a worthwhile investment and competitive with Earth mining in the market.

If the Soviet Union had produced its own answer to Lego during the 1970s, would the identities of the designers of the different pieces and sets be hidden to prevent their assassination at the hands of Danish intelligence agents?

@Anth Install worked just fine for both DLCs, and the main game did not have the build number error.

I’d argue all science can never be apolitical because it relies on organizations for funding. Science is just too advanced for a single person alone to do on their own with no strings attached to a wider group of people, and thus a wider group of ideas.