TranscriptionTumblr post by arctic-hands: > When I was a teenager and still on Neopets I was part of a pretty big Star Trek guild and eventually became part of its council, with the solemn duty of creating weekly polls. Well one day I created the poll “Which would win in a fight? Borg Cube or Death Star?”. Naturally, since...
I mean, there’s the question of if the death star might release so much energy as to be beyond the capacity of the borg to adapt. If I remember correctly, species 8472 had a planet destroying beam weapon that looked vaguely death-star esque in terms of how the beams combined, and the borg struggled against that species.
If whales are smart enough to debate that, they probably have cultural memory of almost getting whaled to extinction. Which would make them like us less, but on the other hand, might make them afraid to get us too upset at them
This reminds me of something I sometimes wonder about lotr: does the ring make you more evil, or does it just make you more like Sauron? If you’re already even more evil than Sauron and you put on the ring, does it slowly turn you ever so slightly more good, to align with Sauron better?
Humans, unlike the animals that human keep as pets, are capable of complex speech, so I’d bet that treats would be marketed towards the humans themselves, so that the humans then push their keeper to buy those treats. Sorta like how lots of ads for toys are marketed towards kids, because advertising works better on them and then they’ll go and push their parents to buy them.
No, I’m suggesting it’s not complex because they don’t have brains set up for it. That isn’t to say that animals don’t communicate, they do, but the concepts one can convey via their communication styles have limits
To be fair, having a mismatch between when energy is available and when it is needed is going to be a problem under any economic system, since it’s a fundamental inefficiency that must be worked around with additional effort and resources
You can adapt to these inefficies, sure, but doing so still takes more planning and effort (in this case in carefully timing one’s phone charging, and in avoiding power using activities like that during non ideal times) than if there was no mismatch of availability and demand. It lessens the impact of the problem, but does not entirely remove it.
I’m personally very excited about how it does seem to be finally making progress if slowly, but realistically, I’m less convinced that it’ll be the solution to all our energy needs than many are. The physics of the process itself is very efficient, sure, but the kinds of machines needed to harness it are literally among the most expensive and complicated things built by humans, and they don’t even produce net energy yet. Granted, the cost of such things should be reduced once they are industrial machinery and not exotic scientific instruments loaded with experiments, but I’d bet that the reactors themselves will still be incredibly expensive and complex (and therefore have expensive maintenance). This doesn’t say good things about the actual cost of the resulting energy, even if the fuel is quite abundant. We could get abundant energy with a similarly high if not quite as much fuel efficiency with advanced fission reactors and fuel breeding, but the cost of those kinds of plants has been relatively prohibitive, and the costs of renewables has been falling. I could certainly see it possible for fusion to reach net energy, only to get used only on specialized roles or for base load power because solar panels end up being cheaper. In a sense this has already happened. It is theoretically possible, if not practically desirable, to use fusion energy in a power plant already, by detonating fusion explosives in a gigantic underground chamber full of water to heat it up, and harnessing the steam. Such ideas were considered during the cold war, but never developed, at least in part because it was calculated that they wouldn’t be cost competitive compared to other power options.
Sure, but you’re not getting as much output from your panels as you could in total that way, making them less efficient overall. I’m not saying you can’t run a power grid on this stuff, just that the adaptations to use them in a grid effectively have costs, and those costs are not exclusive to capitalism
That’s not really net energy gain from a practical standpoint. Technically yes, they get more energy than was present in their lasers, but those those lasers aren’t created perfectly efficiently, and so the actual electricity needed to create them still is much higher than the energy output of the reaction
Oh I wasn’t suggesting we should stop the pursuit. I just think it won’t be a magic bullet for solving our energy needs the way some proponents seem to suggest it will be.
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Doesn’t the fediverse userbase trend towards being made up of millennials? I’m on the older end of gen Z myself and grew up with CDs and DVDs, so I imagine most people here are familiar with the technology.
Fortunately for us, this one isn’t too likely, because realistically, an alien civilization capable of travelling the relevant distance and destroying another civilization isn’t something that can be hidden from. They should be able, fairly easily, to examine every planet in the galaxy and see which ones have life on them, and wipe it out before any civilization ever arises at all. The fact that we exist at all necessarily implies that nobody in this galaxy has been committed to going this, at least for the past billion years or so.
The resources required to attack every life bearing planet only really becomes super expensive compared to waiting for civilization to arise if life is very common but civilization is not, which is admittedly a possible scenario, but by no means guaranteed. But consider: any civilization capable of launching an attack on another, particularly one that can be considered highly likely to completely destroy the target in a single strike (which you absolutely need, because if a target survives your attack, it now knows that you exist and even if it did not also follow your “attack everyone” doctrine, will see you as an existential and hostile threat) must necessarily have interstellar travel technology. The amount of time needed to develop this, and the amount of energy and resources this capability implies, make it highly likely that they have very good automated manufacturing as well. With those two technologies, you dont need to listen for radio signals or similar. You can send a tiny and difficult to spot or trace probe to every star out there (potentially at almost no cost if you can make a probe that can extract raw materials and build copies of itself, but even if you cant do that, the probes can be much smaller and lighter than a planet killing projectile and so if you can build one of those, you can at least launch a probe to every world with atmospheric compositions indicative of possible life, to observe from close range and tell you if civilization arises there. Thus, any civilization that wants to follow this policy is impossible to hide from, it doesnt matter if you send radio signals or not, or if you build structures that are visible or not, because your position was compromised before you even considered that there might be something to hide from. If youre a civilization that worries that aliens might be hostile, then, trying to hide makes no sense, because it wont help. What would make sense instead then is to try to grow as far and as fast as possible, in the hopes of acquiring enough redundancy that your neighbors dont have the capacity to destroy you, or at least enough that they arent sure that they do. This kind of growth doesnt seem to be the policy of anyone we see either though, because it should be visible even to us (we can see stars, and if you want to grow as much as you can and have automated manufacturing, you could start to build dyson swarms and similar structures that would visibly change the amount of light that reaches us from a given star).
Now, there are a few responses to this line of thinking that I’ve seen: The first is that a civilization this paranoid might not want to expand to other stars, because a colony in another system is so distant as to be effectively a new civilization, which might turn hostile to you, and is right at the next star over, and so civilizations might just stay in one star system and launch attacks from there. This doesnt really help them hide, as for the reasons Ive just mentioned, they should be easy to spot by anyone that actually has the ability to threaten them, but it might make it less likely for us to see, which is all that matters for the fermi paradox. But these aliens would still be able to send out probes to spy on our planet, so if theyre within around 5000 light years or so, they should have been able to see us develop civilization, and so if thats what they want to destroy, we again, shouldnt exist to contemplate this right now (and if theyre much further away then this, and theyre still worried that we might be a threat, then they really do need to destroy us before civilization ever arises, for reasons Ill get into in a moment). These hypothetical aliens must in order to make sense have a different policy than just “destroy anything smart enough to develop civilization”. The next most obvious trigger then is “destroy anyone that makes it into space”. Suppose then that you’re these aliens. Your probes report some aliens on a planet 500 light years away (given the galaxy is in the ballpark of 100000 light years wide, this is in your cosmic backyard, relatively speaking), or if youve not done the probes, you hear some radio signal indicating this. You decide to launch an attack. But, you have a problem. That signal from your probes (or the radio signals if you hear those instead) was sent out 500 years ago, and even if your attack moves at lightspeed (it wont unless its something like a laser, but you probably want to launch something at a large fraction of that speed, so lightspeed is still a decent estimate) its still going to be 1000 years between when that species started going into space, and your attack arriving. Thats almost certainly enough time to colonize a lot of their solar system, so just attacking their homeworld probably isnt enough. Do you attack every large celestial body in that star system just in case? They could also have significant habitats and industry and such in orbit of various objects, or in orbit of their sun, so even that might not be enough. Worse, that thousand years of space could be enough time to start to get into interstellar travel themselves, so you might need to target every system within a certain radius of their home star, and even worse than that, if theyre just as paranoid as you, its enough time that they could conceivably begin to launch their own interstellar attacks, and if they happen to see your home star and think “that looks like it might have life, lets attack it”, then your policy was insufficient. Youre not launching an attack against a newly space fairing civilization, youre launching one against whatever exists in that area of space when your attack finally arrives. Thus, you really need to attack well before civilizations start to go into space. If we’re anything to go by, the time between early space exploration and industrial revolution is only a matter of a couple of centuries, so something like industry or radio is also too late, unless your targets are in a very narrow window of distance. If you’re within a few thousand light years (still relatively close compared to the size of the galaxy) then you really should be attacking by no later than the first sign of early civilization, and if youre farther than that, as I mentioned earlier, you really should attack before civilized life ever even arises, because there would be time for a planet to go from having literal cavemen to an emerging interstellar empire before your attack even got to them, and once they have interstellar travel, you dont know exactly where they’re all going to be, and they have the capacity to at least try to attack you. So, you either attack before civilization in which case we shouldnt be here, or you colonize the galaxy yourself to have outposts nearby to any emerging aliens, which is fundamentally not stealthy, and which again means we shouldnt be here because our planet should have been colonized by said aliens before we could ever evolve.
The other response Ive seen before is that maybe, nobody is actually willing to engage in a policy of genocide at first sight like this, but everyone is afraid that someone might be doing so, and so everyone hides despite there being nothing to hide from, and so we see no aliens. But this assumes that everyone considers this possibility, deliberately holds back their own development by trying to hide, despite probably also realizing that hiding is futile anyway, and that nobody across the galaxy ever, or has ever, not done this and so had the galaxy to claim for itself, which seems absurdly unlikely, especially given those hiding still have the option to send the probes, and potentially discover that everyone else is doing the same and so knows of them anyway.
The TLDR of this, because I know this was a rather lot of text for just a response to this, is: The dark forest assumes that one isnt a target unless one takes action that reveals oneself, and that one can be sure of destroying any civilization one knows about in a first strike, and that these are the only options available with no way to try to make oneself a less vulnerable target. None of these assumptions seem reasonable upon further pondering, and if they do not hold, the scenario does not make sense.
I was presuming that nobody has any ftl tech, given that it seems to violate the laws of physics for such a technology to exist. And you can look virtually everywhere, in the galaxy at least, with the right technology (and probably less advanced a tech than needed for manned space travel, what you need is a machine, capable of using the resources available in some asteroid to construct more of itself, and send those copies off towards other star systems. These probes would multiply exponentially until they’ve explored every star in the galaxy, with no further input required beyond building the first one)
I’m aware the information would be out of date, that was part of my point in another response for one of the reasons I don’t imagine the scenario works, because attacks arrive at a distant point in the future. I’ve never personally heard the dark forest scenario as requiring ftl tech, making that a requirement seems to make the entire premise moot as it requires throwing a pretty fundamental part of physics out to even contemplate.
Not at all, there is nothing physically impossible about someone engaging on projects that take centuries or millennia to complete, it just requires a lot of patience and effort. Finding or even attacking an alien species does not fundamentally require anything disallowed by physics, it just requires a long timescale to do slower than light. My assumption was just that any hostile aliens would simply conduct those hostilities over very long periods of time. Having interstellar travel at all, assuming no ftl, sort of implies a willingness to undergo these kinds of long term efforts anyway, and it doesn’t seem absurd to imagine that anyone with the technology to have those kinds of energies at their disposal might also have very advanced medical technology, such that they might live a very long time, which could lend itself to more long term thinking.
The asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs would be insufficient to eliminate a life bearing planet as a potential future source of a threat appearing, unless you hit such planets regularly in that manner every few million years or so. If you were really going to do a policy like this, you’d want to hit the planet hard enough to completely sterilize the place, or at least kill off everything bigger than a microbe.
The aliens would have to be stupid to list a planet as solved for tens of millions of years after killing off the dominant life forms, because, well, a new one will just evolve in short order, exactly as has happened on earth, and they ought to know this.
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Who would win: Borg Cube or Death Star? (aussie.zone)
TranscriptionTumblr post by arctic-hands: > When I was a teenager and still on Neopets I was part of a pretty big Star Trek guild and eventually became part of its council, with the solemn duty of creating weekly polls. Well one day I created the poll “Which would win in a fight? Borg Cube or Death Star?”. Naturally, since...
Trump Loyalists Kill Vote on US Wiretap Program (www.wired.com)
cross-posted from: lemmy.sdf.org/post/15183880...
don't tell iceland (mander.xyz)
You fuckin' hobbits came up here to smoke dope on Mount Doom, huh? (sopuli.xyz)
If some higher being kept humans as pets how would their treats be marketed? (pawb.social)
consider the implications for a post scarcity future (slrpnk.net)
I have a slight suspicion that it is a scam (file.coffee)
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That remains to be seen (sopuli.xyz)
What is the scariest/creepiest theory you know about?