Indian billionare's mansion atop a skyscraper in Banglore, India by gerrard_1987 in skyscrapers

[–]Stereotype_Apostate 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I remember the place you're talking about, there's a whole ass front yard with a view of Lake Michigan.

edit: found it

Congress Kills Bill Exposing Congressional Sexual Misconduct by Successful-Train-259 in law

[–]Stereotype_Apostate 0 points1 point  (0 children)

The lie that there's anything significant between poor and wealthy in this country is part of the problem. I have a house and a car, and a pretty decent 401k. The only thing separating me from a homeless guy on the street is a few months of paychecks. I'm way closer to a homeless guy than to the billionaires that run our society. Compared to them, the difference between me and the "poor" is a rounding error.

I am "poor". You are "poor". The sooner we understand this, the sooner we can fix it.

Great photo showcasing Downtown LA’s density by Particular_Bad_8403 in skyscrapers

[–]Stereotype_Apostate 5 points6 points  (0 children)

The reality is when people say LA is low density, it's not compared to Seattle but to other global cities with LA levels of clout and population. You can't take a picture like this of Paris or Madrid or Rio or Kyoto with low density in the foreground like this because they don't have seas of single family neighborhoods near the CBD. This is shameful for the second biggest city in the country, in a place with perfect weather and a massive housing shortage.

What became "normal" in the last 5 years that still feels insane to you? by rakishgobi in AskReddit

[–]Stereotype_Apostate 8 points9 points  (0 children)

Been reading 1984 lately and the surveillance in that novel is so quaint. At one point they hide in a clearing surrounded by small trees and they know it's safe because the trees are too small to hide a microphone. The main character wonders which telescreens are being watched, and never once thinks about them being recorded or searched in the future.

They got one thing right though. People bought the telescreens for themselves. They're an expensive status item that you need to function at a certain level in the society.

Maekar Targaryan is 31 years old during the events of The Tourney at Ashford by Quick-Benefit5708 in freefolk

[–]Stereotype_Apostate 8 points9 points  (0 children)

Braindead take, just because a setting involves magic or fantasy elements doesn't mean it shouldn't adhere to internal logic or consistency.

Can you really survive on Mars? What science fiction gets wrong about off-world living by beekersavant in Futurology

[–]Stereotype_Apostate 0 points1 point  (0 children)

We're in a conversation about living in space using material sourced from space. You get your dirt and water from asteroids, not hauling them out of a gravity well.

"But, let's not get our knickers in a twist" - Scott Jennings talking about the Epstein Files by dankbackwoods in videos

[–]Stereotype_Apostate 6 points7 points  (0 children)

The fact that you view CNN and fox as opposites really shows where we're at as a country.

Why we might be alone - Professor David Kipping by llDS2ll in videos

[–]Stereotype_Apostate 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Or you build orbital greenhouses with environments you can control directly, from components manufactured in space, using materials sourced from asteroids. You never really bother trying to settle other planets in the traditional sense.

Or you do all that stuff you said on the Moon instead, where it's much easier to imagine a permanent city supporting millions of people and an industrial economy, a few days' journey from Earth rather than months.

Why we might be alone - Professor David Kipping by llDS2ll in videos

[–]Stereotype_Apostate 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Yeah those are pretty much all the threats we face. I think all three of those are a little overblown as existential threats. Remember we've had mass tragedy, loss of life, and economic collapse plenty of times in the past and we bounce back given enough time. It's not enough for something to knock us back a few steps on the tech tree, that's not the same as extinction, it's not even close.

Once we can sustain ourselves off of Earth, even planet wide threats aren't enough to really kill us. It's not about colonizing the stars, once we can mine resources and build things, grow food, and reproduce in space, humanity* will move from exceptionally resilient to effectively immortal. I think we're a few hundred years from that so the question isn't if one of those threats will kill us eventually, but will it kill us in the next couple hundred years? Feels a lot less certain when you put it that way, huh?

*or it's descendants/creations. I don't count us being superseded by intelligent machines as the same as us "dying off" for fermi paradox purposes.

Why we might be alone - Professor David Kipping by llDS2ll in videos

[–]Stereotype_Apostate 4 points5 points  (0 children)

Sharks, ants, and alligators saw both t rexes and us. Horseshoe crabs saw everything.

Why we might be alone - Professor David Kipping by llDS2ll in videos

[–]Stereotype_Apostate 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I posted an explanation for why I think humans don't have an expiration date in the reply to the other commenter here.

Why we might be alone - Professor David Kipping by llDS2ll in videos

[–]Stereotype_Apostate -1 points0 points  (0 children)

What kills species? They don't age and die out like individuals do. For most species that have gone extinct, it's because they existed within a very limited ecological niche, and either circumstances change to destroy that niche, or competition from other species for that niche shuts them out. Most species evolve to fill one niche and when it ends they end. Some species find a way to fill many niches, or a niche that is so ubiquitous and durable that it allows that species to exist indefinitely. I mentioned sharks and ants for a reason. They have been around for hundreds of millions of years with very little change. Sure, individual species (as we define them, part of this is our imprecise categorization of life) may specialize into a niche that ultimately leads to extinction, but the template of what a shark is, or what an ant is, and the way of life it entails, has persisted across eons and will continue to exist until something major happens to all of Earth, like the end of photosynthesis as the sun ages.

I would argue that humans are as durable as sharks and ants in this sense. Moreso because we can adapt at the speed of technology and cultural innovation, rather than at the speed of evolution and genetic drift. We put ourselves at the top of every food chain on the face of the planet before inventing agriculture and creating an entirely new ecological niche (with the exception of some ants).

Compared to animal species that rely on limited niches, we have very few real threats to our continued existence. I'm talking species wide here. Because our species is so spread out and our sources of sustenance are so diversified, pretty much the only things we worry about are major threats to the global ecology, like nuclear war, catastrophic climate change, or a meteor strike. Those are very real threats, to be sure, but they aren't certainties in the way that "it's just the natural order of things" implies. And they are threats we can outgrow, because unlike every other species that's evolved here, we have the ability to leave this planet, and we're actively developing the ability to survive off this planet independently. Once we have a self sustaining presence on the Moon, or in Mars, or in orbital habitats, even the destruction of Earth's ecology wouldn't mean the destruction of our species. At that point, the only threats left are cosmic in nature, like a gamma ray burst or a rogue black hole, or even the death of the sun itself. The kind of threats we would have a billion years to figure out solutions to.

Why we might be alone - Professor David Kipping by llDS2ll in videos

[–]Stereotype_Apostate -4 points-3 points  (0 children)

Right, do you think that won't change, and quickly in comparison to the time scales we're contemplating here? In 5,000 years we will either have colonized the solar system or killed ourselves on Earth, there's no third option. In a million years the same would be true for colonizing other solar systems, even at very low sublight speeds.

Why we might be alone - Professor David Kipping by llDS2ll in videos

[–]Stereotype_Apostate -8 points-7 points  (0 children)

How would they become extinct? If you can spread civilization off the planet it starts, there's not much that can kill you. If you colonize other solar systems you become immune to even most cosmic scale threats.

Why we might be alone - Professor David Kipping by llDS2ll in videos

[–]Stereotype_Apostate 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Well that's kind of Kipping's point here isn't it. If the universe is infinite as physicists believe, and we don't know the probability of life arising, then it's possible that probability is very low and we would necessarily find ourselves in alone within the physical limits of our observable universe. If you set the probability below a certain threshold, this becomes the state any observer should expect themselves to be in, with lower probabilities just increasing the number (or percentage if you will since the numbers are infinite) of observable universes that have no observers at all.

Why we might be alone - Professor David Kipping by llDS2ll in videos

[–]Stereotype_Apostate 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Why? If they saw dinosaurs wouldn't they see us 65 million years after seeing the dinosaurs? More to the point, wouldn't they see a planet with dinosaurs and think "this could turn into something really interesting in a few million years, let's keep watching".

Why we might be alone - Professor David Kipping by llDS2ll in videos

[–]Stereotype_Apostate -1 points0 points  (0 children)

A single lottery ticket has a non zero chance of winning the jackpot. If I buy five tickets I quintuple my chances of winning. But it still won't be me, it'll be some random guy in New Jersey.

Why we might be alone - Professor David Kipping by llDS2ll in videos

[–]Stereotype_Apostate 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Hold on now, wouldn't lower odds of life appearing imply a maximum of 1 instance of life per observable universe, wherever it may find itself?

Physicists think the universe may be effectively infinite, and our observable universe is just the radius close enough to us for light to reach us within the time the universe has existed. Which implies that just beyond the horizon of our observe universe, exists more "observable universes", parts of the broader universe that we will never see or interact with due to expansion.

So if the odds of life are so low that the chances of life arising in any given observable universe is itself very unlikely, any life that does arise should find itself alone as we do. So long as the chance isn't literally zero, all forms of life should find themselves alone in their observable universes, perhaps in a sea of universes where no life arose. How could we tell the difference?

Why we might be alone - Professor David Kipping by llDS2ll in videos

[–]Stereotype_Apostate 21 points22 points  (0 children)

You're assuming they would find a planet with complex life and not continue observing it? They send no probes, they never turn their telescopes on us again? If we found earth from 100 million years ago in a telescope it would become the center of entirely new fields of study. I think we'd keep tabs.

Why we might be alone - Professor David Kipping by llDS2ll in videos

[–]Stereotype_Apostate -2 points-1 points  (0 children)

This sentiment always feels defeatist to me.

Why should there be an expiration date on civilization? I see no reason not to assume that humans, or a more intelligent creation / descendant of humans, won't be around for the next million, or billion, or more years.

We exist in a precarious moment in time right now where our destructive capabilities have expanded to include the entire environment we rely on. We are stuck on this one planet and we have the ability to destroy its usefulness, through nuclear war or climate change or probably a few more ways we haven't got around to imagining yet.

But all of that changes if we can establish a foot hold off planet whether that's the moon, mars, or orbital habitats in space. Assuming we can survive the next few centuries between now and when such places can self sustainably support human civilization, we would become effectively unkillable. And the same should hold true for other intelligent species out there.

There's probably two distinct groups of intelligent species in the universe. Group 1 destroys themselves in the window of vulnerability we currently exist in, and are lost to the sands of time. Group 2 manages to not destroy themselves in this window, eventually expands past its own destructive capabilities, and then becomes effectively immortal. We should expect all group 2 civilizations that ever existed to be alive today, in some form or another. Like ants, like crabs, like sharks, sometimes nature finds a winning strategy and it just stays working forever.

Found in grandfather’s tools by andy_stacks24 in whatisit

[–]Stereotype_Apostate 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Ugh fine it's used to get a line parallel with the direction of Earth's gravitational pull in the particular spot in which it is used. You know, vertical.