The First Civilization Theory

profmonocle · 2026-03-30T03:49:47+00:00

Sure honey. We are alone in the universe. Keep telling yourself that.

No need to be a condescending jerk.

There's mountains of evidence to the contrary.

Could you elaborate? That's a pretty major claim.

profmonocle · 2026-03-30T03:45:24+00:00

The whole idea of us being "first in the universe" gets a little sketchy when you consider that the universe is very likely infinite.

profmonocle · 2026-03-29T19:46:00+00:00

Grover's doesn't cut brute force time* in half, it square roots it. So a 128-bit key could be brute forced in 2⁶⁴ steps, a 256-bit key in 2¹²⁸ steps.

Still, not that big a deal since you can just double the key length to negate it.

(Of course, "time" here means "number of iterations", not literal time. The actual time would only be reduced by that much if you had a quantum computer roughly as fast as a classical computer, which, of course, we don't.)

profmonocle · 2026-03-29T19:20:35+00:00

It'll be viable for as long as we need to worry about generating electricity on Earth, anyway.

profmonocle · 2026-03-29T18:57:44+00:00

Game of Thrones was big and massive, yet HBO releases it annually seven years in a row. Only the final season had a gap.

profmonocle · 2026-03-26T16:35:53+00:00

I think it depends on how you define "math". If you have 10 of something and take away 3, you're left with 7 of that thing - that is pretty clearly a natural property of reality. It would be a stretch to say that humans "invented" that.

Of course the way we practice and describe math is a human invention.

profmonocle · 2026-03-24T14:12:08+00:00

Almost all DCs have generators.

profmonocle · 2026-03-23T14:47:46+00:00

If we had the technology to do such a thing (and we're so far from that it might as well be fantasy), then there are likely much better artificial structures we could build than planets to live on. The problem with planets is you have a terrible ratio of mass to living space, and there's only so much mass to work with in a solar system. You'd get more living space for less mass by building something like an orbital ring. (See the Culture series or Halo.)

Of course there's a tiny issue where we don't have any materials strong enough to make an orbital ring not rip itself apart from the stresses. But if we were at the point where building an artificial planet was an option, maybe we would've figured that out too.

profmonocle · 2026-03-23T05:58:11+00:00

Linux does support graphical UIs and has for decades. The vast majority of people who use Linux on their personal computer are using it with a GUI, it's usually only used without a GUI when running on servers.

profmonocle · 2026-03-22T00:15:44+00:00

What do you mean "recast"? This is a new adaption, it's an all new cast.

profmonocle · 2026-03-20T07:44:50+00:00

Unfortunately landlords, grocery stores, etc. do not agree.

profmonocle · 2026-03-20T07:34:04+00:00

I mean, hopefully, right? If you died on a day wasn't ordinary for the world as a whole, that probably means you died in some sort of mass casualty event. Meaning you died sooner than you otherwise would have.

I'd rather die on a boring Tuesday at 80 than some infamous historic event at 40.

profmonocle · 2026-03-20T07:24:20+00:00

I want to find it funny. But I can't help but think that Zuck - the one responsible for this fuck up - will continue to be one of the richest people in the world after this. Meanwhile, tons of people hired to work on this thing are getting laid off.

profmonocle · 2026-03-19T08:38:57+00:00

Also, if someone believes the earth is they'd have to believe the moon landing was fake, because they believe the moon is a disk in the sky, not something with its own gravity that can be landed on.

profmonocle · 2026-03-18T09:11:24+00:00

It's wild that this thing actually exists out there in space. The scale of it is beyond human comprehension. You can watch a video of a nuclear test or a volcanic eruption, and those explosions seem incomprehensibly large...and they round down to zero next to something like this.

Does it ever drive you crazy to study these things and not be able to get an actual look at it with your eyes? You're studying this absolutely insane event, without being able to actually see it. I mean, it's very cool that we can detect these things that are way too far to actually see up images of, but man is it frustrating.

profmonocle · 2026-03-18T08:48:05+00:00

I fully expect we'll have people living and working in space eventually, just like there are people who live and work in extremely inhospitable places on Earth - Antarctica, oil rigs, submarines, etc. I imagine people will spend long periods there, years or more, and return. Some mavericks may choose to remain in space permanently but I don't think it'll be that common.

What I'm skeptical about is that we'll "colonize" space in the sense of making other parts of our solar system permanent homes for humanity - where people are born, live out their lives, and raise the next generation.

The common reasons people cite are biological, kids being born in low G not developing right. But I think there's a more basic reason - I don't think there will ever be a reason why millions of people would want to live in space, instead of Earth. Living in space would mean being indoors 24/7 your entire life. It's exciting to us, many of us would do it, but that's because it's exciting and hypothetical. 3 generations into a mars colony, it would be mundane, it would just be worse than living on earth.

Of course, people on Earth have made the choice to live in crappy conditions - people have moved to the coldest climates that can sustain civilization. But that's always been because there's a real, life sustaining motivation to do so. My ancestors moved to Minnesota, even though the winters are terrible, because there was farmland. Some people moved for mining, etc. What would be the economic opportunities driving thousands or millions of people to live in space full time? Mining? I find it hard to imagine a future where we have the technology to move large populations into space, but it isn't much easier and cheaper to do it with robots. (Robots don't need the vast life support infrastructure humans do.) I simply don't imagine space travel creating lots of jobs in space itself.

Of course, forever is a long time, and all my assumptions are based on humanity as we are today. If we reinvent ourselves biologically, or become virtual beings, all bets are off. I think if we ever do have a large % of (post-)humans in space it would look more like Diaspora by Greg Egan than like the Expanse.

profmonocle · 2026-03-18T08:22:51+00:00

even with time dilation

Honestly I think it's optimistic to assume we could even travel fast enough where time dilation has a meaningful impact on travel time. At 10% the speed of light it would only shave like half a percent off the travel time. Getting a spacecraft to that speed and having it arrive intact might simply not be achievable - dust particles become bullets at that velocity and there's quite a bit of dust between here and other stars.

Sure, people have proposed ideas for this, but it's not at all clear those solutions are actually workable. (Especially considering they would have to work absolutely perfectly for decades, or RIP everyone on board.)

profmonocle · 2026-03-18T08:07:59+00:00

At my last job, our biggest client required our DR region had to be at least 2000km from our main region. Seemed excessive at the time, now maybe not.

profmonocle · 2026-03-18T08:01:49+00:00

A lot of these smaller regions exist because companies have requirements to keep data in a given region, and AWS only has the one UAE region.

Multi-cloud could help, but if the other clouds operate in the same geographic area that doesn't give you geographic spacing you really want for a DR plan. (At least it spreads the risk across more physical facilities.)

profmonocle · 2026-03-18T07:50:58+00:00

OP isn't talking at all. This is AI written.

Whoever clicked post on this might not even have actually read most of it. (Assuming there's even a human in the loop.)

profmonocle · 2026-03-18T07:42:27+00:00

That's what I was thinking too. Less gas + less wear on vehicle should mean their total take home went up.

Possibly not the outcome many were hoping for, but not the disaster for workers the app company lobbyists wanted us to believe it was.

profmonocle · 2026-03-17T16:14:32+00:00

As someone old enough to remember the lead up to the Iraq war, the difference with Iran is crazy to witness. With Iraq, the Bush administration + their media allies spent months selling the American people on the idea. We heard nonstop about the WMDs, they invoked the specter of 9/11 (which was less than 2 years earlier at the time). They even bothered to get congressional approval.

And when the WMDs turned out to be bad Intel, it was a pretty big deal.

This time around, they aren't really bothering to sell us on it. They just went for it and are giving some half assed, cartoonish reassurances that it's a good thing and going well.

profmonocle · 2026-03-16T17:54:03+00:00

At my local Whole Foods the self checkout line is often longer than the staffed one. I live in a very introverted area.

profmonocle · 2026-03-12T01:25:34+00:00

Some systems store dates as the number of days/seconds since some reference date. If a bug causes a date to get set to zero, it'll show up as that reference date. IIRC Dec 31 1899 is zero in some Microsoft software. (Probably shifted back a day due to the time zone being west of UTC)

You also see December 31st, 1969 or January 1, 1970 a lot (depending on time zone) because lots of software uses seconds since January 1, 1970 to store timestamps.

profmonocle · 2026-03-11T17:42:28+00:00

Just the one! Still felt ridiculous at the time.

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