We can’t even come together to wear a peice of cloth to slow the spread of a virus.
The cloth does nothing to stop the virus but also completely cuts off oxygen to your brain.
No I will not explain. It’s your job to educate yourself by watching more Jordan Peterson videos.
I know it’s stupid but /s really should be mandatory if you arennot serious. Because there are too many prople that are
Poe’s law strikes again
Just stopping by to say that I understood the obvious sarcasm/joke
Goddamnit, stop making me click the downvote button twice!
Did you get the special chloroform-infused masks? I hear they’re the only ones that do the job properly.
Sir, I’m trying to survive a pandemic not learn how to be a lobster.
Don’t make me tap the sign…
I hope you’re a troll. That’s just next level stupidity to be real.
And yet it is…
Whenever I dare to hope about the lofty, admirable star trek future, I remember that space is completely unforgiving and we just aren’t up to the task for anything more than a token selfie by the best dozen humans we can possibly produce with great effort and training.
As a species, we aren’t going to spread out there. Still too primitive, and probably too self-destructive to make it out of this phase of evolution. This might be one of those great filters scientists postulate as to why there aren’t signals from innumerable civilizations out there.
We aren’t even capable of caring for one another, let alone the EASIEST to maintain, most naturally human friendly habitat we would ever encounter in the cosmos as we evolved to fit it. No airlocks, the air/water/waste recycling was already fully automated, all we had to do was not recklessly grow/metastasize to the point we strain the absolutely massive system out of greed and glut, and stop carelessly shitting where we sleep. We all know how that’s been going since we figured out how to make dead animal poison rocket us accross town.
Master space? Master planetary defense? We can’t even defend this world from our own habitual consumerism. We’ll be lucky if we aren’t scattered tribes living near the old hardened structures of the before times for emergency shelter from the new normal weather events in a hundred years. We’re already starting to argue over the resources it’s taking to rebuild population centers from the current new normal. We have played pretend we were since human civilization began, but we are NOT and never have been this world’s owners or masters, and we are still very much its subject.
And Reminder, what we’re doing and have been doing in decades won’t be undone for millions of years. The Earth is a self-correcting system, and the damage we’re doing is inconsequential to its 3.8 billion year old, beautiful story of life growing out of every crevice, just not on a timescale humans can benefit from or even truly appreciate.
Tbf, in order for humanity to get where they’re at in the Star Trek timeline they had to go through WWIII: Nuclear edition
Covid kind of disillusioned me to the whole “all humanity needs is a common enemy/suffering to get right” concept.
Iirc, it wasn’t just that as far as Star Trek goes. Iirc, most world governments and economic systems were destroyed, humanity was a mere fraction of its peak population. Humanity literally physically came together because it was necessary to rebuild.
Its one thing to have a common enemy/suffering without changing anything else as far as governments and social systems goes. It’s completely different when you not only have the enemy/suffering but to also need to literally rebuild everything from scratch
Humanity literally physically came together because it was necessary to rebuild.
I’m pretty sure that didn’t really happen until after the Vulcans showed up, TBH.
From Memory Alpha:
During the 2060s, Cochrane and his team of engineers began developing the warp drive. (Star Trek: First Contact) The challenge of inventing warp theory took Cochrane an extremely long time. (ENT: “Anomaly (ENT)”) In 2061, he was responsible for Earth’s first successful demonstration of light speed propulsion, though his work was far from complete. (VOY: “Friendship One”; ENT: “In a Mirror, Darkly, Part II” library computer file) His primary motivation for commencing warp technology was financial gain in the devastated, poverty-stricken America that existed in the wake of the Third World War.
He finally built Earth’s first warp ship, the Phoenix, in the hope its success would prove profitable and allow him to retire to a tropical island filled with naked women. A historical irony was that, contrary to the fact he went on to use the Phoenix to inaugurate an era of peace, Cochrane incorporated a weapon of mass destruction into its design; he constructed the Phoenix in a silo on a missile complex and used a Titan II missile as his launch vehicle.
(WWIII ended in 2053; First Contact was on 5 April 2063)
Ah yea it looks like I was forgetting large parts, either way I think it still reinforces my main point, we will probably go through a lot more pain and suffering before we can even come close to Star Treks timeline
The Bell Riots (and Irish reunification) are due in a few months.
I remember that space is completely unforgiving and we just aren’t up to the task for anything more than a token selfie
“Wow, rude!” – Carl Sagan, probably
As a species, we aren’t going to spread out there.
Well not with that attitude!
Yeah, space is hard and yeah mistakes have been made along the way. But things are definitely changing. Reusable rockets are nearly here… Between spaceX, rocket lab and stoke aerospace, there is real potential for these rockets to work. Hell, SpaceX has already conducted a successful orbital test flight.
With reusable rockets we’ll start to see a drastic reduction in the cost to get to orbit, probably by two orders of magnitude, but possibly even more. With the cost down people will reassess the value of space and the resources available there. In other words, people will start doing more in space, and getting more from space. Resource collection, refining and specialized manufacturing are three most likely industries to start expanding into space. Once there is work to be done there it will begin to make sense for people to live there.
As a species, we aren’t going to spread out there.
Not today, no. But within my lifetime, I expect we will. Remember, change is usually slow and this would constitute the most profound change in human history.
We aren’t even capable of caring for one another, let alone the EASIEST to maintain, most naturally human friendly habitat we would ever encounter in the cosmos as we evolved to fit it.
I would argue that having 8 billion people in the same place makes earth the hardest place to live in some ways.
One of the options that space habitats would allow for is smaller communities. What if you lived in a space station with roughly the population of a city? Your community wouldn’t necessarily need to be affiliated with other communities to make up a “country”, but it could be. Your community would have that option. And if the community is not geographically connected to the other members of its nation, there’s no reason they couldn’t change their mind, join a different country if you’re views seem better aligned. For the first time humans would have opt-in governance.
Would opt-in governance lead to a more stable society? Would not being stuck geographically near communities with opposing views lead to less violent aggression? I don’t know, but I hope so.
Congress is making laws about bathrooms and genitals like a bunch of 6th graders running a minecraft server. Of course we can’t handle fucking asteroid defense.
It reminds me of how tech companies are all scrambling to use AI. There was a funny article recently where the author pointed out that these companies are struggling to do very basic things, so the idea that they could somehow tackle AI in a way that’s useful and profitable is silly.
Maybe the 10 commandments posted in every Louisiana classroom will stop the asteroids.
Real talk, an asteroid wiping us out would only expedite the inevitable. If we could pull together and deflect an asteroid, there’s hope. If not, we failed the test and die with the consequences. But we don’t need the asteroid to fail this test. We’re making great strides towards destroying our home with home field advantage.
Gotta give it to humanity, though. We’re damn good at ruining everything we touch.
I don’t think we ruin everything… We’re also the best around at improving things, certainly improving our environments.
I know it’s easy to be pessimistic about these things, but humans are evolutionary badasses. We’re capable of amazing things. I wouldn’t count us out just yet.
Besides we haven’t really ruined anything. We haven’t done any damage to the earth that won’t heal eventually. The earth has seen many heating and cooling cycles and plenty of mass extinctions before and it will again (with or without humans).
but humans are evolutionary badasses
How so?
How many predators can take down prey 50 times their size? How many species can thrive in tundra, jungles, plains, forests, mountains and deserts? How many species can be found on every continent? How many species figured out how to fly despite never developing wings? How many species developed hundreds of distinct methods of communication? How many species have been to the moon?
Humans are fucking badass…
How many predators can take down prey 50 times their size?
Ants and a couple of Insects I guess. Also Bacteria and Viruses.
How many species can thrive in tundra, jungles, plains, forests, mountains and deserts?
Well, obviously also most Bacteria. If we are speaking more sentient live then the answer is: mot of them. Birds, Mammals, Insects. It might take a generation or 10 to get them adopted to their new envirment, but almost every species. Is able to adopt to their evolutoany niche.
How many species can be found on every continent?
Most of them?
How many species figured out how to fly despite never developing wings?
Technology. Yes, that’s a human thing at last, at least at the level we use it.
How many species developed hundreds of distinct methods of communication
Various species have methods of communicating, from bees dancing to each other to whales having distinct regional dialects. Yes, humans have added some complexity to it by introducing technology, but that’s realy what it comes down to. Technology.
How many species have been to the moon?
Technology, once more.
So your point is that humans have learned to use technology, therefor they are badass.
I disagree. We are living in an absolut singularity tight now. Humans have learned to use finate resources (oil for example) to amplify the energy that we have at our hands. A single humans beeing today can use energy that would be equal to thousands of men’s work every day.
Since we are drawing on finate resources there are two ways how this will go: we will learn to exploit other, less finate sources of energy (say, fusion) and the groth path will continue (to the stars, eventually). Or we will run out of energy or ruin the livable world by doing so and will fall back to an earlier level of development. Since most of the resources needed are used up we will not be able clime back up. At this moment we are on the second of those paths.
And in our way in getting here we have started the sixt mass extinction, accidentaly started turning the climate into something less sustainable for humans and polluted every single space on this planet, including areas like the deep ocean that we have never even touched physically.
Humans are not badass, in my opinion. We are fucking cancer.
Um, I think you’re mistaking species with kingdom.
“Birds” are not a species, “mammals” are not a species. I don’t think viruses are even described in terms of species because they don’t reproduce sexually. I think you’ll find that when you actually consider species, most of my points hold.
Various species have methods of communicating, from bees dancing to each other to whales having distinct regional dialects. Yes, humans have added some complexity to it by introducing technology, but that’s realy what it comes down to. Technology.
Yes, many species have some rudimentary way of communicating some kinds of information. But obviously bee dances don’t compare to any human language, of which there are literally hundreds. A bee for instance has no way to express appreciation or derision for the English language. My whole point here was that humans, on hundreds of distinct occasions, developed languages capable of conveying complex ideas. No other species has developed a language half as capable as any of ours.
Rather than picking the rest of that post apart, I’m just going to stop here. It’s pretty self evident that humans are impressive as hell. Denying that is… pretty dumb, and purely rhetorical.
As a side note, don’t get too excited about fusion, it’s largely a dead end. I expect it will only be really useful in niche applications (like spacecraft). It will be far more expensive than nuclear fision and not really offer any benefits besides abundance of fuel. There’s still a huge radioactive waste problem. On the other hand, the sun provides all the energy we’ll ever need, and we’re getting better at collecting it. I’m really not concerned about increasing energy demands.
“Sustaining the space mission, disaster preparedness, and communications efforts across a 14-year timeline would be challenging due to budget cycles, changes in political leadership, personnel, and ever-changing world events,” the report says.
First administration: “We must do something about the asteroid. I’ve started a plan to divert it, but it’ll take several years.”
Second administration: “The asteroid is a corrupt globalist conspiracy. We never needed to divert asteroids in the past, why do we supposedly need to spend all your hard-earned tax dollars on this all of a sudden? I will prove my anti-elitist attitudes by cancelling the asteroid program as soon as I take office.”
Third administration: “Yes we recognize that the asteroid is a threat, but as we saw last time there’s just too much political resistance to solving it. Let’s focus on other priorities that we can solve.”
Yea that and panic at the end !
We’ve already solved this. We just need to train a team of dysfunctional oil drillers to send up to the asteroid.
Achievement unlocked: discovering the Great Filter.
Don’t Look Up!
That’s okay, humanity had s good run. I imagine we’ll have extinctified ourselves way before a space rock could do it. A+ for trying though.
We’d rather bomb each other than save the planet.
Sorry don’t you mean let’s fund AI?
/s
I’m not sure I learned anything new other than I want to play the tabletop game they created.
Half the population would believe the asteroid is a hoax spread by the [insert ethnic or religious group here].
No shit.
