Those are the ideas I was referencing as taking decades tbh. Technically a few, especially the laser sail, can potentially get to high enough fractions of lightspeed to get that noticable time dilation effect, but given that makes something that already costs a huge amount of energy, much more expensive than it already is, I’m not sure if you’d actually want to go to those speeds very often.
I mean, saying it would take half of forever with existing technology, when we do not have the technology to do it in the first place, seems a bit redundant. There are any number of hypothetical technologies for travel to relatively nearby stars that, while we don’t have them presently, at least do not violate physics and are more an issue of requiring a civilization of much larger scale than ours to afford to build them rather than one of if they’re physically possible.
An analogy I once saw was this: suppose you were to go back in time to meet a medieval blacksmith, and you show him the blueprints for a modern jetliner. You might, with a lot of explaining of the relevant physics and engineering behind all the parts, be able to convince the guy that the machine could work if constructed. But, he’d have no idea of the process for how many of the parts are made, or the materials they’re made from, and if you included all that information too, the whole process would be so expensive and the size of the economy back then so small that in all likelihood, not even the richest kingdom on earth in his day could possibly afford to actually build and operate one. However, if the blacksmith took all that information and concluded “this can never happen, it’s just too hard”, time would prove him wrong.
Terraforming would seem a bit unnecessary if you can send a crewed ship there. Manned interstellar travel, unless we’re wrong about the whole speed of light thing, is going to take decades at least to reach the very nearest stars (I’d imagine that it is more likely we’d go to those stars first, and only reach Trappist when people from those stars later launch their own ships, until eventually the outer edge of settled space reaches 40ly).
That implies that, if you can send some colony ship to another star, you necessarily have the technology to build a space habitat that can sustain large numbers of humans in sufficient comfort to run a small civilization and all relevant industry, self-sufficiently using only the materials available in space from asteroids and such as inputs. You have this tech first, because the colony ship is itself just one or more of these habitats, on top of some massive propulsion system.
As such, why even bother with terraforming planets? That’s a process that may potentially take millennia to truly finish, longer than it took your ship to even get there with some of the possible propulsion options, will only be viable on a fraction of worlds, and will still get you a place that probably does not have an earth like day or gravity or any number of other differences. You would then be back in the bottom of a gravity well, which requires a ton of energy expenditure to get back into space again. Why not instead, find some asteroids and comets in your target system, there’s probably going to be some around somewhere if our solar system is any indication, and build more of those habitats as needed.
I mean, it’s kinda early to say that elections are never happening when the previous government has only just fallen.
Does anyone know if canned cat foods tend to be raw or cooked? I dont use this brand, but one of my cats has to eat a particular prescription diet for health reasons, and the limited options I have all are canned and contain some chicken from what I can see, this getting into the cat food supply and being seemingly so lethal to cats has me concerned about him.
Does divorce by itself even lower the birthrate though? Intuitively, one might suspect that a couple that were no longer interested in eachother probably isn’t having many children, compared to if those people were to pair off again with new partners?
You can find plenty of weird furry fetish art on the fediverse too if you find the right instances, that’s just an internet thing.
Antimatter does not replicate the way microbes do to be fair. It’s dangerous to handle in large enough amounts obviously, be we don’t have the energy to produce enough to create a serious danger nor the technology to store that amount at once.
To be fair, while I seriously suspect Trump’s stance towards Gaza will probably be worse than Kamala’s would have been, He isnt exactly in office yet, so his fault in this is at most limited to Israel anticipating that he probably wont do anything when he is. Had Kamala won, what is happening today would likely be largely the same.
The whole “either you hate the Palestinians or you hate the Jews” narrative that pops up whenever Israel does something wrong is part of the problem. The government of Israel uses its demographics as something of a shield from criticism, by stating that it is the Jewish state, and thus that to accuse them of wrongdoing is to be antisemitic. But it is not so; not everyone who is Jewish agrees with or desires what Israel is doing, they cant, no matter how many they might bring on board, because it is an ethnic and religious identity that includes some, like children, who aren’t even able to understand and agree to it. The actions of Israel are not the actions of Jewish people as a whole, and they never will be, because ethnic groups simply do not work that way. If anyone is being antisemitic here, it is the Israeli state itself, for attempting to tie their very real atrocities to Jewish people in order to coerce people into ignoring them. Its like the rhetorical equivalent of a criminal taking a hostage in order to deter arrest.
To be fair, I’m not sure if “just arrest anyone convenient and frame them”, is entirely in the wealthy’s interest here. Making an example is one thing, sure, but if you do that and dont get the guy that actually did it, then you have a guy out there who has proven themselves willing to go out and assassinate CEOs, who may well decide to do it again. If you do have the means to catch that guy, then what motivation is there to not just send him through the court system rather than framing someone else? Less risk of a frame up being discovered and sparking even more resentment if you have at least some genuine evidence, after all.
I think that message was a sort of sarcastic way of getting around a “dont talk about jury nullification” rule, in that saying “we cant talk about x”, while making it very clear what x is, prompts people unfamiliar with x to go look it up
If the holy wine (I forget the proper term for it) is supposed to be the blood of Jesus, does that imply that if you concentrate that wine and then run an engine off it, you have a Jesus fueled car?
He’s an old man. Unless anti-aging research unexpectedly advances several orders of magnitude faster than its been doing in the next few years, he’ll be leaving office one way or another.
Tbf, being with a violently aggressive person in a tight enclosed space is still risky regardless
Wait, it’s been since high school that I read that book admittedly, but wasn’t it kinda reversed, where concepts of demons are in universe subconsciously inspired by the appearance of the aliens, rather than the aliens themselves being demons?
from the sound of it, no, the article suggests that someone probably commanded them to fire back in the 70s while the thing still worked, and its just unclear when exactly this was and who did it.
hypothetically, if they do stop water fluoridation, is it possible/practical to add the proper amount to one’s own water? or would getting the dose right and the required ingredients be dangerous? Or would just using a bit more toothpaste give enough of the effect to make such a thing not worth it anyway?
Isnt this the exact reason why there was such concern over the idea of Threads federating with the fediverse at large?
Honestly, Ive come to think that there is truly no such thing as sarcasm so blatant as for everyone to get that it is sarcasm without being told.