This universe being unfriendly to interstellar and especially intergalactic travel would seriously hamper a galactic civilization, and thus be less likely for us to notice them.
There might be hundreds of civilizations out there, each having only expanded to a few dozen stars, not caring to go further. Even the makeup of the interstellar medium might be incredibly dangerous, basically necessitating generation ships to cross. Large scale expansion might simply be too hard.
Don’t forget plastics and pesticides! Those get everywhere, and many are bioavailable by design.
Kelp farms? Domesticated bamboo? We need large areas of land to grow food anyway, we just skipped the charcoal agriculture step. Lathes and the three plate method are the real heroes of industry any way.
A slower ascension into the computing age could mean a more stable set of cultures and a more uniform global situation to avoid anthropogenic filters. Bright candles and all that.
It might have something to do with the available elements.
We live in a population I star system, full of crap spewed out from long dead stars. Perhaps it is exactly this crap (like copper, iron, nickle, manganese, and possibly the bulk of carbon and nitrogen) that allow life to develop with enough agility to survive mass extiction events with any kind of complexity.
Or perhaps it’s exactly those mass extiction events that have allowed enough breathing room for new paradigms to take hold. Maybe our 5-7 mass extictions that didn’t end life entirely are exactly what is needed to prevent stagnation. We just happen to be on the edge of dead and too slow.
How do you expect cops and unfranchised criminals to circumvent a reality bender? I’d be more worried about the reasonable uses for guns, like flare guns, PAFS, harpoon guns, nail guns, and so on.
Not to mention that a lack of guns just means nightsticks and lead pipes become popular again.
Mars used to be B tier, but it really fell off after the hypertsunami.
Pluto is here, so minor planets count. That leaves at least Eris, Haumea, Makemake, Gonggong, Quaoar, Sedna, Ceres, Orcus, and Salacia as vacation candidates.
There are 19 more planetary-mass moons to consider as well, if orbital designation isn’t important to your stay. (I’d say it’s a bonus, as you can see some sick eclipses.)
DDG is bing though, is it not?
The post is arguing that a lack of evidence for one option should not justify belief in a different option. An absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.
The funny part is how how this gets twisted into attacking people. If your belief is so core as to becomes part of your identity, then that belief being wrong becomes a personal attack, and anyone looking for the truth becomes an enemy.
If saying “I don’t know” threatens your belief you have a problem with reality, and once you start ignoring reality your can justify nearly anything to yourself.
The post isn’t dunking on spiritualism, just the claim that anything about it can be known without evidence. It always comes back to evidence.
Factory grow, yes yes, much grow yes!
Some cays are definitely a bit higher on the brain utilization. My close relatives and I have seen cats ask for things, specifically do things they know piss you off in front of you, learn and play fetch, tattle on humans, attack door-to-door salesmen that were getting too pushy, and use a mirror to examine themselves. There’s also stories of cats that got help from several miles away, woke up their humans when a fire started, chased bears off, comforted the dying specifically in their last week, and more than one that could rather reliably smell cancer.
And then there are those cats that are surprised when their whiskers are still there! XD
So actual hunan downvote bots do exists. I’ve always wondered but never had the opportunity to check.
Ui is pretty good, bloatware is pretty bad. Not obtrusive exactly, but invasive and not useful.
Specifically, Creator Deity Atheist, I guess? Especially when the line between superhuman and minor deity is basically a jump rope, a strict definition of theist probably needs a higher standard; not just supernatural being, but super-dimensional?
Maybe a different usage of Atheist is used here, closer to Anti-theist. A belief that gods exist, but they’re not worth worshipping, or no being worth worshipping exists.
Russia is 12th in Uranium exports, with 0.001% of global exports. Kazakhstan is first at 59%, but there’s Canada with 30%, France with 8%, and the US with 2%. There’s plenty of politically easy Uranium, especially if people start buying it over Kazakhstan.
India, Brazil, Australia, and the US are also slated to have the most Thorium resources, which could be a more significant nuclear fuel with modern and near-modern reactors.
If that’s what a “talk” to plants drink does, I’d love to get a “talk” to humans drink. Imagine the psychology experiments I could set up if I could understand the subconscious pheromone, posture, subvocal, and other various poorly understood methods of communication!
Gonggong is named after a Chinese water god, and it does indeed have it’s own ice. It’s also red, covered in thiolins like Pluto, but even moreso. There’s also likely a thin methane exosphere, leaving methane frost on windows.
Gonggong is very far out, moving between 33 and 101 AU over it’s 554 year orbit. It orbits at a 30° inclination, so telescopes would pick up some interesting shots of the other planets poles.
The 1/30 g gravity is nothing special, plenty to jump around in, but enough to not fly away easily. It’s slightly flattened by it’s rotation, which is a nice 22 hours, much slower than other trans-neptunian bodies. This slow rotation is caused by tidal forces between it and it’s moon Xiangilu.
Xiangilu is named for Gonggong’s minister, a nine headed venomous snake monster. It orbits every 25 days, nearly exactly a month like Earth’s moon, but in an eccentric orbit, changing size throut the month. Gonggong has a polar orientation like Uranus as well, leaving Xiangilu a constant half-moon in the dim sky half the year. Sadly eclipses would be very rare.
The trip out there is rather long, but once there it seems quite unique and cozy.