wdym non-personified, it's this guy
V0ldek
joined 2 years ago
I like ‘Star Wars’ way better. I’m a capitalist. ‘Star Wars’ is the capitalist show. ‘Star Trek’ is the communist one. There is no money in ‘Star Trek’ because you just have the transporter machine that can make anything you need. The whole plot of ‘Star Wars’ starts with Han Solo having this debt that he owes and so the plot in ‘Star Wars’ is driven by money [~Peter Thiel]
Your Honor, my client might've murdered mr. Thiel with a Lego model of a Star Destroyer, but as witnessed by Exhibit A he acted in good faith and as what can only be described as service to the community. We move for full acquittal.
the speed of light is not something you can hand-wave away
sorry i just woke up at 4am and realised that bitcoin actually fixes this so i retract my fud
Jesus, that math crankery post is mind-boggling.
SCSPL, which stands for Self-Configuring Self-Processing Language, is just a totally intrinsic, i.e. completely self-contained, language that is comprehensively and coherently (self-distributively) self-descriptive
Okay but is it also self-fuckable in the sense of being able to go fuck itself?
at the distributed, Lorentz-invariant conspansion rate c, a time-space conversion factor already familiar as the speed of light in vacuo
You just said "at the speed of light", but while doing a backflip and taking a shit mid-air.
Dude made "you're holding it wrong" into a philosophy, impressive.
The essay is great, but I'd like to stop on this for a second:
the conclusion I draw as a science fiction writer is that if interstellar colonization ever happens, it will not follow the pattern of historical colonization drives that are followed by mass emigration and trade between the colonies and the old home soil.
Okay, but we don't need that much of a thought experiment to get there. Gliese 832 c is 16 light years away. That means that even if we figured out every technological issue with calling a colony there via Skype, we would have a message latency of 32 years. Can you fucking imagine negotiating a trade treaty where each round of negotiations takes THIRTY-TWO YEARS? How many Earth governments even remain stably in power for 32 years? Of course transporting the actual trade goods would take even longer. So, you negotiate a treaty over three generations of human beings, and then get the actual goods delivered in, optimistically, a few centuries. We're so good at planning things in advance that climate change will wipe us out in like 50 years, good luck running a trade operation where a freight you ordered will be delivered to your great-great-grandchildren.
With colonisation at best you're gonna get a bunch of disorganised human clusters that will grow culturally and ideologically apart really quick. It's obvious on its face that this wouldn't be a somehow coherent society. Again, how do you plan to organise a government structure where a single memo takes THIRTY-TWO YEARS to be acknowledged? Did anyone in TESCREAL ever grapple with the fact that our globalisation age was brought forth thanks to near-instantenous communications, and that's flat out impossible on an interstellar scale? Like, the speed of light is not something you can hand-wave away, it's a physical barrier to information.
what I'm trying to get across is quite simply that, in the absence of technology indistinguishable from magic (...) interstellar travel for human beings is near-as-dammit a non-starter
"Ha, you see, that's your problem right there", Yud exclaimed, "simply invoke technology indistinguishable from magic! Nanomachines, away we go!"
Elon, that you?
From the defense lawyer's statement (after Molly White) :
Really, he's an awkward math nerd. He thinks in probabilities about everything. He speaks in expected value calculations. He loves video games and veganism (...)
Those are aggravating circumstances. If I'm the judge that's +10yrs just for "he speaks in EV calculations".
[citation needed]