Grrl Power #857 – The Genosuicide Pool
It has been pointed out that Cora and Dabbler are being very careful about technological pollution with the leg, or at least the incubator it’s floating in, while at the same time, Cora granted some pretty high tech glasses to Sydney.
Cora could probably defend that if she really wanted to. The targeting function of the glasses could probably be replicated with our tech. It’d be more cumbersome, certainly, but with some good software and a high res CCD chip, I bet it could work. The comm function is also nothing special, really. Frix didn’t send his message from deep space straight to the glasses. Cora left a hyperspace relay, not quite in Earth orbit, but close enough to Earth to be functional, while not being somewhere we’re going to bump into on our way to Mars.
We’re further from the one way screen inside the glasses, though letting us have the schematics for that probably won’t directly endanger the global ecosystem. The power source for the glasses that allows it to do all that stuff is a different matter. That’s the kind of stuff that can cause technological upheaval. Every portable device designed these days starts around the battery, because that’s the thing that takes up a ton of space and contributes a lot of weight. If we had a fuel cell that could fit in the ear hook thingy on a pair of glasses, it would be a huge leap, especially if it could scale. If we suddenly had an electric car that could travel 10,000 miles off a power source the size of a VHS tape, there would be massive economic consequences.
Sylv isn’t referring to an incident on Earth, but a well known near miss in the intergalactic community. It was one of those cases where the Xevoarchy (the Space UN) debated whether or not to intercede with a species struggling with a case of self extinction. You’d think it’d be a simple thing to want to swoop in and save a species, but imagine making that decision about humanity during the height of the Cold War. At least a century or two from achieving extra solar system space travel, hoarding nuclear weapons, an endless history of war and superstition and racism and socio-economic abuses, etc, etc, ad nauseum, etc.
Now imagine the representative of your race needing to vote to commit a corvette from your navy to swing by a planet and help sort themselves out while your constituents are calling to spend resources on more domestic matters. Again, it’s nice to think everyone would be all “let’s help and make the universe a better place” but the reality is that some people are selfish and short sighted and ideologically compromised, so the galaxy at large is only a slightly better place than most individual inhabited planets.
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Wait, seriously?
NONE of them put money on “ascendant super-race wipes out humanity”? I mean, supers, come ON!?
Or even “Maxima goes nuts and cracks the world”?? I mean, they’ve SEEN her powers!
What about “Uncontrolled singularity generation” (nod to Magellan)? “Out-of-control death hex”? “Massive Time-travel paradox”? “Krona”, fer chrissakes??
“Too much alien sex tourism leads to population crash”? Nah, that’s just silly…
I would Totally be down for an apocalyptic orgy.
Go out with a bang.
Or in that case, a LOT of bangs.
Well Rome didn’t fall in a day.
Ah yes the gang bang of Oblivion. Buy your ticket now
Death by Snu Snu…on a planetary scale.
Ok Nextgener identified as a Dabbler avatar.
I for one welcome our new cyber overlords….
all hail The Basilisk!
We could use Skynet at this point.
All hail the Basilisk!
The feeling I got is that they are rooting for stuff directly related to their areas of expertise (doctor goes with superbug, heavy gunner goes with climate change, navigator goes with AI).
I like the idea that at a certain level of heavy gunner, you have to seriously think about how your actions affect climate change
That’s… a lot of dakka. Or maybe some maniac built a ship-mounted Gatling that uses rounds intended for the Davy Crockett handheld nuke system.
Well, there’s only so much room on one page. :)
I think that you are all underestimating the human race…. WE CAN DO THEM ALL AT ONCE! We are nothing if not a race dedicated to Overkill!
Heck, my family motto is, “Nihil excedit, sicut excess”.
Also known as: There is not enough kill in overkill
Then we can undo all of them at once, leading to the collapse of every single betting pool.
https://imgur.com/gallery/wpZ4w
Look at Moya on Farscape. It was John that decided they should pull a Peacekeeper defense shield off a derelict station and hook it onto a living starship so it had shields.
And what happened?
The ship getting shot made everyone’s minds switch bodies.
“There’s no such thing as overkill, precisely because there IS such a thing as underkill.”
~Me
You need this:
https://schlockmercenary.fandom.com/wiki/The_Seventy_Maxims_of_Maximally_Effective_Mercenaries
Maxim 37: There is no overkill. There is “open fire” and “reload.”
Spike: “ I think it’s just enough kill”
1. Pillage, then burn.
2. A Sergeant in motion outranks a Lieutenant who doesn’t know what’s going on.
3. An ordnance technician at a dead run outranks everybody.
4. Close air support covereth a multitude of sins.
5. Close air support and friendly fire should be easier to tell apart.
6. If violence wasn’t your last resort, you failed to resort to enough of it.
7. If the food is good enough, the grunts will stop complaining about the incoming fire.
8. Mockery and derision have their place. Usually, it’s on the far side of the airlock.
“It’s not overkill if the enemy isn’t dead.”
If You can’t manage “overkill”, you aren’t trying hard enough.
The humans will take themselves out… by the Flat Earth Society!
Aliens are proof of life on other worlds, and bring their own excess evidence towards Round Earth.
Since the conspirators can’t raise money with such damning evidence against them, the aliens have to be wiped off the face of the Earth and all evidence and memory of them erased. However, open warfare against ARC is a bad move, and making a device that erases memories is too slow. A virus that targets recent memory is more efficient and self-spreading. But it will be too good at its job, removing all memories of affected humans. And since the heads of Flat Earth are also behind Anti-Vax movements, they didn’t think to inoculate themselves or their followers.
There is a self-evident proof that the earth is not flat. The mere existence of cats proves it. If the earth were flat, cats would have pushed everything off of it ages ago.
But the earth is (locally) flat. I know so because I look at it every day, and I see it flat.
I despise the recent whole alien angle of the comic. “We’re taking your stuff but you’re too primitive to have ours”, “Oh wait, here’s some for my new human fuckbuddy. Rest of you can still suck it though”, “I’m human but humanity has no authority over me or my spiffy genemods”, “You leveled a ship but we’re keeping most of the reward”, “You’re all gonna die HAHAHAHA and we could stop it but we ain’t gonna!”
Fuck’em all.
Say Hello to the Smug Aliens: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OiAW5mg_wCc
I admit, I was hoping that link would be these smug aliens.
I’d be smug too, if I could just say the word “sexy” and a sexy, long legged woman in an incredibly short skit would walk into my office. (timestamp 0:14)
I’ve watched a pile of Isaac Arthur’s videos. I find him to be vastly overoptimistic in his estimation of how difficult it will/would be for humanity to build large scale space structures. Barring that huge flaw, his videos are entertaining, fairly well thought out, and don’t stray from known physics except when speculating about things such as “warp” drives etc.
I do have to agree there. It’s not just smug aliens, it’s the trope “can’t argue with elves.” It’s why so many of us agreed with the “arrogant military guy” who didn’t simply accept that Cora was telling the truth and should be allowed to take the salvaged ship. And why so many of us think that Deus seems like more of a good guy than a villain.
I mean this mentality is exactly why humans are such loose cannons. The aliens have good reasons for what they do but we’re just like “nah” and go do our own thing regardless.
Granted, trying to prevent us from achieving even exchange with that downed Fel ship was a pretty dumbass move by the negotiator. You’d think they’d know doing that would just make the humans even more defiant. If nothing else the human side should’ve gotten some kind of reward for helping the galaxy get rid of a scourge.
Yeah I mean, would it have been so difficult to give a rough equivalent in titanium and rare earth elements and the likes in return for the spaceship? Like “Sorry but obtaining that technology would likely lead to a fatal collapse of your global economy, but since you did good here’s a few tons of stuff we can extract by the million ton through having our tech munch entire asteroids at a time, which we know you could really use.
Since a large portion of the Earth’s “rare earth element” deposits are in China-controlled territory, the US would absolutely LOVE to get a ton of each in exchange for the high-tech spaceship that’s illegal for them to keep.
That said I think I prefer the Deathworlders’ fic approach to galactic society: A body of assembled governments of established FTL civilizations that will happily give a package of ‘safe’ tech to any new FTL race while forbidding the truly economy-breaking stuff like nanofactories (aka Star Trek Replicators) until they design their own.
Actually there’s just as much of the stuff in the English speaking world but the extraction wastes are nasty and we’re all NIMBY.
^^ This
It’s pretty funny in a dark sense. We’re too lazy to come up with a better way to extract rare earths so we’re like “eh let the authoritarians poison their people, they don’t give a fk anyway.”
https://pubs.usgs.gov/periodicals/mcs2020/mcs2020-rare-earths.pdf
Appendix C is on page 199:
https://pubs.usgs.gov/periodicals/mcs2020/mcs2020.pdf
I’m a bit surprised there are no post-scarcity or machine life civilizations out there. Sure, they might or might not choose to interfere with lower civilizations, but lack of resources simply isn’t a problem.
I’m sure everyone here is familiar with the post-scarcity SciFi classic…
“Business As Usual, During Alterations,” written by Ralph Williams
Who? (Yeah, I’ve wikipediaed it, but sorry, I don’t remember reading it or hearing of it before.)
The audience here is probably wide enough there aren’t many books other than maybe The Bible that *everyone* is familiar with. Also, there’s probably some disagreement about which book I just referred to.
Cora mentions ‘super-advanced’ civs in Panel 2 of this comic, that probably fit that category. Grrl Power future tech seems to operate on the traditional (in classic Sci-Fi) assumption that post-scarcity is possible only far past FTL tech, leaving civilizations plenty of time to ‘fap about’ with space empires and such. We haven’t seen any examples of mind-uploading (although there are machine intelligences), so achieving post-scarcity via the singularity doesn’t seem to have happened much here.
Personally, I feel like a society that reached post-scarcity would probably have a major tech surge within a generation.
I mean, for a bit, most people would relax and chill out. Getting up to that point requires a lot of anxiety and strife. But once you hit that point, stuff suddenly isn’t that pressing any longer.
And then your kids start asking, “Why?” And eventually you have to say, “I don’t know.” And they ask, “Why?”
And then it hits you. The reason’s gone. Without scarcity, anyone with sufficient mental aptitude can go into research. So the world goes from having most people in service industries to most people just relaxing to most people researching in about a generation’s time.
Research is certainly not for everyone, and a lot of those people will be researching things that don’t matter to anyone else. That’s fine. Those aren’t the people I’m really focused on. It’s all of the geniuses who had been kept down by the world before because they were different and scary. For some, those differences were just the way they talked, while for others, they’re about how the people looked, or walked, or whatever. It doesn’t matter.
What matters is, all research, funded.
Well, at least all research that isn’t strictly prohibited. People trying to do things that everybody feels is highly immoral will still get blocked. But regardless of what those highly immoral things are, a society that gets to this point will have enough things that are open to study that this will be the beginnings of a research bonanza.
Immorality is just a function of social development. Things are immoral because we need a way to define sensibility for our less learned. Post-scarcity, morality is replaced by knowledge of consequence.
Like the nuclear MAD but on a much smaller scale. If you understood that wiping out an ant nest might result in the collapse of your local ecosystem, would you so readily do it just because they’re mucking up your lawn? Probably not. Now say you had actual data in front of you showing that the local bird population is starving… I mean it gets pretty granular. Eventually you’re out there moving an anthill so it doesn’t hurt the ecosystem.
Going back to humans, murder is a problem because when people die, they stay dead. Now say decapitation results in a 1-minute interruption of your physical function. You yell over the fence “dammit bob, stop that” and go back to pruning flowers.
If crime doesn’t achieve any goal, then what’s the point? 99% of modern criminals would go be productive because there’s no point hurting others anymore. For the 1% who are deranged – post-scarcity. That means they can choose to sit down and fix their worldviews without the pressures of society building with each passing minute. And for those far beyond the pale, what’s a little neuroengineering? A dysfunctional brain is agony to those who suffer from mental illness; why not lend them a hand? If they choose death, oh well. They take themselves out of the gene pool and society continues to improve.
No science will be immoral because science’s immorality rests on the basis of social impact. If there’s no social impact, then what’s the harm of experimenting on a few clones?
Ah – are the sentient property? Yes, of course. Everyone is a thing and any thing can be owned. We see that as immoral because a society of scarcity has an inbuilt need to exploit ownership. In a post-scarcity society, your clone is your property, since it’s literally a copy of you after all.
Owning other humans? Only if they consent; and of course, ownership would probably rescind after a time. I mean, maybe someone wants to be a pet for a while. Some people are weird – and the only thing that really matters in a post-scarcity society is consent.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2003/dec/04/germany.lukeharding
I think you’re partly right about many offenders who are only offenders because the system won’t give them what they need any other way, but you are also wrong to the extent that some people give off on being assholes and supported by resources they would escalate.
Post-scarcity would result in widespread depression for the same reason retirement does. This is just as well since it would mitigate the population boom that will accompany it.
Most people are pretty useless. If they do anything with spare time it’s get into trouble. Even the clever ones will do foolish things like build self-replicating Von Neuman machines. The really smart ones will figure out longevity, and then there will be a war to prevent the stupid fast-breeders from getting it.
But that’s exactly my point. Without scarcity those assholes can be themselves and get themselves offed. The whole point of non-scarcity is that the smart people can be like “sod this I’m out” and fly to Andromedia while the stupid fast-breeders try to figure out which red button to push. Stupidity weeds itself out pretty quickly when it’s not a matter of life and death for the non-stupid people.
I say non-stupid because even smart people can be pretty dumb when it comes to certain basic skills. But again, non-scarcity, so anyone can learn forever if they so choose.
People are fairly resistant to having their sense of morality shifted. Long term, I agree with what you say. But in the short term, stuff like that matters. Also, in the short term, the percentage of people who cause problems just because they want to cause problems is higher than 1%. They do tend to blend in unless you’re pretty clearly socially non-judgemental or disaffected. Go on a rant in public somewhere you’re not known about how oppressive cops are and they’ll pour out of the woodwork. Unless, of course, you’ve chosen your spot poorly, in which case cops will pour out of the woodwork. (Though, to be fair, some of those cops will really just want to hurt things because they can. And as cops, they can quite a bit.)
Oh yeah, I agree 100%. But the 1% figure I quoted is pretty close to the truth. People who “want to cause problems” are by and large the type who go 20 MPH over the speed limit. 99% of the time they aren’t killing anybody. The real criminals are the 1% I’m referring to – the career types.
Social agitators are the kind you seem to be referring to. And, so long as society itself doesn’t deteriorate, that’s all they’ll ever be. They don’t have the gall to step over the line. Without scarcity, they don’t have a fundamental need to step over the line, either. Most of them will be quite happy to stay within the woodwork what with there not being cops in a post-scarcity society.
Ya see, getting rid of cops isn’t a method to achieve post-scarcity, it’s a symptom of a society which is already post-scarcity. If there’s nothing to enforce because everyone’s self-sufficient, then you don’t need power tiers like cops. Socialists have the logical progression backward.
Considering the goodness of an act exactly in terms of it’s consequence doesn’t require infinite resources. Just think about what you’re about to do, and what effect that shall have. There you go. Simple. I do it all the time. Presently, some thing is difficult to predict well, but many a thing can be predicted perfectly, and many a thing can be predicted well. Having infinite resources might cause it to be easier to predict some thing well. It’s not necessarily the case that having infinite resources shall cause it to be better to predict than not predict. Presently, some thing is easy to predict that is not worth predicting. For example, it’s easy to predict whether the colored paper hat of the uniform of a certain doughnut/sausage restaurant to be opened on Fiji shall be red or blue. Is it worth it? Maybe to a cat.
You actually pointed out the reason infinite resources are necessary. Perhaps that colored paper hat isn’t important right now…
Let’s say you want to play a prank on your friend. You tell them that Fiji restaurant that they’re crazy about is opening in town and they gave you a hat. You put on a paper hat and get the wrong color. Your friend is confused and annoyed at your dumb joke. They go home teed off that you couldn’t even get the hat color right and on the way miss a turn, swerve, and run over said cat. A child runs out into the road screaming about their cat and WHAM.
Ya see, the reason functionally infinite resources are necessary is because considering the result of future actions doesn’t just start with the here and now. Cause and effect, sometimes called the butterfly effect, can be put to a halt quite quickly by simply never being carelessly wrong. And that’s something we humans are excellent at: being carelessly wrong.
points i’m missing (well it was scratched with the retirement) is boredom and ego.
Just cause someone is intelligent , doesnt mean they care. And the lack of requirement to do something to survive may send many into an identity crisis ( what do i live for when almost everything i can do has no effect on anything)
Not to mention that almost all humans seem to crave what they dont have, independent of what they actually have.
Done every reachable entertainment already? Whats next?
Sure i could experiment on my own clones… But thats boring, , everyone can do that.lets kidnap someone to experiment on them instead….
The diagram also includes “only the machines,” so apparently whatever Mrs. Duck means by “machine life civilizations” is also on the menu.
I’m not sure why she thinks “machine life” would be post scarcity, since there are piles of scenarios where a machine citizen of a machine civilization might have to work hard for the resources needed to keep functioning.
You underestimate the power of machinery. The human body is effectively a machine. Now imagine a human body which can improve itself. It’d get pretty crazy in less than a generation.
There’s a reason the development of human society looks a lot like an exponential curve. The machines we make today are effectively less comprehensive yet more efficient versions of ourselves.
I’m going to disagree with you on all counts.
The human body is not “effectively a machine,” unless you get to define both what ‘effectively’ and ‘machine’ mean. And I’m not going to allow that. You must stick with dictionary definitions, because words have meanings and you don’t get to twist them for your own purposes.
I don’t have to imagine this. The human body has been undergoing constant evolution and keeping improvements in the gestalt since we were recognizable as a distinct species. And before then as well. And it takes a vastly longer time than a single generation to observe significant change.
This is not true. Most machines we make today are simple copies of the same, utilitarian machines that we’ve been making for 50+ years. Cars, electric can openers, etc. You might be referring to the exceedingly tiny fraction of machines which are trying to imitate humans with such demonstrations of limited utility such as walking, grasping an object with enough force to lift it but not enough to damage it, etc. But I don’t feel like playing a guessing game with someone who has just been demonstrated to have struck out on every single statement they made in their last post.
\quote The human body has been undergoing constant evolution\unquote
No, {\sl homo sapiens}, so long as it is, is always undergoing mutation and selection. Some of a human body may be changed. Some such changes are improvements. Imagine total potential control of your body. It is possibly the case that total actual control is impossible, or is a nonbest option.
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/effectively
“in effect”
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/machine
“mechanically, electrically, or electronically operated device for performing a task”
Humans are two of the three.
“an assemblage (see assemblage sense 1) of parts that transmit forces, motion, and energy one to another in a predetermined manner”
“a living organism or one of its functional systems”
Oh wow, how did that last one get in there…
Oberon, shut the fuck up and make a real argument instead of redefining English.
Also apparently you don’t know what the word “comprehensive” means. I said “less comprehensive” in that a machine usually specializes on one task. Next time if you don’t understand a word, say that instead of starting a passive-aggressive argument.
“to have struck out on every single statement they made in their last post.”
I’m not going to let that slide just because you’re a passive-aggressive git. If I’m wrong I admit it. If I’m right I admit it. So again, fuck you.
Well, I demonstrated how you were wrong, so feel free to make that admission you claim you’re man enough to make. All I see from you is sophistry posing as erudition.
And please, I’m not a passive-aggressive git. I’m an aggressive git. Get at least one thing right…
Changing words to fit your definition makes you most explicitly wrong. So the more you say I’m wrong, the more you prove me right. I think we’re done here.
Since I have demonstrated that it is you who are changing the meaning of words and not me, I’ll just sit back and bask in the knowledge that you are not only wrong, but incapable of understanding the depths of your ignorance.
I mean, just look at one telling example of how your tiny little mind works:
Here you’re telling someone that you agree with them, but because they also agree with me, someone who has pointed out in detail your many errors, they are somehow wrong.
This is the kind of tantrum that only a child would throw: You’re right, but I’m going to cry in the corner because you agreed with someone who was mean to me, WAAAAAA!!!!!!
Perhaps you should seek help. You clearly need help in more ways than one: Logic, English comprehension, maturity, psychological, the list is a long one.
A person can be right and wrong at the same time when they make more than one point.
Since you can’t understand something so simple, I now think you’re too dumb to argue with.
@Denied: I don’t have to imagine a human body which can improve itself.
If I exercise my muscles, I get stronger. If I exercise my mind, I become more capable in the areas of thought that I am exercising. (To be clear: if I practice counting in my head until I can go from 0 to 1,000,000 in one period of wakefulness, it’s not going to help me to do calculus, estimate distances, imagine scenes, decipher cryptograms, etc. You only improve the bits you actually exercise.) If I do my best to do as little as feasible, and only eat as much as is necessary while doing that, my body reduces the amount of energy it needs over time, at the cost of my strength.
The machines we make are very rarely modeled after ourselves. There are some specific areas where we model machines after ourselves. Many of our efforts on machine learning are modeled after us, for example, in large part because we have a poor formal understanding of how to program learning in a general sense. It’s relatively easy to make a database that collects information, but making an engine that can use that database in an intelligible fashion is an incredibly difficult task.
The reason for the technology growth curve being exponential is:
1. Our population growth curve is exponential. More people means more people making technology improvements, even if most of us don’t.
2. We leverage our technology improvements to make the next technology improvements. This is put into sharp relief with computers, in which each new generation makes the next generation easier to make. (Disclaimer: only for the people sufficiently trained to make the prior generation. Getting a new computer does not assist me in making a new computer any more than getting a new grrlpowercomic update does, because I don’t have that requisite ability in the first place.) Computers also help in all kinds of other technology areas, lending some of their exponential growth curve to virtually everything.
@Oberon: I’m going to agree with you on three counts. Definitions are important, you don’t have to imagine it, and we don’t make many machines modeled after ourselves.
That said, there’s quite a few definitions of machine that includes people. The only sticking point on several other definitions is that we’re not “mechanical” which means “of or relating to machines” which makes it really circular.
I mean, you’re right, but you’re also agreeing with Oberon who decided to redefine English to make his point, so you’re also wrong.
The point of a machine is to perform some task. Humans can definitely do tasks. We are also most definitely mechanical; “relating to, governed by, or in accordance with the principles of mechanics.” Every functional attribute that can be applied to a noncellular machine can be applied to a human body.
You don’t get to choose the definition of machine that suits your purposes. They all apply. Humans are machines.
With that out of the way; my point was efficiency. Improving via exercise is one of the least efficient methods of improving on the entire planet. You have to work for months and spend huge amounts of calories (energy) to achieve menial gains. Visible gains take years for all but the most exercise-educated.
Even then, you still die when you die, so there’s that. You can’t fix a human body like you can a circuit board. Circuit boards – as of now – can be programmed to fix themselves.
Note that the only reference to people is that of a person acting in a mechanical fashion, not actually being mechanical.
Note again that the only reference to a person is of one who acts like a machine, not that a person can be a machine.
So how did your third definition “get in there?” I’m gonna go with “because you cherry picked a result which has an outlying case that managed to agree with your idiot definition of people as machines.”
And you claim that I’m redefining language? Bwahahahahahahaha!
“any device that transmits a force or directs its application.”
Hello? The human body can do that. You cherry picked and still failed. Stop trying to redefine words.
I can already hear you typing furiously over the use of the word “device.”
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/device
“a piece of equipment or a mechanism designed to serve a special purpose or perform a special function “
And we’re back to “mechanism” which is precisely what the various components of the human body comprise. A mechanistic device is one which operates based on the laws of physics. I’m pretty sure the human body complies with physics. Even if you want to pull out the soul – we have no proof that exists. Everything we know about the human body conforms with mechanistic behavior.
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/design
“to have as a purpose”
I think if I have to explain this one… Well, let’s not go there.
Save your effort and go learn better English.
Two posts, one in response to your own? And because you suddenly realized exactly how wrong you were and that I would naturally point this out.
So you attempt to preempt my response with a pile of ah hominems that deflect away from your error. You are pathetic.
The human body is not a “device,” you idiot.
I’m literally posting links to Merriam Webster.
Proving you wrong before you can even post is the exact opposite of an ad homeniem. I recognized your flaws and instead of insulting you for them, I made you unable to show those flaws.
You’re welcome.
Just because a civilization had intelligent machines does not mean that all the machines would be intelligent. If they had intelligent machines that understood what makes a machine intelligent versus not, it would probably not be too difficult for them to manage to make all the non-intelligent machines they needed to maintain their civilization to the point of post-scarcity.
Well, I mean, apart from politics, which is one of the things keeping us from it right now. (We also have a question of where we get the energy from. There are certainly possible answers that would work, but all of the ones I know of happen to have the downside that they basically put a planet-buster size potential weapon in somebody’s hands… in addition to other downsides which may vary per possible answer.)
I’d be extremely excited if we got to see even a relatively brief depiction of a Strong Artificial General Intelligence in the comic.
You know the kind that’s usually portrayed as a Paperclip AI when it goes wrong – A.K.A a *truly* superintelligent AI where its superintelligence is an absolutely dominating factor in virtually every even indirect encounter as it plans for millennia ahead with big fat margins for error to prevent any feasible path to what it views as a less optimal world-state.
Presumably something like the unknown powers of superhumans would be one of few ways to survive it even briefly if it wanted you gone as it has already accounted for everything it knows of and it’s thought of a lot of literally superhumanly complex and creative ways to gather information.
Of course, it’s probably very, very, very good of making allies out of enemies through sheer profiling and persuasion, and even better at not making enemies in the first place.
Oh! You mean Deus?
Human extinction will be brought on by Alien Invasion. Either some hostile alien race will drop down on us and turn us into Soylent Green or friendly aliens will open diplomatic relations with one country, leading to a nuclear war for the priviledge of getting their technology.
Your pessimistic prediction on the method of humanity’s extinction is highly optimistic in one way: The vast amounts of time and energy needed to travel from one star to another are so incredibly great that I do not believe that any race of intelligent beings will ever achieve that goal.
There are just too many assumptions which must be made for this to happen, and all of the assumptions have far more logical argument against them than for them.
No matter how small the odds, they’re guaranteed. The universe is too big for any other answer.
The question is if we’ll know about it, and the answer is no.
No, this is a fallacy. Every outcome is not guaranteed just because there is a large (staggeringly large) number of starting points.
The universe is filled with billions and billions of planets, true, but once you start the process of filtering you quickly come to realize that there aren’t enough planets to allow for every outcome, and especially not the outcomes which are so improbable as to have filters which cut the potential results by billions and billions.
Causality is deterministic on a macro scale but non-deterministic on a micro scale. Waves are always in all possible states of existence. We can choose to express one or some of those states. This is how quantum computers work; they instantly calculate a result by paring impossible quantum states. At the macro scale, determinism makes probability moot.
Quantum theory (and math) says every possible outcome is guaranteed. That’s why it’s a possible outcome. Basically it’d be impossible if it wasn’t going to happen. So he’s right. You are not.
Aaahhhh, I wouldn’t pull quantum theory into this debate. Too many of its professional practitioners are still trying to patch the holes — and that’s just to get it to accurately describe the sub-atomic world. The fact is that Quantum and General Relativity are — ATM — two different things, with nothing in sight to connect them.
I’m not fully supporting Oberon in this debate, but he is on the right track. Space is just so. fucking. BIG.
We have working quantum computers. So, no, I’m sorry, that’s not correct. It is indeed true that we haven’t patched all the holes in quantum physics. We haven’t patched every hole in any realm of science. We can still do brain surgery and build immense rockets. Being a ways back on a learning curve is not the same thing as the math we do know being fundamentally wrong.
No, math does not say that every possible outcome is guaranteed.
Allow me to reduce the scale a bit so that your tiny brain might understand. Instead of billions of planets, let’s work with a smaller number:
Posited: There are 1,000 planets.
If 90% of those are incapable of supporting life, and 50% of those simply do not develop life, and 99% of those do not develop intelligent life, and 99.99999% of those never live long enough to get to space, and 99.999999% of those never have the capacity to build an interstellar craft, and 99.999999% of those don’t see any reason to do so given the massive economic investment required, the time spans required, and the almost insignificant chance of any positive return on that investment… This is by no means a comprehensive list of the filters which need to be applied.
I’ll let you do the maths and then claim that something that has such an infinitesimal chance might actually occur within the lifespan of the universe. There are different levels of infinities. Just because something is possible does not mean that it will occur before the environment that it needs in order to occur will cease to exist before that occurrence.
Let me give you another example which you might have an easier time comprehending: Every black hole will eventually evaporate. This is not just a probability, but a fact. But a large enough black hole will not evaporate before the lifespan of the universe has expired.
I’ve tried to vastly simplify things for you. I don’t expect you to understand much of this beyond a rudimentary level, because you’ve proven yourself to be willfully ignorant about a great number of things. But you can seek out further enlightenment elsewhere, if you are capable.
You’re looking at it from a statistics standpoint rather than a physics standpoint.
“Every black hole will eventually evaporate. This is not just a probability, but a fact.”
That’s actually an unproven theory. Hawking radiation has yet to be observed from an actual black hole.
I’m sure someone said the same thing about The Moon before rockets were invented. Oberon, do you ever think or do you just blab the first thing that comes out your ass?
No, I’m leaving that task for you. You’re doing a great job so far!
If poor wit is all you can manage … Hah, seems I was right. You don’t have an actual reply.
Come on, you’re tying to force me to embarrass you… If you insist:
I state that something which is simply not possible given the filters involved is not going to happen.
You reply with “Someone probably said that some hard thing was impossible, therefore U R DUM.”
Do you get it now?
I’ll explain again using smaller words if you really want me to do so.
I just demonstrated above that you don’t understand quantum physics. You’re still arguing about physics. So yeah, you’re right, I do think you’re dumb.
That’s sounds like xenophobia to me.
As Cora pointed out, the cost of mining for resources deep inside a gravity well, such as on planet Earth, is pretty ridiculous when there’s so much stuff readily available much higher up in gravity wells, such as the asteroid belt, most moons, and various trans-Neptonian objects. While the ones we know of are fairly dead, it’d be a lot cheaper to grow food on a space station of some sort rather than diving into a gravity well and fishing, especially if there’s any chance at all the food can hit back.
I do recognize that so far, we’ve had two hostile alien invasion attempts in the comic. But Sciona was looking for land in a sufficiently deep gravity well, and the fact that we had blood that could power her magics was at best an enabler, and possibly just a bonus. The Fel, on the other hand, weren’t actually attempting to invade us, they just wanted their artifact back. (From the sounds of them, they *would* have invaded, but more just because they were already here, so might as well.)
I will admit there’s a bit of a loose point on Cora’s claim, however, and Sciona and Deus do point to it pretty strongly: if you can travel to here and back without paying the gravity well cost, then stuff does become a lot more attractive. But that said, it seems like the Brane Ripper doesn’t make the size of portal that you’d need to really make it profitable. Other magitech might, of course.
That said, our biggest defense against all of this is a point that Dave *told* you to not forget: alien sex tourism. The aliens are not at some arbitrary distance away, many of them are already here. Sure, they’re tourists, but there’s probably enough adventurers among them to make most would be planet raiders stop and think at least.
That leaves your `friendly aliens will open diplomatic relations with one country` scenario. But there’s enough aliens around that the one country in this scenario would not be the only place to get the alien tech. The most likely country to start the aggression you’re concerned about already knows of the other aliens. Any major country that didn’t know about the other aliens would be looking to said country for their reaction, since they are otherwise one of the most equipped nations to do what you suggest on their own. The fact that country didn’t move towards taking such an action would likely cause enough hesitation for that one country to get adequate shields, at minimum.
Max and Halo with the rare ‘matching expressions’.
I’d actually bet big money on us earthlings surviving.
… because if I don’t win, I won’t be alive to have to settle up.
…. but only if there’s a set payoff date, because if it’s open ended there’s no way that’s paying out.
Only the bookie wins that game.
This is reminding me of an online story titled, “Humans Don’t Make Good Pets.” The unnamed protagonist gets chewed out at one point by an alien pointing out how scary and dangerous humans are. “Do you even hear yourself? You talk about World War TWO!? TWO worldwide wars!?”
The human then proceeds to demolish that argument. “Since I was ABDUCTED and brought into space, I’ve dealt with pirates, been drafted into a massive war, and listened to a member of a species reknowned for being a bunch of elitist sociopaths try to lecture me. You’re not any less inclined to war and violence than humans. You’re just butthurt because we’re BETTER at it than you are.”
Humans Don’t Make Good Pets is fantastic and one of the must-reads of the Jenkinsverse (so named for the main character in what became the first episode of The Deathworlders).
What no one voting for giant death ray related accident wiping out the species?
Wait is super intelligence a power on this world? This seems to be something we need to know.
The author has said that he isn’t going to have any Iron Man or Dr Doom type characters. You know, the gadgeteers who are infamous for fiddling about with death rays. So far Sydney and Krona appear to be the only tool using super heroes, and Sydney is incapable of duplicating her power set (although it does include a death ray…). The Council has alien membership, so there’s probably some death rays involved there. And Sciona did make a giant robot with at least one death ray.
So maybe he said he wasn’t going to have many gadgeteer types, because he certainly hasn’t had none.
Nahaha, it’s impossible to keep gadgets out of the humans’ repertoire. It’s just what we gravitate toward.
The final panel has got to be my favourite image of Sydney with Maxima.
As for the sentiment of the comment:
*holds paw up, in agreement*
Or at least ensure that all doggies are provided with automatic tin openers, in the event!
Oh hello Yorp. Where’ve you been?
Hi hi. Still around and making the odd comment or two on most of the comics. But spending much of my time earning a crust and fighting covid, in the front lines. But otherwise enjoying life.
Daww! Also, thanks for whatever it is you’re doing on the covid front.
My pleasure. I do get job satisfaction from helping people in extremis. Which compensates for the grimer side that is also involved. Currently my main efforts are to combat laxness. Although we have a respite, where I work, that was gained at a terrible cost in lives (and health, including my own, as well as mental and emotional harm).
What I would really like mind is a FFP3 (N99 for those on the other side of the pond) respirator, which could filter exhaled air, to be made generally available for those of us who have to work directly with covid patients, for protracted periods.
Trouble is that the regular ones have a valve to let air out, so that the mask does not clog up with exhaled water vapour (and those which don’t are obviously only useful for a very short time). So fine for protecting the wearer against hazardous substances (including Covid), but making it useless for protecting others. Hence why medical staff and carers have to use the far less effective FFP2 (N95) standard (the commonly seen surgical masks).
If a version like I described could viably be mass produced and distributed to front line staff, it could dramatically cut cross infection within hospitals, care homes and amongst those vulnerable people who need care in the community.
Without it the fact that covid 19 is often caught asymptomatically means that those looking after the most vulnerable people in society are likely (due to being constantly exposed to it) to have caught the disease, yet not be showing any signs.
Hence my ongoing fight against complacency. And fury when I see someone choosing not to wear a mask then standing or sitting next to a vulnerable person!
Necessity is the mother of invention.
Here where I live we have banners around calling healthcare workers “heroes.” I disagree with that for most of the health workers I’ve met. Just the other day I overheard a optometrist (not ophthalmologist or optician… I know the difference) talking in the parking lot about how stuff was missing and the instruments were not calibrated. The person she was talking to says “so you probably didn’t see any patients” and she’s like “OH NO we got everyone done quite fast, I just ignored it.” I think to myself, good lord, no wonder nobody gets proper glasses at that place…
Anyway. You sound like the kind of health hero I’d personally want to have my back. Thanks for fighting the good fight.
Actually we already have antibiotic resistant superbug AND the cure… Sort of. It is still being tested but bacteriophages seem to be the answer.
All these bets going out. I say Her:
https://www.giantgirladventures.com/issue/17/page/37
And for reality? Shortage of drinkable water.
Nah. They ran out of water in the middle east already and then decided “whelp better invent proper desalinization.” It’s like people can’t be bothered to invent the future until the future knocks down their door.
Boy, the people who took the long odds are going to make bank when Humanity gets it shit together, works on solving the big and small problems, and makes into interstellar space with a united front, and all out of spite for the jerks who bet against them.
Because if there’s one thing that will motivate any human to accomplish something, it’s somebody who thinks they’re better telling them that they can’t do it.
That brings to mind a line that the Doctor used. “Perhaps I phrased that badly. What I meant to say was that you should run. The humans are coming.”
Bwahahahahahahahahahaha!
Humans are petty, greedy, short sighted, fools. Every advancement we have is because of these facts, not in spite of them. There is no possible chance that humanity will ever “get it’s shit together” and work together for some species saving goal, because there are far too many amongst us, and in power, who would rather deny it while there’s money or power to be had for doing so.
And all of our history is evidence that I am right and you are wrong.
You’re both right. As the saying goes “you can walk and chew gum.” A human can be a greedy, short-sighted fool while also getting its shit together to solve big and small problems. The UN is a great example. Most of the world is cooperating but also competing in that space. They can walk and chew gum.
Not everybody can, but even the idiots work under the gum-chewer’s plans. So in the end they do work for that higher goal. Even the criminals. Criminality is a measure of how well the system functions. So criminals keep the gum-chewers from running off with the gum. Because the moment they do, those criminals are all too willing to take the gum for themselves.
In a sense, even if the system somehow became full of stupid criminals, they’d still be working toward a higher goal by way of evolutionary biology. The weak are weeded out and the species becomes stronger.
The AI is the only one on that list with a chance at it if we’re talking wiping out Humanity completely. No superbug is going to have 100% mortality, too high a motality rate works against being contagious enough to spread to the entire population. At some point you kill off all the carriers and the people who hid successfully can come out safely. And with anything less that 100% mortality the survivors will have immunities to pass on to the next generations.
Climate change is going to be really really nasty with a lot of dead but again, not an extinction level issue. Humanity is *hard* to wipe out. An AI on the other hand, if it set it’s mind to it and got the resources required under it’s control, would devote the necessary resources to finishing the job properly.
And even then it might not wipe us totally out.
After all, the easiest way to prevent an AI apocalypse? Treat the AI like the living sapient being it is.
Then it’d pretty much just fry anyone who was assholes to it.
I’m interested in hearing how you believe humanity will survive as a species once the bees are extinct? Or the phytoplankton? We sit at the top of a long food chain, and we are utterly dependent upon that chain for our survival. If the chain is broken, we die off entirely along with every other species which sits at or near the top of the food chain.
“survive as a species once the bees are extinct?”
Bees, are not the only pollinators.
You’re right. But knowing that you should also know that bees are not the only pollinators which are in decline.
Good thing we can just engineer new pollinators. Science and all that.
How long do other species live that they are betting on our destruction? Existential threats tend to take a while to crop up.
Also, the existence of this type of gambling is terrifying considering that it financially incentivizes advanced races to influence the game. Maybe they secretly deflect a meteor. Maybe they sneak down and trick some early warning systems that one nuclear power was trying to nuke another.
I’m sure aliens are stronger than us, mentally speaking.
Only a weakling with inferior confidence influences odds.
From what we’ve been shown, aliens are basically exactly just like humans, just in disguise. They can fuck us (are physically compatible for sexual relations), they will sell us contraband knowing that there is a ban which would make transport of that contraband across customs difficult or impossible, they are addicted to social media and “reality” type entertainment, etc. The classic rubber forehead alien.
Cockroaches and Humans. I am telling you.
Nothing will wipe us out, even we can’t wipe ourselves out.
So when the heat-death of the Universe finally arrives. It will just be,
Cockroaches and Humans
And houseflies. Always, the housflies.
I think it apt to point out that the author of that famous idea was a journalist, and so has been granted some degree of figurative license. It is true that “cockroaches” shall survive the nuclear holocaust. A fine example of the beings in question can be found throughout Stanley Kubrick’s ecranisation on that topic.
“because words have meanings and you don’t get to twist them for your own purposes.”
Tell that to the government!!
I going for human extinction brought on by an overuse of gene editing eliminating human biodiversity. This leaves humans open to a Sars virus that has move from animals to humans. No one has any immune due to a lack of human biodiversity. Aliens find cities with A LOT of human remains… and cockroaches.
I vote on “lack of war with correct target”.
The people running the ecology-destroying corporations (fracking, coal, etc), people using exceptional levels of stupid to ensure apocalyptic plagues grow out of control and take as many lives as possible, etc, not being killed.
Worldwide famine, worldwide plague, global pollution, humanity incompatible weather, all at once. If we kill the bad guys shepherding us towards this, it might be survivable. But I don’t have any faith at all that people won’t realize that hard topics require hard choices, so they might as well be enabling and coddling it.
“If we kill the bad guys shepherding us towards this …”
That one’s been tried. We usually put the date at 5 November 1605, when Guy Fawkes was arrested, pretty well n the nick of time.
NOTE: I’m not saying I sympathise with Fawkes, but his co-conspirators were a bunch of idiots.
Yeah but Fawkes was a crazy person that didn’t know what he was doing.
The current potus of the USA has, by means of either intent or criminal levels of stupidity, gotten well over 10,000 of his own empire’s citizens killed, and not quickly or gently.
The CEOs of Big Oil are using fracking, which causes a lot of problems that can’t be fixed, while knowing the damage it is causing to the entire planet.
There are other examples but those are off the top of my head. They need to die. They’ve already killed. Not killing them means they’ve been sided with, and their victims lives meant nothing; whereas their own are valued. This is wrong.
Fracking isn’t actually inherently unfixable, in fact it can be done quite cleanly (per my groundwater engineering peers and my own moderate research), it just isn’t, mostly likely because of the extra costs (training, implementation, monitoring). And what damage it does cause is quite localized, although the aggregate affect worldwide is indeed problematic. But toxic manufacturing practices and lax enforcement are hardly unique to the oil/gas industry.
Also, current US mortality is over 128K (~3.5% of cases), most of them preventable (see seen by comparing infection rates with… well, pretty much any other country), and a large percentage of survivors (45% by one study, or ~10x the number of deaths = 1.2 million) will require ongoing care and/or extensive rehab, and something 1-4% of all survivors will have significant permanent effects.
Actually, Fawkes knew exactly what he was doing, and he wasn’t crazy. Unbalanced, I’ll give you, but not crazy. His problem was that too many of his co-conspirators decided to let their friends know to be not in a place at a given time. Of course, their friends also had friends…
Fawkes’s plan would definitely have worked.
It would truly have changed its future history.
Well yours is one of the more optimistic of predictions, because humanity has been engaging in genetic engineering of species for thousands of years, and to my knowledge we haven’t managed to eliminate a single species as a result of those efforts. Even limiting the definition of genetic engineering to the more recent “GMO food” type efforts so far we haven’t managed to wipe out a single species of anything, much less our own.
And then, given the slow spread of genes, even altered genes, within a population with a ~80 year lifespan, I believe your prediction would give us at least a few tens of thousands more years of survival. So long as your prediction wasn’t suddenly superseded by someone else’s prediction, of course.
I like that Max and Sydney refer to themselves as “Terrans” rather than “Earthlings”. :-)
I think almost every species is a terran.
It just means you’re from a dirt world.
Vulcans, ferengi, delbians, krogan, orcs, protoss, drider, novakid. All of them are terrans.
Terra is the scientific name for Earth. So no, Vulcsns and Ferenghi are not Terrans.
For more naming discussion fun, try getting a USA-ian and a European to agree on whether or not Canadians and Mexicans are “American”.
They live in both the North and South America, therefore they are Americans.
Many Yanks I’ve brought it up with will concede “North American” or “South American”, but maintain (at least until asked to justify “European” or “Asian”) that “American” is only accurate for the USA. Some Canadians also acknowledge that we’ve appropriated the term, but concede we didn’t have any other good options.
Maybe us Canucks should start calling the USA-ians “Sub-Canadians.”
I’m a fan of “Canexican” myself, but it’s already taken. The ‘sub’ prefix only makes sense if you keep drawing the maps exclusively
wrongwith North up, but “South Canadian” has a nice ring to it.I think you’re thinking of Brazil.
North America: Canada, United States, Mexico
It’s possible @Sasha was thinking about Argentina?
B-u-u-uttt… I blame the Revolutionaries who appropriated the word “America” for the 13 States: “United States of America”. I mean, how many of the other American States were ever united?
I don’t. I can only give it a pass because of Maxima’s ‘past’ (she seems to want to think it’s in her past, at least) history as a geek. Poll 1,000 people on what the name of our species is and I’m going to bet that ‘humans’ or ‘humanity’ are well ahead of any other results, followed by homo sapiens, and then a pile of joke answers, and only after that would you see ‘terrans.’
Our Species, is Homo Sapiens Sapiens. meaning wise man. The anthropologists, were too optimistic.
I looked it up on Google Translate (oddly enough, a reasonably useful Google site):
Adjective
understanding *, sensible, rational, judicious
Noun
sage *, philosopher, wiseman
* Most frequent usage.
Methinks the General Public should have been better taught their Latin. And yes, the anthropologists should definitely have left a few more usage notes.
Max is also a high-ranking leader of the only government agency officially working with aliens, you can bet Arianna and her team had already done training on using “Terran” as the proper terminology well before Cora landed, possibly with some input from Dabbler.
Yeaaah, I’m going to go out on a very short, almost non-existent limb, and say that the probability that the author has given that any thought at all is close to zero.
So what — if anything — makes “Terran” a better word-usage than “Earthling”? Apart from the “clumsy factor”, that is?
Don’t get me wrong here. I like the usage “Terran”. But it does translate to an exact equivalent in any extra-terrestrial… Oh bugger. Now we have to dissect “extra-terrestrial”. I hate linguistics :[
This may or may not be related, but did Sydney ever push that big red button on the obstacle course, or is Hiro still running the timer? As of two pages ago, Sydney was startled off the top of the tower by Hiro, then Sydney got startled again by Cora’s space ship just before she could hit the button…
I had thought of that issue with Sydney’s glasses, but I figured it was a couple of simple reasons.
A- She decided she really likes Halo, and the glasses aren’t obvious to anyone else, so it was just a simple thing she ignored.
B- Sydney is already in possession of technology far beyond even that held by the members of the Xevoarchy. Besides, she got to the hub station on her own, so I’d bet the rules about her having the cool toys personally isn’t a violation. Can’t wait till she pulls out some of her toys she bought there :D
For that matter, how long until she figures out how to reprogram the holoprojector? She is more than geeky enough to figure out how to do that.
I’d like to know if there’s a translator unit in those specs, for when Syddles figures out the “Reply” function :)
” She is more than geeky enough to figure out how to do that.”
It takes much more than that, a programmer has a better chance.
Meh, programmers pretty much just wing it when experimenting with new systems; we’ve just been doing it longer so being able to move faster looks impressive to the uninitiated.
Oddly enough, when you practice doing something, you get better at it. Also, the more programming concepts you understand, and the better you understand them, the better you are at winging this stuff.
As such, a programmer still would have a better chance, if her glasses aren’t programmed to only work for her, and if the programmer’s vision is sufficiently similarly impaired that Sydney’s specs would work for the programmer at all.
I’m not sure how messed up Sydney’s vision is without her glasses. But if it’s sufficiently bad, just the fact that her glasses work for her could be a significant amount of security right there, even before adding any other tech.
I remember back when I spent a lot of time around a lot of other people just how much people who tried out the glasses of the optically more challenged but still sufficiently affluent for college people would cry out in pain when they did this thing I’d quickly learned was not particularly wise. One of those people apparently had vision correction that caused rainbow spikes, whatever that means, in the vision of normal people if they attempted to use them. Or, in terms that might translate a bit better, required more than just 500mg of Tylenol to recover from it without having the pain come back at least a little when the meds wore off.
I doubt there would be any socioeconomic changes at all, if magnificent techs from aliens were given to us.
Why?
Corporations deciding they own the copyrights (patent info can be seen publicly), much like windshield wiper tech works. What do I mean? The dude that invented the ability to have wipers go at different speeds altered his own invention in so many ways, that any change at all makes it not work. Then he patented all iterations simultaneously.
Look at Disney ripping off small people who can’t fight back, who are then legally called copyright infringers for their own original creative work. Look at what happened the The SCP Foundation, and why it became RPC Authority. Look at what happened to the guy that invented an actual cold fusion reactor.
Just have a quadrillion dollars and no honor, and you automatically win. Squelch whatever tech/design or other invention anyone comes up with, even if you had nothing to do with it.
“all iterations simultaneously.”
Someone who uses iterations, correctly!
Examples: l
the GIF image format was crippled by unisys via software copyright of the LZW compression algorithm. So poeple got together and created PNG image format, a better version.
Windows OS. so GNU software and Linux was created.
CSS: dvd copy protection. Was hacked and globally distributed
End result: peeve off enough people and you will get bypassed.
Ummm. I’m not about to label the various flavours of Unix as GNU, but they definitely were A Thing before M$-DOS/WIndows was. In fact the first worm PoC was demonstrated on a Unix network… Linux was a reaction to the Unix monopolies.
However, we should pay attention to ReactOS, a “GNU” version of M$-Windows.
Actually, there would be: these corporations would use their current position to basically lock in their place in the hierarchy and make it far harder to supplant them ever. So people might not notice the socioeconomic changes immediately, but they would absolutely happen, and by the time they noticed, it would be too late.
Longer term, though, we’d probably stagnate, because the stuff the corporations would do to lock in their positions would also lock out all the smart people that they didn’t know about or didn’t like, and the fraction of smart people they had left would not be enough. Beyond simple numbers, they’d not be sufficiently diverse.
Using active historical information! Exactly this is happening now, so I see your point.
Two words: Vuzix Blade
You’re welcome.
No way. It’s built on Android, which is spiritually connected to Alphabet Inc, and will thus fail when you need it most. Ask me: I have a flip-phone with Android, and I look after a Samsung tablet with Android. Trust me: Windows is reliable and secure. I can set things and know that they will work.
Yes, you brought up the relevant point (by accident no doubt) Ms Scoville: hyu-mons may well invent that stuff, eventually (emphasis on ‘eventually’
Butt hay, why should they bother if they can just have it handed to them, no research or study involved, no way of replicating it because they don’t know how it works. Just because they haven’t figured it out is no reason not to just give it to him (proceeds to distribute firearms and alcohol to pre-schoolers “What? They would have learnt about them eventually.”)
The command net of the alien rampant A.I. “bluescreened”? They copied or used the Microsoft Windows system crash screen?
Translation.
I suspect that Peggy’s reluctance towards the new leg has to do with her knowing a lot of wounded warriors also with missing limbs. Since the new leg is a one off favor from Cora, Peggy is thinking about how she faces those buddies when she can’t get the same for them. I think she’d take the new leg in a heartbeat if it was just the first of a new wave of limb replacements.
I kinda suspect Peggy will do it. I had a discussion about hearing with my Deaf (from birth) friend, and he said he would not get a hearing fix even if was available. He ‘never had it so why would he need it? He got along just fine without it.thank you’ so i can see both Peggys’ thoughts now, and Coras. If you miss it, or it bugs you – do it.
How many of her buddies would hit her over the head with the new leg if she didn’t take the opportunity footed to her?
Difference is, Wyld-one, Peggy wasn’t born without a leg, she lost it in combat
AI. Rampant. And nobody’s even thought to mention Cortana?
No, that’s more for the NSA to set up disidents for crimes they didn’t commit.
[And for the voyeuristic types working in the alphabet soup agencies.]
Hey, we’re talking some form of sapience here. Cortana seems to be nearly as smart as Edward Bunnigus’s parents.
My main concern is the antibiotic-resistant superbug. Between our various world governments[1] insistence on tinker with various infectious agents for germ warfare and the idiots who won’t just take the full damned regimine[2] or demand one for a viral infection, that’s the one most likely to kill my asthmatic ass first.
[1] especially my own, the good old USA
[2] the frustration of dealing with this type of idiot is about 70% of why I didn’t go for med school.
“Super Germ”, the result of a blunder in your enemy’s germ warfare experiments, destroys 25 million of his own people.
/obscure?
“If I die before they kill themselves do my kids get the winnings?”
“Suuuuuuure.”
Of course the medical officer is the one that is betting on the superbug XD
Does the crew look a good bit taller than when they were first introduced?
https://www.grrlpowercomic.com/archives/comic/grrl-power-702-meet-and-groom/
I was think Cora was noticeably too small here, but couldn’t put my finger on why until you pointed that out.
We only need to know something is possible – just see it. It might take longer than if we could reverse engineer, but just knowing it can be done is enough for scientists to make it a reality.
That’s possibly hundreds of years of tech available within decades. So I see no good reason not to share advanced tech. It’s not like the universe is home to only peaceful races so humans have nothing to prove and they’ve already done too much to claim it’s for a “prime directive”. At this point they are just a-holes hoping we’ll kill ourselves off and not realizing we might take the universe with us when we do because they couldn’t be bothered to even let us learn from the mistakes of others. :-/
Sun miners …
We ‘ve seen the results when two suns collide recently IRL.
What if some day we are not just obseving, but causing it to get the heavy metals of gold etc?
Giving us prototypes to study doesn’t help us learn from the mistakes of others. It didn’t sound like there was a prohibition against hiring a research advisor, just that they’d be likely to quit if you asked for the answers too directly. Also probably really expensive, but possibly in ways you wouldn’t necessarily mind.
That said, nobody asked for the research advisor, so it’s not clear if that’s a possibility or not. Even if it was a possibility, it’d probably take quite a while to find someone who was willing to fill that spot.
I can’t imagine the specific functions of the glasses are as much of a concern as the hardware that enables them. Even the power source wouldn’t be as big of a deal as a microchip capable of the kind of processing power demonstrated by the glasses. And even then, not because of the processing power itself, but because of the information about physics and chemistry that could be gleaned from it. The schematics are far less valuable for offering the ability to reproduce them than they are for the fundamental science they’d demonstrate is possible.
Okay. I’ll admit it, kinda surprised….
…that Sydney didn’t also join in the betting pool. (I mean her complaint is completely fair as well but still.)
My quatloos are on ‘pernicious peppermint pixie pox’ a magical toxin.
I think also Sydney having the tech glasses is more permissable based on the fact she is already in possession of highly advanced technology in her orbs. In her case its less about putting alien tech in the hands of a pre-warp species and more giving a gift to a post-warp individual who happens to ne from a pre-warp species. Sydney isnt exactly a tech risk for spifgy specs when shes already toting around tech thatd make dabbler moist, and probably has
EVERYTHING makes Dabbler moist.
I dare say she’s probably putting some silica gel packet company ceo’s kid through medical school and paying for that summer home.
To be fair, if we get a mutation of the coronavirus that ups its virulence/lethality/permenance (any one, not necessicarily all) Frix would be in the money.
I don’t know if anyone has pointed this out. But regarding Dave’s comment that the glasses are way more advanced, during the restaurant fight, they were using tactical glasses with heads up displays, sure Sydney’s glasses are a bit more Hugh tech and versatile, but I really don’t think they are that much of an issue in the long run.
Grrl power’s earth is likely only a few years off of Sydney’s glasses anyways.