My Stellaris empires always end up starting more like the vulcans with a focus on science and mostly peaceful exploration, and end up a society of soul-crushing academia that will compromise their own sanity, values and safety for any chance at powerful or dangerous knowledge, ruling over a collection of random protectorates that they maintain for little reason other than diplomatic influence and to have someone to lord their vastly supervisor tech over.
They exist, but are only really relevant at the local level, or rarely as a spoiler effect if one gets vaguely popular. This isn’t so much that people don’t want other options, but mostly because the US system is badly designed. The US has a first past the post, winner take all type system, ie, if you win the most votes in a given election, you win that spot and it’s all yours. That makes some intuitive sense, but is actually not the most democratic option, as it means that parties that have, say, 20% of the population supporting them don’t get 20% of the seats, they get none of them, because for each individual seat, they won’t win the most votes. Worse, such a party will cause the major party it is less similar to to win, because it’s voters voted for them rather than the major party it was most similar to, so even if the voters on that side of the political spectrum are in the majority, their votes are split among multiple parties where their rivals that stay as one party can then be the single largest one. The US system accidentally makes it mathematically inevitable for two and only two parties to dominate.
Historically they have switched up once or twice, when one party became so unpopular that it basically became nonviable, and a different party rose to replace it, and once the current major parties have swapped ideology more or less, but this kind of thing is very rare.
didnt some religion have a concept where since they believe god infallible, any loophole in the rules must therefore be intended, possibly as a reward for the cleverness of finding it? I forget which one that was
I mean, isn’t the entire concept of the Fermi paradox that given the universe is so large and old, it seems surprising that we see no signs of aliens anywhere, and therefore some explanation must exist for why we have not? That’s more focused on intelligent life than extraterrestrial life of any sort I suppose, but given it’s even named a paradox in the first place, someone must find it surprising
I find them comforting in a reassuring, kinda awe inspiring way. Like, they’re a visual sign of at least trying to address climate change, and there’s something about having a giant, obviously artificial moving structure towering over the landscape that just gives me a sense of thrill and wonder that we are capable of building that. Those things are pretty massive if you get anywhere close to one, after all.
The way I see it, making jokes about this kind of thing is a fundamentally human reaction. People often react to grim scenarios with humor, consider all the jokes about things like wars that exist- and being trapped in a failing submarine is a pretty grim thought that people might seek to distract themselves from by twisting it into humor. I don't think joking about an event like this that resulted in deaths is the same thing as wishing for people to die, they are, after all, already dead, and uncomfortable as the thought is, the dead are not as far as we can probably know capable of taking offense to anything. There is no possible harm that jokes or anything else can do to them anymore.
Obviously I would consider it pretty rude to joke about it around someone who knew one of the deceased, since you can at least cause emotional distress to those people, but I don't see a problem with joking about it on the general internet.
Another thing to consider is that some of the jokes have been mocking the quality of the sub itself, rather than the people on board (save for the ceo I guess). If you cheap out on stuff and that decision kills people, I think it's perfectly reasonable for people to mock you over it.
To be fair, a patty sandwich of any type (be it hamburgers, chicken sandwich, beans, or any kind of imitation meat) is going to be similarly labor intensive and time consuming if one had to make the patty and bread oneself rather than being able to just buy them. I’m sure traditional recipes for most cultures can be made similarly convenient if probably somewhat different from their original form, if demand exists for them to be premade and sold that way. There’s a specialty grocery store very close to my home that specializes in Indian food, tho also has some international foods from other places too, and it’s freezer section has all sorts of Indian dishes done up as tv dinners, or premade frozen samosas of various flavors one just has to fry in a pan for a few minutes, among other things.
Now I’m imagining placing a ring of gigantic dyson-sphere powered magnets in an intergalactic void to create the final and ultimate supercollider, the size of a galactic supercluster