“It will not be we who reach Alpha Centauri, and the other nearby stars. It will be a species very like us – but with more of our strengths and fewer of our weaknesses.”— Carl Sagan
This one has been my go to for years and years.
It gives me comfort. In that we probably won’t every get there, because of our evolutionary failures as a species, but that’s ok. Because the next species or evolution of our kind will stand a better chance.
Kind of reminds me of the quote usually attributed to Einstein - I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.
In yours we’re evolving to be better and smarter. In mine we didn’t learn anything from War Games.
I think this is a terribly disheartening quote. It’s very true. But it’s sad that there’s basically zero hope for us as a people to come together to do great things that benefit our species and the others trapped on this planet with us. We’re doomed to a future of selfishness and violence
Well there is a chance we might get our collective shit together after a world wide set back in tech, medical, any other scienctific advances. If we have a massively destructive climate event, solar flare, or any other big global hit, then many years later after the survivors reconnect humanity. We MIGHT have a better mindset and work together more. I doubt it though, but I’m a pessimist.
Even lemmy.word, at least for me, was difficult to join. I have a hard time to log into the account I have created there. I think we must understand this is not redit, the platform is fundamentally different how you approach it. The fuller the server gets, the more difficult it gets to get into your account.
It’s almost like they shouldn’t be counted at all unless they are free to vote. But the states with significant prison populations wouldn’t go for that. Maybe we can compromise. Perhaps only 3 out of every 5 disenfranchised prisoners should count for representation purposes.
You’d have to eliminate children and immigrants too if you did that, but those new numbers wouldn’t reflect reality in most communities with so many people being excluded from the census.
Small quibble here, but illegal immigrants are absolutely counted in the census, obviously they are under-counted, but they are intended to be counted. No one is “excluded” from the census.
Small quibble, but the census came up with about 331 million people, and there are almost 8 billion people on the planet. Clearly, some are excluded from the census.
Within my facetious response is a kernel of truth: some of those people within US borders are foreign tourists. Surely, a French high school class touring Washington DC shouldn’t be counted on the census.
When someone overstays their visa, at what point do they stop being “foreign persons” and start being “undocumented Americans”? At what point is it reasonable to start counting them as our own?
I was more referring to green card holders, but that’s exactly my point. By excluding people based on whether they can vote or not, you get inaccurate results and make the whole process pointless.
The only problem there is that the count also determines how federal money is distributed. Undocumented/illegal immigrants still use interstates and water mains and disaster money and national parks and federal buildings. Unless we want funding cut, we still have to count them.
*Edit: I’m embarrassed that I got all that written before 3/5 hit me. “The only problem” 😬
Oh shit, I never even thought about that. It’s another level of insidious. 1. Be republican 2. Get a huge prison in your district “for the jobs”, 3. Get more positions guaranteed to be republican, since the voters in your district still are. Would work for a democrat too, they don’t care about criminal justice reform either :(
Might work slightly better for republicans because they can work the identity politics angle more easily.
The incessant idea that I get when I read about quantum physics: with no observers and nothing to interact with/measure it, was the universe itself in superposition during the Big Bang? If so, did the wave function even collapse or are we just one of the possible outcomes inside of it?
That’s the wrong interpretation of “observing”. Observation is the act of measuring the properties of an object/particle by “interacting” with it. Basically if something is not being observed (I.e completely isolated) it enters superposition until such a time that it’s measured/interacted with again. Observation has nothing to do with consciousness imo, just connection to causality in the universe at large.
Never said anything about it not existing. From what I understood, a particle that’s not interacting with an outside force stays in superposition by default. The universe was supposedly a single particle at the moment of the Big Bang, thus it stands to reason that it would have been in superposition if it couldn’t interact with anything else.
If you trace back the cosmological evolution of our universe you’d get a “singularity”, that is not the same thing as being a single particle. Even the physical existence of a singular point at the beginning is not accurate. A singularity in physics is a mathematical artefact signaling the breakdown of the descriptive power of the theory you are using. The common example is the singular behaviour of the electric field around a charged particle in classical electrodynamics, the singularity is a signal that you’d need to switch to quantum electrodynamics to describe the physics close to a charged particle. Similarly with cosmology: close to the beginning we have a singularity that signals the breakdown of the descriptive power of our theories, and we need to switch. What we would switch to we call a " quantum gravity theory", but we are not yet sure what that theory is.
Not scared shitless, but a mix of being scared and disgusted, maybe even slightly traumatized? :D I stumbled into an adult watching this, and had a look at it when I was honestly too young for this shit. www.youtube.com/watch?v=EjZ7Cb5WDLM
I regularly wear a kilt at formal events. They are made of several layers of thick wool and if you don’t wear knee-high thick woollen socks you look like an idiot.
I assure you they’re not as breezy as you’d think!
The 1990 remake of the Night of the Living Dead. I was like 10 when I saw it, and then I had to walk through a dark forest alone to get home (I was supposed to walk with older girls but they left me behind). I legitimately thought I was going to die.
I just rewatched gremlins, and beside some jumpscares it’s pretty camp and tame.
But then the scene comes where the Santa Claus gets stuck in the chimney, discovered due to the smell. This is not shown, just a story that gets told pretty off handed.
I realized that that was the part that made the movie scary to me when younger. And it colored the rest of the movie darker, too.
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