This makes a strong case on the discovery side of the discovery vs. invention controversy.

Ironically, my dad idolized Pythagoras and the notion of discovering a scientific fundamental to be remembered for thousands of years, for which the secret is not to actually do science, but raise a cult of scientists who attribute their inventions to you. Like Thomas Edison.

Of course the accretion disc is like the most powerful chainsaw in the universe, so between that and spaghettification by tidal forces there won’t be much left to actually do observing.

Ima go out on a limb and say treating kids like garbage probably does a lot of the heavy lifting in wrecking their minds. Also working all the adults so no-one is around to parent, and overworking and underpaying non-guardian adults like teachers.

Things like the lack of school lunches, the limit of civil rights on kids, delinquency (that is, state and federal crimes that apply to children only) and so on show that the fucks we give for children in the US are scant.

I remember when the Columbine High School shooting happened, and everyone was so eager to blame it on video games and Marilyn Manson. We make these claims because we don’t want to face the consequences of the choices our society has made.

Reagan planned on making Climate Change a moot point thanks to nuclear holocaust, but he couldn’t provoke the Soviets into a first strike and didn’t have the heart to pull a Stillson. (He should have known better. China relayed the Soviet plan for Мирное сосуществование and Carter was fully on board.

Anyway, the cold war ended and Germany reunified, and now we didn’t kill ourselves with nukes, and death by mostly famine is looking like a grim possibility. (I was rooting for AI takeover or science experiment mishap if we had to choose a near-future great filter) We knew shit was bad in the 1990s and aughts, and the science sector had strong data analysis in the seventies (when there was a strong conservation movement). But capitalism prevailed and Reagan got elected which was the beginning of the dusk of America.

This is a bit of a raw spot for me.

I was an incel in the mid eighties to early nineties, before we had the term. It was conspicuous that a) as a teen I had a raging, compulsive libido (which was not uncommon) and b) society gave zero fucks about my overwhelming frustration and expected me even to learn trig and grammar. This drove me to become a frustrated, bitter, antisocial, misanthrope, much of which carries on to this day, though now my acerbic vitriol is finely distilled and crafted before it is slung at penetration velocities.

This is to say my sexual frustration as a teen and young adult figures into my own (well diagnosed) madness, though in full disclosure, I’m pretty sure compound neglect did the heavy lifting.

I lost my virginity became sexually active at twenty-six, and was able to enjoy many relationships both fulfilling and disastrous, but it did mean realizing the misogynistic bubble in which my young adulthood was spent did not have an accurate view of what women, or heck, the whole of the human species, was about. And the paths I forged were not clear, easy to find roads, rather rabbit-trails and deer tracks.

Our society does very, very little to recognize our teens navigating their developing sexual drives. (Parents, teachers, ministers and politicians alike seem to resent that our kids are horny, except when they are athletic superstars.) Much of the US still teaches abstinence-only sex ed (often seasoned with large doses of right-wing Christian ideology, such as women have only value as an untouched virgin, and men are obligated to go into a relationship blind, then committing to be a provider). Even our more comprehensive sex-ed omits ideas like opt-in consent.

Our society really dislikes and disregards our teens, and the consequences of this have always been stark. Sexual frustration consistently figures into our history of spree killers and rampage killers, our domestic terrorists like Ted Kaczynski and Timothy McVeigh. It was a common driving factor for the rise of the alt-right in 2016, and is useful in both the transnational white power movement and the Christian nationalist movement. When you need an army of V8-worshiping warboys eager to ride eternal, shiny and chrome, chastity commandments are your friend.

I hypothesize that young people getting laid don’t turn into terrorists, but both here in the states, and across the middle east, young people sexually frustrated are easily radicalized.

I don’t know how to fix this problem, and it’s only gotten worse with the advancement of faith-based initiatives and most recently the Dobbs ruling. I have little hope and though my embitterment has gone political, it persists with sympathy for the newer generations being driven into fascist militarism

Unless you’re ancient Inuit and really hungry. They hunted polar bear, and the bears hunted them back.

Yes. Microplastics is slower gray goo.

You’re Wrong About did a solid deep dive into this one. ( On buzzsprout )

This, I do not question, but I highly expect horny astronauts to rise to the challenge.

Sadly, I also expect a first sexual assault in space will be forthcoming soon enough. We as a species continue to struggle with the whole opt-in consent notion.

I am absolutely sure the first sex in space record has been filled, even if it’s not yet public information.

We’ve also seen space-trained astronauts who’ve gone a bit loopy, about relationships, no less. Fortunately they were planetside at the time.

Saying something is smaller than the LHC (even by orders of magnitude) isn’t that hot a take. Few partical accelleraters are not smaller than the LHC.

Not that I am a well informed political scientist (so speculating robust political systems is well beyond my pay grade), but I am certainly open to ideas.

Here in the States we haven’t been able to engage in some basic improvements, like disposing of the Electoral College, which was a white-power motivated backdoor from the beginning. So finding the path from regulatory-captured late stage capitalism is going to be a challenge.

I like the high-speed reactivity of gas (it gets hot enough to cook almost immediately, but I can live with electric and I like the safety of induction (which was nice when young kids were about).

However I grew up in Los Angeles smog which messed up my lungs. So I may be high risk.

I’m too poor to replace stoves or choose homes based on a philosophy, though.

We don’t expect them to vent all contaminants but to reduce the density so they don’t cause significant harm.

If they don’t do that, its a regulatory failure.

We know this. Reagan knew this when he opened the door for lobbyists.

According to Marx ( Das Kapital ) corruption of the government towards the interest of the owning class is inevitable.

We still don’t know an effective way to keep government public serving. Marx recommends the end of hierarchy, but that model needs some development.

But yes, government is intended to serve the public and when it doesn’t (such as with regulatory capture) that is government failure. US federal and state governments typically fail, only rarely enacting policy consistent with public interest.

Humans definitely rely on parasitism to survive, especially on each other, but we’re susceptible to intra-species parasitism because our organizational instincts lead us to be credulous. I think if we didn’t think of it as that, and embraced a cooperative outlook (that restricted competition or antagonism) then we’d have fewer people wanting to engage in parasitism.

But I’m guessing. Some people want to compete for competition’s sake, and some people do so just because kinder survival strategies aren’t available or working.

That said, whether we go extinct in the next few centuries (a significant risk right now) or we are able to organize enough to quell the climate crisis and clean up the plastic crisis, or just are reduced down to thousands, and stay that way though a few ice ages, is beyond our individual power to influence at this point. Our elites who own all the wealth can’t even think past next year, which might be an indictment regarding the deep-time survivability of our species.

I’ve learned to disinvest. I will not be here to notice what happens, and have only been disappointed in how humanity treats each other.

The thing is, we assuredly have a lot of great filters between who we are now and Q-continuum or whatever enlightened existence we imagine as a goal.

We obviously have some tragedy of the commons problems, and fail to regard everyone in our civilizations of hundred of millions as fellow and equal human beings. Either we figure out how to overcome these sociological problems, or we die out. Depletion of resources, warfare-driven holocaust and contamination by pollution are some of the less exciting filters, but they’re recurring.

I suppose if we try some geoengineering and it leads to disaster then we can say we killed ourselves by big science experiment. Though black holes or strangelets would have been cooler.

Um…sorta? A rudimentary AI simulation of them will live until power ceases, but that will be a separate entity than the flesh and blood gazillionaire who commissioned the AI to represent him.

On the other hand, it does intersect with the transporter paradox: When you beam down to the planet, is it the same you or just a clone with all your memories that is convincingly you even to itself? And if that’s the case, when you go into delta sleep and then wake again (at which point all your cognizant functions reboot) is the waking you the same person as the you who went to bed the night before?

If there’s any possibility that it isn’t then the gazillionaire AI zombie may be good enough.

Some of them are smart enough to know we’re bad news. Or good news for the carrion eaters.

The lion is kind enough to kill and eat them, one at a time.

We come, cement over their habitat and dump sticky toxins everywhere. Also we dam up rivers and cause local droughts.

And when a particular predator decides to take care of business and hunt some naked apes, we send out a special ape with a shiny pith helmet, a penchant for tea time and large caliber rifles to manage the feral wildlife.