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Cake day: June 5th, 2023

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  • Why would the universe being a black hole invalidate religion, any more than, for example, the universe being really big already does? Don’t most religions focus more on some entity or entities they think made or govern the universe more than what physical processes are “used” to do that, or what the ultimate shape of the universe is? Even when a contradiction is found, it’s easy enough for a religion to just say “well, that was metaphorical”, or “just the limited understanding given by (insert deity here) to our ancestors” or something along those lines to make it fit.


  • I’ve recently come to the position that really, there isn’t truly such a thing as incorrect grammar. There’s grammar that doesn’t fit the norm for the people one is speaking to, and if it’s different enough to impair the ability for the intended audience to understand what you’re communicating it can be impractical or inadvisable, but since grammar isn’t an intrinsic part of the universe outside of human creation, and since the way it’s used changes whenever people “break it’s rules” in numbers over time, it can’t actually be wrong. After all, someone could view something written in a very closely related foreign dialect as another similar language written correctly, or one’s own language written incorrectly, and there isn’t really a non-arbitrary way to decide which is the case.



  • A dictatorship of any sort wont get you much different than capitalism does: capitalism has the effect that it does because it creates a situation where power concentrates (because wealth is generally a proxy for power, and having a lot of capital under capitalism allows you to more easily obtain more of the finite pool of it), so that decisions are made that benefit the few with power while the many without much of it suffer the negative externalizes of those decisions, that the wealth of the powerful insulates them from. A dictator represents simply skipping to the end-state of that, where power is highly concentrated among one person and those that directly enable them. They still will make decisions that benefit themselves at the cost of the well being of everyone else, because people are selfish that way. Even if you somehow get a person that somehow cares more about everyone else than themself, that person wont be dictator forever, and since that mentality isnt the norm for dictators, odds are soon enough you’ll end up with an “unenlightened” dictatorship again.


  • Its a great movie quote, but I always found it a bit grating used outside that context, because, well, other animals dont instinctively develop some natural equilibrium with the surrounding environment.

    Its not like a wolf will realize that they’ve been reproducing too much for the local population of prey animals and decide to have fewer cubs, or actively avoid certain prey species that have declining numbers compared to the rest, if theres too many to support the excess ones will simply starve, or wander off in search of prey. The rabbits wont decide to reproduce less if something happens to the local predator population, they simply overeat their food supply until their numbers collapse back down or their abundance causes the number of predators to rise.

    The equilibrium is a product of every species acting in a way that would upset that balance if they were not all in competition with eachother, and it is only stable over relatively short periods of time, in the long run it changes under pressure from geological and climactic shifts, evolutionary adaptation, etc. All humans have done, is evolve an adaptation that is too disruptive for this process to look the way it normally does. (namely enough intelligence and aptitude for tool use to effectively adapt to different conditions much faster than the time it would take for anything slower breeding than perhaps a single celled organism to evolve a counter for).

    Id be willing to bet that, if you gave any other animal a set of traits that effectively allowed them to adapt to things much faster than the pace of natural evolution, you would get similar disruption.

    What’s more, such an equilibrium will eventually come back. If humans manage to destroy our natural life support system enough to go extinct? Then it will return as whatever survives our mass-extinction event fills empty niches and carries on as it has. If humans do survive but manage to make large scale civilization impossible and must revert to low tech subsistence hunter-gathering? Then they would be subject to the same growth constraints and competition as other large omnivores. If humans develop technology and infrastructure that allows for high tech industrial civilization to exist with a generally sustainable resource cycle, that doesnt disrupt the surrounding ecosystem anymore? Then that surrounding ecosystem is no longer subject to our disruption. If humans develop technology and infrastructure that just replaces by brute force the natural systems that we rely on, so as to no longer need them to survive, and continue on until the whole natural ecosystem is gone? Then as humans and their pets, crops, livestock, parasites etc would represent the whole of life remaining on earth, that built environment would be the environment, and as it would have to have been made generally self-sufficient and stable to get to that point, it would still represent a stable ecological state, if a very different and less diverse one than what exists now.

    That doesnt mean that things wont change anymore once a stable state is reached, even stable environments in nature are not permanent, but humans cant logically continue to diminish a finite natural environment forever. Eventually humans will stop doing that, there wont be any humans to do it, or there wont be a natural environment left to do it to. In that sense, we can be viewed the same as any other disruption caused by any other organism, we’ve just created a much bigger shock than usual and the process of finding a stable state is still ongoing.



  • The traditional notion of a Dyson sphere/swarm isn’t using the thing to power earth, or launching the construction materials from earth for that matter. You would literally deliver enough power to overheat the planet that way.

    The idea is that you mostly live in space habitats by that point, so a given solar array is just powering the habitat it’s attached to, or one nearby (or for one farther out, you can have some satellites that are just big, thin foil mirrors that focus sunlight from a wide area onto a solar array). You probably build these from asteroids and such, since again the energy cost to launch material from earth is prohibitive. A bit like how it would be cost prohibitive for a single city on an empty planet to engage in a project to colonize and build new farmland and cities across the entire world: they wouldn’t actively build with that goal in mind, so much as they expand a little bit, and a bit more with the surplus gained by that expansion as the population grows, until one day their descendants run out of empty land to expand to. A Dyson sphere is just the end state of this for a solar system rather than a planet.

    It probably does take thousands of years, or more, and a corresponding level of effort, but that’s nothing compared to the life of a star, so if you have a species that’s got the technology to build a civilization in space, they have the time.