Why do you need a more powerful energy source, while you have a star going that’s gonna release free energy anyway? A Dyson swarm need not be a single project, it can be assembled gradually by just adding solar power arrays until there’s eventually no place left to put one.
Maybe the surprise is there to scare the shit out of the person using it.
If radio at the energies used for long distance communication is deadly to you and your spaceship isn’t enough to protect you from it, good luck getting into space in the first place.
Ive done it before by mistake tbf
“Ive watched you guys enough to literally learn how to speak an alien language. Do you really think I don’t know about all the problems you have on your planet?”
It was more like hyperbole on my part, I was using that as a catch all for whatever kinds of things a business could abuse it’s position by doing. I didn’t want to just say “be able to do businesses or not do business with whoever they want”, because I wanted to say something more broad than just applying to payment processors, even if choosing not to do business with someone and thereby shutting them out of much of the economy is the way a payment processor would do this .
I don’t think that businesses, not being individuals, should actually have the same rights as individuals I guess. I don’t really agree with the idea that a corporation should be able to do whatever it likes by default, simply because I think corporations in general have too much power to be trusted with such.
I mean, when your service is fundamental enough to the economy, and centralized enough to make just going to an alternative a major hassle, if an alternative without a similar policy even exists, then why should they get that say? The power to effectively ban the sale of certain types of thing, or force media platforms to censor certain types of content, is the sort of power we generally reserve for governments, not private entities that can do whatever they want. Honestly they’re important enough these days that they should basically be treated like some sort of public utility in my view.
Which means that playing it is also free, no?
Free to play depends on what the operating model actually is I’d say. Some pay to win mobile game is worse than free with paid cosmetics, which in turn is worse than something like freeciv.
Because of inflation and such, but the important aspect of them is being super rich compared to everyone else (hence we don’t count people that have a billion of some much less valuable currency), and that’s a very old problem.
Billionaires aren’t new. I also don’t really think LLMs will be as impactful as they get hyped or feared to be, and actually think AI as a whole outside mere chatbots will be positive if not the revolution it gets hyped as.
Honestly I do think there has been an improvement. It might not seem like that when viewing the past, but the past is easy to overestimate- we don’t have to live it anymore.
As to civil rights, it should be pointed out that while recent years have seen regression in the US, its not always a regression to the point that things were at back then, and more importantly, the rest of the world does not necessarily share the political woes of the US.
No? Im saying those factors should be understandable, they just need to do the relevant testing to figure it out before building something the public could visit. Hence mentioning due diligence.
Between the pink color, two arms and rounded face, I guess it does kinda look like one of those human-descended “All Tomorrows” creatures.
I’ve long found the notion that the lesson of Jurassic Park, if a fictional story like that must be taken to have one, should be something like “science/genetic engineering is bad” or “you can’t control nature” to be a bit silly, given that, well, it’s a zoo. With pretty big animals, to be sure, but dinosaurs were animals still, not kaiju or dragons or whatever other fantasy monster, and some genetically modified to be somewhat bigger and lack feathers would still be such. It’s a story about some people building a zoo badly because they didn’t do their due diligence about the animals they had and cheaped out on staff and the systems they had for containing the animals, and somehow people get the take away that “these animals are special and can’t be safely contained” rather than “letting rich people cheap out on safety is a bad idea”.
Were one to write a broadly similar story where someone cheaps out on a park containing elephants and tigers, and they get out and maul some people, it’d be obvious, but give the tigers scales and make them born in a lab and suddenly it’s a monster movie.
The sheer irony of stonetoss comparing something to facism
tbh just with how the fediverse works I would not trust vote counts here whatsoever. The downside of having no central authority over the network is that anything that lets one instance affect the whole network, like votes from bots on one instance being federated, cant be entirely trusted.
Im probably guilty of writing a lot of those tbh. Its always a toss up if I get a joke, think I get a joke but get it completely wrong, dont get a joke, or dont even realize something is a joke.
Honestly, I don’t think very many of them could really be described as such, as at the very least most hobbies either don’t have a person or group that could be called it’s leader, or if they do, it’s generally some business that owns some relevant IP that very much isn’t considered unquestionable and above criticism. You could get cults that emerge within some hobby group instead of taking up the whole subculture, but given even things as mundane as exercise groups have had this happen before, I’d guess that can technically happen in just about any of them.
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.