☆ Yσɠƚԋσʂ ☆ @ yogthos @lemmy.ml

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Indeed, and another point to consider is that it's highly unlikely we'd observe a civilization at our level of development. Life on Earth appears around 4.5 billion years ago. Humans start evolving around 2.8 million years ago. Use of language appears around 100,000 years ago. Writing is invented around 5500 years ago.

Inventions of language and writing are the landmark moment here. Before language was invented the only way information could be passed down from ancestors to offspring was via mutations in our DNA. If an individual learned some new idea it would be lost with them when they died. Language allowed humans to communicate ideas to future generations and start accumulating knowledge beyond what a single individual could hold in their head. Writing made this process even more efficient.

So, after millions of years of life on Earth no technological development happened. Then when language was invented humans started creating technology, and in a blink of an eye on cosmological scale we went from living in caves to visiting space in our rocket ships. It’s worth taking a moment to really appreciate just how fast our technology evolved once we were able to start accumulating knowledge using language and writing.

Now let’s take a look at how technology itself has been evolving. Once we discovered radio communication we went through a noisy period where we were leaking a lot of our broadcasts into space, and within a span of a 100 years we started using more efficient communication, and encryption. If somebody intercepted our broadcasts today they would look like noise because they’re designed to look like noise. Our society today is utterly and completely unrecognizable to somebody from even a 100 years ago. If we don’t go extinct, I imagine that in another thousand years future humans will be completely alien to us as well.

So the period during which intelligent life would be recognizable to us during its course of evolution is infinitesimally small. The time between creating language and becoming an advanced technological society is measured in thousands of years, while evolution of life is measured in millions of years. The chance of two different intelligences finding each other at exact same stage of development where they might be able to communicate is incredibly unlikely.

I would also imagine that the biological phase for intelligent life is rather short. We’re likely to develop human style AIs within a century, and they will be the ones to go out and explore the universe. Meat did not evolve to live in space, we’re adapted to gravity wells. An artificial life form could be engineered to thrive in space without ever needing to visit planets. This is the kind of life that’s most likely to be prolific in space. Furthermore, post biological intelligences would likely be running at much faster speeds than our mental processes operate on. What we consider real-time would be might we consider to be geological scales. Such beings might consider what we view as real time akin to the way we look at continental drift. We're aware that it's happening, but it's of little interest to use on day to day basis. It's quite possible that advanced civilizations become solipsistic and care little for the outside universe.

For all we know the Universe may be teeming with intelligent life and we just don’t recognize it as such. We might be like an ant hill next to a highway looking to see if there are other ant hills around.

Chances that there is other intelligent life somewhere out there are pretty high, but the chances of us meeting it are slim to none.

https://redsails.org/witbd-rs-abridged/

The US worked hard since WW2 to ensure that Europe would be politically subservient to the US. The Marshall Plan indebted Europe to the US, and NATO made Europe militarily dependent. Such economic and military dependence necessarily led to Atlanticist politicians rising to the top. Incidentally, the EU makes the whole problem worse because the bureaucracy there is not accountable to the people living in individual European countries.

Hating Russia is basically the sole requirement for advancing in EU politics.

https://imgflip.com/memegenerator/497281194/Victoria-David-Beckham-Be-Honest

The government doesn't just exist in a vacuum as you seem to think. It represents the interests of those who hold power in a particular society. In the US, it is the capital owning class, and these are the people who decide to cut your healthcare, to gouge you for education, and so on. The government simply exercises their will. Entire books have been written on the subject, yet here you are confidently attempting to debate a topic you clearly haven't spent even a few minutes thinking about.

Also, if a large central government was the problem, then we'd see the same kind of shit happening in China that's happening under capitalist regimes.

We might just have to wait for China to definitively surpass the west, and act as an example of what could be.

Nah, they did it through the power of class dictatorship.

Don't forget overuse of antibiotics in commercial animal farming.

For the same reason Republicans haven't released the Epstien client list. Many of them and their donors are on the list.

the most self aware liberal

Great, now let's extend this logic to a solar system and see how that works.

Oh thanks, I love me some Red Sails. :)

Out of curiosity, what do you think the sentence "I'm home alone" means exactly?

One huge impact mass FOSS adoption would have is that there would be a lot less software and hardware churn. Commercial nature of proprietary technology is the main driver for constant upgrade cycles we see. Companies need to constantly sell products to stay in business, and this means you have to deprecate old software and hardware in order to sell new versions of the product.

Windows 11 roll out is a perfect example. Vast majority of Windows 10 users are perfectly happy with the way their computer works currently, they're not demanding any new features, they just want their computer to continue to work the way it does currently. However, Microsoft is ending support for Windows 10 and now they're forced to buy a new computer to keep doing what they've been doing.

This problem goes away entirely with open source because there is no commercial incentive at play. If a piece of software works, and there is a community of users using it, then it can keep working the way it does indefinitely. Furthermore, in cases where a software project goes in a directions some users don't like, such as the case with Gnome, then software can be forked by users who want to go in a different direction or preserve original functionality. This is how Cinnamon and Mate projects came about.

Another aspect of the open source dynamic is that there's an incentive to optimize software. So, you can get continuous performance improvements without having to constantly upgrade your hardware. For most commercial software, there's little incentive to do that since that costs company money. It's easier to just expect users to upgrade their hardware if they want better performance.

I would argue that non technical software users would be far better off if they had the option to fund open source software instead of buying commercial versions. Even having to pay equal amounts, the availability of the source puts more power in the hands of the users. For example, building on the example of Gnome, users of an existing software project could also pull funds together to pay developers to add features to the software or change functionality in a particular way.

This is precisely what makes licenses like GPL so valuable in my opinion. It's a license that ensure the source stays open, and in this way inherently gives more power to the users.

Oh yeah, once you start seeing it, you realize that we're swimming in propaganda and people are simply regurgitating it uncritically like chatbots.

Reading Marx is like unearthing the Necronomicon in a university library, a forbidden text that lays bare capitalism's inner workings. But the true horror lies in realizing you're surrounded by people who treat exploitation as 'just how things work.' Suddenly the world reveals itself as a self-sustaining asylum, where the so-called 'rational' diligently reproduce the madness of the system.

I find hashtags are kind of essential for using Mastodon

yeah the headline is a little bombastic, but the article itself was interesting