zifnab25 [he/him, any]

The original problem was posited... 60 years ago?

It's a bit like saying "I wonder how the dinosaurs died?" in the early '00s, a few years before meteor theory really got nailed down. Like, ignore the last century of postulation. We just knocked this out real quick.

Natalie should know better. But also... the really nasty shit under Obama was heavily under-reported and only ever seemed to penetrate media in a select few circuits. Casually tossing off a "What even did Obama do that was so bad?" is almost forgivable if you're not a terminally online 30-year-old who makes hour long YouTube videos about politics, history, and culture.

Valiantly defending the Titan of Industry from in between its toes, while the behemoth clutches at its heart and collapses due to a congenital heart defect.

All these conservatives from back in the 90s telling people "Learn to code!" with no idea of the tidal wave they were about to unleash.

staring at my Microsoft DevOps certification, dejectedly

I think she's joking about how people over-report his trivial shit. But it can be read as blithely ignoring the monstrous crimes Obama did commit while in office, because it echoes a lot of the liberal apologia of the administration that amounted to "The worst thing Obama ever did was wear a tan suit".

Since she basically stopped making content, I'm a little surprised she still has an audience. Like so many otherwise curiously influential and interesting people, she's doomed herself to drowning in the social media space when everyone would be better off (her most of all) if she just logged the fuck off.

Performance Enhancing

Libs on /r/politics only make jokes about the Ork-shaped Slavic Brainpan and how many indictments Trump is currently under.

yeah, the comic describes it as "the virtually impossible"

We are a lot better at it now than we were, say, ten years ago. But it is nearly trivial to outwit a "bird detecting algorithm" by holding up a vague facsimile of a bird. That gets us back to the old TrashFuture line about AI just being "some dude at a computer filling out captchas".

I'm not saying we aren't building on centuries of work, i'm saying the rate of recent progress is remarkable.

The recent progress is heavily overstated. More often than not, what a computer does today to recognize a bird is to pull on a large library of data labeled "birds" and ask if there's a close-enough match. But that large library is not AI driven. Its the consequence of a bunch of manual labeling done by humans with eyes and brains. A novel or rare species of bird, or a bird that's camouflaged, or even just a bird that's out-of-focus or badly rendered, will still consistently fail the "Is this a bird?" test.

Cynical take: To kill us. Dark forest style.

As a sci-fi explanation for the Fermi Paradox, I found Dark Forest Theory compelling and thrilling.

As an actual IRL explanation for a lack of First Contact, I'm totally underwhelmed. Space is big. The speed of light heavily truncates both travel and communication. Extraterrestrial life certainly isn't common, as evidenced by all of the planets in our own Solar System that are lifeless.

It should be noted that ::: spoiler spoiler across three different books, the humans and tri-solarians never actually meet. The whole build-up is ultimately a bust, as both humans and aliens end up fleeing Dark Forest attacks by other alien races who have only just barely noticed their presence and attack on reflex. Fun dramatic twist, but it really banks on everyone being invested in outcomes that are hundreds of generations into the future.
::: That strikes me as highly implausible.

Other thoughts: If aliens showed up it we wouldn't detect them in atmo, not as a quick fly by. We'd detect something huge like engines or something going real fast way out in space. Like on the edge of the system. If they were in our atmosphere they would make themselves known one way or another at that point.

The sheer amount of energy for super-luminal travel would suggest we either can't see them or can't miss them.

But one posits a degree of technological advancement so beyond our current scope that we can barely conceive of it. And the other posits a kind-of soft ceiling to scientific advancement, such that alien life just can't be an issue even in another thousand lifetimes.

If first contact is anything, it will more likely be communicative than a literal fly by. Humans tuning into the extraterrestrial equivalent of AM radio will be the first to discover an advanced off-world civilization.

Going back to 3Body, one of the most compelling plot beats for me was ::: spoiler spoiler when the Tri-solarians started producing daytime drama TV shows about star-crossed lovers communing across a great distance, in order to influence humans into sympathizing with the refugee colony ships they intended to send Earthward. :::

Like, that's what I imagine a real human/alien interaction would look like for... centuries. Long before either saw the other one face-to-face.

"What is the return on investment?"

In the case of 3Body,

::: spoiler spoiler it wasn't about profit but the about the survival of the entire ecology. The planet was doomed to fall into one of the stars and so the race was picking up and moving as much as it could to the next-most-habitable region. ::: That's only very loosely a "profitable" enterprise. Certainly, the initial generations won't see any kind of profit simply due to the length of the journey.

The same principle applies to other planets – if it's profitable, it will be pursued.

But a practical ROI can only really be measured within a single lifetime. And extraplanetary travel will always have a return of $0, as anyone deciding to perform extra-planetary exploration today will not see the benefits for generations. One might argue a more Ursula LeGuin-esque view of interstellar colonization - as a struggle for survival that simply expands beyond the frontiers of a single planet. But then, what we're really talking about with Martian colonization or extra-Solar travel is some kind of politically or ecologically motivated Exodus. Because the economic exploitation of the New World was mostly just hit-and-run raids early on. The Virginia Company was an abject failure as an economic exercise. It cost far more to maintain than it yielded.

The real motivating force behind early colonization was the 30 Years War and the flight of the Protestants. What you're ultimately going to need are some Huguenots with space ships. Even then, the real labor force in colonization were indentured servants and slaves. And there's not going to be a Trans-Atlantic Triangle to move people from Earth to the spacial frontier, because... Its space. There's nothing out there.

TrashFuture has hit on a few new attempts at Killer App firms, but it's all Mindfulness this and AI that.

I think the last app I downloaded was an AI art app, which I used maybe twice.