Parenthood has taught me that anyone who thinks they don’t want kids should absolutely be free to follow that and not have kids.
It’s also taught me that all of the cringe goofball nonsense is 100% sincere. Being a parent changes the human brain in weird ways. Which is good, because babies need someone to clean them up after they puke on themselves and shit their plants so hard it gets in their hair.
(Parenthood can be considered a necessary mental illness.)
Space launches via catapult are entirely possible on earth. We don’t do it mostly because the engineering scale is dramatically larger, not because of how we math.
The laws of physics seem to be consistent throughout our universe, so any claim that an alien race could travel through space without math is what skeptics call “an extraordinary claim”.
I dont really see how a contrarian “what if they’re just too weird” stance is even helpful in a discussion about why math is the closest thing we have to a universal language. If an alien civilization is too weird to grok math, I dont see how we’d ever be able to communicate with them at all.
If the aliens have godlike powers I think we can presume that they would either be smart enough to figure us out or else weird enough that talking to them isn’t worthwhile.
Literally every civilization we have ever encountered evidence of has math and language. If an alien has neither, and is not smart enough to figure us out, then they’re likely not the sort we could communicate with on even the scale of our communication with plants and insects.
The sun is the big one. What we call “visible light” is just the band of the em spectrum right around Sol’s peak. A larger\hotter star would have that band shifted dramatically bluer, while a smaller/colder star would be redder.
For instance, what if they don’t have the concept of symbolic representation of objects/concepts in visual/auditory ways?
Then how did they manage space travel?
Rocket science demands math. You can’t get to orbit if you can’t figure out both the rocket equation, orbital dynamics, and sufficient chemistry to power your launch engine. And you don’t even realize that orbit is a thing if you don’t have enough math to realize that the lights in the sky are things you might be able to stand on.
We have sapient non-human life right here on earth that doesn’t have the concept of writing. And since they don’t they didn’t build cities or civilization and we keep them in zoos and nature preserves.
If a spacefaring race is so utterly alien they don’t even have a concept of counting how did they manage space travel?
And, like I said, math only works for the (presumably large) subset of aliens we could eventually talk to.
Counting is kind of basic. From one-two-three you can get fairly quicky to yes-no, and then comparisons, and with yes/no/more/less/same you have enough to fuzzle out whatever squak gigors.
Aliens we could talk to at all wouldn’t be cthulu or q. They would live in the same basic reality we do, with entropy and gravity and the same elemetnts and stars. (They WOULD likely see different colors than we do, unless their sun was the same temperature as Sol and their planet the same size as earth)
If the scrawl says “episode IV” it was already fucked with.
Star Wars mananaged to have each movie retcon something, including the first one. ;)
Money is fungible. $1 from pot tax, lottery tax, or DMV fee spends the same in the general ledger, and any pretense to the otherwise is just make believe.
(If your state implements a lottery “for education” and raises $10 million, the near immediate result is reducing general fund outlay to education by $10 million.)
Sexualities are only useful as options on the dating app.
Whether you describe yourself as “asexual” or “demisexual” (or "straight’ or “gay”) only matters when you’re looking for a new partner and need to choose how much “what do you mean by that” you want to put up with.
The EU is about twice the size of the USA…
In FOSS you’re paying with your time and plausible feedback / contributions.
It’s not so much a philosophical challenge as a grammatical question.
Was the egg that the very first chicken hatched from a chicken egg, even though it was laid by a non-chicken?
If I waved a scientifically-advanced biotech wand and impregnated a chicken with a small dinosaur, would the resultant egg be a chicken egg even though a dinosaur came out?
I think you underestimate how long a telegram can be.
Not everyone who sent telegrams was as poor as Victor Hugo inquiring about the English sales of Les Miserables by sending a single '?"
No, I would not keep seeing a doctor who demanded I consent to AI to continue being a patient.
Just as I’d stop seeing a doctor who said they now want to ban all vaccines. Or who demands that patients go to their specific church. Or requires that we give blood.
A doctor who asks to use it, however, is entirely tolerable. I don’t mind if my doctor has an LLM look at my MRI scan to help find precancerous growths, and neither should you. But “talk to this chatbot instead of a triage nurse” is an unacceptable level of care.
One of the virtues of the EU is that it counteracts the balkanization that let people make ignorant statements like “[ part of] Europe is better than [the average part of] America”
If you separate America and Europe into similar-scale subdivisions (local schools, postal codes, sports teams, etc) you’ll find the two areas are broadly scattered on most metrics which aren’t things like “native English speakers”, “uses metric”, or “has a passport.”
“Europe” has a bunch of countries that do some things better than the typical American experience, but there are a lot of things that the USA and it’s internal states do better than the typical European experience.
(For the easiest example, look at trans rights. Some parts of the USA are Iowa and some parts are fiercely transclusive; some parts of Europe are as LGBT friendly as NY and some are TERF island. )
A ferry or other regular short-run vessel can be electrified too. The tour boats at Niagara falls switched to pure-electric a few years back, and they’re plugged in to recharge during onboarding and off boarding.
If a boat travelled as fast as a plane the extra resistance would likely make it less efficient. And the whole shape would be designed to be most efficient at speed, so you couldn’t carry that much in the first place.
For an aircraft to travel as slow as a ship it would also need to be radically redesigned, and would likely be a lighter-than-air design since low speed makes reliable lift hard.
Zepplins, derigibles, blimps, and balloons are fairly efficient per surface mile. (Less so depending on how they achieve buoyancy…)
This is really dependent on how many people are taking the same trip you are.
There’s a rail line that goes very regularly between my state capital and my state’s eponymous megacity. (And more along the entire corridor on south to the national capital). If it’s just one or two adults doing that trip it’s cheaper to ride the rail, since the two round-trip tickets cover gas, fuel, tolls, parking, and depreciation. Not so if it’s enough people to fill the car.
There are two things you appear ignorant about.
First, while gender and sex are not the same thing HRT can be absurdly effective and adjusting the latter to match the former. There are humans out here who look and act “obviously” manly or womanly, despite privately being female or male respectivly. And that’s before we consider surgical options.
Second, human sex is not that simple. Take the IoC’s “trans women” ban, where they are now testing for the SRY gene. Except that there are cis-women who are XX with a copied SRY from their fatber’s Y, and XY humans for whom the SRY gene is dormant, or whose testes never developed, or who are testosterone resistant – and have appeared feminine since birth. Its entirely likely the IoC will wind up banning more cis women than trans women.
Taken together, these facts lead most people to conclude that the only fair thing is to take people at their word. Sure, doing so means you may need to treat some apparent “bearded women” and “men in dresses” contrary to your initial perception. But most adults do that anyway for literally every other aspect of humanity, and unless you’re a sexist jerk the sum total of what you’d need to change is just pronouns and salutations.