jkf
1hr ago
Sure -- those could be other people doing the same thing, or people already in the market trading up and taking on a manageable mortgage.
jkf
2hr ago
Boomers might be changing this, but typically I think a great many house purchases come from people just moving to roughly equivalent places for work, better schools, location preference, etc. Locational arbitrage has been a big thing since even before covid -- if your place in the city is worth $1M+, buying an equivalent (or better) place elsewhere for half the money and pocketing the difference gets pretty attractive, and if anything drives up prices in the other places (low demand), while being lost in the noise of the urban real estate markets. (ie. not many people do this relative to the total housing stock in a big city, but it's still enough to distort the much smaller rural markets)
jkf
2hr ago
Can you be more specific as to why?
Space is really big and the lifespan of every known creature is extremely short as compared to the timescales inherent to interstellar travel -- science fiction is fiction. Same goes for extracting resources -- Columbus thought he was going to China, which was known to have lots of resources that could feasibly be moved back home and sold at a profit. If he thought it would take 1000 years to get to China, he would not have gone.
Strong disagree. Leaving an unmistakable message would cost essentially nothing. For example, you could just leave an arbitrary number of probes in the system, have them watch for signs of intelligent life, and if they see them, physically visit any such beings and deliver a message face to face. This would cost essentially nothing.
I depends on your probes, doesn't it? Complex mechanical devices tend to have a pretty limited lifespan too -- if we hypothesize for the moment that self-replicating machines are not also science fiction, it still costs a lot more to have your probes hanging around replicating in every system they visit for hundreds of millions of years than not.
jkf
23hr ago
For one thing I guess it means that there's a pool of buyers (current homeowners) who are not sensitive to interest rate or other affordability concerns when looking at houses -- so demand does not (necessarily) exceed supply?
jkf
23hr ago
(3) is probably the main source of disagreement -- I think interstellar colonization attempts are highly improbable due to the physics of the thing. (as mentioned, with possible edge cases where a highly advanced civilization has literally no alternative but to flee their home system -- seems improbable too though?)
Given ¬3, (1) no longer makes sense either -- why would you "lay claim" to something that you can never visit?
Messages... yeah maybe. I guess you need to include the odds of us finding the messages? Messages that are literally impossible to miss (on a millions of years timescale) would also be resource intensive to produce, and some black obelisks on Mars might very well exist! (or else your probes are designed to shoot some proto-DNA onto habitable planets and we are the message, of course)
jkf
1d ago
the argument is "sending probes for conquest/destruction is normal, somebody might do it", and your counter-argument is "nobody would ever do it"
No, my counter-argument is "nobody CAN do it", in the case of conquest -- space is too big for conquest to be meaningfully possible. You can posit some scenario (generation ship fleeing a dying sun, say) in which it might make some sense -- but then one can counter-posit that this too sounds pretty rare, and just add a few more (small) terms to the Drake equation.
Similarly with destruction -- I can see how it might be possible for some civilization to send probes around that blow up and/or harvest all the matter from every system that they encounter, but my argument is that there's no obvious motivation for this behaviour, so it would probably be pretty rare too.
One can reject the Dark Forest hypothesis on the basis that interstellar conquest is largely impossible, therefore nobody has any reason to hide or become omnicidal -- and one can further note that "all the matter/energy in a star system" is way more than any self-replicating Von Neumann exploration setup would have reason to harvest.
Which leaves you with adding terms for "probability that any given intelligent lifeform wants to destroy the galaxy for no reason" and maybe "probability that any given lifeform is incredibly sloppy and wasteful to the point of accidentally destroying the galaxy" to your modified Drake equation -- I really do think these terms can be small to the point of negligibility, although of course they interact with your guesses at the other ones. If you think life is extremely common in the universe you might make it work -- but IMO it would need to be common enough that we'd know of it happening more than once for the chance to be worth considering.
Wake me up when Elon finds some Martian dinosaur skeletons or something.
jkf
1d ago
I think maybe you misunderstood my point. I'm saying that exploring, conquering, and extracting resources is pretty normal. That's what most species do if they can.
I understand your point perfectly -- my point is that if only the first of those is something that a species can do vis a vis space exploration, which certainly seems to be the case, then they will not do the other things.
If your Von Neumann probes are star-hopping around the galaxy, they really only need enough resources from the solar system to hop on to the next few stars in your path -- where they will do it again. That doesn't seem like a lot of resources, and burning more resources than you need is wasteful, which is also something that most species are evolved not to be.
jkf
1d ago
Yeah, transhumanism is dumb -- I think aliens who are roughly subject to the same constraints and desires as humans are very much more likely than otherwise; you can put a separate 1E-20 in your Drake equation if you want trans, uh, -alien aliens.
jkf
1d ago
The argument sort of shifts though -- "sending probes to explore is normal, we've even done it" moves to "sending probes for conquest/destruction is normal, anyone would do it".
Exploratory probes do seem pretty likely for sufficiently advanced civilizations, but unless the probes are remarkably inefficient at replicating you should be able to explore the galaxy pretty effectively without harvesting every scrap of energy/matter from every star system you visit -- granted on a long timelime, but I think we are stuck with that anyways. (thanks Einstein)
A lack of deliberate conquest/destruction type probes seems to point equally well towards "space is hard and there's not really much point in conquering/destroying other star systems because they are too far away to be either useful or harmful" as "everyone would obviously want to destroy/conquer anywhere in the galaxy that might produce a species that could compete with them (on massive time scales)".
Historical examples of grabbyness involved a lot more "grabbing stuff will make you super rich" than "you will probably never even know what you've grabbed; better destroy it just in case somebody else grabs it".
jkf
2d ago
if the likelihood of intelligent life developing is high enough that likely to produce a Renaissance Italy level civilization 150 light years away, it follows that (probably) there have been thousands if not millions of intelligent extra-terrestrial species who have had the opportunity to send a probe and/or a colonization wave through our solar system.
If...
The thing is that all of this stuff depends on exactly which values you wanna plug into the Drake equation -- any options between "we are alone" and "spacefaring intelligent life is pretty rare but not that rare" seem on the table based on what we can observe.
The assumption that Von Neumann probes would necessarily/likely be maximally grabby paperclip maximizers does seem like reasoning from sci-fi to me -- like, would you design a system that just goes around raping every star system it encounters? Why would the aliens?
jkf
2d ago
If development of intelligent life is so likely as to produce intelligent civilizations that close to use in space and time, then almost certainly there would have been either Von Neuman probes or a colonization wave (from other intelligent civilizations) passing through our solar system hundreds of millions of years ago. And we don't see these things.
But how would we know if a probe had come and mined a bunch of asteroids (or sucked Mars dry, or something) some millions of years ago, then moved on?
jkf
5d ago
Tesla wasn't just ambitious, it was standing on the shoulders of legacy giants
Tesla hit the goldilocks zone in so many ways it is incredible.
sure buddy
jkf
7d ago
How many divisions has the eurozone? If some country wants to leave it, it could be done -- I doubt that the will exists anywhere at the moment, but things do fall apart eventually.
jkf
7d ago
I burned bridges and access and money over the last year+ trying to stop this from happening and as you can see I failed miserably.
Is that you, JD?
jkf
8d ago
Introducing a contradiction in the set of lemmas you give a system will indeed break it.
"Break it" in the sense that it will give a wrong answer, though -- or "break it" in the sense that it will become confused/non-functional?
jkf
8d ago
Eh, that's like "if the religious right are smart they will shut up about abortion" -- I don't think it's in their nature. (lol, lmao)
jkf
8d ago
Pray the diesel stays high -- when it drops you will know that the big recession is finally coming.
jkf
8d ago
White women were in fact 52-46 (Blue) according to the exit poll; this is a regression since it was much closer to 50-50 in 2024 as I recall. This time wipipo as a whole were split down the middle.
"Pander to white women" is maybe more feasible than "pander to minorities" as a Republican path to victory -- not sure how you shake off the abortion albatross though.
jkf
8d ago
IDK, the SC margin seems like it's stretching as they count lol, so what do I know!
While it's nice that Florida came around, a two percent margin there seems a bit concerning?
jkf
8d ago
Eh, i dunno -- AFAICT pretty much everywhere has been counting whatever forms of early/mail-in ballots they have first -- so you could be seeing some blue mirage action with only 25% counted and a pretty small margin?
Florida senate was leaning blue until like 80% counted!
jkf
11d ago
I would argue the other side on "troon" -- it's a neologism for one thing, and not at all an established diminutive in English. Not inherently insulting per se, but AFAIK as you say was coined by haters so two strikes at least.
"Tranny" is much older; even if you exclude transmissions from the conversation, it was common argot for "transvestite" for the longest time before the gender deal was much of a glimmer in anyone's eye.
The fact that the people who are making a big deal about being called how they want in terms of pronouns and/or general gender essence are also wanting to dictate the name of their condition is a pretty big push actually -- "fuck you I won't do what you tell me" is actually a pretty mild form of disagreement in such cases, and (as you say) it could be done in a much stronger way.
So I'll argue that using "tranny" is just a way of saying "i reject your hypothesis" -- aggressive, but only as insulting as you want to make it and far from contentless.
Even 'gay' is not (hopefully) a slur when you are talking about an actual gay person -- if there were a movement to require non-chuds to refer to gay people only as 'homosexual' (certainly no homo!) or something even more cumbersome, would you support it?
The term obviously was invented by people who are against "trannies" with the intent to offend
This is not even slightly obvious to me -- the very same word is (very commonly for like 50+ years) used to refer to a somewhat cumbersome to pronounce/type automotive component, and the general format is in extensive use in casual English. (see esp. Australia; "sunnies", "mozzies", "footie", "barbie" etc etc etc)
It doesn't at all diminish/insult transmissions! Why would it be an obvious slur against... trann-o's?
We could just continue with the regular culture war thread, but assign everyone a flair of "woke" or "chud" at the desired ratio, and flip them every week!
Failing to argue in accordance with your flair would be an automatic two week ban, starting at the beginning of the current week -- call it "devil's advocate or STFU"...
Seems like the sort of thing that might be in the /drama codebase already, and if not they might like to back-merge it!
It's not hard to believe at all if you reason from observation instead of from science fiction -- we don't know of any sentient species that lives more than a few centuries; maybe there's a reason? As I said, generation ships may be a possibility, but you need to also think about the probability of somebody wanting to do this -- if it's low enough, it doesn't really change things much unless intelligent life is really quite common in the galaxy.
Of course -- but if one were building a machine capable of self replication, deliberately building it to do so in an uncontrolled manner seems extremely unwise -- as you note, these machines tend to be pretty dangerous to those around them!
It depends how easy it is to build these machines, doesn't it? If it's trivial, I think we are wandering back into the realm of science fiction; after all, so far as we know it's not actually possible to build a self replicating machine that can do so over the span of millions of years and survive travelling through interstellar space at some reasonable speed. It sounds kind of hard, if you think about it?
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