sylver_dragon

Part of the mythology of Jesus is that he got better. So, the cross became a symbol of his sacrifice and suffering for the followers of his religion. It's a constant reminder of "look what you made Jehovah do by being an evil sinner." It is also a concise icon which can be used to identify the members of the religion. And, it's been in use for a long time now and is well recognized as a Christian religious symbol, with the original usage of crosses as torture and execution devices being mostly ignored. Perhaps back 1500 to 2000 years ago, such confusion may have made sense. These days, it's so far removed from that context that such confusion is usually a matter of being willfully obtuse.

One way to look at this is to consider why the aliens came in the first place. There's some common sci-fi tropes around this, but most of them fall apart under scrutiny. Now, this scrutiny does assume that our understanding of the physical laws of the universe are "close enough" that we can rule out such magic as stargates, warp drives or the like. Yes, there are some theories like the Alcubierre drive, but those sit far enough at the edge of "might be possible" that I'm going to ignore them.

Give us your resources (water, gold, hair)

On the scale of "everything in our solar system", the Earth contains a vanishingly small amount of everything which isn't biological. Water, minerals, and other inorganic stuff is in vast abundance in comets and asteroids. And this ignores the possibilities of rocky bodies much, much, much closer to home for any alien species. The distances in interstellar space are absolutely vast. Just getting to the next star over is going to require an insane investment of time, material and energy. And then you want to stop, turn around and go back? XKCD did a What If a while back which contemplated catching up to the Voyager probe and bringing it back. It's technically possible. It would also require something like 10-15 Saturn V rocket's worth of fuel. Now multiply that by a stupidly large number for going to another solar system. The energy expenditure to go pick up rocks in another solar system is just never going to be worth it.

And then there is the issue of time. Thanks to the wonders of length contraction, a vehicle could accelerate at 1G half way to the target solar system, flip around and decelerate at 1g to be able to stop there. And the time for the travelers would actually be pretty reasonable. You could cross the disk of the galaxy in about 24 years (assuming you want to stop on the other side) [source]. Of course, that's 24 years for the travelers. Back home a couple hundred thousand years will have passed. And you thought your dad has taken a long time to get cigarettes at the corner store.

Even just going to Alpha Centari , the traveler experiences 3.9 years. Back home, it's 6. This means there's a round trip time of 12 years, and that's just for the closest possible star. It gets far longer really quick. It's likely that hundreds or thousands of years will pass "back home" while the travelers are going somewhere. By the time they get back, their home may so radically different that the stuff they set out to get isn't even in demand anymore. Here is a fun calculator you can play with the numbers yourself.

The last thing to mention is the fun of Reaction Mass. Again, unless we find some spooky new source of thrust, going forward means throwing stuff backwards. And when you're talking about accelerating at 1g for years, that is an insane amount of "stuff" you need to huck out the back of your spaceship to keep that level of acceleration up. Once again, the scale of the universe results in insane requirements.

With all that said, strip mining nearby solar systems seems really unlikely. Perhaps more likely will be the next trope.

Hi, that's a nice planet you have there. It'd be a shame if someone colonized it.

So, this has all the "fun" of energy costs and reaction mass as above, but at least you don't have to worry about going back. And given the vast distances involved, this is a one way trip and communicating to the home world won't need to happen. It's going to be a case of launching a seed into the darkness and not expecting to hear from them again. Maybe provisions will be made to send back a "we did it" beacon. This will prevent reseeding the same planet over again. But, at a message latency of years (possibly centuries), keeping up a dialog is going to be pointless. Even a returning "we did it" probe could arrive back to a society which asks, "who the fuck are these guys?" Because all records of the trip got lost three centuries ago.

This is also something which is going to require a lot of faith on the part of the colonists. At best, the knowledge they have of the planet they are going to is years, decades or centuries out of date. Imagine getting part of the way there, only to realize that the planet you hoped to colonize got cooked by a large solar flare. You're now committed to a journey which will end with trying to desperately setup some sort of long term habitat somewhere really inhospitable. I hope you're good at creating O'Neill Cylinders. In fact, why didn't you just make one of those in the first place and save all the energy and effort of flinging yourself at a distant star on a wing and a prayer? Unless your home star is about to die, leaving it doesn't make much sense. Large rotating habitats are likely to be a far easier engineering challenge than building an interstellar ship. And they will be close enough to home that, if something goes wrong, help might actually reach them in time.

Our five thousand year mission is to seek out new life and explore strange new worlds

Ok, standard caveats here about energy costs and reaction mass. However, humans have done some pretty amazing things just for curiosity, aliens doing the same seems reasonable. Though this leaves the issue of time. Now, I'd expect that any such long range mission would be done with automated drones collecting data. Maybe with intelligent enough AI to recognize intelligent life, collect data and then start the long journey home. And maybe when it arrives home, it won't get blasted out of the sky as some unrecognizable alien device, because the program which launched it got shut down due to lack of funding 50 years ago. But, the time from launch to probe return starts to get kinda crazy really fast. Imagine you launch a probe and, if everything goes exactly right, it doesn't return for a thousand years. Maybe at some technological level this seems reasonable, but societies just don't seem to be stable that long.

So ya, maybe this would be a reason for automated drones recording anything and everything they can. But sending people to do this means those people leaving home and expecting to return to a world so vastly different from the one they left as to be unrecognizable. Unless they somehow have a society that just doesn't drift at all, it's quite possible that they will arrive home and have to figure out the language their own people are speaking. I don't doubt we would find people willing to take this on (heck, I might have gone for it when I was younger). At the same time, the investment of energy and resources will need to be borne by a society which has zero expectation of ever seeing anything back for that investment. Again, it's possible, but also seems pretty far fetched.

The great invisible sky wizard of Frobozz demands we cleanse the universe of the unclean (this means you).

Another thing, which has motivated humans to amazing heights of effort, wastefulness and stupidity is belief. Nothing gets large groups of people motivated to piss away resources like a religion. Why would it be any different for aliens? So maybe, there is some species out there which is majority held under a strong enough belief system that they are actually willing to expend the time, energy and resources to obliterate any signs of alien life. And Earth just fucked up by having an oxygen rich atmosphere. As a possible sign of life, this means all Earthlings must die. So, how are we destroying the Earth? Well, we could go there, look for signs of life, report back, setup an invasion fleet, etc, etc. Or, remember that whole "slowing down" part of visiting another solar system? What if we skip that and instead just send several large chunks of iron and have them keep accelerating the whole way? They can then use advanced Lithobraking to turn said planet to a far flung cloud of debris. This takes less time and avoids issues with plucky pilots flying up the exhaust port of our invasion mothership.

Welcome to the Dark Forest. Population: Whatever it was, less all humans. If the goal is total annihilation, the same tech which would get a ship to another solar system is exactly the same tech needed to simply destroy a planet in that solar system. At the energies involved in a sizable object moving that fast, it's going to exceed the binding energy of a planet. Fling a few such devices at a remote solar system, provide a bit of automated terminal guidance and program them to dust any planetary body which shows signs of life. Set a timer for a few years/decades from now to turn your telescopes that direction and wait for the show.

In this case, they won't care what our language is and we won't even know we've been "visited" by aliens, as we will have all died in massive flash of energy. Good times all around.

Conclusion

Unless there is a way around the speed of light limit to the universe, visiting other solar systems is probably off the table. Sure, there may be some very long range program to send automated drones to the nearest stars and collect some data/pictures for return to a later version of our society. But at the energies and timescales involved, it's unlikely. And for further away solar systems, the timescales make it so impractical that it's probably never going to happen. This also means that aliens visiting Earth and having to sort out our language, is also likely never going to happen. Getting out here just really isn't practical.

Hell, it's getting hard to avoid. DuckDuckGo now has an AI answer at the top of search results. When doing technical searches, it's usually just regurgitating the top StackOverflow answer, but there is always the problem that it could be regurgitating a bad answer. Or badly regurgitating an answer. So, it's usually best to ignore it and read the answer it's trying to give and then research what the person actually said and if it's right.

Sounds like we should expect another price hike soon.
That said, Apple TV+ does have some good shows, and they haven't yet built Netflix's or Amazon's track record for killing off shows, yet. I've reached a point where I don't really want to start a new show, before knowing how many seasons it got before being canceled. Too many shows I like have faced the axe, mid story, for me to want to get invested in another show which will go one or two seasons then just die. But, I'm still willing to give Apple the benefit of the doubt in this regard.

Put it, along with the documentation for whatever the thing is, and tape (packing tape works well) to the back of the thing. When it comes time to move or do something that requires the manual and/or tools, you have both the tools and documentation easily at hand and not lost in some junk drawer somewhere.

While slaves were almost certainly involved, a lot of the labor was likely Corvee Labor. Less like chattel slavery and more like taxes in the form of labor.

Movie theater audio systems continued to go big blue baby boinking bonkers. Remember when the THX logo wasn’t survivable by children under 7?

Yes

So, the solution to completely fucked up sound is to use a device to mangle that sound back into something which isn't complete shit?
And yes, I understand it's about the director wanting the loud sounds to be loud. But, when your art direction means that a major (if not majority) of your audience is going to have to "fix" your artistic direction, your artistic direction is the problem.

p.s.: don't mean to jump down your throat, this is just one of those things that grinds my gears. Along with the "let's make everything too dark to possibly see" art direction which has become popular.

I think it's less about the tech picked and more about developers with no sense of security and a poor understanding of networking. I've seen far too many web applications where the developer needed some sort of database behind it (MySQL, PostGres, MSSQL) and so they stood up either a container or entire VM with a public IP and whatever the networking layer set to allow any IP to hit the database port. The excuse is almost always something like, "we needed the web front end to be able to reach the database, so we gave the database server/container a public IP and allowed access". Which is wonderful, right up until half of the IP addresses in Russia start trying to brute force the database.

Ya, Secure Boot is really only useful for corporate devices or very specific people who might actually be targeted by state level attackers. For most of us, it's not worth the hassle.

Ya, they kinda should be. While I don't like Youngkin one bit, he was pretty well calibrated to run as a Republican in Virginia at the time he ran. He was elected in late 2021, and people were pretty unhappy with the situation around COVID at that point. And much of that blame was piling up on Democrats (read: Biden Administration). Virginia was not some solid blue state. With a heavy military and FedGov presence, there is a lot of pull towards the GOP politically. And Youngkin was reasonably charismatic and appealed well to the GOP base in Virginia. Also, the Democrats had gone out of their way to find as bland of a candidate as possible. Sure, there was nothing major wrong with McAuliffe, but you really don't want your campaign slogan to be "meh, he's ok".

Earle-Sears is basically the wrong candidate at the wrong time for the GOP. She's done little to nothing to distance herself from Trump, and that brand is not doing well in a lot of Virginia. Even in the Southwest, which is redder than a baboon's ass, Trumpism has been showing cracks. Earle-Sears's has also not been doing a lot to promote herself, hiding out from journalists and avoiding debates. She's just not the charismatic, "independent conservative" which Youngkin built a campaign message around. By contrast Spanberger is pretty close to the center of politics in Virginia. She's basically a centrist Democrat who has been out pushing a left of center economic message. She's also former CIA, which I think helps on the balance in Virginia (again, big Military and FedGov presence). She won't win any sort of popularity contest on Lemmy, but the candidates Lemmy would like aren't going to win in Virginia at the moment.

Try using old.reddit.com. Literally just replace www with old, or add old in front of reddit.com. This should take you to a version of reddit's interface which isn't complete trash and it usually also allows you to bypass the need to login for NSFW content.