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BardoTheConsumer posted:My problem with this is that by this logic Russia or the US should have nuked the other immediately upon discovering the technology to do so. It doesnt make sense to fire a KKV at every random civilization you see just because they could theoretically do the same to you, and for proof of that look no further than the idea that our particular species (mostly) finds that idea repugnant. We've come really close, and it's only been a few decades with people we could literally pick the phone up and talk to. How's it gonna go down with things we maybe can't even begin to communicate with, who might already have have launched their kill missiles, and all we can tell from where we are is that they could do it. And that situation goes on for millions of years without anyone doing something aggressive.
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Dec 10, 2018 22:01
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my dad posted:1) is false. Sending something across interstellar distances is insanely expensive, and doing so accurately is even harder. Why would sending something across interstellar distances be insanely expensive? We've already launched objects that will cross interstellar space. A large rock would survive the trip just fine, and we know for a fact that they do it all the time. quote:2) I have no idea about. Like, it'd be pretty hard to tell the difference between a random rock, a spaceship, and a KKV, but something sufficiently large coming at you at 0.6c would probably stand out quite a bit. I don't get what you're saying here. There is no difference between these things. Anything with mass moving at speed is a KKV. The thing coming at us could just be a rock that's not moving all that fast, and we miss those until they're right on top of us all the time. The whole point is that you don't really need something moving at any significant fraction of c to wreck a civilization. quote:3) is false, because it is extremely hard to confirm that you actually completely destroyed your targets considering the timespans and distances involved. You can't confirm it, but if you send a bunch of rocks that you are reasonably sure will hit then you probably don't have to worry too much.
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Dec 10, 2018 22:02
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Also nuking the hell out of most of Eurasia would negatively affect us as well because we ya know share a biosphere, the same issue doesn't apply to one-shotting a planet thousands of light years away
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Dec 10, 2018 22:03
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The good news is space rock launches from Over There don't really work as a weapon because the target can see them coming too far away and if they have a similar tech curve to us and are smart enough they'll destroy the rocks, go dark and then quietly go after the source for the next ten thousand years. The bad news is space rock launches from Over Here in the Oort Cloud or other-solar equivalent do work much faster and spotting a miniature robot probe of the minimum size required to nudge an asteroid is a lot harder than spotting the asteroid.
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Dec 10, 2018 22:15
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Literally every single person you walk past could suddenly pull out a knife and stab you to death, and you could do the same to them. What is preventing this from happening? (goon answer: living in a basement and never going out  )Paradoxish posted:Why would sending something across interstellar distances be insanely expensive? We've already launched objects that will cross interstellar space. A large rock would survive the trip just fine, and we know for a fact that they do it all the time. To eradicate a civilization, you need to wipe it out before it can establish working space habitats. For this to happen, you need to act reeeeeally fast. Aliens would need to see us, recognize us, and kill us before this. Unless they are literally in our immediatte neighborhood, it would take hundreds, thousands, hundreds of thousands of years for information about our existence to reach them, and their answer, whatever form it could take, will take AT LEAST that much time to reach us. You could send something going as ridiculously slowly as the Voyager probes, but the timespans involved are utterly insane. You need something going close to C to even have a hope of doing damage. And it's been less than a century since the first space flight, and we've landed poo poo on Mars. Besides, the foul xeno may or may not see you as an existential threat, but trying to kill them and failing, which the attempt probably would, guarantees they will see you as an existential threat. Civilizations aren't individuals. There's no "headshot" unless you can blow up their star somehow, and that's where we start talking about space magic.
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Dec 10, 2018 22:24
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VitalSigns posted:Ok but the point was how plausible various explanations for the Fermi paradox are, so if we start with "well assuming a completely implausible thing that could never exist existed, then there's no problem" well ok but my point is that it's implausible in the first place. There's no way for something to evolve to be a space wolf because the environment they evolved in on any planet would be entirely unlike what they'd need to be space predators. I don't know who you are disagreeing with? There would never be space wolves.
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Dec 10, 2018 22:48
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my dad posted:Literally every single person you walk past could suddenly pull out a knife and stab you to death, and you could do the same to them. What is preventing this from happening? (goon answer: living in a basement and never going out Like I said, I don't really buy into this theory all that much so I'm not going to go too much farther defending it, but this isn't at all a comparable scenario either. For this to work you'd need a button that could kill anyone that you look at it, but also you know they have the same button. Assuming that this actually leads to peaceful outcomes is a little bit too much like the argument that an armed society leads to a polite society. Eventually people who aren't bloodthirsty monsters are going to start pushing those buttons just because they're scared. quote:To eradicate a civilization, you need to wipe it out before it can establish working space habitats. For this to happen, you need to act reeeeeally fast. Aliens would need to see us, recognize us, and kill us before this. Unless they are literally in our immediatte neighborhood, it would take hundreds, thousands, hundreds of thousands of years for information about our existence to reach them, and their answer, whatever form it could take, will take AT LEAST that much time to reach us. You could send something going as ridiculously slowly as the Voyager probes, but the timespans involved are utterly insane. You need something going close to C to even have a hope of doing damage. Nothing about this scenario really makes sense unless we assume that they're relatively close and civilizations are fairly common, though. You basically have to take that as a given when talking about any Fermi paradox solution that isn't just "the great filter is way behind us and we don't see anyone because civilizations are ridiculously rare." No one is going to be flinging anything at us from halfway across the galaxy. The "solution" is that if any two civilizations are close to each other they either blow each other up or stay really quiet to avoid attracting attention.
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Dec 11, 2018 02:52
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Paradoxish posted:
Right, that's kind of why I think it might be nonsense. It seems like human-level intelligence requires a sort of runaway intelligence effect that isnt really evolutionarily viable under most circumstances and isnt Normally selected for, so I posit that the development of the sort of runaway intelligence Humans have is the great filter.
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Dec 11, 2018 07:41
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The evolution of a species that expends literally astronomical amounts of energy to chase after every threat it percieves is insane. Like, how would they not starve to death chasing after fireflies in their prehistory
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Dec 11, 2018 08:01
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Maybe all of the asteroids that caused extinction events on Earth were launched by aliens trying to prevent intelligent life from emerging on Earth 
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Dec 11, 2018 08:04
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Paradoxish posted:Like I said, I don't really buy into this theory all that much so I'm not going to go too much farther defending it, but this isn't at all a comparable scenario either. For this to work you'd need a button that could kill anyone that you look at it, but also you know they have the same button. Assuming that this actually leads to peaceful outcomes is a little bit too much like the argument that an armed society leads to a polite society. Eventually people who aren't bloodthirsty monsters are going to start pushing those buttons just because they're scared. Buttons seem cumbersome, maybe a trigger of some sort? Assuming someone is going to kill you because they can't be sure you won't kill them is loving dumb as hell and I posit that societies that think that wouldn't get very far.
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Dec 11, 2018 08:07
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qkkl posted:Maybe all of the asteroids that caused extinction events on Earth were launched by aliens trying to prevent intelligent life from emerging on Earth What if we come from some blue guy who drank some weird poo poo and dissolved into a waterfall? Edit: Actually, any press release about UFOs since we found out they are real? drilldo squirt fucked around with this message at 08:12 on Dec 11, 2018 |
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Dec 11, 2018 08:10
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DrSunshine posted:This is a really excellent, interesting and informative post!! Thanks so much for making this, LtStorm. Everything until now I had read about Silicon biochemistry seemed to indicate it was not likely to be possible because of something involving silicon compounds being more fragile or less flexible than Carbon ones (If I recall correctly?), but coming from an actual chemist, that really is informative and opens up the possibilities for speculation much more widely. A lot of discussions on silicon biochemistry seem to fixate on what silicon can do compared to carbon under the conditions we like to live under. If you are trying to build molecules using silicon the same way you would build a molecule with carbon, you're almost assuredly going to end up with a fragile, easily broken down molecule. That definitely doesn't mean silicon is fragile, and it doesn't necessarily mean silicon isn't flexible. We're still learning what silicon can do as far as building macromolecules goes. Bug Squash posted:Re: Silicon based life I assume you mean "complex molecules" rather than "complex bonds"? I've seen ideas about silicon-based life dwelling at temperatures much colder than we like--in addition to the ideas about it existing at hotter temperatures. Really the thrust of that discussion is that silicon-based life probably wouldn't live under the same conditions as us--under our conditions carbon is clearly winning with silicon relegated to a micronutrient in our bodies. If you make things much hotter or colder you're going to suddenly make different molecules (based on silicon or carbon) possible or impossible. So there are complex silicon molecules that would surely be stable only at low temperatures, but there are also complex silicon molecules made more stable by a highly acidic and hot environment. We do know of some complex silicon-based macromolecules currently. Silicone, which as I mentioned before, is roughly equal parts silicon and oxygen and is a very heat stable rubber. Silicones, as made for commercial use, are long chains of alternating silicon and oxygen with other groups of atoms sticking off the sides of the chain to control the physical properties of the bulk material rather than making the individual chains particularly complex. If you want a silicon-based macromolecule that isn't in the form of a long chain, you can look to silsesquioxanes. Silsesquioxanes are cages of silicon and oxygen that can be built in different sizes and levels of completion as well as being able to polymerize and, most importantly, can have other molecules attached to them at multiple places on the cage. Silicone and silsesquioxanes more or less represent the most well studied macromolecules based on silicon right now. There is a plethora of other polymers out there that use silicon, but they tend to be much simpler networks of silicon and oxygen atoms bonded together with few to now modifications with other atoms or molecules. Science hasn't yet built any silicon-based macromolecules as complex as the proteins in our bodies, but then again, it hasn't managed to build any carbon-based macromolecules that complex either. Not without hijacking the cellular machinery of microbes to do so, at least. The only way to find out for sure how complex silicon-based macromolecules can get is to continue doing research! VitalSigns posted:Well I'm glad someone out there didn't drop out of chemistry as soon as it got hard, unlike me (great post!) I'm curious what point you consider to be when it got hard!
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Dec 11, 2018 09:16
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LtStorm posted:A lot of discussions on silicon biochemistry seem to fixate on what silicon can do compared to carbon under the conditions we like to live under. If you are trying to build molecules using silicon the same way you would build a molecule with carbon, you're almost assuredly going to end up with a fragile, easily broken down molecule. That definitely doesn't mean silicon is fragile, and it doesn't necessarily mean silicon isn't flexible. We're still learning what silicon can do as far as building macromolecules goes. I'm interested in super-rubber for high-performance hydraulics and engines. Would also lead to a lot of materials for making lightweight spacesuits. Let these guys have all the funding they want.
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Dec 11, 2018 11:27
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On the same note, with respect to the recent discovery that the Earth's crust is actually teeming with organisms, I wonder if it could be possible that there might be silicon-based life living deep within the Earth's mantle, or in a place like the surface of Venus?quote:The Earth is far more alive than previously thought, according to “deep life” studies that reveal a rich ecosystem beneath our feet that is almost twice the size of all the world’s oceans.
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Dec 11, 2018 15:23
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my dad posted:Besides, the foul xeno may or may not see you as an existential threat, but trying to kill them and failing, which the attempt probably would, guarantees they will see you as an existential threat. Civilizations aren't individuals. There's no "headshot" unless you can blow up their star somehow, and that's where we start talking about space magic. This is an interesting thought and makes me think of that one SCP where we accidentally genocide an alien species by accidental contamination with microbes. We then try and help and accidentally sterilize the whole species because we don't completely understand their biology. This then causes them to try to exterminate humanity with a variety of different mechanisms. Maybe the reason no one talks to each other is because everyone's afraid of visitors coming and giving everyone Space AIDS? Even if that's not the case, I think things could very quickly go south when it comes to inter-species relations because of how alien we will be to each other. We struggle today with inter-cultural dialog and understanding, it's going to be much more difficult communicating with an entity/group where we have nothing in common. Here's the relevant excerpt, it makes for a good little short story. http://www.scp-wiki.net/scp-1322 quote:08.1952 Anomaly discovered.
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Dec 11, 2018 17:11
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I think space tigers is bit of a lolzy outcome,in reality what we may actually have an agressive confrontation with is a drone swarm with the controllers long dead. A never ending SEARCH AND DESTROY message. Rrally depenss on how many though, if the factoties arr automated and the resource acquisition became automatic asqell you must wonder how long a dead civilization could keep pumping deathdrones out
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Dec 11, 2018 18:26
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LeoMarr posted:if the factoties arr automated and the resource acquisition became automatic asqell you must wonder how long a dead civilization could keep pumping deathdrones out 
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Dec 11, 2018 20:13
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axeil posted:This is an interesting thought and makes me think of that one SCP where we accidentally genocide an alien species by accidental contamination with microbes. We then try and help and accidentally sterilize the whole species because we don't completely understand their biology. This then causes them to try to exterminate humanity with a variety of different mechanisms. I dont think this works? Our bacteria and viruses evolved to infect us, specifically, in the same way as we evolved to need a particular set of fats and proteins. Alien life could maybe outcompete native life, but the idea that an earth virus would have the apparatus necessary to infect an alien species seems... far fetched. Bacteria are more likely, but even they evolved a certain way, with certain sugars as their primary food, which an alien body likely wouldnt contain.
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Dec 11, 2018 20:43
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seems like year one on the enterprise everyone would be totally immune to everyone else's bacteria but by like year 100 million of the great space empire bacteria would be bound to evolve that can digest things that are common to many life forms. Like hans and chewbacca wouldn't ever evolve to be able to mate, but like, it seems like eventually the mange rotting chewie's hair would figure out to digest hans as well. a million years later at least. And at some point if it could infect new species would depend on how different life really is. if animals on every planet often evolve hair and there is only like 3 chemistries animals commonly use to do it universe wide then bacteria that generically infect 1,2 or 3 or have various strains with various successes at all three are gonna evolve EVENTUALLY.
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Dec 11, 2018 21:17
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BardoTheConsumer posted:I dont think this works? Our bacteria and viruses evolved to infect us, specifically, in the same way as we evolved to need a particular set of fats and proteins. Alien life could maybe outcompete native life, but the idea that an earth virus would have the apparatus necessary to infect an alien species seems... far fetched. Bacteria are more likely, but even they evolved a certain way, with certain sugars as their primary food, which an alien body likely wouldnt contain. Oh hm, I didn't think of that. There are some cross-species diseases (rabies) on Earth but they're not very common compared to the cold/flu.
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Dec 11, 2018 21:22
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axeil posted:Oh hm, I didn't think of that. flus are cross species, swine flu/bird flu naming isn't just being fanciful, they really are flues swines and birds have. but humans and birds share like 80% of our DNA, an alien that shared 0% would be such a larger jump. There is a small number of fungus and bacteria that will infect plants and animals, and that is about as distant as anyone knows of.
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Dec 11, 2018 21:32
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On the other hand something like this will grow on a plant, infect an invertebrate and show up to grow in wounds or in the goop in your lungs just fine, but will also just eat a ball of tar and oil. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pseudomonas_aeruginosa Stuff like this isn't really like a virus where it's using precise cellular keys that need to match up exactly. if aliens had any parts that were damp at all this would probably show up and start growing and not even care if the alien did or didn't have earth biology. And the alien may or may not have an immune system that could deal with an alien bacteria setting up a film on it's entire lungs happily ignoring the alien and just treating it as some free water to hang out in.
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Dec 11, 2018 21:45
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Something I don't think people have mentioned yet itt: Chirality. It's highly likely that, even if alien whatevers have the same chemical composition as human/Earth whatevers, the chirality will be different. That's the difference between poison and yummy, in food.
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Dec 12, 2018 00:14
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Spacewolf posted:Something I don't think people have mentioned yet itt: At some point something is alien enough they aren't even a lifeform to any bacteria, they are just an environment. Like our eyes are all full of bacteria. we have a complex biome of bacteria living on the surface of our eyes fighting an unending biological war with our immune system. But you can also just get river amoebas in your eyes and have them go crazy and ruin your eyes. They don't really "know" they are infecting an eye, and don't really have any biochemistry that is reliant on anything eye related, they just kinda show up and go 'oh cool, this is a weird river" and reproduce just fine in the water of your eye till the waste products they make blind you. That seems like how an alien infection would work. You are a complex biological reaction that is probably unique in all the universe, but you are also just a place with stuff in it. If there was some alien ET amoebas and they wanted to live in my eye are eat plastic out of my blood or convert the trace silica in my bones and set up little ecosystems in my juice where my immune system barely has any clue how to cope with this stuff and the other bacteria offer no competition they probably could.
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Dec 12, 2018 00:49
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axeil posted:Oh hm, I didn't think of that. On the other hand the ones i can think of are really really nasty when they jump species.
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Dec 12, 2018 02:49
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Spacewolf posted:Something I don't think people have mentioned yet itt: Ooh, chirality! Let's talk about chirality! Aliens that by some chance use identical building blocks to us, but with opposite chirality, is an interesting thought. The poison thing was more or less made up by Bioware for Mass Effect, though. Chirality means handedness in a molecule; two molecules with chiral centers have identical arrangements of atoms but are mirror images of each other, much as your hands are mirror images of each other. We call these mirrored molecules enantiomers of one another, with the two forms, because of how they are studied, being called left-handed (L) and right-handed (D). Life as we know it uses L-amino acids as its basic building blocks and D-sugars as its fundamental source of energy. "Homochirality" is the name used for the fact all life we know uses the same enantiomers. The origin of homochirality is an outstanding question in science. We don't even know what mechanism gave us the homochirality we use, whether it was something that happened in space or on Earth, or if it happened before or after life arose. General consensus is that biochemistry benefits from sticking to one enantiomer or the other--which one doesn't matter, just that we're primarily made of one. The argument for this is that proteins in our bodies being composed all of the same enantiomer makes them more stable and able to interact consistently. Another argument is that our bodies run better because enzymes that catalyze reactions in our body generally work better with one enantiomer over the other. We do know that D-amino acids and L-sugars won't kill you--our bodies generally can't metabolize them but they aren't really toxic to us. If you ate a diet only containing D-amino acids and L-sugars you might reach the toxicity levels necessary for some of them to kill you but you'd probably die of malnutrition first. We also know if you were eating food identical to what you're used to, but made entirely of D-amino acids and L-sugars, it'd probably taste wrong. Our senses of taste and smell can distinguish between enantiomers of amino acids and sugars; the mirror forms don't necessarily taste bad, but will taste different including having no flavor at all to us. For example, the artificial sweetener Aspartame is just D-phenylalanine, the mirror form of the essential amino acid L-phenylalanine we find in our bodies. Your body can convert some D-amino acids to their L-forms, but we aren't evolved to do so to the point it would save you and on that note the only thing keeping you primarily made out of L-amino acids is your body's active maintenance of itself. Once an organism dies there's plenty of natural, if slow, reactions that will convert L-amino acids to D-amino acids and vice versa--eventually there will be an equilibrium where there are equal amounts of each. This happens so consistently it can be used to find out how long an organism has been dead, in fact. Thinking about it, if D-amino acids and L-sugars were highly toxic to us there would be a strong evolutionary pressure on organisms needing defensive mechanisms to produce them as toxins or poisons. It's not the ability to produce opposite enantiomers that's the problem there--our bodies can and do produce D-amino acids. You can find D-amino acids all through the biochemical reactions in our bodies and in other organisms. Some bacteria even build their cell walls out of D-amino acids to protect themselves from enzymes that would otherwise effectively destroy those cell walls. Just from the basic perspective of evolution, after billion of years of trial and error it seems like a perilous problem that the opposite enantiomer of one of your basic building blocks would be notably toxic to you as you can't really avoid them even if your own enantiomer is more common. Enantiomers aren't permanently fixed things; they can and do undergo chemical reactions that swap them to their opposite form. Now, what can be either beneficial or highly toxic to you based on its enantiomer are other compounds. The famous example is thalidomide, of which one enantiomer is a useful drug while the other enantiomer is usually biologically inert but also causes horrific birth defects if taken by someone while they're pregnant. It's not enough to purify thalidomide before using it as a drug because it will swap between its two enantiomers in the body which also means we are't 100% that it's true one version is safe while the other is dangerous, or even if the same enantiomer isn't in fact both the drug and the poison both while the other is just inert.
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Dec 12, 2018 04:32
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VitalSigns posted:Or humans die of ethanol poisoning all the time, but horse livers manufacture so much alcohol dehydrogenase that not only is it impossible for them to drink enough alcohol to kill them it may not be possible for them to even get drunk because their liver breaks it down so fast it can't accumulate in the bloodstream. I didn’t know this and also this is perhaps my favorite thing I’ve learned on SA. Also I’m glad they can’t get drunk they’re already really dumb. These were both great posts VitalSigns. Also great thread, it’s like a dilettantes buffet in here. The sheer numbers involved in this topic are beyond my ability to really grasp. Like I can do so logically but my brain just goes “nah, gently caress it, let’s use the word big and call it a day.” 100-250B stars in our galaxy. 200B - 2T galaxies in the universe. So that’s how many planets? Nah gently caress it. Going with big. squirrelzipper fucked around with this message at 07:39 on Dec 12, 2018 |
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Dec 12, 2018 06:53
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squirrelzipper posted:I didn’t know this and also this is perhaps my favorite thing I’ve learned on SA. Also I’m glad they can’t get drunk they’re already really dumb. It's kinda funny that the one thing that can't kill a horse is alcohol.
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Dec 12, 2018 20:26
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Alhazred posted:It's kinda funny that the one thing that can't kill a horse is alcohol. Upsetting though because it mean BoJack Horseman isn’t realistic  LtStorm posted:Fascinating quote about stuff I knew nothing about Thanks for this! Really interesting! Mr. Grumpybones fucked around with this message at 23:37 on Dec 12, 2018 |
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Dec 12, 2018 23:34
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re: Chirality https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UyTqgnKD3sw SpaceTime must be reading the thread.
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Dec 13, 2018 00:19
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Spacewolf posted:Something I don't think people have mentioned yet itt: Wasn't that a minor story point in the Mass Effect games?
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Dec 13, 2018 16:03
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squirrelzipper posted:I didn’t know this and also this is perhaps my favorite thing I’ve learned on SA. Also I’m glad they can’t get drunk they’re already really dumb. And yet they're all nothing compared to Graham's Number. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graham%27s_number They had to invent new forms of mathematical notation just to write it out. It is so large a standard decimal representation of it would not fit in the universe. When you finally start wrapping your mind around it and realize that Graham's Number / Infinity still rounds to 0 you get to realize just how big infinity is. Wait But Why also did a good write-up on it, back before the author went off the deep end on Musk worship. https://waitbutwhy.com/2014/11/1000000-grahams-number.html Scientific American also has a good write-up on it. https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/roots-of-unity/grahame28099s-number-is-too-big-for-me-to-tell-you-how-big-it-is/
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Dec 13, 2018 16:51
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This thread could probably do with a second wind so it's probably not aliens... but please god be aliens.
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Jan 10, 2019 00:03
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khwarezm posted:This thread could probably do with a second wind so it's probably not aliens... but please god be aliens. I really hope it's not Aliens!! Otherwise the Great Filter might be ahead -- See: https://nickbostrom.com/extraterrestrial.pdf
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Jan 10, 2019 00:09
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DrSunshine posted:I really hope it's not Aliens!! Otherwise the Great Filter might be ahead -- See: https://nickbostrom.com/extraterrestrial.pdf I don't think that's right. That argument is for non-technologically advanced life. The phenomenon in question, fast radio bursts, is from other galaxies. If life forms are generating them, pretty sure that means they are more technologically advanced than us. And we're able to hear them as soon as we turn an ear to the sky. That would mean high tech life is common! (It's probably not aliens)
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Jan 10, 2019 02:01
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Epitope posted:I don't think that's right. That argument is for non-technologically advanced life. The phenomenon in question, fast radio bursts, is from other galaxies. If life forms are generating them, pretty sure that means they are more technologically advanced than us. And we're able to hear them as soon as we turn an ear to the sky. That would mean high tech life is common! (It's probably not aliens)
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Jan 10, 2019 03:21
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twodot posted:You twist the logic any way you like. You can argue "We should have heard someone by now, so by on our current tech levels the Great Filter is behind us, because it was in front of us, there'd be a lot of assholes polluting space with radio waves" or you can argue "We've been looking in the wrong spots/ways, finding civilizations with new techniques just validates that assumption and there is no great filter". The Drake equation has enough variables that anyone can just pick their favorite and say everyone else is very badly estimating it. (Though of course in this specific instance, it'd be really bizarre to see people messaging passing between galaxies) You're talking about with one data point (which is all we have). If we get a second data point, it eliminates a lot of those possibilities. Mr Sun says all additional evidence of life is discouraging with regard to how much further our tech can evolve. Not true! Evidence of more advanced tech would be encouraging. And they're not suggesting coms: quote:Rather than being designed for communication, they would more likely be used to propel giant spaceships powered by light sails which bounce light, or in this case radio beams, off a huge reflective sheet to provide thrust, the scientists said.
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Jan 10, 2019 04:12
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Epitope posted:You're talking about with one data point (which is all we have). If we get a second data point, it eliminates a lot of those possibilities. edit: Just to head off the argument, the response is "the thing you think is common is actually much rarer than you think". edit2: I suppose Divine Command Theory would make it very weird to find a second civilization, but I'm guessing that's not your approach. twodot fucked around with this message at 08:58 on Jan 10, 2019 |
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Jan 10, 2019 08:50
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communism cannot and will not work
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Jan 10, 2019 11:23
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