Shrike
20hr ago
It was more like 4 or 5, wasn't it? 2 tankers, 2 or 3 destroyers?
All Operation Project Freedom proved is that they won't be able to get the 1600 ships that remain stuck in the gulf out before Trump's term ends at this pace
This does seem unlikely, but the incentive structure that seems to be forming (ships not participating in the scheme get hit) would work to Trump's favor, if Operation Project Freedom was something we were doing, which it isn't, unless of course it is (I dunno I haven't checked the news this afternoon).
In other words, the only thing likely to get the strait open is an end to the war.
Fundamentally I think this is correct. But it does appear that the US has a substantial military ability to protect tankers going through the strait. And there were, as I seem to recall on earlier Iran threads, strong suggestions otherwise. So I think it's interesting, both militarily and from the perspective that it theoretically allows the US to, however marginally, ease the constraints on them, while maintaining the constraints placed on Iran.
Shrike
1d ago
Worth noting that the Namu, as I understand it, had been in the Gulf since the start of the war and was not attempting to transit the straight under US protection when it was hit. Apparently was instead anchored offshore when it was struck. It also doesn't seem clear that Iran actually hit it (at least intentionally – apparently they denied the claim they had attacked it.)
Shrike
1d ago
Another good example. People forget how completely low light environments absolutely neuter cameras!
Shrike
1d ago
I am extremely confused by accusations that I haven't addressed the downsides of indiscriminate RKV spam, particularly if you're targeting systems with budding civilizations or near-peers.
Either RKVs are dangerous enough that you should expand out in space as quickly as possible to defend yourself against them because people will fire them off indiscriminately, or they aren't actually all that dangerous and so there's no rush to expand. We both seem to agree that firing off RKVs isn't actually all that great of a strategy, so it doesn't make sense to try to be grabby specifically to survive RKVs.
As I've mentioned elsewhere, a sufficiently fast RKV will appear barely any time after the light that came off it.
This sufficiently fast RKV will never arrive, because it will hit a piece of interstellar dust and vaporize. If you're worried this won't happen, you can make sure of it pretty trivially as a defensive measure by creating armor belts of small high-density particles, which is going to be considerably easier and cheaper than making an RKV kill chain.
Any RKVs that travel at a more leisurely pace to avoid obliterating itself will likely be detected by any "peer" civilization and intercepted by another RKV of some kind, or a high-energy laser or particle weapon that will ablate it and push it off course.
None of these defenses are technically hard; some of them could be probably be accomplished by civilizations below K1 on the Kardashev scale. (For reference, the interplanetary dust cloud - which is thick enough that dust strikes are routine on spacecraft - has less mass than a relatively unexceptional asteroid).
At the bare minimum, you should harvest that.
Why? If you've decided to wait until the end of the universe to crunch numbers then you might as well just wait until then to do everything.
You forget that you can extract rotational energy from existing black holes with remarkable efficiency (compared to most power sources). It's easy. You just have to drop mass in the right way.
Uhhh, here's what I in fact said:
By creating a small black hole and feeding it mass, you now have an extremely efficient method of both energy production and propulsion.
I think you may have just skipped over my most interesting proposal for an Aestivation civilization. Sad! I thought it was neat.
They'd have eaten the whole thing and sent probes and VNRs our way.
Sure, and this might have already happened and we just don't happen to know it!
VNRs are trivial to the kinds of civilizations we're discussing.
VNRs are considerably more complex and far-fetched than solar-sails, and, just like separatist expeditions into space, an inherently dangerous technology that a smart civilization would think twice before launching.
You demand that every civilization convergently decides to become a hermit. They is really not a good argument.
Not at all, my argument (which I am mostly making for the case of intellectual honesty since I too am skeptical that life elsewhere in the universe is abundant if it exists at all) is that there are a multitude of reasons why there might be aliens in the universe that we have not observed, and thus the inference from not seeing them is not especially strong.
Including, hilariously, that they've already converted most of the galaxy to Dyson swarms and we don't know that because they routinely divert a tiny fraction of their energy into masking their position from any planet with biosignatures. You say it would be pretty trivial to detect those planets via inferential telescopic means at ludicrous ranges and take seriously the idea of a Nicoll-Dyson beam; very well, I find those sorts of megastructures very far-fetched but if you're going to the trouble of making one and have the technical means to do it, you likely also have the technical means to trivially prevent planets you've detected with biosignatures from noticing via selective emissions or laser masking.
"Grabby aliens" is only one path out of thousands for a society to take, and the fact that we have not observed it being taken is not particularly strong evidence that it hasn't happened, let alone that the other thousands of options have not been pursued.
Shrike
2d ago
The short version is that the US has announced and then called off a program to send vessels through the strait, during which brief window they successfully transited both warships and civilian vessels through the strait. (There were rumors that at least one Gulf State was not a fan of the escorted transit plan and pulled or threatened to pull basing access, and that's why the US flip-flopped). The US also blew up a bunch of Iranian military assets that tried to attack them or were otherwise deemed a threat, and interdicted several Iranian tankers that were trying to run the blockade with Super Hornets. Despite this of course the ceasefire is still on, we're assured!
The cynical part of me wonders if all of this hasn't been a bigger part of the news cycle because despite the embarrassing rumors that the USA and its allies got crosswise on how to approach the situation, or the humorous claims that the US attacking a bunch of Iranian assets was "just a love tap" and not a resumption of the conflict it is more or less good news for the Trump administration militarily; it suggests that Iran actually does not have a good grip on Hormuz if the US can escort civilian shipping and handily fend off attacks.
Shrike
2d ago
You just made a big long argument that RKVs are so cheap that you could sterilize the entire universe but also that RKVs aren't cheap enough to destroy every possible outpost made by a civilization that made something as obvious as a Dyson sphere.
Now, setting aside the fact that this does actually explain the Fermi paradox (a prior civilization targeted every planet that was then capable of supporting life) you completely failed to address the downsides of spamming RKVs in universe where there may be civilizations that can produce RKVs: they are 1. likely noticeable because of the heat signature produced by relativistic speeds, even against interstellar particles, and 2. very easy to intercept with other RKVs or lightspeed weapons, and 3. not likely to be reliable against targets at long ranges because any minute error (including errors introduced by unexpected gravitational forces during the intervening travel time) will cause it to miss.
There are ways to mitigate these problems but RKVs are not good weapons against any civilization that might be able to shoot back in the next [distance away in light years] years. Since it is more energy-efficient to defend against them than to attack with them, we would not expect them to be utilized en masse among peer civilizations.
Aestivation without collecting resources?
Why would you collect resources when the universe will do it for you? Stars won't be very energy rich near the heat death of the universe, but Sagittarius A* isn't going anywhere, and will likely continue to grow until after the stars burn out (remember, black holes can grow from cosmic background radiation), until the expansion of the universe places all objects and radiation beyond its gravitational reach forever. You could park yourself in orbit and run calculations off of a black hole (which emits tremendous amounts of radiation as it consumes matter, and tiny amounts as Hawking radiation) for an infinitely long amount of time. This would likely be more efficient than building Dyson spheres throughout the universe; Sagittarius A* has the mass of about 4 million stars and is growing. Right now it would take vastly longer than the age of the universe for Sagittarius A* to evaporate due to Hawking radiation. And because Hawking radiation grows as the size of the black hole gets smaller, it seems arguably perfect for such a plan, since you will be maximizing energy collected at a point when the universe is the coldest. As time goes on and the universe grows colder and your calculations grow more efficient, you also gain more energy to calculate with.
The main objection to this plan is that the Hawking radiation output on a supermassive black hole is too negligible to power anything, but I am not sure this holds true if we are orbiting near the event horizon with our Dyson swarm, due to time dilation. (Also you get fried with gamma radiation when the black hole collapses, but whatever, surely you've finished your big math problem or whatever by then.)
However, this is only the second-best plan involving black holes. By creating a small black hole and feeding it mass, you now have an extremely efficient method of both energy production and propulsion. You could (in theory, if you can do the math right) travel around the entire universe at relativistic speeds and feed 100% of the mass into your black hole, directly converting about 25% of it into energy to run your calculations with.
Since our entire point is hibernating until the universe is colder to do the math, the best time to crunch the numbers and figure out how to do this is after the universe is already dying. You'd only need a small "bootstrap" energy source (which might even be something as trivial as a fusion reactor) to run your calculations at that point. Of course, you wouldn't want to gamble on this unless you were pretty sure a black hole starship was possible.
Fodor's take is braindead. Yeah, sure, we can digitize and live in VR. Doesn't stop space probes and VNRs from being sent out. That is the default expectation.
Fodor explicitly discusses this, which tells me you've dismissed his take as "braindead" without bothering to read it (which you can do here). Even if he was wrong about the space probes, it's pretty clear that a society that virtualized at, say, 2200 levels of human technology wouldn't really need to expand to have all the energy they could ever need, and any probes they sent would be much less conspicuous than a DYSON SPHERE.
All you need to accept is that STL interstellar colonization is possible, and that most species would want more resources, especially if they're easy to acquire.
I would argue that you actually have to accept that most species will pursue ~limitless resources that they don't need, which is a harder pill to swallow. If we assume as a default that most species have no access to contraceptives, this makes sense. But if something like the human experience is the default, we can expect most species to grow slowly if at all by the time they need to colonize other worlds because they will be able to control their own reproduction, and they will not maximize the pursuit of energy resources simply for its own sake (we certainly do not do this on Earth). They will have zero reason to construct anything like Dyson sphere, as they will have no need for the energy. Furthermore, colonizing other star systems without cracking the lightspeed barrier is a very dangerous idea, for obvious reasons: your first concern shouldn't be aliens, but members of your own species developing their own culture in a technologically advanced parallel socio-political environment. No sane species would permit this by default without some sort of constraints. We should expect most species to, at least while their star is still burning, to centralize their civilization around their star system, which will have enough resources for practically limitless numbers of their society without anything besides modest engineering (such as space habitats), and actively inhibit attempts to leave by would-be splinter societies.
Shrike
2d ago
This council produced and agreed to the Arian formulas that, "the Son is like the Father according to the Scriptures" and "the Son is not a creature like other creatures."
Didn't this council (which was minority Arian) specifically and explicitly affirm the Nicene Creed and the Dated Creed only had any hold because the Emperor held them in Constantinople after the council was ready to adjourn?
Whatever beneficent role Pope Liberius played here, it does not seem like he was checking a genuine majoritarianism on the part of the bishops, unless I misunderstand something.
Shrike
2d ago
the compelling ideological scenario to maintain secrecy isn’t really there
Keep in mind that the allegations out of the former US government personnel pushing for "'disclosure'" are that the parties responsible for maintaining some of this information may have committed crimes or at a minimum failed to be entirely transparent with Congress.
If you are the executive branch (just setting the NatSec question to the side for a moment) your incentives for unraveling the secrecy about a historical program like this are very complicated. You might want to disclose stuff to make yourself look good, or your political foes look dastardly. You would think very carefully before disclosing something that ran the risk of Congress passing the Ending Insane Executive Power Overreach Act of 2026.
Which is consistent with what we're seeing out of the executive now (a drip of documents, blurry pictures and video, nothing particularly politically interesting). But of course that's also consistent with the government not really having anything politically interesting to begin with.
If anything spicy does start to come out, pay close attention to how much of it is oh-so extremely historical.
Shrike
2d ago
we need a good explanation for why there's such an abundance of untapped negentropy in the wider universe
There's no shortage of such good explanations, such as the Dark Forest Theory, the Aestivation Hypothesis, and of course Greg Fodor's Intraterrestrial Hypothesis (which of course if expanded universe-wide would explain very neatly the lack of mega-engineering.) "Grabby aliens" is just one model of how advanced alien species might behave based, essentially, on pre-modern human behavior.
Shrike
2d ago
I will concede that even JWST probably couldn't detect the thermal signatures, assuming the craft coasted in after doing the bulk of the braking by 10 AU away.
And this is exactly the sort of arrival by aliens we should expect if they don't have exotic space propulsion. Some sort of solar or magnetic sail, from what I can tell, is just a more efficient way of traveling long distances than a nuclear rocket. Fewer moving parts and chance of malfunction, too.
We're still requiring a model of alien psychology that has to reconcile some very questionable behavior
To be clear, I do not think that it needs to follow AT ALL that because some of the stories from e.g. fighter pilots and intelligence personnel are true, that all the stories of alien abductions are true. Similarly, even if every single story of alien abduction is true (as understood by the people telling them) I don't think it follows necessarily that any of the strange UFOs/UAPs spotted in the sky and undersea are alien in origin.
If they are here, why do they act in a manner that's just at or below the threshold for robust detection by our ever-improving detection capabilities?
According to who? The narrative from former intelligence/DoD/CIA types is that they very much can be tracked (but that they exhibit evasive behavior/attempts at "signature management"). Are you unaware of the "range foulers" that appeared when the Super Hornets got their AESA upgrade, of the declassified US documents discussing a potential UAP spotting via a satellite, of Ratcliffe talking on national television about corroborating UAP tracks from multiple sensors, of the "UAP detection mode" on the S-400 discussed by a former CIA analyst...?
If your argument is "why aren't they detected by civilians," where's the clear photo of NGAD? Of the SR-72? We know (or at least can assess, in the latter case) they were built and flown. The RQ-180 flew operationally for probably a decade before really clear footage was taken of it by civilians. It's not hard to prevent civilians from taking slam-dunk evidence that something exists. Even large organizations with significant amounts of institutional incompetence can do it routinely.
Why are they here?
If we detected atmospheric signatures that strongly indicated life in any star within, say, 40 light-years, I think we would attempt to launch a probe to investigate sometime within the next 100 years. Nothing that we put on that probe would be authorized to speak for us in any binding sense (although of course we might opt to put some golden records or something on it).
Which, if you think about it, would explain fairly neatly the behavior we've witnessed:
- Evasive objects that act defensively (including jamming and evasive maneuvering) when confronted
- The long-established connection between UAPs and the ocean (and nuclear testing)
- The reported "humanoid" bodies and the abductions
- Yes, even the technological "pacing" that seems to occur
I don't think there's a monocausal explanation for UFOs, and due to the numerous reports from many angles of what seems to be what might be termed a "spiritual" dimension to them, I tend to suspect part of the true explanation is even less prosaic than modestly advanced aliens from a nearby world. But I try to think through the possibilities with an open mind, and I don't think the broad outline of the reported behavior is very odd for an unmanned scientific mission. And yes, I don't see any tension between an unmanned scientific mission and the reported acquisition of "bodies." Even granting that an advanced civilization saw a bright line between biological and mechanical entities the way that we do, biological entities could be helpful at accomplishing various aspects of the mission, and there's no law of physics that would prevent them from being put together at the destination, or prevent them from utilizing the biological makeup of the native life, adopted as it conveniently is to its native environment.
Shrike
2d ago
I think the natural phenomena explanation is more likely. (Like I said, I don't think we've actually spotted Dyson swarms.) But the truth is more complicated than "oh well we would know if they were out there." The fact that we might know if someone built a Dyson sphere tells you something about how much we don't know.
A civilization with the technology to build even one should be in the process of a Grabby Alien takeover of the lightcone.
Maybe - I don't actually think Dyson sphere are very likely to be built, even by an advanced spacefaring civilization. Swarms are slightly more likely, but even then I don't think the fact we haven't spotted them. And I don't actually think the scenario where Grabby Aliens start making Dyson Swarms in the entire galactic neighborhood is a given, either.
overwhelmingly tend to turn out to be well explained by natural phenomena?
You've found one paper arguing that one candidate is explained by natural phenomena. I think it is most likely all of them are explained by natural phenomena but, again, what sort of argument is this?
"We can say confidently there's no aliens because we looked for one extremely difficult to build megastructure of questionable plausibility, found multiple potential matches and we're pretty sure one of them is explained by a natural occurrence" is just a bad argument. I would bet every single one of these SETI findings is due to some natural occurrence, but that doesn't make the argument good!
Shrike
2d ago
You're getting some replies saying "why wouldn't we see them in space" so I'm dropping this note to remind everyone that SETI efforts have indeed found stellar signatures broadly consistent with stellar engineering.
Do I think that's what we've spotted, personally? No, not really. Do I think "we haven't spotted any candidates for technosignatures, so there aren't any" is a good argument when we have spotted candidates for technosignatures? No, not really.
Shrike
2d ago
Obviously I definitely think it's possible for a group of people to keep a secret (...most corporations do this!) but I also don't understand the entire line of argumentation that holds "these whistleblowers must be wrong because if they were right somebody would blow the whistle" (!??!?!!?)
Shrike
2d ago
Deceleration without getting caught is the hard part, especially if you aren't going to dramatically lengthen the journey in the process.
No it's not, you can e.g. decelerate from nearly .5C over the course of about 20 years with a magnetic sail.
There is very little justification for aliens that advanced to go to all the bother and do... whatever they're presently accused of doing.
This is an odd objection to me given that the "aliens" in the conventional narrative supposedly act exactly as humans do towards, say, apes (trying to observe them discreetly but slipping up in embarrassing ways, occasionally knocking them out with mysterious weapons and taking biopsy samples or tagging them, doing hybridization experiments, etc.) and if anything that seems suspiciously anthropomorphic. It seems to me we should expect aliens to behave weirdly, if they were truly from a distant world in some way.
Shrike
2d ago
I mean if you had met a Klingon, I would think it would be hard to not mention it to someone
But people make these claims all the time! There's not a lack of mentioning stories of aliens!
the fact that no one has claimed those prizes, the money, the fame, or the career security that such proof would bring is pretty strong negative evidence.
- I don't think this reasoning is sound. It would suggest that no secrets could possibly be kept if people could profit from them in some way. Which is trivially untrue! There are lots of cutting-edge stuff locked up in SAPs that nobody will ever get a book deal about.
- Secondly...Lue Elizondo utilized Pentagon security procedures to release three videos of UFOs, and then he wrote a nationally bestselling book about UFOs. Obviously this thing you are saying is not happening happened! It was in the New York Times!
You'd be brighter than most stars from our perspective.
Uh, what? Proxima Centauri is the closest star, and it's not visible to the naked eye. I don't think it would be hard to launch a probe via electron beam or a laser in a non-visible spectrum without being noticed by pre-Sputnik astronomy.
ETA particularly since you probably would not be pointing the laser directly at the planet, you'd be "leading" it. This objection doesn't really make any sense imho.
Shrike
2d ago
Is calling it the shared environment created by a group of people not sufficient?
The word I would use is "culture" (although I don't think it's magical, and I don't object to other words).
Is it substantially different?
Your source shows massive swings over time (e.g. surging from 21% of prisoners in the US in the 1920s to 50% in the 1990s) that can't be explained by merely noting skin color or ancestry. So your source shows that it is substantially different within the SAME population. (As an aside, thanks for finding those older numbers.) It also shows a massive gap between Latin America and the Caribbean (22.5) and Sub-Saharan Africa (9.5). If your article's suggestion that blacks are responsible for the high levels of murder in Latin America and the Caribbean, then yes it is substantially different on different continents as well!
The only crime one could hazard a guess on for comparison would be homicides, and SS-Africa is a world leader in that department.
Yes, and there is a much higher homicide rate in the American black community than in Sub-Saharan Africa; your source shows 9.5 which is considerably lower than African American homicide rate in the US (more than twice that, on a quick Google). So yes, substantially different.
The point of HBD is to help us recognize that these trends in behavior originate from the people. That their environments are not coincidental but a product of their expressions.
This is also the point of a cultural analysis. The cultural analysis focuses, however, on the choices that people make, whereas an HBD analysis focuses on their ancestry. My specific objection here is to focusing on HBD to the exclusion of other factors. As your own sources show, other factors are tremendously important.
Desegregation and Civil Rights made things worse as well.
Boomer conservatives generally don't mind desegregation but they do not necessarily support everything that Civil Rights ended up entailing.
being tougher on crime that's not punishable by death would functionally just be a different form of welfare
Interestingly in the United States penal servitude is legal.
Which is also what would happen if they somehow managed to end welfare.
Perhaps, but what's your superior solution? "Keep welfare, return segregation" is not a palatable political solution.
Shrike
2d ago
managed to keep quiet
What is the argument for this? There's been more than 70 years of persistent rumors from government officials regarding bombshell evidence of UFOs. As just a random example, I have sitting on my hard drive a 1950 letter from a USAF Colonel to an MIT professor mentioning rumors of a UFO crash in Mexico.
Shrike
3d ago
I can't possibly imagine what would influence the shared social environment of Icelanders except the Icelanders themselves.
Interesting. What's the name for the shared social environment created by a group of people?
But the research on home environment and IQ, for instance, shows that there are no IQ gains into adulthood.
I don't believe this is correct, my understanding is that studies tend to show that home environmental impacts are modest, not nonexistent.
Many sub-Saharan nations can't even qualify for a comparison.
Then what's the point of HBD? If African-American violence is substantially different from people of similar ancestry, then why am I supposed to think that ancestry is important at all? If you can't compare two groups of related people simply because they are in different environments then it sounds like the environment is doing a lot of the heavy lifting.
So the freedom to make a bad decision in a more prosperous society harms low quality people in a way that the constrictions of scarcity did not.
We started this conversation with you condemning what you termed the conservative explanation that "welfare state and ghetto culture" were responsible for high African American criminality. But now with just a little pressing, you're resorting to essentially the same explanation: that access to expanded resources and fewer constraints led to a dramatic rise in African-American crime. This is just a slightly rephrased version of a boomer American conservative rant about the welfare state and soft-on-crime prosecutors. You might object that your idea that "prosperity leads to crime" is mechanically different than "dependency via the welfare state leads to crime" theory our hypothetical pal would espouse, but you would also oppose giving them welfare, since that could increase their latitude of action.
Your criticism is that our boomer friend doesn't understand HBD. But you agree with him that welfare policies make the situation worse (and probably you agree with him on his criticisms of lax law enforcement, I would guess). And neither you nor our hypothetical boomer conservative can do anything about their ancestry. He might be able to do something about the welfare state and law enforcement policies: those are actual levers the American state has control over. So while you criticize his lack of understanding of The Bell Curve (which, I think, is actually something many, perhaps most intellectual conservatives are familiar with) he's actually trying to push policies that might make a difference on the ground in real life. And to the degree that those policies can make a difference one way or the other, it seems to me that you think his understanding of the problem is largely correct.
Shrike
4d ago
Yet the mechanism does not hold the same effect when looking at a different population. So it's not a cause but a consequence.
Then why do white Americans also suffer worse effects with out of wedlock births?
Could there be something different about that shared social environment in Iceland that impacts the outcomes of children?
There are plenty of single mothers who successfully raise their children alone. So single parent homes are not a cause but a consequence.
Aha, but there are plenty of black people who don't behave in anti-social ways, so the same logic holds there, right?
I do personally believe two parents households are better
They are, my understanding is that children in single-parent households do in fact suffer worse childhood outcomes, even in Iceland.
A low intelligence low impulse control person was always going to have problems when given the freedom
What gene controls freedom?
Or are, at the least, not indicative of an improvement in intelligence.
Even if you don't buy the Flynn effect, do you deny that African-Americans have a greater percentage of European ancestry than Africans? Do you deny that they perform better on IQ tests?
A more constrictive environment prevented the expression of bad behaviors. A more permissive environment allowed for it.
Oh, interesting. In what sense is the United States in the 1960s and 1970s or the 2020s a more permissive environment than Africa today? Is the law enforcement here less competent? Or is it that the United States has more legal freedoms and the people who you say have an antisocial disposition are careful Constitutional scholars who have figured out how to game the system? Or what?
Shrike
4d ago
Paleo-cons got kicked out of the mainstream a long time ago.
Lots of people who probably don't know what a paleo-con is still vote R and can express similar sentiment.
Are either of these things relevant or related?
Yes, out of wedlock births are an anti-social behavior that correlates with bad childhood outcomes (at least in the US of A).
Out of wedlock births in Iceland are the norm and happen at almost the exact same rate as out of wedlock births for AA's.
In Iceland, though, this only translates to about a quarter of children being raised in single-parent homes - quite possibly, the parents being married in all-but-name, you're right that it doesn't cause significant problems. It's something like twice the rate among African-Americans - which, relevantly to my point, has risen since the 1960s. Why has this negative behavior among African Americans risen with their IQ score?
And we can ask the same question about violent crime: what's the HBD explanation for why African-American crime rose massively in the 1960s even as they grew more prosperous (in the 1940s, when African-Americans were poorer, crime was much lower)?
Shrike
4d ago
To take your narrative seriously one would have to imagine that a post-war government program that lasted 9 years in the 1860's which gave resources and education to a group of people was always going to lead to that people being welfare dependent.
In the conservative narrative you are trying to identify (not necessarily my narrative), the Freeman's Bureau would just be the start of a much more persistent and long-running government-led effort specifically designed to target black Americans (and other minority groups) with various types of benefits.
The 'monocausal' foe is the nature of human beings, the differences between them, the widely divergent population groups humanity is composed of and the wide variety of circumstance they find themselves in.
If you hung out around conservative Americans long enough you would hear some of them say something along these lines, perhaps with fewer five dollar words.
Most people find it easier to learn how to read than to have 5 children with 5 different men, collect child support, become obese and claim medical benefits on top of that.
In the United States, African-American out-of-wedlock births have increased dramatically since World War Two. This is despite the fact that measured African-American IQ scores have also increased over the same period of time. Why?
Shrike
5d ago
That doesn't explain why blacks are drawn to it more so than other races.
The origin of the American federal welfare state traces its way back to the Freedman's Bureau, established during the Civil War. As you might guess from the name, blacks were "drawn to it" because the Bureau was specifically established for them.
A sociological theory that hangs it all on "IQ" and doesn't account for the facts of the historical case is less fixing the problems with lefty sociological theories and more embracing them, just swapping out "IQ" for "racism" as the Great Monocausal Foe.
I think some people assume that accomplishing this swap will lead to closing the welfare state tap off, perhaps unaware or forgetting that the tap was turned on at a time when (functionally) that very belief was widespread.
But there's no evidence that hardening against RKVs requires K2 levels of energy. If the Sierra Club's lawsuit against the Dyson sphere succeeds, we're not doomed to be struck by RKVs. Furthermore, as discussed previously (and also below) a Dyson sphere isn't even the best method of energy collection.
If you are really worried about this, you can use a laser or similar system to ablate them so you can move them off-course in a predictable way.
Yes, and from what I understand, it is also unstable if sufficiently dense.
This also describes a Dyson swarm to begin with. If you're going to go to a ridiculous amount of engineering effort, for not very good reason, you may as well keep going!
No it doesn't. Self-replicating devices with short doubling times already exist, but they have not eaten the observable universe despite trying. In addition, plenty of things with (probably) much lower floors for "happening" haven't happened.
Notice that you employ this argument selectively: civilizations will build Dyson swarms because it's the best idea, but launch VNRs even though it's a TERRIBLE idea. But maybe we live in a universe where the opposite happens: civilization don't launch VNRs because it's a bad idea but they don't make Dyson swarms, either, even though it's a good one.
For the GAH to tell us anything about the universe, it specifically requires assuming that technological progress will arrive at "can build Dyson swarms" and stop there. If it turns out that the most efficient way to harvest energy is by the care and feeding of your own black hole then we'd never notice the stars being blotted out.
And yeah, I'd bet that the black hole is actually preferred by truly advanced civilizations:
So yeah, if we just assume advanced aliens prefer to use more efficient energy gathering methods then we won't observe them (or at least not by looking for stars being eaten). Waste heat isn't hard to move around (or put to work) so I am not sure we'd see that, or even know if we did see it (my understanding is that there are plenty of odd IR signatures in space.)
Now, maybe it turns out that artificial black holes are ~impossible to create (right now our estimates are that creating one artificially would be extremely difficult) but if it's doable then you would expect that to be preferred.
I tend to agree that it's the cheapest fit, I just don't find the GAH very persuasive, because it seems to me there is a lot of uncertainty around it, and from what I can tell about our own future trajectory as a species, we are not on the path to creating the technosignatures in question.
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