I live in an affluent part of South Carolina. It’s become completely overrun with Trump assholes and degenerates. I don’t know how much longer I can take it. Where can we go?...
Also remember the periodic waves of “Hillary is bae! Mother of dragons! Yas Queen!” and “I love Mayor Pete” and “KHive ftw!” and even a smattering of Mitt Romney fanboi-ism on /r/politics, as their campaigns rose and fell.
Literally no, I was there and I don't recall that at all.
A lot of people worldbuild when they daydream and have the bones of a story kicking around in their brain, but have to pay the bills and raise the kids etc so they never flesh it out and write it down. What's your story's premise? Fantasy, sci-fi, alternate history, mystery, western, whatever genre.
I played a fantasy game (on Nintendo 64!) that had a lore waaaay too ridiculously deep for itself, but part of it was that a vaguely dwarvish race had dwindled to a single city via repeated wars and pogroms from other races, and were living under the protection of one of the large human kingdoms at the time. These dwarves were also secretly harboring the last known dragon in the world, who had given magic to humans about a thousand years ago.
I once started writing a story with a "monster universe" setting but in space. Werewolves and vampires always at war with each other. Humans and animal-humanoids caught in the middle. A few eldritch horrors lurking around the void.
I did a self contained short story set in that universe, about an observation station sitting at the edge of the galaxy, monitoring for potential intergalactic information. They detect a large mass of dark matter that only became detectable when it got close enough to reflect light from our galaxy. As they observed, they realized that the string of dark matter was just a tentacle the size of a large star cluster, and they couldn't see what was on the other end. It swept close and then retracted away.
That's an incredible outline! Got a working title? Maybe "Out of the Bag" or something?
I like the idea that you start with "quirky" locals who are presumably likeable and the main character is probably a bit off putting at first but then later the mob mentality comes out and your sympathies are reversed.
I've read a lot of books and articles about how to write, and honestly it just seems like different authors all have different routines. Some are very rigid with their schedules and some write when inspiration takes them.
Everyone needs to know fundamentals of plot, character, and dialogue though. There are college classes on it n
I've got a similar story that I've been workshopping for years...the alien races decide humans are too warlike, and after our first space war (against other humans, with us not knowing aliens exist yet) the alien council ruling the galaxy decides we're too dangerous and getting too technologically advanced, so they send an AI to try to wipe us out. Galactic civilization has been largely peaceful for tens of thousands of years so they don't know how to do war, but they program an ai to try to eliminate humanity while preserving the rest of life on Earth.
They mostly succeed, but in the conflict the earth does get devastated despite the best efforts of the AI. A human colony ship escapes, and hundreds of years later the descendants of the massacre return to wreak bloody vengeance on the rest of the galaxy.
We're last minute people, maybe a week in advance without air travel, a month with. A family friend just invited us to join them on a vacation NOVEMBER 2025. That seems bonkers to me!...
For international travel, I start making a vague plan about year out and formalize things about 4-6 months out. Which is also when I generally start vaguely planning flights across the US. I try to have all the dates finalized about a month out.
Me too, but mainly because there's no active volcanoes near me
We did have a massive dry-season lighting storm out of nowhere once which sparked a wall of fire surrounding my city, burning over 8000 square km and blotting out the sun.
In 2020.
Definitely felt like the end of the world.
Also set up one of the greatest reddit exchanges I've ever seen
Commenter 1: these fires were sparked by 10,000 lightning strikes over the course of a day during hot, dry weather
Commenter 2: PG&E [our electric utility, known for both high prices and sparking wildfires] execs breathing a sigh of relief for this one
Commenter 3: I dunno, pretty suspicious. Has anyone ever seen PG&E execs and 10,000 lightning strikes in the same room?
The Great Filter is the idea that, in the development of life from the earliest stages of abiogenesis to reaching the highest levels of development on the Kardashev scale, there is a barrier to development that makes detectable extraterrestrial life exceedingly rare. The Great Filter is one possible resolution of the Fermi...
That's why faster than light travel is the holy grail. Without it, we're just kind of stuck.
Imagine if wormholes had zero constraints on the physical location of the other side of the wormhole though. We could open a portal to OUTSIDE the observable universe. What a mindfuck. We might even find a false vacuum decay racing towards us at the speed light, or regions of space that are contracting instead of expanding, or initiate a new big bang by opening a wormhole to an area of space where that hasn't happened...we could travel to a point where we can watch the milky way get formed, since the light of its formation is just reaching that region of space. If it turns out the heat death of the universe is just a local phenomenon, we could continue expanding forever beyond it. World without end.
Plus isn't the rate of expansion of the universe increasing? So at some point, even going at light speed, your destination will recede faster than you can travel.
I was suggesting that photosynthesis is a very unlikely mutation to occur and thus its unlikeliness means most life, if it emerges, won't progress to that stage.
The filter doesn't have to be ahead of us, it could be some stage of development that we've already passed. Like photosynthesis, or the development of consciousness. If, out of all life that develops, only a tiny fraction ever develops photosynthesis, the universe would be largely devoid of any life that we can presently detect. Despite us being the lucky lifeform that did develop photosynthesis in our past.
The failure to develop photosynthesis is the filter. I don't know how you're not getting this. No photosynthesis, no complex life, no sentience, no interstellar civilization.
We have to be extremely careful that we don’t accidentally trigger a weapon that is going to kill or dramatically cripple our civilization before we become a truly interstellar species.
But why are we the first. That's the question. Given the age of the universe, statistically it should have already happened by now. Unless something was stopping it.
Well, we've already sent a couple of probes out of the solar system, but they're not really going fast enough to have any meaningful interstellar impact.
Second would be intergalactic and to a lesser degree interstellar travel. If we assume both 1) intelligent civilizations are extremely rare and 2) faster-than-light transportation is impossible, it could be that everyone is just too spread out to make contact.
Not just too spread out to make contact, too spread out to even detect each other's presence
Eh. The amount of oxygen in out atmosphere is pretty much impossible by non-living processes alone iirc. Anyone who can do astro-spectroscopy can probably tell there's life here, from thousands of light years away.
"And behold, I Myself am bringing floodwaters on the earth, to destroy from under heaven all flesh in which is the breath of life; everything that is on the earth shall die." - Genesis 6:7
"If you had not committed great sins, God would not have sent a punishment like me upon you." - Genghis Khan
Roko's basilisk is a thought experiment which states that an otherwise benevolent artificial superintelligence (AI) in the future would be incentivized to create a virtual reality simulation to torture anyone who knew of its potential existence but did not directly contribute to its advancement or development, in order to...
If Roko's Basilisk is ever created, the resulting Ai would look at humanity and say "wtf you people are all so incredibly stupid" and then yeet itself into the sun
Do your parents help you financially?
Coup attempt in Bolivia reportedly under way as army and police storm palace ( www.ctvnews.ca )
Seriously, where do I go?
I live in an affluent part of South Carolina. It’s become completely overrun with Trump assholes and degenerates. I don’t know how much longer I can take it. Where can we go?...
Ukraine destroyed columns of waiting Russian troops as soon as it was allowed to strike across the border, commander says ( www.businessinsider.com )
Ukraine destroyed columns of waiting Russian soldiers with HIMARS, a Ukrainian commander said....
New Study: At Least 15% of All Reddit Content is Corporate Trolls Trying to Manipulate Public Opinion ( medium.com )
What's the story you would write if you were an author?
A lot of people worldbuild when they daydream and have the bones of a story kicking around in their brain, but have to pay the bills and raise the kids etc so they never flesh it out and write it down. What's your story's premise? Fantasy, sci-fi, alternate history, mystery, western, whatever genre.
How far in advance do you usually plan vacations?
We're last minute people, maybe a week in advance without air travel, a month with. A family friend just invited us to join them on a vacation NOVEMBER 2025. That seems bonkers to me!...
A thunderstorm in Guatemala began simultaneously with the eruption of Mount Fuego ( i.imgur.com )
What do you think the Great Filter is?
The Great Filter is the idea that, in the development of life from the earliest stages of abiogenesis to reaching the highest levels of development on the Kardashev scale, there is a barrier to development that makes detectable extraterrestrial life exceedingly rare. The Great Filter is one possible resolution of the Fermi...
TIL about Roko's Basilisk, a thought experiment considered by some to be an "information hazard" - a concept or idea that can cause you harm by you simply knowing/understanding it ( en.wikipedia.org )
Roko's basilisk is a thought experiment which states that an otherwise benevolent artificial superintelligence (AI) in the future would be incentivized to create a virtual reality simulation to torture anyone who knew of its potential existence but did not directly contribute to its advancement or development, in order to...