I wouldn’t put too much stock in notions of a great filter. The “Fermi paradox” is not a paradox, it’s speculation. It misses the mark on how unbelievably unlikely life is in the first place. It relies on us being impressed by big numbers and completely forgetting about probabilities as we humans tend to do what with our gambler’s fallacies and so on.

Even the Drake equation forgets about galactic habitable zones, or the suitability of the stars themselves to support life. Did you know that our star is unusually quiet compared to what we observe? We already know that’s a very rare quality of our situation that would allow the stable environment that life would need. Then there’s chemical composition, atmosphere, magnetosphere, do we have a big Jupiter out there sweeping up most of the cataclysmic meteors that would otherwise wipe us out?

All these probabilities stack up, and the idea that a life-supporting planet is more common than one in 400 billion stars is ludicrously optimistic, given how fast probabilities can stack up. You’re about as likely to win the Lotto, and it seems to me the conditions for life would be a little more complex than that, not to mention the probability that it actually does evolve.

I think it might be possible that life only happens once in a billion galaxies, or even less frequently. There might not be another living organism within our local galactic cluster’s event horizon. Then you have to ask about how frequent intelligent life, to the point of achieving interstellar travel, is.

You know why your favourite science youtuber brushed right past the rare earth hypothesis and started talking about the dark forest? Because one of those makes for fun science-adjacent speculation, and the other one doesn’t.

It also relies on the notion that resources are scarce, completely brushing over the fact that going interstellar to accumulate resources is absolutely balls to the wall bonkers. Do you know how much material there is in our asteroid belt? Even colonising the Moon or Mars is an obscenely difficult task, and Fermi thinks going to another star system, removed from any hope of support by light years, is something we would do because we needed more stuff? It’s absurd to think we’d ever even consider the idea.

But even then, Fermi said that once a civilisation achieves interstellar travel it would colonise a galaxy in about “a million years”. Once again relying on us being impressed by big numbers and forgetting the practicalities of the situation. Our galaxy is 100,000 light years across, so this motherfucker is telling us with a straight face that we’re going to colonise the galaxy, something we already know is unfathomably hard, at approximately ten percent of the speed of light? That is an average rate of expansion in all directions. Bitch, what?

If we did it at 0.0001c, that’s an average speed of 30km/s, including the establishment of new colonies that could themselves send out new colonies, because it’s no good to just zoom through the galaxy waving at the stars as they go past. That seems amazingly generous of a speed, assuming we can even find one planet in range we could colonise. Then we could colonise the galaxy in about a billion years.

Given the universe is 14 billion years old and the complex chemistry needed for life took many billions of years to appear, and life on our rock took many billions of years to evolve, then the idea that we haven’t met any of our neighbours - assuming they even exist - doesn’t seem like a paradox at all. It doesn’t seem like a thing that needs explanation unless you’re drumming up sensational content for clicks. I mean, no judgement, people gotta eat, but that’s a better explanation for why we care so much about this non-problem.

No, the Fermi paradox is pop-science. It’s about as scientific as multiversal FTL time travel. Intelligence is domain-specific, and Fermi was good at numbers, he wasn’t an exobiologist.

I’m sorry, which part of your comment do you suppose relates to me?

This week on How to Raise an Entire Generation With an Intimate Knowledge of Counter-Surveillance: Ban Their Favourite Social Media!

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If you hear David Graeber talk about it, the IMF and the World Bank’s power was shattered after occupy, countries weren’t willing to accept their terms anymore because the word was out that leaders who did that were selling out their own people. Things changed, but there are powerful hegemonic forces at work that work to stop us from hearing about it. They want us to believe we are powerless.

Just because you didn’t storm the bastille yet doesn’t mean nothing is being done. Most direct action is on the ground and invisible. That’s why it looks like decades pass with nothing happening, then overnight everything changes.

Yeah, and that’s all true, but in the comment I replied to was room for the implication that “mob justice” is a problem somehow.

We’re told it would be chaos, some great threat to society, but like, the only examples of mobs that I can think of doing any real damage are groups whose immediate aims were supported by the ruling class. Lynchings in the US south were openly permitted and encouraged by the entrenched white supremacist police state. Witch burnings were encouraged by the state to disenfranchise women from power over their own bodies, and they laid the foundations for capitalism.

Then those horrific examples of state oppression are presented to us as examples of the horrors that await if we were to ever stop bowing to that same state and take matters into our own hands.

Even if the person making the comment didn’t intend to reinforce that notion, it’s a default assumption for many people and I didn’t want it to stand unchallenged.

When everyone is on the list, noone is.

“Mob justice” is a boogeyman invented to distract you from the fact that the cops and the state give you no justice at all.

Such a good analogy. I’d go further and say all laws are like this. They don’t actually stop anyone from doing anything, and they don’t even guarantee anything will happen to them as a consequence. They’re just lines on the road.

We have to kill him, or else he’ll die!

That’s not a gotcha, it’s very simple. Doctors decide whether a fetus is viable outside the womb, and if it is, then it’s a birth. The line for this keeps shifting earlier as neonatal medicine improves. Doctors aren’t going to destroy a child that can live, they took a hypocratic oath. Once it’s outside on its own, “my body my choice” no longer applies.

In fact, the opposite is frequently a problem, where enormous intervention is given to keep an extremely premature child alive when all you are doing is guaranteeing them a lot of suffering. There are plenty of parents who wish in retrospect that the option to simply not intervene had been offered, because they see how much pain their child goes through. It is already perfectly fine, legally and ethically, to decide that a child is simply too weak to have a good quality of life. You can offer them milk (if they feed on their own that is a sign of good health and probably won’t ever happen with a case like this), but after that hold them and say goodbye.

People talking about late term abortions and killing babies after ripping them out of the womb at 40 weeks are completely divorced from reality. That’s Alex Jones level bullshit.

Not lately.

Because bourgeois morality is false. Throw off the chains they have placed on your mind and become a based murderist.

A wallpaper app is already targeting the most vulnerable. Nobody who knows how to remove the spyware that’s already in Windows is installing a wallpaper app.

You only have sympathy for people who are already technically competent to some standard you’ve chosen? It’s those who don’t have technical competence that this shit works on. I’d bet that’s the reason a wallpaper app was chosen for these shenanigans, because it filters out the people who will be wise to it.

Like it or not, building a secure internet means making systems that are safe for regular internet users, and if you’re getting snooty about the kinds of programs a person installs, I’d wager that’s not you. Even if it’s just the least competent 5 or 10% of the internet falling prey to this, it’s the predators that make the environment more dangerous for everyone. Put the blame where it belongs.

Also, those people aren’t using Linux partly because Linux is an elitist community that shits on anyone who’s not comfortable in the command line. If you want Linux to be a viable threat to the Windows monopoly, you need to accept that these people will need to be accommodated, unless you’re happy selfishly keeping it to cloistered group of nerds who are toxic towards every newcomer, and you think that’s the way it should be. I’ve certainly met Linux people who think that way.

USB has always been reversible. In fact you have to reverse it at least 3 times before it’ll FUCKING PLUG IN.

But but but rational actors supply and demand something something invisible hand of the market.

Orthodox economics can’t be wrong. That’s why you have an orthodoxy, to make sure everybody knows it’s right! That’s how science works!

Yup, Stremio + realdebrid + VPN is utterly unmatched for service, plus you get fast torrents for everything else.

Yeah, I looked into it and the backend is proprietary, so the central owner can restrict features. Like for instance independent instances can only have 10 users.

It’s “decentralised” except only in extremely limited scope, the code is centrally controlled and the network remains largely, functionally centralised.

They’re capitalising on the decentralised, federated buzz while doing it so poorly they’re setting up users to say “oh people tried decentralisation, it doesn’t work, look at Bluesky”.

If it’s not open source, it’s not decentralised.

That’s a beautiful name.