I post pictures with my other account @Deme@lemmy.world

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: August 9th, 2023

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  • I think you’re taking the trollface in the meme a bit too literally. It’s annoying and unnecessary, and can cause mistakes that wouldn’t have been possible otherwise. Ahem, the Mars Climate Orbiter is a good example of a particularly costly one.

    Nobody is flying into an incoherent rage. It’s merely annoying having to accommodate the outdated quirks of one country. You having to do the opposite is quite reasonable on the other hand, because you’re not accommodating the conventions of one country, but those of the rest of the world.





  • Bear in mind that there are multiple countries where English is the largest language and metric is used, and that English is the modern lingua franca. It just so happens that the largest english speaking country has some weird ways to measure things. As such those weird measurements and associated conversions are often forced on anyone who wants to look for a recipe in English, be that their native language or not.



  • Oh no. I just want to be rid of the imperial system. I would have no issue with it if it wasn’t a part of my life. Unfortunately I work in a field where imperial units are used world wide (apart from China and Russia for historical reasons). Because of this, I use some of those units myself every day at work. I understand some of them but take no pride in it. The only reason that the imperial system is still used so much is purely by convention. It is inferior to the metric system in every aspect. I do not feel superior to people who use imperial units because as stated above, I am one of them. People who I feel superior to are the ones who delude themselves into thinking that this somehow isn’t purely because of convention. I dislike them because they are forced upon me by international conventions. OP appears to dislike them because recipes written in English force those units into their life.





  • #1: I doubt there would ever be a situation where those same resources wouldn’t be better used to make things slightly less unbearable on the home world. In our case, even if we covered the world in poison and had an endless nuclear winter, Mars would still look like the worse planet to live on. It’s doubtful whether or not a better one exists within any “practical” distance. If the aliens happened to have a lucky spawn in a star system with multiple habitable planets, good for them. They have another chance to figure things out. But interstellar flight (not to mention colonization) is still vastly more difficult.

    #2: Exploiting the resources of the solar system is orders and orders of magnitude simpler than establishing self-sufficient colonies in uninhabitable space or planets. The show For All Mankind threw out most of any believability it had a while ago, but even there the entire fourth season revolved around the subject of how even a single asteroid full of rare earth metals would sate our hunger for such a long time as to effectively kill any initiatives to expand in space.


  • Space exploration necessitates a technological industrial civilization. So they/we would somehow have to figure out how to first do #2 (so as to not die), while still maintaining the industrial capacity to spread out into space. That sounds like an even more improbable subset of the already improbable scenario #2.


  • That distance exists not only in space, but most likely time as well. Extrapolating from our singular data point, it would seem that the lifespan of a technological civilization is quite short. The odds of two of those being around at the right times for even one of them to detect the passing emission shell of the other is diminishingly small.


  • My thinking is that a technological species either goes into ecological overshoot so badly that it kills itself (or at least its capacity to conquer space) ((this is what we’re doing currently)), or then it learns to live harmoniously as a functioning part of the wider planetary system, and thus has no need to spread into space.