Settling a dispute
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I have a friend who works for a library. They still offer this service. I don't think anyone under the age of 70 has used it in some time.
Wow, seriously?
Imagine how many people actually call from a smartphone their kids bought them.
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So you're saying he did analyze the metals, and that he couldn't conclusively prove that they weren't alien metal?
wrote last edited by [email protected]This whole "it's comprised of an unknown element" thing that sci-fi likes to do is ridiculous in and of itself.
If aliens did turn up on Earth their starships would be constructed out of known materials, sure it might be some exotic alloy, or other engineered metamaterial, but we definitely understand what it was.
There's no such thing as alien atoms. Iron is iron.
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There were literally phone numbers you could call and someone at a library would look up the answer to your question. In like, a day or so. And call you back with the info.
There used to be an address at some university and you could mail them photographs of insects and they would tell you what those insects were.
Usually it would turn out to be a beetle of some kind.
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Oh wow, to be jump scared by the Destiel fanfic writer I'm obsessed with (the stories not the person lol) in the wild.
Northern Sparrow is an amazing writer and talks often about bird physiology in her fics!
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This whole "it's comprised of an unknown element" thing that sci-fi likes to do is ridiculous in and of itself.
If aliens did turn up on Earth their starships would be constructed out of known materials, sure it might be some exotic alloy, or other engineered metamaterial, but we definitely understand what it was.
There's no such thing as alien atoms. Iron is iron.
I'm still not convinced alien technologies would be totally incomprehensible to us. Some of it obviously will, but their tech will still adhere to basic fundamentals like levers, inclined planes, and wheels -- as well as fundamental forces like electromagnetism, kinetic energy, and pressure.
When you need to fasten two parts of machinery together, there are a limited number of efficient ways to do it. I fully expect bolts, nuts, and washers to be a universal technology. Same with focusing radiation; there are not many substitutes for lenses, mirrors, and lasers. When you need to move something around in gravity well, you're always going to need a wheel. If something needs to rotate, there aren't many substitutes for a rotor, stator, copper windings, and electricity. Gears, chains, and belts work just fine for transferring that rotational energy. Nobody is gonna go looking for exotic forces to perform tasks that can be far more easily accomplished conventionally.
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Oh wow, to be jump scared by the Destiel fanfic writer I'm obsessed with (the stories not the person lol) in the wild.
Northern Sparrow is an amazing writer and talks often about bird physiology in her fics!
well yeh it's fiction. because birds aren't real.
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I'm still not convinced alien technologies would be totally incomprehensible to us. Some of it obviously will, but their tech will still adhere to basic fundamentals like levers, inclined planes, and wheels -- as well as fundamental forces like electromagnetism, kinetic energy, and pressure.
When you need to fasten two parts of machinery together, there are a limited number of efficient ways to do it. I fully expect bolts, nuts, and washers to be a universal technology. Same with focusing radiation; there are not many substitutes for lenses, mirrors, and lasers. When you need to move something around in gravity well, you're always going to need a wheel. If something needs to rotate, there aren't many substitutes for a rotor, stator, copper windings, and electricity. Gears, chains, and belts work just fine for transferring that rotational energy. Nobody is gonna go looking for exotic forces to perform tasks that can be far more easily accomplished conventionally.
Not wheels. When your technology is sufficiently advanced you un-invent the wheel and just hover everywhere.
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Not wheels. When your technology is sufficiently advanced you un-invent the wheel and just hover everywhere.
I know right? Who needs fire anyway?
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Pfft, I bet you can't even tell me one interesting thing about minerals
Here's a cross-over mineral and biology:
Teeth are not bone. They are made of a variety of the mineral apatite called hydroxyapatite (fluoride treatment converts some of it into fluorapatite, which has stronger chemical bonds).
Further, apatite is a homophone for appetite but they come from completely different root words.
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This whole "it's comprised of an unknown element" thing that sci-fi likes to do is ridiculous in and of itself.
If aliens did turn up on Earth their starships would be constructed out of known materials, sure it might be some exotic alloy, or other engineered metamaterial, but we definitely understand what it was.
There's no such thing as alien atoms. Iron is iron.
I think the most crazy thing we could potentially encounter atomically (that we theorize about but haven't seen) is material from the possible "Island of stability" that could be (much) farther along in the periodic table from things we've created.
For the uninformed, the island of stability is a range on the periodic table with atomic numbers in the ~170's (currently the element with the highest atomic number - how many protons in the nucleus - that humans have synthesized is Oganesson, with an atomic number of 118) where it is believed that nuclei will remain (more?) stable, rather than breaking down in microseconds after we slam other elements into each other with devices such as the Large Hadron Collider.
There are SO many challenges with even getting to 118. Getting higher than that is theoretically possible but so far we haven't worked it out. A super advanced civilization might have the means and/or dedicated the resources, and be the beneficiary of whatever properties exist in the advanced/exotic matter that we know nothing about.
That being said, we would still be able to analyze the materials and understand what we're looking at, even if our WTF meters are breaking from the overload because we don't know how they managed to achieve it.
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I know right? Who needs fire anyway?
Replaced with plasma and lasers.
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Pre-smartphone was a very different time.
You would NOT believe-… ok honestly everybody reading this already knows.
But there are SO many people that will offer confident unprompted incorrect advice on so many subjects while they have the sum of human knowledge in their pocket. Or they will ask some dummy for the answer while having that same access.
And the best part is that many of them use their literal human knowledgebase portal to send the wrong information!
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well yeh it's fiction. because birds aren't real.
Fuck you too pal
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Part of our animal nature is to be tribalistic, and we don't often get a lot of that in our daily lives so that people find ways to feed that need. Tribalism involves violent intent about outgroups that don't conform to our "tribe" (read: pack).
wrote last edited by [email protected]Warning: Rant
There are two meanings to the word "Tribalism". One sense of the word just describes people living in tribes. The second meaning involves discriminatory behavior or attitudes towards out-groups, based on in-group loyalty.
There is a perhaps understandable tendency to conflate these two meanings. For one they are spelled and pronounced the same. We aren't really taught a lot about tribal cultures, and we just kind of assume things. Also our 'cultures' have been teaching us tribal people were savages and we did them a favor by conquering them.
I'm not claiming that they don't correlate to some extent. Of course you are going to have a preference for the people in your tribe over the people not in your tribe. You know those people, you are around them a lot and can personally vouch for their character. People not in your tribe are strangers and not immediately trusted. That much is true.
What I take issue with is the idea that Tribal people automatically hated anyone not in their tribe (out group) and had violent intent towards them. Also, equating being in a tribe and being in a pack is dehumanizing.
Yes, there was sometimes conflict with neighboring "Tribes", but for the most part tribes stuck to their own territory and didn't cause problems for other groups. Tribes often coexisted peacefully near each other for hundreds of years. This was advantageous in that it gave us trade partners and potentially ways to get new genes into the gene pool. Plus unnecessary fighting is just a good way to end up dead for no reason.
Typically tribal people settle on their territory pretty quickly and it's usually enough or more than enough to provide for the needs of the tribe- so there was little need to encroach on other peoples territory. Also when conflicts did arise, it very rarely escalated into 'Total War', where the goal was to kill/subjugate the members of the other tribe and take over their territory, because A) that's a good way to get a lot of your own people killed, and B) they had their own territory so they didn't need more.
Ironically, it was the invention of "modern" agriculture and "Civilization" that really kicked off the second type of tribalism. Modern (aka Totalitarian) style agriculture is extremely efficient. As such it nearly always produces a surplus of food (barring droughts, blights, and other natural disasters). When you introduce a surplus of food into a population- it has he effect that the population size increases along with it. Once you get more people than the land can support, then you do need more territory.
Another effect of 'Civilization' is that you see full time soldiers for the first time. In a tribe practicing subsistence living, your job would typically be something related to the daily survival of the tribe. Hunter, Gatherer, Cook, Crafts-person etc. If 'War' broke out then all of the able bodied Men and sometimes women would become 'Warriors' for the duration of the conflict. Again, since there was relatively little conflict there was no need to have people who were warriors exclusively (soldiers). With 'civilization' you can pay some people out of the surplus of food to guard the food.
So what happens when you are a large group of people, made powerful by the new technology and you find yourself in need of more land to farm? You take it- typically from the tribe next door. Only now the goal is 'Total War'. You want to kill or subjugate everyone in the territory you are tying to conquer. The problem is that they are human beings and you are human beings- so how do we get normal people to want to fight and kill their neighbors? The second form of Tribalism. That group is bad. They are uncultured swine. They are subhuman in some way because they are different. That's the kind of attitude you have to foster about other people to get your people to agree to conquer them.
Pretty much the entirety of human history sees the same scenario play out. 'Civilized' groups 'other' tribal people and systematically wipe them out and/or conquer them and appropriate their land. It wasn't until Europe/Asia had basically ran out of tribal people to conquer that nations started to go to war with each other.
The same thing happened with civilizations that arose in the New World, Mayans, Aztec's, Inca etc. It's no coincidence that these cultures relied heavily on agriculture.
What is my point? It's that 'Tribal' people are less 'tribal' than civilized people. It's the civilized people who are savage.
Why does this matter? We tend to forget that for the vast majority of human history we lived tribally. It's kind of easy to forget that because people didn't start recording history until right around the same time as civilizations were invented.
What am I trying to say? It's not "a part of our animal nature to be tribalistic", automatically hating anyone not in our in group and harboring violent intent about them.
Further evidence, look at modern attitudes towards tribalistic thinking. Despite living in the more savage mode of living- a large percentage of humans have woke up to the fact that tribalism is bad, short sighted, bigoted, and unfair. Take some very young children and put them in a playground together and they will play. They don't form little cliques based on superficial characteristics or 'culture'. We have to be taught to hate each other. We have to be told the reasons why it's ok to discriminate or subjugate others.
Tl:DR Nope. Respectfully of course.
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Replaced with plasma and lasers.
wrote last edited by [email protected]Humans harness fire now more than all of history combined. And fire is plasma.
I'm just saying, even the lowest tech has never really disappeared. We still use rocks and steam in our highest technologies. There's no reason to think aliens would abandon whatever tech has worked for eons.
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Not wheels. When your technology is sufficiently advanced you un-invent the wheel and just hover everywhere.
wrote last edited by [email protected]Its very important that they can only hover and not float or fly. If they could float or fly then you wouldn't be able to do cool car chases in a society without cars
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Its very important that they can only hover and not float or fly. If they could float or fly then you wouldn't be able to do cool car chases in a society without cars
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Probably comes from the old tale that hummingbirds never stop flapping their wings or they die so why would they need feet?
Hummingbirds, the real Speed and Crank stars.
Is it a tale? It thought stopping would basically overclock the heart after too long. I saw one land the other day (possibly the first time I've ever seen that) and it kept flapping while hanging onto a twig.
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Warning: Rant
There are two meanings to the word "Tribalism". One sense of the word just describes people living in tribes. The second meaning involves discriminatory behavior or attitudes towards out-groups, based on in-group loyalty.
There is a perhaps understandable tendency to conflate these two meanings. For one they are spelled and pronounced the same. We aren't really taught a lot about tribal cultures, and we just kind of assume things. Also our 'cultures' have been teaching us tribal people were savages and we did them a favor by conquering them.
I'm not claiming that they don't correlate to some extent. Of course you are going to have a preference for the people in your tribe over the people not in your tribe. You know those people, you are around them a lot and can personally vouch for their character. People not in your tribe are strangers and not immediately trusted. That much is true.
What I take issue with is the idea that Tribal people automatically hated anyone not in their tribe (out group) and had violent intent towards them. Also, equating being in a tribe and being in a pack is dehumanizing.
Yes, there was sometimes conflict with neighboring "Tribes", but for the most part tribes stuck to their own territory and didn't cause problems for other groups. Tribes often coexisted peacefully near each other for hundreds of years. This was advantageous in that it gave us trade partners and potentially ways to get new genes into the gene pool. Plus unnecessary fighting is just a good way to end up dead for no reason.
Typically tribal people settle on their territory pretty quickly and it's usually enough or more than enough to provide for the needs of the tribe- so there was little need to encroach on other peoples territory. Also when conflicts did arise, it very rarely escalated into 'Total War', where the goal was to kill/subjugate the members of the other tribe and take over their territory, because A) that's a good way to get a lot of your own people killed, and B) they had their own territory so they didn't need more.
Ironically, it was the invention of "modern" agriculture and "Civilization" that really kicked off the second type of tribalism. Modern (aka Totalitarian) style agriculture is extremely efficient. As such it nearly always produces a surplus of food (barring droughts, blights, and other natural disasters). When you introduce a surplus of food into a population- it has he effect that the population size increases along with it. Once you get more people than the land can support, then you do need more territory.
Another effect of 'Civilization' is that you see full time soldiers for the first time. In a tribe practicing subsistence living, your job would typically be something related to the daily survival of the tribe. Hunter, Gatherer, Cook, Crafts-person etc. If 'War' broke out then all of the able bodied Men and sometimes women would become 'Warriors' for the duration of the conflict. Again, since there was relatively little conflict there was no need to have people who were warriors exclusively (soldiers). With 'civilization' you can pay some people out of the surplus of food to guard the food.
So what happens when you are a large group of people, made powerful by the new technology and you find yourself in need of more land to farm? You take it- typically from the tribe next door. Only now the goal is 'Total War'. You want to kill or subjugate everyone in the territory you are tying to conquer. The problem is that they are human beings and you are human beings- so how do we get normal people to want to fight and kill their neighbors? The second form of Tribalism. That group is bad. They are uncultured swine. They are subhuman in some way because they are different. That's the kind of attitude you have to foster about other people to get your people to agree to conquer them.
Pretty much the entirety of human history sees the same scenario play out. 'Civilized' groups 'other' tribal people and systematically wipe them out and/or conquer them and appropriate their land. It wasn't until Europe/Asia had basically ran out of tribal people to conquer that nations started to go to war with each other.
The same thing happened with civilizations that arose in the New World, Mayans, Aztec's, Inca etc. It's no coincidence that these cultures relied heavily on agriculture.
What is my point? It's that 'Tribal' people are less 'tribal' than civilized people. It's the civilized people who are savage.
Why does this matter? We tend to forget that for the vast majority of human history we lived tribally. It's kind of easy to forget that because people didn't start recording history until right around the same time as civilizations were invented.
What am I trying to say? It's not "a part of our animal nature to be tribalistic", automatically hating anyone not in our in group and harboring violent intent about them.
Further evidence, look at modern attitudes towards tribalistic thinking. Despite living in the more savage mode of living- a large percentage of humans have woke up to the fact that tribalism is bad, short sighted, bigoted, and unfair. Take some very young children and put them in a playground together and they will play. They don't form little cliques based on superficial characteristics or 'culture'. We have to be taught to hate each other. We have to be told the reasons why it's ok to discriminate or subjugate others.
Tl:DR Nope. Respectfully of course.
You are taking what I've said far to literally. I wasn't writing my dissertation, I was making observations. I also did not infer that being tribalistic makes you hate outgroups, but in the sense of "tribes" yes they have always had violence inherent to them, because we live in a violent world. Bears can kill you, moose can kill you, other tribes can kill you. It comes from protectionism more than hate, but that notion gets compromised by bad actors pushing an agenda.
There have always been things to fight for. The good hunting grounds, the good fishing grounds, the safest places to camp, etc... violence isn't always a bad thing either, it is a necessary part of living in a diverse world. You can't reason with a fire, or a bear. You can avoid them, but that's just protectionism again. I never implied tribalism is bad, I implied it's a part of our nature. Humans are pack animals that have always lived in family groups and fought to protect the sanctity of that group from outside forces. Civilization is the act of forgetting the past to damn the future. It's not what it is supposed to be, but that's what it has become. We use our "civility" as a cudgel to beat those who think/live differently.
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You are taking what I've said far to literally. I wasn't writing my dissertation, I was making observations. I also did not infer that being tribalistic makes you hate outgroups, but in the sense of "tribes" yes they have always had violence inherent to them, because we live in a violent world. Bears can kill you, moose can kill you, other tribes can kill you. It comes from protectionism more than hate, but that notion gets compromised by bad actors pushing an agenda.
There have always been things to fight for. The good hunting grounds, the good fishing grounds, the safest places to camp, etc... violence isn't always a bad thing either, it is a necessary part of living in a diverse world. You can't reason with a fire, or a bear. You can avoid them, but that's just protectionism again. I never implied tribalism is bad, I implied it's a part of our nature. Humans are pack animals that have always lived in family groups and fought to protect the sanctity of that group from outside forces. Civilization is the act of forgetting the past to damn the future. It's not what it is supposed to be, but that's what it has become. We use our "civility" as a cudgel to beat those who think/live differently.
You are taking what I’ve said far to literally.
Perhaps. This particular topic has been a lifelong interest of mine, so if I went into far to great of detail in my answer I apologize. Honestly I tried to hold back and stay on topic, but I failed to be concise for sure.
I wasn’t writing my dissertation, I was making observations.
Fair enough
I also did not infer that being tribalistic makes you hate outgroups.
Eh, you may not have been intending to imply that, but with the statement "Tribalism involves violent intent about outgroups that don’t conform to our “tribe” (read: pack)." you can probably see how someone could easily infer that's what you meant.
in the sense of “tribes” yes they have always had violence inherent to them, because we live in a violent world.
This may seem pedantic and forgive me if you aren't interested in the distinction, but a group of people organizing themselves into "Tribes" is no more and in a lot of ways less violent than other ways of organizing yourself, so to associate the two does a disservice to both the method of organization, and the people who have been and still are members of tribes. That was the point of my rant about how 'Civilization' was when you really start to see 'Tribalism' in the bad sense take off. It's not your fault that they named the word after the wrong group- I guess I just want to highlight the distinction for the people who are interested. I'm not trying to attack you personally.
Bears can kill you, moose can kill you, other tribes can kill you. It comes from protectionism more than hate
Of course, and please don't mistake me, I'm not putting forth some sort of 'Noble Savage' argument. Tribal people were people and had all of the faults people do. My overall point is one of generalities and not hard and fast rules, it's still an important thing to consider imo.
but that notion gets compromised by bad actors pushing an agenda.
Exactly. One of those agendas has traditionally been that 'Civilization' is an unmitigated good and nothing of value was lost, while 'Tribalism' was when humans were at our most animalistic and violent. I would just like to see the narrative more closely fit the reality of the situation
There have always been things to fight for. The good hunting grounds, the good fishing grounds, the safest places to camp, etc…
Eh, kinda but not really. In our modern view we can recognize that other people live in areas that have resources we would like to have, but we don't advocate for fighting those people to get the resources. We trade for them. Prehistoric and tribal people were likewise capable of trading for resources, and did so frequently. Fighting for it (endangering everyone involved) was likely the the last resort in most cases. We tend to overlook the fact that in our abundant society we always have 'spare' young men we can send of to war for territory or resources. People living a subsistence lifestyle typically valued such young men who could go and hunt dangerous prey much more highly than we seem to value our young men.
Only a madman in 2025 would advocate annexing another sovereign nation to get their oil, trees, or minerals. It was likely just as rare for tribal people to fight over such things when 'sane' alternatives existed.
Humans are pack animals that have always lived in family groups and fought to protect the sanctity of that group from outside forces.
As you can probably guess because of my username, I am not personally bothered by being called a 'pack animal', because I have a deep understanding of what those things mean. There are (perhaps subtle but important) differences between a 'pack' and a 'tribe', that I won't go into (unless you are interested), but my point is in light of the way tribal people have been traditionally portrayed by western culture, equating a group of human beings with wild animals has all sorts of icky connotations that perhaps you don't mean but are present nonetheless. If you wouldn't refer to a group of black folks as "Monkeys" or "Apes", you might think twice about making such comparisons, that's all I'm saying. After all it is a fact that as human beings we are all Monkeys and Apes, but thanks to racist douchebags- it can be hurtful to people not in our 'in groups' to go around saying that if you don't clarify exactly what you mean.
Civilization is the act of forgetting the past to damn the future..
I like that. It's poetic and there is a lot of truth in that. I may steal that for future conversations.
We use our “civility” as a cudgel to beat those who think/live differently.
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