I’m of the opinion that sci-fi, especially soft sci-fi, should have vehicles or devices which look absolutely fucking stupid because of some in universe physical or technological constraint. Like this thing
Big fan of machines which look like they will open a gate to hell. This one looks like it will also rip your soul out of your body, all it needs is a metallic sheen instead of white and the vibe will be immaculate.
The Stellarator uses a twisted torus of magnets to cancel out the uneven fields that make it difficult to contain a fusion plasma in a regular tokamak:
One of the saddest things about the fact that the actual proposals for Diamond-based MNT by Drexler and his colleagues are incredibly niche and unknown is that we only have like a dozen of these cool as hell sims of nanomechanisms. Nothing outside of that handful can be found.
@Tominhekk02
Yeah, and that cutscene is an in-universe propaganda video delivered to you by the “ministry of truth” for which deviations in attention from are considered treason,
I do not believe the game which is an incredibly obvious satirization of human supremacy and totalitarianism-
This shouldn’t be surprising, if you believe innate physiological differences are what determine your moral worth wrt the hypothetical of aliens, you probably believe something pretty similar when it comes to humans.
@cumcumfuck
@ravenm0der
Believing that some innate physiological differences between you and say an equivalently intelligent being grants you special moral worth over themis pretty white supremacy coded, like definitionally that’s what white supremacy is, just applied to human ethnicities here.
Fellow artists I'm begging you to learn about industrial and product design. Not everything you needs to look like a a cool creative art project. In fact, most things look how they do for primarily utilitarian or logistical reasons, and that is a HUGE part of worldbuilding.
This video constitutes great evidence that the digital cellphone is a Completed Technology. Every advancement past a certain point just goes to marginal quantitative improvements, or gimmicks that fundamentally offer nothing of real value.
PlayStation 9 spoof commercial for the PS2 (1999)
Last year Sony trademarked every console up to the PlayStation 10 which is set to roll out around 2055.
The “hunter gatherer tree smurfs” are a pretty obvious stand in for indigenous peoples, so saying “I’m on the side of the colonialist genociders because the tech is cool” is a pretty bad look.
@ElGranSenglar
It’s quite simple, they don’t actually care about anyone getting healthier, they simply hate being made to look at someone they deem unattractive.
The ability of the United States to assimilate literally any culture is the best and worst part of our country. Ten thousand years from now, we will have alien bug people growling that this here is Murrica and the gubbermint can take their ray guns from their cold, dead claws.
One of my favorite kinds of future tech is stuff which is absolutely possible but is simply impractical and worse than more boring solutions, like this.
Putting a spin hab on the surface (or inside) of large body with almost negligible gravity is a lot more plausible than spinning the entire object like in the Expanse.
A city on Nereid, the third-largest moon of Neptune. I believe the circular buildings house centrifuges for artificial gravity habitats. In the background, spacecraft ride gigantic cones of exhaust.
Excellent space scene by
@zandoarts
#space
#art
Functionally speaking there’s nothing substantively different about this than using your phone while eating but everyone pretends it’s black mirror because as we all know black mirror is when high tech
@zoro_kaiser
A example of how Francis Fukuyama is literally just a guy is how his Twitter pfp isn’t like an actual picture of him, but a buzzard car from mad max.
Most people have an idea of what “nanomachinery” is supposed to be of course, but it’s mostly informed by sci-fi and not very accurate at all, and not accurate wrt these proposals.
Humans by default don’t tend to find each other scary, so it can be hard to convey how animals likely see us. Fiction that I think did a pretty good job of it though, was Expedition/Alien planet, in their depiction of Eosapiens.
HFY where humanity’s unique trait is mostly that we’re quite large. Most alien sophonts are around the size of crows, and the fact we are this large is an amusing novelty to them. The crow sized aliens love to ride on humans and this greatly improves interspecies relations.
@Ambersol13
@cosmoscenti
To be fair the atomic manhole cover is probably the fastest any man made object has travelled *in our atmosphere*, at around 60 Km/s from a cursory search, which is insane.
If we are so blessed as to have the capability to reside robot bodies I’m fairly certain that a lot of people would much rather have something like the art in the quoted post than this thing.
@RomanianLiberal
@jdcmedlock
The anime character isn’t just any rando either, it’s a dude who’s sole purpose is to genocide the whole world beyond his align and ends up killing like 80% of humans.
Yes! Try to imagine AI+robotics labor with essentially unlimited resources so there will be few limits to growth in space. What will our civilization do with a million+ times greater productivity? Fantastical ideas will no longer be fantastical.
The food scenes in Studio Ghibli productions, particularly the most famous ones from Hayao Miyazaki’s movies, are distinct from other anime in that the narratives slow down to accommodate the cooking, eating, and sharing of food
@Xenoimpulse
They tend to be more “we should use technology to make me a superintelligent immortal god king” rather than “we should use technology to turn me into a fox girl”
The M134 Minigun is a six-barrel rotary machine gun with a high rate of fire (up to 6,000 rounds per minute).
Used with tracers, it has a definitely impressive visual (and not only visual) impact 🔊
[📹 arc-x₁₀₀₀]
Some of the weirdest parasitic copepods are in the genus Philichthys. They live inside the skull bones of fish. They are so weird that we don’t know what most of their body parts are. The female (right) is 2cm long and has processes growing out of her body. Male in vial on left
To me this isn’t a plateau due to technological limitations, rather that the digital cellphone as it stands is at the apex of utility to the average human being. It is conceivable that there are personal devices which offer truly novel and useful functionalities-
If you:
1. Like realism in science fiction
2. Like discussing science more generally
3. Are someone with subject matter expertise
4. Want to talk to SMEs
You should join ToughSF via the link here:
@Birchmouse
The HRT billionaire vampire has a level of self awareness that makes him incredibly funny and like-able imo, hopefully the revolution will spare that one.
It’s always amazing to see good books get adapted well, like in the case of Dune, but I think an unfortunate consequence of this process is that whatever aesthetic was used in the adaptation tends to dominate all depictions and references of that fiction, so incredible works like
Moolec achieves USDA approval for plant-grown animal proteins.
Moolec’s genetically engineered soybean accumulates animal meat protein.
It is unlikely to pose an increased plant pest risk relative to non-engineered soybeans.
Bay’s Transformers are really interesting to me because they a great showcase of how we’re okay with astounding amounts of brutal violence as long as the characters don’t leak “real” blood or guts.
This is what ship-girls should look like. None of that “regular human woman with some ship bits glued to her back” garbage, I’m talking big mechanical creatures truly straddling the line between man and machine. Fantastic stuff.
That’s awesome, because this is the thing that makes regular meat. If you give two shits about the suffering of animals the best choice is a no brainer.
@softminus
We actually had to make a rule about discussing classified things because of this dude in our discord server.
He’s pretty cool though I love him.
@greenkerfuffle
This post is not about authors writing about human supremacy, it is about the people who look at those works and align themselves with the human supremacists in fiction.
All the ships and stations of The Expanse in one mega-poster... to scale!
For reference the Behemoth in the center is 2.46 km long.
#space
#art
by Moreorlesser.
This is species of video of previously thought extinct after 2008, but technology has resurrected them. They used to be called things like “what Pokémon would look like in real life”.
@APOAPSlS
Not necessarily, the emergence of microbes may be easy, but the emergence of organisms which produce visible technosignatures may be a lot harder. Consider that microbes appeared less than a billion years after the Earth formed, while the occurrence of complex multicellularity-
That a significant number of people will look at blatant allegories for various kind of evil, which make it so easy to see why the evil is in fact evil, then go on to side with the evil, really goes to show how many humans are complete moral vacuums waiting to be given something-
Fusion powerplants are such a fundamentally unexciting technology in a practical sense to me because when you get down to it there’s really not much they do better than fission as far as terrestrial electricity generation goes. While being so much harder.
Reagan instituted a bunch of budget cuts that resulted in the Mirror Fusion Test Facility being cancelled. A whole approach to magnetic confinement fusion we never really found out would be viable or not. So he’s my choice
Unironically they should make more stories in which the establishment is right and the rebels suck. It’s very common irl but seldomly is it depicted in popular media.
“Herbivorize predators” is insufficiently ambitious. Given the capability, we ought to enable all life to be autotrophic or electrophagous, which grow and replicate using nonliving feedstock.
There is a lot which is lackluster about Fallout 4, but something that isn’t in my opinion is it’s art style and direction. The creature and robot designs are especially good
@aspenwatcher
@halomancer1
Well at the end of the movie he said “I think we already killed everyone” doesn’t get much better than that. Btw what a fuckin excellent bit, gave me goosebumps in the theater.
In all the decades of caterpillar rearing, I have never seen a case of parasitoidism as extreme as this. Anyone knows what it is? On tomato today, Gainesville, FL (host - probably once was a cabbage looper). RT if you don't but want to find out.
Too many people make giant bugs shrieking monsters, I feel like it would be more realistic and a lot more creepy if giant bugs are just completely silent
All you can hear is the subtle clicking and creaking of its exoskeleton while it quietly approaches you
We may find ourselves in exceptional circumstances simply because no other circumstances would permit our existence. There is no luck involved. When the mere act of observation is dependent on those circumstances it should be no surprise we may find ourselves in “unlikely” ones.
Cultivated meat is unlikely to be economically viable, but this kind of opposition is so blatantly repugnant that it really doesn’t matter, it’s bad on principle alone. These people do not wish to protect “consumers” or “health”, they merely wish to protect their right to-
Key Florida House and Senate committees have voted to ban cultivated meat. The ban is ostensibly about consumer protection & public health.
Here's a photo of the diverse array of consumer & health advocates lobbying for the bill. (H/t
@DrFarazHarsini
)
Lotta really terrible qrts on this so here’s my two cents. Space colonization and resource utilization shouldn’t be fundamentally distinct from the things life already does, which is turn nonliving matter into more living matter.
The mining industry is responsible for harming biodiversity, workers and locals. What if we could replace it with a clean process that can’t harm anyone? Well, we can.
Watch "Unlimited Resources From Space – Asteroid Mining" now in Spanish: