[–] 14 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

Nothing to point to, just me musing over something after digging up figures on masses involved in spaceflight and comparing them to the rest of human industry.

The total mass EVER launched into orbit from the 1950s to now would fit on about five big freight trains, or four minutes of current global container shipping, or half of a Panamax ship payload.

The total mass launched onto escape velocity is a third of a freight train and an actual majority of that is Apollo.

So little mass, commanding so much outsized attention and myth-making, and that people pin such hopes and eschatological significance onto...

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  • [–] 4 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

    It's actually about perpendicular to him. Only similarity is that it posits that AI systems are dangerous. Take all the New World Order conspiracy theories and infowars the elite wants to kill you off and take your stuff and become transhuman, with sooper seekrit nefarious depopulation plans and you will eat the bugs and stay in your minute city pod, and replace the ruling elites with AIs.

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  • [–] 4 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

    I have been forced to on multiple occasions explain to people that there is a difference between thinking that there's anything at all intrinsically good about the fact that things like us that have come about the way we did come with expiration dates, and dealing with it.

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  • [–] 4 points 2 days ago

    Heh. Read the actual full paper.

    Kardashev didn't even think that colonizing whole galaxies was the likely end state! He thought that instead everything from billions of light years around would pile into individual huge artificial monolithic structures for efficiency!

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  • [–] 4 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (2 children)

    It gets worse

    Edit basically if you took 90s black helicopter conspiracists, and early 2000s infowars, plopped them down in the current day with Google and a Claude subscription

    Edit 2 Its like a year old, and when the PDF first started floating around the internet it was being sold on sketchy websites for $30 and was the subject of one of those youtube-comment-botting rings that will have lots of chains of comments hyping how a book is relevant to a topic and is the best thing ever.

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