There might be something out there, but I don’t think it could possibly be a wild population of anthropoid apes. Not in 21st century USA; not that have never left behind a single skull, hide or specimen shot by a hunter.
It just takes one or very few to be true.
There’s a list of rules out there somewhere, I forget what they’re called, but one of them is something very like “if it exists, there’s porn of it.”
This reminds me of that. And is also something I am certain of, but cannot prove.
I refused to get Twitter when it was first released, because I believed the restrictions on text content would lead to the downfall of mankind. It would reduce us to only be receptive to 256-character text, would erode context and nuance, and dumb us all down.
Since then, Trump used it to stage an insurrection, a billionaire bought it out to further his own agenda, and it has been used to channel misinformation and outright lies to a gullible public. The governance over it has been largely removed because it’s perceived as unfair to conservatives. It’s led marketing to target the short-attention spanned, of which the audience is steadily increasing. TL;DR is not only a meme, it’s a way of life.
So I guess I actually can prove I’m right.
[Bolding mine]
Know thyself. You got that inside info.
So is falling from a plane.
The tricky bit is being functional once the journey ends.
Can a device be built that can be accelerated to a significant speed, travel for 10,000 years in interstellar space, and wake up to function properly once it gets to its destination? 10,000 years is an awfully long time for a complex machine to remain in working order.
Tons of Bigfoot porn out there, according to a quick and dirty search.
I think (but cannot prove! 
) that the big limit on how advanced technology can get is how long it takes us to learn. There may be ways to travel faster than light, or build wormholes, but the scientific understanding needed to discover those things is beyond the capacity of a biological being within its normal lifespan.
We can see the beginnings of that now, with the increase in credentials needed to get a job. Used to be a high school diploma was enough, then we started wanting bachelor’s degrees. Now, lots of jobs require at least a Master’s degree. We’re spending more and more time in school just to learn “the basics” of how to do things, because “the basics” are getting more and more complicated.
The physics work that made Albert Einstein famous, for which he received a Nobel Prize, is taught to first and second year physics students now. Those same students will have to study for close to another decade to even begin to produce new work, and by that time, a lot of them will be starting to lose their edge. Their best creative years are spent just catching up to where we are now.
And that will just continue to get worse over time. At some point, you’ll graduate school just in time to retire, and progress will grind to a halt.
There was hope that Artificial Intelligence would take over, and produce the Singularity, which would allow us to transcend this fundamental limit on biological achievement, but now even AI is starting to look like it might be beyond our grasp.
That limit is real, and we surpassed it thousands of years ago. The invention of language and the invention of writing are, by far, the biggest advances in our species’ history.
Likewise, I’m certain that Bill Clinton sexually assaulted at least some of the women who came forward with accusations, he didn’t have consentual affairs with all of them.
Speaking of Clinton, I’m still convinced (I brought this up in a thread about HRC a couple of years ago and got some pushback on it) that he and Hillary had a sit-down at some point early in their marriage in which they agreed that he was just a dog and was going to be sleeping around, but that divorce would be bad for both of them politically in the conservative south, so she agreed to look the other way/defend him for as long as they both shall live, and in return he would use all of his political skills to help her attain high office as well.
I’m convinced that a great many pro-Brexit politicians made tons of money off of shorting the Pound Sterling before the referendum. Hedge fund managers who contributed heavity to the Leave campaign and then raked in millions the next day have come to light, but I have no doubt the old boy network among the Tories and the Brexit Party made out like bandits as well.
I believe that 99% of flat earthers are just trolling. Echoing @Velocity above (I’d typed this out and then scrolled a bit more in the thread), I’m convinced that at least 85% of people who are publicly, overtly, dogmatically religious, don’t really believe in most of it, but put on the act 24/7 because they believe everyone else within their community does believe it all.
Re: the OP about porn on the early 'net…a FOAF worked for a major entertainment company in the early 90s and was very much on the forefront of internet use. Back in 1994, when most people had little more than a 14.4 connection, he said to my friend, give me any perverted weird idea, and I’ll show you it’s out there on the web. My friend said “light bulb up the ass” and five seconds later they found a site extolling the joys of rectal illumination.
Yes, there are ways we can improve on the situation, so I don’t think we’ve hit the limit yet, but even with tools like reading and writing, we’re still going to hit a new, higher, limit at some point. You can only read (and understand) so many books in a week/month/year/decade/lifetime, and if that number is less than what you need to read in order to advance science in some meaningful way, you will never advance science in a meaningful way.
Physics students today probably know more math than math majors did a hundred years ago, and certainly know more than Isaac Newton ever knew. And that math is just the basic minimum they need to understand things like Relativity and Quantum Mechanics.
There’s lots of things we could drop from the curriculum, like “the evolution of the model of the atom”, because you don’t really need that to understand the current model of the atom, but even there, those things will eventually be replaced by other things you do need to understand in order to produce new work. No one will ever expand on Quantum Mechanics if they don’t have a solid basis in really high-level math.
Yeah, I’m certain of that, too. I’m not certain it couldn’t be proved (or at least, I’m not certain he wouldn’t be found guilty if brought to trial.)
I don’t know the nature of their agreement. I have friends who are consensually polyamorous just because one wants a lot more sex than the other, so i don’t know if the agreement was that mercenary. But i also am certain they had an agreement that he could have affairs and they would stay married.
I thought it was obvious when she went on TV before his first election, when there was tons of evidence that he was sleeping around, and said that she stood behind him that:
- she knew he was sleeping around
- she supported him despite that
- she was promising the US public that she wasn’t going to make it an issue if he were elected.
Of course, when one of the parties to an affair is the President of the United States, consent can be a very tricky concept to pin down, due to the extreme power disparities involved. A man in such a position would be well advised to keep it in his pants, or at least restricted to relationships that predate his rise to power.
I dunno, I recall that several years ago, back when Google search hadn’t been enshittified yet, I searched for “Diffie-Hellman key exchange porn” (quotation marks included) and got 0 results, and I just tried it again now and got nothing as well.
So maybe that topic is one of the rare exceptions to the rule. Or maybe porn of it does exist, but is squirreled away in some obscure corner of teh dark webz and I’m just not looking hard enough.
As for the Fermi paradox, my personal belief is that technological species capable of space flight, and possibly even interstellar travel, do exist, but they are so rare that even the nearest ones are outside our sphere of causality, so we’d never be able to learn of their existence anyway.
Sidebar to say that I’m going to be adding the term “enshittified” to my vernacular post-haste. Many thanks.
Here’s another. I’m certain that Oswald acted alone. BUT…maybe because he’d had a history in intelligence while in the military, the U.S. government then tripped all over themselves bungling the story and the evidence, working overtime to sell (ironically enough) the truth, which only gave creedence to the loony conspiracies.
Also, I’m certain that there’s a flashing neon sign in the management office of this building blaring “If you don’t know the answer, just transfer them to Frank!” It’s the only explanation for half of the calls I get at my desk.
I think the term was invented/popularized by Cory Doctorow. Here’s one of his articles about the concept.
Related to that: I believe one of the reason theories about the JFK assassination are so common because a lot of people do NOT want to accept the idea that one man acting alone could bring down the US President.
Ewwww.
You shouldn’t have looked.