You could ask why God created sentient beings with violent habits, desires and capabilities in the first place. Most violence in the world is performed by normal people, not sadists or psychopaths. It’s just the problem of evil boiled down.
If flying cars were mass produced how could they be policed/controlled?
A flying car could theoretically take off and fly in any direction, which could present hazards like mid air collisions. Streets have stop lights and stop signs that control traffic and police can monitor these intersections, but if everyone is in flying cars is it just mass chaos? A free for all? Anyone can do anything? It seemed a bit more organized on The Jetsons..
Other than “here,” what other possible mechanism could there be?
I wonder what it’s like to enter into an arranged marriage. What it’s like to fall in love with someone you just met. To have sex with someone you don’t even know* (I assume consummation isn’t expected right away in these situations?) How you navigate things if you find out that you hate each other.
All I’m saying is that it’s not necessarily just a simple question of willpower.
Look at it this way. Few people still consider alcoholism, tobacco addiction, or really any other drug addictions as matters of willpower anymore.
How successful do we think recovering alcoholics or smokers would be if they were expected to drink at least 2 drinks a day, but no more than 5? Or smokers were expected to smoke at least 3 cigarettes daily, but no more than 5?
Not well, I suspect. But that’s exactly what we’re expecting overweight/obese people to do - it’s not only willpower, but the willpower to regulate, instead of merely quitting altogether. You have to eat, but you can’t eat too much.
And I’m sure not coincidentally, glp-1 inhibitors are show remarkable results in lessening other kinds of addictions.
I wonder how it is the very first person, to whom a data centre, as currently designed, was pitched to, did NOT after a few moments perusal, promptly hand it back and say, ‘No! Try again.’
I mean, it seems ridiculous. In dimension, in resource demand, in negative impact on communities and environment, etc, etc.
Sounds like something a nefarious underworld overlord from the comics would propose.
Maybe it’s just me.
You mistakenly think any of those externalities matter to the builders and operators. They don’t.
Corporations are solely about making money, not being nice neighbors. If they had to pay for the water infrastructure, or were required to have negligible net water use, they’d design differently. If they had to build and fuel the power plant to run the thing, they’d design differently. If it was required to have no more than a 40dB sound power level at the exterior surface of the building, they’d design differently.
Since zero of those socially beneficial things are required by laws they can’t get around, zero of them are done.
It is no more complex than that.
your priorities are sound and inarguable. But have you ever considered the possibility that, if instead of considering fitness as something else to be focused on, something that can only displace your other priorities in a zero-sum game, it could be something that could help you better manage your other priorities, helping to give you more energy, alertness, and vitality?
I wonder why, if there is a just god, children get cancer.
I wonder why so many people believe there is a just god.
On long drives I wonder how my life would have been different if I’d made one different choice.
and often i wonder if people think they think they are being helpful, or smug and superior, or just ignorant, when they say things like “you can achieve anything if you want it enough.” Listen, people, I can wanna be a fighter pilot or astronaut with the mental might more than any human in history, I can get a phd in physics, and I’m not going to get good enough vision and shrink three inches to qualify.
The processes that created life might have occurred somewhere else, and the living organisms were transferred to our planet somehow.
One that I often wonder about, especially when I am stuck in traffic, is what would happen if everyone just moved away from an area, leaving all the buildings and cars and billboards behind. How long would take before nature would take over and you could never tell that there had been people here?
I wonder about all of the secret lab stuff through history that was too horrible or dangerous to reveal…“things man was not meant to know”…Like what if AI-implant enhanced Dolly the Sheep and her Ebola-venom-variant Giant Hornet cellmates escape from the lab…
With AI there is something called emergent properties. Which means as the AI training involves better hardware, better algorithms and more data, that the AI just spontaneously develops new talents.
As AI gets better, new and unexpected abilities will start to emerge. Some of these abilities could grow global GDP by several trillion dollars a year by increasing productivity.
The rate of economic growth could accelerate quite a bit if AI actually pans out, and there are endless trillions of dollars to be made, as well as solutions to age old problems humanity struggles with. So there’s your answer. I feel like you’re looking at modern chatbots as the end goal of AI, that is just another stepping stone. The same way that the world’s best AI 10 years ago was only playing atari games. That wasn’t the end goal either.
Right, that’s why I excluded the “here.”
Thats what happened in a lot of the Americas. When the first europeans visited them they brought a ton of diseases the natives had no defenses against, and 90%+ of natives died from multiple plagues at the same time. Entire cities were abandoned.
My understanding is what really happened was 100-200 years later when new waves of europeans came over they found all these pre-build cities and roadways with no people, and thought that god built them to welcome the europeans.
Its possible, but the universe is about 14 billion years old, and life has existed on earth for 4 billion years.
In order for life to exist, there needs to be heavy elements. It took something like 1 billion years for enough stars to perform enough fusion for rocky planets capable of supporting life to exist.
So who knows if life arrived elsewhere between years 1-10 billion in this universe. Life didn’t evolve on earth until the universe was about 10 billion years old.
FWIW, life will continue to evolve for another 100 trillion years or so before the stars burn out. Supposedly the world will be most hospitable to life around 1-10 trillion years from now. By then, stars will be much more stable which will allow life more time to evolve.
If you compress the entire 100 trillion year stellar age of the universe into a 365 day calendar year, it is currently 1:12AM on January 1st and intelligent life has already evolved in at least one location. By 1:12AM + an additional 0.01 seconds, human descendants will be so advanced they will make Sci-Fi technology seem obsolete.
I walk mornings. I have to cross the old old field to get to the trail we walk.
I always (or often) think about how many dead bodies are under that field.
From ancient peoples, dino bones, native Americans. The Trail of tears and CW battlefield are close. Settlers very likely passed thru here.
The place was in the same family for at least 150 years before we bought it. So there’s a family burial plot on the far side of field. Of course the markers are long gone. The big oak still stands.
Yeah, gotta be bones under there.
(I won’t retell the story of the skull we found in the old outhouse, yep, that was fun, not!)
I think you misunderstood my point, but my comment may not have been clear. If life exists, then abiogenesis must have occurred (somewhere) at some time in the distant past. That isn’t the question. The interesting question, particularly as applied to likelihood of intelligent alien life, is whether abiogenesis is so fantastically improbable that its occurrence here was a very rare fluke, or alternatively, that there may have have been some step in the evolutionary process that was extremely improbable. For example, the evolution of mitochondria which are essential to biological cells.
The hypothesis is that there is some “Great Filter” that tends to prevent the formation of life even when conditions are favourable, or prevents its evolution beyond a very primitive phase.
The “Great Filter” hypothesis also posits that it may be in our future, not our past, and that all civilizations have finite lifetimes and face inevitable extinction, given sufficient time, through extinction events like nuclear annihilation.
If any of those are true (I don’t think they are) then it would explain why no sign of intelligent alien life has been detected.
I wonder if dogs remember their dreams. And what their dreams are like.
My one dog dreams a lot. He even barks (softly) in his sleep.
Most of it is chasing rabbits I’m sure, but… why bark? He does chase rabbits while awake, but he does not bark at them.
It’s the difference between something being simple and something being easy. The solution to losing weight is very simple. As you say, it’s a matter of not eating junk (adding a bunch of healthy stuff / superfoods doesn’t help if one doesn’t eliminate the junk). But actually doing so isn’t easy.
Which is something that I wonder about. That is why is it that so many people seem to think that if something is difficult that it must also be complicated. There’s a lot of things in this world that are simple, but extremely difficult, to accomplish.
Because life spent the last 4 billion years evolving not to starve to death, and life forms that engaged in calorie restriction and unnecessary activity all died of starvation and didn’t pass on their genes. Sexual reproduction didn’t evolve until 1.5 billion years ago, and asking people to consciously restrict their sex lives doesn’t work. Our urge to not starve to death is over twice as old.
Also despite the fact that we all collectively pretend we care about obesity because of the health risks, we really care because within our social hierarchy, fat people are considered romantically, morally and socially defective. As social animals, we crave status and access to romantic partners. As people get older and develop a stronger sense of self, changing their appearance to gain social status loses its priority in life. Especially as other priorities show up like child care, caring for aging parents, finances, relationships, health problems, etc come up.