FTL travel through standard space is unrealistic. FTL travel through the warping of spacetime is not. (at least, not if fusion power or some other form of ridiculously power-dense source is invented)

It’s internally inconsistent because they have this giant fleet for exploration, without the potential for benefit to those who constructed the fleet. They mine nothing, gather nothing, and when they encounter an alien planet with no transwarp capability, they are forbidden from interacting with them. This means that…

That certainly explains the proliferation of photon torpedos and phasers.

It works just fine for Starfleet officers and crew, but how does one reward an industrious employee without currency and in an environment where they can have everything they want without showing up to work on time?
If I have someone I truly rely upon and trust, and I want to show him how his contributions have been…

These NPC sidequests are grindy and the loot is all low level- and in order to even get the shitty loot, you generally have to shell out some gold, not even knowing whether you get a goat or a toaster.

What if EVERYONE is simultaneously a shopkeep or a rocket scientist or a medical billing accountant AND a philosopher, all at once, all of the time, regardless of whether we wish to be one?

Though I am only a layperson, everything I have seen regarding the disunity between quantum physics and relativistic physics appear very similar to the compromises one would make at small scales in a simulation.

You know what’s stupid? Not just ordinary impracticality, but genuine stupidity?

What Greta doesn’t realize is that the data from New Horizons comes back to us at a ridiculously low bitrate. It’s literally STILL sending us data from that flyby. NASA didn’t sit on the picture, it comes in as a 2kbit stream intermingled with other data, and by the way, it comes as raw sensor data, not a JPEG.

The reason ASI is a potential death of humanity is that an ASI given a goal will seek optimal output of that goal. If you ask an ASI to optimize the production of a product, you cannot be certain that it won’t endeavor to convert the entire mass of the Earth to that product, or figure out how to convert biomass into…

The technological hurdles for Artificial General Intelligence are basically identical to the hurdles for Artificial Superintelligence. I think it’s merely a matter of scale. Now that an AGI has conquered the game Go, I think we’re less than 20 years off from AGI and therefore ASI.

Have they tried turning it off and then back on again?

Choking is how you eat ‘em.

I live in Albuquerque, where numerous shootings of unarmed people happened for 30 years, without a SINGLE case of a cop being prosecuted or terminated for any of them went on until the DOJ finally got involved.

If there isn’t an epidemic of police misconduct, how come on average there is one obvious incident recorded on video per week, and how come in most of those cases the police agency responsible closes rank and fails to prosecute, testify, or release evidence about the incident?

In what way is “Black Lives Matter” unreasonable?

It doesn’t have to be that. It could be that cops wearing cameras are more polite and “by the book” and that this behavior is seen as passivity or weakness by those whose primary play in life is the use of physical force.

John McAfee is an unskilled fraud of a man, who appears to be either on drugs, or struggling with some kind of serious emotional or psychological breakdown. It would really be better if everyone in the press were to simply ignore him so that his illness won’t be fed by a press eager for news of the strange.

Let me explain to you what you are too thick to have gotten on your own. For thousands of years, men have been attempting to reprioritize society so that male power is enshrined and female power is forbidden and never used. Female power is sexuality, attractiveness, and subtlety.

I think you’re missing the point of Boaty McBoatface. The name is not supposed to be witty. It’s not supposed to be funny on its own. It’s supposed to be an awful name for a boat.