Stanislaw Lem sometimes put ideas relating to the possibility that our universe was "designed" in his fiction—have you read "His Master's Voice", or the Lectures of Golem XIV in "Imaginary Magnitude"?

"And in Olaf Stapledon's First and Last Men, this sort of cosmic vision eventually leads to humanity awakening into a kind of "cosmic spirit" which encompasses all living things."

I was using "take advantage" in the sense of "take advantage of our great Black Friday deals", not in the sense of "take advantage of this poor schmuck and fleece him for all he's worth". The people buying stuff for porn stars are probably middle class types who can afford the kind of small purchases people make on…

I don't get it either, how does taking advantage of an opportunity to get free stuff make a person "damaged"?

Not true, the Casimir effect is thought to qualify as an example of a region of space with negative energy density (for example, see p. 4 of this article where they mention "the energy is binding energy corresponding to a mean energy density slightly smaller inside the cavity than in the outside vacuum"), and Harold…

Entanglement doesn't mean each member of a pair mimics whatever happens to the other member after they have been separated. It's only about correlations in properties that wouldn't have been affected by anything that happened to them since they last interacted at a common location. It might seem that there is nothing…

Check out my reply to BathAssaultz where I gave a short attempt to explain the basic idea—the key is to understand a concept called the "relativity of simultaneity", which says that different "inertial reference frames" can disagree about whether two events were simultaneous (and disagree about the order of two events…

This story isn't complete without a link to the full set of cards (including the explanatory text on the back of each one), which that "So Bad So Good" link is lacking. You can see that there is sort of a story and the appearance of dinosaurs isn't totally "inexplicable", something about experiments with a "time…

According to physicists it is like that, I gave a link to a paper saying so (published in Physical Review, one of the most respected physics journals). Relativity is counterintuitive, you can't put too much faith in simple analogies like imagining space as "water". One of the trickiest parts intuitively is the relativi…

A wormhole does create the same problems, see the "using wormholes" section of wikipedia's "time travel" article for a quick summary. If you (or anyone else reading along) are interested in more details, the books Black Holes and Time Warps and Time Travel and Warp Drives (both written by physicists) are good…

Incidentally, one implication of this might be that while an FTL warp bubble would get destroyed by quantum effects, a slower-than-light warp bubble might still be possible—I wonder if a slower-than-light warp bubble could have any advantages over other proposed propulsion systems for interstellar travel?

Like I said, it's based on calculations using semiclassical gravity—one big result to support it is that if you have a wormhole and you try to take one mouth on a trip at relativistic speeds to introduce a time difference between the two that allow you to create closed timelike curves (time travel), at the moment the…

But those are all pretty consistent with the budget explanation for the differences between American and European films, since those movies were all quite cheap by Hollywood standards. If European filmmakers were working with budgets like those in Hollywood, they might well produce more spectacle-based sci-fi and…

A strong reason to be skeptical of this is that any FTL warp drive could, unless relativity is wrong (and relativity is the only basis for thinking it would work in the first place), double as a time machine that would allow at least sending messages into the past, if not actually traveling there in person. The…

That's not what he said, like, at all—he was embarrassed that Europeans would think of America in terms of the sillier, more immature genre movies (the kind where people "dressed in exosuits and wrestled crab-jawed aliens"), but he also said about the discussion of The Walking Dead that "This is the world I want to…

I wonder if this was actually scripted or more improvised...it almost sounded like the person playing the actress might not have been told the character was supposed to be a robot...

Sure, I figured it was implicit in "an adaptation of Journey to the West" that the basic story (including the nature of the "pillars") was the same as the cartoon, I was just pointing out a funny detail that the cartoon left out.

And you are missing my point, which is solely about how these stories are viewed in an ethical sense, not whether we believe the religious ideas they portray are literally true. A story about a higher being who wants to help everyone see that they should avoid selfish actions that cause suffering to others, and may…

I suppose an important difference is not that the traditional Christian God is a "stereotypical old white guy with a white beard", but that this version of God is associated with a black-and-white morality that involves damning wrongdoers eternally (and this kind of black-and-white, Manichaean view of life is…

As Robbot said, this is an adaptation of "Journey to the West"—if you haven't heard of it, it's a classical epic of Chinese literature. In the original story, when the Monkey King came to the five pillars at the end of the universe, in addition to signing one he also took a leak on another...