Why this being implicitly compared to land area? Of course Canada and Russia will look horrible relative to their physical size, and Japan and Western Europe will always look way bigger. And until China and India are taking up at least a quarter of the maps, they aren't actually that impressive.

We Canadians will always look bad when our stats are compared to land area.

According to this posts' chart anyway, Earendil's parents had no divine ancestry. The immortal vs. "Gift" destiny required that any cross-breeds had to choose which one they and their descendants would follow.

There were a few trees in the books, but I remember them being focused on the direct lines of a few major characters and families. I think this guy's chart tries to pull in all of the "A son of B, son of C, etc." that only exist in the narrative (and maybe essays and such; I don't recognize everything).

Yeah, Dwarves seem unique on that front. And there certainly are no half-dwarves I'm aware of.

My understanding is that they're some kind of human subtype. They're have similar longevity, and are about as close to any human nation culture-wise as the humans are to each other. Something about "amition" is almost always mentioned when describing humans, though, and hobbits don't have much of that (except the…

Even when I've found a decent mobo in a premade, it often turned out to be a slight variation on a more standard board. A few times this has meant it was hard to figure out exactly which variation I had, something usually necessary for BIOS updates and whatnot. I've also come across RAM that was (for whatever reason)…

It depends on why the splash exists.

Where life can move to and then thrive and where it can start from scratch are probably totally different things, though. Ocean vents and alkali lakes are good examples of the former, but probably not of the latter. In a few centuries, some kind of life will probably thrive on our moon, but it sure as hell won't have…

Seconded.

It remains to be shown that gods were consciously or intentionally invented.

I so wish it wasn't futile to hope that some beautiful part of the human-accessible universe would be set aside as a "no humans ever" zone.

This seems to me much more like optimism in the "we don't end up destroying ourselves after all" sense than optimism in the "best possible outcome" sense.

The thing about statements like ACC's is that once they're made they change the way we talk about things. And since it's a statement about how we talk about things, it shortly makes itself obsolete.

Actually, they had plenty of gods, and were apparently doing pretty well.

So, um... don't be?

But we'd still advance. One of the secondary points of the article are the innovative agricultural and engineering techniques evident in the ruins. That we might get computers in the 3100s instead of 1900s is ultimately inconsequential if in the meantime people have enough food and the opportunity to improve…

Yeah, I did a double-take on this stuff, too. Best I can figure (without further reading) is that the solution is in here: "Each citizen of the empire was issued the necessities of life out of the state storehouses, including food, tools, raw materials, and clothing, and needed to purchase nothing."

Yes, yes... very clever :)

I'm thinking more of an actual space-race scenario. You're absolutely right about their current approach. Once there *is* a rush, I'd expect things to change.