Yes, yes YES we know, atomic fission doesn’t work that way. This isn’t reddit, people in Lemmy can like, read and stuff. Everyone put the charts away unless someone raises their hand.

Like furries but they got a thing for reptiles instead of mammals. Includes dragons and dinosaurs and such.

Pictures of furry boobs of course.

As with many things, you can love the content they produce while hating the fandom and all the people in it.

Well then you just trade furries for scalies and bronies.

I’m pretty sure everyone clapped.

From experience: all stages of a coconut are distinct, edible and used for different dishes, treats, condiments and ingredients. It’s truly a wonderous plant and sad that most Americans are only familiar with the overripe, hard kind with hard flesh.

I got to travel Southeast Asia for a time, it’s atrocious how much we’re missing out on in the USA.

Even the really fresh coconuts here just don’t compare to the ones you get fresh off a tree. It’s unreal. Don’t get me started on my Mango Rant.

Conservatives hate this one trick!

(The trick: literally everything in all aspects of reality, from the larges to smallest scales to every branch of life and consciousness is a motherfucking SPECTRUM. No hard lines. Nothing is solid. Not even the matter you’re standing or sitting on.)

Go get those weird looking white ones from an Asian grocery store, they look like styrofoam cylinders with carved pointed tops. Use a butcher’s knife to chop the point off. (carefully, they are full of juice, you might be able to cut it just right so it leaves just enough meat over the water cavity.) Insert straw and long spoon to carve the natural jell-o out with. Thank me later.

Edit: this is also a great date-night activity.

You should look up Penrose’s work in conformal cyclic cosmology.

The short version is this: as the rarified universe becomes massless particles flying in all directions as space expands, it is basically the exact same conditions as the big bang. IE, when the universe fizzles out, from a different reference frame it’s still an infinite field of energy expanding out faster and faster.

Just cross out the “distance” part of interactions between particles, without humans or anything with mass really to observe or interact with anything, the relationships between photons are all that matters, and from that perspective it will be the same as the big-bang state. All that’s important to look at is the relationships between these particles, the angles between them and probability of them interacting with each other.

Fuck that, I will mess with shit.

“I want all humans to be able to change sex, race or species at will.”

“Give every human being the ability to experience what someone else has experienced by pressing a small button on the top of our heads.”

“Make volcanoes erupt food. Just endless, nutritious food for everyone.”

“Babies are hatched from eggs. I dunno man, seems like it would be silly.”

“No more mosquitoes. Replace them with tiny little airplanes that sometimes circle around you and you have to swat them down like king kong.”

Ideally our species survives and manages to send ships away from Earth well before that or you’re going to get a really warm summer eventually, followed by sitting on a charred ball of barren, airless rock for the majority of those trillion years.

If you get the chance, ask for omnipotence or to become conscious energy systems or something. You can still choose to experience being a human and having all these experiences, but you will never be stuck, you will never get bored or feel anything related to being mortal if you don’t want.

You could even choose to live a whole lifetime. Maybe billions of lifetimes, each one feeling totally and completely indistinguishable from reality, because it would be reality.

You could be experiencing that right now.

No, really, this is a fantastic question we should all ask more.

Because on the outside, in terms of space and the physical universe, it will undergo phase transitions, it will experience a long, slow cooling into rarified energy… but those terms “long” and “rarified” are just from our human reference frame. Roger Penrose’s work demonstrated how even a vast, infinite expanding space with tiny particles zooming through it, from other reference frames behaves exactly like the big bang. IE: as the universe cools and expands, it’s still infinitely dense and exploding outward from a different perspective of time and space. It’s perpetual.

That’s one thing. The other thing is this… time passing is meaningless if nobody is there to observe it. You will be dead for an infinite amount of time, you won’t notice a moment of it. But every passing moment you’re dead, the universe is rolling dice. It’s always rolling dice.

Eventually, even if it takes so incredibly long that we don’t have numbers to express it (we actually do) then something is bound to happen again. Eventually these “somethings” will be just right to create a kind of universe, complex information systems, and maybe even a consciousness that can experience it.

It sounds kind of fantastic and overly fanciful, but I am basing this on the evidence that it happened at least once before that we know of.

Seriously, even halfway through my expected lifespan and I’m already seeing a point where I’ll be ready to get off the ride. Not in terms of self-harm or depression, but just generally as the decades go on it gets less and less enjoyable in a broad sense.

Our brains absorb too much information and memories than our minds were meant to handle. Our emotions become an annoying liability. Our memories reveal themselves to be these tenuous and bizarre amalgamations of experiences and imagination and cannot be trusted, and maybe most annoying of all is seeing people making the same mistakes around you all the time, and tuning you out for being “old” more and more, determined to fall into the same holes and traps that could be easily avoided, but dragging all of society with them over and over. It takes away a lot of the magic of seeing the future.

Even all that would be something manageable, if I had a loooong life I would probably escape from everyone and just read in the woods or something. But holy shit it has to be alongside physical health because by far the worst, worst, worst thing about getting old is the aches and pains and minor irritations that turn into crippling infections, unhealed strains, and degrading senses.

I am quite positive that something happens after you’re dead for an infinity amount of time, no idea what, but it happened before so it stands to reason it may again, and even the slimmest chances become 100% assured after an infinite amount of time.

On this note, one of the best Cosmic Horror shows of all time was Chernobyl on HBO.

A story of a small town affected by forces outside anyone’s understanding. Terrible, primal, cosmic power unleashed and uncontained threatening the entire world. It kills indiscriminately in the most horrible ways, melting people alive and contaminating all it touches after escaping a high-security confinement.

A plucky team of brave souls work tirelessly to find some way to stop the monster from burrowing into the Earth and gaining even more power in a race against time.

And what’s most amazing is no part of it is exaggerated or sensationalized, it’s so accurate to reality that even the actors look like their real-life counterparts. The showrunners went on to work on The Last of Us.

I’m not so sure good policy is the way to do it… but I do know from political experience that good policy is something EVERYONE hates. Precisely because it doesn’t benefit them exclusively.

Our problem we’re butting up against is this, that as individuals we are resistant to the bitter medicine we know will help us. So we have no choice but to elect leaders we know will trick the population in some way, but we never know what’s a trick and what’s a power grab for personal gain. (Present admin excluded, they’re a painfully transparent consequence of our society abandoning community and education.)

But we had a social democracy in the US that lasted more than 200 years. That’s not a bad run, it’s proof of concept. Maybe the USA will splinter and fracture, but from that will come new ideas, new areas of democratic progress and new alliances and power groups who now know that such a thing is possible.

I don’t think we’re going to have a unified world, at least not in our lives and certainly not with our existing social systems, but war and disease and atrocities broadly are on a decline across the globe. It may spike again in places and at times, but despite that we are living in an age of unprecedented peace and prosperity, that shows that something we’re doing is working, but we have to manage and maintain it by resisting apathy and nihilism. If we stop seeing the positives and stop caring, we backslide to raiders looting our houses and raping and pillaging our communities.

look where it got us

I mean, you can easily point to the atrocities that the USA was built on and feel a deep sense of shame, and we collectively should, we should remember the horrors of the past. But having a social democracy exist and survive as long as it did was proof of concept of an experiment that was not supposed to work. It’s proof that we can do better if we unify just a little. Yes, it could have been better or lasted longer, but we don’t exactly have a lot of alternatives. We’re fucking animals. The fact that we can do any of this at all is amazing.

But we can easily play this “would we have been better off” game forever. Back until we first started killing each other for thousands of years which led to our brains developing into this absurd thing we have now. Would we have been better off if the USA was never founded? Would the Native Americans have been better off? Would the Europeans? (Read Pastwatch, good speculative ideas on all this.)

The reality is though that we’re here now and we’re better off as a society than we’ve ever been. Yes, there are bad things happening, but it’s in the decline. We just feel bad because we don’t live long enough to see that long arc of history and cannot see that tangible, powerful decline in war, disease, suffering, murder and rape and so many other every-day horrors we all had to live with for literally thousands and thousands of years. I can easily count the number of times my house has been raided, and that number is one time, and it wasn’t even an armed militia, it was just some random, confused person. That’s a MASSIVE improvement historically speaking.

What I think is fucking with a lot of our heads is that we imbibe in fictions without taking away the good lessons and grounded, material lessons. We read novels or watch Star Trek and believe that we’re entitled to the stars, that we have this glorious, unified future just around the corner, that all we have to do is make X policies and elect candidate Y and we will have world peace and food replicators.

Nah dog, we’re not going out there. We’re not going to get better than this. Maybe our non-human descendants in a very, very long time from now, but currently, creating a democracy that lasts more than 200 years might be the absolute best we can do.

Our species broadly is far more concerned with narratives and stories than reality. This is how our brains work on a very fundamental level.

People think their brains are tools for determining reason and logic, and I suppose with exercise and effort they can be, but it’s not what we’re designed for.

We have brains designed to tell stories to explain how you feel, or to feel things about stories supplied to you. That’s it. It doesn’t need to make sense or have logical consistency, the brain doesn’t give a shit about consistency or reason, it just wants to tie loose ends together to create a coherent narrative that you can use to survive.

See huge paw prints by your watering hole? Feel worried? Your brains writes the most likely story for how those prints got there and why you’re scared. In that situation the story-telling can save your life. In our modern, complex world we have the exact same brains structurally, but the clues and emotional signals are vastly more complicated and others supply us stories for why we feel those feelings, and brains soak that shit up like sponges. We take the narratives supplied to us and twist them and turn them and find ways to fit them into our own lives because this is how our minds work. The whole time thinking you’re figuring something out or doing something good for yourself or your future. Like you’re part of the story.

We have no future until we start accepting the weaknesses and flaws in our own minds and can set up policy-level safeguards against ourselves, but I don’t see that happening since the people who should be managing these safeguards are as fallible as any of us.