What part of that phrase was confusing?

I mean, feel free to look up each word if you have to, there are only three of them…

Before it was cool!

Did anyone else see the humor in the way the question was asked?

“What would it mean”

Because you know, “meaning” is a concept that exists only within the context of awareness.

So if awareness were to disappear for whatever reason, there would suddenly be absolutely no meaning to anything, definitively.

Also, a side note, one could argue that evolution is entirely mistakes. Mutation and speciation, are a direct result of errors in DNA replication. Evolution can only happen as a result of mistakes.

That’s nature for you, always adapting.

That makes perfect sense, one has to have at least heard of something to know what it’s about.

This is a wild take.

Space mirrors are not a new idea, they’re a very old one, a staple of sci-fi only now being tested in reality.

They stated that this is a small scale demonstrator, just to test the technology. The goal would be to get some real world measurements and decide on whether it could be economical and realistic going forward.

What part of that is a scam? I would say it’s perhaps overly optimistic, but it’s a perfectly honest exploration of engineering.

Oh yeah, 100% those are straight up dangerous situations.

You’re just not allowed to freak out during those dangerous situations. It’s like how “there’s no crying in baseball”, well “there’s no freaking out in aviation”.

Were they flying escort for some B-17s?

To be fair, a lot of pilots didn’t make it home in that role.

I bet there’s better missile countermeasures in the “old” jet.

It’s probably a concern being so close to various conflict hotspots.

Then it should be to hard for me to pay them.

Shit man…

Sure, but she’s a trained pilot. You’re literally drilled on a large number of emergency situations and procedures, with step by step checklists. The lead pilot dying isn’t even the scary kind of emergency, in that situation the plane is still working fine. A sudden loss of airspeed, engine out, or a control surface unresponsive, those are all much scarier, and the pilot is expected to stay calm in all of those situations.

What? He’d never died during a previous lesson?

You gotta love a good crowd-sourcing campaign.

Honestly I think Bethesda has always had the same problem. They have an unhealthy relationship with feature creep.

Sometimes if you love an idea, you have to let it go…

Most of the advantages don’t come from being over 40, but rather, from the experience of having lived over 40 years. What you have is knowledge and perspective. You can make better choices, fall into fewer traps. It’s that “wisdom” thing you may have heard of.

Also, as most people over 40 have been working for some time now, many of us (though definitely not all) have reached a different phase of their life financially. In my 20s, when things went wrong it was generally like “well, this is my life now”, but in my 40s when something goes wrong it’s more often like “ok, how much will it cost for this problem to go away?”. And don’t forget, with all of that wisdom we have, sometimes we can just solve the problem, but when that won’t work, throwing money at problems is generally effective.

Finally, I think someone already said it, but it’s worth repeating. You stop giving a shit about a lot of things, and it’s liberating. It feels like honesty and confidence and contentment.

New laws in California and New York might stop people from 3D printing guns

It absolutely, positively, will not do that. If someone wants to print a gun, no legislation is going to stop them. It could at best, slow them down by maybe an hour, as they find, download and install different firmware for their printer.

If you want to prevent people from printing guns, you’ll need a different tactic, because that won’t do it.

I gotta say, north from San Francisco is pretty amazing. I did a road trip years ago, we were in a hurry for this section, so took the I-5 rather than the coast road. That was a shame for the LA to SF section of the trip, but my god when we got north of SF… Driving through Shasta National Park was perhaps the most beautiful scenery I’ve ever witnessed.

At some point we passed a lake beach that was truly unreal, the vibrant greens of the pines, the red clay of the shore, and rich blue of the water, the color was so intense, so saturated, it was like an alien world in the best possible way.

When you look to the east, you can see Mount Shasta. Now, being from New England, up in the Appalachians, I thought I knew what a mountain was, I was wrong. Shasta loomed over the terrain, a solitary giant, with a perfect cone shaped lenticular cloud overhead. The scale was truly awe inspiring.

Note: I didn’t have to search for “lenticular cloud” to find that image, I just searched for “Mount Shasta”.

Should you make this drive, up toward Portland, don’t forget to stop in weed CA. It’s an old logging town, probably not a lot to see, but there’s a lovely, kitschy little diner, a great place to stop for lunch. The food was good, and you get the opportunity to pick up some merch like a shirt that says “I got high in weed CA”.

You need that leg enhancement.

It’s the only way to play the game. If you played all the way through without trying this, all I can say is you missed out.

With the jump and the air dash you will be an unstoppable melee demon. And it will be fun.

I don’t think that’s accurate to say at all. If anything, our current climate crisis points out that there are potentially multiple ways that we are nearing population limits. Sure, we could move to cleaner energy and prevent population growth from impacting the planet, but we aren’t doing that, not fast enough.

We keep using more and more land for farming, and that often means destroying existing habitats, which has a real ecological cost. We could prevent the destruction of more habitats with advances in vertical farming, but generally speaking, those methods require more energy and have larger carbon footprints.

And ultimately, even if agricultural techniques keep up, there are simply other limits. For instance, you can’t just generate more energy forever. Even with a mastery of fusion power, making free energy out of water, at some point the generation and use of energy heats the planet too much directly. You don’t reach that point until your generating energy for trillions of people, but that’s a hard limit, boiling the planet is not an option.

Unlikely.

We are eventually going to hit a real limit on the number of humans this planet can support. Whether or not we’ll get there, that’s not really in question. When we’ll reach that point, that’s harder to say, could be 5000 years, but I’d bet it’s closer to 500. At some point, relatively soon, we are going to need to start expanding into near space, the moon, earth orbit.

It would be the same for any intelligent species. They start their existence in relative equilibrium, until they start outperforming other species, they shape the world to fit their needs, they invent machines, medicine, and then they are no longer in equilibrium, their numbers are steadily increasing. Any intelligent species will eventually be more successful than their planet can support.

But if a star system were surrounded by a Dyson Swarm, millions or even billions of free floating habitats and space stations orbiting the star, that’s actually something we could detect. We know that isn’t happening all over the galaxy, because we actually probably wouldn’t miss that.