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this post was submitted on 14 Aug 2023
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Showerthoughts
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A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. The best ones are thoughts that many people can relate to and they find something funny or interesting in regular stuff.
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Rewatching Stargate and international cooperation feels so strange and bereft somehow. A kinder path.
I often times wonder if an extraterrestrial threat would be a unifying factor or if people would still be selfish unless it affected them. The pandemic was the closest we've seen to a world level threat recently and it just increased selfishness IMO (at least in the US)
I thought Marvel's Secret Invasion had an interesting quote on this that I'll paraphrase: nothing makes humans stronger than uniting against a common enemy, but as soon as that enemy is gone, they always devolve into tribal bickering again. It'll be a miracle if we ever reach Star Trek levels of global unification and peace.
Don't forget that Star Trek universe went through an apocalyptic phase before reaching their post scarcity society. I'm quite optimistic that we'll reach Star Trek levels of peace, but reaching that state without having 90% of the population annihilated in some kind of a World War or some other catastrophe? That's what I'm kinda pessimistic about.
Never mind Star Trek, at the rate we're going we'll be lucky to get The Expanse.
I mean, we've already surpassed The Expanse in some ways (at least the first couple books).
Something that struck me was in Caliban's War they were relying heavily on mirrors to focus sunlight for growing crops out at Jupiter. I guess the authors just didn't foresee LED technology advancing as rapidly as it did.
Leviathan Wakes was published in June 2011. Caliban's War was published in June 2012.
The L-prize "60W" category winner was announced in August 2011 (it was Philips). It didn't become commercially-available until April 2012, but even then, it was like $50 -- far from affordable for most people. Now you can get equivalent or better bulbs for less than 1/10th of that.
The EU.