COVID-19: Chapter 4 - OPEN FOR BUSINESS

Wow my most liked post turned out to be a lie. Apparently ICU beds aren’t completely filled, they are just out of ECMO machines and having staffing issues. Still bad but not quite as bad as it looked.

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For any alien race to hear our TV signals they’d have to have huge antennas very close, like not more then tens of light years. And for it to be that far and still detect our broadcasts it would have to be like a megastructure like the massive antenna array at Vega in Contact. And of course the antenna would have to be pointed right at us to detect it – the downside of a high gain antenna. Very sensitive but highly directional. So this alien race would have to take the effort to seed a ton of antennas all around the galaxy.

And then the opposite is true to. If the aliens were broadcasting powerful signals saying what’s up dog, then they’d have to be like sending massively powerful transmissions from a high gain antenna at every star in the sky. Which, maybe the galaxy is just a nice friendly place but maybe it’s full of xenophobic alien races that would be all fuck it lets exterminate these guys, it’s the only way to be sure. Screaming HEY GUYS WHATS POPPIN to the entire galaxy seems like maybe not such a hot idea.

It would be way simpler to just send a bunch of von neumann probes to every star in the galaxy and, you know, have them report back their findings.

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Move. Seriously.

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I was just thinking, the first state that has to set up a field hospital with a bunch of GM’s shiny new ventilators should have windows along one wall. Then you take all these Karens and force them to look at it - like the Americans did forcing local Germans to see the horrors concentration camps and medical experiments.

Maybe once they see 100s of people slowly dying and the ones who live will be messed up possibly for life - they’ll realize it’s not a damn hoax.

I’m really sick of just laughing it off, or scratching our heads in wonder at how people can be so stupid. This shit is dangerous. I’m ready for start forcing or strongly coercing people to face reality - for the safety of the rest of us. Maybe make a mask law. If you violate it you get your choice of a huge fine or a tour of the field hospital.

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Human beings have always been terrible. Absolutely always. Every single period of human history is full of war, misery, suffering, racism, genocide and exploitation. I’ve completely given up on any objectively good outcomes or future progress, and I have absolutely zero expectation anything will get better before I die. Or really ever.

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:popcorn:

So you’re saying we’ve hit peak humanity? Because as shitty as now may be, I think we are better than we were at any prior point in history.

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I know this is off topic, but it would take an unimaginable amount of energy to send out detectable signals out in every direction. And why would you do this if you don’t know who’s listening in on the other end? Certainly, we aren’t doing anything like this. Us humans are actually moving away from blasting radio signals in all directions and moving towards fiber-optic cables and satellites that beam signals down to Earth. Probably advanced civilizations aren’t wasting energy shooting signals out into the void of space.

Basically if there were human-like civilizations around every star near us we would probably not be able to detect them at all, even with SETI.

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The only thing that would happen is Karen would bitch on Facebook about how horribly she was treated by being forced to visit a hospital ward.

It’s been proven over and over again. These people do not care until something DIRECTLY impacts them.

In order for Karen to change, Karen needs to see her mother/father/kid on a ventilator. Nothing else will make her sacrifice something so difficult like wearing a mask to Walmart.

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Dad got out, he made it to a seven year olds birthday party, what can I say he’s exercising :thinking: testing his eye sight :grimacing: hopefully the crew were isolating beforehand as promised, small crowd though.

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Take it up with Fermi. Whether they are sending signals (only came up because I think Stimabuser mentioned it) or travelling or sending probes, the point was that Fermi somehow guess/calculated that given the billions of years and billions of planets some indication would likely be evident.

But probably not if most civilizations offed themselves within the first couple hundred years they were capable of it.

I’d say true, but this can be grossly exaggerated if you forget that peace doesn’t get nearly as much press as war.

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Please let this be true.

https://twitter.com/LasVegasLocally/status/1272386663579181056

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I’d posit we were better off as a species in the early 2000s at the latest, before the housing crash, ubiquitous cell phones & social media, and of course, the current shitshow.

My casino in Indiana opens tomorrow. Poker, valet, buffet and a few other thinks stay closed. Masks and temp checks mandatory for guests.

Peak humanity was like '68-'72. Moon shot, Hendrix, Zeppelin, Kubrick.

I hate this bullshit notion that manned spacetravel is the only space exploration that matters. The last few years have been incredible in terms of space exploration and no one cares. We are discovering exoplanets and studying their atmospheres for signs of life. We are seeing gravitational waves --actual goddamn ripples in spacetime from two black holes colliding into one another. Voyager 1 became the first true interstellar object in 2012. We are dumb fucking human monkeys banging hammers on shit and we have made a tool that has left the fucking solar system. It’s a backwards retrograde idea that space exploration has to involve shipping primates to the moon and shit. Who the fuck actually wants to go to the moon. They don’t have coffee or fast food there, what is even the point.

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https://twitter.com/CT_Bergstrom/status/1272310662773915648?s=19

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This can’t possibly be true.

Where I live (Trondelag, Norway), there have been zero new cases in the last 14 days. In the last month, roughly 10.

We started opening up end of April, a lot more mid-May. Masks have never been in use here. Social distancing (meaning 1 m apart, max 20 at private gatherings, 50 at public (soon to be 200)) in place, but violations definitely happen (though not a lot).

We really crushed the curve and got R down to an estimated 0.4 way back when, but even now (well, a week ago) it’s estimated at ~0.45 for the entire country - though with a very big confidence interval (0.05 - 0.95…). So even though infection rates are very, very low, shouldn’t R be higher per your theory?

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