ZOMBIE FORUMS

It's a stinking, shambling corpse grotesquely parodying life.
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PostPosted: Sat Oct 02, 2004 1:29 pm 
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I thought it was "Infinite rednecks firing infinite shotguns at infinite stop signs will eventually recreate the complete works of Shakespear in braile." :P

edit: typos

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Last edited by Emy on Sun Oct 03, 2004 4:55 am, edited 1 time in total.

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PostPosted: Sat Oct 02, 2004 4:34 pm 
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Emy wrote:
In an infinite universe, anything merely improbable is certain to occur.


That is true. Unfortunately, our universe is finite (though expanding). It has been about twenty thousand million years since the Big Bang; thus, the universe is a sphere forty thousand million light-years in diameter.

(I avoid the word "billion" in context so as not to sound like Carl Sagan. ;-) )

Gazing Rabbit wrote:
I'll give but one argument: the strong survive. And aggresivnese = streangh.


The major premise is acceptable; the second is not, as it presumes the conclusion. Aggressiveness is the active application of strength; but, unlike political power, strength exists whether or not it is used.

Besides, one can be aggressive without being strong. Not long after the 1988 Summer Olympics, some idiots in a bar provoked the silver medallist in heavy-weight boxing (maybe super-heavy? can't recall for sure) into sending them to the hospital with one punch each. The boxer was culpable in the fight, as his fists are legally deadly weapons, but irrespective of that, the drunks who provoked him got ... um ... smashed.


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PostPosted: Sat Oct 02, 2004 5:01 pm 
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Tamayo wrote:
Gazing Rabbit wrote:
I'll give but one argument: the strong survive. And aggresivnese = streangh.


The major premise is acceptable; the second is not, as it presumes the conclusion. Aggressiveness is the active application of strength; but, unlike political power, strength exists whether or not it is used.


Agressiveness also provides a role in the acquisition of strength. It helps one small power take over other nearby small powers and forge an empire. Once there is no unoccupied land left on the planet the only way to gain control of it, and the resources in it, is to take it from somebody else. While many agressive powers will fight a losing battle, chances are that whoever is left in the end will have been one of the agressive ones.

'Agressive' dosn't necessarily mean 'conquistador' though. There are other ways of gaining power. Look at how Western companies make third world countries their bitches. Look how OPEC has made the West their bitches.

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PostPosted: Sat Oct 02, 2004 6:04 pm 
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Labrat wrote:

'Agressive' dosn't necessarily mean 'conquistador' though. There are other ways of gaining power. Look at how Western companies make third world countries their bitches. Look how OPEC has made the West their bitches.


Bingo.

Economic power is undoubtably one of the ways in which power will have to be divided in an inter-planetary sense.

Assuming that they don't want to come and blow the fuck out of us, that is.

It's all about, as one bad sci-fi put it, leverage. Essentially, everything can be commoditised, wether it be material resources, labour, or leibensraum, all contact will be about transactions. (If they're nice little carbon based lifeforms that we have no real trouble understanding, at least).

Hell, if humanity ever starts expanding space-ward, we'll do it because we need living space and resources. And how long before somebody claims all the land on mars, and starts renting it for obscene prices? Remember, if there's enough demand, you can charge whatever the hell you like.

Hopefully, the aliens need something we need to get rid off. But that's highly unlikely.


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PostPosted: Sat Oct 02, 2004 6:48 pm 
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themadthinker wrote:
Hopefully, the aliens need something we need to get rid off. But that's highly unlikely.


Well, aliens that actually exist could be structured and based society and social demands in a way we can't possibly comprehend. So maybe they'll need something we never even conisdered could be useful to anyone.

I just wonder how many ways could micro-organisms evolve when they become more complex. How many legs? What kind of balance? What kind of extra organs would they have and where would they fit and what would they eat or use for energy sources?

These kinds of threads always fill me with questions... sorry to not add much.

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PostPosted: Sat Oct 02, 2004 7:02 pm 
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Just remember that you're standing on a planet that's evolving
And revolving at nine hundred miles an hour,
That's orbiting at nineteen miles a second, so it's reckoned,
A sun that is the source of all our power.
The sun and you and me and all the stars that we can see
Are moving at a million miles a day
In an outer spiral arm, at forty thousand miles an hour,
Of the galaxy we call the 'Milky Way'.
Our galaxy itself contains a hundred billion stars.
It's a hundred thousand light years side to side.
It bulges in the middle, sixteen thousand light years thick,
But out by us, it's just three thousand light years wide.
We're thirty thousand light years from galactic central point.
We go 'round every two hundred million years,
And our galaxy is only one of millions of billions
In this amazing and expanding universe.

The universe itself keeps on expanding and expanding
In all of the directions it can whizz
As fast as it can go, at the speed of light, you know,
Twelve million miles a minute, and that's the fastest speed there is.
So remember, when you're feeling very small and insecure,
How amazingly unlikely is your birth,
And pray that there's intelligent life somewhere up in space,
'Cause there's bugger all down here on Earth.

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 Post subject: Drunken political philosophy post-fu
PostPosted: Sat Oct 02, 2004 7:35 pm 
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themadthinker wrote:
Hell, if humanity ever starts expanding space-ward, we'll do it because we need living space and resources. And how long before somebody claims all the land on mars, and starts renting it for obscene prices? Remember, if there's enough demand, you can charge whatever the hell you like.

Not to base a logical argument on Sci-Fi, but see <i>The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress</i> by Heinlein. Once space travel becomes affordable enough to open a frontier, I predict a wild upswing in libertarian ideals.

Your ability to charge rent on land, for example, depends on your ability to evict squatters from that land. Government's ability to tax, enforce laws, etc will be limited, not just by the distance and time needed to dispatch communications and materiel, but also by the sheer volume for space. Authority needs a certain density of troops, administrators, etc in order to function at the level we're used to today. You just can't achieve that density over night. Maybe not even in a millennium, depending.

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PostPosted: Sat Oct 02, 2004 9:58 pm 
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Ezelek wrote:
**stolen from the Meaning of Life**


<3

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PostPosted: Sun Oct 03, 2004 5:13 am 
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Hell, if humanity ever starts expanding space-ward, we'll do it because we need living space and resources.

bread and circuses. . .
Sadly, we're likely to expend most of the resources necessary to a major space effort before the majority of people realize that we need to go to space to acquire rescourses for earth.
Kali_Ava wrote:
themadthinker wrote:
Hopefully, the aliens need something we need to get rid off. But that's highly unlikely.


Well, aliens that actually exist could be structured and based society and social demands in a way we can't possibly comprehend. So maybe they'll need something we never even conisdered could be useful to anyone.
You mean like "what's all this goop left over when we refine crude oil? I wonder if we could do something with it, maybe if we could make it a little thicker, and mold it. . ."?

Kali_Ava wrote:
I just wonder how many ways could micro-organisms evolve when they become more complex. How many legs? What kind of balance? What kind of extra organs would they have and where would they fit and what would they eat or use for energy sources?

Well, microorganisms developed in a couple million different ways on earth, and there are at least 10 known species with the biological capacity* sapience. Imagine how the evolutionary paths could would differ given a different base environment. A world with, say, 1/10th the land area of Earth, for example, may have produced a sapient, tool using, aquatic species. Probably one that's not even vaguely humanoid. Imagine a warlike, species that has come to earth to conquer our oceans. . . Save the wahales takes on a whole new meaning! :P

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PostPosted: Sun Oct 03, 2004 10:12 am 
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Given the current state of our oceans, I doubt any sophont would want to live there if there were any alternatives.

Although... that would lead for an interesting story. An alien race contacts earth, gives them all sorts of advanced technology -- clean energy sources, pollution-eating microbes, and all sorts of other green technologies. The aliens come back in a decade to find earth's biosphere as clean and pristene as it was in the years before the industrial revolution. Then they take over the now-habitable planet...

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PostPosted: Sun Oct 03, 2004 11:56 am 
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Herbal Enema wrote:
Given the current state of our oceans, I doubt any sophont would want to live there if there were any alternatives.

Although... that would lead for an interesting story. An alien race contacts earth, gives them all sorts of advanced technology -- clean energy sources, pollution-eating microbes, and all sorts of other green technologies. The aliens come back in a decade to find earth's biosphere as clean and pristene as it was in the years before the industrial revolution. Then they take over the now-habitable planet...


That would make an interesting book, y'know... if it's not already written.

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PostPosted: Sun Oct 03, 2004 8:51 pm 
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I wrote a large story where aliens did something similar. They showed up, contacted the UN and the more developed nations that weren't members, and began passing on superior technology and cultural/behavioral engineering programs in exchange for a modest amount of raw resources and crude materials they could use. Then they left.

With the technology and ideas left behind by the aliens, the UN and several non-member nations merged into the Terran Hegemony, supposedly a unified government to represent all of humanity as they readied themselves to join the vast interstellar community. Meanwhile, everyone in those nations was disarmed, money became entirely digital, and the state reigned, sort of like in Brave New World. Everyone was implanted with a tracking chip that would not only let the government know where each and every citizen was at all times, but could generate a small electrical pulse to render that person unconscious for several minutes. Keeps crime down ya know.

In the meantime, more efficient technologies replaced power plants, cleaned contaminants from the air, water, and soil, and over-population was solved by yearly contraceptive injections to everyone who hadn't received a license to breed. Most of the populace was kept in a stagnant, ignorant stupor, cattle for the government to exploit as it pleased.

Thirty years after showing up and altering human civilization and the planet, the aliens returned and used the systems the Hegemony had put into place to round up most of the populace over 21 years of age and ship them off as slaves for their vast interstellar empire. The remaining population on Earth was kept under military jurisdiction as a breeding ground and the planet was strip-mined of the resources their alien civilization required to sustain itself and terraformed into a world more suitable to the lifestyle in which they desired to be accustomed.

I never got around to finishing it. I should find wherever I put it and get to work on it again, revise what I've already written.

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