anti-aging / life-extension medicine might make a dent in the number of generations you need to get somewhere.
Plus, thinking you need to live near a star, on a planet, is merely a bias for "free" fusion power and gravity that you don't need to maintain.
I'm sure once we get artificial fusion working, the options for living in a community in a big, multi-story, 2 gigatonne, 500k population O'Neil cylinder tethered to a Kuiper belt iceball will look like "a big town with a nightlife, farmland, and a stable climate, with cheap trade and transit options for 'nearby' cylinders"
At which point you can colonize any frozen rock bigger than Rhode Island between here and Wolf 359 'easily' (slowly) whenever you want to move your O'Neill cylinder.
It would require not merely anti-aging, but being able to produce resilient offspring at a later age, otherwise, anti-aging would be detrimental to the project since in the intermediate stages of the journey, non-reproducing adults would be a resource drain.
Or you have your kids early, raise them, and then focus on community tasks (like running the ship) after that.
I don't think I regarded my kind, wise, and friendly grandmother as a 'non-reproducing adult resource drain'... Seems like a cruel way to describe one's golden years.
It is definitely a cruel way to think of it, but the thing is that in a generation ship, you have resources for a limited number of human beings. Longer lifespans mean you have more human beings to support. Life extension makes more sense if you can have the kids at age 50 to keep total population within reasonable limits. On a generation ship, it makes more sense to have a Logan’s Run scenario where once people reach a certain age… Carousel!
It seems like people being able to reproduce at-will would be the problem. Designing a system where people are sterile by default and can only have a child with intervention seems the only way to prevent random population explosions. If some group in your population finds religion and decides to be fruitful, you have a big problem. If 15% of your population has double replacement numbers, you have a 45% increase in your population in two generations.
Endless Sky seemed like a nice refresh when I tried it a few years ago, did a few initial quest lines.
It was interesting how the different faction technologies had different power/mass/volume/hardpoint production and consumption ratios, so there was a real nudge towards having tech all from one faction, and gently discouraging min-maxing the build using a Frankenstein of gear sourced from the far-flung-corners of the galaxy. At least that was my recollection.
Well, if it was that way, it certainly isn't any longer. They keep adding new alien races, storylines, and sectors of the galaxy, and some of my best ships were franken monsters with tech from a half dozen races. There is a core storyline that is primarily human, but if you play to the end of that will suddenly discover that there is significantly more around you that becomes reachable with some interesting new technology (trying not to spoil anything)
They have done a good job balancing the numbers so that everything requires some tradeoffs. More species/tech gives more choices and interesting variability. Some species make very efficient drives, others inefficient, more powerful but produce tons of excess heat, those folks also produce good passive cooling, others great active cooling but power hungry, etc. The ship hulls tend to match the sizes of the drives and weapon hardpoints of that race, but often work much better when outfitted with different kit (perhaps with some wasted space)
Plus the fleet management is pretty good. You fly your flagship, but you can park ships and switch your flag to different ships. So I might fly a fast little scoutship, then switch to an armor-clad behemoth surrounded my 20 of my heavy-hitting henchmen for some different missions.
... How well does that work? Asking because my SC3K runs always ended up being boring cases of "yes, we sell landfill space to the surrounding 4 cities, and if people want education they're going to have to go to a library and learn to read themselves, and we're obviously too broke to improve things."
The wet cloth between the counter and the cutting block keeps the cutting block from sliding / moving on you when force is applied, which is more comfortable and safer.
I cook every day, and I’m also a mechanical engineer, I’ve never understood where the sideways force comes from. I’ve also never had a board slide away from me. Tbh I thought this came from chefs chopping on stainless steel worktop. I’d like to understand.
Even if you're chopping perfectly vertically, a board will slide around or rock slightly. Like say you want to julienne some basil or something with a chef's knife, you'd probably be doing a rock chop, which involves lateral forces, causing the board to slide. Then also if you want to scoop up the food with the side of your knife, like scrape up minced garlic, those are lateral forces too. A wet cloth under a cutting board also softens/dampens the force of the knife hitting the board when chopping, which is nicer on your wrists.
When you chop, you're applying force almost entirely vertically. When you slice, you're applying at least some force horizontally. That horizontal force can be transmitted through the knife to the food to the cutting board, causing the board to slide. It's especially noticeable when you're slicing food that is high, like a loaf of bread, and the cutting board is on a slick stone countertop.
I mean, yeah, it's "a lot" because we've been starved for so long, but having run analytics aggregation workloads I now sometimes wonder if 1k or 10k cores with a lot of memory bandwidth could be useful for some ad-hoc queries, or just being able to serve an absurd number of website requests...
CPU on PCIe card seems like it matches with the Intel Xeon Phi... I've wondered if that could boost something like an Erlang mesh cluster...
Suppose it's something where the user may be accused of doing something nefarious if a sequence or pattern of behavior is exposed.
- "Ex-spouse: I looked you up on a dating website, and your userID indicates it was created while you were at Tom's party where you swear nothing happened."
- "You say you are in XYZ timezone, but all your imageIDs (that are unique to the image upon creation) are timestamped at what would be 3am in your timezone)"
Granted, for individual messages that are near-real-time, or for transactions that need to be timestamped anyway, it's probably fine, but for user-account-creation or "evergreen" asset-creation, it could leak the time to a sufficiently curious individual (or an organized group that is doing data-trawling and cross-correlation)
> - "You say you are in XYZ timezone, but all your imageIDs (that are unique to the image upon creation) are timestamped at what would be 3am in your timezone)"
Can you expand on this? I don't see a situation where it's actually leaking. You either have a photo with EXIF or an image post were generated when post is created and created_at usually exposed.
The Kushan Carrier looks exactly like the one I put together as a kid after playing Homeworld, right down to the readme file saying "if you've never done anything like this before, I'd suggest starting with something else"... a warning I ignored as a kid!
Learning Elixir and fixing a bug in an open source project went from "risk of a long slog over the course of a month with no reward" to "pepper an LLM with questions (debugging errors, understanding syntax, translating code snippets to English descriptions of behavior), write 20 lines of code by hand, write a few test cases, and submit the PR fix".
Plus, thinking you need to live near a star, on a planet, is merely a bias for "free" fusion power and gravity that you don't need to maintain.
I'm sure once we get artificial fusion working, the options for living in a community in a big, multi-story, 2 gigatonne, 500k population O'Neil cylinder tethered to a Kuiper belt iceball will look like "a big town with a nightlife, farmland, and a stable climate, with cheap trade and transit options for 'nearby' cylinders"
At which point you can colonize any frozen rock bigger than Rhode Island between here and Wolf 359 'easily' (slowly) whenever you want to move your O'Neill cylinder.
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