I would thoroughly recommend the Fall of Civilizations podcast episode on the ancient Phonecians. It goes into detail about life in Phonecian society, particularly Carthage, and its rivalry with Rome and ultimately the Punic wars. It's quite long, but well worth it if you want a broad picture of how life was like in that period.
So just of the top of my head, things that have made mainstream news in the past ~week;
- A Small molecule oral cancer drug kills 100% of solid tumors across 70 evaluated cancer types
- LK-99, potentially the first ever room temperature ambient pressure superconductor (unverified as of yet)
even after reading a bunch of articles about many aspects, the cell organisation to produce mineral rods support as scaffold for mineral/enamel surface layers is .. really something
At this rate of change anything twenty years out is essentially impossible to estimate.
There are commercial companies working on Fusion power. We may have electrified everything by then, we may have painted the dessert white or we may be totally doomed.
if the super conductor thing fans out we might not even need to wait for fusion to go mainstream to electrify everything. That tech could take 10,000x the efficiency of batteries.
> the new revolutionary battery (that we will never hear about again
Which is a cute thing to say if you're totally ignorant of the substantial progress being made, in fundamental research and manufacturing methods, of batteries and energy storage systems every week.
More and more, I'm starting to believe that we are witnessing one of two phenomena. Either we're observing an emergence, in which humanity is making quantum leaps in scientific advancement, or indeed, some form of intelligence is subtly guiding us toward solutions for humanity's most pressing problems.
Or the alternative: after several years of media coverage almost exclusively being about either the pandemic effects, covid, layoffs, or wars; we've gone "back to normal" by relying on these revolutionary studies/concepts that struggle to ever make it to full availability for clickbait.
Used to be a brilliant mind could learn all there was known about science. Now its too much, and our minds have a hard time grasping what millions of minds working on a million problems for untold hours can accomplish.
imagine if ai basically ended human labor we all had universal basic income and everyone was essentially advised to become an artist or scientist to essentially work on elevating our knowledge. imagine if every starving kid or adult in 3rd world countries were scientists.
I mean with AI we might not need all those brains on problems but it couldn't hurt to have that large of a scientifically educated body .
I don't think those are your only two possibilities. The much more mundane answer is just that this isn't really that different from most years. There's usually a couple of seemingly "big" breakthroughs every year. It's just that the past few years have had most of them overshadowed by negative clickbait news even moreso than normal.
Why would you believe that an intelligence is pushing humanity that way?
For instance, LK-99 was discovered in 1999. Why would an intelligence who pushed someone to make this tell them to study it for decades and to patent it before they made a publication?
I would love to use Firefox, Brave, even Safari, but I'm quite literally locked into the Google eco-system. My work emails are G-Suite, so having chrome means I can sync data from sheets, slides, docs etc. I stupidly moved everything personal to a Gmail address too back in 2016 when things weren't looking so grim, and cloud only was a hype so I'm kind of locked into using chrome for personal use too as I can't get away from not having Google account sync functionality.
De-googling is incredibly hard. I've used my Gmail address for everything from government voting registration, to companies house, to services I can't even remember signing up for. At this stage, I'm kind of stuck. Bonus: I own an android phone and Google services are essential. Please don't preach to me about grapheneOS or whatever, they suck without the play store.
No one said you had to ungoogle your life all at once. Take steps. Switch your browser to Fx or something else. Pick up a new email address with low fees with calendar & contact sync over CalDAV/CardDAV & keep both emails in use while slowly converting some over to the new address. Use LiberOffice or Etherpad on new documents. Use UnifiedPush on Android to handle notifications without send everything through Google. Install F-Droid & migrate to open alternatives. Eventually, you’d find Aurora store is just used for a handful of apps like your bank & everything else is in your browser or uses an open protocol so F-Droid apps work fine.
Iris Alexandra's twitter is especially enthralling. Seems like so much discoveries and innovation happens from computer science to physics, chemistry and biology all from people with anime profile pictures.
> Here's a chunk of pyrolytic graphite on the same magnet with the same stick. Even with less density and more surface normal to field.... It doesn't lift off. If it's diamagnetism it's a fucking absurdly strong one
I'm watching all of this unfold as an unknowledgeable bystander. I'm at a loss for half of the technical terms and have no clue how many of those people are just LARPing.
But the positive energy of this all is very refreshing. This is what the internet was made for and I'm glad I can take part of it even if only by contributing moral support.
There's a certain subset of people on the intersection of high IQ, high-functioning ASD and LGBT that produces a lot of high impact activity in STEM fields.
There is no comma between ASD and LGBT, so I would assume that user is making an "eats, shoots and leaves" type joke where the humor comes from the concept of high functioning LGBT rather than an already existing assumption that sexuality and gender directly affect one's functions
I heard from a psychologist that homosexuality is associated with higher creativity (possibly explaining why it wasn't eliminated through evolution/natural selection). That seems true in art anyway, but I am not sure if in science the flamboyant online profiles simply make them more memorable characters or if the association holds.
I hope we get a video from Iris proving it's not glued to the support, if they were able to produce a levitating grain that's amazing. Regardless if superconducting or not.
I know this is a joke, but can we for a second take a step back to marvel at how we're now watching US Congressional hearings about UAP's, where the word "Aliens" and "Extra-terrestrial life" was mentioned several times? I feel like I'm living through the beginning of a sci-fi movie.
More to the point, why is it always people in the US that have credible or semi credible (or for that matter ANY) evidence of UAP's, UFO's etc? The earth is a big place, why is it always the US they choose to visit? Is Botswana not good enough? Is Europe not technologically advanced enough? Does South America not send the right message?
I assume there is some particular combination of factors at play here:
The US has a very advanced military and intelligence apparatus which operates globally.
The US has an enormous area that it operates in domestically (large areas of both the Pacific and Atlantic oceans).
The US also has a relatively open culture and emphasizes free speech.
When you look at all of these factors it seems that by having all of them it makes it a lot more likely for people to detect UAPs and then talk about them. The other thing that might be at play here is that, as an American, I have no idea what a credible news source would be from Botswana and it is unlikely to be in English even if I would consume it in the first place.
Exactly but when you bring this up you get attacked. Sure there might be extraterrestrial life and no one is doubting this possibility but that they would focus on only the US and only get seen I the US is quite self centered.
Also don't forget how would we approach another planet if we had the tech to go there. The life forms on that planet may appear to us a monkeys or even ants and we would probably just ignore them.
> but that they would focus on only the US and only get seen I the US is quite self centered.
Because it isn't true. I started paying attention to UFO's after the 2017 new york times article on the subject, and yes, there is a perception that it's a US only phenomenon, but it's a misconception. I do not have a link to point you to, but UFO's are being reported world wide, and there have been some famous cases outside the US (as far as UFO cases get famous) such as the school, Wikipedia
https://en.m.wikipedia.org › wiki
Ariel School UFO incident.
> More to the point, why is it always people in the US that have credible or semi credible (or for that matter ANY) evidence of UAP's, UFO's etc?
The US is one of the only countries with the resources to explore such things?
Or maybe because the US is the fourth largest country by land mass, and the only bigger ones are Russia, China, and Canada. China probably would keep it a secret, as would Russia. And we would probably process Canada's. And in fact you do hear about stuff over Russia all the time.
Being a kook and a congressman (or intelligence officer) are not mutually exclusive. I haven't really seen anything credible, have you? It's always some ambiguous statement like "I've been told by a high ranking official...", "It appears to be not of this planet..." which puts my bullshit detector on full blast.
Assuming this isn’t just a big psyop trying to scare US adversaries, and that UFO’s are real… the US was the first to detonate nukes in 1945, on its own territory, which might explain some of the UFO interest. Maybe the UFO’s were investigating how scientifically and technologically advanced humanity was becoming, and naturally focused on nuclear tech as a leading indicator.
Also, the 1936 Berlin Olympics TV broadcast was the first human signal capable of detection from distant space, and might have alerted them to humanity. Travel time of the broadcast plus travel time of UFO’s to Earth (assuming they have lightspeed capability) might have resulted in them arriving right around when nukes were invented (if they’re from, say, Alpha Centauri which is 4 light-years away).
Finally, the US and Europe have free press where things like this are more likely to be publicly reported than in say, the USSR back in the day, or China under the CCP. Which, in conjunction with the above, may explain sightings maps like this one, where sightings are most frequent in the US and secondarily in Europe:
Also, if you search number of reports by date ranges, and choose an arbitrary cutoff at, say, 1944, look at what you get (I would need to see all this data graphed to see when the real inflection point to cut at is, so I'm just guessing here):
1-1943: 1566 sightings reports
1944-2023: 294,641 sightings reports
Two orders of magnitude more sightings reports in the 80yrs since nukes were invented, vs in the almost two millennia previously. Obviously we also had more robust and technologically advanced media in the latter time frame, so that contributes much to the discrepancy. But still a huge discrepancy.
UAP sightings and encounters are a global phenomenon, documented by civilians and military/government individuals and declassified documents going back decades. If you begin even cursory research into the topic, you'll discover as much.
> The earth is a big place, why is it always the US they choose to visit?
Since almost all credible English-speaking UFO sightings (i.e. someone actually saw something strange in the sky and isn't delusional or lying) have been US military hardware, it stands to reason that the US has been the site of a lot of sightings reported in English. The only other really obvious places where you might see this kind of stuff is rural Russia, Kazakhstan, Mongolia, or China, and I don't know what kind of things the locals have been primed to believe or say when they see strange lights in the sky.
It's not just the US, but the intelligence agencies who for some reason are the people that ET has chosen to reach out to and have the sole evidence and knowledge of the extraterrestrials. You know, the people who lied to the world about the presence of WMDs in Iraq 15 years ago. They have received communication with ET nobody else has and they have evidence if we just trust them.
Life feels more and more like a Sci Fi movie. Also consider that the US is one of the few nations with such advanced sensor technology, and also the one that likely flies the most training runs, patrols etc.
The hearing today, especially how much we didn't hear, was fascinating.
"Non-human" rather than "extra-terrestrial", I feel, was said a few times to try and tell us something. Perhaps they don't come from far away. Perhaps they come from outside, or perhaps they are from here.
When did they begin to show up?
What if nuclear blasts had an effect outside what we knew?
> What if nuclear blasts had an effect outside what we knew?
Wait, isn’t this the plot of Twin Peaks: The Return?
The news today is reporting that it was David Grusch, already not taken very seriously, who testified on the presence of “non-human” biological material found at crash sites. You know what that claim is compatible with? Putting an ape into an advanced drone in order to test the effect of its flight on life. You know, just like was done in the 1950s for space research.
If I were to make a sci-fi plot, I'd say the first nuclear blast in a US desert (Mohave?) spooked the aliens because they happen to live somewhere around that desert, in a "different dimension" so to say. To them the blast was a spike of hard radiation of unexplained origin. After digging into it, they've realized the relationship with us (to their astonishment) and developed an entire new branch of science about cross-dimension space travel. Now they can regularly send equivalents of bathyscaphes to our plane and observe us. They don't space travel as we imagine it, they rather submerge. The bathyscaphes protect their bodies from instant disintegration, but they already have a prototype of a space-suit that will let them leave the bathyscaphe. In the meantime they've been dropping some artifacts to steer our civilization in the desired direction. They really want us to develop an advanced machine civilization because they have means of directly connecting to a certain type of machines. As for their goals, it's the same goals that we have for Mars or Moon: explore and colonize because we can, perhaps find some minerals.
Signal is great, easily one of the best apps I've ever used. As someone who's privacy conscious, I've been trying forever to get my network of friends, family and colleagues to use signal with literally no success. Here in the UK, WhatsApp is ubiquitous, and to even _think_ of using a different app is, by most laypeople's standards, absolutely weird. Most people I've convinced have downloaded Signal, gave it a go with a few messages, and them promptly went back to WhatsApp because that's where the majority of their communication happens.
I'm convinced that it doesn't matter how good the product is, what matters is the network effect. Nobody cares about privacy, what they care about is whether everyone else is using the same app. Until there's some doomsday scenario of everyones messages getting leaked or something (the closest was the WhatsApp privacy policy changes that triggered worldwide scrutiny and was a general PR nightmare), nobody will be moving en masse to a plucky small app that their network isn't on.
Also doesn't help that Signal are implementing features like crypto transactions that most people don't care about.
> Here in the UK, WhatsApp is ubiquitous, and to even _think_ of using a different app is, by most laypeople's standards, absolutely weird.
Several countries in Europe have already 1/10th of their population using Telegram. Telegram sees more than one million download per quarter in the UK alone.
Telegram is simply a much better app (better UI/UX) and nobody around me finds it weird. As soon as friends and family tries Telegram, they're hooked.
The network effect is already there and I guarantee you that if there still people finding it "weird", it won't last long.
There's also zero problem using both WhatsApp and Telegram (which many people do: I don't but many do).
Kind of wild that Apple have built up so much of a reputation that you're calling it the 'best VR headset ever made' without it even being released yet. This just proves that good products are like 70% perception, and its why we continuously drink Coke even though there's so many better healthier, tastier drinks
>and its why we continuously drink Coke even though there's so many better healthier, tastier drinks
mostly because it's cheaper and everywhere. Even water these days can cost $2 in a standard 16.9 oz bottle. You don't go out to buy a coke because you want the finest drink in the land.
You don't just develop existential dread about climate change out of nowhere. First comes awareness, in this case the younger generation grew up being educated about climate change.
Then you get exacerbation/increased attention - in this case social media and traditional media which have fuelled doomsday rhetoric and alarmism in general. Not to say that it isn't a big issue, it's massive; but doesn't help that we're feeding young minds with constant negative stimuli about how we're all going to die and there's nothing we can do about the problem.
Blender is what I point to when people tell me open source is doomed for failure. There isn't anything that comes remotely close in terms of features and ubiquitous support, and its free. Honestly the best example of open source done right.
And on the brink of not existing at a couple of times in its history, reinforcing how tenacious you have to be :) Huge Kudos to Ton who've been through hell and back for Blender to end up what it is today.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6dbdVhVSat8