toolforger

Frame challenge: polytheistic religions can have massive outbreaks of intolerance and persecution just like monotheistic ones. I recall mentions of war involvement of "red" and "yellow" tibetan religious orders, including mutual harrassment and fighting, as an example.

That does not change that the Grandi series diverges. And if you mean cardinality by "numerosity", then the cardinalities of the positive and negative sums is exactly the same. Unless you've been talking about the limit of Thomson's Lamp integral, which might indeed be 0.5, but that's not the Grandi series.

@Anixx there is no "proper" way to sum a Grandi series!

@Anixx I am just advocating against drawing conclusions from the "sum" of the Grandi series; this sum does not exist. You may get convergence to 1/2 if you inntegrate the graph of the Thomson lamp, but that is not the Grandi series but an exponentially declining series which does converge but I'm not sure if the convergence is meaningful.

@Anixx the sum of a divergent series is a meaningless concept, particularly for alternating series: The sum can be arbitrarily large if you can reorder the terms, or even diverge e.g. if you reorder it as 1+1-1+1+1-1+1+1-1+... I.e. the "sum" of the Grandi series does not exist, so you cannot draw conclusions from it.

A quantum-mechanical superposition is not a probability, you need to square it to get probabilities. Your reasoning is as valid or invalid as anybody else's though. For example, one could define the probability of 0 and 1 in a finite interval as you approach t-limit, e.g. between t-limit - x and t-limit - x/2, with x sliding towards zero. I believe that this will simply alternate between 0.25 and 0.75 and not converge nicely. That's the difference between convergent and divergent series: The convergent ones always give the same result regardless of method, the divergent ones don't.

@Anixx The intervals matter only insofar as their diminishing length places the series' "infinity" at a finite point in time, so we need to the series' limit to assign a meaningful state to that time. Turns out the series does not have a limit.

@Hudjefa That, in combination with the switch alternating between a 0 and a 1 position. E.g. if you have a "more physical" lamp with the usual inductivity of electrical currents, a 50% current intensity will result; mathematically, the series will become more like an integral over the last switching cycles and converge to a 50% value, while an alternating 0-1 series does not converge. I.e. you need both, an infinite series and nonconvergence.

The story about the standardized cart width is a modern legend, and actually falsified by archaeological evidence.

Interestingly enough, there are different factual definitions of Fascism. The one I have been preferring is: Authoritative ("leaders are right"), totalitarian ("everybody must participate"), superiority ("we are better than the rest"), and militarism as a positive value ("combat is a defining moment" and similar). I'd say the loss/victimization narrative can lead to fascism but it isn't essential, cf. the Japanese WWII mindset.

I believe the answer is over-optimistic but food or predators aren't the worst bottleneck - it's the labor to build all the buildings you need. E.g. a simple brickyard is pretty easy, but it will eat a lot of manual labor to keep it running; automation is always possible, but that takes even more manual labor.

@Tim so you assume the policy is racist against white people while ignoring that other ethnicities are being under racist pressure. Which exactly what I mean: people picking just those aspects that please their preselected views while ignoring everything else. This is actually what everybody does in everyday life, but it's not suitable as an answer to a question that asks for illuminating all sides of a difficult problem that does not have a correct solution. --- And with that, enough discussion.

@Tim First, votes would just give a 50:50 response. Second, they'd judge other qualities than what view is "right". Third, as I said, there is no right answer here, just different kinds of evils. Fourth, I don't have a good answer, because I lack the cultural background to make one; I just have enough cultural background to identify one-sided answers and comments.

@Tim the side that does the things that ConcernedCitizen considers illegal. The judges who are not just following party ideas even if they are in a blue state (few judges actually do). If you consider this answer offering a "do the right thing" choice, I challenge that it's even the obvious right thing to oppose the company's politics - there are arguments to be made for both sides. I find the question more useful than the answer, frankly.

@Tim I agree that there's unavoidable politics involved. The problem with this answer, however, is that it is massively one-sided, citing selected examples without a hint that there are counterexamples, so it bears all signs of a political agenca instead of being an honest attempt at helping people with the question.

If existing intelligence is a factor, I'd say the order is horses < cats < dogs < dolphins/bonobos. (Cats are much less intelligent than most people think, their problem-solving involves no pre-planning at all, that starts at the dolphin/bonobo level.)

I think this answer is overly pessimistic. Many of the points are debatable and/or could go either way, most underestimate the ability of humans to adapt. (E.g. sure they would need more food, but then they's also be bigger and stronger than most medieval soldiers so their generals would give them more food to keep them in fighting condition).

Practical engineering means looking at all aspects of energy generation, not at Joules per kg of fuel. In fact the comic conveniently leaves out photovoltaic and wind energy, because then the J/kg figure would have to be "infinity" because fuel weight is always zero (no fuel). -- -1 for being both incorrect and not an answer to the original question.

BTW I read the Quora link, and looked the nuclear winter material up. It seems that Allan E. Hall is doing a very elaborate misleading representation; in particular, his dismissal of Nuclear Winter being a thing seems pretty fishy (he completely ignores the effects of dust on solar input, a hilarious omission).

7. If the stellar fleet is moving at 0.9 or 0.99 c, a single proton hitting it can do significant damage even if the proton is motionless (relative to the galaxy). Any slower fleet would be unable to navigate to a different galaxy in an interesting timeframe. For interstellar travel, you'd go for 0.5 c, where individual particles don't carry much impact but dust grains do.

6 (cont'd) Proteins are a very different matter. They are basically a chain of N-CR-CO-CR peptides, where R is a variation; this is one of the simplest chain that can be assembled and disassembled with little energy, so it' s pretty ideal as a basic building block and likely to be present. The rests (R) do vary, so here we have indeed a potential for food compatibility.

6. No, carbohydrates and fatty acids are pretty standard. There are only so many ways you can build a carbohydrates, and all of them exist in our ecosphere; fatty acids have more variation, but they are build from a very small set of small blocks so the human physiology should be able to digest them as well. Maybe they need to apply chemistry, such as cooking, but it should work.

The Martians may be content to just fend you off. Even humans don't do genocide usually just because some native shot an arrow at your battleship, unless they are really bored or have been waiting for a genocide excuse. (I find the premise that Mars has an advanced civilization a quite labored and often-ridiculed trope, so maybe that particular worldbuilding isn't very enlightened - or, on the other hand, the author may have thought of something really great here.)

3. Sure you can move asteroids, just not quickly.

On #6: That's actually less of an issue. Distribute a few handfulls of organic dirt in various places, and exponential growth and evolution will make it occupy all the ecological niches that the native flora/fauna cannot use as efficiently.

On #6 (continued): Food: Carbohydrates and fat are chemically pretty simple, so if they worked for our ecology, you can expect to find them in native fruits and animals. I.e. energy intake is not a problem. You will have problems with essential amino acids unless the local ecology happens to use the same aminos, but these are too varied so you likely will have issues. This is where you need to bring your own ecology; fortunately, we're not talking about large quantities (mere grams per day).

On #6 (continued again): Viruses and bacteriae will be mostly incompatible, but the few that get through can be devastating (which would be a pretty rare thing to happen though, so there's a chance that this won't hit the first colony).

On #7: At interstellar speeds, you don't need an asteroid to kill a ship, a fist-sized stone, a pebble, or a grain could be enough. Even a single proton could smash a ship if you are going fast enough, and the proton happens to hit an atomic nucleus and the fragments happen to hit neighbouring nuclei. But even asteroids can be very hard to detect, some are really black and you detect them only when they obscure a star, and you might not have enough time for evasive maneuvers. Details depend a lot on the speed and where you are navigating though.

Most of these points have slightly flawed premises.

On #1, #2: A nuclear winter will still stop any reasonable way to produce energy. --- A 10-fold radiation decrease won't help you if if's one million above the "you can survive this" threshold, or if you cannot survive until the radiation is back down. --- Radiation that is already in your environment is far more difficult to control than radiation from the outside. (Of course stellar radiation is still nasty. Intermediate on Earth are still preferrable to interplanetary radiation.)

On #3: While you have plenty of energy if you can navigate space, there might be other restrictions. You might not have the technology to accelerate asteroids, or under time pressure (need to get out of space before the pursuing Vogons detect you, or before the last supplies run out). So while you're right in general, the story situation might be different, particularly if it is a really small spacefaring fleet that lives off supplies (something you allude to yourself in other points).

On #4 and #5: I completely agree on this one, unless the escape fleet has some handwavium - a teleporter built by precursor civilisations, for example. Going to another galaxy doesn't give you anything that you don't have in the current one though. Even a different star cluster might be hard to justify.

@JBH you're thinking late dark ages, where a middle class had started to exist in towns, which wasn't feudalism anymore. Go back to Charlemagne, and that middle class becomes paper-thin, or even nonexistent because everybody is serf, travelling merchant, or nobility (senescals etc.).

@JBH Further, you present your answer as if it were based on common sense and sensible consensus, while in reality, many of your claims can be reasonably disagreed.

@JBH I mentioned those old societies to refute your claim that any society must have a middle class to be economically viable. E.g. feudalism has been viable for more than a millenium. (If I wanted to claim that feudalism is an answer to the OP's question, I'd haven written an answer.)

I agree that wealth is the ability to command more resources, BUT I disagree that the working class is, by definition, the middle class. History has lots of counter-examples: Feudalistic states, colonialistic states, and state with a large slave caste (not all fit but many do).