Opaque Thoughts

I've never heard of Jill Stein, but she has shot to the top of my list of presidential candidates.

My initial response to the idea of deciding who one will vote for by taking a short multiple choice quiz is one of unease, but is it really any worse than letting the American media turn the presidential election into a high school popularity contest? At least this way lesser known candidates can gain some publicity.

She has no chance of winning, but voting for such candidates is far from a wasted vote. The nobody of 2012 can be the underdog of 2016 and the winner of 2020, all the while the politicians who DO make it into office feel pressured to conform to the voting trends. If the Green Party gets significantly more votes this year than last then other parties will adjust their policies to attract more some of those votes back.

I Choose HAMPTURE!

Underwater Hamster Habitats

EVERY THORN HAS ITS ROSE

Someone recently expressed a pessimistic attitude towards the potential of humanity because of all of the bad things we have done and still do today. The following was my response.

"Humanity sucks? Compared to what? We are animals that have constructed an immensely complex network of trade spanning the entire surface of a planet. We have pooled technology and put men and women into orbit and onto the surface of THE FUCKING MOON! Even the wars we have fought across history and prehistory have advanced our species. Every aspect of our being has aided us in some way. 

An interstellar civilization wouldn't really be giant empire so much as it would be billions of separate civilizations communicating with one another via laser link.

I would imagine any one stellar civilization would advance, digress, advance, and so on over time. They would worship the trickle of information that comes through the narrow laser links from the nearby star systems with civilizations more advanced than them and be basked in the praise of the less advanced civilizations that they send their own technological and cultural information to. Every few millennia, one of the thousands of links connecting any one star system to its neighbors may go black and every surrounding civilization would ping for reply from their lost brother. The pings may be answered centuries later by a new civilization that has grown out of the ruins of the last; the former civilization having been destroyed by war, disease, economic collapse, or stellar event.

Trade may occur, but not as it occurs on Earth or as it would between planets of the same star system. A trade agreement may be struck if a star system lacks a substance that a neighboring star system has in abundance and vice versa. Or, instead of being satisfied with narrow laser links for information, civilizations may send physical copies of huge amounts of data through the void of space. Such ships could contain every bit of data the vending civilization had ever produced, from scientific papers and technical schematics to archaeological findings and pop-music. Each shipment would take centuries or more to reach its destination.

I hate the belief that buying things for the sake of buying things is good for the economy. It's true that arrows switch from up to down and colors switch from red to black when people spend their money, but the economy isn't a bunch of numbers and graphs. The economy is the totality of resource development, production, management, transportation, and distribution.