Random Thought Depository

Point for "yes": the parts of the Drake Equation we have some information about seem to point toward life probably being common. The sun is a pretty common type of star. Planets seem to be pretty common. There's a planet around Proxima Centauri that gets about as much light as Earth and is about the same mass as Earth (it orbits a flare star, so it's probably not actually very friendly to life, but its cosmic proximity suggests planets like that are very common). If terrestrial planets are common, the basic recipe that produced life on Earth (liquid water + energy + complex chemistry) is probably very common in the universe, and it exists or existed on at least four worlds in our own solar system (Earth, Europa, Enceladus, and ancient Mars). Life seems to have got started on Earth pretty much as soon as Earth had conditions conducive to it, which suggests if you have conditions conducive to it for a billion years or so abiogenesis will probably happen.

Point for "no": the Fermi Paradox suggests a significant possibility that the nearest sapient aliens are so far away we'll never meet them or interstellar travel is so difficult it's basically completely impractical (either flat out impossible or the reward to effort ratio is so low even the most determined civilizations give up on it very quickly). Real science suggests interstellar travel is indeed formidably difficult, to the point that "we're living in a universe where interstellar travel on any significant scale is basically impossible" seems pretty plausible.

Point for "yes," kind of: even if physical interstellar travel is impossible, interstellar communication would be much easier. IIRC, we could talk to a technologically advanced civilization on a world orbiting a distant star with the technology and actually existing equipment we have now, if we knew where to point our radio telescopes and had the patience for a conversation in which receiving a reply would take years to millennia. So, even if we never physically meet sapient aliens, we may get to talk to them. Even a universe where physical interstellar travel is impossible may have a thriving galactic community of technologically advanced civilizations who communicate with each other by radio (if so, we're probably excluded from this network only because there hasn't yet been time for our nearest neighbors to receive our radio leakage and send a greeting and their first message to reach us; could happen any day now!). Also, even in a universe like that, with sufficiently advanced technology we might one day meet aliens in a way, by reconfiguring human intellects into a format that can be encoded into a radio transmission and sending them to the aliens, who could then run these posthuman minds on their own computers (and vice versa, some of the aliens could experience life on Earth this way). I think it's likely that we'll have the technology to do that within a few centuries, and it's likely that many of the alien civilizations, most of which would probably be much older than ours, would have the technology to do that.

Wait, you're asking about sentient aliens, not sapient aliens. So, like, would the Foundation and Dune sci fi settings, where we've never met sapient aliens but we have encountered lots of aliens analogous to nonhuman animals on Earth, count as universes where we met aliens for this question? I think meeting sentient but non-sapient aliens is more likely than meeting sapient aliens if interstellar travel is feasible (though if it's not getting to talk to sapient aliens is more likely; a radio transmitter with interstellar range is much easier to build than a starship, but having a conversation with someone in another solar system through radio transmissions requires people smart enough to build radio transmitters who know about radio at both ends). There's no Fermi Paradox for sentient but non-sapient aliens, and "sentient aliens are common but sapient aliens are rare" is, I think, one of the more plausible possible resolutions of it.

1) The vat-meat future; factory farming is replaced by meat produced through direct tissue culture methods. The primary motivation for this is efficiency, though it being more humane might be a secondary motivation; the tissue cultured flesh doesn't have a brain or much of a nervous system and probably isn't sentient. There'd probably still be some consumption of meat from "real" animals, as novelty foods, "traditional cultural heritage" things, Veblen goods, etc. but it'd be a small volume compared to modern factory farming and would likely often involve relatively humane resource-intensive boutique livestock-rearing practices, or be obtained by hunting of wild animals, etc.. Let's say for the sake of argument that it's pretty small-scale. "Companion animals" like dogs will still be around, but I think they're pretty obviously better off than their wild cousins. In this world order, the main source of anthropogenic nonhuman animal suffering and death would probably be pest control and habitat destruction. I think it's probably a toss-up whether a cornfield contains more animal suffering than an equivalent area of natural grassland, and that's probably approximately representative of the impact humans will have on nonhuman sentients in this scenario (agricultural fields will be most of the world's dramatically human-impacted surface area, I think). I think it's possible that humans in this scenario will end up having a slight net positive impact on nonhuman animal well-being via "anthropogenic wild animal suffering in vat-meat world vs. naturally occurring wild animal suffering in a hypothetical world with no humans is basically a wash."

2) A philosophy that encourages people to give greater consideration to nonhuman animals as moral patients becomes popular enough that it becomes the new normal of human conduct. I'm assuming relative psychological realism, so this philosophy would probably still allow some species in-group preference in that it's still OK to value human lives more and kill nonhuman animals to save human lives (so e.g. survival hunting is still permitted), but something like killing animals for meat when plant-based alternatives are readily available just cause meat is tasty is forbidden. I think this is probably going to be basically similar to 1); the main change in the relationship between humans and nonhuman animals is most humans are going to become vegetarians (I say "most" cause I assume there will be some people who at least partially reject the new morality and probably some humans will still do subsistence hunting), and that will leave pest control and side-effects of agriculture and settlement construction and industrial activities as the main source of anthropogenic nonhuman animal suffering. I guess this will probably be a bit better than 1) from a nonhuman animal well-being viewpoint; this kind of human society is more likely to take expensive and inconvenient measures to protect or improve nonhuman animal lives and is likely to be less tolerant of legacy recreational and traditional carnivory. Though I suppose there is a counter-factor that in a culture like this meat may have a "forbidden fruit" appeal to some people, e.g. a society like this might have an aggressively chud minority of humans who never consented to the new way of doing things, resent having social norms and laws based on values they don't agree with shoved down their throats, and do a lot of "for every animal you don't eat, I'll eat two!" type vice signalling about it. And, also, I suspect 1) is likely to kind of turn into 2) given time; I suspect the biggest obstacle to the Steven Pinker decline of violence thing going brrr on speciesism is motivated reasoning to not feel bad about eating meat, driven by the unfortunate fact that meat tastes good, and that obstacle will be removed once people can have their cake and eat it too by being vegetarians with an exception for vat-meat.

3) Collapse of industrial civilization, reversion to preindustrial agricultural mode of production. I think being a livestock animal probably usually sucked less before industrialized livestock-rearing. In old timey livestock-raising animals were often worth more alive for the secondary products they produced (milk, eggs, wool, etc.) and hence not slaughtered until relatively late in life and it was often more practical to give livestock some freedom of movement so they could forage for their own food to a considerable extent, and old timey livestock-raising was often done at low density (a farmer having a few chickens instead of a giant warehouse full of battery cages, etc.). I suspect preindustrial livestock often were net better off than their wild conspecifics or near relatives! Sure, a lot of them got slaughtered young, but a lot of animals die young in nature too, and they got protection from predators and other benefits from their association with humans. I think this might be another "kind of a wash whether anthropogenic nonhuman animal suffering in this scenario would outweigh natural nonhuman animal suffering in a world with no humans, hard to model factors might tip this into a net positive or net negative scenario in terms of human impacts on nonhuman animal well-being." This scenario would be a disaster for humans, of course.

4) Collapse of civilization, reversion to hunter-gatherer mode of subsistence. In which humans are basically going to interact with other animals the same way other large predators like wolves and lions do. I guess the existence of late Pleistocene humans was, like, mostly bad for the well-being of other animals, but in the same way the existence of wolves and lions was; if they went extinct their place in the food chain would just be filled by other predators, and if all predators went extinct their prey would probably get a brief respite, use it to reproduce up to the limits of the land's carrying capacity because they're too dumb to have a concept of carrying capacity or do birth control, and then enter a more-or-less equally miserable equilibrium in which their numbers are capped by disease and starvation instead of predation.

5) Extinction of humanity and destruction of the entire terrestrial biosphere due to anthropogenic catastrophe. Whether you think this is better or worse than an alternate history diverging from ours in the late Tertiary in which humans never evolved is basically a measure of how blackpilled you are about wild animal suffering. One grimly humorous aspect of this one is if the biosphere is wiped out by an unfriendly AI you could put a lot of weight on the question of whether the agent of the biosphere's destruction is happy in its victory condition, because it's now the only sentient being left in the solar system, probably, more-or-less. For instance, I think from this perspective the scenario in Charles Stross's Accelerando is a particularly disastrous one, because I think the Vile Offspring are likely quite miserable in their posthuman capitalist ecosystem in which they ruthlessly compete with each other for resources; they're probably constantly frustrating each other's desires to make number go up, i.e. constantly inflicting their nearest equivalent of animal pain on each other, and since their ecosystem is a Dyson sphere they built by completely strip-mining the solar system post-Singularity V.O. suffering likely outweighs pre-Singularity Earth biosphere animal suffering by many orders of magnitude.

6) Transhumanist optimist future in which we build and/or become superhumanly intelligent machine entities with fantastic technological powers. I think this is our best chance for a future in which humanity's existence is hugely net positive for nonhuman sentient life on Earth and in much of our future light cone. A society of this sort wouldn't just be freed from our incentive to kill animals because meat is tasty, it would have the technology and resources to intervene and micro-manage entire biospheres at the level of power and attention necessary to radically change the life of every sentient being in them. And if they're our mind-children, so to speak, and inherit our human trait of compassion, I think it's pretty likely they'd use that power for good.

In the very long-term, human extinction (either 5) or human extinction but not biosphere destruction) or 6) seem like the most likely far futures to me, in that they're the conditions that I think are most likely to be stable in cosmic timescales. Unless there's some unforeseen law of physics that prevents 6), if humanity survives as a sapient species long enough we're probably eventually going to get to 6), even if it takes many thousands of years, unless we go extinct first. The next hundred years or thousand years might be some other kind of future, but if so it's probably going to be part of a road that eventually leads to human extinction or 6).

Like… how does the magic determine where technology begins? I mean, a gun is just a little house for tiny explosions to live… what part of that process is interrupted by magic? Does gunpowder simply not combust in Magictopia?

“What seems to be the matter?” asked the Elf, in that same insufferably airy tone that would have made it a fortune doing voiceovers for shampoo commercials.

Khalil sighed miserably. “Phone’s dead,” he said, scowling at the shimmering city. “Figures. Of course it lets me take a thousand blurry cat pictures and then konks out on me the moment I find something worth photographing.”

The Elf laughed. Khalil suspected it was meant to be a scornful laugh, but his companion had the emotional inflection of an automated voice messaging system, and it lacked punch.

“Foolish human,” said the Elf. “Your ‘phone’ will not work here. No technology functions past the borders of Faerie.”

If Khalil let his eyes unfocus and used his imagination, the expression it wore could almost pass for smugness. “Now hang on,” he said. “That’s a fucking lie. No way is that true.”

“Foolish human, I cannot tell a l—”

“Oh, shut up. You say no technology works here, but you’re clearly wearing some kind of ritzy elf sword. Are you gonna try to tell me that they grow on trees here? Obviously you’ve got smelting and forges and metallurgy. You’re wearing woven fabric, and you stole a bunch of medicine from that pharmacy in Detroit. We rode my bike over that troll bridge and it didn’t stop working.”

“That’s different,” protested the Elf, a shallow groove between it’s eyebrows betraying profound distress. “That’s not technology.”

“It is, though! ‘Technology’ doesn’t just mean guns and electron—”

There was a hand clamped tight over his mouth, smothering him before he had even registered movement. “Hold your tongue before I cut it out of your head,” hissed the Elf in his ear. “You don’t know what you’re messing with.”

It released him, and Khalil stumbled back, staring wildly. It had moved terrifyingly quickly. No doubt it could make good on its threat if it cared to—six years of boxing and he still had no hope of defending himself against something that could move like that.

“What magic doesn’t know can’t hurt it,” said the Elf in a low and strangely unsteady voice, sounding for the first time like a living being. “Be careful what ideas you give it. Some things seem right, and that’s what matters.”

The Elf must have grabbed him hard, Khalil realized, tasting the tang of blood where his lip had been torn open on his teeth. He swallowed, and stared at the Elf in horror. “Are you telling me,” he said slowly, “That your entire magical system, the physics of your entire world… is based… on vibes?”

The part of him that was a twenty-seven year-old peace activist recoiled in disgust even as the ten year-old pirate fanatic vibrated with excitement. If I live through this, he thought, I’ll have to tell my mom that all those hours glued to the History Channel weren’t wasted, after all.

Very gently, he tipped a little of the powder down the barrel of the gun. He had no way of knowing the appropriate amount to use and simply guessed; after all, if his suspicions were correct, it might not matter much in this world.

He pried the moldering leather bag out from under the skeleton’s arm and reached inside. A few dozen lead balls clinked together under his fingers, along with a little bundle of greasy cloth. With trembling fingers, he tore off a square of fabric and wrapped it around one of the bullets. Like a swaddled baby, he thought grimly, and pushed it down the barrel until it was nestled snugly over the gunpowder.

Almost ready, he thought. He dropped a pinch of powder into the flashpan on the top of the gun, flicked the frizzen back into position, and rose to his feet.

“Step away from the Fabio impersonator,” he said, kicking the rotten door off its hinges. “Or I will shoot you with my gun.”

The queen was beautiful, but she was not attractive. No, thought Khalil, that’s not right. She was attractive—in the way that the lights of beachside cities attract baby sea turtles away from the surf; attractive in the way that hot stoves attract curious children’s hands; attractive in the way that trays of beer attract garden slugs to drink themselves to death. 

We’re making a big change to how account deletion works on Tumblr, and we’re really excited about it, because this is something that some of you have been requesting for… well… a literal decade.

Before today, when you deleted your Tumblr account, it was immediate and permanent. Occasionally, this resulted in Very Sad Times. Even though we’ve tried to make it super difficult to accidentally delete your account, this is something that still happens a lot. Like, a lot. There’s also plenty of folks who delete their account on purpose, but then regret it shortly afterward. Worst of all, if your account was hacked, and then deleted by the hacker, there was no way to get it back. 

All of these problems are *poof* no more. As of today, when you delete your account, we will keep your data for 30 days. Your account will remain recoverable during that time, and you can contact us within that 30 day window if you’d like us to restore your account.

Eventually, we hope to make this process a bit easier, and allow you to restore your account with a single click of a button. For right now, though, you’ll need to contact us via tumblr.com/support and choose the category “Account Access” > “I have deleted my account or blog by accident”. 

FAQs

How do I delete my account? Does that process look different now?

You can follow the steps here to delete your account on the web or through the mobile app, which works pretty much the same way as before. You’ll notice we’ve updated the confirmation screen to reflect the new process, though.

Does a deleted account still appear on Tumblr during this 30 day window?

Nope. As soon as you submit the request to delete your account, all of your blogs will no longer be accessible (they’ll 404), no one will be able to message you, your posts will no longer appear in search results, and you won’t be able to log in anymore. This happens right away, not 30 days later. Deleted accounts still behave exactly as they always have.

What about my email address and username? Will those become available again immediately after account deletion, like they did before?

Notably, no, they will not. In order to make it possible for the account to be restored during the 30 day window, the username and email address must remain associated with the account during that time. So they won’t be available to register again until 30 days after you’ve deleted your account.

If you’re deleting your account, and you already know that you’d like to use the same username or email address on a new account immediately afterward, we recommend that you change your username and email address before deleting the account. That way, they will become available right away, instead of being on hold for 30 days. 

What if I’ve accidentally deleted one of my sideblogs, but not my entire account?

If you delete a sideblog, it will be deleted right away, and cannot be restored. We can only restore an entire account (which will restore all of its blogs along with it). 

Is this feature retroactive? Can you restore the account I deleted two years ago?

As much as we would like this to be possible, the answer is no. We still haven’t perfected the art of time travel, so all accounts deleted before today are still deleted for good. This new change will only apply to accounts which are deleted after this announcement is posted.

Where can I learn more about the account deletion process?

Pedestrian traffic lights

Human: We just train new people how to do it?

Elf: *gears visibly turning in their head*

Human: Are you alright?

Elf: I just realized that we didn’t have to let that whole city fall to ruin just because my grandfather died.

Human: My cousin made it.

Elf: Impossible! Those metalworking techniques were lost a hundred years ago!

Human: What do you mean lost? My great-grandmother learned to make these swords from an elven smith, then taught it to her kids.

Elf: That's ridiculous. No elf would give such secrets to a human.

Human: They didn't. Meemaw delivered the metal to the forge, and no one kicked her out when she stayed and watched. She always said they barely acknowledged her even when doing business with her, like she wasn't worth noticing.

Elf: Come to think of it, my great-uncle always was rather single-minded when he started working.

Human: So he wasn't ignoring her, he just forgot she was there?

Also:

If they can live for centuries or millennia, that might lead to selection pressure for superhuman memory so they can retain and use more of what they learned in such a long lifespan, which might later lead to them being slower to develop writing as it would have less advantage over spoken words and memorization for them. I think it'd be a nice alien touch for a species like fantasy Elves if they have a basically Medieval-to-Renaissance equivalent society but are managing to make that work while not having a writing system because they have very long lifespans combined with superhuman memory. That "You can... draw sounds?" thing in The Thirteenth Warrior but instead of the literate person coming from a more scientifically sophisticated culture and his literacy being a facet of that the illiterate people are centuries-old fantasy Elves who know about dinosaurs and the moons of Jupiter (or their setting's equivalent of those things) and know the circumference of their world and the literate person is a human from a mostly less scientifically and technologically advanced human society who thinks the world is 6000 years old and flat and thinks of telescopes as eldritch Elf sorcery.

In the dark forests of Mount Rainier, you may come across strange red and white plants that are growing without any green leaves. Candystick (Allotropa virgata) is a type of plant called a mycoheterotroph. It does not have any chlorophyll, which is what makes plants green. Most plants use chlorophyll to convert the energy of the sun into food in a process called photosynthesis. To get energy without having chlorophyll, mycoheterotrophic plants are parasites on fungi in the soil. The fungi in turn get energy from nearby conifer trees. This complicated relationship between plants like candystick, fungi, and trees is not fully understood. However, it allows candystick to thrive in the low light conditions of Mount Rainier’s old growth forests.

What other unusual wildflowers are you finding in the park?

Remember, as snow begins to melt, please stay on trails to avoid trampling wildflowers just starting to grow!

For updates on what’s blooming where visit https://go.nps.gov/RainierWildflower

Unfamiliar with Mount Rainier’s wildflower species? Check out the wildflower guide at https://go.nps.gov/RainierWildflowerGuide

Star Patrol rocket Piccard-5 encounters an artifact of the incredibly powerful White Marble Civilization. circa 2169, colorized & shipgirlified.

Commission for @foxgirlchorix, based on a render by Holly for @torchship-rpg

This is some of my best rendering work ever! These commissions do have a knack for putting me out of my comfort zone enough to continue developing my technical skills and style.

Image ID: Digital art of two ship girls in a black and blue nebula background. One girl is a very large solid white marble statue with a naked feminine form, pitted and cratered with meteoric impacts, drifting belly-down though space. Instead of a face, her head has a large hole which glows yellow-orange, with a white marble sphere held in space outside of it. A green tractor beam is being emitted towards the second girl, a Torchship named Piccard-5. She is a silver girl with her body resembling a star patrol jumpsuit. Warp drive rings circle her waist like a hula hoop. She is wearing a spherical ball helmet. She is wearing white rocket boots. She has glowing red-orange radiator panels as wings on her back. The white marble sphere's tractor beam is slowly disassembling her into individual hull sections, disconnecting her radiator wings, removing her boots to reveal the rocket propellant inside her legs, and taking her body apart. Piccard-5 is reacting with a worried or confused expression. End Image ID.

Artist's notes and concept sketches in the read more: