Well I do appreciate that response, these are hard questions.

Is abortion murder too? At what point is a clump of cells a human?

This is my favorite sentence of the day.

Yeah, we like to pretend things are black and white, but nothing is simple, there’s always another perspective to view things from.

If anyone else is into stories like these, I do also have to mention “Welcome to Nightvale” and “Alice isn’t dead”.

Dungeons and Daddies (not a BDSM podcast), an actual pay D&D podcast about four dads and a Honda Odyssey accidentally thrown into the forgotten realms.

The players are the writers and director from the rocket jump YouTube channel, they also made a show called videogame highschool. The DM is Anthony Burch, creator of “Hey Ash, Whatcha Playing?” As well as the lead writer behind borderlands 2 (and basically the reason it’s a good game).

Fuck man! It’s called school!

That mindset is just so disappointing… I mean, why would you even say that? It’s like a statement that immediately backfires, because it makes it sound like you’re the one not thinking!

We as a planet might be though.

There’s no guarantee that the US will be a cultural superpower going forward… (I think the US empire is likely to go the natural way of empires sooner than we may be ready for)

I’ve always found this interesting. Human beings (or any vertebrates I suppose) are really more of a colony than a single being. And it’s not just a technicality, it’s meaningful. Much of that colony interacts with your nervous system and affects your moods and behavior. You think you have total control of your mind, but you would think and act differently with a different balance of gut bacteria. Chew on that for a while…

This appears to be my local stadium!

I don’t understand your gripe here. What’s wrong with those terms?

what’s the worst they’ll do? chain you to the desk and make you work at gunpoi-- yeah… they’d probably do that…

Yeah, he probably would. Luckily He doesn’t have enough ICE agents to do that. And as ICE is his only personal army, that’s the force he’d have to use.

In other words, he’s all talk, he’s out of cards to play here.

The picture isn’t great, but I’ll bet the framerate is amazing!

Or we could stop emptying genies from bottles…

But I guess then only the bad guys have reality altering weapons… Whatever.

That’s what I’m hearing. Honestly, I think that checks out.

This is the same reason that harvesting solar energy in space and beaming it down is also a stupid fucking idea. It’s politically problematic. Nobody wants anybody to have giant death rays in space, so there’s effectively no way to get the energy down to earth. It looks like we’ll all just have to rely on all the green technologies that already work.

the lagrange point isn’t a stable orbit.

That’s totally true, but to be fair, it’s still more stable and requires less maneuvering than low earth orbit. So if we’re comparing the two orbits…

We just need another massive once a millennium volcano eruption. Throw the world into chaos and starve half the population to death while the earth is half covered in atmospheric ash for a year. The slow Thanos snap.

I gotta be honest, that sounds like a less-than-optimal solution. But I like that you’re thinking outside the box!

That doesn’t really happen at very low orbit, where Starlink is.

any such object placed there would need to have a diameter larger than that of the moon

Well that’s kind of my point, that’s still a lot smaller than what Elon is suggesting. Elon suggested a sphere with a diameter larger than the earth, if the alternative is a disk larger than the moon, well that actually seems like a much better deal. Also, assuming a disk and a sphere have an equal diameter, the sphere has 4 times the surface area, so that’s not a trivial difference.

Lofting something that massive up there and more importantly keeping it there given that it’d also be well within the gravitational influence of the moon would be quite the challenge.

That’s interesting. Yeah that could be a challenge. Given the size of the thing, it seems like the obvious thing would be to utilize solar wind for maneuvering, as it’s already essentially a solar sail.

The Japanese space agency tested a solar sail in orbit with a novel steering system, rather than changing shape, it used something much like LCD cells to shutter individual quadrants of the sail. Something like that could potentially work.

Point two is that the Deep Space Climate Observatory is currently already parked there.

Yeah, that’s a good point. Although if you were actually building something this big out there, you would probably build in some capacity for probes to dock to it. This is a huge installation after all, a facility more than a probe. Or just add on a module that duplicates the capabilities of the deep space climate observatory. I mean once you’re constructing something this massive, that additional cost has gotta be a drop in the bucket, right?

Why?

Usually when people talk about this kind of thing, they suggest making a sun shade and delivering it to the Lagrange point between the earth and sun. It certainly feels more reasonable to do it that way. But I wonder which method really is more feasible. (Obviously both methods aren’t realistic right now)