raccoona_nongrata

This is also theorized to be a similar reason that gay people persist throughout history; they are an extra care giver or hunter, gatherer etc. who has no offspring of their own to worry about, so they help ensure the family groups genes get successfully protected in a holistic way.

People talk about genetics as if it’s just about individuals, but really it’s just as much about group success. If I’m a gay member of a family and my siblings reproduce, statistically my genes are still getting passed on (since all us siblings are just different combos of our parents). So if I ensure my nieces and nephews survive my genetics succeed as well, just kind of blended up.

The question of at what magnification our free will exists or doesn’t exist always seemed like kind of an impractical intellectual exercise to waste too much time on.

Yes, technically we’re probably all just really hyper-complex arrangements of dominos whos motion and sense of self can be theoretically traced back to the big bang or whatever primordial event set the chain falling.

But on a human scale none of that really matters outside of maybe informing a vague recognition that we aren’t wholly conscious of why we do things.

If someone kills a bunch of people no amount of philosophical quibbling and defining is going to make me think that person should be allowed to continue living in society, justice simply couldn’t be a concept at all in the absence of some form of free will, yet we require justice to cooperate in making better lives for ourselves. So the value of acting as if we have free will is more valuable than an esoteric philosophical truth.

I hope it’s multicellular and I hope they bring it back, I wanna be the first person to eat an alien.

For those disappointed that this excellent answer doesn’t confirm the Proto Molecule, another recent discovery by the James Webb telescope on Jupiter’s moon, Europa, is that there is amorphous CO2 ice concentrated along “chaos terrain” on the surface, possibly oozing up from the subsurface ocean.

Generally this form of CO2 is not long-lived, so it’s either being replenished by some chemical process in the ocean or…

(≖_≖ )

( ≖_≖)

_…aliens

It’s honestly pretty tragic that traitors and racists so poisoned southern culture that it effectively killed an accent by association.

I would’ve liked a world where the south abandoned its confederate and slavery past and instead embraced the parts of southern culture worth salvaging. Instead we got Jim Crow and all that false reality coping “sOutH wIlL rIsE aGaIn” bullshit.

Twist my arm why don’t ya

This was who I immediately thought of lol. It’s pretty incredible to see what he achieves simply with consumer grade lab equipment and some knowledge. The one where he makes hot sauce from vinyl gloves was pretty interesting.

It’s often hard for me to intuitively wrap my head around the transformative nature of chemistry, the way that you can take one material or substance and change it into one that has entirely different properties really does seem like a kind of magic sometimes.

It’s an interesting innovation if it can be scaled safely and sustainably. My understanding is that some surfactants (the product of the heating method here) can be toxic and not very environmentally friendly, hopefully this recycling method is not just kicking the can down the road on that sense.

Assuming a photon travels without interacting with something else (which would become increasingly likely as the universe approaches heat-death) they would just get more and more redshifted by the accelerating expansion of the universe until they were undetectable. They would still exist since they don’t “age”, they’d just never be able to reach anything.

There is a theory called the “Big Rip” though, where the universe basically reaches a point where it’s accelerating away so fast that it begins tearing apart atoms and the fundemental nature of space would change. So it’s possible that’s the point that photons would stop existing, if it’s a thing that even happens.

I’m not a physicist though, so someone with more knowledge feel free to chime in.

I work four, ten hour days, it is more or less the same. The place empties out early, less people going around etc.

If it was a 4-8 for the same pay I’d probably be less exhausted by thursday. It’s the hours, less so the days It’s split between.