You could have been born on Mars when it had water. All that's left is dust
this post was submitted on 29 Sep 2024
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What are P and N?
The two types of semiconductors. N-types have a slight excess of electrons, allowing them to move freely and P-types have a slight lack of electrons, effectively making freely moving electron βholesβ. By sandwiching them next to each other, you can create diodes and bi-polar junction transistors.
And as we all know, bi-trans is an important part of queerdom.
Source: has a degree in electrical engineering. And is bi.
Edit: not cool enough to be trans though.
The aliens haven't yet consumed our planet in this timeline. Consider yourself lucky.
Statically speaking, globally, we are living in the freest, most prosperous age in recorded history. It was the most peaceful as well, but I am unsure if recent events have changed that.
But by and large, we have more rights and are more prosperous than any other era of human history. And drspite the fact we could literally end the whole goddamn world right fucking now, it's very, very clear that the powers that be really like living, and most conflicts are more focused and less destructive than ever before.
It could very easily be way, way fucking worse. We are nowhere near the worst timeline yet.
But by and large, we have more rights and are more prosperous than any other era of human history.
Wall-E Buy-N-Large hehe
David Bowie and Freddie Mercury did a duet.
We live in a timeline where open source exists, where computers arent as locked down as they could have been, where encryption is common
There are multiple cases where pure chance and human hesitation prevented all out nuclear bombardment in the Cold War.
So for that alone we are extremely lucky.
Kids seem more aware of toxic behaviours and seem to clock their mental health better than I ever did. Even 10 years ago, talking about mental health was considered a taboo.
You, specifically, dear reader, are not dead. Well done for that, keep it up.
There are people who love you, whose lives are better because you're in them, and I'm seriously super proud of you for making it to today.
Me too, me too.
In terms of total war and death worldwide, this is the most peaceful time in known human history.
We're getting awfully close to another World War given ongoing affairs in Ukraine and the Middle East...
Is that still true? Like, as in, updated in the past year-to-the-last-few-months? War (even though theyβre not calling it war) is rising in many places.
I don't believe this is something easily tracked and updated annually. The point is in terms of amount of population as a percentage. People in the 21st century largely have more food, shelter, and general security worldwide than in all of known human history.
Don't let anecdotal news about wars worldwide override the fact that much larger scale (as percent of world population) have occurred and occurred consistently in past history. Wars, famines, plagues, and other things have wiped out far more of the population overall historically. While the wars you see today are horrible, and in specific regions they might be decimating, they still pale in comparison to the level of death in human history and the scope of death of past wars.
The Black Death in the 1300s itself killed 30-50% of all of Europe. Ghengis Khan is estimated to have been responsible for killing 10% of the world population, which would be more than the entire population of Europe today. There's a lot of less than documented Chinese history that also suggests massive deaths from famines and plagues and stuff that seem to have amounted to a large percentage of the world population at the time.
Another thing I have seen a lot of in the last decade, mostly relating the the US, is that while large scale violent crime may be up (like mass killings) overall murder and crime is lower than it has been in past decades. Again, in a macro scope of things. You'll always have pockets of geography and/or time that are bad.
Hitler lost WW2, the south lost the American civil war, and we haven't all nuked each other (yet)
Hitler learned about Eugenics from America. We were forcibly sterilizing people for being "inferior" which you can imagine who that meant. America built their own concentration camps for Japanese citizens and our forced labor in our current prison system is just tge more pletable version of labor camps.
The American civil war was about slavery, but tge north was not full of abolitionist people like you might assume. Tge rich in the North and South were against ending slavery, but their hands were forced by the larger population. The only reason we have not had nukes go off is only because they are old and not maintained well. We've dropped a few nukes on accident that just didn't go off. At least two of those were over America.
the south lost the American civil war,
They've been trying to play the long game
Kinda terrible examples thoβ¦
Sure βHitler lostβ. Cause he killed himself and stuff. But the Nazis won. The US saved most officers and gave them jobs in NATO and the nascent west German government. Then used them to hunt and undermine communists all over the world. The Nazis themselves kinda won. The Cold War was basically a Nazi war, which they won.
The south βlostβ. But after they lost the US became the most racially segregated country in the world and became the chief inspiration to the Nazis.
Then the US literally bombed Japan TWICE for no fucking reason other than spooking Stalin.
You have 3 wrong examples, that actually show we are living in the timeline where the Empire won.
Ok dude
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In this timeline, princess Leias bun stayed intact. Wholesome.
Everybody here things it so funny to talk about how we'll all die ans it's all horrible but really?
Lifw is pretty good. Yeah, we're off worse off today than, say, 30 years ago, but compared to the 4 billion or so years before that? We're doing awesome.
We have direct communicationto anyone in the world in the palm of our hands. Even the poor got better and nicer food today than kings had 300 years ago. Life expectancy even over the past 100 years has gone up dramatically...
This "we're living in the worst times ever!" Is kind of like climate change deniers cherry picking a tiny sliver of a huge graph and say "see? Temperatures.are going down!" It's nonsense. Yeah, things got a bit worse.over the past decade, they'll get better again soon and we're still way better off than, say, 1980
I try to be a "silver lining" type of guy whenever possible, and a recent example that I've been using is mRNA vaccines. They were advancing achingly slowly before CoVID-19 basically turned the whole world into an mRNA lab. Now, thanks to that, there are vaccine trials underway for seasonal influenza, EpsteinβBarr virus, HIV, RSV and several types of cancer. There's even talk of a bona fide cure for the common cold.
Near-infinite access to pretty much any information you can possibly dream of, content, questions, etc, on a little device in your pocket
ive said to my kids "you have the sum total of all human knowledge available at your fingertips 24/7 and youre bored? "
The problem with that is it has led to ignorant people believing theyβre smart β all because they can find any random site that backs up any nonsense they assert. Critical thinking and credible research are endangered concepts now.
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All the times where we narrowly avoided nuclear war.
Well, scientifically speaking, we are living in one of the best timelines possible because there is developed life to ask this question to begin with. It's all about perspective.
What makes me think this is "worst timeline" is that i fear things will start regressing and we will have to go back to the beforetimes or worse. And in some better world where people are less apathetic it might not go that way.
Tell me worst thing, I'll tell you worser.
If you're wealthy, everything is better than ever before
There are books written about this exact topic. The most famous in recent years is Factfulness.
I'm sitting in my air conditioned house, watching not one, but 2 HD screens, one of which is playing cheers because I love that show and I can watch it all I want anytime I want. The other is my phone which is a absolute miracle of human achievement allowing me access to the sum of the worlds knowledge which I'm currently using to look at funny shit that amuses me. Also I didn't move a finger to say any of that. I just said it and it typed it for me, correcting most of my mistakes. And you, who are reading this, might be literally anywhere on this planet right now. I also used my phone to order my food which was promptly brought to my home for my enjoyment.
The world certainly has a lot of shit aspects but on the whole, we are living in amazing times right now for those of us fortunate enough to be in a safe country.
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Instead of sleeping in a cave and spending all day trying to kill food with a sharp stick, you can use your pocket internet to have food delivered to your door. In your very comfortable living space. Thank you Science and all the smart people in history that brought us here. Life is not as bad as the losers would have us believe.
Iβm more a visual person, so let me show you some graphs: Famine rates are down: https://ourworldindata.org/images/published/Famine-death-rate-since-1860s-revised_850.png
We can do so much more with our computing resources - Note, logarithmic scale: https://www.singularity.com/images/charts/MicroprocessorClockSpeed.jpg
Billions of people live in a democracy, before 1850 almost none did: https://bigthink.com/the-present/democratic-rights/
Pizza
The fact that most of the world has decent access to food. And the fact that here in the first world (I'm in Canada), just about everyone has access to some kind of food.
I know it isn't perfect and there are still a small percentage of people that may have difficulty with access to proper food, plentiful food or enough food ... but everyone everywhere here has something to eat.
I'm Indigenous and when I was growing up in the 80s, mom and dad had enough for us to eat but we weren't starving or anything.
However, my parents were born in the 40s and they said they had to live through famines as children ... in modern Canada! They remembered a severe famine that swept through northern Ontario in the 50s where every hunter and trapper just couldn't find enough wild food anywhere to feed people. It was a normal cycle that happens in our part of the world that takes place at least once a decade - most times it is just small decline in animal populations but other times, everything just disappears for one reason or another (disease, migration, weather, temperature, animal movements, etc)
In my grandparents time ... starvation was a normal part of life to the point where lots of our old legends are filled with stories of cannibalism and murder because people were starving to death.
It all just means that in our modern era over the past hundred years ... food has become plentiful for the majority of the world and that starvation has become less prevalent than it ever was in human history.
In our modern world of interconnected finances, services, governments and systems ... it is all hinging on a very delicate balance ... because as Will Durant put it ..
"From barbarism to civilization requires a century; from civilization to barbarism needs but a day"
Our easy access to food for everyone is only possible if we maintain a functioning world order of cooperation.
You get to exist and understand that you do. That's pretty huge already, as far as I can tell.
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