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Cake day: June 5th, 2023

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  • The idea isn’t to build one station. A station in this case is equivalent to a city or a town, you just keep building them over time. Not just a handful, but at first dozens, later hundreds, eventually thousands or millions of them. This isn’t about some sort of sci-fi “we’re fleeing because earth is dying” plot, it’s about utilization of the extreme abundance of resources available outside of earth. Again, if you’ve reached the point of being able to build these, Earth isn’t dying, because even if you just totally ignore the climate or even if you’ve just had a nuclear war or something, you’ve proven the ability to build livable space on literal dead rocks, so worst come to worst you could build them on earth too and then you have a society for which is effectively climate-proof. Not that this is the goal mind you, it’s just a side effect.


  • its much easier than terraforming an entire planet, orders of magnitude easier. Its difference between building a city and building an entire world. I dont think this is something we’ll see anytime soon mind, Id imagine the better part of a century at the earliest for even the most basic ones.

    that being said, the answers to the latter two questions are actually much easier: You solve the radiation issue by putting a lot of stuff between the people inside and space, what stuff depends on where the structure is. On a place like mars, itd probably just be a lot of dirt piled on top, or you build underground to begin with. as for the latter, you dont launch it all at once, just as you dont build a colony on another continent by loading an entire city onto a ship. You harvest most of the needed materials from wherever you plan to build it, and construct it in space. You probably send people back and forth in a large number of trips with multiple smaller ships. This sounds very difficult now because we do not have much infrastructure in space yet, and launching mass is very expensive. Once one can both mine materials in space and refine and assemble them into useful forms there, the task is dramatically easier as one just has to launch the people. We wont really be doing any space colonies without building that kind of in-space economy first, which will be a slow process











  • Almost none do, the gila monster is one of the few venomous species. It isn’t usually a fatal venom to my understanding, though as this proves it can be and it’s still said to be highly unpleasant in any case. It’s also not a terribly common lizard to see as a pet either, like you can probably find one if you go looking for it, but if you just want a pet lizard, there are a lot better suited species that will be most of what is sold, so I’d bet this guy intentionally wanted to get these ones and knew what they were, and was being reckless with them, rather than just didn’t know they were dangerous or something.


  • Something to consider here is that selective breeding of dogs is very often not done to the dog’s benefit, and indeed in some breeds makes them less healthy. It’s done for the benefit of their owners, either to do some job or for aesthetics, in a way that would be considered absolutely abhorrent if done to people (indeed, a lot of people think that in dogs it can go too far, especially where breeds with health problems are concerned). Eugenics is at least conceived by its proponents as being for the good of the species in a way that dog breeding is not, it’s just that the easiest way to do that is to control who has children, which isn’t generally considered acceptable for people, and the easiest ways to prevent someone you don’t want to have children from doing so are to kill or forcibly sterilize them, which is even worse. Additionally, it’s tricky to know what traits even are detrimental or beneficial to the species, and the personal biases of whoever is in charge come into play (for instance, a lot of historical examples of eugenics being pushed have been by people who were, well, extremely racist and therefore selecting for things like skin color, which if successful would simply lower genetic diversity, which is counterproductive)

    Now, as far as comparing humans to dog breeds (as in, why people find it okay to say “x breed of dog tends to be more aggressive”, but not “x group of people are more aggressive”), it should be considered that humans already have a rather low genetic diversity, as far as species go. If were we like dogs, we would probably all be the same “breed”, so to speak, even people from different ethnic backgrounds (sure, we can tell ourselves apart due to not looking exactly the same, but even two dogs of the same breed don’t look exactly alike, and we’re very attuned to seeing small differences in humans that we might not see in other animals). I’d bet it would probably be possible to eventually selectively breed a bunch of humans to have noticably and consistently different traits beyond just skin and hair color (which while visibly distinct from the outside, don’t really represent very much change), but intentionally engaging in breeding humans like dogs like this would be considered, well, a horrible thing to do, and in any case, isn’t what we currently have nowadays.




  • Honestly I have mixed feelings on these guys. Like, sure, they absolutely did need to be jailed, because trying to overturn an election is extremely dangerous for the country and one cant set the precedent that one can get away with attempting it, but at the same time, these people were lied to, and if the things that they had been led to believe about the election being stolen had actually been true, I cant help but think that something like what was done might have been justified. It feels kinda messed up, then, that the people who had been led into this with misplaced trust and false promises are the ones getting the bulk of the punishment, and not the people who sold them on lies in the first place.


  • The US literally took over the country’s central bank, occupied the country for a period of over a decade, and forced it to pay a huge percentage of it’s national income for that period to US banks to repay a debt that it never fairly acquired in the first place (admittedly, one that the US had basically taken over from France, which had forced it on Haiti in the first place, which is one of the reasons I also named France as a contributor in one of these replies). The country was prevented from using this revenue to invest in itself for a significant chunk of time, and that kind of investment has compounding effects that would have made the country at least somewhat better off had it not been basically robbed of it’s income at gunpoint. As things like organized crime thrive under an environment of poverty and desperation, it isn’t that unreasonable to think that the gangs would be less severe a problem had this development been allowed to occur.