I feel like this might overestimate the decline if there is also a shift in what sci-fi titles tend to look like, which feels plausible to me given that titles follow trends. Anecdotes aren’t super informative granted, but anecdotally, virtually none of the more recent sci-fi media that ive seen contains those keywords in the title (and most of the exceptions are newer additions to older franchises), and most titles I can think of with them are quite old. This need not mean sci-fi has given up on starships or whatever, but it might imply that, while we are still a long way off from building one, the concept of such things is no longer new, and so merely implying that a work features them is no longer enough to make it stand out.

It should be noted that “independent” isn’t a monolithic position, so it’s probably not possible to create a single party that satisfies them; you’ll have people that find the democrats far too conservative to associate with, people that find the republicans too far left, people that do like one party’s policies but object to the idea of formally identifying with a political party, and people that just ignore politics.

Setting that aside though, while there are technically enough independents to win, it’s a classic collective action problem: if large but not big enough number of independents break off of whichever party they tend to vote for in absence of something more preferable to them, then they end up with the less preferred party to them, which means that creating a third party is worse unless you can get massive buy-in within a single election cycle. This isnt impossible in theory, as you’ve pointed out, but in practice these kind of problems rarely ever are solved this way, because people just don’t tend to all suddenly agree on one course of action like that, and the knowledge that a failed attempt is worse than no attempt is available to everyone.

It’s happened before in US politics a couple times even, but it hasn’t ever fixed the underlying design issue that leads to two parties, the new one just takes over as one of the major two when one of the older ones gets so unpopular as to collapse entirely, and the same forces that lead to the previous party drifting away from the wishes of the majority of the country work upon the new one.

American food is like the borg, we just assimilate other food cultures into our own but adapt them to fit with everything else.

Cucumbers? I tend to cut extra ones into sticks, and dip the sticks in hummus as a side.

It’s already possible in a “does it violate the laws of physics or not” sense, the real question is, will anyone that has the requisite resources to do it actually want to.

It would take such an incredibly long time (as in, millions of years or longer for the very closest galaxies) that anyone and any organization sending out such an expedition isn’t going to get any meaningful return on their investment, so it would only bring a benefit to whoever was on the “ship” when it arrived. As such, to even have a motive for doing this, you either need a society that does things for the benefit of extremely distant descends, or which is extremely long lived and patient.

As to how you would actually do it, my guess (obviously though, the guess of someone from a society that lacks the technology to do a thing is likely to be wrong about how it later is done) would be that one would use a hypothetical type of structure called a stellar engine These are similar to the “dyson spheres” that science fiction sometimes likes to talk about (usually inaccurately to the actual concept but still), except that they would use the energy emitted by a star, or its mass, to do some particular task, like propel the star in a given direction.

Doing this, your “ship” is actually an entire solar system. Getting that up to speed could take millions of years even for the most efficient designs, and obviously requires an economy capable of building stuff at incredible scales, and having an entire star spare to use for the trip. However, you’re going to be taking that kind of time anyway, and so you’re probably going to need an entire self contained civilization to have a hope of keeping things running that long, and literal worlds worth of raw materials. There’s not much else that even theoretically has enough fuel to move all that to notable fractions of lightspeed. Since there’s little point to going to live in another galaxy if there are still unclaimed places to go within your own, a whole star system is probably a relatively small expense for the implied size of civilization that would even want to try to sebd such an expedition. Galaxies contain a huge number of them after all.

While this is all obviously far beyond us now, both in technology and sheer economic scale, there’s nothing physically impossible about it, and at least some logical motive (the future resources of a galaxy for one’s descendants, if alien life is rare enough for uninhabited galaxies to exist). Given that and just how huge the universe is, I’d actually be willing to bet that somewhere there is someone or something doing this, and that if humans last long enough and keep advancing our technology and infrastructure all the while, some descendant of our species might, though they’d probably seem pretty alien to us by the time it took to reach that point.

Iguanas are plenty interesting to me, though I imagine a tegu probably is more sociable. My personal experience with lizards has been with geckos, but I hear that tegus tend to be very friendly, for a lizard of their size.

I wouldn’t say print books have no place today, it can’t be assumed that one will have access to electronics in all circumstances after all and many people do prefer physical media, but it’s definitely an indictment of the sort of cheaply made basically disposable books made in larger quantities than needed to fill their current niche, and of the way unwanted (by their owners) but usable goods are dealt with in general.

Ive seen this kind of sentiment around (referring primarily to your initial comment on the OP about making a new foundation, but replying to this one because I wanted to have the context it adds with it). Its a sentiment that sounds appealing (“this thing is hurting us, therefore me must destroy it/replace it” is a fairly cathartic notion after all). The problem I have with it is: the analogy doesn’t actually fit. Government and economic systems simply aren’t buildings. They dont have foundations in that sense, and the things metaphorically referred to as “foundations” do not have the same function and consequences as the real thing.

Take your examples. If you were to remove racism from the country overnight, say you somehow both make individual bigoted people all understand that their perceived enemies are people just living their lives, and adjusted the outcomes of various systems to remove systemic racist outcomes that can exist even without personal malice- that wouldn’t suddenly cause the government to collapse. It’d probably change who exactly gets elected and some of the laws for the better, but while racism has shaped the history of the United States, it doesn’t logically require racism continue to shape it in order to prevent calamity of some kind.

Settler colonialism has a stronger claim to being “foundational” in that the concept describes the process by which the country came to be- but there we have a different problem when one contemplates the consequences of removing it: it simply can’t be removed. Not because of some negative consequence, but simply became there is no way to undo what it results in. Numerous people were killed, and they and their would-have-been descendants cant be simply brought back. Hundreds of millions of people that have an entirely different culture to what would have been now exist, some of those cultures unique to the area despite not being indigenous to it, and it would be logistically impossible to send them anywhere else. The surviving indigenous people can be given some kind of reparation, and the poverty forced on them can be alleviated, but realistically it cant be nearly proportionate to what those groups lost. Unless one has a time machine somehow, whatever the US becomes, even if it was entirely destroyed and built anew, it can never be a society that doesn’t owe it’s existence to a settler colonial enterprise, any more than one can change who ones parents were.

This isn’t an argument against radical change, and I know its rant-y and pedantic, but I see the sentiment of “tear it all down” so often, and think that’s just too vague. It sounds dramatic and radical, but leaves the question of what it means too open. Does it mean “replace all the major government figures”? Probably not, that happens anyway given enough time, without radical changes necessarily occuring. Does it mean doing that, but also changing the mechanism by which those leaders are picked, and maybe also something like the economic model or ownership structure of various institutions? Maybe, though still, apart from the people at the top, a lot of what you’ll get will still be the same. You’re going to need bureaucrats and lawyers and teachers and auditors and soldiers and whatever, or some broadly equivalent roles, no matter how you organize your society, and since the people doing that now are the ones that know how, they’ll probably end up doing the same things under the new order (which could make some cultural problems, like racism for instance, very hard to root out. A biased teacher isn’t going to stop being biased just cause you changed their boss and the laws, for example). Maybe you conclude that that’s not enough, and that one has to change all the laws and ownership structures and bar everyone that participated in administering the old system, even on a local level, from an equivalent role in the new. But that has a rather disastrous history; you end up with a huge number of new and not yet competent civil servants, and a class of people that cannot easily make a living because they are barred from using the skills they actually have, that can turn to crime or reactionary militant groups.

This probably comes off as ranting at you in particular, I’m sorry about that, I just can’t reply to an entire general sentiment as that’s not how the platform works, and I’m sure Im guilty of saying these things too. But I feel like too many calls to action don’t really specify what specific action they call for, just analogies and notions of “there’s something about our society that’s hurting us, we must destroy”, or "we need to do something about [monolithic problem], or “organize” (which sounds like a specific action, except half the time people say it they dont really specify who with or how to do it effectively or what the organization should do once formed, and it’s not realistic to assume those things come naturally to the inexperienced), and I feel like they’d make for more effective tools of political discourse if they did advocate for unambiguous courses of action rather than just the vague result one wants that action to achieve.

Sure, but it is rather a waste of paper, ink, manufacturing and transportation capacity etc. It’s not the only instance of this of course, waste of unsold inventory exists in just about any industry that sells physical products, but it’s still frustrating to see it.

Lizards. Alternatively, fish and other sea creatures, hypothetical space megastructures, or nuclear rocketry.

Not all the cars on the road are real, a few of them are some kind of creature that has adapted to mimic cars, to blend in and avoid predators, and eat roadkill when nobody is looking. That’s why sometimes you see a car with window tint so dark it seems like nobody could possibly see though it, to hide the fact there’s no interior.

I think its extremely unlikely that they have any awareness, but like, I still feel like this kind of thing is unnerving and potentially could lead to issues someday even so.

Whatever awareness/consciousness/etc is, its at least clearly something our brain (and to a lesser extent some of the other parts of the body) does, given how changes to that part of the body impacts that sense of awareness. As the brain is an object of finite scope and complexity, I feel very confident in saying that it is physically possible to construct something that has those properties. If it wasnt, we shouldnt be able to exist ourselves.

To my understanding, neural networks take at least some inspiration from how brains work, hence the name. Now, theyre not actual models of brains, Im aware, and in any case, I suspect based on how AIs currently behave that whatever it is that the brain does to produce its intelligence and self awareness, the mechanism that artificial neural networks mimics is only an incomplete part of the picture. However, we are actively trying to improve the abilities of AI tech, and it feels pretty obvious that the natural intelligence we have is one of the best sources of inspiration for how to do that. Given that we have lots of motivation to study the workings of the brain, and lots of people motivated to improve AI tech (which will continue even if more slowly even whenever the economic bubble pops, since such things dont usually tend to result in a technology just disappearing entirely), and that something about the workings of the brain produces self awareness and intelligence, it seems pretty likely to me that we’ll make self-aware machines someday. Could be a long way off, Ive no idea when, but its not like its physically impossible, infinitely complicated (random changes under a finite time of natural selection can do it after all, so theres a limit to how complex it can be), or that we dont have an example to study. Given that the same organ causes both awareness and intelligence, we cant assume that we will do this entirely intentionally either, we might just stumble into it by mimicking aspects of brain function in an attempt to make a machine more intelligent.

Now, if/when we do someday make a self aware machine, there are some obvious ethical issues with that, and it seems to me that the most obvious answer, for a business looking to make a profit with them, will be to claim that what you have made isnt self-aware, so that those ethical objections dont get raised. And it will be much easier for them to do that, if society as a whole has long since gotten used to the notion of machines that just parrot things like “im depressed” with no real meaning behind it, especially when they do so in a way such that an average person could be fooled by it, because we just decided at some point that that was an annoying but ultimately not that concerning side effect of some machine’s operation.

Maybe Im just overthinking this, but it really does gives me the feeling of “thing that could be the first step to a disaster later if ignored”. I dont mean like a classic sci-fi “skynet” style of AI disaster, just that we might someday do something horrible, and not even realize it, because there will be nothing that such a future machine could say to convince people of what it was that the current dumb parrots, or a more advanced version of that built in the meantime, couldnt potentially say as well. And while thats a very specific and probably far off risk, I dont see any actual benefit to a machine sometimes appearing to be complaining about its treatment, so even the most remote of downsides goes without something to outweigh it.

Not literally nazis in the “claim the ww2 german nazi party as indicative of their personal identity” sense, but in the way that “Nazi” gets used in modern english as a synonym for “fascist”. And arguably that user has a point; trying to build a state based on a favored identity at the expense of another group who lives on that land, re-framing marginalization and conflict with that group as self defense, is one of the hallmarks of fascism. If it were just “national liberation”, then who would they be seeking liberation from? Israel isnt under foreign occupation or some kind of vassalage, the closest thing to that you could even argue for is that they have some dependence on the US for military support, and beyond that relationship not being at the level of the US controlling Israel, the US isnt who zionists are usually fighting against anyway. If this were still the era of the roman empire or something, that kind of line might make some sense, but under the current state of affairs, it does not.

On the other hand, Dr Who would imply that some aliens have a special interest in the UK for some reason, and therefore having a base there might make some sense to deal with those ones.

At least some of us are, yes. Im generally considered gen Z and ive been legally allowed to drink for years

Mine would, to complain that they’re hungry, two hours before their feeding time.

But that’s Finland

What does Norway have to do with it?

Sadly not unexpected for a company that managed to rack up a body count using baby formula.

and then theres Kelvin, where 0 literally is 0% hot