I had a MoO2 game where after winning the election I opted to reject the vote and keep playing. I went around with ships that had stellar converters destroying every enemy inhabited toxic planet, or anything that was medium or smaller without any specials.
Then I used planetary construction on the resulting asteroid field to build a large barren planet and terraform it into a Gaia world.
MOO2 had a genocide option where you could slaughter the inhabitants of a conquered planet to make room for your colonists. This decreased happiness severely. But if you built colony ships and sent them to already full worlds, the unwanted population units just ... disappeared... without affecting happiness.
The colonist get decreased happiness when you genocide the natives because they wanted to do it.
Before following any advice, opinions, or thoughts I may have expressed in the above post, be warned: I found Keven Costners "Waterworld" to be a very entertaining film.
I had a MoO2 game where after winning the election I opted to reject the vote and keep playing. I went around with ships that had stellar converters destroying every enemy inhabited toxic planet, or anything that was medium or smaller without any specials.
Then I used planetary construction on the resulting asteroid field to build a large barren planet and terraform it into a Gaia world.
Yup did that too.
Needed to make way for those intergalactic highways.
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ChanusHarbinger of the Spicy Rooster ApocalypseThe Flames of a Thousand Collapsed StarsRegistered Userregular
I had a MoO2 game where after winning the election I opted to reject the vote and keep playing. I went around with ships that had stellar converters destroying every enemy inhabited toxic planet, or anything that was medium or smaller without any specials.
Then I used planetary construction on the resulting asteroid field to build a large barren planet and terraform it into a Gaia world.
I always thought that was funny.
“How did you make this large gaia world from the remains of a tiny planet?”
“Oh... well its hollow and only 150 meters thick, but should be fine, right?”
I had a MoO2 game where after winning the election I opted to reject the vote and keep playing. I went around with ships that had stellar converters destroying every enemy inhabited toxic planet, or anything that was medium or smaller without any specials.
Then I used planetary construction on the resulting asteroid field to build a large barren planet and terraform it into a Gaia world.
I always thought that was funny.
“How did you make this large gaia world from the remains of a tiny planet?”
“Oh... well its hollow and only 150 meters thick, but should be fine, right?”
So it's just a Dyson Sphere without the ooey gooey star matter center.
Destroying planets is such a sanitized war crime. Drop a couple tons of viral agents into the atmosphere and call it a day. Sword of the Stars gets this right.
I remember playing the original Master of Orion and getting a pretty solid empire that most people weren't going to fight, and having extremely good miniaturized technology. The election (or whatever it is) came around and because I was large enough to be threatening, everyone voted against my empire and I did not manage to get a high enough percentage of the vote to win the game.
Anyway it turns out that the fastest way to increase your population's share of the vote is to stop building normal ships and start building thousands of long-range unmanned ships full of bioweapons and send them to the highly populated but undefended core worlds of your competitors. I won the next election with like 85% of the vote, despite increasing my population by about zero!
eh... it's slightly faster if you can enslave their populations via mind control, because increased ship creation and more resources to pay for maintenance.
I had a MoO2 game where after winning the election I opted to reject the vote and keep playing. I went around with ships that had stellar converters destroying every enemy inhabited toxic planet, or anything that was medium or smaller without any specials.
Then I used planetary construction on the resulting asteroid field to build a large barren planet and terraform it into a Gaia world.
I always thought that was funny.
“How did you make this large gaia world from the remains of a tiny planet?”
“Oh... well its hollow and only 150 meters thick, but should be fine, right?”
So it's just a Dyson Sphere without the ooey gooey star matter center.
Well a small one, I guess. I guess you wouldn’t have to worry about where to throw your trash (I’m guessing on this scale the gravity of the whole sphere would dominate the local gravity of whatever you were standing on and anything you threw into a hole would fall towards the center of gravity in the middle? Not sure on that honestly.).
Edit: the internet says if the planet was perfectly spherical the gravity on the inside would be 0 no matter where you were or how big the sphere was because it would cancel out. So assuming outside gravitational forces were negligible you could just float around in there indefinitely. Neat, I guess, hope you brought a source of thrust though.
Couldn't you pretty easily superheat some of the gasses in a planet's atmosphere to effectively "destroy" that planet? I mean, easily in the relative terms of sci-fi tech versus, say, blowing the whole thing up or creating an artificial black hole in the planet core or something.
"Lord Deathulon we have finalized plans for our new ultimate weapon the planet cracker see we take these big metal jaws and-"
"Let's just keep turning them into lightbulbs it saves space in the budget for team building."
Edit: if you need a cool sci-fi weapon name just call it the Incandescor Beam or something I dunno look we're igniting atmospheric gasses not running a marketing firm.
I mean if all you want to do is kill everyone you could just tow a random large asteroid in from the nearest local asteroid belt and deorbit it.
I know a lot of porcelains and glass are pretty resistant to acid as well, and can be bonded to some metals so maybe you could coat structural materials with a glass coating.. If you could stay above cloud levels I guess you may be ok, and higher altitudes should reduce the impact of the winds by thinning the atmosphere...
Is there a chemical way to convert sulfuric acid to water? With so much co2 you should be able to produce oxygen, even if just by maintaining algae farms. The more I think about it the more it sounds like a colony may be more feasible than mars..
You would have a harder time resupplying due to the gravity well, but on the other hand travel times to earth would be shorter.
It wouldn't be. The only attractive feature is earth like pressure and temperature. You'd not only have to deal with high winds and stability, nevermind trying to land resupply missions on your tossed by the wind platform, but any loss of lift means that everyone dies, you still need to be airtight and have full airlocks. Cloud cover even makes solar power an issue and in situ resource use is absurdly hard
Compared to mars, which "only" has temperature and pressure issues, but heating is a solved problem if you have electricity and standard structural materials work. You also have the option to dig a base out
I mean, Mars also has radiation and surface impact issues which are a pretty big deal, in my opinion!
We're going to make inflated dome structures to protect people living on mars!
Mars has over 200 surface impacts per earth year.
Well the domss will be small versus the surface area of the planet!
Very reassuring, that.
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That_GuyI don't wanna be that guyRegistered Userregular
IMO it would be ill advised to colonize the surface of Mars or Luna. It just so happens that both bodies have exceptionally large and stable lava tubes that would be great for such a task. I think Musk's plan is to dig down into one of those tubes for long term habitation.
Yeah, underground or semi-underground colonies make the most sense. Probably at least the living space should be underground and a seperate, airlocked dome section could be aboveground for things like agriculture, recreation, and transport (it would still be a lot easier to have aboveground trains and such for long distance transport than subway tunnels).
It solves a bunch of problems for physical protection, air containment and pressurization, radiation shielding, etc.
Probably in the future there will be laws saying you can't strip mine an entire planet if people live there, so you need to scour it of life first, then it's fine.
MayabirdPecking at the keyboardRegistered Userregular
I remember reading in my youth that there were no burrowing dinosaurs. Not that there hadn't been any evidence found of dinosaurs digging burrows, but that dinosaurs just didn't, because. These usually were in the same sorts of publications that speculated dinosaurs went extinct because they were too fat and slow or something.
I don't get people who get all pissy about new dinosaur discoveries - "They have feathers now they suck" and that sort of thing. I personally enjoy every time the BS of my childhood gets refuted. Some of them dug tunnels, the vast majority of them died when a GIANT ROCK FELL FROM SPACE, and they were fabulous.
Someone did the math and determined that it would take the sun's entire energy output for 1 week to overcome the gravitational binding energy of a planet like earth. The death star is capable of outputting that much on demand. That kind of energy production rate vastly outpaces even our sun. Wherever the death star shows up it would destroy the entire star system with its gravity alone.
I remember reading in my youth that there were no burrowing dinosaurs. Not that there hadn't been any evidence found of dinosaurs digging burrows, but that dinosaurs just didn't, because. These usually were in the same sorts of publications that speculated dinosaurs went extinct because they were too fat and slow or something.
I don't get people who get all pissy about new dinosaur discoveries - "They have feathers now they suck" and that sort of thing. I personally enjoy every time the BS of my childhood gets refuted. Some of them dug tunnels, the vast majority of them died when a GIANT ROCK FELL FROM SPACE, and they were fabulous.
I'm still mad that the SciShow guy said non-avian dinosaurs always non-aquatic so aquatic reptiles are never dinosaurs. That's not how this freaking works.
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Ninja Snarl PMy helmet is my burden.Ninja Snarl: Gone, but not forgotten.Registered Userregular
I remember reading in my youth that there were no burrowing dinosaurs. Not that there hadn't been any evidence found of dinosaurs digging burrows, but that dinosaurs just didn't, because. These usually were in the same sorts of publications that speculated dinosaurs went extinct because they were too fat and slow or something.
I don't get people who get all pissy about new dinosaur discoveries - "They have feathers now they suck" and that sort of thing. I personally enjoy every time the BS of my childhood gets refuted. Some of them dug tunnels, the vast majority of them died when a GIANT ROCK FELL FROM SPACE, and they were fabulous.
The field of paleontology doesn't work like, say, molecular biology. In molecular biology, we've barely scratched the surface of genetics and major new discoveries almost always lead to new tools or new understanding that help further development. It's also a relatively young field, having really only matured with the advent of cheap computing power. Thus, molecular biologists are used to simply learning a lot of new stuff while they continue with their work because that new stuff generally aids them instead of disproving some fundamental core of their work. The info source on what they work with is also DNA, which is available in great abundance and there's no risk of massive gaps in the data aside from what we don't understand yet; all the info is there even if we don't comprehend it. The risk in molecular biology is generally that somebody is going to out-scoop your work, not disprove everything you've built a career on. Disappointing, but not generally something that will ruin your career.
In paleontology, which has been a formal science for a couple hundred years and informally existed throughout much of human history, people adhere to proposed paradigms and then build their whole careers off those paradigms, particularly if they suggested them. That attachment generates employment and revenue in the form of grants, reputation, publishing, etc. If somebody comes up with a theory that counters your own (feathers instead of just skin, for instance), that could end your paying career and thus, naturally, people will wield all their influence to fight such ideas. It's not necessarily a matter of disagreement, but rather a matter of personal survival (though pride and ego can definitely be a thing). The field is also necessarily reliant on fairly scant info as only a tiny sliver of fossil evidence was ever even made. Having your career shut down because the info you discovered from one dig is refuted twenty years later by a dig twenty feet away is something anybody would fight personally, even if the professional move would be to examine the info and accept it as valid.
It's not a "paleontologists are jerks" thing, it's just that new theories can be direct personal threats to them because of how their funding works and thus they might choose to try and preserve their personal well-being over supporting a professionally threatening new theory. So when a whole generation of paleontologists base their work on dinosaurs just having hide run up against some newfangled idea about dinosaurs having feathers, they throw down hard because it could put them out of a job and invalidate a big chunk of their theories. The flaw isn't in the field or the people in it, it's in how they get funded because it basically forces them to fight new ideas instead of examine them.
Someone did the math and determined that it would take the sun's entire energy output for 1 week to overcome the gravitational binding energy of a planet like earth. The death star is capable of outputting that much on demand. That kind of energy production rate vastly outpaces even our sun. Wherever the death star shows up it would destroy the entire star system with its gravity alone.
I remember reading in my youth that there were no burrowing dinosaurs. Not that there hadn't been any evidence found of dinosaurs digging burrows, but that dinosaurs just didn't, because. These usually were in the same sorts of publications that speculated dinosaurs went extinct because they were too fat and slow or something.
I don't get people who get all pissy about new dinosaur discoveries - "They have feathers now they suck" and that sort of thing. I personally enjoy every time the BS of my childhood gets refuted. Some of them dug tunnels, the vast majority of them died when a GIANT ROCK FELL FROM SPACE, and they were fabulous.
I'm still mad that the SciShow guy said non-avian dinosaurs always non-aquatic so aquatic reptiles are never dinosaurs. That's not how this freaking works.
Althouth not technically correct, tt's a useful shorthand to explain why e.g., plesiosaurs are not dinosaurs.
Of course, the new Spinosaurus finds kind of puts a lie to the whole "dinosaurs were never aquatic" thing, so…
Someone did the math and determined that it would take the sun's entire energy output for 1 week to overcome the gravitational binding energy of a planet like earth. The death star is capable of outputting that much on demand. That kind of energy production rate vastly outpaces even our sun. Wherever the death star shows up it would destroy the entire star system with its gravity alone.
I remember reading in my youth that there were no burrowing dinosaurs. Not that there hadn't been any evidence found of dinosaurs digging burrows, but that dinosaurs just didn't, because. These usually were in the same sorts of publications that speculated dinosaurs went extinct because they were too fat and slow or something.
I don't get people who get all pissy about new dinosaur discoveries - "They have feathers now they suck" and that sort of thing. I personally enjoy every time the BS of my childhood gets refuted. Some of them dug tunnels, the vast majority of them died when a GIANT ROCK FELL FROM SPACE, and they were fabulous.
I'm still mad that the SciShow guy said non-avian dinosaurs always non-aquatic so aquatic reptiles are never dinosaurs. That's not how this freaking works.
Althouth not technically correct, tt's a useful shorthand to explain why e.g., plesiosaurs are not dinosaurs.
Of course, the new Spinosaurus finds kind of puts a lie to the whole "dinosaurs were never aquatic" thing, so…
In both cases, it's really an issue because people are incredibly bad at unlearning bad information. One of the biggest flaws in humans, honestly.
Someone did the math and determined that it would take the sun's entire energy output for 1 week to overcome the gravitational binding energy of a planet like earth. The death star is capable of outputting that much on demand. That kind of energy production rate vastly outpaces even our sun. Wherever the death star shows up it would destroy the entire star system with its gravity alone.
I remember reading in my youth that there were no burrowing dinosaurs. Not that there hadn't been any evidence found of dinosaurs digging burrows, but that dinosaurs just didn't, because. These usually were in the same sorts of publications that speculated dinosaurs went extinct because they were too fat and slow or something.
I don't get people who get all pissy about new dinosaur discoveries - "They have feathers now they suck" and that sort of thing. I personally enjoy every time the BS of my childhood gets refuted. Some of them dug tunnels, the vast majority of them died when a GIANT ROCK FELL FROM SPACE, and they were fabulous.
I'm still mad that the SciShow guy said non-avian dinosaurs always non-aquatic so aquatic reptiles are never dinosaurs. That's not how this freaking works.
Althouth not technically correct, tt's a useful shorthand to explain why e.g., plesiosaurs are not dinosaurs.
Of course, the new Spinosaurus finds kind of puts a lie to the whole "dinosaurs were never aquatic" thing, so…
In both cases, it's really an issue because people are incredibly bad at unlearning bad information. One of the biggest flaws in humans, honestly.
I think that’s one thing that isn’t emphasized enough in school.
Like we teach kids science, history, social studies, etc, but its all grossly simplified at best. But no one really ever says in school “we are teaching you this, but its really only a half-truth because you are a kid and wouldn’t understand the whole truth and most of the time we don’t even really know the truth entirely anyway.
Like kids go to school and get taught things but no one ever teaches the concept that knowledge isn’t an all or nothing thing but more of “we will teach you 10% of the truth in elementary school and you get to high school and we will get you up to 25% and in college they’ll maybe get you up to 50% and then if you get a pHD and work in the field a few years maybe you’ll get to 75% of the truth but beyond that you are on your own because even the experts are only going to get to 85 or 90% and beyond that who the fuck knows, and also things might come along in that last 10% as we discover it that make us have to vastly reframe or reconsider the 90% we thought we knew”.
So people float around through life thinking they know jack shit, when in fact they don’t know jack shit, and in fact no one knows jack shit, some people are just better at functioning with an incomplete set of information than others.
Like we teach kids science, history, social studies, etc, but its all grossly simplified at best. But no one really ever says in school “we are teaching you this, but its really only a half-truth because you are a kid and wouldn’t understand the whole truth and most of the time we don’t even really know the truth entirely anyway.
I agree with your overall point, but I think I must have been one of the lucky ones because I was told that the chemistry and physics etc I was being taught as a kid was a simplification - and that the reality was significantly more complicated in most cases.
I remember coming across the concept of "Lies-to-children" in the first Science of the Discworld book many years ago. Really helped shape my understanding of my own knowledge, and lack thereof.
Like we teach kids science, history, social studies, etc, but its all grossly simplified at best. But no one really ever says in school “we are teaching you this, but its really only a half-truth because you are a kid and wouldn’t understand the whole truth and most of the time we don’t even really know the truth entirely anyway.
I agree with your overall point, but I think I must have been one of the lucky ones because I was told that the chemistry and physics etc I was being taught as a kid was a simplification - and that the reality was significantly more complicated in most cases.
My biology teacher, when it came to learning about the immune system, came right out and told us that we were learning stuff that was no longer considered accurate, but was necessary as the accurate stuff hadn't been incorporated into the exam
We also learned about the plum pudding model, Lemarckian evolutionary theory, and the light as a wave/particle experiments, which helped with the idea that scientific knowledge is constantly evolving
I learned that aurora were reflections off the ice. Because that was on the state standardized test. In 2001.
To emphasize how sad that is, this particular science test was created in the 90's. It was not a holdover, it was just made wrong.
To be fair, most teachers (and the old but not THAT old books) taught it right, with the end of class addition that, "If you get this on your MEAP all this won't even be an option."
Hevach on
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ChanusHarbinger of the Spicy Rooster ApocalypseThe Flames of a Thousand Collapsed StarsRegistered Userregular
I learned that aurora were reflections off the ice. Because that was on the state standardized test. In 2001.
To emphasize how sad that is, this particular science test was created in the 90's. It was not a holdover, it was just made wrong.
To be fair, most teachers (and the old but not THAT old books) taught it right, with the end of class addition that, "If you get this on your MEAP all this won't even be an option."
yeah i was gonna say i learned about the aurora in school well before 2001 and i've never heard of this ice reflection theory
One of the most insightful classes I ever had was "The history of physics 1850-1930"
This was a 3rd year class at the physics department I was allowed to take while not being qualified, and unfortunately the math was too hard so I didn't take the exam.
But taking 10x 3 hours to discuss every step between Newton / Maxwell into SR/GR and QM really highlighted to me how all these models were arrived at. What problems existed and had to be solved. How much excitement the new models gave when they showed predictive qualities and led to new discoveries.
I have always wondered about this wisdom of some half steps though. The Bohr atom model, for instance, never made much sense to me.
I learned that aurora were reflections off the ice. Because that was on the state standardized test. In 2001.
To emphasize how sad that is, this particular science test was created in the 90's. It was not a holdover, it was just made wrong.
To be fair, most teachers (and the old but not THAT old books) taught it right, with the end of class addition that, "If you get this on your MEAP all this won't even be an option."
yeah i was gonna say i learned about the aurora in school well before 2001 and i've never heard of this ice reflection theory
It was in a lot of school level texts until the 60's (and my parents old 1971 World Book Encyclopedia), but to emphasize how out of date it was even then, Benjamin Actual Fucking Franklin disproved it, and proposed that it was a buildup of electrical charge in the atmosphere (which he believed explained why it was a new and growing phenomenon - the Maunder Minimum created an almost 100 year period with extremely little aurora so by that time if you lived farther south than Svalbard your area probably hadn't seen an aurora in several generations). Which wasn't strictly correct, but was reasonably close considering the contemporary understanding.
It did persist far enough into modern understanding that NASA included it in their brochure on common knowledge and misconceptions about aurora:
One of the most insightful classes I ever had was "The history of physics 1850-1930"
This was a 3rd year class at the physics department I was allowed to take while not being qualified, and unfortunately the math was too hard so I didn't take the exam.
But taking 10x 3 hours to discuss every step between Newton / Maxwell into SR/GR and QM really highlighted to me how all these models were arrived at. What problems existed and had to be solved. How much excitement the new models gave when they showed predictive qualities and led to new discoveries.
I have always wondered about this wisdom of some half steps though. The Bohr atom model, for instance, never made much sense to me.
The Bohr model of the atom is crazy because the simplifying factors it provides are still useful! Like the basic interpretation of hydrogen NMR spectra works if you just assume the Bohr model of the atom is correct because it gives you approximately the correct magnetic field for the atom and that's what NMR is measuring.
Two years ago, planetary scientists reported the discovery of a large saltwater lake under the ice at Mars’s south pole, a finding that was met with excitement and some scepticism. Now, researchers say they’ve confirmed the presence of that lake — and found three more.
Considering what Himalayan salt goes for, I wonder if I should invest in Mars salt futures.
A Black Hole at the Center of Earth Plays the Role of the Biggest System of Telecommunication for Connecting DNAs, Dark DNAs and Molecules of Water on 4+N- Dimensional Manifold
The earth’s core is the biggest system of telecommunication which exchanges waves with all DNAs and molecules of water. Imaging of DNAs on the interior of the metal of the core produces a DNA black brane with around 109 times longer than the core of the earth which is compacted and creates a structure similar to a black hole or black brane. We have shown that this DNA black brane is the main cause of high temperature of core and magnetic of earth.
It's full of unrelated references that aren't actually referenced in the paper, some of which are incomplete or improperly cited, but which hit all the keywords.
13 authors from unrelated fields took part, but they have an interesting common thread: several of them are vocal critics of journals that do things like "automated peer review" or "pay to publish" shenanigans, and several others have a large volume of bizarre word salad works, some of which are known to be created by bots to defeat automated peer review scripts being run in the same journal, one author in particular had been releasing several papers per month in it, each as nonsensical as the last (while actual reasonable sounding work was published elsewhere).
Thankfully the stupid media hasn't gotten ahold of this yet and issued breathless reports about the stunning findings, but the smart media isn't quite getting to the conclusion either. The short of it seems to be that scientists fed up with crappy journals have teamed up to ridicule this one into nonbeing.
Some...French? guys did a similar thing a decade or two ago but to prove a different point. Theirs was, if I recall correctly, a physics paper about pre-big-bang thermodynamics which they wrote to be incredibly dense buzzword-and-cross-reference gibberish with meaningless equations thrown in. Nobody could actually prove it was meaningless, though, and it sounded enough like real theoretical physics papers that it got published.
If that black hole telecommunications dark DNA paper got 'auto peer-reviewed' then I think the auto peer review system deserves the criticism. I think the headline I saw about it on Futurism said it was published in the New Macedonia Journal of Medicine or something?
Open Access Macedonian Journal of Medical Science. Some browsing of their index turns up a lot of what looks like real work, but also a lot of quackery and a ton of word salad. They claim to be peer reviewed but there seems to be a lot of questions on that.
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Then I used planetary construction on the resulting asteroid field to build a large barren planet and terraform it into a Gaia world.
Needed to make way for those intergalactic highways.
dog catching the mail truck really
I always thought that was funny.
“How did you make this large gaia world from the remains of a tiny planet?”
“Oh... well its hollow and only 150 meters thick, but should be fine, right?”
So it's just a Dyson Sphere without the ooey gooey star matter center.
eh... it's slightly faster if you can enslave their populations via mind control, because increased ship creation and more resources to pay for maintenance.
Well a small one, I guess. I guess you wouldn’t have to worry about where to throw your trash (I’m guessing on this scale the gravity of the whole sphere would dominate the local gravity of whatever you were standing on and anything you threw into a hole would fall towards the center of gravity in the middle? Not sure on that honestly.).
Edit: the internet says if the planet was perfectly spherical the gravity on the inside would be 0 no matter where you were or how big the sphere was because it would cancel out. So assuming outside gravitational forces were negligible you could just float around in there indefinitely. Neat, I guess, hope you brought a source of thrust though.
Just like the dinosaurs did!
I mean, Mars also has radiation and surface impact issues which are a pretty big deal, in my opinion!
Mars has over 200 surface impacts per earth year.
Well the domss will be small versus the surface area of the planet!
Very reassuring, that.
It solves a bunch of problems for physical protection, air containment and pressurization, radiation shielding, etc.
Turns out there absolutely were, only no one had found the evidence up to then. And now a new older, even better preserved specimen of a different species has been found.
I don't get people who get all pissy about new dinosaur discoveries - "They have feathers now they suck" and that sort of thing. I personally enjoy every time the BS of my childhood gets refuted. Some of them dug tunnels, the vast majority of them died when a GIANT ROCK FELL FROM SPACE, and they were fabulous.
I'm still mad that the SciShow guy said non-avian dinosaurs always non-aquatic so aquatic reptiles are never dinosaurs. That's not how this freaking works.
The field of paleontology doesn't work like, say, molecular biology. In molecular biology, we've barely scratched the surface of genetics and major new discoveries almost always lead to new tools or new understanding that help further development. It's also a relatively young field, having really only matured with the advent of cheap computing power. Thus, molecular biologists are used to simply learning a lot of new stuff while they continue with their work because that new stuff generally aids them instead of disproving some fundamental core of their work. The info source on what they work with is also DNA, which is available in great abundance and there's no risk of massive gaps in the data aside from what we don't understand yet; all the info is there even if we don't comprehend it. The risk in molecular biology is generally that somebody is going to out-scoop your work, not disprove everything you've built a career on. Disappointing, but not generally something that will ruin your career.
In paleontology, which has been a formal science for a couple hundred years and informally existed throughout much of human history, people adhere to proposed paradigms and then build their whole careers off those paradigms, particularly if they suggested them. That attachment generates employment and revenue in the form of grants, reputation, publishing, etc. If somebody comes up with a theory that counters your own (feathers instead of just skin, for instance), that could end your paying career and thus, naturally, people will wield all their influence to fight such ideas. It's not necessarily a matter of disagreement, but rather a matter of personal survival (though pride and ego can definitely be a thing). The field is also necessarily reliant on fairly scant info as only a tiny sliver of fossil evidence was ever even made. Having your career shut down because the info you discovered from one dig is refuted twenty years later by a dig twenty feet away is something anybody would fight personally, even if the professional move would be to examine the info and accept it as valid.
It's not a "paleontologists are jerks" thing, it's just that new theories can be direct personal threats to them because of how their funding works and thus they might choose to try and preserve their personal well-being over supporting a professionally threatening new theory. So when a whole generation of paleontologists base their work on dinosaurs just having hide run up against some newfangled idea about dinosaurs having feathers, they throw down hard because it could put them out of a job and invalidate a big chunk of their theories. The flaw isn't in the field or the people in it, it's in how they get funded because it basically forces them to fight new ideas instead of examine them.
Althouth not technically correct, tt's a useful shorthand to explain why e.g., plesiosaurs are not dinosaurs.
Of course, the new Spinosaurus finds kind of puts a lie to the whole "dinosaurs were never aquatic" thing, so…
In both cases, it's really an issue because people are incredibly bad at unlearning bad information. One of the biggest flaws in humans, honestly.
I think that’s one thing that isn’t emphasized enough in school.
Like we teach kids science, history, social studies, etc, but its all grossly simplified at best. But no one really ever says in school “we are teaching you this, but its really only a half-truth because you are a kid and wouldn’t understand the whole truth and most of the time we don’t even really know the truth entirely anyway.
Like kids go to school and get taught things but no one ever teaches the concept that knowledge isn’t an all or nothing thing but more of “we will teach you 10% of the truth in elementary school and you get to high school and we will get you up to 25% and in college they’ll maybe get you up to 50% and then if you get a pHD and work in the field a few years maybe you’ll get to 75% of the truth but beyond that you are on your own because even the experts are only going to get to 85 or 90% and beyond that who the fuck knows, and also things might come along in that last 10% as we discover it that make us have to vastly reframe or reconsider the 90% we thought we knew”.
So people float around through life thinking they know jack shit, when in fact they don’t know jack shit, and in fact no one knows jack shit, some people are just better at functioning with an incomplete set of information than others.
I agree with your overall point, but I think I must have been one of the lucky ones because I was told that the chemistry and physics etc I was being taught as a kid was a simplification - and that the reality was significantly more complicated in most cases.
You just have be aware of that fact and have a little humility.
My biology teacher, when it came to learning about the immune system, came right out and told us that we were learning stuff that was no longer considered accurate, but was necessary as the accurate stuff hadn't been incorporated into the exam
We also learned about the plum pudding model, Lemarckian evolutionary theory, and the light as a wave/particle experiments, which helped with the idea that scientific knowledge is constantly evolving
To emphasize how sad that is, this particular science test was created in the 90's. It was not a holdover, it was just made wrong.
To be fair, most teachers (and the old but not THAT old books) taught it right, with the end of class addition that, "If you get this on your MEAP all this won't even be an option."
yeah i was gonna say i learned about the aurora in school well before 2001 and i've never heard of this ice reflection theory
This was a 3rd year class at the physics department I was allowed to take while not being qualified, and unfortunately the math was too hard so I didn't take the exam.
But taking 10x 3 hours to discuss every step between Newton / Maxwell into SR/GR and QM really highlighted to me how all these models were arrived at. What problems existed and had to be solved. How much excitement the new models gave when they showed predictive qualities and led to new discoveries.
I have always wondered about this wisdom of some half steps though. The Bohr atom model, for instance, never made much sense to me.
It was in a lot of school level texts until the 60's (and my parents old 1971 World Book Encyclopedia), but to emphasize how out of date it was even then, Benjamin Actual Fucking Franklin disproved it, and proposed that it was a buildup of electrical charge in the atmosphere (which he believed explained why it was a new and growing phenomenon - the Maunder Minimum created an almost 100 year period with extremely little aurora so by that time if you lived farther south than Svalbard your area probably hadn't seen an aurora in several generations). Which wasn't strictly correct, but was reasonably close considering the contemporary understanding.
It did persist far enough into modern understanding that NASA included it in their brochure on common knowledge and misconceptions about aurora:
https://pwg.gsfc.nasa.gov/polar/EPO/northern_lights/aurora_broch.pdf
The Bohr model of the atom is crazy because the simplifying factors it provides are still useful! Like the basic interpretation of hydrogen NMR spectra works if you just assume the Bohr model of the atom is correct because it gives you approximately the correct magnetic field for the atom and that's what NMR is measuring.
When we hit 500,000 subs.
The Monster Baru Cormorant - Seth Dickinson
Steam: Korvalain
Stretch Göhl.
Considering what Himalayan salt goes for, I wonder if I should invest in Mars salt futures.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6910781/
It's full of unrelated references that aren't actually referenced in the paper, some of which are incomplete or improperly cited, but which hit all the keywords.
13 authors from unrelated fields took part, but they have an interesting common thread: several of them are vocal critics of journals that do things like "automated peer review" or "pay to publish" shenanigans, and several others have a large volume of bizarre word salad works, some of which are known to be created by bots to defeat automated peer review scripts being run in the same journal, one author in particular had been releasing several papers per month in it, each as nonsensical as the last (while actual reasonable sounding work was published elsewhere).
Thankfully the stupid media hasn't gotten ahold of this yet and issued breathless reports about the stunning findings, but the smart media isn't quite getting to the conclusion either. The short of it seems to be that scientists fed up with crappy journals have teamed up to ridicule this one into nonbeing.
If that black hole telecommunications dark DNA paper got 'auto peer-reviewed' then I think the auto peer review system deserves the criticism. I think the headline I saw about it on Futurism said it was published in the New Macedonia Journal of Medicine or something?