If it's unlawful, will Amazon be punished? Doesn't breaking the law usually mean punishment?
People get punished. Corporations receive (at most) a small fine that usually amounts to far less than what their crimes netted them.
Readit NewsCoriolis3 commented on Amazon Unlawfully Confiscated Union Literature, NLRB Finds vice.com/en/article/bvz3k... · Posted by u/cf100clunk
Coriolis3 commented on Beyond “Fermi’s Paradox” XVI: What Is the “Dark Forest” Hypothesis? universetoday.com/149410/... · Posted by u/Hooke
I wonder if we're making too many assumptions about how civilizations would live and spread. I've always wondered why our species puts so much focus on planetary colonization instead of building smaller habitats. We seem to assume we'll terraform Mars, maybe build habitats on some of the Jovian moons, then jump to the next star. It seems more logical to me to take the ISS and iterate on it, building larger habitats and learning how to live in them.
There could be trillions of habitats out there and we'd never know it. From small low-orbit stations orbiting home planets to larger complexes orbiting their stars instead up to generation ships moving to the next star to mine for more resources or to build more ships due to population limits being hit. Once you've perfected the building of habitats that are large enough and are tailored to your species specific needs, why mess around with planets that can kill you in so many different ways?
Maybe the reason we don't see anyone is because we can't resolve even very large habitats at light-year distances and the reason we don't run into them is because we don't have anything they can't get somewhere that isn't already inhabited. Perhaps they avoid inhabited systems because of the dangers involved.
I agree, for an advanced species space habitats seem far superior to planets. A constant supply of free energy (solar), easy access to endless metal (asteroids), no earthquakes/tsunamis/volcanos/wildfires. If we're talking far-future, to me the Culture and their Orbitals represent the ideal utopian endpoint for humanity.
Coriolis3 commented on Have we already been visited by aliens? newyorker.com/magazine/20... · Posted by u/elorant
That's one of the biggest problems I have with Star Trek. If we were literally gods by comparison to some fledgling species, the only ethical approach would be to elevate them and cure their diseases and advance their knowledge as quickly as humanly possible.
Check out Iain M. Banks's "Culture" novels for a sci fi society that takes that approach to other civilizations. The Culture tries to raise up every lesser species of aliens to their own level of hedonist, post-scarcity wealth and technology. "The Player of Games" is both a good introduction to the series and an example of their cultural outreach at work.