swansont

The limitation is that reflective surfaces are not 100% reflective, and the high power needed for any appreciable acceleration makes absorptive heating a huge obstacle

Both statements can be true. You are stating something obvious (people don’t die for the same reasons as they did in the past) and also making misrepresentations about the theory. Perhaps you could give us examples of the evolution that’s happened that allegedly wasn’t from natural selection.

I thought it was clear that I can’t decipher what you’re saying, unless this whole thread is about stating an obvious, uncontested fact with no further point. Yes, we have reduced selection pressure in many ways owing to having intelligence. Individuals survive that likely would not have without our technology. What are you wishing to discuss?

Repeating yourself is not an answer to my question Which is: so what? Is your point that you need to explain the obvious? I’ve already said that we reduce selection pressure, though I wouldn’t say it’s reduced to zero. Yes. So what? It seems there’s no point to be made past this preamble of stating the obvious, to wit, that human intelligence (enabled by other evolutionary changes) has been a great advantage. I’ve been waiting for the second act, and it seems you’re reaffirming that there is none. Opposable thumbs are arguably necessary for our technology, which you have mentioned. I think the disagreement you’ve seen is from your gaps/deficiencies in understanding evolution, not in the general observation.

Ok, we have a survival advantage. So what’s the point you’re trying to make? Lots of species have a survival advantage for the world as it has recently been. You also said “Humans have been evolving for more than a million years. Back then we've evolving closer to the way wild animals have. Both society and technologies have made humans much more likely to reach reproductive age than wild animals.” You agree that our traits give us a survival advantage but you made a distinction between our advantage and “wild animals” but now that doesn’t matter? You seem to be treating human evolution as being different because we’re leveraging our intelligence and opposable thumbs, but you haven’t made a case for why that should be.

Your LLM algorithmically determines that your statements are at odds with statements made by others Are LLMs analyzing rules or just recognizing patterns in its training data? I don’t see this as projection as much as interpolation. I saw this summarized as “the centroid of thought” You’re not teaching it to play by giving it the rules, you’re training it by letting it memorize a bunch of games that have been played. How do you know when it works vs not work This is reminiscent of arguments that torture works because sometimes you get correct information.

I’m not sure if offended is the right word, but quoting responses as if they were rebuttals to a different argument or comment is certainly off-putting. If you think that’s what the responses were addressing I think you have some reading comprehension issues. Otherwise it’s not something you can call a good-faith exchange.

Yes, and? Evolution is differential reproductive success, so if you have a disability but are past the age where you reproduce, the effect you have on the gene pool isn’t the same as if you’re younger, and (again) a disability is not necessarily heritable. You can’t lump everything together as this simple citation does. A genetic defect in one environment can be neutral, or a genetic advantage, in another environment.

You mentioned technology without going into details. I’m trying to discern where you draw the line. You certainly implied it, between “what is the main driving force behind human evolution if natural selection has so much less impact on us than animals living in the wild?” and all of your examples of “unfit” people reproducing. And this. One issue is you have not quantified anything. How do you assess how much something has evolved? What evolutionary developments are you using as a comparison? What time scale are you using? I’ve already said I think we’ve reduced selection pressure You were just telling me you weren’t offering the opinions I thought you were, so what opinions are these? (and a number of misconceptions have been pointed out)

You’ve yet to show why this matters. Lots of deaths have little to do with genetics, but can be prevented, and why would society and overall intelligence (which enables technology) be treated separately? Humans aren’t the only species that use tools. Do we discount evolution in those other species? Ours doesn’t count because we are less likely to drink bad water? Your arguments give off a whiff of eugenics

Deafness and blindness, etc. aren’t necessarily heritable traits. You seem to be focused on fairly recent events because humans have been evolving for more than a million years. I think you can argue that we’ve reduced selection pressure owing to our collective intelligence

What a crock of shit. I suppose this is what bigots tells themselves in order to justify their attitudes, but, as with many of your posts, there’s no evidence that this comes from an effort to have a discussion in good faith. There’s no actual scholarship involved; no citations of laws or the Constitution that are allegedly being violated, and no investigation of other possible motivations for the policies or the public good that results from them. It’s based on bigotry and not facts (e.g. the largest group of SNAP recipients is white people). This framing isn’t consistent with rule 2.12

Collimation isn’t really necessary; you could be focusing the light near where the sail is. I think being monochromatic is the more important factor.

“Scientists say the Earth may not be engulfed by the expanding fireball of the dying Sun, which has long been assumed to be our planet's ultimate fate. This is not expected to happen for another five billion years, long after all life on Earth has been wiped out.” ‘"If tidal interactions predominate, Earth is engulfed by the Sun. If the Sun's mass loss predominates, Earth escapes into an orbit larger than the radius of its star," Mr Esseldeurs, an astrophysicist at Belgium's University of Leuven, said in a statement. Until now, scientists had favoured the first hypothesis.’ https://www.rte.ie/news/newslens/2026/0619/1579351-sun-earth/

From what I can tell, they feel they deserve more than what they have. They see others, of whom they think less, who have more, so it’s unfair. Also perhaps fed by misperceptions, like that there are more of “them” than there really are. But there’s also an attitude of making sure people who you don’t like don’t get anything, even if it means not getting things yourself.

Nothing about photon propulsion requires you use a laser; a couple of solar sails have been deployed

The issue with discussions based on imagined physics is where the line is drawn. You could imagine a reactionless drive, which would solve lots of problems, but there’s no evidence that you can do this - no existing physics that supports it, and further, it’s contrary to what we know. There’s a difference between undiscovered physics that resides in some parameter space we can’t yet probe or experience, and nonexistent physics that would have to be hiding in the parameter space we occupy. We’ve discussed photon propulsion a bit, and the numbers just don’t support it being practical. Light from the sun has additional hurdles to overcome. There’s a limit to how small a spot you can focus sunlight to, and since it’s multicolored, dispersion is a problem - each wavelength behaves slightly differently in terms of refraction and diffraction.

If we were closing in on that, would there be so many physicists with research-related jobs?

It’s also people bitter about the way they think they’ve been treated, as the exploiters weave a fiction about that. Find a scapegoat and make people afraid of and/or hate that group; they are made to be the source of all the problems. Often the scapegoats are a small minority. e.g. “Illegal immigrants are taking your jobs and housing” is generally not true, but it sure riles some people up.

Was the sun orbiting the earth actually based in physics? There was a model, but the model is mathematically valid

You might expect the technology of aliens able to pull this off to be a lot more successful.

Mimicking emotional behavior, according to its programming.

Is the bound matter closed system? I think you’re only looking at a subset; in creating a low entropy structure you are sending the (systems with) high entropy elsewhere. Does maximum entropy require every subsystem have maximum entropy?

I’d assumed we were discussing only orbital mechanics in that scenario

But trading KE and PE is true in a two-body system as well.