“Some people become depressed at the scale of the universe, because it makes them feel insignificant. Other people are relieved to feel insignificant, which is even worse. But, in any case, those are mistakes. Feeling insignificant because the universe is large has exactly the same logic as feeling inadequate for not being a cow. Or a herd of cows. The universe is not there to overwhelm us; it is our home, and our resource. The bigger the better.” David Deutsch
The resources are there in crazy abundance. But we will never get to them, the scale of the universe is unfathomable. Even at the speed of causality, human lifespans are simply not a match to the distances involved. And that implies we can somehow accelerate any real amounts of mass to those kinds of speeds which is already a non starter.
Our species was born on this rock and it will perish on this rock. And it will have no impact on anything even within our star system, let alone this galaxy.
The sentiment that the universe is our home is a nice one, but it’s not true at all. Existential crisis is the only reasonable thing here, at least from the lens of human existence.
Take an extreme hypothetical. Suppose in the 1500s the government of Spain had taken some artifacts relating to the indigenous peoples of New Mexico. Would the government of the United States really be the rightful owner of these artifacts?
For other countries it's not quite as extreme, but in general the link between ancient culture in place X and modern country in place X is less strong than people try to make out.
I don’t see the controversy of your example because since there was no UNESCO and other global agreements in the 1500s, the indigenous people of this area are still around and so it would be the local Native American tribes that can have a legitimate claim on their heritage.
Lots of native american tribes committed genocide and destroyed other tribes. If Tribe A made some artifacts, and then was genocided out of existence by Tribe B, which was then conquered by the Tribe C (USA). Would you want Tribe B to have ownership of the artifacts of tribe B?
Including your 'tribe C' (the USA) with two indigenous tribes (A & B) in your example is highly disingenuous. And self-serving to your contrived hypothetical.
It is an interesting theory, if I understand it. Is the Idea that controlling a geographic region makes one the rightful heir to any artifacts created by people and cultures previously in the region?
Does the USA have a claim to all indigenous Artifacts created in the US? It doesn't seem that different than Egypt laying claim to Egyptian artifacts.
I think it’s clear the spirit of my comment was to mean that the descendants of the original owners would be one of the parties with a claim to have their artefacts repatriated. It’s clearly not a strictly geographical problem.
Are we talking genetic ancestry? What if the genetic ancestors have little in common with the current geographic population What if the genetic ancestors themselves were brutal slavers and overlords who extracted the riches by force?
This is a very good point, which I brought up in another comment. Arguing on the basis of broad genetic ancestry to establish ownership of ancient artifacts can quickly get murky and nonsensical, when considering nations that exist today with similar genetic ancestry, and also those former nations which may have been antagonistic, yet have similar genetics.
The idea of a nation-state is surprisingly recent and not completely universal, right? Historically people might be organized along kinship, tribal, ethnic, religious, or some other lines. Then an empire could pop up and control various groups of those, often against their wills, sometimes via intermediaries (which might not even map well to the underlying peoples).
I do think the best thing to do is to return artifacts to their rightful owners, but figuring out who the rightful owners is, can be quite difficult.
I mean, if they stole some artifacts from a tribe, which was subsequently wiped out by a tribe of bitter rivals, do they give their artifacts back to the rival tribe that later went on to form a government? (Just as a hypothetical, hopefully this is general enough that it is clear that I’m not trying to describe any particular real situation).
Interesting thought. Perhaps the Egyptian relics should be repatriated to modern day practitioners of Egyptian polytheism. I believe the Kemetic Orthodoxy is currently headquartered in Illinois, USA.
Hah. I’m going to intentionally pass on that one, my main point was that it is hard to make these decisions. The existence of surprising edge cases like yours just goes to show that it is a hard problem.
> We're already inundated with mediocre programmers, many of whom have CS degrees, which is precisely why the industry looks at job experience more than credentials
How does looking at job experience help to distinguish good from bad developers?
You make a good point - I’m not sure it (always) does. However, it’s been my experience that hiring managers believe it to be a good indicator.
My sense is that hiring managers think academic experience is so far removed from the needs of industry that that won’t be able to understand or evaluate the merit of academic experience. I’m of the opinion that they’re mistaken, but ah well…
I think your statement "Once you have plasma breakeven you have a self-sustaining heater basically" is false. According to Wikipedia [1] - if I interpret it correctly - the fusion energy gain factor from plasma must be 5 (!) to have a self-sustaining heater:
"Most fusion reactions release at least some of their energy in a form that cannot be captured within the plasma, so a system at Q = 1 will cool without external heating. With typical fuels, self-heating in fusion reactors is not expected to match the external sources until at least Q = 5"
I oversimplified in that statement, you need more than a factor of 1 because of heat losses to the environment yes. However 5 is not much different than 1. We've gone from 0.0001 only a few years ago to close to 1 now.
And btw, you really want more than 5, 10 or 20 ideally, but again, that's not too hard as compared to how far we've come and new reactors will be beyond that soon.
Fusion begets fusion. ITER plans to have high-intensity, relatively short Q=10 shots. If the plasma heats itself then it doesn't need much heating. This sudden focus on Q is clearly the result of one vocal non-expert not understanding the field and everyone listening to them like they have something valuable to teach.
On top of that the US and Germany had the same ability, it just that they were extremely slow in their decision making.
When they finally made that step it did help. Incompetence caused scalpers to rise and profit while the rest suffered until the Government finally got their heads out of their asses.
Nothing about stalinism or communism in here. Just general incompetence.
It’s not one or the other, especially if there’s intent. Yes punish, but don’t scapegoat the whole systemic problems on the individual and then think you solved the problem by creating a ‘deterrence’ to others. Life doesn’t work that way. Imagine if every serious crime prompted a review and action to stop it ever happening again - imagine how much further along we’d be to a more just society.
