this post was submitted on 16 Jun 2025
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Hurling ordure at the TREACLES, especially those closely related to LessWrong.
AI-Industrial-Complex grift is fine as long as it sufficiently relates to the AI doom from the TREACLES. (Though TechTakes may be more suitable.)
This is sneer club, not debate club. Unless it's amusing debate.
[Especially don't debate the race scientists, if any sneak in - we ban and delete them as unsuitable for the server.]
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Since nobody else has mentioned it:
The (fictional) Ringworld is an immensely old mega-engineering project, requiring super-strength materials to put a habitable ring around a sunlike-star; a day-night cycle is provided by solar-collecting shadow squares in a smaller (thus faster-moving) orbit, connected by super-strength wire.
This is an unstable arrangement, and requires repeated adjustments every century or so. Naturally, that system broke down (via capitalists grabbing the expensive fusion power plants for their own purposes) and the backup system was destroyed by a bioengineered weapon.
The resolution to all this depends on psychic luck produced by evolutionary processes over the course of a handful of generations on Earth.
Truly, "hard SF" means that enough details have been given that you can be sure it won't work.
Oh and don't forget the cat people that used to be more aggressive but now they are nicer because of all the long wars in which the aggressive ones killed each other. I liked Ringworld overall, but indeed there is an awful lot of eugenics thinking in there.