This isn’t something that gets solved by just hoping people’s individual lifestyle choices fix it. Production has to be scaled back, and market economics is clearly not capable of that sort of conscious decision making.

Pretty sure polar ice caps are still shrinking.

Sorry the consequences of industry aren’t snappy enough for your short attention span, I guess?

I wanna see Curzon Dax in SNW. Pretty sure the timetables match up there, given he negotiates the Khitomer accords.

Yeah, if anything the TOS ships are more realistic in regard to their interfaces. In an emergency, when you may not have lights or gravity or whatever, buttons and knobs come with certainty. Flat, featureless touchscreens? Not so much.

i feel like the answer to what is and isn’t canon can be summed up with;

Why do the klingons look different?

They always looked like that, you just didn’t notice before.

Canon has always been squishy. The Eugenics Wars takes place in the nineteen-nineties… oh but didn’t Voyager’s crew visit our nineties? Plus, DISCO had that Elon Musk name drop.

…so the timeline floats up as the present day does. Canon is just a vague sense of the things everyone agrees on.

If i were gonna write the Borg going forward, I’d have the queens be a failed experiment to elevate one drone to the role of tactician specifically to deal with the Federation. It didn’t work, so they don’t do it anymore.

We’ve never built nuclear. We not only need a reactor, buy need to buy all the relevant skills and build all the supports to create an industry.

Oh, that does change the calculation quite a bit. I wonder if this push has more to do with those submarines than any energy considerations.

excited to see how the thorium rock-salt reactors progress

It’s a long-term investment. Once it’s built, nuclear outright breaks the pricing scheme on fossil fuel energy. Surely the prudent thing is to have both it and renewables? To have one to shore up the other?

This is somewhat confusing. He’s against nuclear power, a thing that would offset a considerable amount of carbon emissions… because building a plant is a lengthy process? It’s not as if you can’t also install solar panels in the mean time

Living, growing, changing cells are pretty damn dissimilar to static circuitry. Neural networks are based on an oversimplified model of neuron cells. The model ignores the fact neurons are constantly growing, shifting, and breaking connections with one another, and flat out does not consider structures and interactions within the cells.

Metaphysics is not required to make the observation that computer programmes are magnitudes less complex than a brain.

I like to think by the time Kirk gets the enterprise, all those spacious crew quarters we see in Strange New Worlds have been eaten up by retrofits and upgrades.

The trouble with phrases like ‘neural structures’ and ‘language parsing’ is that these descriptions still play into the “AI” narrative that’s been used to oversell large language models.

Fundamentally, these are statistical weights randomly wired up to other statistical weights, tested and pruned against a huge database. That isn’t language parsing, it’s still just brute-force calculation. The understanding comes from us, from people assigning linguistic meaning to patterns in binary.

All hardware becomes legacy hardware in time. Even if we assume they’re eventually able to deliver on all those great big shiny promises, I’d rather not have to schedule an outpatient surgery just to keep up on emails. Pocket touchscreens being practically mandatory is bad enough…

And your metaphor was a fun oversimplification.

Desertification has increased

Local flora has decreased

Rabbit populations have octupled

Deer populations have doubled

Yeah yeah, you see the individual and not the historical pattern.

Isn’t it funny that the US keeps doing this? The presidents are incidental, flitting in and out of office with the whim of the public. But the conflicts? Those last. Nuclear rockets parked in Yugoslavia one century, flooding Ukraine with weapons the next. You know children in Vietnam are, to this day, born with napalm induced complications?

Doesn’t this all ring a little too familiar to you? Do you think maybe our grandparents had cute little nicknames for Khrushchev, comparing him to Hitler, when they were our age?

Amazing, a century latter the blame is still squarely placed on Russia. Those people must not be capable of self-determination, am I right my good Cold Warrior? Good thing we had this stockpile of depleted uranium, by jingo! So what if it leaches into the groundwater? Canadian mining firms have been poisoning Ukrainian groundwater for decades now! What’s a little rare-earth-elements between allies, amiright?