Ordinary people just trying to live their lives hate this one simple trick.

If titles are anything to go by, murderizing an absolute shitzillion of people makes monarchs pretty great.

Not at all! Remember, imagination knows no bounds. You can continue making stuff up with no basis in fact pretty much forever.

Please, lecture me more about what my motivations are. Of the two of us, you’re clearly the expert on that topic. I’m dying to hear more.

That’s also something I was told in response to my skepticism during NMS’ pre-release hype phase, and it’s a complete misunderstanding of what’s going on here. I’m not trying to stop people from being happy, on the contrary, I’m trying to help them avoid disappointment by getting them to stop huffing hopium in industrial quantities. But they don’t wanna stop.

Looking forward to the silver lining of a bad event you know to be inevitable is not the same thing as actively wishing for that event to happen.

Reading comprehension, man.

It seems that you need a refresher. I suggest you rewatch those original pre-release trailers and then try playing the game to see if it looks anything like that. I did that a few months ago, and spoiler alert, it did not. Continued support is of course praiseworthy, but it wouldn’t have been necessary if Hello Games had actually kept their promises to begin with. It boggles my mind that gamers so vehemently defend a company that took a decade longer than it should have to deliver some (not all!) of what was promised and also wasted a bunch of time and resources on bloating the game with stuff that was never mentioned and that nobody asked for. Gotta be some form of sunk cost fallacy or Stockholm syndrome or something…

Needless to say, I disagree with you that there’s little reason to believe this will be the same. On the contrary, there is every reason to believe that. Due to my skepticism, I was talked down to by people excited by the trailers back then, just like I’m being talked down to by you now. Vindication felt very sweet first time around, so I’m looking forward to round two.

BWAHAHAHAHA! No. I didn’t fall for it the first time, I see no reason to fall for it now.

I don’t see why the shareholders wouldn’t want his head on a pike as well.

I take it you have nothing else relevant to add to the topic. Cool. See you around.

Feel free to make up the difference by rereading those two sentences a hundred times. Maybe that’ll be enough for the point to get through.

4000 words? Oh please, that can be done in a hundredth of that: The laws of physics are constant, and more advanced technologies have energy requirements that must be met by preceding technologies. At the same time, each technology also has to offer enough tangible benefits to be worth pursuing on its own.

Feel free to name one or two examples and show how and why they’re incorrect.

We’re having quite a bit of trouble making that transition even with the benefits of a couple centuries of fossil-fueled industry. I find the idea of jumping directly from horse-drawn wagons to wind turbines and solar panels rather implausible.

I wonder if there’d be new fossil fuel deposits by then.

Probably not. Coal is basically trees that didn’t rot, and the reason they didn’t rot is that there were no microorganisms that could digest wood at the time. Between the evolution of wood and the evolution of organisms that could digest it, dead trees would just pile up on top of each other and sink into the ground under the weight of new layers of dead trees above them. Now that there are microorganisms that digest wood and dead trees rot away, new coal is not forming.

Oil does continue to form in some ocean areas where there is a layer of water without any oxygen on the ocean floor. Since these areas support no life, any organic remains that descend to the bottom (mostly plankton) remain unconsumed and eventually get buried and turn into oil. But it is a slow process. Estimating oil reserves is notoriously difficult, but it seems there’s about as much left in the ground as we’ve burned in the last fifty years. So in other words, four billion years of oil formation gets you about a century or two of industry. Since the Sun is about halfway through its lifespan, that means the Earth can potentially create enough juice for one more industrial civilization like ours. That’s assuming that those oil reserves are allowed to build up and don’t just get used up piecemeal by smaller civilizations arising in the interim. And also assuming that that final civilization is even able to make use of that oil, which is much harder to handle than coal (extraction, refining, transportation, etc.), without using coal as a stepping stone. And also assuming that no anaerobic microorganisms evolve that can survive on the ocean floor without oxygen and consume those organic remains, which could put a stop to oil formation just like wood-eating microorganisms put a stop to coal formation. Yeah, that seems like a lot of ifs to me…

there’s plenty of opportunity for a successor to us to reach the stars

No, there isn’t. We’ve already used up all the easily accessible sources of fossil fuels, so whoever comes after us won’t have the energy sources necessary to have an industrial revolution and will be stuck at a pre-industrial tech level forever.

this is rapidly becoming Reddit 2.0, just without spez

Becoming? Always has been.

So? Death from old age is inevitable too, that doesn’t mean I’m going to stop breathing or eating. All of life is just postponing the inevitable, but just because the inevitable is inevitable doesn’t mean we should stop postponing.

There is enough time for another intelligent species to evolve after us, the problem is that we’ve already used up all the easily accessible fossil fuels. That means they won’t have the energy sources necessary to have an industrial revolution and will be stuck at a pre-industrial tech level forever (or rather until the oceans boil off).

That’s cute and all, but it ain’t gonna be birds and deer who gets life off this rock once the Sun starts threatening to swallow it in a few billion years. We’re screwing up badly in the short term, but we’re the only hope Earth life has in the long term.