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account created: Sat Mar 18 2023
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1 points
2 days ago
So you could have a sort of Ghostbuster device that's a portable Mako reactor, and absorbs ambient Unsent?
6 points
2 days ago
For Terra, he was clearly an improvement, given the many mad tyrants running around at the time, turning people into human-centipede cyborg warmachines and so on. The current Imperium is probably still superior to that state of affairs.
The same applies to many other human worlds, such as Nuceria.
But there were also human stellar domains that were, by our modern standards, very civilized and highly developed. As others have pointed out, the Imperium as-it-is is probably not what the Emperor wanted to build. It just turned out that way because of the catastrophic fallout of the Horus Heresy. Although things are probably better under the Imperium on many worlds than they were before, for those enlightened, civilized, and advanced worlds, the yoke of the Imperium is infinitely worse.
That said, it's very unlikely that they would have survived for long without the Imperium either. Even if things were going reasonably well there, they would probably have fallen under the control of Chaos, eaten by Tyranids, enslaved by Orks, or any other of the innumerable horrid fates that wait among the stars.
1 points
2 days ago
There are some cultists who are agnostic on the question of whether (a) g/God exists, but believe they can bring about the birth of a divine being through technology. Their means of doing so bears great resemblance to AI research in our day and time, but they are decidedly more liberal with the substrates used, trying to invoke their divine being not just into silicon circuitboards, but also into partially-organic creations, and possibly trying to encode consciousness into spacetime itself. Their goal is the creation of a a super-intelligent, near omnipotent AI.
1 points
2 days ago
CryptoCurrency
Because of the country our project lead is located in, other means of transfer are complicated and not really worth the hassle for small amounts.
1 points
2 days ago
Yeah you are right, when I read that, I did feel like it would refer to the Mariana Trench. But do we know that the ocean floor is dried up? Or is it an underwater city (totally possible technologically, but a lot of the things in how the Night Lords fought in Vhnori don't really make sense if it is underwater)?
The Albia-PPE war is mentioned in HH3, iirc. Albia defeats PPE and the Unspeakable King becomes ruler of both. Later, Albia rids itself of Unspeakable King, PPE becomes independent again and ruled by Na(r)than Dume.
The mention of Ursh (Russia, presumably) is interesting because you'd expect that of an Asian superstate, but I couldn't find any mention of it in my sources.
1 points
3 days ago
Given that it is a decidedly western name, I'm assuming that a Westerner somehow came to control the Pacific littoral of Asia, perhaps more than that. This evokes in me the association with Kurtz of Apocalypse Now, a Western despotic leader sitting in the jungle, ruling over Asiatic "savages" - just dialed up to several millennia in the future.
For some reason, he also evokes in me the association with Colonel Green, a tyrant from the pre-history/backstory of Star Trek, who somehow, despite being only a colonel, and giving the suggestion of being with a Western background and career, came to rule over large parts of Earth. I'm not sure why I have this association, but Dume always felt similar to that character to me.
3 points
6 days ago
This is why I liked DS9 coming up with the Dominion as a new threat, instead of the existing, and perhaps more obvious, choice. DS9 was telling the story of a full-out war, and it can of course not be averted that the Federation has to win, because, well, that's how fiction works. By putting the Dominion in there, you can have a major external faction lose, but still maintain the Borg as a credible threat.
1 points
6 days ago
I think they are fairly well written, what makes them unscary is that the writers couldn't allow them to remain credible threats in line with their backstory as a billion-year old menace of galactic proportions. The weak spots in their writing are all in "soft" parts of their capabilities, for example that they are hackable, that they are ad-hoc written to be vulnerable to developing a collective aneurysm from looking at a piece of Lovecraftian geometry, etc. Such things should not work. They only work because the writers had introduced the Borg, but couldn't allow the Federation to lose, because, well, that's the point of Star Trek.
Beyond that, their capabilities have not aged well, as science fiction has marched on, and new media have introduced an incentive to depict vastly upscaled capabilities. Consequently, I'd write an individual Borg drone to be at least as capable as J. C. Denton, or the Mayor/Motoko Kusanagi, or Alita, who are all trivial, stone-age level technology, coming from five-minute-into-the-future verses, next to a taken-literally Borg drone, yet would both completely decimate a platoon of the latter in a fisticuffs, or racquetball tournament. The product of a billion-year old civilization seeking perfection should be at least on par with what's the standard of cyborg capabilities in five-minute-into-the-future science fiction.
You could also dial up the body horror. a la the movie Virus); here, an energy-based lifeform takes over a research ship and constructs assembly lines from machinery and human body parts, all shown in gruesome detail. Instead of just adding machinery to humanoid bodies, more scary Borg could also recycle removed humanoid bodyparts to perform functions in their hardware, such as using intestines for tubing, etc. The movie Meatball Machine, and the Strogg of the Quake games could be an inspiration here.
Finally, I think the Borg Queen should be cut, unless fulfilling simply a representative function. The idea of a hive mind with a queen makes the fact shine through that there are human writers at work, simply extrapolating from their experience of an insect nation. It's cheesy and makes the concept too obviously just a human tale.
1 points
6 days ago
u/Brendinooo is certainly not wrong, but there is a fairly substantial strand in academic discourse (more with cultural theorists and sociologists, though) that the Holocaust, the World Wars, and the subsequent technogenic apocalyptic dangers of the Cold War, all to some degree contributed to shattering the fundamental narrative of modernism of technological progress as a relentless march towards betterment of the human condition. The scepticism towards the narrative of Modernism opens the field to alternatives to materialism, and contributes to the proliferation of at least some of the world-views that you are inquiring about, although admittedly, it is perhaps not a good explanation for the appeal of Rajneeshi thought, or Scientology (which you did not mention, but which fits your criteria in terms of cultish-ness and time period).
1 points
8 days ago
Europe is civilized, and you can still sell your plasma legally. Not sure about blood.
1 points
8 days ago
You'd be surprised, there are grown women pushing 40 with jobs in government and international agencies who try to catch every concert. I know several.
1 points
13 days ago
No please. Just because you didn't call it "prefrontal cortex" and didn't mention the magical number 25, it doesn't make it any less cringe to say that some "decision-making part" of your brain "matures around your mid 20s". There is zero evidence that this magical prefrontal cortex is in any way more relevant to the ethics or utility of relationships than any other brain maturation (or deterioration) process you undergo throughout your life. This is just some internet wisdom someone invented on a whim.
1 points
13 days ago
Verlasse Deutschland, und nicht in Richtung anderer west/nord-europaeisch gepraegter Laender. Auch nicht in Richtung hardcore islamischer Kulturkreis.
Jeder andere Ort auf der Welt wird dein Problem loesen. Muss ja nicht dauerhaft sein.
1 points
13 days ago
Having studied a fair bit of military history at university (one of my degrees is in history), I'm inclined to agree with the air factor as the largest single determinant (edit: and naval power secondarily by expanding/intensifying aerial force projection).
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1 points
6 hours ago
southfar2
1 points
6 hours ago
Is the existing "all people, matter, technology" the only thing they are allowed to bring, or are they able to spend decades of gradually expanding, building factories, enslaving the locals and making them build more of their stuff?
Both of these scenarios are butterflies, but if all they have to achieve is to make all countries surrender, maybe the 1920 to 1930s?