u/Bataranger999

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What sort of outer material could a humanoid robot be made of that it could "feasibly" regenerate from damage done to itself? This healing factor would only work on exterior damage. It couldn't regenerate damage done to its circuitry, or regrow limbs after they've been destroyed, but could regenerate quickly from large dents, bullet holes, scrapes, etc. on its surface.

What sort of surface material would you write this robot as being made of?

There is this odd misconception about Stoic philosophy that it's "against" anger. Every once in a while, aside from all the usual posters asking how Stoicism can help them jettison their higher brain functions and lobotomize themselves, you get people who have turned against the entire faculty of anger. These people view anger as completely redundant to the business of contentment and as some sort of "bug" in the human mind that serves no practical purpose.

The primary culprit for this seems to be Seneca, who rails extensively against the emotion in the passage On Anger. What they fail to notice is that in the first few lines of the passage, it's specifically a passion of anger Seneca says he views as dangerous:

>1 You’ve pressed me, Novatus, to prescribe a way of soothing anger: from this I infer that you’ve rightly come to fear this passion, especially and above all, as foul and frenzied. 33 All other passions have something calm and quiet about them; this one consists entirely in aroused assault. 34 Raging with an inhuman desire to inflict pain in combat and shed blood in punishment, it cares nothing for itself provided it can harm the other: it throws itself upon the very weapons raised against it, hungry for a vengeance that will bring down the avenger too.

In this case, he's specifically talking about a type of anger that never goes away. Anger in the Stoic theory of mind roughly means "a judgement that something unfair is happening". Anger is simply what "perceiving an injustice" feels like in the conscious mind. A passion of anger is what it looks like if the person reasons the injustice still hasn't been resolved, or the injustice is something that's actually no injustice at all. A logical error, basically.

This is where people who aren't familiar with the Stoic theory of mind get things wrong. They don't treat anger as the manifestation of a certain type of judgement that must be resolved for the person to no longer be angry. Instead, they see it as some sort of "bug" that always gets in the way and can never be reasoned about.

This has the fatal result of the anger these people feel almost always resulting in a passion, because they're not seeing a problem in anything except the fact they're feeling angry. This is the origin of people with "anger issues" who are stuck spinning in circles, trying to "deal" with their anger instead of seeing their anger as the natural consequence of judging everything around them as an injustice, and working on changing those judgements instead.

Now, this doesn't mean all passions of anger can be resolved the same way. A husband who reasons that his wife deserves to be subjected to domestic abuse, and acts on that impression, will only make himself more sick. The husband's passion of anger exists because he's made a logical error while reasoning about his wife, and can never be resolved as long as he still believes his judgement is sound. This is exactly the type of anger Seneca holds disdain for - a person under the thrall of a passion of anger who sees the injustice in their fellow human beings, harming themselves and others as a result of that error.

From what I've observed, the people who think anger itself is a bug simply cannot differentiate between the normal precognition of anger from a passion of anger. They don't believe a person motivated by anger to defend someone being bullied and a person motivated by anger to abuse their wife are pretty much experiencing the same emotion.

Their assumption is wrong - they are. Both people are perceiving an "injustice" and feel that as the emotion of anger. The only difference is that the first instance of anger won't become a passion - it will be resolved once the person acts on the anger and judges the bullying over with once they've done their part. The second instance will only get worse the more that person acts on the anger, becoming the kind of passion Seneca rails against.

See how in the bullying situation, anger directly served the person and is the reason why the actual injustice was settled. They didn't turn on the emotion. They made a correct, pro-social judgement that manifested as anger, acted on it, and resolved the situation.

The second instance of anger was a logical error - it harmed the person. It could be more accurately called "rage", which is universally what we call that type of manic, malcontent-inducing anger. It's what Seneca considers to be the source of "an inhuman desire to inflict pain".

People who believe anger can never be a positive force are making a categorical error on what that emotion is and how to manage it well - or worse, they think it *can't* be managed well. In that case, they doom themselves to the life of an inert punching bag who's scared they'll turn into a raging lunatic if they even dare to act on the sense that their situation isn't desirable and must change.

These civilizations would maybe colonize a few other star systems around their home system, then would find no further motivation to keep on repeating the same process billions of times over again. Instead, they'd focus on "aestivating", which is to say, focus on their computational technology to run vast simulations of anything they could ever want.

STL stands for Slower than Light. Which STL travel method do you favor the most compared to others?

1. A single starship from a K2 civilization en route to our solar system detected 5 light years away.

2. A fleet of berserker probes heading directly for Earth detected 100 light years away.

3. The entirety of the Large Magellanic Cloud being moved towards the Milky Way via stellar engines for each star, detected 163,000 light years away.

The starship and probes are traveling at relativistic speeds. Somewhere between 0.5 - 0.8c. The stellar engines are moving roughly at 0.0033c.

The armor is durable enough to tank several point-blank explosives and most calibers of bullets, and enhances the user's strength and speed to decent levels. It can lift something like a car over its head or rip a piece of thick alloy in two, but it's not really designed to do that without expending significant amounts of power in one burst.

The invisibility field works by bending light in the visible range around the suit, and is created by a "cloaking generator" installed within. The device and the armor itself are powered by a micronized energy-dense fuel cell. It bends light in the infrared range as well, keeping it hidden from thermal sensors up to a certain distance.. As a result, if it's turned on for too long, it'll fry the user inside from the heat buildup. The cloak field has to be off at some points during a mission to allow the suit to cool off.

The obvious problem of seeing out of the suit while the light is bent is the only thing I've used "handwavium" technology for so far. The invisibility can be turned on and off at will by the user. The power armor dampens sounds produced by itself to a certain degree, so it has the stealth applications of invisibility too.

It's not inaudible - it can be heard if an enemy is close by and the user is walking. The light bending effect can also be noticed from up close if the enemy is paying attention to that certain spot. The armor is deployed in small numbers toward unsuspecting targets instead of in an active and crowded battlefield.

Is there something I've overlooked while adapting this to a semi-hard sci-fi setting? Don't mind the innuendo of "semi-hard".

The invisibility field works by bending light around the suit, and is created by a "cloaking generator" installed within the suit. The device and the armor itself are powered by a micronized energy-dense fuel cell. The invisibility can be turned on and off at will by the user. The power armor dampens sounds produced by itself to a certain degree, so it has the obvious stealth applications of invisibility too. It's not inaudible though - it can be heard if an enemy is close by and the user is walking. The light bending effect can also be noticed from up close if the enemy is paying attention to that certain spot.

The way I'm currently using it in combat for a story is that the operator of the power armor lets an enemy glimpse them in one spot, then triggers the cloak field so that the enemy fires at the empty space where they last saw the operator, only to get blindsided from a different direction as the operator reappears elsewhere. Pretty much using it to get the upper hand in firefights.