u/DiamondCoal

So a solar gravitational lens is a telescope that is aimed directly at the sun in order to observe the light that is bent around the sun. Effectively focusing the light rays into a natural telescope. NASA scientists have proposed missions to actually crate various observation satellites so we can observe these exoplanets but no offer has been offficially greenlit.

But what would this effect look like from the other side. If we were being observed by various gravitational lenses and we just looked at various stars to see an eye staring back at us. Obviously this would be pretty difficult to do due to these telescopes being monumentally smaller than actual planets. But if we assume that an advanced alien species used some other detection method to know some basic characteristics of Earth it would be a potentially habitable planet by their estimates and worth creating a specialized telescope for it.

On our end all we would need to do is look back. With a big enough telescope of course.

In Spanish and Portuguese the term for someone from the US is “Estadouidenise” which translates roughly to “United Statezian” which is not a word in English. But ever since auto translate has appeared on Twitter or Threads every time someone mentions Americans or America the country Latin Americans say “Um aktuualllly America is a continent, not a country, I’m also American”. Oh my god it’s so annoying. There’s no way to say it in English. Fuck me.

And then some of them have the audacity to say that America is actually ONE continent. I’m sorry but if you consider Europe or Africa a continent you better consider North America and South America different continents. At least North and South America have different tectonic plates and an isthmus to delineate. If India isn’t considered its own continent despite it having taller mountains than the Caucasus and its own tectonic plate but Europe gets a pass, I’m actually gonna tweak.

But back to the main point, only Latin Americans get like this. Even terrorists who hate the United States call the US, Americans. This is strictly a one sided beef the Latinos have with the rest of the world. In Chinese they call people from the US “Měi Guó Rén” while they call North America “Běi Měi Zhōu”. Měi being a spin on “Merica”. This is not people being lazy or dumb this is just what it’s called.

Hey yall, I loved the newest DLC but I felt like it lacks the sense of replayability that Utopia mode offers. I just wanted to offer some things I think would be a good addition to add into Utopia mode.

1. Colonial Politics: Factions literally disappear in colonies. Maybe because it would be too hard to balance or something but it genuinely feels jarring. A lot of faction hubs just don’t work the same in colonies and it’s pretty strange. Here’s how I’d do it: when the colony is first established you get the choice to put one community and one faction in the colony. The Utopia abilities and faction hubs only apply to the colony. Frostland bonuses would also need to be modified. Outposts only get the bonus from the city assigned to them. Frost team efficiency bonuses now work as an outposts generating additional frost teams instead of less teams needed to run it.

2. Additional communities/factions: Honestly 11Bit just needs to recycle the story mode factions into the Utopia mode. Just a stylized change would be nice. Sure maybe a couple of Utopia abilities are new but I don’t need the whole tree to be different.

3. Negotiations & War: In Utopia mode there are 3 colony sites and 1 self governing outpost that is always discovered last. It would be much more interesting if this self governing outpost could be discovered earlier and negotiated with. Basically a scenario that mimics Breach of Trust parts 1 & 2. All of the gameplay mechanics are already there anyways.

4. Scenario timing: Please give us the option to control when the different scenarios happen (other than No Steam Cores obv). The long Whiteout usually takes way too long to arrive and the Plague + Doomsayers come seemingly randomly. It’s easy to deal with these scenarios one at a time but the game becomes crazy difficult when multiple activate at the same time. I’m not opposed to difficulty it’s just that there’s no control that bugs me.

In the new DLC we experience the downsides of geothermal energy, a once seemingly unlimited resource now comes with a downside: an unstable geology that brings earthquakes and volcanic eruptions. I believe this gives the perfect explanation for how the world got so cold.

Mass use of geothermal energy at either Yosemite Yellowstone, Toba or Cerro Galan caused a super eruption that spewed clouds of thick dark smoke into the sky that darkened the days and brought cold to the earth. The darkness brought snow across the world gradually which increased the albedo (how reflective the earth is) which gradually made the earth colder and colder in the next decades (FP1). Additionally this abundance of dark ask also clumped together into what we now call whiteout storms.

This all corresponds to a single invention: the steamcore. The invention of the steamcore was a marvel of professor Hawkins and the British empire. The ability to harness steam into a highly efficient turbine was a miracle of science. But it was also the primary driver of the new ice age. Eventually the technology faced extensive criticism for what became obvious, it was the sole technology responsible for what led to the newest mass extinction event. Professor Hawkins needed to flee during the fall of London so he boarded an experimental steam powered aircraft. Suddenly, sabotage! A resentful person destroyed the aircraft and Hawkins in it. Additionally this person also destroyed all of the professor’s blueprints for the steam core.

In the end the only person left who could manufacture the steam core was one Nikola Tesla, the young pupil of Hawkins. Despite this Tesla decided to avoid using the steam core to power his new city and instead directly heat the city via electricity. But Tesla’s obsession with electricity and unwillingness to utilize steam cores for heating resulted in a massive fire that burned Tesla city to the ground.

Edit: To all the people who say “that’s not how geothermal energy works it couldn’t reasonably effect a volcano” I’m sorry but a colony with like 5k people max basically destabilized a volcano in universe. We’re not talking about real life. Geothermal energy would actually probably cool down a volcano irl but this is a video game.

And to people saying a volcano couldn’t cause as dramatic a shift in the climate as we see in game. Yea, there’s no way any volcano or asteroid or human intervention could do that. The Chicxulub impact that killed the dinosaurs literally landed in an oil field and killed most animal species only dropped the temperature by 26°. An impact would kill most humans.

Finally if you think the earth’s orbit was moved and that’s why it is cold you’re still probably off as moving the earth to Mars’s orbit would only cool the planet by like 30°. And yes, dimming the sun is also not the case because Mars only gets 44% of the sunlight compared to Earth. So unless a literal STAR dimmed bellow like 30% luminosity you wouldn’t see the -70° c temperature low we see in game. Yes I know the game takes place in the north so it’s naturally colder but Svalbard (at or near where the game is estimated to take place) reaches -40° at its absolute coldest (and that’s not the average daily temperature btw).

This isn’t to say that multiple things couldn’t have caused it. The most common theory is that an asteroid hit a supervolcano for example (although realistically an asteroid that hits the ground doesn’t contribute much to the temperature equation). My point is that there is no way to get the earth as cold as it gets in the game by any realistic measure.

I know this it titled like there would be one big moment you’d realize your career is facing a serious bust in the next year or two. But I’m talking like a medium term (3-7 years) downturn with limited professional growth and high risk of job loss. How bad would it realistically need to get before you considered something else?

And I know, some people are gonna say “can’t be my job because it’s too important/specialized” but that’s the beauty of a “what if” question, it doesn’t need to be realistic.

There are three main technologies we cite when we talk about going from cavemen to early societies: fire, tools and agriculture. While plenty of people have discussed fire and the concept of animals using tools something more stringent may be agriculture. Simply put, like the rocket equation, early farmers often found that the most efficient method to make more food is to have children. But children required more food, so in order for a non-nomadic society to form it required a caloric efficiency that supersedes the energy required to produce the calories in the first place. Humans just barely made it over this hurdle 10,000 years ago as most societies required 80-90% of the population to be farmers/pasteurizers in order to survive sustainably.

This really couldn’t have happened without a long term commitment to the mass domestication of animals and plants to our benefit. Sounds simple enough, if a society is to emerge it requires a long term domestication initiative. The problem is that the more calorie dense a plant/animal becomes that provides a higher evolutionary pressure for other species to consume the plant/animal. This reverse domestication pressure came at early humans from all sides: molds adapted to eat old food, locusts swarmed crop fields, rats nibbled at food stocks, coyotes and foxes raided chicken coops and in modern day sharks follow fishing vessels for a quick meal.

At the very least this means for societies emerge the domesticator species must be at the top of the large animal food chain to protect against other large animals from stealing domesticated animals, have a strong immune system to protect against most bacteria & funguses that consume their food, and even domesticate extra plants/animals whose only purpose is to protect the main food source.

While you may imagine dogs and cats when I invoke domesticating a side-protector species to protect crops the actual most common protector species is actually funguses like arbuscular mycorrhizal which protect plants against harmful bacteria. Our entire species is built off the workings of hundreds of smaller species which eat our scraps and the scraps of the things we eat. All supported by a species with a strong immune system that was so destructive that predators went extinct in their presence.

All of this is goes on with the background of malthusian pressures which force any marginally efficient species which grow too large which will effectively overuse the limited nutrients of their environment. Again the process of domestication causes domesticated produce to become adverse to decay. If this process is too efficient and produce decays too slowly the environment could completely collapse.

While I don’t think agriculture is THE great filter it is certainly a significant filter for any species to become dominant. Agriculture essentially puts selective pressure on other species and requires up-in-coming domesticators to rapidly advance their development hence becoming non-dominant. It’s a timer against the local ecosystem where the long term advantage lies in ever adapting nature.

Note: Reading this back it sounds like AI, I promise I’m not using AI to write this. Run it through a detector it’s 100% human written.

The recent SpaceX ipo demonstrated a core problem with the company: a terminal lack of focus. Okay, that’s not exactly true, they are focused on low earth orbit (LEO) and AI. Something not a lot of people mention about the starship is that it’s really only useful for interplanetary transport. SpaceX’s current plan is basically to (1) get starship online and (2) send 20 starships to refuel one starship in space and have that transport the Artemis 3 crew around the moon.

That’s fucking crazy. Starship does have potential for revolutionizing LEO and a potential near earth space economy, but their Mars ambitions cannot happen even if Starship works. Getting to Mars is an entirely different ballgame. The trip to Mars will take 9 months, meaning you literally need to build a mobile space station just to get there. And needless to say, Elon has not mentioned anything showing that the company has the logistics or desire to do that.

Mars is not just difficult, it’s monumental. It requires serious long term thinking that SpaceX doesn’t have. Unlike the moon where you can land for a day or two then leave, the astronauts will be stuck there for two years before taking another 9 month trip home. That means serious development of long term Martian and Interplanetary habitability.

Even if somehow SpaceX doubled down and really drew up scrutinizable plans for Mars they wouldn’t get the money for it from the private sector because there’s no long term profit. And yea I know, Elon will control the company until he dies via the terms of the IPO but that doesn’t mean investors will stick with him or SpaceX.

Blue Origin on the otherhand actually has a realistic long term plan: Develop the moon. It’s attainable, allows cooperation with dozens of other firms that can build the modules, and lets other companies waste money on research until the profit opportunity presents itself. It’s the snapping turtle vs the hare. Blue Origin knows its role, Lunar transport. It’s not going to jump on some bs trend or sci fi fantasy. Its product is government contracts. When the contracts turn to private, BO going to stick with that. All for the goal of being the foundation of space development.

Elon learned the wrong thing from Starlink. He’s trying to be both a contractor and a service provider. He assumes that whatever he makes will be used by governments and organizations. Bezos knows that the business starts and ends with the customer. If NASA says “build a lander” Blue Origin builds a lander; SpaceX instead buys Grok thinking that the government will want Grok. Elon needs to stfu and “put the fries in the bag”. You can’t beat Amazon at customer satisfaction, that’s legit their product.

If the IPO doesn’t fail it’s only a matter of time until investors will jump ship to any other rocket company. Maybe that’s not Blue Origin, but it probably won’t be the current SpaceX.