I agree with you for the most part. We’ve seen companies with dominance just sit on innovation and basically slow play it when competition keeps up, or go straight to lawfare or popularity contests (Intel cough cough). Kinda sucks we place more importance on the resources used to arrive at innovation than the practicality of those innovations. But where we’re at now, it’s like peeling an onion and what everyone wants to find is 3 layers down, so it’s not like we can build more LHCs to smash particles, because the things we need to find are a couple skips past that point. We eventually find it, what next?

I’d imagine any intelligent alien life form would be intelligent enough to realize that they’ve reached a point at which they can simply life in a sustained utopia. Heal the planet, work less, fill time with hobbies and pursuits. Humans have this flaw, and it’s that the mentally ill squander the world’s wealth and use it for dick-measuring contests. A small minority of us will kill their own mother for a job promotion, and the people at the very top want to squander it all so they see another 0 in their bank account, or outrace the other 7 megabillionaires to the dick-measuring contest on Mars. I could only hope aliens aren’t as as stupid. We could just litter the earth with trees, solar panels, 2 br condos, and hammocks, and have AI work for us, but nope. Every single die shrink leads to more transistor density and never any power efficiency because big numbers are better for shareholders. They sold us downstream. If any alien contacts us or leaves a trace they’re most likely just as dangerous to our survival as we are. Space conquistadors

This is mostly uneducated postulation, but I think as we become more technologically advanced, technological advancements (and the knowledge of mechanics necessary to allow for them) become fewer and more far between as advancements occur.

I feel like the industrial revolution was a perfect storm of many advancements all happening in the same blip, and it allowed us to go from Wright to the moon in one lifespan, but 100 years later, we’re still not far from that point, technologically.

I mean, look at radiological half life - that’s the point at which there’s a 50% chance that any one atom will decay, but when that atom decays seems to be mere chance more than anything. It’s perplexing and maddening. But the more we stare at that, the more sure we are in the belief that the void, nothingness, is actually rife with energy just flitting in and out of perceivable existence, affecting observable particles, but we just can’t see this vacuum energy. Almost like quantum mechanics is used as a workaround to try to make sense of those unseen forces (and when we can observe them, it’d likely be able to be described in a more classical sense).

Maybe the industrial revolution gave us some hopium lol, but we’ve been butting our heads into a wall for a century pining for a magical microscope. Maybe in 500 years it’ll all look mostly the same, who knows

A lot of us understand it as dice rolls based on shit we can’t account for, more or less. Be a bit easier when someone finds out vacuum energy causes unstable isotopes to decay but I’m not nearly that smart and I’m also digressing. Kids in 300 years acting like it’s common sense lol

‘and half of them are dead / but what about THIS ONE? / nobody knows, nobody knowwwws’

No, the cat is one or the other. Radioactive half-life is the point at which there is a 50/50 chance that any single isotope had decayed, and we usually work around that in classical systems by using large sample sizes (a pile of isotopes, it’s easy to see that half of it would have decayed). But for one single isotope we aren’t observing (or the cat), we need to look at it in terms of probabilities until we observe it

… It’d be a lot easier to explain this if Schroedinger had a whole pile of boxes with cats in them

I always think of amperage as a cat trying to use its jawline to prise open a cracked door. The door is ohms and the volts is the cat’s energy levels at that point. Wide open door you just hear the cat’s claws frantically scraping a thud when it slides into the wall

The wild thing is that, at the time, the abandonware DOS games I was playing in the late 90s were more recent than Skyrim is right now.