Somewhere between “I want to play sci-fi video games all day,” “I want to invent everything ever,” and “I want to go on a 6-month backpacking trip in the wilderness.”

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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 14th, 2023

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  • I feel like, at their core, most religions boil down to two things, for most people:

    • Giving you purpose/security/scapegoats (“I’m living a good life so I can go to heaven,” “the Lord has a plan/is watching over me,” “Satan/sinners/demons tempted me”)
    • Dissuading you from inquisitive, critical thought (out of self-preservation, I’d imagine)

    Personally, I prefer to define my own purpose, live a more “dynamic” lifestyle than is traditional, think critically, and question authority. Doesn’t make me “better” than religious folks, in fact they’re probably overall happier than I am. But I can’t imagine living that way, regardless of whether or not I believe in a magical sky Santa who can’t decide whether he loves us unconditionally or whether or not he’s actually omnipotent.



  • In the Star Trek universe, if you’re intent on “glassing” a planet, it’s in one of two scenarios:

    1. The planet inhabitants can’t fight off a single star ship, in which case you could just park in orbit and bombard to your heart’s content, with the option of either precision strikes or complete annihilation, without expending anything other than the energy it takes to power the ship.
    2. The inhabitants can fight off a star ship, in which case they likely have the technology to detect such a weapon at sufficient range to intercept/destroy/redirect it, or planetary shielding powerful enough to stop it.

    In the latter case, you could put the effort into adding a cloaking device to the weapon to get around that. But in that case, why not just use a regular cloaked ship to delivery some other payload? There are tons of examples in TNG of narrowly-averted planet-killing disasters only prevented by careful engineering. Probably way easier to actually cause the disaster. Examples include igniting the atmosphere, causing geographic instability/earthquakes/volcanic reactions, exploding the system’s star, crashing a natural moon into the planet, unleashing a biological weapon…