Random Rants 94 I rant at the thread title and shake my fist menacingly.

[Valka D'Ur]

That plan wouldn't work because Valka doesn't own a working printer.

 

[Synobun]

Cut my thumb pretty badly while chopping vegetables. Probably what I deserve for using 10-year-old dollar-store knives.

 

[Comrade Ceasefire]

Cut my thumb pretty badly while chopping vegetables. Probably what I deserve for using 10-year-old dollar-store knives.

Sympathies, thoughts and prayers.
Look on the bright side: a sharper, sturdier knife would have taken your arm off at the elbow.

 

[BenitoChavez]

I recently listened to a podcast where the creators of the 3 Body Problem Netflix show were being interviewed and I learned they were working on adapting the books when Covid was at it's peak. One of the questions was about how they dealt with the real life existential dread of Covid versus the existential dread of the series. It got me thinking that while they both are existential threats, but very different kinds of threats, which in turn led me to coming up with my own existential threat scale. So without further ado, here it is:

Level 0 - A threat where an aspect of your life is irrevocably changed. It's level 0 because existential means related to your existence and this is only a threat to part of your existence. But I think it's the level people tend to be most concerned about so it's an important one to include. There's a bunch of examples, going to jail for a long period of time, becoming homeless, having a limb amputated, etc.
Level 1 - A threat to your life or the people you care about. Pretty self-explanatory. I believe Covid fits into this category.
Level 2 - A threat to your local/regional society. There's that new movie Civil War coming out which depicts the break-up of the United States. Possibly permanently, I don't know as I haven't seen the movie yet. But as an American that's a level 2 threat.
Level 3 - A threat to human civilization as a whole. The classic example would be nuclear war where the fallout would make large swathes of the Earth uninhabitable. The dust from the explosions would go into the atmosphere, blocking light from the sun causing catastrophic climate change. In such circumstances, current human civilization would be impossible. We'd be bombing ourselves back to the stone age.
Level 4 - A threat to humanity as a whole. AKA an extinction level threat. The alien invasion depicted in the 3 Body Problem is this kind of threat, where the aliens intend to kill off humanity and take the Earth for their own.
Level 5 - A threat to life as a whole. An example would be a nearby star in the Milky Way going supernova and the gamma rays from the explosion irradiates the Earth killing all species. This is a category that could potentially be split into two. One for Earth based life and another for Earth and non-Earth based life. But since all life that we currently know of exists on Earth, I'm keeping it as one category for now.
Level 6 - A threat to Earth itself. So not just all species on Earth not existing, the the Earth itself not existing. An example being when the Sun turns into a red giant star near the end of its lifespan and engulfs the Earth. I think some people might not make a big distinction between level 5 and 6, but to me, the destruction of the planet on which I lived, regardless of whether or not life currently exists on that planet is a step up in horror.
Level 7 - The death of the universe. Whether it's heat death where all the energy in the universe gets used up, the big rip where matter and space itself gets ripped apart, or the big crunch where everything gets compressed into a point like singularity, the end result is the same. Everything that has ever existed will cease to exist in any meaningful sense. I could have perhaps made a few more levels between 6 and 7 for the solar system, galaxy, and galactic supercluster but those scales don't hold much meaning for me.

 

[Valka D'Ur]

I recently listened to a podcast where the creators of the 3 Body Problem Netflix show were being interviewed and I learned they were working on adapting the books when Covid was at it's peak. One of the questions was about how they dealt with the real life existential dread of Covid versus the existential dread of the series. It got me thinking that while they both are existential threats, but very different kinds of threats, which in turn led me to coming up with my own existential threat scale. So without further ado, here it is:

Level 0 - A threat where an aspect of your life is irrevocably changed. It's level 0 because existential means related to your existence and this is only a threat to part of your existence. But I think it's the level people tend to be most concerned about so it's an important one to include. There's a bunch of examples, going to jail for a long period of time, becoming homeless, having a limb amputated, etc.
Level 1 - A threat to your life or the people you care about. Pretty self-explanatory. I believe Covid fits into this category.
Level 2 - A threat to your local/regional society. There's that new movie Civil War coming out which depicts the break-up of the United States. Possibly permanently, I don't know as I haven't seen the movie yet. But as an American that's a level 2 threat.
Level 3 - A threat to human civilization as a whole. The classic example would be nuclear war where the fallout would make large swathes of the Earth uninhabitable. The dust from the explosions would go into the atmosphere, blocking light from the sun causing catastrophic climate change. In such circumstances, current human civilization would be impossible. We'd be bombing ourselves back to the stone age.
Level 4 - A threat to humanity as a whole. AKA an extinction level threat. The alien invasion depicted in the 3 Body Problem is this kind of threat, where the aliens intend to kill off humanity and take the Earth for their own.
Level 5 - A threat to life as a whole. An example would be a nearby star in the Milky Way going supernova and the gamma rays from the explosion irradiates the Earth killing all species. This is a category that could potentially be split into two. One for Earth based life and another for Earth and non-Earth based life. But since all life that we currently know of exists on Earth, I'm keeping it as one category for now.
Level 6 - A threat to Earth itself. So not just all species on Earth not existing, the the Earth itself not existing. An example being when the Sun turns into a red giant star near the end of its lifespan and engulfs the Earth. I think some people might not make a big distinction between level 4 and 5, but to me, the destruction of the planet on which I lived, regardless of whether or not life currently exists on that planet is a step up in horror.
Level 7 - The death of the universe. Whether it's heat death where all the energy in the universe gets used up, the big rip where matter and space itself gets ripped apart, or the big crunch where everything gets compressed into a point like singularity, the end result is the same. Everything that has ever existed will cease to exist in any meaningful sense. I could have perhaps made a few more levels between 6 and 7 for the solar system, galaxy, and galactic supercluster but those scales don't hold much meaning for me.

Yeah, it was #6 that gave me a sleepless night the first time I read about that. It's hard to fathom, the Sun expanding so far that it basically has your planet for lunch.

Earth will be long-dead by that point anyway. I read another depressing article that says there won't be any vegetation, no atmosphere, not even plate tectonics will work. Our planet will be completely dead.

And just because the Sun might have another 5 billion years or so, that's not how long we have. As I recall, the article mentioned something like a bit less than a billion years left for life here, and toward the end it's going to have to be the extremophiles, because nothing else could tolerate the conditions that are coming.

This is why it really isn't too early to figure out how to pack up and leave, while we still can.

 

[Cutlass]

The alien invasion depicted in the 3 Body Problem is this kind of threat, where the aliens intend to kill off humanity and take the Earth for their own.

I can't imagine aliens showing up to take the planet from the Humans and the humans having any chance at all. Unlike fiction, the aliens won't be incompetent.

 

[Lexicus]

I can't imagine aliens showing up to take the planet from the Humans and the humans having any chance at all. Unlike fiction, the aliens won't be incompetent.

The thing is if they have the technology to get here they wouldn't need to get here.

 

[Cutlass]

The thing is if they have the technology to get here they wouldn't need to get here.

Not necessarily true. Planets similar to Earth are going to be few and far between. Having interstellar flight isn't the same thing as a galaxy spanning warp drive. This could be the closest planet that meets their needs. All it takes is removal of the local vermin.

 

[Sarin]

The thing is if they have the technology to get here they wouldn't need to get here.

Maybe, maybe not. We still know very little about the universe outside our own solar system. It might just be that planets in the "goldilocks zone", with right surface gravity and magnetic field of the right magnitude are very rare, and making up for any deficiency in this regard might be much more complicated than interstellar travel.

 

[Valka D'Ur]

Maybe, maybe not. We still know very little about the universe outside our own solar system. It might just be that planets in the "goldilocks zone", with right surface gravity and magnetic field of the right magnitude are very rare, and making up for any deficiency in this regard might be much more complicated than interstellar travel.

Right now the astrophysicists aren't necessarily looking for exoplanets with life. They're just happy to find planets roughly Earth-sized, at the right distance from its primary to have human-compatible surface temperatures, with a nickel-iron core. Having any life going on there beyond those requirements would be gravy at this point.

Of course other species could have a different definition of what would constitute a "goldilocks" zone. After all, there's speculation that there could be life of a different sort on Titan or other moons out there.