On the subject of “capturing dark energy” (I don’t think this technically captures any energy previously existing), my favorite proposal is to connect distant galaxies together with strings, and use the resulting tension to turn a turbine. In principle your limit would then only be the strength and length of your intergalactic rope.
See Mining Energy in an Expanding Universe for what I think is the earliest proposal for this idea.
1I think you are partially sanitywashing the positions of your company with regards to the blogpost.
I did not read Matthew's above comment as representing any views other than his own.
There seem to be no organised religions that ever managed to hold it for long before falling into rose-tinted fatalism, no group who stand before god and bargain
Hm, I got the opposite impression from reading this sequence of blog posts from Bret Devereaux on ACOUP
The most important thing to understand about most polytheistic belief systems is that they are fundamentally practical. They are not about moral belief, but about practical knowledge. Let’s start with an analogy:
Let’s say you are the leader of a small country, surrounded by a bunch – let’s say five – large neighbor countries, which never, ever change. Each of these big neighbors has their own culture and customs. Do you decide which one is morally best and side with that one? That might be nice for your new ally, but it will be bad for you – isolated and opposed by your other larger neighbors. Picking a side might work if you were a big country, but you’re not; getting in the middle is likely to get you crushed.
No. You will need to maintain the friendship of all of the countries at once (the somewhat amusing term for this in actual foreign policy is ‘Finlandization‘ – the art of bowing to the east without mooning the west, in Kari Suomalainen’s words). And that means mastering their customs. When you go to County B, you will speak their language, you wear their customary dress, and if they expect visiting dignitaries to bow five times and then do a dance, well then you bow five times and do a dance. And if Country C expects you to give a speech instead, then you arrive with the speech, drafted and printed. You do these things because these countries are powerful and will destroy you if you do not humor whatever their strange customs happen to be.
[...]
Ah, but how will you know what kind of speech to write or what dance to do? Well, your country will learn by experience. You’ll have folks in your state department who were around the last time you visited County B, who can tell you what worked, and what didn’t. And if something works reliably, you should recreate that approach, exactly and without changing anything at all. Sure, there might be another method that works – maybe you dance a jig, but the small country on the other side of them dances the salsa, but why take the risk, why rock the boat? Stick with the proven method.
But whatever it is that these countries want, you need to do it. No matter how strange, how uncomfortable, how inconvenient, because they have the ability to absolutely ruin everything for you. So these displays of friendship or obedience – these rituals – must take place and they must be taken seriously and you must do them for all of these neighbors, without neglecting any (yes even that one you don’t like).
This is how these religions work. Not based on moral belief, but on practical knowledge (I should point out, this is not my novel formulation, but rather is rephrasing the central idea of Clifford Ando’s The Matter of the Gods (2008), but it is also everywhere in the ancient sources if you read them and know to look). Let’s break that down, starting with the concept of…
idk about you, but the characters in my dream act nowhere near how real people act, I'm just too stupid in my dreams to realize how inconsistent and strange their actions are.
I get a conversation not found error when clicking on your first link
In my opinion, the usual utilitarian reading also ignores this aspect too though. The usual reading says that each person has the choice between accepting or rejecting the utilitarian logic, but a rejection of the utilitarian logic doesn't look like leaving the city, leaving the child to suffer. It looks like actively fighting to bring the child out into the sunlight.
idk if you saw my second comment, but I think this explains it
Those who walk away are those who are even able to live in a non-Omelas, those who are able to imagine even the possibility of not having a hidden evil at the heart of a perfect world. The reader who does not walk away from Omelas, lives in Omelas and has lived in Omelas for their whole life, in the sense of mentally inhibiting the world in which any Omelas must have the tortured child. Those who walk away are therefore the very few who are able to reject that mental world, leave it, and achieve all the good rather than just the good that comes at a tragic cost.
This makes sense, especially given when Le Guin says "The place they go towards is a place even less imaginable to most of us than the city of happiness. I cannot describe it at all.". If she did describe it, the reader (who has not yet themselves left Omelas) would assume that place also has some horrible secret, and so her attempt would fail.
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¯\(ツ)/¯, but if you could...