Science fiction is in it’s essence the exploration of a situation when all the confounding factors have been magicked/scienced away.

Not uncommonly it explores the requirements of the technical solution, what would the machine need to do for this to work out? And/or What happens if it doesn’t?

Take for example “Do androids dream of electric sheep” by Philip K Dick, it’s about finding androids advanced enough not to know they’re artificial and how to identify and relate to them when the only diagnostic is slow, clumsy, and suspect. It’s more an exploration of what makes a person than it’s around the marvels of The Machine™.

During the 1900s the vehicle for science to magick with had been machines, computers and AI. Remember that space travel, fission power, psychology, modern medicine were all new, hope inducing breakthroughs just this same period.

There’s also the issue that the definition of the genre came after it becoming large enough to matter. The edges between scifi, punk/cyberpunk, speculative fiction, isekai and even to fantasy are all made after the fact, meaning modern machines go into scifi, old machines go into steam-/diesel-/etc-punk. The main difference between Science, Magick, and Eldritch horror is how detailed the mechanics of the solution are described, and speak to different people.

But on the topic of the story not being centered around a machine: try the Hyperion series by Dan Simmons.

Or go the entirely other way with Ring World by Larry Niven. There’s plenty of machines-did-it in the fringes, but the central theme is to figure out what would be needed for a Ring World to exist, what would happen on it, and how would it be managed. It’s an exploration of physics more than anything - more “what is the machine” than “machines-did-it”.

And the Foundation series (Asimov) famously explore the premise “what if sociology works”, and the other details solved by throwing machines at them.

You also have The Culture (Iain Banks) series that center on/around post-scarcity society and explore that.

So happy for you! The world is better off for your empathy and care <3

Thank you for letting me help, and hope you both have a better life from your encounter!

I’ve also done the 'sup head jerk with cats around the neighborhood, they start in surprise the first few times, then do it back.

It’s apparently an acknowledgement/greeting between cats.

And yes, heed the advice to “ignore” cats until they approach. Sit calmly, do your thing, let eachother know you’re there, and then wait. Often doesn’t take more than 15 minutes.

Getting a cat to come to you is easy, you give it food and pets, and then stay calm when it’s eating/enjoying.

Repeat until you’ve built trust, a sick or hurt cat will typically take longer to trust. Count on several days of repeating this without hitches (no sudden loud noise while you’re doing it, etc).

Sometimes cats are desperate and everything turns up in a magical, calm way without bloodshed. But more commonly the next part is trickier, the cat will resist you picking it up (especially if hurt) or shutting it in.

Trick here is to be decisive and clear in your body language. Prepare a cat carry box with hard sides, feel free to prepare it with some textile smelling of you, be mindful that it will almost certainly be pissed on. Also bring a towel.

You will have to, in a calm manner, put the folded towel over the cat, and with it lift the cat into the carry. The towel is to trap legs so you won’t be scratched, and if you manage to have it snugly around the cat, there’s also a way to calm cats by gently pressing them down.

If you are unsure, slow, nervous, or hesitate in your movement, the cat will bolt. If you’re too fast, loud, or big in movements, it will as well. Relax and do it in a deliberate motion.

If you release the cat from the carry, it will take considerable time to rebuild trust. Consider either going with it to the vet at once, or let it out in a quiet spare room with food, water, and litter box, and giving it a day or three to get accustomed to the room before letting it explore the rest of the place.

Don’t get scratched by the cat, they can have some pretty nasty stuff on the paws, and some transmittable pathogens if anything draws blood or gets in your face/eyes.

Good luck!

Cats do pant, but also run hotter and enjoy higher temperatures than humans (24-26 °C depending on race).

Also, cats have lots of ways to release heat, cats can arrange their fur to release more heat (or burr it to trap more), they lay on cool ground, they can lick themselves for evaporative cooling, and of course seek shade when it gets hot.

We had a hot summer with temperatures of over 30 °C indoors and I got worried my European shorthair would overheat, got them a gel pad that wicks away heat when laid upon, but they thought it was ridiculous and just laid on the concrete floor in the shade whenever too hot and was super comfy and lazy.

I’ve used Spotify with subscription on android for years and never had any issue with it. The Web and desktop apps have also worked well for the last decade or so.

Deezer, Newpipe, YouTube have all had their places, but Spotify does it’s thing the best.

Modern nuclear plants take about 1 Mt of fuel per ton of waste, and energy production is about 70-90% effective. Modern systems also dispose about 80-90 % of spent fuel at decay times that leave only a percent of radiation every 20 years.

Nuclear is however indeed a dead end, with current exponentially increasing energy needs we probably only have 150 years of Uranium before we need to figure out an alternative. At current energy levels, we have about 550 years.

150 years of very low pollution, stable energy is however a better, cleaner, cheaper and safer energy source than fossil oil has been throughout human history, and safer than current wind, solar and hydroelectric power.

With the new tech, that is mostly true, the 70s tech is like the first of any tech: unwieldy, hard to control and very inefficient in both production and retirement.

Compare the first x-ray machine to a modern PET-scanner. The former caused cancer in fetuses and caused radiation poisoning through walls, the latter is a clean cellular resolution scanner that can be serviced and recycled as well as most anything.

A conceivable way could be to disrupt the nuclear force of the target atoms, maybe like an anti-Pion/Gluon ray that self-propagates the reaction through the released energy.

(As we might remember, splitting the atom yields a bunch of energy, and uncontrolled such reactions go Hiroshima)

It might be controlled by sub-particle lensing, probably some kind of magnetic field, to be active at a specific distance.

For the reaction to be contained, either there’s a radially limiting component (air is not particle dense enough to propagate the reaction, or atoms not energy dense enough) or it’s a cascade triggered by the beam which stops when the beam stops (or the reaction gets too far away from it)

As I believe Pions and Gluons are their own anti-particles, I don’t know how we would go about doing this, but hey, that’s for Science!™ to solve.

What is this thread but people yelling at clouds?

Board games have been nearly ruined by kickstarter.

Instead of buying a well reviewed and recommended game from a store, you have to back a hyped up sales pitch, and then wait 4 months for delivery, if the producers don’t just bail with your money or go “oops, we couldn’t finish what we promised, and we already spent all your money…”.

And if you don’t back it to later read the reviews, the game is out of print and still waiting for the first wave of deliveries, meaning a second print is still at least a year off.

Also, the ratings are heavily skewed by people rating on the hype or early/review copies, meaning the rankings are heavily amazonified.

EtA: Also games are heavily bloated with social media candy: heavy and fragile minis, box stands, blingy crap periferals (branded dice holding toucan) and still needing organisers, player aids and mods from third parties who’ve gotten review copies to make said supplements…

Oh, and the stretch goal extras (get another 150 vanity minis/3D printed scoring tokens) for only $150 and an 18 month wait!

At least once you can

Precisely, so the Federation may be anarchist, even though the member races aren’t.

With what we know about how the Federation interacts with other races and planets, real world logic would indicate that the humans could be (and live) the model that the Federation is built upon.

All this is conjecture ofc, and is probably as much an exercise in understanding post-scarcity anarchism as possible Star Trek lore :p

Which is inherently anarchist :P

As it seems a common confusion in this thread, I repeat, anarchism doesn’t have to be without government or rules, several forms of anarchism are focused on not limiting individuals freedoms and/or not allowing power over eachother (while accepting government and rules not contrary to that). Both of which I believe describe how the Federation works.

That’s one form of it, but there are plenty other schools of thought that overlap quite significantly with the Federation, check out the primer on Wikipedia.

Anarchist doesn’t need to mean without government, simply that no one is above another, which is echoed in how the Federation is structured towards the other races.

I’d say they’re post-scarcity anarchist. There’s no central/communal resource dispersal as needed for socialism, nor the central/communal resource allocation/planning needed for communism.

There’s seemingly no authority outside starfleet exerting any power, nor does anyone ever claim a motivation beyond exploration or study (to do something meaningful). The lack of money and unlimited access to replicated resources pending available dilithium also points to a society without exploitative discrepancies.

The humans also never are reported to have any resource hogging, the only tensions/stratification seem to be militarily (and against external parties also diplomatically), meritocratic, and even then the bottleneck seems mostly to be to not fall behind other races.

I don’t see neither capitalism, socialism, communism, despotism, theocracy, nor fascism, but many aspects of anarchism. If you’ve read anything about The Culture, they openly speak about being anarchist, and it’s very similar to Star Trek.

Interesting, in my part of Europe this coincides with developing and dynamic regions (a lot of employment, culture and progress).

Wonder if movement or birth rates affect the percentage the most?

“The plot suggests that if there were nothing – a complete vacuum – beyond the observable universe, our Universe would be a large, low density black hole. This is a little scary, but we have good reason to believe that’s not the case,” Patel added."

Your source refutes your claim.

Do a study and publish!

Polyphasic sleep is sorely understudied, and iirc we barely understand if it’s not harmful.