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Joined 4 months ago
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Cake day: October 6th, 2025

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  • Fuck it, let’s assume we can build jump gates.
    Let’s say they’re just big enough to send a tiny unmanned drone through.
    I hop into my space ship and accelerate with a conventional engine to 86% of light speed.
    No violation of physics needed, just shitloads of energy.
    I fly to another star, which takes 10 years from earth’s point of view.
    Due to time dilation at 86% light speed, time in my space ship passes half as fast as on earth.
    If someone on earth had a strong enough telescope, they could look at a clock on my ship and see that it ticks half as fast as the clocks on earth.
    But in my frame of reference, earth moves away from me at 86% light speed.
    So if I look at earth through a telescope, I see that the clocks on earth tick half as fast as mine.
    There isn’t a universal time. Time is always relative to speed and this is no problem when the reference frames are separated.

    I arrive at the star, after 5 years have passed on earth.
    I activate a jump gate and send the drone through with a message. It arrives on earth instantly, 5 years after I left.
    But from their reference frame, they could see my clock ticking only half as fast as theirs.
    After earth’s 5 years, only 2.5 years have passed for the space ship they see.
    They activate their jump gate and send the drone back with a reply.
    It arrives instantly at the star, 7.5 years before my space ship gets there.

    This is why FTL travel isn’t and will never be possible. Even with tricks like jump gates or wormholes, it creates time paradoxes.


  • We could maybe eventually load up multiple asteroids with building materials, frozen embryos, a self-healing nanobot factory, blueprints for building artificial breeding chambers and humanoid robots, controlled by an AGI to serve as educators, and send them off to nearby stars.
    Upon arrival on suitable planets, the systems wake up and jump-start colonies.
    After several hundred or thousand years of development, those colonies could build their own seeder asteroids, kicking off an exponential progress.
    If every colony in turn colonizes 4 new systems within 10,000 years, we could theoretically colonize every suitable star system in the Galaxy after 200,000 years. At a very reasonable ~0.1% of light speed.

    But we would have zero control over the colonies, no shared culture, no trade, hardly any meaningful communication. So there would be very little benefit to it, and knowing human nature, a war of total annihilation would be likely as soon as suitable planets get scarce.

    Intergalactic travel will never be possible for humans.
    The nearest galaxy is 2.537.000 light years away. By the time we get there, we wouldn’t be humans anymore.










  • There is absolutely no issue with it.
    But there are lots of other distros that add things to it which are great for desktop.
    GUI tools for driver installation and kernel switching, snapshots, preinstalled Steam+Wine+Codecs+Flatpak, newer and more software, atomic updates, a faster package manager, more third party support, etc.

    Debian is better than it ever was, but so are lots of other distros, especially the ones that build on it.
    Nowadays you really have the choice between “good” and “better”.