Calvin and Hobbes have got you covered, more or less.
Admittedly, that may only work inside Calvin's head.
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With This Ring (Young Justice SI) (Thread Twelve)
- Thread starter Mr Zoat
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Admittedly, that may only work inside Calvin's head.
SaltyWaffles
I am dissapoint, son
- Pronouns
- He/Him
The other guy's argument that being intelligent means nothing if you nuke yourselves into the stone age is fallacious; if you nuke yourselves into the stone age, chances are your species simply wasn't intelligent enough.
- Location
- texas
Considering that DC has space dolphins and space whales, probably not.
Can't think of DC having megaraptors in fighter jets, but Swamp Thing did have a Dinosaur Plant Elemental who followed Swampy to Mars, and stayed to revegetate the planet.
On the planet Illium in DC franchise, there are antigravity trees.
Combine those two facts, and DC could have dinosaur plant zombie space pirates.
- Location
- Australia
I chose megaraptors to represent strength, the specification of acting purely on instinct is the more important factor. You can barely be a domestic power if all you care about is screwing and eating. Let alone anything past that
You also don't get nukes by chasing meat and the opposite sex so even the failure is a point in the arguments favour
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- Location
- Nova Scotia
Well not really. Most people have a phone, which is split between apple and google. Most servers run linux, and a big portion of everyone's computing is done over the internet, using their device as a thin client to access some service running on a linux system.
You might not think of a car as a computer, but everything on a car is run using a computer that runs it's own operating system and speaks it's own car-specific protocols.
- Location
- USA
The argument is more for a middle ground of intelligence being optimal. You want to be smart enough to be able to build rocket ships, but not so smart that individual members or small groups of your species become threats to the stability of the whole. Mad scientists are great but they're basically playing Russian Roulette with the whole species, and at some point we'll lose that game and someone is going to accidentally turn the Earth into a black hole.
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- Australia
Which is why you go multi-planet.
Realistically speaking there's no difference but scale between a mad scientist taking out Earth and someone who smokes in bed taking out an entire apartment complex.
There were plenty of hicks going "and that's why you don't live in a city" after the London Fire, that doesn't mean we shouldn't have them.
- Location
- USA
Hicks? We shouldn't have hicks? That's pretty callous.
Show, don't tell. This is how you do it for grand scale politics.
Hope we see more of that merc. Takes guts to go sass something you believe to be an eldritch horror.
Be interesting to see if the Guardians will consider the treaty null and void once The Beast is deposed.
It is an improvement on his previous nickname.
Intelligence =/= Wisdom.
Building nukes requires the first. Not using them inside your own biosphere requires the second.
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- texas
It was established in the Hourman series that in the future they will give up using numbers to count the millenia (or century, I don't remember), instead naming them in honor of superheroes.
So in the far far future, Paul will discover that the next thousand years are named in his honor- The Cake Man Millenium!
- Location
- Australia
It will be interesting to see how they manage the situation if they try, while GLs already operate in hostile environments, those environments are generally
a) something in which they have at least a sliver of moral high ground
And, arguably I'm making a redundant point here,
b) not a region in which the vast majority of it's problems stem from GL action.
The system isn't a mess because of The Beast, most of the time he couldn't give less of a shit if he tried.
It's a mess because GLs chase every criminal and it's unregistered dog right up to the line, effectively herding trouble to a single point.
It's as despicable an act on a galactic scale as it is in say, Trenton, NJ.
That does rather suggest that sorting it out is more or less as simple letting the regional GLs cross the border and do their job.
Fluffy
Destroyer of.......most worlds
- Location
- High Earth Orbit
Why is it that when I heard that new name all I could think of was this
Science
If you're reading this, omae wa mo shindeiru.
- Location
- Killeen, TX
A portmanteau of "Little Death" and "Beast in the Bed".
- Location
- United states
There is a bit of a flaw in your argument when one considers that it would only take a few people to fire a few nukes and the number that have got are usually less than a percent of the entire population. Example being the times that people were freaked out about a potential nuclear war IRL. So less the entire species being idiotic enough to do that and more a select few idiots from the species ruining it for the rest of the species.
- Location
- Somewhere out there
If you want to count servers and smartphones and other embedded systems, then Paul's statement is still accurate -- it just changes which operating system family is in the lead. iOS and Android both belong to the same OS family, and that's the same OS family as macOS and mainframe computers: UNIX. The fact that some are Linux and some are some variation of BSD is more or less irrelevant.
Which would violate the Guardian treaty with Larfleeze that cedes to him Sector 2828.
- Location
- Hampden Park
If Larfleeze leaves Vega then he'll be invalidating it.
Empiricist2
Let's play doctor!
- Location
- Baton Rouge
A few things: his railguns are effective so frequently mainly because he uses them in just about every engagement, and he puts lots of effort into the railgun rounds. Crumblers are very effective against energy shields and most conventionally durable opponents, mageslayers work against magic, and angel feather rounds against the demonic. If he was regularly scoring kills solely with iron rounds, I would agree with you. But he has specialized ammunition that he chooses to fire out of a railgun but could be delivered in a number of ways.
Second, other forms of attack work plenty fine. He used gamma beams against Clayface, more mundane constructs against the invasion of Shiruta, gravity converters against the Sheeda Huntsman, destructive pulses and assimilation against the Star Conquerers, all to greater effect than railguns. But he doesn't usually open with these because railguns work most of the time, and the other weapons are power hogs comparatively. Or they're too destructive to use without sufficient justification.
Ehh, this is inefficient for not just the stated reasons. They don't all need to use the same operating systems and file structures. All they really need is a commonly agreed upon communication standard and file formats that they can all convert to and from. A German speaker and a French speaker can both communicate even when they don't understand their counterpart's language provided they both can agree to communicate in English.
Intelligence is absolutely an advantage, but it has diminishing returns if you can't fix other aspects of your species as well. Internal unity is helpful, as is the ability to peacefully coexist with other races. Otherwise they nuke you back into the Stone age.
I guess the Maltusians need internal unity less because even a group of a dozen of them is an incredibly powerful force. But if they actively fought each other over agreeing to separate peacefully, then they likely wouldn't be more than a violent blip in the history books.
Counterpoint: the Pak from the Known Space books. Terrifyingly intelligent, but regularly nuke themselves into the Stone age because they're as tribalistic and paranoid as they are smart.
Not exactly hard evidence, but we don't have many real world examples of alien civilizations.
Huh, I suppose the Guardians never bothered with a clause of Larfleeze not leaving of his own will, because if someone could force him to do that then he's not much of a threat any longer. Comparatively, at least.
And if Larfleeze were to get shot in the face, then the treaty would naturally become invalid.
Alternatively, shut down all of his rings remotely and take them along with his power-battery, leaving him stranded and powerless on Okara.
Dealing with Larfleeze isn't hard unless you decide to make it hard, like trying to unfuck the brain of someone who's been brainfucked since before your planet had sentient life.
Alternatively, shut down all of his rings remotely and take them along with his power-battery, leaving him stranded and powerless on Okara.
Dealing with Larfleeze isn't hard unless you decide to make it hard, like trying to unfuck the brain of someone who's been brainfucked since before your planet had sentient life.
How, exactly, would one go about doing that? If Larfleeze could be shut down that easily then he would have been.
SaltyWaffles
I am dissapoint, son
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Again, if you're not intelligent enough to realize that global thermonuclear war is decidedly against your self-interest and is caused by paranoia and prejudice, it's a moot point.
I suppose that, at some point, you must conflate intelligence with wisdom/self-awareness/critical thinking skills, because intelligence without any of the latter is tantamount to being nothing more than a machine.
- Location
- Somewhere out there
Nope, this is only true if you espouse a certain set of assumptions. Most humans do, but you're failing to account for sufficiently alien mindsets.
The Pak Protectors' intelligence is actually pretty narrow. They have a tremendous capacity for reasoning and extrapolation and a dramatically-extended lifespan in which to gain experience and plan, and it can be assumed that's coupled with a better memory. However, that intelligence is hard-wired into an exceedingly narrow, rigid, instinctive (that is, preconscious) goal pursued with a ruthless utilitarianism.
From a Pak Protector's perspective, there is no ambition that needs to be pursued and no greater race that needs to endure. There is only the Protector's bloodline. Everything else is secondary to that. If thermonuclear war would kill off almost all intelligent life, but leave a sufficient breeding pool to repopulate the Protector's progeny without external threats, then the Protector would encourage that war and scheme behind the scenes to try to make it happen. It doesn't matter that the technology would get nuked back to the stone age, because the bloodline would endure, and they can rebuild.
It's completely logical and intelligent. It's even wise, if you look at it the right way. But it doesn't uphold what we commonly consider to be values.
- Location
- Pittsburgh, PA
I'm so strong that I can't flex without my muscles exploding my entire skeleton. Clearly, arguing that this is not in fact a valid definition of strength makes me close-minded.
Based on your description, the Pak shouldn't even have the capacity to nuke themselves; they'd be wandering around in tight family groups, violently murdering any other Pak they encounter. How the fuck does such a being ever sit down and put serious time into developing the sciences, when their only real goals are immediate and predicated on maximizing their group's survival?
Empiricist2
Let's play doctor!
- Location
- Baton Rouge
They have a perfect memory, to the point where they view their memories as a Breeder to be blurry and vague.
And their goal of furthering heir own bloodline isn't quite as strict as you make it seem, although it's pretty close. If a Pak Protector's Breeders all die, then they might be able to go through the mental hoops necessary to adopt the whole species as their bloodline, and work in their central library where all non-weaponizable information is stored. They usually just voluntarily starve to death though.
I think a lot of it is explained in Protector, although it might be in another book.
Even if they were all murdering other tribes, eventually some localized groups would win out and have the resources for furthering science. Because within their tribes, Protectors are pretty much completely unified.
They aren't short sighted. Furthering their technology helps ensure their survival, whether that's through making better weapons, better resource collection, or making space ships to get away from other Protectors.
Plus, they're absurdly intelligent. They don't need much time at all in order to advance their knowledge.
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