The costs of the big powers going to war is just too high for everyone (rational) to bear. So instead we trade, more or less peacefully.
Oddly enough, Saga depicts a war with costs along those lines. As a result, both sides "outsource" the conflict and have the native populations of other planets fight on their behalf.
... the downside of inducing passivity into a population. Aggression is ultimately what gets people out of bed in the morning instead of just remaining immobile and dying of thirst.
I'm waiting for the sequel, where they learn from their mistakes and directly induce passive-aggression into the population instead.
How about, two space faring species meet, trade technology, form a conglomerate socieity which is greater than either of them would be alone, culturally richer, with every individual in both societies better off?
Congratulations. I think you came up with the plot of the first sci-fi movie that nobody would bother to torrent.
Change this gene in something with a larger brain and you could create animals smart enough to deserve human rights. At that point the only ethical course of action is to give them said rights. The problem is the lack of a proper legal framework for such.
We need to start defining legal rights for intelligent, non-human entities immediately.
Totally not necessary:
That's crazy talk -- I bet you sympathize with those cheese-eating surrender monkeys.
You'd have legions of unemployed geniuses.
Pfft, big deal. There will always be work to do. Those roadrunners aren't going to catch themselves, you know.
Or worse, if it's resourceful enough.
The astronauts were paid their regular military salaries, plus hazardous duty pay. It was a pittance.
Too bad -- they should have negotiated better terms up front.
when you've decided to use someone else's resources, be it Facebook, YouTube, or even Geocities, to host or distribute it, only to find they object to being used by a horrific terrorist organization.
Or AT&T, Cox, Comcast, Verizon
The angular momentum imparted by the planetoid caused Venus to "flip".
Wouldn't it keep rotating? Why would it flip end-to-end and then stop?
meeting in the lobby of the police department can help weed out people trying to rip others off
Well yeah, it's right there in the summary. It shouldn't come as much of a surprise.
I'll reiterate how grateful I am that cell phone charging -- and as a side effect, data transfer -- have been standardized, thanks to the EU mandating the Micro-USB connector and voltage standard. It's made life easier for pretty much everybody worldwide who owns a cell phone. Maybe it's because countries that culturally emphasize improving the quality of life, have their services change in ways that improve the quality of life.
At the 43:25 minute mark, President Obama is supposed to say “I’ve heard some folks try to dodge the evidence by saying they’re not scientists; that we don’t have enough information to act. Well, I’m not a scientist, either. But you know what — I know a lot of really good scientists at NASA, and NOAA, and at our major universities. The best scientists in the world are all telling us that our activities are changing the climate, and if we do not act forcefully, we’ll continue to see rising oceans, longer, hotter heat waves, dangerous droughts and floods, and massive disruptions that can trigger greater migration, conflict, and hunger around the globe.”
Instead, the entire section is skipped. Obama’s comments resume with “The Pentagon says that climate change poses immediate risks to our national security. We should act like it.”
Maybe their expectation is that the appeal to military authority will carry more weight than the appeal to a scientific one?
Why read some boring headlines, when you can read the comic book instead?
Those who can, do; those who can't, write. Those who can't write work for the Bell Labs Record.
