And those in power by definition need their power, hence, everyone else is only permitted weak security.

What matters is managing and adjusting the relative weaknesses, to maintain the pecking order.

There will always be back doors.

OMG. Ok I hadn't thought of that. At least the last TV I bought for a relative was just a computer screen for media box.

ZFS :-)

typo, more decentralisation not centralisation

Ok, but propaganda is basically the problem and has been for over a hundred years. And it's everyone. Not just far right or Russia or today's bogeyman. It's everyone doing it.

The antidote can't really be "curated information" because all the propagandists want to then be the curators. And that's what they do.

The only real antidote is more dissemination, more distribution, more centralisation, more alternatives, and people just being exposed to all this stuff having to get smarter about integrating and comparing and contrasting what they read.

Yes, makes sense.

What I mean about the floor level is that, if you look at the outside of the door on the central module, and you take that door's floor height line and follow it right the way through the craft, then when you get to the front, inside the command module, in order for the pilots to be able to see out the top window, their chairs would have to be higher not lower. I gather it's the only place where the inside doesn't match the outside.

There were the four pods, two at the front and two at the rear, above the landing struts, though. But in any case, whatever fuel source they were using must have been extremely compact. Something nuclear-based, perhaps.

I love the design. I just wish they'd worked out the floor level in the interior into the command module, because it doesn't line up.

Thanks, yes I enjoyed The Expanse tv show. I'll look at the books.

Yes, by all means, identify myths and blind beliefs and wishful thinking where that occurs.

On the point of reason, though, humans have had our advanced technology for, say, a couple of hundred years.

The universe is billions of years old. We've basically just learnt enough to realise that technology can do things we can't imagine, and we've only just started. Say a civilization started out a billion years ago. How would we even begin to comprehend what they're capable of? In fact, the human mind, our brains, may be simply too limited to form the concepts to understand reality at a deeper level. And as a species, we might always be like that. So, anything is possible.

I think it's just a question, in practice, of what's the outcome. If alien intelligences revealed themselves tomorrow to the world in a way that was undeniable to most people, and the message was simply, hey guys, you're like small children to us. We don't interfere, but generally, try not to fuck it up. What would we be doing different?

Indeed. The critical thinkers did better.

The people who rely on copying what everyone else does, what the authorities say, what the consensus view is, didn't do as well as the people who started using critical thinking systematically, i.e. western enlightenment for example, and other places where that was used. The fact that now we can have an AI in the role of authority or group think isn't surprising when you realise it, because so often we do just rely on common patterns, authorities, and copying.

When the moon was blown out of orbit in 1999, taking the Alphans with it, it also created a rupture in space-time here on Earth, which is why we are all living the alternate version where we never returned to the moon.

I think the mistake is imagining that the politicians are doing anything at all based on reason and science, rather than basing everything on politics and vested interests.

It's agents all the way up.

But yes, great point. Why are we using all this stuff to make life more complicated and creating lots of worthless tasks.

Plutarch and a daily patch of stem cells says it'll work.