sounds like Bolo

The moon’s day length is so long that it wouldn’t make any sense for any crewed mission to use it, they’re going to need their own lights on an arbitrary 24 hour cycle anyway, so there’s no reason not to have every future crewed mission there use the same one

I mean, I sort of imagine it to be less the “rule on the books” part, and more the “do we actually have the physical capacity to enforce those rules” end of it. They cant really imprison him (I mean while he’s feeling guilty he might stay willingly, but they cant keep him in if he eventually changes his mind, so itd more be him imprisoning himself). Trying to despite the futility of it would seem somewhat dangerous, because again, if he should ever change his mind, you clearly dont want to seem hostile to something with that kind of power, especially when you dont have it. Saying “Our law is not sufficient for you” could just be interpreted as the most diplomatic way given his mental state to justify leaving and not returning.

Quite a few of the original nazis were those too, or started that way. Groups like that are known for recruiting the youth.

That’s gotta be bad advertising, surely? Like, even someone who hates the people who currently live there and so doesn’t feel horrible about contributing to forcing them out, is still not going to want to go build in the ruins of a warzone I’d imagine?

Eventually shouldn’t we theoretically reach a point where AIs can solve any possible practical to use captcha just as well as a human? I kinda wonder what the answer to replace them will eventually be

Far less friendly, aliens in my empires tend to get marginalized to basic resource planets and banned from growing their population because my primary species is more optimized for research output. Also my most common ascension path is bio-ascension, which federation humans would find very illegal since it’s primarily genetic augmentation.

Maybe? I’m not really familiar enough with them to know

My Stellaris empires always end up starting more like the vulcans with a focus on science and mostly peaceful exploration, and end up a society of soul-crushing academia that will compromise their own sanity, values and safety for any chance at powerful or dangerous knowledge, ruling over a collection of random protectorates that they maintain for little reason other than diplomatic influence and to have someone to lord their vastly supervisor tech over.

Something that I started wondering, when I watched that TNG episode where someone tries pointing lasers at the Enterprise, is if they could still be a viable weapon in the star trek universe if you put enough energy into one. Like, barely-space-capable species laser weapons might barely be noticable to the shields, but if you had like, a laser with a significant fraction of a star’s energy output pumped into it, or just a billion of those primitive laser-wielding ships, surely the shields have got to give eventually

But did they pack the Klingon-repellent bat spray?

Yo mamma so fat, the Tholians ran out of web trying to trap her.

Twins are not perfect copies of each other’s brain though, they are merely genetically identical.

That depends on what “you” are. If you are just your brain or nervous system, as in the specific atoms and such that make up that brain, then sure, obviously those atoms can’t be in two places at once, so you are wherever they are. On the other hand, if you are the structure of those atoms and particles, the way they are arranged, the patterns of movement they form as they go about their work, the information they contain by all this; then it stands to reason that a sufficiently perfect copy is the same as you, because if whatever makes you “you” is part that structure, whatever makes it “your” consciousness instead of someone else’s, and the copy has exactly the same structure, then the copy must also contain whatever that part is that makes it “you” and not someone else, and therefore has to be you as well.

This isn’t a settled question, so one sort of has to decide what answer one thinks is more likely, I personally think the second.

Consider a hypothetical for a moment. Suppose there are two people, I’ll call them Bob and Bill for the purposes of distinguishing them. Suppose they get captured by some sort of mad scientist, who runs an experiment on them both. They wipe the brains of both people in such a way as to not completely kill them, but such as to remove every trace of their memories, personality, etc, essentially rendering them braindead, but without the physical damage that usually entails. Then, they painstakingly re-create those same neural pathways, same memories, personality, etc, but they recreate Bob’s persona in what is originally Bill’s body, and likewise, recreate Bill’s memory and personality in Bob’s. Which of these two people is now Bob (or if one thinks neither really are and that Bob is just dead, who at least has the better claim)? The one that has the physical brain, nervous system etc of the original Bob, but remembers and thinks exactly like Bill? Or the one that acts like Bob, and remembers being Bob, and probably thinks he is Bob and would insist on his being such, but does not have the same material in his brain as the original? If one of Bob’s friends raids the lab trying to rescue him, which should he take back home?

The activity of something is essentially information (consider how computer programs are ultimately just the activity of the components of a computer). If I copy information from one substrate to another, and do so with no changes, I don’t have any new information. Applying that back to brains, assuming that consciousness really is only brain activity (which seems highly likely, but since we don’t really understand the nature of consciousness, isn’t completely proven), then I’d disagree with the new brain= new activity step

I’m not sure it’s really the same thing, because it’s already pretty clear that something happens to consciousness when one is asleep, since that period is experienced differently than when awake, positing something like that about the nature of what happens to it doesn’t add a bunch of unnecessary complexity the way that assuming the universe just randomly assembled to look far older than it is does.

It seems a silly question to ask, but interesting to think about because I can’t think of a way to prove the intuitively obvious answer: how does one know that the duplicate doesn’t somehow inherit the original consciousness, and some new one with the memories and personality of it doesn’t get immediately generated in the original body?

My point is meant to be, that proving that two duplicates are not the same people as eachother, is not quite the same thing as proving that a duplicate is not the original person.

Presumably not without some means of information transfer, but that doesn’t mean that a replica isn’t you, because it could also mean that there are now two of you, both of which have an equally valid claim to the original identity, but which immediately diverge into identities distinct from eachother by virtue of having slightly different experiences after the split.

The thing is, we don’t actually know that continuity is required for it to be the same consciousness. It might work that way, or it might be that sufficiently recreating the right brain patterns restarts the same consciousness in a new location, or something else entirely

I dont know the details, but Ive heard of companies that do this, or kits that can be used for it, existing, though I can only imagine that changing a car that one’s business has not manufactured and was never designed for such a conversion must take a lot of manual work, which would be expensive before even considering things like the cost of batteries.