They said it had a massive storage capacity, and it was going to be expanded, and kept somewhere safe. What’s the difference if it feels real?
Ironically, what if that’s how our actual reality is even? It’s at least plausible, not that - as you said - it would make any difference if true.
Moreover, there are postulated by string theory to be 11 dimensions (I mean… who knows whether that is true, but we are speaking hypotheticals here regardless of instantiation of any one actual implementation), yet we only occupy 3 spatial and 1 time. The other spatial, and perhaps more interesting the other potential time, dimensions all offer numerous possibilities.
The ancient book Flatland does a pretty great job exploring that concept imho.
That is a fantastic book, and anyone who hasn’t read it should
And its successor SphereLand is, if not quite in the same league in terms of being ground-breaking (especially for its time), also neat.
The Matrix was cool bc it popularized such thinking, bringing it out to where it was comfortable to talk about it in more mainstream company. But it most definitely was not the first to expouse that idea that truth is partly what we make of it, as well as not that too.
Here’s a rather trippy movie version that doesn’t do such a bad job adapting it - https://youtu.be/avMX-Zft7K4
I doubt I’ll ever read the book but the wikipedia article about it was quite interesting. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flatland
The author died >100 years ago, so the entire text is public domain if anyone wants to read it. https://en.m.wikisource.org/wiki/Flatland
I don’t like reading books on a screen but… it is hard to pass up free - then again, libraries also exist and THIS BOOK IS WORTHWHILE.
I could barely put it down the entire time I read it, it just consumed me.
Just a note, it is actually so offensive to a woman’s role in society that many (most? I have no idea) scholars think that it was so over-the-top that it must have been meant as a critique of the then-status-quo.
This book has fucking VISION, even centuries into the future.
Hopefully it won’t remain so for millennia as well - bc of the thoughts finally becoming commonplace in society; but even then it would remain as a historical milestone towards that fantastic end.:-)
Just a note, it is actually so offensive to a woman’s role in society that many (most? I have no idea) scholars think that it was so over-the-top that it must have been meant as a critique of the then-status-quo.
The author outright stated that it was meant as a critique in the 2nd edition, so there’s no need to guess :)
Was that the actual author, or a statement added on their behalf? I thought I recalled reading it as the latter, where it seemed they were just guessing.
Either way it could be a kind of trigger warning for someone who even knowing that wouldn’t want to read the text.
It was the actual author, who got annoyed that people couldn’t recognise satire. Not much different from today, in other words 😂
Hehe. Thanks for sharing that.
In fairness, there are a LOT of kinds of people in the world - e.g. I would have thought that someone advocating to block access to medically necessary abortions would surely have been satire but… nope.
As with any form of message passing, the meaning depends on both the sender and the recipient - I would argue far more so the former, but some extremely selfish people would just as vehemently argue that the latter is all that matters to them.🤷
Your passion makes an excellent case on its own. You convinced me to give it a shot, I’ll look for it at the library. I hope they have it.
I LOVE books that TRULY make you THINK.💗🧠
Alright so I went to the library and they are getting a copy from another branch, should have it in a few days.
I think the librarian was kinda impressed I asked for a book from the 1880’s. 😆
Hehehe, you haven’t even touched the book yet and are considered smarter already:-).
Something, something, condoms.
Although in this case it would be sort of like putting a condom on an extremely realistic dildo that didn’t know it was a dildo.
I’m bad at metaphors.
I’ve never seen HD B’lana
Correct me if I’m wrong, but…there are actual high resolution blu-rays of TNG because the show was shot on film and the original reels still exist, while DS9 and Voyager were shot on tape so good old NTSC 480i is the best we’ve got. So would hte above image be upscaled via AI or something?
On a related note, JMS had the foresight to film Babylon 5 in 16:9 format which was cropped to 4:3, so the show does exist in widescreen, though I understand it isn’t in any particular kind of HD, especially the CGI space scenes.
As far as I’m aware, you are correct. However the capability to upscale a video well enough has been around in the home since at least when Nvidia released the Shield with its AI upscale like 6 years ago. I rewatched DS9 and Voyager switching it on and off and it did a good enough job back then to trick me into thinking it was HD. Since then it’s just gotten better. Maybe the picture of Be’Lana is a photograph that was taken on set or a frame that used generative AI to upscale it. It’s still very sharp from what I remember watching on TV when it aired.
The image above is an animated GIF though, so it would have to have been taken from a video source.
Can’t compare if you’ve never raw-dogged the universe outside of a holodeck.
There you go, that’s the metaphor I was going for.
whoops!
