Like nearly everything from the media, it's a lie designed for clicks.
Let's not throw baby out with bathwater. This kind of thinking has been so harmful for social cohesion, and we need a cohesive society if we're going to have a prayer of handling the worst problems we've ever faced as a species in a way that future generations will be remotely proud of.
Yes, because yellow journalism making a comeback means that somehow the readers fault for distrusting the journalists... Classic GN shilling
Let's not throw baby out with bathwater. This kind of thinking has been so harmful for social cohesion, and we need a cohesive society if we're going to have a prayer of handling the worst problems we've ever faced as a species in a way that future generations will be remotely proud of.
We have no hope of facing those problems if our social cohesion is so fragile that it can't even handle calling an article out as clickbait.
There's a very big difference between calling something clickbait and saying "everything from the media is a lie".
Like nearly everything from the media, it's a lie designed for clicks.
Let's not throw baby out with bathwater. This kind of thinking has been so harmful for social cohesion, and we need a cohesive society if we're going to have a prayer of handling the worst problems we've ever faced as a species in a way that future generations will be remotely proud of.
Yes, my comment was a bit hyperbolic. However, if we're going to have a prayer of handling the worst problems we've ever faced as a species in a way that future generations will be remotely proud of, we need a media that doesn’t profit from the exact opposite occurrence.
> The new particle contains two charm quarks and an up and a down antiquark. Several tetraquarks have been discovered in recent years (including one with two charm quarks and two charm antiquarks), but this is the first one that contains two charm quarks, without charm antiquarks to balance them. This is not the first time a tetraquark has been measured, but instead it's the first time a tetraquark with two charm qua…
Like nearly everything from the media, it's a lie designed for clicks.
This sort of comment is actually worse than the thing it is attempting to denigrate. "The media" isn't lying to you. "The media" is a smokescreen that lumps a wildly diverse collection of information purveyors under one, inaccurate and overly generalized, umbrella. Some media seeks to find the truth, some seeks only to manipulate you. Some is built from the ground up to push an agenda (political, religious, etc.), some was built to make money and some was built to speak truth to power. This last should not be lumped in with the rest, even when it disagrees with YOUR personal agenda. There are a great number of journalists that seek to reveal truth, to confront the powerful when they abuse their positions and to attempt to reveal and expose our failings. Don't discount them with inaccurate and dismissive comments like this. The best of them may be the only thing between you and the depredations of those that control our lives and places like the US, where laws provide at least some protection for these journalists and where a tradition of journalistic integrity at least has the possibility of being followed give such journalists a chance to do what they do so well.
True for what it is, but this is handled in the books. They literally don’t want our planet, they want our star . And the dark forest: without a history of correlated interaction we have no reason to believe they will allow us to live, so we can’t allow them to live, so they can’t allow us to live. Eliding a more major spoiler, they absolutely intended to annihilate us on arrival and they would have gotten away with…
> True for what it is, but this is handled in the books. They literally don’t want our planet, they want our star. That's... an odd reason. There are plenty of stars out there, unless the aliens started out right next door (like in Alpha Centauri) there's not much reason to go after our star. I haven't read the books...
They are indeed right next door. Also, it’s a crowded universe, and no-one wants to be noticed, so just showing up at Tau Ceti or whatever would be very unwise; there might already be someone there.
The major bit of artistic license is that their Alpha Centauri is way more broken than ours; the real one isn’t all that badly behaved.
It’s implied that the whole situation is very unusual; interstellar invasions don’t happen as a rule and they’re only doing it because their star(s) is basically broken.
Neat! What can you imagine might be applications for exotic particles like this? (even if if it's a stretch or fictional)
Given the massive energy required to do experiments like these and the microscopic scale in both physical and time dimensions I think we're centuries away from doing something practical with the particle itself. It may be the missing piece of some future technology we can't even imagine yet.
I think the more immediate motivation is to help either validate our current understanding of how the universe works, or to break the model in an interesting way.
It’s a great book, but it suffers from the same old issue. A civilization that is capable of packing a robot into particle by manipulating higher dimensions doesn’t need to take our planet. They could terraform Mars or any other planet they want.
I had the same problem with the books. If the sophon is that omniscient and that powerful, it could do far more than just mess with experiments. I also never understood the wallfacers - why can’t they communicate via encryption, using a private key stored in each individuals mind alone?
The sophons aren’t particularly powerful, though. They interfere with particle physics experiments by actually interacting with the particle beam, but they can’t do much else. It’s mentioned at some point that the humans are worried they could interfere with computers, but clearly they can’t even do that (if they could, Lou Ji’s plan probably wouldn’t work).
Killing everyone is too much to ask, remember they were ultimately just protons, physically they're not more powerful than cosmic rays. Their strength was information gathering and special effects.
Tbf, from the way they were described it should have been fairly easy to defeat the Sophons even without any science-fiction technology; just build e.g. 10-20 particle accelerators distributed over the world and take measurements close enough in time to each other that you cannot be at multiple sites without exceeding the speed of light. Then at most 3 of them could be corrupted for any given run, and these can be th…
This is addressed in the book; a new sophon is cheaper than a new particle accelerator.
If aliens don't like us, then why wouldn't they just destroy us, rather than troll our physicists and mess with the results? Why would they specifically mess with the particle accelarators at this point? Why not with earlier physics?
Because your interstellar equivalent of the CIA can obtain the political capital to prevent a civilisational rival from emerging via subtle manipulations, but it can't obtain the political capital and consensus needed to commit wholesale genocide. There's a big difference between the scenarios.
In this case the subtle manipulations were just a holding pattern while they waited on the genocide; it was going to take them 400 years to get here.