What no one has seen before: gravitational waveforms from warp drive collapse

> ...produces the high quality that made them all popular in the first place

Agree with everything you said in general, but you lost me at the very end in the context of this thread. Hard to equate Stack Exchange as a "high quality" destination. It was probably true in the first few years after inception, but years of tug war between "the business they think they're in" vs. "the business their users think they are" have made a terrible experience for said less-informed users.

When given an alternative (e.g. LLMs, ironically probably trained on their own content, but without the snarkiness and self-righteousness of their mods), users seem to be voting with their clicks [1].

[1] https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/387278/has-stack-ex...

When a gwave passes through, since the space contracts or expands, you get changes in density, since bone and soft tissue are different densities, there should still be a pressure differential that can be heard.

> but their (sometimes inconvenient) organizational goals are what produces the high quality that made them all popular in the first place.

Plainly not true for either Wikipedia or Stack Exchange. The rules came later, once the rules lawyers showed up to help everyone understand that those sites needed to change because they were too useful for people. This might be ancient history, but the debates that raged on for the Wikipedia editors are important. There were people who thought Wikipedia should be what we all think it should be, and they'd been there since the beginning... but they were more interested in adding missing content to Wikipedia. The exclusionists though, who to a much lesser degree hadn't been there since the beginning, thought it more important to be more prestigious than Britannica, a paper encyclopedia, for their own egos or something. And they formulated rules that they believed would get them there. And more or less the same thing with SE, though it's a private business and less a open source project than Wikipedia. Every once in awhile you'll find a 15 or 20 year old question/answer, and you'll be gobsmacked by how just "nice" it was. There was room to go off topic a little, room to provide solutions rather than answers, and so on. Though, many of those are getting deleted now days. Wouldn't want the replicants to get any ideas about how SE is supposed to work.

The disconnect is that when the core group of users was much smaller, those places acted to some extent like a real world community of people, even if no one knew anyone and no one recognized anyone else's face. Because they were a community, people wanted to be helpful. If someone had a question that was difficult to find the correct wording for, others were willing to interpret and answer the interpretation. They really wanted to be helpful. But now the group of users is much too large, and instead of wanting to be helpful, they want to compete. No one can rack up 400,000 reputation being helpful. They can't rack that up if others are being helpful. And it doesn't feel like a community, so they don't ever feel like they should be helpful.

Well if a planet has a few intelligent species, the expansionist one would dominate the rest.

If there is no expansionist species, after a time one will emerge due to mutation over time.

Look at humans - there were a bunch of other intelligent species around the time humans came to the scene - we out expanded and outcompeted all them.

Now of course this is just a sample of 1. But also seems kind of inevitable. So if mutation and natural selection are the only way for an intelligent life to emerge, it would probably also be expansionist, just by virtue of outcompeting everything else. And thus would naturally want to “explore” for the sake of it - just like humans.

Of course there might be other ways to achieve intelligence- like it being developed by other species (AI). But same rule still apply. If there are more than one, eventually the one that wants to expand will expand more than the others that don’t…

And even if the species found a way to “change themselves” to make them not give a fuck, by a virtue of change being possible eventually you’ll get expansionist “strain” again.

The acknowledgements are also cool:

> The crew thanks the creators and actors of the Star Trek universe for their inspiration for this work.