Formerly u/CanadaPlus101 on Reddit.

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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • I believe in conspiracies as a general concept, like the two guards, and I believe governments have classified programs. When it gets to a certain point where vast numbers of people are involved in covering up something huge perfectly, you run into the problem of everything being possible and nothing being falsifiable, though.

    In practice, people don’t believe in conspiracy theories because they honestly assess it’s the neatest way to explain the world, it’s because they get emotional satisfaction out of the community and the feeling that they know something which other people don’t. There’s psychology literature about it and everything.

    What I said is my goto answer when I suspect I’m about to be arguing about melting steel beams or whatever, because that’s just a waste of time.









  • Like I said in OP, that’s how modern dictatorships work, too. They have coups and intrigues and corruption absolutely everywhere you look. The dictator spends most of their time just staying on top and keeping the factions in balance.

    I’d say you’re right that the degree of control was lower on average before the conveniences of fast travel and communication, but then again it varied quite a bit. Rome’s level of centralisation is still etched across the European landscape.










  • If your water splitters are running, you should really just use the electricity they’re on to generate heat. Fire is especially dangerous in enclosed spaces.

    Also for load balancing you could constantly be splitting water into hydrogen and oxygen, then react them back into water when you need a large amount of energy at once as an alternative to electrical batteries which degrades less over time, if heat is all you want at least.

    Some kind of combustion with oxidiser built in might always have an application. Chemical rocket boosters maybe? (Hydrogen specifically can also be turned back into electricity with like 80% efficiency in a fuel cell, FYI, although it’s sooo hard to store)

    I suppose there might be The Martian-esque edge cases as well, where more complex, controlled chemical reactions are temporarily impractical, but like in the book and movie that’s highly unsustainable and you’ll die if you’re stuck doing it for long.