Doesn’t it demonstrate that the actual dinos in real life don’t have to be big to be popular, because humans will simply portray them how they want to see and bring interest in the species regardless?

I mean, raptors

Similar story where I work, manufacturing a type of x ray emitting tool. Never seen anyone having problematic readings on the dosimeter badges, but when I was hired I did get told that they had only once had an incident, where one of the engineers had been for some reason repeatedly testing a prototype by directly holding the sample the x ray was firing at in his hand. Not sure what happened to him

If you’re actually curious, or someone else reading this is, you never can get a rocket, or anything with mass, to the speed of light either, not just faster than it, but you can get arbitrarily close. However, you never notice anything stopping you going faster than your current speed, there’s no point where your rockets stop working or anything, rather, time and space stretch and squeeze such that neither you nor anybody else see you going faster than light. If you have a magic rocket that somehow has infinite fuel and can fire forever, you can actually get anywhere as fast as you want, from your perspective.

Alpha centauri is famously about 4 light years away, but you can get there in 2 seconds, from your perspective, if you go fast enough. But, everyone on earth will see slightly over that roughly 4 years go by in the time that for you is just 2 seconds. (You’ll see them move slowly too at first, since they’re moving relative to you just as fast as your ship is moving to them, but when you slow down, you’ll see them seem to speed up until you’ll have seen them do 4 years worth of stuff by the time you stop). Meanwhile on your ship, you don’t see yourself crossing that 4 light year distance in less than the allowed time either, because space itself is squished kinda, so that the distance to alpha centauri is shortened to the point that if you’re getting there in 2 seconds, it’s now less than 2 light seconds away, from your perspective, and you’re not moving faster than light to cross that distance in that time. People outside will also see your ship compressed like this too.

This isn’t just a regular optical illusion either, space and time really are different for the people on and off the ship (and indeed very slightly different for everyone anywhere). Nobody has the “correct” view of the universe, because everyone’s perspective is equally valid.

I imagine any explanation of the expansion of the universe for people that are not themselves studying astronomy is going to be simplified in a way that gives the average person the basic idea but not the complete picture to avoid confusion when explaining the concept. Ive not studied astronomy, but I did get most of the way through a physics degree, and know that at least there, a lot ideas are explained in that sort of way to people without much knowledge of the subject, especially the more confusing concepts. I wouldnt be surprised if thats the case for most fields of science. For a different example as an analogy, its common knowledge that you cant move faster than light (ignoring the whole expanding spacetime stuff), but it isnt always explained why this is the case, leading to questions from some people like “what happens if I fly a spaceship to the speed of light, and then turn on the rockets to try to go faster?” which have easy answers or just dont make sense as a question if one has had the behavior of objects at high speed explained, but which seem reasonable enough questions to ask if all youve been told is that the speed of light is just some cosmic speed limit. People cant reasonably blame you for finding an incomplete explanation you’ve been given, well, incomplete, and then asking questions that come to mind as a result.

Dont we see other galaxy groups though? Im no astronomer, but I do recall the universe having some degree of structure above the scale of individual galaxies, with groups and clusters of them forming larger groups or filaments surrounding voids of space with fewer galaxies in them.

Edit: quick search in wikipedia brings up a list of a few groups and clusters known, of which the local group is merely one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_galaxy_groups_and_clusters

I’m guessing you misread the title as animals instead of mammals, and then didn’t read the actual post text

I’d argue that our civilization is more capable of solving it’s own problems than it ever has been, just because we are are far better at identifying them, communicating them to the rest of the world, and analyzing the effects of what we try. Just because we have not solved all our problems does not mean that people in years past would have been able to do so and we’ve somehow lost that ability.

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 used to be pretty excited about 3d printed homes, but an argument I’ve seen, that’s made me a lot more skeptical of them, is that much of the work of building isn’t putting up the actual walls, it’s all the wiring, plumbing, installing windows and climate control and insulation and roofing and whatever else like that that turns a building from essentially an artificial cave into a more livable space. A 3d printer that prints you walls out of concrete or whatever is only doing the easy part for you in that case, and not necessarily even in the most efficient or desirable manner. Not to say that the idea of more efficient ways to build housing cheaply isn’t interesting to me, I just think that it’d be something more boring, like a a bunch of improvement to modular prefab construction. 3d printing is an awesome technology, but it’s not a good option for everything

Probably, if they hang around us and study us that often

Humans, unlike the animals that human keep as pets, are capable of complex speech, so I’d bet that treats would be marketed towards the humans themselves, so that the humans then push their keeper to buy those treats. Sorta like how lots of ads for toys are marketed towards kids, because advertising works better on them and then they’ll go and push their parents to buy them.

Funnily enough the instance my masto is on also uses that motto, tho for an entirely different reason

I just add a bit of bottled mustard, about half a teaspoon to a box of mac I find to be good, too much more and you start to taste the mustard distinctly.

Adding a bunch of black pepper to it also does good things in my opinion

Monosodium glutamate. Makes things taste more savory. Also causes furries to make in-jokes about family unfriendly topics.

Something to consider here is that selective breeding of dogs is very often not done to the dog’s benefit, and indeed in some breeds makes them less healthy. It’s done for the benefit of their owners, either to do some job or for aesthetics, in a way that would be considered absolutely abhorrent if done to people (indeed, a lot of people think that in dogs it can go too far, especially where breeds with health problems are concerned). Eugenics is at least conceived by its proponents as being for the good of the species in a way that dog breeding is not, it’s just that the easiest way to do that is to control who has children, which isn’t generally considered acceptable for people, and the easiest ways to prevent someone you don’t want to have children from doing so are to kill or forcibly sterilize them, which is even worse. Additionally, it’s tricky to know what traits even are detrimental or beneficial to the species, and the personal biases of whoever is in charge come into play (for instance, a lot of historical examples of eugenics being pushed have been by people who were, well, extremely racist and therefore selecting for things like skin color, which if successful would simply lower genetic diversity, which is counterproductive)

Now, as far as comparing humans to dog breeds (as in, why people find it okay to say “x breed of dog tends to be more aggressive”, but not “x group of people are more aggressive”), it should be considered that humans already have a rather low genetic diversity, as far as species go. If were we like dogs, we would probably all be the same “breed”, so to speak, even people from different ethnic backgrounds (sure, we can tell ourselves apart due to not looking exactly the same, but even two dogs of the same breed don’t look exactly alike, and we’re very attuned to seeing small differences in humans that we might not see in other animals). I’d bet it would probably be possible to eventually selectively breed a bunch of humans to have noticably and consistently different traits beyond just skin and hair color (which while visibly distinct from the outside, don’t really represent very much change), but intentionally engaging in breeding humans like dogs like this would be considered, well, a horrible thing to do, and in any case, isn’t what we currently have nowadays.

If you don’t want your posts/content to appear on other websites from the one you posted it on, why would you use a federated platform in the first place? Isn’t the entire point of these kinds of platforms that this kind of content is shared between sites?

And on a mostly unrelated side note, that bit about people trying to force the website to display CP to get the owner in legal trouble is exactly the reason why strict liability crimes that don’t care about intent are a bad idea

hypothetically, what stops a spam group from creating their own instance to register accounts on, or several such? It’d get defederated quickly once the attack got going, sure, but it would take time for this to get done, and in the meantime the spam gets in

Ever had glofish? They look much brighter under a blacklight, but they’re still noticably colorful even under natural sunlight, in a way that the unmodified zebra danios (the original fish) are not

I doubt that the gene would be successful in the wild, given it would make it harder for the deer to hide from predators.