The only proper response.

Near death experience?

That comment was fun. Kinda typically a bit of a snarky comment, but really came off as nice and wholesome in context.

I thought docking didn’t involved noses.

Not true! She ate a monkey yesterday. …and she grabbed it before she ate it.

Why would you, though, when you could have little goblinoid babies and save on the vet bill?

Is this how circumcision works?

Family is family, even if it must be created by magic and held together by compulsion. …right?

Why are people always so dualistic in their categorizations?! What if I want to be able to afford rent and fuck monsters?!

• It’s not PHP
• It’s already implemented in browsers

Well, to play devil’s advocate - and species eating it’s own on the regular would be a failure - but much more so for one whose primary strength is working together.

I’m referring to the laws of the universe, which have not always been consistent. A strange attractor can form states that are temporarily dynamically stable - and for something like the universe, we may not notice any small changes to ‘constants,’ as we are directly subject to them (including our tools of measurement). Aside from that, change is likely so slow that we may not even notice it.

Nevertheless, if the big bang is in any form to be believes, we must accept that the universe’s basic laws can change, and yet they enter states where they do not noticeably change. If the pattern of the rest of nature holds (massive numbers of similar forms and structures distributed over time and space, where rough repetition along a common theme is a common theme), the universe will probably do similarly.

What would be incredibly odd would be:

• something came into existence from nothing
• that something happened for a while
• that something basically stops happening due to even distribution of energy throughout space
• end of story

Or

• no consistency whatsoever

Either of those seem unlikely. But, of course, I live in this universe, so I could be biased. :-)

I meant a strange attractor, but I think it also has prostitutes properties of a strange loop.

A strange loop is a hierarchy, or heterarchy, where as you proceed ‘up’ the hierarchy, you eventually arrive where you started.

A strange attractor is a system which, although never quite having the exact same state, cycles around the same general set of states. One way of thinking of this is “a loop which never quite mets up with itself”. An interesting example of this would be a three+ body gravitational system where the bodies are of comparable mass, and no stabilizing elements are present. Odds are very against them actually striking each other, but orbits are virtually completely unpredictable. Nevertheless, they won’t eject any of the bodies, so they will always be in the same general region.

As applied to the universe, you could set the ‘laws’ of the universe as values on a manifold, and these ‘laws’ would flex and shift as the overall state of the universe changes, but the universe would cycle around within a probability niche - a strange attractor. There’s also a potential it could leave that probability niche and ‘fall’ into, or enter into, another. One such probability niche would be the very strong tendencies of the universe - the ‘laws’ of the universe - as we know them.

What caused the initial imbalance, and what prevents it from happening again?

Nothing. It’s happening, and has always been. Anything that claims the universe as a whole is deteriorating is absolute bollocks, as it requires a creation myth, just as it postulates destruction.

If the universe is anything that we currently have theories for, the universe is a strange loop.

Interesting, but i have to disagree with “and therefore the universe should look the same in every direction.”

Everywhere we look, we see asymmetry and variegation, along with instances of homogeneity and monoculture, as one thing wins out in a small domain.

So, yes, in some sense, same in all directions, but that “sameness” sure has a heck of a lot of play. And not being special, per se, doesn’t mean lack of uniqueness. Even cloned plants on the same shelf have differing viewpoints, though perhaps not “privileged”, unless one happens to be closer to a sunny window. But that happens.

I’ve also thought about life being an expression of entropy increase, but I can’t say I fully agree. There are aspects of that at play - somewhat more noticeable in thought and consciousness, and the efficiency of organizing thought - but I think that an assumption of universal entropy is just another local-phenomena-first issue. Although it applies in systems we isolate from the universe as a whole, the broad tendency for substance clumps (i.e., organization) and variegation is also universal.

So it would seem.

I think it’s a trauma-avoidance mechanism. If someone doesn’t register a major event, and can just continue living their known pattern, there’s something (biologically) good in that, when the other option is to disrupt the pattern you use to survive.

Now that survival isn’t by-and-large the issue, and we have the capacity to register and process things of great magnitude, some of us can and do. But, it’s up to those who do to create an actionable course, if they want others involved. It’s just not enough to shout and make sure people know - there must be an actionable course for it to truly register.

It can be hard to watch that apathy, though.

The really interesting part, though, is that it demonstrates the ability of the populous to see something with immense implications - then just shrug it off, forget, and get back to the ‘normal’ things.

Fair.

Well, minus ‘A Chinese or American research program’. The ability for the US or China to keep an active, capable project like that a secret for over two decades is incredibly unlikely. More unlikely than anything else postulated.

…but still, definitely unknown.

I have coined a theory I call “Galactic spring.” It’s that the emergence of intelligent life is a manifestation of and synchronized by some underlying phenomena - perhaps just the natural growth in informational complexity in a galaxy-wide entanglement network. Perhaps just a matter of sufficient amounts of the needed elements being available. The specific underlying mechanism isn’t that important, unless we have an understanding about the initial emergence of life to compare it to. But the theory is that there is a larger synchronizing factor.

Like spring, there are some species that may emerge early. But also like spring, the emergence of one heralds the emergence of others. Every other “the earth is the unique snowflake of the universe” theory has failed. We are simply emerging. The conditions are occurring that generate intelligent life, and there’s no strong reason to believe that our circumstance in that regard is unique.