Do you think the four-stroke engine is unique to Earth, or is it a simple enough design to have been independently invented elsewhere in the universe?
Vast and easily accessible hydrocarbon reserves are a lucky accident of Earth's particular biochemistry and geological and ecological histories, any alien worlds are unlikely to have ever had liquid-fueled combustion engines at all.
>>28775272Water is pretty abundant. So, developing steam power isn't a stretch. And from there, a hydrogen engine is a natural evolution. Although it's a pretty large technical gap. Ethanol seems like the most probable step.
>>28775367>Ethanol seems like the most probable step.Electric cars would be the next step. The electric motor is an invention so obvious and context-independent that it should exist in any society. The electric car is just as old as the internal combustion car, gasoline was just cheaper and more reliable at the time.
>>28775254>first contact with ayy lmaos>cultures and ideas are shared>mfw they went through a 60s muscle car phase like we did but they never really left because no oil crises>mfw l6s are the cheap engine, v8s are everywhere>mfw l8s and v16s are the premium/rich optionsone can dream
>>28775254I once read a science fiction story in which aliens accidentally invented the FTL-drive, which caused their technological development to stall.They later came to Earth to attack itBut as they begin their assault, things take a turn for the absurd—the Roxolani attack with matchlock weapons and black powder explosives. Humans retaliate with automatic weapons and missiles. The battle is over in minutes, and most of the invaders are killed. A few are captured alive.When they are interrogated, the truth becomes evident: the method of manipulating gravity is absurdly simple, and species that discover it are able to use faster-than-light travel with primitive technological sophistication. This enabled them to engage in wars of conquest on a galactic scale. However, adopting the gravity technology stifles further technological development as the creative energies of societies that find it go into perfecting it. In contrast, humans somehow missed developing gravity manipulation and advanced further technologically. Unlike the broad reaching implications of Earth technology, gravity manipulation has no other uses.
>>28775272Peak midwittery
>>28775395Name pls
>>28775393Could you imagine chopping it up with a boomer grey >Yep they don't make em like the use to, twin drive plasma fusion with a blown hydrogen infuser. it had so much thrust the sum bitch could jump a budweiser long neck from here to the next galaxy
>>28775439The Road Not Taken -Harry Turtledovehttps://www.eyeofmidas.com/scifi/Turtledove_RoadNotTaken.pdf
>>28775379Electric has taken 100 years to be feasible.The brute force of internal combustion was needed to build the manufacturing infrastructure required to develop just a viable battery.You take electronics for granted.We detonated 3 nuclear bombs 2 years before semiconductors were invented.Look at this picture.The individual machines are driven by a belt system. There's one massive engine outside that spins overhead shafts ran throughout the factory.A blacksmith hammer and forge doesnt have the precision to build an electric motor.
>>28775254If you consider the need for cheaply available energy for industrialization as the "filter," a planet without hidrocarbons would be in a tight spot. Solar needs electronics which you cannot develop without an industry and eolic, while available, would not be as efficient (think those old time wild west pumps).But carbon based energy sources like charcoal or peat could be used to drive steam engines and possibly drive innovation until chemistry allowed liquefaction of fuels to drive something like an ethanol/methanol engine.EVs and electrification would very quickly catch up in such a situation for the lack widely available gasoline.>>28775379What has enabled modern EVs is the battery tech, even with its innefficiencies, gasoline has been for a very long time the most dense energy form.
>>28775882 (me)Consider also that a diesel engine could feasible run on vegetable oil, so it's a machining and material science issue rather separate of energy availability to run a steam engine or machine, for example.
>>28775442that boomer grey is probably the guy that fixes anything for 30 bucks or a case of beer...or both
>>28775395This is a funny mind experiment. It begs to wonder if AI will have that impact on mankind, a sort of quick fix band aid that eventually leads to stagnation of innovation and eventual regression.
>>28775902Practice already shows that code generated by AI is MUCH WORSE than code written by humans and alarmingly often ends in catastrophic errors if the errors are not corrected earlier by experienced programmers.For example the infamous Windows 11 bugs are largely the result of mindless overuse of AI.
>>28775931Yes and it will only get worse. Soon the average programmer will be no better than the AI it once trained up. Programmers are already shittier today than they were 10-20 years ago. The enshitification will continue with tools that trivialize all barriers of entry into nothing.
>>28775931Then the issue is the lack of correction or laziness of the software engineers. As someone who works in tech, I've never used AI to write anything more than a few methods at a time, I don't know if at Microsoft people blindly use AI to generate entire projects and submit them.
>>28775939I used to think StackOverflow promoted bad habits among programmers.But that's nothing compared to damn AI.
>>28775939That is like saying it's bad for the forestry industry that the chainsaw was invented because lumberjacks before had to use axes which took "real skill" and a high barrier to entry. Yes programming will eventually become (or already is) a sort of blue collar job with AI being the main tool, with a lower barrier to entry, I don't know how this is a bad thing though.
Any industry has always cared about quality x quantity, or the overall throughput or efficiency. The average quality can take a hit but if you can produce far more lines of code, if you can copy paste an error and it tells you exactly how to fix the bug, etc. that greatly improves efficiency. There is nothing difficult or interesting about programming, it's mainly about the ideas and design and research for what you're implementing.
>>28775965
>>28775882>>28775272Any planet with hydrocarbon based life is more or less by definition also going to have hydrocarbon reserves, simply as a precondition of possibility. There are huge amounts of molten hydroxides and carbonates in the mantle which hydrogenate in the crust to form coals and oils and natural gases, along with atmospheric carbon that precipitates into carbonates in the oceans and gets subducted into the mantle.
>>28775983it's called market and technical pressures retardthere's no reason to save as much on game size as people have 1-2tb storage on their consoles/pcsand how does "efficient code" save anything lmao textures take up the majority of game size, what kind of dunning kruger brainlet made this we simply optimize on developer efficiency and throughput rather than the size of the game in megabytes
>>28776183yea just make it use more ram and cpu bro we got plenty
>>28775254ive come to the belief that intelligent life like ourself needs a situation nearly identical to earths to arise so probably. they would probably look like us too, bipedal at the very least is a requirement
>>28776183Internet speed scales far slower than storage does. My internet is actually SLOWER than it was 5 years ago thanks to at&t. Meanwhile, storage capacity per dollar has ~doubled.
There are more six cylinder internal combustion engines running in the universe right now than there are humans on Earth.
>>28775254there is no life anywhere else in the universe
>>28775544Fucking crazy how we had to build elaborate, precise and somewhat delicate rube goldberg machines on steroids using iron age tech to explode liquid fire to generate work so we could have enough productivity to eventually invent a rod inside of a cylinder that does the same exact thing but with like 7 total parts rather than 1000.
Alpha Centauri uses 3 stroke engines
>>28776653alpha centauri sounds kinda gay
>>28776183>there's no reason to save as much on game size as people have 1-2tb storage on their consoles/pcsbrother... 300gbs is 30% of 1tb, that doesn't count the amount of the drive devoted to OS.
>>28776119nopeoil is unique to earth
>>28775254Aliens are definitely LS swapping shit. It's just more powerful and reliable than their shit.
I wish I knew how to record my screen for 4 seconds and upload it to 4chan inunder a minute.But these are basically moving at the same time and it's making me horny.
>>28776391It's this.You know all those games like Mass Effect and Halo and all of those sci-fi books you read that talk about "the ancients", "the progenitors"?You're looking at them. It's us. Dealing with trannies and Africans.
>>28776183What market pressures are gamers squeezing to demand shittier, bigger (file size), unfinished yearly releases?We all waited for Elden Ring. We had to. We didn't have a choice? And guess what? It sold over 20 million copies.
>>28776373Does that make us a lesser lifeform?Does the universe actually belong to 6 cylinder engines?
>>28778282>I ever tell you about the time our FTL drive died in the middle of nowhere, and the human on board with us pulled the engine out of his car and bolted it on to the drive, enabling us to get back home?>Since then, I keep a spare "El Ess" engine on all my ships. You never know when you need them, and you need them more than ya think.
>>28776119>Pretending Abiogenic petroleum origin has any basis in realityWhat was that about midwit?
>>28778289Kek
>>28775254Who gives a fuck.Who fucking gives a fuckFuck fucking fuck a fuck.Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck. Ing.
>>28775395>has no other usesSee that's the one flaw in the premise. It's a good, and fun story, and suspension disbelief for the sake of the message and all of that,But grav manip has ALL of the uses.All.It would fix quite literally every problem we have (thus allowing us to deepen more into our self-species predatory behavior and attack each other for having a single arm hair out of place, or not present)
