The fact that the OpenBSD logo has to include its name spelled out really tells you everything you need to know, doesn’t it.

Yes, I thought that was obvious from the start. What part of “Luke shouldn’t have hesitated” did you find unclear?

Let me give you an analogy. You see a huge guy, beside himself with rage, winding up to chop a baby using a machete. Do you think it’s psychopathic to shoot him in the face to save the baby? That’s the position Luke was in. He could see what Ben was going to do in the future just as clearly as you can see what the big angry guy is about to do. And if you hesitated and the baby ended up chopped in half, you’d probably feel a lot of regret and guilt, just like Luke.

The Jedi exist in a universe where the deity they worship is actually real and provides them with both a way of seeing far into the future as well as an objectively correct moral compass. This means the Jedi are ethically obligated to act in ways that might seems psychopathic to people who do not posses such clairvoyance. This is precisely why they’re supposed to avoid emotional attachments, because those might compel them to act in ways that feel better in the moment but end up doing far more harm. The older I get, the more convinced I become that basically all of humanity’s problems boil down to people doing what they feel like instead of what they know they should.

I don’t think Luke used statistics to determine what Ben would do in the future.

As for Minority Report, it’s unfortunately one of those movies where the filmmakers try to clobber the audience over the head with a moral that the story doesn’t actually support. Jurassic Park is another such movie. It’s all about “man shouldn’t play god” and “life will find a way”, right? Wrong! The dinosaurs only escaped their enclosures because Nedry sabotaged the system and turned the electric fences off. The park would’ve been fine if he hadn’t done that. The real moral of that story is that humans can triumph even over mother nature as long as we don’t stab each other in the back.

Minority Report is a very similar case. The precrime program was a roaring success, eliminating nearly all premeditated murders. Yeah, sure, one guy managed to figure out a way to fool the system, but luckily he got caught regardless. That’s a reason to implement safeguards and improve the system, not to shut the entire program down. No system is perfect. Sure, precrime would probably produce a few wrongful convictions and fail to catch a few criminals, but guess what, those issues were far worse under the old system. Going back to a crappy old system because the new and improved system is not absolutely flawless is just stupid. Even in its prototype stage, precrime had far fewer issues than conventional law enforcement, and those issues would’ve been reduced even more with further development and refinement of the system. Shutting the entire thing down the moment a single teething issue cropped up was one of the most egregious cases of throwing the baby out with the bathwater ever put on screen. So yes, you unironically did get confused about who the bad guys were in Minority Report, but it’s not your fault, because the filmmakers were confused about it too.

It’s almost as if Luke’s unwillingness to make necessary sacrifices and his half-hearted actions bringing about the exact outcome he was hoping to prevent were a deliberate commentary on real life and on the situations we find ourselves in both as individuals and as a civilization or something. But that can’t be true, because the sequels are shit in every way with no redeeming features whatsoever, and Rian Johnson is a complete idiot who doesn’t know what he’s doing.

Oh please, don’t quote that ketamine-addled frog at me. The whole thing is his fault anyway, he fucked up literally everything he touched:

• First he opposed training Anakin at all. Because letting a kid whose Force sensitivity is off the charts run around unsupervised just after you’ve found out that the Sith are back is apparently a good idea…?
• Then he assigned him to wet-behind-the-ears Obi-Wan instead of a more experienced master who might be able to guide him better, despite knowing full well that Anakin was going to be difficult to train due to being too old.
• He didn’t recognize Palpatine as a Sith lord despite frequently meeting him face to face.
• Failed to defeat Dooku.
• Dismissed Dooku’s warning about a Sith being in control of the Republic as disinformation despite every word of it being true.
• Provided incredibly stupid, worthless, ineffective, and likely even outright damaging ‘guidance’ to Anakin in the throes of emotional turmoil.
• Decided that he and Obi-Wan should split up to fight the Sith individually instead of ganging up on one while the other was occupied, and then sent Obi-Wan after Anakin despite being explicitly warned that it wouldn’t work.
• Failed to defeat Palpatine.
• Tried to stop Luke from going to rescue his friends, who would later prove instrumental in the defeat of the Empire.
• Tried to teach Luke the same “attachments bad” bullshit that he fed Anakin in order to get him to assassinate his own father; in the end, of course, it was precisely that attachment that proved key to victory. If anything, the Empire was defeated because Luke, unlike everyone else before him, didn’t listen to Yoda.

So yeah. Every single thing this little green asshole ever said and did was wrong. If it weren’t for him, the Republic likely wouldn’t have even fallen in the first place. If Yoda says that the future is always in motion, the one thing we can be sure of is that the future is as solid as a rock.

That wasn’t a dream, it was a vision of the future. Luke’s a Jedi, the Jedi have faith in the Force. The Force showed him a vision, and he believed it. That’s what Jedi are supposed to do. And you know what else? The Force wasn’t wrong. Given what Ben would go on to do, Luke shouldn’t have hesitated.

It’s okay to like them while they do good and then change your mind when they turn evil.

I don’t see why the shareholders wouldn’t want his head on a pike as well.

I take it you have nothing else relevant to add to the topic. Cool. See you around.

Feel free to make up the difference by rereading those two sentences a hundred times. Maybe that’ll be enough for the point to get through.

4000 words? Oh please, that can be done in a hundredth of that: The laws of physics are constant, and more advanced technologies have energy requirements that must be met by preceding technologies. At the same time, each technology also has to offer enough tangible benefits to be worth pursuing on its own.

Feel free to name one or two examples and show how and why they’re incorrect.

We’re having quite a bit of trouble making that transition even with the benefits of a couple centuries of fossil-fueled industry. I find the idea of jumping directly from horse-drawn wagons to wind turbines and solar panels rather implausible.

I wonder if there’d be new fossil fuel deposits by then.

Probably not. Coal is basically trees that didn’t rot, and the reason they didn’t rot is that there were no microorganisms that could digest wood at the time. Between the evolution of wood and the evolution of organisms that could digest it, dead trees would just pile up on top of each other and sink into the ground under the weight of new layers of dead trees above them. Now that there are microorganisms that digest wood and dead trees rot away, new coal is not forming.

Oil does continue to form in some ocean areas where there is a layer of water without any oxygen on the ocean floor. Since these areas support no life, any organic remains that descend to the bottom (mostly plankton) remain unconsumed and eventually get buried and turn into oil. But it is a slow process. Estimating oil reserves is notoriously difficult, but it seems there’s about as much left in the ground as we’ve burned in the last fifty years. So in other words, four billion years of oil formation gets you about a century or two of industry. Since the Sun is about halfway through its lifespan, that means the Earth can potentially create enough juice for one more industrial civilization like ours. That’s assuming that those oil reserves are allowed to build up and don’t just get used up piecemeal by smaller civilizations arising in the interim. And also assuming that that final civilization is even able to make use of that oil, which is much harder to handle than coal (extraction, refining, transportation, etc.), without using coal as a stepping stone. And also assuming that no anaerobic microorganisms evolve that can survive on the ocean floor without oxygen and consume those organic remains, which could put a stop to oil formation just like wood-eating microorganisms put a stop to coal formation. Yeah, that seems like a lot of ifs to me…

there’s plenty of opportunity for a successor to us to reach the stars

No, there isn’t. We’ve already used up all the easily accessible sources of fossil fuels, so whoever comes after us won’t have the energy sources necessary to have an industrial revolution and will be stuck at a pre-industrial tech level forever.

this is rapidly becoming Reddit 2.0, just without spez

Becoming? Always has been.

So? Death from old age is inevitable too, that doesn’t mean I’m going to stop breathing or eating. All of life is just postponing the inevitable, but just because the inevitable is inevitable doesn’t mean we should stop postponing.

There is enough time for another intelligent species to evolve after us, the problem is that we’ve already used up all the easily accessible fossil fuels. That means they won’t have the energy sources necessary to have an industrial revolution and will be stuck at a pre-industrial tech level forever (or rather until the oceans boil off).

That’s cute and all, but it ain’t gonna be birds and deer who gets life off this rock once the Sun starts threatening to swallow it in a few billion years. We’re screwing up badly in the short term, but we’re the only hope Earth life has in the long term.