I Will Ask You Questions - Now with MORE fantasy ecology!

Hit me.

Hit me.

Programming grew from total obscurity to a useful, if slightly esoteric trade, and now to near ubiquity in the last few decades. What skill do you expect will be useful in forty to fifty years that is practiced by very few people now?

Just realized we're still in the 1950s. 0_0

Hit me, because Wheat STOLLLEEEEE MY QUESTION ://///////

Assuming this is mideval times, and soldiers got one silver each like the unwashed ungrateful peasant scum they are, id simply give the first soldier a bag of silver pieces and tell them to take one, pass it on. If the bag was empty, one person accidentally took two, or somebody didn't get any, I'd kill them all and grab random citizens from the farming communities to form the line once again, and take it from the top.

monarchy at work!!!

Just realized we're still in the 1950s. 0_0

Hit me, because Wheat STOLLLEEEEE MY QUESTION ://///////

I actually looked this up, since his response was pretty interesting, but the South American civilizations began in river valleys as well. That said, it's definitely worth considering the implications of Andean civilizations since they advanced through a very mountainous region - they had mastered terraced farming and complicated irrigation systems, but only used the wheel in toys. If the 'old world' had developed in a similar environment, we may have had technological advances in very different stages of history.

If you don't think the question's interesting, I can do a different one. How's about...

Given what you know of history and modern day research methods, what can a government do to help scientific progress aside from warfare and increased spending on research?

Mmm, I know nothing of history.

Or at least, not enough to answer that question coherently.

Programming grew from total obscurity to a useful, if slightly esoteric trade, and now to near ubiquity in the last few decades. What skill do you expect will be useful in forty to fifty years that is practiced by very few people now?

Hmm, I'm not sure if this qualifies as a very rare skill, but being able to speak multiple languages would probably be very useful in an increasingly global future world. Technological literacy will probably also be a very difficult skill to get by without.

Unless of course we hit a massive apocalypse of some kind before then, in which case I retroactively change my answers to farming and scavenging.

Given what you know of history and modern day research methods, what can a government do to help scientific progress aside from warfare and increased spending on research?

Free (or at least significantly cheaper) tuition. Not cutting education budgets for schools. More economic support for poorer communities to help reduce the number of dropouts.

If you were put in charge of a nonprofit / charity organization and were given a budget of only a few million dollars, how would your organization spend this money to accomplish the most good? Would you try to acquire other donors, or simply spend the endowment that you have received?

It's been a while and I got distracted but hey, let's answer this.

The cop-out answer is it depends. Some causes are naturally cheaper than others, and can get away with a smaller percentage of money spent on charitable action-- something like Doctors Without Borders would likely have a higher cost than say, trying to spread awareness of a particular societal ill (and spreading awareness would actually feed into acquiring other donors, I'd imagine). To commit a huge logical fallacy and use anecdotal evidence, my research this semester is in the field of cancer biology and might cost three thousand dollars, at most. I'm working in flies rather than people, so there's that, but it's possible to stretch money really far.

Even then, though, I'd probably put most of my money towards support and not towards the administrative overhead of acquiring more donors. To some extent I'd say it's easier for a charitable organization to get away with a smaller overhead because of the internet (anecdotal evidence, again: that ALS charity and the ice bucket challenge. I have no breakdown of the cost of internet viral things, because predicting whether or not something'll go viral is impossible, but it's probably reasonably cheap unless you pay to get celebrities involved). Assuming my few million is say, three million, just a tenth of that on overhead's still 300,000 dollars, which is a mildly unimaginable sum of money. I could probably cover most shit I'd need to spend money on with that, and put the rest into direct spending towards whatever my cause is.

give me the most awkward personal question you can. yes ill answer it.

another one

Agree or disagree with the following statement, and explain your reasoning - "The value of sentience lies in its ability to predict the future, and therefore a species that was capable of observing time differently from us such that they can see the future perfectly would have no reason to evolve sentience if they did not have it already."

If they had that power it would necessiate a new definition of sentience. Like... SUPER-sentience. So, um, I agree with the statement in a roundabout way. Really, the discovery of such a species would shake up lots of our theoretical definitions of sentience, sapience, and junk. It's kind of foolhardy to assume that our principles will remain the same.

Free (or at least significantly cheaper) tuition. Not cutting education budgets for schools. More economic support for poorer communities to help reduce the number of dropouts.

Imagine that you are one of the first members of a cult which you truly believe in. How do you most effectively recruit for your cult without alienating your family and friends, who are members of a different cult?

Manners and behaviour quite simply put. I engage with a wide variety of folks, people that wear suits and people that wear not suits. Generally, cheapskate behaviour turns me off of people faster than anything else. Just being polite is enough to leave me with a good impression, by that I mean nice, I couldn't fucking give a fuck if you fucking swear or call people names. Just as long as you don't mean harm, and are generally respectful of how others that might care about that feel then we'll have no issues.

Unless you wear socks and sandals of course. That just makes you terrible.

Give me a non personal question.

I have edited the OP to reflect the rules, since people haven't figured them out yet, but since you specifically asked for a question and I am here to ask you questions, I will give you another one.

Imagine that you are tasked with the governance of a traditionally rebellious province. Your overlord / emperor / president doesn't care how you administer it, only that the amount of revenue generated by trades and tariffs exceeds the costs of defending and ruling it. Your personal fortune and the fortunes of your family, however, depend upon continued rule of this province. How do you govern? You may define the reasoning for their rebellion and technological level of the scenario as you see fit.

give me the most awkward personal question you can. yes ill answer it.

Values, for the purpose of this question, refer to the principles which govern your actions and determine what actions you see as ethical. These tend to be nebulous ideas, like 'equity' or 'social good,' and are often difficult to measure. What criteria do you use to determine if your own actions are in line with your values, and when (if ever) do you consider the values of others?

Imagine that you are one of the first members of a cult which you truly believe in. How do you most effectively recruit for your cult without alienating your family and friends, who are members of a different cult?

Well I guess it depends on how similar our two cults are, ideologically speaking. If they have very much in common, I would probably try to play up the similarities, and then explain why I think that our philosophy is an improvement over the older religion.

If they don't have much in common at all, than recruiting my family is obviously a lot more difficult. But either way, I still probably want to try and recruit my family first. After all, they're the last people that I want to see following the wrong religion.

I would still have to be prepared to take no for an answer though, at least for the time being. Not everybody is willing to just change their whole outlook on life overnight. I'll let them think it over for awhile and try again in a few weeks or so, or maybe the next time that they're having a convienent crisis of faith.

Imagine that we were horribly wrong about the position of the mantle, and there is actually an 'undersea' below the ocean floor, with various cavernous openings into the seas. This undersea is occupied by a race of sentient cephalopods who are just as ignorant of us as we are of them, but have progressed to a technological level that is, on average, around fifty years behind ours. What would their first impressions of us be, and what barriers would exist between our interactions with them, aside from distance, pressure, and other environmental constraints?

Alrighty, so some background/definition stuff to consider first, just so we've got a handle on exactly what kind of squid-sentients we're talking about. Cephalopods come in two varieties; those with external shells (nautiluses and also the extinct ammonites) and soft-bodied ones like squids, cuttlefish and octopi. Nautiluses can only survive to 800m, while the Vampire Squid is a free-swimmer that probably doesn't go deeper than 1000m. The best example we have of an abyssal cephalopod is probably the Bigfin squid, observed at depths of up to 4700m. Interestingly, both vampires and bigfins are the ones that are likeliest to not be active predators (the shallower-water octopi or predators like Humboldts are almost certainly more intelligent, following the prevailing hypothesis that vamps and bigfins are detritivores/passive scavengers), and neither have particularly acute vision (which is unnecessary in a lightless environment). Most abyssal creatures can detect flashes of bioluminescene consistent with predators/prey, but have little need for more advanced vision in their habitat.

My initial answer would have been "abyssal zones are not conducive to advanced intelligence", but that's only thinking in terms of our intelligence (which was (before tool use) necessary neural wetwork for navigating a 3D space (arboreal) using chiefly binocular vision). Most intelligent life on earth though are generally social creatures and/or actively predatory, which again requires superior sensory equipment.

In keeping with that, what's to see in the deepest, darkest depths of the ocean floor (or cavernous systems in the earth's crust, as the original question posited)? Because the abyssal seafloor ecosystem (at least, the one that doesn't rely on marine snow as a food source) has chemosynthetic bacteria clustered around hydrothermal vents as the base of the food web, thermal vision would be a lot more useful in locating food than photosensitive eye-receptors. But! This forgets that shallower-water, benthic octopodes have many, many nerves in their arms, which could render eyes/eyespots in the body region even more useless. If a species like this became social, they'd almost certainly communicate through touch, possibly augmenting it with chemical cues so you know there's another squid-feller in the vicinity before you get your tentacles all up in their grill. Octopodes can operate their arms independently, so "talking" to someone with one hand while exploring the environment with another wouldn't be weird at all.

In the cave systems (where marine snow won't fall), all your food will be localised around the hydrothermal vents, so learning to harvest it/thin it/etc in a sustainable manner would probably be the earliest attempts at agriculture. This could eventually shift toward better understanding of how hydrothermal activity can happen; maybe even tapping of the seafloor to create suitable "farm"land. There's potential for alternative methods of living if you live closer to an oceanic entranceway and venture out to find food/collect marine snow. Here you'd probably also get technological advancement via various human vessels sinking; these could potentially serve as a kind of divine inspiration for the squidfolk.

I wouldn't see much impetus though for them to try and explore upward; if their main sense is touch I'd imagine they'd be quite an agoraphobic race because having nothing to cling to would be really disorienting. They'd also need technological solutions to navigating the oxygen minimum zone and dealing with lowering water pressure as they ascend up the water column; most conventional solutions would entail sealing them up in a pressurised suit which would severely restrict their senses. I'm struggling to figure how they'd advance to a 20th-century technological stage, but that would actually put us at the right point for them to attempt a "space race", wherein we could have a proper "first encounter."

Assuming, perhaps, that we've posited the potential existence of an undersea race through deep-sea explorations with bathyspheres and submersibles like the Deepsea Challenger, we hopefully won't kill whoever is inside whatever pod manages to breach the surface. The trouble with communicating with an entity like this is a) their fundamentally different perception of the world, because we communicate through audiovisual cues and they use heat+touch+maybe smell? b) they'll need to be kept in a probably-enclosed space to maintain adequate pressure, which further limits their ability to process information from us. Their exploration suit wouldn't have cameras, it'd likelier have haptic noodles. What even are haptic noodles? I sure don't know. First encounters would probably entail a lot of touchy-feely stuff, which I could certainly see humans misinterpreting.

If we actually managed to exchange ideas, though, we could probably share any of our culture that doesn't have a visual component. For an absolute spitball, I'd say they'd be into dubstep because the vibrations from a sufficiently large bass amp would be more detectable than, say, an orchestra (because sound carries a lot better in water than in air).

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If anyone else wants to speculate on how these guys' technological advancement would proceed given the environment they evolved in, by all means pick up this question! I couldn't quite crack it when thinking of how you'd get 50's-era krakens up ins.

50 years ago is the 1960s, not the 1950s.

do normal people start out with poor couch potato skills

What aspect of your life would provide the most insight into a better understanding of humanity if you were to be passively watched by an intelligent observer (human or alien)?

An aspect of my life would only provide the most insight into a better understanding of me. If you want insight on humanity, you'd have to look at humanity.

Alternatively, fuck if I know. If I already knew, you wouldn't need to observe me. I could tell you and save a lot of time.

Instruments, for $400:

This Australian instrument produces a low, bellowing sound when played.

What is boomerang.

Dinosaurs for $1000.

Four legs, two eyes, and named after the notorious Dang Ron Paul.

What is an Ostrich.

Belgium for $300.

That sounds like a great deal!

Anyway I'm pretty sure I'm winning at this thread, gimme another question!

Instruments, for $400:

This Australian instrument produces a low, bellowing sound when played.

What would help instill the feelings of urgency in a turn based game without using real world time at all as a game mechanic?

What is boomerang.

Dinosaurs for $1000.

Imagine that you are a consultant / marketer for a nonprofit group dedicated to promoting sex positivism. How would you promote sex positivism in a country of your choice whose culture is different from your own, and how would your tactics vary based on your budget (with near-limitless resources on the high end, and only enough money for a locally-oriented campaign on the low end)?