Also, expanding on that, if you go into every interaction with a narrow expectation (e.g. to find the love of your life) you will be disappointed almost all the time but if you keep an open mind you might come out of that with some other positive interactions (a new friend, an interesting conversation, …) than you expected or were hoping for.

Media-bound formats are even more terrible though. File-based ones are much superior for longevity.

All DST and time zones should be removed and we should only have one global time. People in different locations would just get up at different times on the clock. Communication about times would get so much easier, communication about schedules would get so much easier. “The same time every week” would have an actual meaning all year around regardless of any notions about getting up later relative to local sunrise in the darker time of the year.

Isn’t really fine dust what they are all worried about with microplastics, air quality and such things right now?

You can always pregame too so you don’t spend too much on drinks

I suspect being drunk an arrival is a large part of being able to tolerate the experience.

Habitable also doesn’t imply that we are compatible with the local ecosystem, just that we could bring the plants and animals we are compatible with, but for that they would still need to exist to take some.

Earth isn’t travelling with you though so Earth would be toast long before you arrive.

FTL in general and FTL that can evacuate entire planets worth of even a single species are very, very different scales of technology.

No. FTL travel does not mean we have the means to transport billions of people and the entire ecology around us including specific conditions of Earth’s orbit in terms of temperature, day, month and year length and many other parameters each of those plants, animals,… requires to another place within a few decades.

I would say that it depends on a lot of different factors.

A computer can be obsolete because you require available spare parts to quickly repair it when something breaks and those are no longer available.

A computer can be obsolete because it is physically much larger, much heavier, much louder or less power-efficient than a more modern computer performing the same task for you.

A computer can be obsolete because of some external change, e.g. when Apple moved from x86_64 to ARM or when some new encryption algorithm or codec is not supported in hardware on that system and the software implementations are lacking in performance or power efficiency.

A computer can be obsolete when its hardware is no longer supported by drivers in modern operating systems with security updates.

I think the best way to think of something new (to you, something new to all of humanity is harder of course) would be to pick some aspect of society, your daily life, a technology or social norm you are familiar with,… and analyse which underlying assumptions make it the way it is and then just figure out what would happen if that assumption didn’t hold. That is basically what a lot of classic science fiction writers (among others) did. Take e.g. Asimov’s Nightfall, a story about a world with (IIRC) 6 suns where it is only night once every 2000 years so people are not accustomed to darkness at all. Or Terry Bisson’s They’re Made Out of Meat where he questions our implicit assumption that aliens would be meat creatures like us.

The average person will always be able to afford water because if they can’t they will soon cease to be a person. Watch out for statistical effects like that because they might mask the true horror of the situation.

I think there is a flaw in these kinds of arguments and that is the assumption that a perfect simulation would even be desirable. Why not enhance it with abilities like teleportation, third person views, searches and other HUD-like UI elements,…? I can tell from years of using Second Life that those don’t ruin immersion nearly as much as VR-proponents seem to think.

As a programmer that whole month less day thing sounds like a total nightmare.

I am not convinced thematic instances are a good thing. That means people interested in that topic lose all their communities if that instance goes away.

Some recent series I have enjoyed are Star Trek Strange New Worlds, Foundation, Wednesday and The Mandalorian.

Some older ones I would recommend are Babylon 5, Stargate SG-1, Stargate Atlantis, Star Trek DS9, Community, The Good Place,

Out of all of those I would say Babylon 5 has the best long term story and character development in a way that just isn’t possible in something that is as short as a movie (especially the characters Londo and G’Kar).

I find the opposite. Good TV series tend to have much, much higher quality story telling than even good movies, mostly because a movie is the length of a short story.

Richard Bartle mentioned the topic in some detail in his book Designing Virtual Worlds as well.

I was thinking more about hyper-inflation levels, 100%+ within weeks, not the 10-15%+ annually we have seen recently.

I don’t feel crypto is a good example because it is used by so many people as more of an investment and most spending was never really feasible due to high transaction costs and slow transactions.