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Life seems to be a not-so-low probability event. Commonplace chemistry generates very fast all the necessary basic of our life chemistry. Then you have clay and the like that are extremely good candidates for creating self-enclosed biochemistry factories - protolife, in other terms. Plus, it...

Sometimes, it's time to promote my favorite artist:

One of the things you get when you contemplate the time involved and our existence within is the infinitesimal chance that we're left undisturbed. Earth is prime estate. Biomass and everything. You want to colonize anywhere, it's the solar system. Even if the biosphere is bad from your...

ROFL. Once someone figured out how to spell for "correct" translation, this had to spread quick.

Yes, but in the context of the Drake Equation, the accepted meaning of the term Great Filter is "all the things that drastically cut down on potential galaxy-visible civilizations". If you want to refer specifically to "the last Great Filter we are potentially facing", then you probably need a...

Solar Neutrinos are nice. Anytime you hear about astronomers being bothered by models of solar neutrinos it's because of this. If your model says that you should get This amount of solar neutrinos, but you get That, then either your model is wrong... or the rates of nuclear reaction at the core...

He's also getting punched in the nuts by the Senate Committee which is cutting his funding for the Moon 2024 because he doesn't want to spend it on the doomed and wasted SLS, and the senators want to teach him who really orders NASA around. AKA "I give you money to spend on my state, don't you...

Totally forgot about this. But at least, I could slip in the Terminator Species in.

That's because you tend to think of the filter as something ahead. Each filter ends more stuff than a civilization; the first ends entire worlds. It's just hard to think about it because we obviously have passed it. My personal two "old" filter candidates: - Complex life. Life arose fast...

It's more like reproduction than exodus. Unless there's scientific/technological advances far beyond what we expect, you will never emigrate any meaningful % of a civilization to another planet, in this system or another. The only thing you can do is create a daughter civilization somewhere...

No, but you can put a reasonable cap. A mathematical paper came out a couple years (a decade?) ago. They ran monte-carlo models, and put a cap on the numbers of technological civilizations expected on our Galaxy. 8. If there were more than 8 active civilizations in our light cone across the...

That's a matter of semantics. When we talk about civilizations in this galaxy, every factor counts. Every factor that is near-zero is equally useful to explain why there's no civilization around. Just because we've crossed it does not mean it's not a filter - it's merely a filter that we...

In Drake equation scholar circles, you usually call them Berserkers (thanks Fred Saberhagen).

Remember: "it only takes one".

Not entirely, because we appear to be latecomers. The Universe is nearly 14 billion years old, our sun and Earth appear to be 5. So, if you want us to be the first but without a great filter, you have to figure out a mechanism by which absolutely no life could develop for the first 9 billion...

"All it takes is one" is the most powerful force in the Fermi paradox.

Even with sublight travel at 1% light speed, a single technological species with about a hundred years more than us can colonize the entire galaxy by hopping around, filling a new planet in 5000 year, and then going again, in about a dozen million years. That's the essence of Fermi's "paradox"...

If you remember high school physics, they probably told you about refractive indices. Water is 1.3333, which means that light travels 1/1.33333 as fast as vacuum while in water. That's how light is distorted when it changes medium, and sticks appear bent when they plunge into water. Light...

Probably not a true game, but you can sell your soul again to Facebook https://techcrunch.com/2019/09/25/facebook-horizon/

No verified mark, fake!

"Because we thought it was an awesome idea. I mean before trying to figure out what she'd do as a Warchief."

It's an industry report from a specialist firm that has usually good data. And the data is 223% growth in western subs between july and august. Not "about 200%", 223%. (with the interesting tidbit that even with 223%, it's still below launch numbers for BFA)

They should. Classic Triples WoW Subscription Revenue in August

It's actually very simple. Every content tier slide down one rung per release. Your high-end raid ends up low-end raid next expansion, which ends up good group next expansion, which is random PUG group the next one, which becomes nearly soloable the one after. WoW ended up making the first half...

At last, Furor speaks:

Hey, it's Furor!

It's probably shitty beer, but, god... what a waste.

None. They probably designed their expansion's new mechanics earlier this year, way before Classic exploded. And it's going to be too late to turn the ship. Besides, they probably attribute the popularity entirely to nostalgia.

Expecting maybe a tiny 8.3 raid at best, and an expansion announce for early summer 2020 with beta starting in January/Feb. They need a new expansion ASAP to get their numbers back up, because the people dropping out of Classic won't go back to BFA. The Shadowlands leak is probably very likely.

I tried again when they brought in the (slightly modified) mastery path, but the daily grinding required to do the track killed any hope of playing again. If I could confine my grinding to a day or two during the weekend, that'd be okay-ish. But that's impossible.

Energy states at least are highly quantized. If they weren't, atoms wouldn't even be stable.

The origins of Quantum Mechanics is that values of a number of physical properties are discrete rather than continuous. However, a number of quantum fields (probabilities of X) seem to be continuous rather than discrete; the discrete values seem to appear in the interaction with those fields...

I think I talked about it in a previous incarnation of the forum. The point of a level system is that it gives you an indicator of suitable content. Level under you = "content that is easy or trivial". Level above you = "content that is hard or that you shouldn't be doing" Once you scale...

Not just that, but you also have the ugly Balance™ that raises its head. For scaling to work, you need to balance the scaled content to your weakest class. Which means you cannot afford to have too much of a difference in power between the classes on every form of content, or you end up with...

FTFY.

For which I thank god. Even if it doesn't exists, I thank him for this. It's also a piece of shit in the case of a RPG. It requires you to make your game easy mode, or you're fucked. I remember the first Elder Scroll game (Oblivion? I think) that introduced this "content scaling". The end...

Yea. Considering some were intimating that the BFA population was slowly approaching the million US and maybe barely more EU...

Yeah. The two playable furries in the WoW universe are Taurens (and variant) and Worgens.

And it requires a shit-ton of delta-V if you want a rendez-vous rather than a simple pass.

EDIT: It's only 7 degrees vs the rest of the planets. But this is exxagerated by its highly elliptical orbit: 47M km perihelion for a 70M km aphelion.