Oh I mean, yeah, anthro characters are probably older than civilization, but I meant the furry fandom as a specific subculture rather than specifically the subject it is centered around.

Furries aren’t as recent as people tend to think either I might point out, the subculture has existed in some form since like the 80s to my understanding, it’s just more popular and visible these days.

I don’t think these myths are meant to be taken completely literally, but in any case, Zeus isn’t exactly the most upstanding and consistent deity out of all mythologies.

It could be the aro in me talking, but I don’t really understand how people can get good sleep in the same room as one another, let alone the same bed. Having someone within the immediate vicinity, even an extremely liked and trusted person, seems like it would be a distraction at best and at worst cause anxiety over if I was making it harder for them to sleep

Fair. It does seem a bit inefficient to make the crust and then not eat it though

Empty carbs in moderation are fine, it’s not like they’re poisonous or anything.

This has the interesting implication that the mirror “sees” what shows up in its reflective surface and not outwards like the “eyes” would seem to indicate

Vore.

To be fair, quacks that claim to be able to do magical stuff are still around, some do quite well well for themselves even

I mean, you can’t really say that we’re going to drive ourselves to extinction, until we’ve been driven to extinction. Most things people list as likely to do this, climate change, nuclear war, are things that could conceivably do so, but honestly aren’t likely to. Destroy civilization maybe, but that just takes disrupting supply lines hard enough. Extinction means nobody, anywhere on the planet survives, even if it’s some little pocket of people in some corner of the world whose climate is good after warming is considered and which isn’t a target of any nuclear arsenals, because in a number of generations such a little pocket can grow to repopulate the planet again. It’s not an impossible thing for sure, but killing off a species capable of surviving in almost any climate zone found on the planet, with the ability to manipulate the growth of it’s own food supply, and adapt new tools actively in response to problems within a single generation, is a difficult task.

My suspicion is that it’s abiogenesis, but it’s only a suspicion that I can’t have any certainty of

Similar story where I work, manufacturing a type of x ray emitting tool. Never seen anyone having problematic readings on the dosimeter badges, but when I was hired I did get told that they had only once had an incident, where one of the engineers had been for some reason repeatedly testing a prototype by directly holding the sample the x ray was firing at in his hand. Not sure what happened to him

that goes against the whole concept of a cure though. Like, if you kill someone that has the flu, they wont have the flu anymore, but that doesnt mean death cures the flu.

If you’re actually curious, or someone else reading this is, you never can get a rocket, or anything with mass, to the speed of light either, not just faster than it, but you can get arbitrarily close. However, you never notice anything stopping you going faster than your current speed, there’s no point where your rockets stop working or anything, rather, time and space stretch and squeeze such that neither you nor anybody else see you going faster than light. If you have a magic rocket that somehow has infinite fuel and can fire forever, you can actually get anywhere as fast as you want, from your perspective.

Alpha centauri is famously about 4 light years away, but you can get there in 2 seconds, from your perspective, if you go fast enough. But, everyone on earth will see slightly over that roughly 4 years go by in the time that for you is just 2 seconds. (You’ll see them move slowly too at first, since they’re moving relative to you just as fast as your ship is moving to them, but when you slow down, you’ll see them seem to speed up until you’ll have seen them do 4 years worth of stuff by the time you stop). Meanwhile on your ship, you don’t see yourself crossing that 4 light year distance in less than the allowed time either, because space itself is squished kinda, so that the distance to alpha centauri is shortened to the point that if you’re getting there in 2 seconds, it’s now less than 2 light seconds away, from your perspective, and you’re not moving faster than light to cross that distance in that time. People outside will also see your ship compressed like this too.

This isn’t just a regular optical illusion either, space and time really are different for the people on and off the ship (and indeed very slightly different for everyone anywhere). Nobody has the “correct” view of the universe, because everyone’s perspective is equally valid.

I imagine any explanation of the expansion of the universe for people that are not themselves studying astronomy is going to be simplified in a way that gives the average person the basic idea but not the complete picture to avoid confusion when explaining the concept. Ive not studied astronomy, but I did get most of the way through a physics degree, and know that at least there, a lot ideas are explained in that sort of way to people without much knowledge of the subject, especially the more confusing concepts. I wouldnt be surprised if thats the case for most fields of science. For a different example as an analogy, its common knowledge that you cant move faster than light (ignoring the whole expanding spacetime stuff), but it isnt always explained why this is the case, leading to questions from some people like “what happens if I fly a spaceship to the speed of light, and then turn on the rockets to try to go faster?” which have easy answers or just dont make sense as a question if one has had the behavior of objects at high speed explained, but which seem reasonable enough questions to ask if all youve been told is that the speed of light is just some cosmic speed limit. People cant reasonably blame you for finding an incomplete explanation you’ve been given, well, incomplete, and then asking questions that come to mind as a result.

Dont we see other galaxy groups though? Im no astronomer, but I do recall the universe having some degree of structure above the scale of individual galaxies, with groups and clusters of them forming larger groups or filaments surrounding voids of space with fewer galaxies in them.

Edit: quick search in wikipedia brings up a list of a few groups and clusters known, of which the local group is merely one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_galaxy_groups_and_clusters

Space.

Israel is not Judaism and criticism of it is not criticism of Jewish people as a whole. To hold otherwise is to hold an entire people responsible for the actions of a few (those in the Israeli government), that those people often have no or only limited influence over, which would be an inherently bigoted position to take because it robs those people of their agency. If anything, the Israeli government itself is being antisemitic in a sense by pushing such a narrative in order to use Jewish people as a whole as a shield against criticism of their actions.

I’d argue that our civilization is more capable of solving it’s own problems than it ever has been, just because we are are far better at identifying them, communicating them to the rest of the world, and analyzing the effects of what we try. Just because we have not solved all our problems does not mean that people in years past would have been able to do so and we’ve somehow lost that ability.

Pumpkins I’m curious about. All I can even think of to do with a pumpkin is pie, though I’m sure there’s probably more traditionally done with them