A place for majestic STEMLORD peacocking, as well as memes about the realities of working in a lab.
Rules
This is a science community. We use the Dawkins definition of meme.
Imagine someone who's familiar with /r/birdsarentreal finding one of these in real life without knowing the punchline
A thing like that could shatter you. Am I even real? Did I create this place? Am I a brain in a storage locker somewhere, and it's all just made up for me? What are they trying to tell me now, when they show me these things? Am I being tested?
I mean we are all brains in a storage locker. It’s just a portable/mobile storage locker.
Yes! It’s this mentality that has helped me cope with some major life events. It really helps to put things in perspective when you realize that who you truly are is little more than a pink blob driving a meat skeleton.
And it is all the more fascinating when you think about all the other pink blobs that did not get the chance to exist like us - e.g. (non-avian) dinosaurs, but also too like chimps that can talk, walk, use tools, etc., but do not come anywhere close to our level of Mind.
Without getting into any particular religion (even though this is almost a direct quote from the description of a religion in the super-old TV show Babylon Five), in a way we are the universe (molecules) thinking about itself!:-P Our pattern may be small, but our significance large, at least to our own perspective - e.g. every human life is precious, or arguably should be; but at the same time, as you point out, on the grander scheme it's nothing at all.
I find such thoughts very freeing - like, we can choose to love, or not, rather than have that forced upon us by like societal conventions, or whatever. Namaste and junk. :-)
If you think about Newton’s law that says energy can neither be created nor destroyed, then it’s not unreasonable to imagine that our life energy is floating out there in space until we’re born, where it then enters our bodies. Then when we die, our energy is released back out into the universe. So in a way, we are literally catching a ride through our life on our way to who knows where.
Or perhaps not only Space, maybe just here on Earth.
Or you could get even weirder, and wonder if the reason that electrons aren't anywhere in particular is b/c they are really everywhere, at once - so maybe we are all the same entity, who just forgot?
Sci-Fi is fascinating to me, especially from the Golden Era of like Asimov and HG Wells and Arthur C. Clarke. And one thing that scifi has taught me is that nothing is beyond the bounds of imagination!:-D
And part of that is that Time itself is something that we see only narrowly, through our human perspective. But from the perspective of Energy, which as you say has existed since the dawn of Time, and will continue unti its end too, the lifetime of stars themselves is but a "short" while. Or like how we may read a long book (or series?), describing someone's entirely lifetime or even spans over millennia, but to us it takes just a few days (weeks?) to read.
Or we could get even weirder than that - this whole Universe could be a simulation, and like there's a million running in parallel, and when it grows cold or uninteresting, the Matrix-God could just start it back up again to fulfill whatever purpose it had in mind.
None of which we can properly DO anything about right now, since we do not know and cannot affect any particular outcome. Hence why we wrap back around to just ignoring it, from the practical perspective at least, and live out our lives however we wish:-). But it is fun to think about regardless:-).
I think there actually is a theory that there's only one electron in the whole universe, it's just everywhere
Or doesn't string theory postulate that electrons themselves are merely vibrations of even more foundational... thingies, though ofc nobody really knows much about that.
Maybe we're all part of the same waveform duality equation:-). I really dislike the thought that I could be in any way related to Donald Trump, but it does give me compassion to think that there but for the grace of God (and education, and genetics, and circumstances, and hopefully many more things added to this list to provide separation:-) go I, or any of us really.
It’s just brains in storage lockers all the way down
but how many of them are occupied by catgirls
I would imagine the answer to that is a non-zero number.
welcome to Blade Runner
Imagine how the real birds feel encountering one.
"Jerry is such a weird asshole since he tried going through the invisible wall at the research institute"
Either like they've met Frankenstein's monster, Terminator or Robocop
As a founding member of the organization Birds Were Real, I resent this conflation of reality. Clearly this is evidence that birds were at some point real but now are not, Birds Aren't Real is trying to spread propaganda to push a narrative that is factually wrong.
From research and data we can tell birds existed at some point, the fossil record is inarguable, but there is zero evidence that there are any living birds left among the cohort scientists claim as living examples of "birds". It seems like every other week news comes out about how some flying creature that scientists were previously totally confident was in the bird family is actually a totally different unrelated animal like a bat or a cricket or a flying squirrel.
The Birds Aren't Real people are absolute nutjobs, they deny the reality of the fossil record right in front of their very eyes, as hard as it is to believe for some, birds did exist long ago in Earth's history but at some point they all left on a spaceship and never came back (what do you honestly believe Dodos just went... extinct because Europeans slaughtered them all for no good reason? They had built complex aqueducts and developed basic electronics by that point, there is no way they would have just let their bird sect be wiped out, it would be like human beings not developing a masculine culture of war and logic to fight back against saber tooth tigers, not a chance).
Explain.
I mean it’s compelling evidence but frankly you are going to need to provide a lot more cross substantiating backup evidence to prove such bold claims.
This isn’t a smoking gun like the infamous Nessie Photo that proved the existence of modern subfjord lava cave Plesiosaurs, and y’all think that just providing this one picture proves it all….
I'm a member of Birds Are Real and the OP is a misinfo campaign to cover up the fact that birds are real and are plotting against us
The thing I don’t get about you Birds Are Real freaks is that if birds were indeed still real and they were in fact plotting against us, why wouldn’t you just join them and help them plot? Certainly you would be in the most powerful position in the human race if you became the loyal human minions the new global overlords could trust.
The internal logic of you peoples weird little, let’s face it CONSPIRACY, doesn’t even make sense or at least it means y’all would fight on the human side in a Global Human-Bird War instead of the birds. I mean come on, if we actually did live in the absurd reality you believe is true where birds are still real then how could you possibly live with that choice?
All the cool people would immediately realize Bird Kingdom would be way fuckin better than this B-movie budget slow motion apocalypse where only a handful of billionaires have died yet in submarines.
I should be amazed you're being up voted while saying today's birds aren't real but then I remember this is lemmy
cannot get satire
Maybe I've seen so many poets of people who actually believe this stuff that I can't tell satire from reality anymore
The specific claim that "birds aren't real" has been a long-standing joke on the internet meant to parody real conspiracy theories
Birds aren't real, bro. Why do you think they follow you everywhere? Why are there always birds around? Because they are SPYING on you.
Next we'll make the Earth flat.
We'll need a humongous iron, and an even humongouser ironing board.
Bird Law: No matter how crazy your conspiracy theory is, someone is actively working to make it a reality.
So Q was referencing Pigs in Space every time he said "mon capitan!" I knew it.
Reminds me of the Orvillecopter.
^100% of youtube was that kind of shit from its inception in 2005 through the following couple of years. It was fucking magical.
This has to be one of my favorite communities I'm subbed to. Thanks @fossilesque@mander.xyz for posting great content all the time.
♥️
Servators part 1
“From the moment I understood the weakness of my flesh, it disgusted me. I craved the strength and certainty of steel. I aspired to the purity of the Blessed Machine.
Your kind cling to your flesh, as if it will not decay and fail you. One day the crude biomass that you call a temple will wither, and you will beg my kind to save you. But I am already saved, for the Machine is immortal…
…even in death I serve the Omnissiah.” - some bird in New Mexico apparently
in reality a steel consciousness would fail after 5 seconds because it has zero adaptability or flexibility
Macabre
Conspiracies as prophecies is not the world I want to live in.
Technically a something being a conspiracy doesn’t mean it’s wrong. Even if colloquially people often call ideas conspiracies in a derogatory manner to dismiss their validity, a plot by the government or whatever to replace or invent birds as a form of surveillance would be a conspiracy by definition: “A plan by a group of people to do something unlawful or harmful”.
/rant
The problem I have with the whole "birds aren't real" thing is that bird-drones are expensive, very expensive. Think about all the "birds" you've ever seen over the course of your whole entire life. Think about how much it would cost to build and maintain that. I'd hate to see the bill.
Why do you think the US defense budget is so big?
i like to think they believe only some birds are drones. still expensive, but not impossible
Shortwave (iirc, it was npr one,) did a thing on it. The funny part is as the episode was starting up some turkeys wandered into the road and we’re staring at me.
They knew I knew.