D&D and the rising pandemic
- Thread starter GreyLord
- Start date
CleverNickName
Limit Break Dancing (He/They)
As we've learned in Portland last year, property is far more important than people. Apparently.
Actually, yes. Some humans have a problem extending beyond mere proximal empathy. Same reason they won't wear masks or get vaccinated. In reality, those are measures to be kind to their fellow humans, and they just can't concieve needing to do things for people they don't know, especially if those people are Them, the outgroup.
sigh. And we wonder what The Great Filter might be?
Ryujin
Legend
Needs more "XTREME!" in the marketing.
Or maybe... cost taxpayer dollars? It looks like hospitalization of unvaccinated folks cost the US over $2 billion in just June and July this year.
Unvaccinated COVID-19 hospitalizations cost billions of dollars - Peterson-KFF Health System Tracker
COVID-19 vaccines have been free and broadly available to adults in all states and the District of Columbia since mid-April 2021, meaning adults in the U.S. have generally been able to be fully vaccinated for COVID-19 since late May 2021 if receiving a two-dose vaccine. COVID-19 vaccines are...
www.healthsystemtracker.org
CapnZapp
Legend
J.Quondam
CR 1/8
How depressing that good ol' fashioned "selfish azzhattery" could be a universal biological constant.
But... terribly plausible. Being merely the functional result of typical evolution -high technology requires large numbers of sentient creatures. Truly large population densities of sentient creatures doesn't happen until some base technology is created, which is typically after the fundamental psychology of the creature is set - so that fundamental psychology has some form of a Dunbar Number, set as some low multiple of the number of individuals a small tribal group might typically contain. It may be in the hundreds, but not in the tens of thousands.
Your chance to reach the stars is predicated on a species developing empathy far outside its Dunbar Number. If you don't, you don't go to space, because just around where you develop the technology to go to space, your people wind up too entangled in internecine struggles to go further. This point may also correspond to the point where the population is sufficiently large to seriously impact planetary ecology.
Basically - you have to be very lucky for your people to become interested enough in the collective welfare that a transition to space is possible.
I'd prefer John Blutarsky to some of the Senators we have now.
Ryujin
Legend
So the only thing that's keeping us from the future predicted by "Idiocracy" is Covid?
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