• SquiffSquiff@lemmy.world
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    23 days ago

    OP: you and many commenters are making some significant assumptions. There’s a great short story available online: “The Road Not Taken” by American writer Harry Turtledove that considers how aliens might arrive without more advanced weapons.

    • davidgro@lemmy.world
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      23 days ago

      I was thinking about that story a lot when all the hype about the room temperature (not) superconductor was going on: Had it been real, it was simple enough that we could have discovered it a couple centuries sooner and who knows what our technology would be like.

    • CanadaPlus@lemmy.sdf.org
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      22 days ago

      And it’s a stretch, but it’s good to point out that there’s a lot of edge cases to consider. Even human big history is mostly open questions.