SoylentNews

I'm not one of those soylentils who complains about politics stories not being techie enough for this site, but nonetheless i'm glad we haven't had a story about Trump's inauguration. I haven't read / watched anything about it and yet somehow I was sick of it before it happened. I guess I'm just weary of the divisive, partisan bitching.

Let's all talk about computers, or robots, or space or something.

So by rights today should be a really shitty day: The Brexit morons have condemned us to a national atmosphere of poverty, oppression, overt racism and, worst of all, Nigel "the mollusc" Farage's supremely kickable smug excuse for a face all over the TV for the next month. But at least I got a nice chance to vent today.

I sometimes do online marketing & academic research surveys in order to pick up a little extra cash. It's worth about £50-60 a month, which is really handy. Often it's boring grind work, but other times it can be interesting. Sometimes you get to see previews of new films & products, and sometimes, just sometimes, something more serendipitous.

Half way through a marketing survey about newspapers I realised it had been commissioned by the Daily Mail. In the wake of today's news I really wanted to give those hate-stirring shits a piece of my mind. I completed the survey honestly (which wasn't hard) and at the end of it there was a lovely free-text field for me to give any comments and feedback about the Mail brand. I let them have it. I told them about the lies and the hypocrisy, about the profiteering fearmongering. I told them they are a laughing stock online, mocked them for the Clickbait Sidebar of Shame and suggested they all give up their jobs and go live in the wilderness. I only wish I'd had the presence of mind to copy-paste it all before hitting submit, but I feel soooooo much better now. So thanks Daily Mail, for letting me vent my spleen upon you, it goes some tiny, insignificant way towards redeeming for all the damage you done over the years.

If you're interested in the survey websites I use BTW:
Swagbucks - earn money & vouchers from surveys and other online tasks My Swagbucks referral link, sign up here and I get commission
Prolific.ac - et paid to take part in academic research

Just had an automatic email from Paypal in response to a withdrawal request I made today. It contains this nugget of enlightenment:

Funds will take up to 2 hours to appear in your bank account, but may take longer, depending on your bank.

Right, so it will take less than 2 hours, unless it takes more than two hours, in which case it will take longer. Thanks for that.

Who the fuck is writing this? I mean is someone actually getting paid to spout this non-information? It might be a trivial thing, but I think it points to a serious dumbing-down of society, when a massive worldwide organisation worth billions can't even hire someone capable of putting together a meaningful sentence, or someone else capable of checking it. How do they allow something that makes them look so STUPID out in front of actual users?

Geez.

I dream quite a bit, but I'm not normally one to talk much about my dreams. Other peoples' dreams bore me, and I don't really think there's much wisdom or insight to be gained from studying them so I don't generally see a reason to share mine.

However this dream I had last night affected me somehow, and I wanted to get it off my chest. It was one of those long epic dreams that seems to last for days, even though in realtime it probably lasted only a few minutes or hours.

In my dream I was going about my normal business for a few days, and as is often the case when I've got a lot on I can go a few days without catching any real news. However I kept seeing headlines and short clips of news, which showed a weird red wibbly thing enclosed by some kind of space station, and footage of an astronaut aboard the ISS. I knew that something big was going on in space, because it was all over the mainstream news and space doesn't normally get much coverage. I gradually pieced more and more together until I finally thought I had the whole story, and then had time to sit down and watch a proper news report, to confirm my suspicions.

Turns out the Americans had either found or built (they weren't admitting either) some kind of device in close orbit around the sun that enabled instant access to any other star system in the galaxy. Somehow it also managed to teleport an astronaut from the ground to the ISS and back again. I remember watching the report in complete amazement, alternating between "this is impossible" and "this is awesome" for ages. In the meantime, all the people around me were entirely unimpressed, writing it off as boring nerdy space stuff.

By the end of the dream, there were adverts on TV selling land on distant planets, all of which appeared to be sparse rocky deserts with a little or no greenery. None of the planets had any animal life. There didn't seem to be any talk of infrastructure of any kind being built or artists impressions of how it might look in the future, just real footage of featureless land on uninhabited planets. There were also suggestions in the news that many countries were thinking of dumping all their incoming migrants onto one of these planets, where they would almost certainly starve. Footage of one planet showed evidence that the Americans had been there for some time, with a big military base / outpost of some kind built in the sea.

Weird, meaningless and probably dull I know, but the thing that got me was the profound sense of disappointment when I woke up and reality gradually asserted itself, and as the moment of confusion passed I realised that FTL exploration and settlement of the galaxy will never happen.

It did get me thinking though - if cheap and instantaneous access to the rest of the galaxy did suddenly magically appear overnight, how would humanity handle it? With resources and living space suddenly abundant would war disappear overnight, or would someone try to somehow hoard and control it all? Would the influx of cheap resources and materials from other worlds usher in a techno-utopia on Earth, or would it be too much for our environment to assimilate?