asciilifeform: if martians land tonight and in their pov 'sentient' means 'grasps at least first order logics' they will immediately barf, 'we found a race where 1 full battallion of sentient males for erry female , and whole buncha veggies '☟︎
asciilifeform: there also is a c) 'what exactly means 'higher brain function' . seen through certain lens, most current-day earthling ~already~ walking around without any
asciilifeform: i see 2 separate q here -- a) 'can evolve this from earthlings' (possibly not, path-dependent) b) 'could physically exist such a critter' ( unknown, but i dun see any fundamental whynot )
asciilifeform: you can pack as many #ifdef (xyz) into arbitrarily small segment.
asciilifeform: can easily picture higher brain being an optional #ifdef
asciilifeform: sad earthlings already farther along this track than anybody cares to admit ( or mircea_popescu would not be running his sea water reactor )
asciilifeform: or could have scenario in the vein of mircea_popescu's parasitic worms tale
asciilifeform: whoknows, maybe dimorphism could carry farther than it does in earthling.
asciilifeform: hey, silicon-based critters also currently thought impossible
asciilifeform: http://btcbase.org/log/2018-09-09#1848881 << btw, incidentally 'a broomstick fires once'(tm), and there was at least 1 ameri-sf writer d00d (l. niven) who had a sorta cat-like alien race, who colonized exactly like this, and eventually evolved 'nonsentient' females☝︎
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: coupla times in recent yrs asciilifeform , in saeculum, was asked to recruit various hands ( programmers, reversers, etc ) and you can prolly guess result
asciilifeform: afaik the recruitment queues are as full as ever
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: hey, he prolly played 'aces', so learned barrels!11 if played 'flight simulator' instead, whoknows, maybe would've bellylanded
asciilifeform: it aint much of a hypothetical -- 'new world' shipment was precisely as described
asciilifeform pictures kiddo who shows up to recruiter, 'i wanna be submarine commander! i played 9000 hrs of 'sea battle' ! '
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: if you smelled enuff, you prolly drank some
asciilifeform: ( and did wonder, in civ1, 'why the fuck MUST 'discover' 'womens suffrage' to build starship ... )
asciilifeform: and yes i liked civ1, liked 'battlezone' also but did not imagine that 'battlezone' teaches irl tank tactic
asciilifeform: ( might be interesting to contemplate a power source that runs on guano funnel, but i suspect there is substantial devil in the details )
asciilifeform: ( not that it make no diff in ~which direction~ temp diff )
asciilifeform: peltier is potentially very good current source for long-term unattended stations -- unlike photopanel, it isn't afraid of rain, or bird shit, etc. and a long stake into the earth potentially gives coupla of degree temp diff yr round☟︎
asciilifeform: oh was this the new york subway pistolero ?
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: upstack : so who was j r davis ?
asciilifeform: esp. the ones who ended up in the trade to begin with 'because easier'
asciilifeform: 'iron phobia' is endemic in programmer types.
asciilifeform: well yes, will dig until 'too hard' and go gabriel_laddel'ing somewhere.
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: i think it is clear that if digger aint willing to contemplate 'maybe i die before hole, but next one will dig, cross the barbed wire over my corpse' will dig no serious holes.
asciilifeform: ( i can see why asciilifeform's approach, 'dig for years with a spoon, maybe eventually make hole' is not 'sexy' and does not appeal. but it imho beats splat. )
asciilifeform: it's a remarkably common failure mode.
asciilifeform: 'if i close eyes wall will surely vanish'
asciilifeform: e.g. gabriel_laddel, then proceeded to re-enact the same splat
asciilifeform: that was his first, and from my pov, really the last, splat, against the wall
asciilifeform: the sad bit, tho, is that he gave up pretty early on re: actually making the thing boot on physical iron. erry copy i got hold of, ran in vmware strictly.
