Nostr Web Client

Food for thought. As I was writing a question I think I understood from rereading. What I'm missing is how times in past where families were larger didn't also have a "long term survival" evolution in play. Fewer large families today doesn't seem to increase this arena, shrinks it if anything (perhaps raising importance of it, which may be your point).

Daniel Wigton 4mo ago

They did, but because large families were common, that wasn't the evolutionary pressure. In all cases, then and now, evolutionary success looks like many descendants. It isn't exactly that because you may give rise to a clan of morons that is over fitting a narrow niche that will go away. Think Dodos etc. But number of far future descendants is a decent proxy.

For humans, we live long enough to aid and abet two generations so the best we can do is count grandchildren.

The evolutionary pressure of the age is whatever is keeping you from having 25+ grandchildren. In the past everyone kind of assumed children were a blessing because if you didn't have them your farm would start falling apart as you got creaky in the joints. So that wasn't the limiting factor.

It was things like disease resistance and hygiene. There have been lots of them many simultaneous. For humans a large number have less to do with physical health and more with our ability to cooperate. Learning to read and write has been big the last few hundred years. With computers it is now essential. I suspect learning to code is a partial pressure as is the ability to touch grass. But the biggest is the most obvious but also most contentious. Birth-control. We now have to come up with reasons to conceive rather than have it be a thing that just kinda happens. Most people don't have articulated reasons and well that is like having poor hygiene in crowded European cities. You just aren't going to have many surviving descendents.

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Daniel Wigton 4mo ago 💬 2

I feel like I should make a few disclaimers. All the big numbers like 25+ grandkids indicating "success" are just mathematical realities, not value claims. I do not equate genetic evolutionary success with personal success.

This is implicit in my claims that people need ideas that replicate in their offspring that in turn encourage them to have and educate offspring in turn. For humans it is the ideas themselves that are important to replicate. We still need the biological substrate, but the replication of ideas is still something that people without children can participate in.

Also 25 is just needed to guarantee personal lineage. For someone content to "do their part" in replicating society as a whole into the future replacement level is fine. So 5-ish grandkids.

The general point being that we don't need to return to some sort of snobbish oligarchy of big families looking down on people who can't have kids or who came to the ideas too late. We still need the meme makers!

ᴛʜᴇ ᴅᴇᴀᴛʜ ᴏꜰ ᴍʟᴇᴋᴜ 4mo ago

both of my parents populated my brain with a lot of basic stuff that has shaped how my models have developed.

mostly it's circumstantial (lots of poverty, and a screwed up culture especially among women) but partly also temperament, i'm not very social, and haven't gone out anywhere for over a decade very much. a recent outing with a bitcoin hiking group was nice, but of course none available. but nice ladies anyhow.

Daniel Wigton 4mo ago 💬 1

Just think how many truth claims will be able to be validated and replicated between minds via rely instances. That may have a larger total impact on the population of earth 100+ years from now than my 6 kids.

(I say "may" my kids are terrific of course. As their father I have say that by contractual obligation.)

ᴛʜᴇ ᴅᴇᴀᴛʜ ᴏꜰ ᴍʟᴇᴋᴜ 4mo ago 💬 1

yeah, i think that open communication is going to be a key to our survival going forward. europe is going straight down the toilet, and usa is kinda sorta almost opening up but the only way we get this to happen is by building the tools and once they are polished enough and enough people adopt the tech because of shit like OSA in the UK and the shit in the EU, they WILL adopt it because it's built to evade their control. all the rest of the "open social" networks have single points of failure. nostr is a true web, and will be more of an archaepelago, which is a more failure resistant network shape.

considering that there is good reason to believe that there is a magnetic reversal triggered solar driven catastrophe coming in the next 20-30 years, if the ruling class stops this information and the research and experiments in building to prepare for it, basically we could see another

https://www.npr.org/sections/krulwich/2012/10/22/163397584/how-human-beings-almost-vanished-from-earth-in-70-000-b-c

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Youngest_Toba_eruption#Toba_catastrophe_theory

they think it was just an eruption causing a massive glaciation but i'm pretty sure it was closer to 72000 years ago and it was initiated by a magnetic pole flip. estimates of the ancestry of the modern human genome suggest that at one time in the past it was in the range of 1-5000 individuals.

lightning does strike twice but you never know when or where. ignoring the evidence of a cyclic global catastrophe and just carrying on as though nothing is happening is a sure way to get to another near extinction. there was a catastrophe 6000 years ago that is recorded in the rocks near the Tianchi volcano in china, and the event of 12000 years ago kicked off a minor ice age called the Younger Dryas

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Younger_Dryas_impact_hypothesis

again, one was volcano, another, another volcano, and another, talking about meteor impacts. these things have a remarkable regularity that points to the 6000 year 90 degree rotation of a massive magnetic field structure created by the galaxy, which rotates every ~24000 years (the field, i don't know if it's the rotation, but i do know that this coincides exactly with the cycle of precession of the equinoxes, which does a full 360 in the same period - we are currently at the end of the position of pisces and moving into aquarius now).

if the field change triggers seismic and volcanic activity on the planet it probably also triggers crazy stuff in stars as well, and if that triggers a massive flare... well... firstly, only people in caves will survive, as outside above ground everything is nuked with X-rays within 8 minutes of it happening, and then after that, the amount of energy that passes into the earth causes the magma under the crust to lose traction and the new magnetic alignment induces a 90 degree change that leads to the mother of global tsunamis, of which only a handfull of places on the planet are high enough up to not be inundated.

so, yeah, as i see it, this kind of information is available on the mainstream social media but it may come soon where it's only propagating underground on a protocol like nostr, where people can run their own nodes and surveillance against this is extremely expensive.

ᴛʜᴇ ᴅᴇᴀᴛʜ ᴏꜰ ᴍʟᴇᴋᴜ 4mo ago

also, not sure if you have been paying attention but in the last two years there has been a LOT of major outages of networks and servers, and no coincidence at the same time there was major solar flares observed and auroras photographed. may 2024 was big, then again in october, and another one in i think it was march or april, been quiet for now but in a month or two it's set to tick up again.

it is also highly correlated to violence and war and insanity, as well as affecting the weather and triggering catastrophic natural disasters. the earth's magnetic field is moving very fast now, north magnetic pole is tracking fast through canada and maybe, if the trend of the last 400 years is an indicator, it could move all the way down to the gulf of mexico, at which point the tension between the crust and the magma, and the amount of energy coming down with the field opening right facing the sun... i mean, do the math. seismic activity has been definitively correlated to solar flaring activity and coronal holes especially (which cause a strong solar wind) and magnetic poles do not deflect this energy, plasma and high energy particles. they funnel it down to the ground. i mean, idk how to explain the epic magnitude of such an event. lightning strikes like the ones on jupiter, same size but here. campi flegri goes off, and that one in greece, and throw in etna and the one on iceland and the ones in south america and china. lol. yeah, nah.

so yeah, probably not only is it an important conduit of communication of the information about what is going on, nostr's architecture means it will remain functional even while half the internet goes dark. this is gonna be very important.