Along with the antenna, there’s another problem to solve - power. The probes need a power source that, after the better part of a century, can still output enough power to send a signal home. That doesn’t leave a lot of options. RTGs will not do for this, their power output is too low. It’s theoretically possible to build a battery large enough, but it’ll add tens of tons to the probe’s mass. A nuclear reactor would probably be lighter, but has the same problem as an RTG, in that its fuel supply will decay along the way. And if you need to make course correction maneuvers on the trip (cause let’s face it, we’re not going to bullseye a dwarf planet sized target from lightyears away), the probe has to stay powered for the entire time, so the propulsion system doesn’t freeze up. And now you need to worry about propellant losses.

EDIT: Finally got around to reading the article and I’d love to know what the author of this idea considers unrealistic if decelerating from 0.3c into orbit around a black hole >20 lightyears away sounds plausible.

Or that everyone else is just as horrible as they are, so they’d feel justified in being a sloppy fart of a person.

This is bullshit. I’ve been staring at it from every angel. They’res no hippo in this picture.

Your friends are constantly spewing EM radiation at you. So is your home. The trees outside. The very sky. There’s no escape. Even if you were to enclose yourself in a Faraday cage and exist in complete darkness, your own body would still be bathing your surroundings in EM radiation that bounces off the cage.

I live out in the countryside. The nearest store is about 2.8km away. Put on some good music, get an ice cream for the second half of the trip, it’s a lovely walk. I could catch a bus back, there’s a stop right by the shop, but my timing is generally shite. If I’d be halfway home by the time the bus comes, I’d rather just walk.

Reminds me of Seth Rollins and Roman Reigns cutting a compliment promo on each other.

Hats off to my man MrEdders. Yes, I’ll absolutely watch your three hour video on some obscure 90’s FMV noir game!

Since you were so insistent that it’s simple, I told you to go and implement non-rigid capes to two old games that never had more than a rudimentary physics engine, and report back just how easy it was. And seeing how your reply, three minutes later, started with the words “Already done,” I can only assume that you did it. So do tell, how easy was it?

Cause that was the task. Add soft body physics to Jedi Outcast, which is running on a modified Quake 3 Arena engine. Or create a new animation rig and redo all of the character animations. And you did it in three minutes. So show your work.

Took you three minutes to implement soft body physics in the Quake 3 engine, huh? Show your work.

Right. Go add capes that aren’t just rigged to the existing skeleton to Jedi Outcast or Morrowind, then come back and tell me how easy it was.

I didn’t think I’d have to point out that adding a cape is a similar pain in the ass. Dynamic objects like scarves and capes are not the same as a shirt. If your character framework isn’t set up for them from the start, implementing them is not as simple as “just plop it in there bruh”.

A character model is made up of “slots”. The head slot, the chest slot, the legs slot and so on. When you equip a piece of gear, it replaced the body mesh in that slot. So a helmet model replaces the head, a cuirass replaces the chest, I think you follow. If you want a piece of gear to only partially cover the character, you need to create a new slot. But gear is easy to implement, since it conforms to the character’s “body” and uses the same animations.

Now add a scarf. First, you need to create a new slot, so that equipping the scarf doesn’t replace the head or chest. And then comes the question of animations. Are you going to have the scarf just lay flat against the character? That’s the easiest approach, but it’ll be completely static, look like ass and probably clip through at least some of your armors. You could use a cloth sim. If your scarf mesh has enough polygons, it’ll look the best. But it’s also computationally expensive, especially if you go with mesh-based collisions for maximum eye candy. And what types of objects can the scarf collide with? Just the character, or world objects as well? Every object the scarf collides with will create a whole new slew of physics calculations, all the time, dropping your performance in the gutter like a mob snitch. Or you could create a bespoke rig for the scarf. It’ll look better than a static object and won’t have a notable performance hit, but won’t look as good as the cloth sim, especially since it won’t collide properly with whatever else your character is wearing. And you’d need to create matching animations for literally every animation the character can possibly do. Every. Single. One. Your animators would want to murder you. And they will, when you come back to them a little later and say “Okay, real impressed with the scarf, now let’s make 5 different ones. And I want capes.”

TL;DR: It’s not just another piece of gear.

Counterpoint: Blender was the first 3d modeling tool I tried and I bounced off that UX so hard that I haven’t touched it in nearly 20 years. Sometimes a bad UX is just bad UX.

Planning for the future has nothing to do with whether or not one fears death. And it’s perfectly okay to live more in the moment, because the moment is all we have. The past is gone, the future is yet to come, you exist in the now. So go ahead, procrastinate a little! The vast majority of our problems are not so time-critical that an hour long walk is going to ruin your future. Treating yourself to a coffee and a donut every now and then doesn’t leave you fated to be destitute in 5 years.

There’s no use in fearing the inevitable. It will come, whether you like it or not, and no amount of fighting can stop it. Fearing it only makes you focus on some indeterminate time in the future and lose sight of the now.

NATO not expanding eastward was never put to paper. No one ever officially signed off on it, nor was it ever an official decree. It was never anything more than words of appeasement. Russia “agreed to democracy on its doorstep” because they were going through a regime collapse and were a tad preoccupied with preventing the collapse from going further. Even if they had kicked up a storm about it, what were they gonna do? The breakaway nations weren’t going to just unpack their bags and stay with the abusive ex cause the ex said they can’t leave. Russia would’ve had to suppress them militarily once again, and they didn’t have the resources to do that.

NATO expanding eastward was because the former Soviet bloc countries wanted it. Because if you’ve regained your independence (for some of them it wasn’t even the first time) from an aggressive neighboring nation, would you not wish to protect it with the means available to you? If Poland and the Baltics believed that, for the first time in centuries, Russia would stop doing Russia things, would they have sought to join? Because the only reason they’ve been spared Ukraine’s fate is that Russia was in no position to execute militarily when those countries were accepted into NATO. And look at us now, thirty some years later, Russia is doing Russia things.