Ideas

So, random blog post to gather up my ideas and dump core.

Idea #1: Originally, lengths were measured with some arbitrary standard: then, we defined a meter as a millionth of the distance from the pole to the equator, since any sufficiently advanced civilization after us could redetermine what a meter was from the definition. However, once we leave Earth, that standard ceases to be useful. So, we shoehorned the definition of a meter into some fraction of the distance light in a vacuum travels in a second. Better, but no sane person would remember what fraction it was exactly.

Hence, I propose a unit of length split into billionths of the distance light in a vacuum covers in a second (which is another arbitrary unit, but we have to take these things on one at a time). It would come out to be around a foot, which would suit the Americans pretty well: it’d just be a tiny bit shorter. Unfortunately, we would be leaving out all the aliens that developed counting systems in other bases (10 actually is a pretty good number to base off of: it’s small enough to grasp with unhacked minds, but not small enough to be useless at making large numbers). Well, by the time we know they’re out there, we’d probably want to be using something else.

Idea #2: We should get biohacking started, and quickly: once we can reroute orgasms to intellectual activities, we could probably bootstrap ourselves pretty quickly without need for a singularity. Hehe.