Far less work than a conventional house - it’s just that for the latter, there’s a ready-made supply of specialists, so you can just replace the work cost with money.

Do you mean in construction or in daily living?

I suspect similar to what we’re already seeing in terms of “tuning kits” (solar thermic energy kits, decentralized power kits, new insulation…)

The main direction for improvements from an SP perspective would probably be in the realms of

• increased efficiency of those kits

• decreased production and maintenance requirements for those kits

Supplying people with basic life necessities should not need to garner a profit.

This goes for food, water, shelter, but also electricity, healthcare, public transportation, and internet.

(Coincidentally, most of these are basic human rights.)

Society as a whole experiences net benefit (even am economic one) from those, so society as a whole should fund them.

Yes, this requires taxes.

OK, I’ll bite:

You appreciate civilization because you’ve lived in nature.

What’s the most danger you’ve lived in

People die of starvation in a world that literally has enough food for everyone - because speculating with food is more profitable than feeding them.

People die of diseases that have known cures with low production cost - because the market will only finance medical research if the resulting drug comes with a net gain price tag.

There are literal wars being fought and people being shot for economic gains.

Humanity doesn’t have a resource problem. It has a distribution problem.

And the current method of deciding distribution of goods is capitalism.

that you think getting rich is equivalent to predation?

Genuine question: Where do you believe a millionaire’s millions ultimately come from?

There is only so much net economic gain one can create with their own two hands. Everything beyond that is created by other people’s hands.

In particular I really like the episodes that deal with interacting with other civilizations, diplomacy, and exploration more-so than say, an anomaly episode.

In light of this, and since you were able to work through the not-so-stellar episodes of ST, I’d strongly argue that Babylon 5 should be your next stop.

It has a slow start, some more mixed episodes, dated special effects and both main characters (they switched after season 1) are plain “heroic American leader” types, but virtually everything else is top tier even today. An excellent political plot, humor, great characters with genuine growth.

Just be aware that it is different from DS9 (personally, I like both).

Battlestar Galactica (the new one) and The Expanse are probably worth pointing out, too. To me, they’re the best high-production-value sci-fi shows that didn’t sacrifice their plot. Nevertheless, both are far more grim than the shows you’ve mentioned and overall “feel” different.

The ability to extrapolate what something would taste/feel like from mere looks is a learned one.

Toddlers don’t have it yet, which is why they’re stuffing everything into their mouths.

You might not consciously remember licking a carpet, but the part of you that’s holding up the “dusty”, “textured” and “CRUMBS!!” signs does.

Alien intelligence is not required to follow human reasoning.

The Lords of Alpha Centauri could run a long-term social engineering program on Earth because they believe capitalism, conflict and social darwinism are objectively Good for You and we need to be purged of the folly of humanistic ideology before we can be allowed to join the galactic civilization market.

Or because they find our struggles entertaining.

What I can tell you is that no rational spacefaring civilization would need to resort to social engineering if they just want to kill us. Just toss a bit (or a lot) of spare delta v on a sufficiently large asteroid (or five) and humanity goes the way of the dinosaur.

(Different story if they want us dead, but want to make it look like suicide because of the space police.)

Good to know, thanks.

Whatsapp is encrypted. The problem is the Metadata they want - i.e. your whole address book.

I do not agree to Facebook having my phone number, but if you use WA and have my number, they have it, too - even if I don’t use WA myself.

If you can convince your family to switch, use Signal or Matrix.

Otherwise, use Shelter on your phone with a limited, WA-ony address book.