Welcome to Reddit.

People must think that as moderators we're spending all day reading all comments from our 18.2 million members. We don't and that would be insane. Instead, we split the work up and each of us are assigned just 1 million to follow and police. /s

If you want to post something like your s-curve hypothesis and it's backed up by some semblance of credible sources, cool, but posts that just come across as crazy rants don't work. People will downvote the post and the comments will be mocking in nature.

Evidence based on a plausible hypothesis for the future are welcome.

Do a bit of research. This is just wrong: "One is the idea around how life as we know it evolved from viruses to us through a process I’ve nicknamed Organic Intelligent Design."

Think about it: viruses have no ability to reproduce without hijacking a cell's machinery. So viruses logically come later than cells.

Unfortunately thinking about things leads to us killing off about 99% of the ideas that occur to. Of the ones you can't personally kill, reddit will do the job for about 99.999% of the rest.

The ideas that do survive are not really worth all that much: google meat loaf recipe and you get 25 million+ hits, creating a 'new recipe' won't exactly add much to the conversation.

But we do get oddball ideas that don't want to die. Like FTL flight. Impossible according to relativity, mathematical loophole allows for negative energy. If that turns out to have physical significance who knows what we might end up with? I get annoyed when people on futurology play around with that type of idea without explaining which physical laws, as we currently understand them, are being abused but I know that interesting stuff may be hidden in those unkillable ideas so I rant away and keep reading.

That being said some ideas don't belong here. Like this one: lithium from seawater; EVs and battery storage demand will cause the price of lithium to go through the roof; it takes years to start a new mine...blah,blah,blah. We can obtain lithium from brine (one currently used method); brine is just condensed sea water; some places need fresh water so set up a brine making shop using solar and wind power and sell the evaporate i.e. fresh water.

Sounds like a decent idea, for the here and now but there isn't any 'futurology' to it.

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>Humanity is inside our local S-Curved Technological Singularity which is resulting in, for humanity, a local massive evolutionary leap where humanity will evolve from the human species into the newly born infantile stage of an Advanced Technological Race of Pure Minds.

r/iamverysmart

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>While a virus cannot reproduce, under normal circumstances we are aware of, without hijacking an existing cells biological machinery, the truth it, neither can a human. I dare you to live and reproduce without consuming, tearing apart, and using other existing life in order to live and reproduce.

My friend, I wish to introduce you to photosynthesis and chemosynthesis.

ETA: Unless you are arguing that humans did not arise through evolution and have been present since before other life on Earth, but I'm not sure there's even a religion that believes that.

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I agree with you about the rule changes but I believe they are the way they are to give mods the power of discretion, because if they do have to start blocking certain recurring discussions (something verifiably false perhaps, a cutting edge flat earth theory), there needs to be rules that back up that decision otherwise they will get a lot of negative perception.

So I agree the rules could change for some benefit but it would not be to fully remove the need for sources/justifications but to allow carefully rationalized theories as well, because otherwise there would be nothing to stop waves of fake articles from being posted, be it ai-generated or faith-based arguments.

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>virtually any speculation could be rejected or accepted.

Yes, because sci-fi concepts need to be grounded in reality, this subreddit specifically focuses on evidence-based speculation. Speculation is not bad so long as you can base it on observable reality. That means there needs to be a plausible reason that it could exist in the future.

But context and the nature of the discussion is super key. For example we probably shouldn't make posts about how warp drives work in Star Trek ships because they are purely fictional, but starting a discussion about how life would be in a future where warp drives exist seems relevant to Futurology, because the focus has shifted from a non-existent technology to a social structure which can be mapped and have nuances that can be teased out with our diverse understandings of societies. It would be wrong to ban all posts that mention fictional technologies for this reason, which is why it's important for mods to have discretion as it is difficult to create rules focusing on the content of discussion around a post as the context can be more important than the content.

We may not have warp drives ever as their existence has not been confirmed by science, but there is absolutely plausibility that they can exist in some form, thus a discussion about how they can affect society is relevant to the sub.

I have seen a lot of sci-fi discussion in this sub that is not banned or blocked.

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Personally I think it's just as important for everyone to know sci-fi concepts as real world concepts, because it's all part of a unified conceptual language we use to discuss science.

All of the points you made are potentially plausible but also possibly impossible to put into practice, so therefore should not be bannable unless you are making claims that they are possible without providing evidence of such. Certainly one can provide research that seems to indicate such may be possible in the future, that is something this sub is used for quite frequently.

So all of those items may be found to be science fiction in the future but we don't know exactly what we are capable of and what nature allows, and so we can neither confirm nor deny whether these are possible.

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That link you provided made an enormous claim, that an interferometer NASA is building can generate a warp bubble, with no direct source provided.

It would be nice if humanity could prepare for nascent technologies before they transform society, that would be an amazing technology in itself!

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