We’re talking about people who openly commit multiple felonies on a daily basis. They’re openly practicing mass bribery and insider trading. They routinely murder random civilians in the Caribbean. They’ve been openly flaunting the law on Congressional appropriations from day one. They are a criminal organization.

Faking an assassination is a minor item on their already extensive rap sheet. When they’ve already committed dozens of murders, what’s a fake assassination at that point?

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Because I don’t live in a solipsism that concludes nothing is real?

These things exist in degrees.

Fuck Donald J Trump. I hope the rat bastard dies shitting himself inside out.

Try talking like that about Xi on Chinese social media.

Eh. The US has been around just as long as a civilization. If the Chinese get to claim credit for the radically different ancient predecessors to modern China, then the US can claim decent from both the ancient Native American civilizations as well as the ancient Middle Eastern civilizations that are ultimately the predecessors of many countries such as the US.

No. They have to fail. It’s literally physically impossible for them to succeed. If they succeeded, there would be no need to go back in time and do the deed.

I always loved the interpretation of the assassination of Arch Duke Ferdinand that it’s a historical event that has been repeatedly meddled with by time-travelers. So many folks want to go back and prevent the First World War and all the subsequent events. So they try to prevent the assassination. However, without the world wars, they would have no reason to go back in time in the first place, so they always fail.

That’s what happens if you try and go back in time to change the past. Your actions will always be thwarted, as if reality itself is conspiring against you. Go back to try and kill Hitler? Your gun jams when you try to pull the trigger. The fuse on the bomb fails to go off. Maybe you just have a random heart attack as you’re walking through Berlin on the way to intercept him. Maybe the time machine just breaks whenever you try and turn it on. Random fluke events just keep occurring in a way that prevents you from meaningfully changing the past.

And that’s why the Archduke Ferdinand assassination is so silly. It’s a fixed point in time; you can’t go back and prevent it. But so many people have tried that it’s now this jumbled mess of an event. Originally it was a simple assassination that worked on the first attempt. But reality kept impinging more and more improbable events that now the assassination is downright comical. People keep trying to prevent the arch duke from being killed, and reality has to invent ever-more ridiculous fluke events to make sure the assassination still happens.

I always like the Robot Chicken version where they actually do sit down for an incredibly awkward dinner.

Read what I wrote. I didn’t define a monoculture as literally every individual being the same. I defined a monoculture a a planet that had a similar level of cultural diversity to a small country like Iceland. We would typically call countries like this a monoculture, even though they obviously have variations gender, class, etc. People don’t have to be absolute identical clones for it to be a monoculture.

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They are more subtle, but they are there. And it does have an atmosphere. It’s substantial enough that communication to the surface can be lost for months due to planet-spanning dust storms. Yes, it’s only 1% the pressure of Earth’s at the surface, but that’s enough, especially when you allow forces to act over geological time scales.

And yes, they can be as varied as those on Earth. Life doesn’t actually increase the biome variety as much as you think it does. The kind of life you get in any given biome on Earth is a direct function of the geology and climate in the area. Input a given altitude, rainfall, temperature, and soil conditions, and you’ll get a similar biome anywhere on Earth. Yes, there are different individual species in the rain forests of South America vs the rain forests of Africa, but they’re both rain forests. They work as biomes in similar ways. Wherever the local climate and geology support rain forests, rain forests sprout up. The only exception is isolated islands that can’t be reached by certain species.

This is why Mars can have the same biome diversity as Earth. The living components of Earth’s biomes are a direct mapping to the nonliving components. Earth’s living biomes are no more diverse than the underlying geology and climate.

And this is before we even consider Martian life forms, which almost certainly exist. We know of bacteria that exist deep in the Earth’s crust that, if you transported them to deep under the Martian surface, would be able to survive and thrive just fine with zero modification. We know Mars used to have vast oceans and all the ingredients necessary to get life started. And we’ve seen numerous bits of circumstantial evidence of bacterial life present in some capacity on Mars today. While scientists are loathe to affirmatively proclaim life on Mars. The extant existence of bacterial life on Mars today really isn’t that an unusual claim. If life could get started on Earth, there’s no reason to believe it couldn’t have started on Mars. And that’s before you consider pansperia. If nothing else, we know life can comfortably exist deep in the planet’s crust. And who knows how such life might affect conditions on the surface.

Mars is rocky desert or rocky desert with canyons.

Mars has river deltas. It has flat plains. It has shifting rolling dunes. It has mountains and valley. It has a twisting series of canyons so constricted they’re called the Labyrinth of Night. It has vast ice sheets and polar caps of frozen carbon dioxide and water. It has caves and frozen mud flats and a thousand other varied forms.

Mars is a world. It is a place. It has biomes as varied and unique as those of Earth.

Pluto is ice ball or rocky ice ball.

There are more things in Heaven and Earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy.

Depending on the setting, that could make a lot of sense. Imagine a planet settled entirely by the descendants of a single expedition. That planet wouldn’t be a complete cultural monolith; not everyone would be identical. But an entire planet with the cultural diversity of a small place like Iceland really isn’t unreasonable. If it’s a species’ home world, that makes less sense.

Or, a really dark bit of head canon? Every time you find an alien species that lives on its home world and has a single culture? Inevitably this means a cultural evolutionary bottleneck existed in the planet’s past. If it’s not a colony planet, then something else must have caused that bottleneck.

My head canon? Any planet like that is one where an alien Hitler won. When you encounter a planet like that, it means that some time in the last thousand years or so of that planet, a Hitler-like figure came to power and achieved global hegemony. They decided that there was one and only one right way to live. Everyone was either forcibly converted to that lifestyle or done away with.

The Pacific Northwest? Aka Stargate…wherever planet looks like the hills around Vancouver…

I mean…do all Namekians look alike to you?

I think Mr. Piccolo belongs to the Bigoted Racial Stereotype community.

Whoops, mixed up Popo and Piccolo

Like that child molesting robot Dwayne 'the Rock" Johnson built!

Man, it would be really hilarious if someone named “mechoman” got raped by an out of control robot. That would be fucking hilarious.

It’s more existentially terrifying if the wish operates differently. Instead of adjusting reality to make your words true, it simply constrains you to only be able to speak true and correct statements. So when you try and speak, “no, I have three wishes left,” what comes out is “I have two wishes left.”

In particularly powerful forms, this wish could be used to solve metaphysical and existential questions. You literally can only speak the Truth. Want to know the day you die? Pick a random date and try to say, “I will die on ____ from ____.” Your actual date and cause of death will come out instead.

Yes.

You’re confusing a continent with a craton. A continent is an entire geographic region. It’s not a singular object.