Well of Souls Forums

There's two reasons why the inner planets are useful examples of 'planet types'. They're dramatically different in terms of black body temperature and mass. The consequences of these differences, having the effects they do on atmospheric composition and density, are very relevant to human life. It d...

Namaphry, there is a significant difference between saying something there is no evidence to support a stance, and saying that a stance is untrue. It doesn't make any sense to say that the stance is 'untrue'. The claim 'Pluto is a planet' is even more unfalsifiable than 'bellbottoms are cool'. It's...

Pluto was discovered in 1930. Pluto was conclusively determined to be too small to have perturbed the gas giants in 1978. All of this happened before I was born. Why should I, the new generation, care about the cultural baggage of decades long past? All this stuff about people's mistaken search for...

Hmm. Now I'm trying to imagine what the earlier, less successful Loroi attempts at flight would have been like. Trying to use a glider with a telepathic assist seems dangerous... even worse if it isn't fixed-wing! I can definitely picture some of them being brave enough to try flapping wing arrangem...

Definitions have consequence for our understanding. Putting this under a microscope would mean looking at how it influences behavior. People who consider Pluto a planet regard planets and other objects like Pluto differently from those who don't. I haven't put anyone under a microscope to figure out...

Earth is defined as a planet because it's like all the other planets of the Solar system, that seems straightforward enough to me. They're all massive objects that formed from the sun's protoplanetary disk. Mercury is a bit of an outlier, since it was so close to the sun that all the lighter materia...

Pluto is what it is. Twentieth century cultural baggage doesn't make it more significant than Eris, Haumea, or Makemake, not any more than centuries of revisionism makes Christoforo Columbo more significant than all the explorers of the Americas that came before and after him. There's a lot of senti...

I dunno. If we grandfather it in, then we have to keep explaining it to children hundreds of years down the line, including those born on other worlds and around other stars, and we Terrans would end up looking like sentimental nitwits in the process. We can set everything beyond Neptune's orbit int...

'Men do, women are' is a terrible, ubiquitous cliché. The classifications it about people are wrong just as often as right, and it causes just as much harm to men as it does to women. Joan of Arc did help win battles, and not just by being, but also by doing. Meanwhile, those who officially commande...

Joan of Arc was very clever, brilliant even. The records from her trial, at least, are proof of that. Though men commanded her soldiers, she was still in attendance at war councils, and she gave good advice to unit commanders, which they listened to, believing that it was divinely inspired--not just...

Yeah... when I read those pages, I was very impressed, because I'd never seen a comic depicting space combat that wasn't either a) totally arbitrary about every aspect of it, so in other words, space combat was nothing but a tool to create dramatic tension; or b) such extreme hard science that sever...

I resisted posting this before, but in hindsight, it might have cleared things up a little. Governments can and do take advantage of their ability to literally print money to pay off some of their debts--virtually every power does this in moderation--but it's true that if your debts are more than ha...

Nifty! She looks like she's got plans, alright. I love how the braid contrasts with the spiky hairstyle.

I'm hesitant to ask this sort of question, but I am really curious, what was Stillstorm like when she was Beryl's age? Would we have recognized her?

For many reasons, I think using unmanned combat machines (regardless what AI they do or don't have) dramatically favours the aggressor in any planetary invasion. To start with, it's hard to bring vast numbers of troops through space, and the aggressor is likely to be outnumbered. But with orbital su...

The Soia-Liron empire fell a very, very long time ago, at a time when there were still several species of humans on Earth, and modern humans were neither the most dominant nor the most widespread. So, if the Loroi genome is based on a human species, it could have been a psi-powered, pointy-eared rac...

Armrests are also more useful if your sitting posture is open and designed to shed heat. Just like leaving your arms hanging down, using armrests exposes your underarms and abdomen to the air, and makes it easier to leave your legs open. If you don't need to shed heat this way, it's less problematic...

There's not much use to continuing the discussion when there's no response I can make to Grayhome except several variations on 'you're complaining about how I described things that I never described'. So, yes, forgetting everything since the yelly boldface thing.

If anybody wants a more prosaic explanation for the Loroi scent, there's always the 'life on a space warship' bit. If you live on a space warship, body odour is one of the worst problems you can have short of enemy action and mechanical failure. Even as bad as bland rations. I know if I was designin...

A good diplomat is not judgemental. They try to see things as they are, not in terms of how they believe they should be. They strive to understand the perspectives of others unlike them, no matter how alien, and to get all the facts before concluding their thoughts. They use simplification is a tool...