No Stupid Questions
No such thing. Ask away!
!nostupidquestions is a community dedicated to being helpful and answering each others' questions on various topics.
The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:
Rules (interactive)
Rule 1- All posts must be legitimate questions. All post titles must include a question.
All posts must be legitimate questions, and all post titles must include a question. Questions that are joke or trolling questions, memes, song lyrics as title, etc. are not allowed here. See Rule 6 for all exceptions.
Rule 2- Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material.
Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material. You will be warned first, banned second.
Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.
Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.
Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.
That's it.
Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.
Questions which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.
Rule 6- Regarding META posts and joke questions.
Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-question posts using the [META] tag on your post title.
On fridays, you are allowed to post meme and troll questions, on the condition that it's in text format only, and conforms with our other rules. These posts MUST include the [NSQ Friday] tag in their title.
If you post a serious question on friday and are looking only for legitimate answers, then please include the [Serious] tag on your post. Irrelevant replies will then be removed by moderators.
Rule 7- You can't intentionally annoy, mock, or harass other members.
If you intentionally annoy, mock, harass, or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.
Likewise, if you are a member, sympathiser or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people, and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.
Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.
Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.
Let everyone have their own content.
Rule 10- Majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here.
Credits
Our breathtaking icon was bestowed upon us by @Cevilia!
The greatest banner of all time: by @TheOneWithTheHair!
view the rest of the comments
Interestingly, there's a strong argument that we are one of the first, at least locally.
Firstly, an infinite amount of time hasn't passed. Time actually started at the big bang (Asking what was before is akin to asking what is north of the north pole).
The big bang also didn't create any heavy elements, these required stars to produce. The first generation of stars could not have supported life. Later generations of star each have more heavy elements available. These allow for the formation of rocky planets. Our sun is in the earlier phase of this.
This leaves 2 questions. How long for life to evolve (all the way to technological intelligence)? And how easy is interstellar travel?
Life on earth seemed to pop up almost as soon as it could. That could be normal, or it could be us winning the lottery on the first play. As for evolution speed, we have no clue for comparison.
The 2nd is the critical one. As it stands, interstellar travel seems limited to the speed of light. This, and the cast energy requirements make interstellar travel and colonisation difficult. If a local species developed this ability, it is quite likely they reached us before now, and colonisated earth. The fact we can trace our evolution shows this likely didn't happen. The chances of such a species turning up in the window of time we are in, is almost zero. The fact we exist, without alien overseers is evidence we have won the race, at least locally.