Imagine an advanced alien civilization.

It's hard for me to imagine without some technologies. It must have some forms of AI, it must have some forms of robust smart contracts, it must have encryption.

Are they using paper money? Paper ballots for elections? What else seems implausible?

A doodler and computerer. I like permissive/permissionless open source, smart contracts, p2p systems, room-scale VR, and NixOS.

shazow.net

Currently: WhatsABI

Say more! I think I agree but I wonder how you imagine the differences. What part of "car culture" do you imagine is implausible?

Are we leaning more "private autonomous vehicles everywhere" or "public transit everwhere" or something else?

Sounds right to me! I wonder if this implies there would be very few individually *owned* vehicles? (Rather than JIT arrangements.)

Trying to generalize and abstract out the theme: Feels like we're stuck in a lot of "discrete" spikey adoptions/use cases/infrastructure, whereas a sufficiently fleshed out advanced civilization would have more continuous modes and adoptions.

We can imagine a world where there's a continuous suite of diverse options between "public" and "private" transport, but instead we have a giant gap and a lot of identity/culture clash between them.

I think both? The part that seems implausible is:

- individually operated vehicles
- The idea of traffic systems like lights and stop signs and whatnot. I’m imagining in this advanced civilization everything “just works” and is in constant motion. In practice that seems like it could either take the form of an advanced public transit network, or autonomous private vehicles that are in constant communication with eachother