User talk:FlightTime
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 | If you feel that I have reverted an edit or issued a warning in error, please Click Here and let me know. I am human, and I do make mistakes. Please don't interpret an error on my part as a personal attack on you. It's not, I promise. I ask you to simply bring it to my attention; I am always open to civil discussion. To keep discussions coherent, I will usually answer in the talk page where the first message was placed. If I left you a message on another talk page, please answer there: I will have it on my watch list. Thank you. |  |
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A message from Milladrive[edit]
I thank you for the recent attention to the film Winchester '73. It occurs to me that a film about a rifle should contain a link to the Wikipedia page defining what a rifle is. Should it not?
On another point, I was unaware until now that it is overkill to link the U.S. states in which cities are located. If I may respectfully ask, what is the criteria? Thanks in advance. :)milladrive (talk) 04:18, 4 July 2024 (UTC) milladrive (talk) 04:18, 4 July 2024 (UTC)
milladrive (talk) 04:18, 4 July 2024 (UTC)
- @Milladrive: Avoid linking common terms per OVERLINKING. (Most people know what a rifle is) - FlightTime (open channel) 12:47, 4 July 2024 (UTC)
A Dyson sphere constructed by extraterrestrial plants[edit]
@FlightTime: This is not an important discussion, so you may wish to disregard it entirely—or simply delete it! But I found certain ideas that you raised curious, and wondered if it was worth exploring them with someone else who might have considered some of the implications!
I saw your edits at Dyson sphere, and could not see anything to quibble with, apart from the edit summary—but given the behaviour of certain editors I sparred with at length earlier this year when I argued that notable depictions of Dyson spheres in fiction ought to be described, at least in terms of how the objects are portrayed, I suspect that your change of "in fiction" to "in popular culture" will not last long. At the time there seemed to be very strong ownership behaviour, and a former article of long standing by the title "Dyson spheres in popular culture" was deleted by one of them after the other had cleared nearly all of its contents as either unsourced (despite clearly identifying the works that they appeared in; apparently secondary sources have to attest both their appearance and why they're important enough to mention in the first place, but details of their depiction are merely "trivia" unless described in detail by secondary sources that constitute serious scientific literature, and are not themselves concerned primarily with fiction). I say that I "suspect" this will be the case, because they have thus far been quite restrained in their editing since that long and frustrating argument—after years of reverting nearly all other editors' changes to the article, I haven't seen them doing so recently.
But, to return to the main point: extraterrestrial plants couldn't build a Dyson sphere? Well, it's an open question as to whether anyone can! But your change was of "extraterrestrial life" to intelligence. And we don't know that extraterrestrial plants wouldn't be intelligent, or even mobile; science fiction has long posited the existence of intelligent plants (and of course, science fiction isn't reality, but since we don't even know if extraterrestrial life or intelligence exists, let alone Dyson spheres, we are really dealing with imagination here). Although the owners of "Dyson Sphere" have shown great disdain for Star Trek in particular (the conflagration was over an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation prominently featuring a Dyson sphere, and the description thereof), I'll note that an episode of Star Trek: The Animated Series actually featured intelligent plants.
However, whether intelligent plants could exist somewhere in the cosmos may be questionable due to the current taxonomic definition of "plant" in biology. Fungi, for instance, despite generally being "planted", i.e. rooted to the ground or other things, as opposed to "animal", i.e. motile, are no longer considered "plants" because they aren't genetically descended from the same lineage as plants, but are roughly as different from plants as are animals. And while the development of life elsewhere in the universe might theoretically involve complex organic molecules such as DNA and RNA, it would not be lineally descended from either plants or animals as those terms are currently defined in biology. Which would be quite a poser if we ever discover things that we would typically describe as "plants" or "animals", based purely on their resemblance or function, on other worlds: we would need a whole new vocabulary to categorize each type of organism on each planet where it had evolved; under our current definition there could be no plants or animals anywhere but earth! But perhaps we would then revisit the narrow definition currently in use.
Not sure I've said anything actually useful here, but would love to hear from you if you have any thoughts on the above! P Aculeius (talk) 17:57, 4 July 2024 (UTC)
- @P Aculeius: Easy, its just a phrase, that if a DS does exists, it's safe to say intelligent life is involved regardless of form. - FlightTime (open channel) 18:08, 4 July 2024 (UTC)