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Oh no. Are you spending too much time on AF? Well maybe that's why you don't have any kids.
Quote:Smartphones broke dating. AI might finish the job.
Humanity may be scrolling its way out of existence.
The argument goes (partly) like this: As smartphone ownership skyrocketed globally during the 2010s, more and more young people tapped into a vast, omnipresent trove of personalized entertainment, which reduced their incentives to socialize in person. When you have virtually every movie, TV show, and pornography ever made at your fingertips, you no longer need parties for stimulation or diversion. And when you have an X or Facebook account, you can participate in a public conversation — and experience communal recognition — without ever leaving the comfort of your goon cave.
Yet this withdrawal from in-person socializing reduces young people’s opportunities to meet romantic partners or develop social skills. Relationship formation falls as a result.
“The digital revolution has played a signal role in both degrading socialization for young adults and dividing young adults from one another,” Brad Wilcox, a senior fellow at the Institute for Family Studies, told me.
And that revolution is only just beginning. After all, the tech sector’s quest to make social isolation more appealing did not end with the advent of the iPhone, Netflix, or TikTok.
Since 2022, more than 1 billion people have gained access to an infinitely patient conversation partner — one who can speak knowledgeably about all of their interests and listen compassionately to all of their problems. Thanks to Claude and ChatGPT, hermits can not only enjoy perpetual stimulation without social contact but also forms of emotional support that had previously required an intimate friend, family member, lover, or licensed therapist.
And these are the worst versions of these products we’ll ever see. Future iterations may take even more engaging forms; someday, Claude might be able to get it on.
This makes the “smartphone theory” one of the more important hypotheses of our time. If its narrative is correct — and there is some compelling evidence in its favor — then the fertility crisis is liable to deepen in the coming years. And AI might be replacing more than just our jobs.
In countries as varied as the United States, South Korea, Turkey, Tunisia, and Finland, young adults became less likely to have a romantic partner. And this “relationship recession” seems to have fueled the post-2010 drop in fertility. According to a 2025 study published in Nature, mothers in most high-income countries are having about as many children as they did decades ago. Yet fertility rates are falling nonetheless, due to a steep drop in the share of women who have any children at all.
The coupling collapse can’t be explained by a sudden expansion of women’s rights; it is happening even in deeply patriarchal societies like Saudi Arabia. Nor is it easily attributed to economic turmoil; rates of romantic partnership have fallen in both high-growth and low-growth nations, advanced economies and developing ones, countries rattled by the 2008 crisis and those largely unharmed by it.
Smartphones, on the other hand, were in the right places at the right times.
In country after country, the rise in singles — and drop in birth rates — coincided with the mass adoption of smartphones, according to an analysis from Burn-Murdoch, the journalist at the Financial Times.
Correlation isn’t causation. But there’s reason to think this timing isn’t coincidental.
In one recent study, economists from the University of Cincinnati examined how teen fertility changed in different American and British localities as they gained access to 4G mobile networks. They found that the arrival of high-speed internet consistently accelerated declines in adolescent birth rates and conceptions. Their explanation for this phenomenon is straightforward: When the center of adolescent life moves online, in-personal socializing declines — and with it, opportunities for one thing to lead to another.
It rather seems to me that the reason people don't have more kids is because cost of living is on the rise, there are wars across the world, rise of xenophobia, and the gloomy future of the polluted unlivable world.
teachings of the Bible are so muddled and self-contradictory that it was possible for Christians to happily burn heretics alive for five long centuries. It was even possible for the most venerated patriarchs of the Church, like St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas, to conclude that heretics should be tortured (Augustine) or killed outright (Aquinas). Martin Luther and John Calvin advocated the wholesale murder of heretics, apostates, Jews, and witches. - Sam Harris, "Letter To A Christian Nation"
(June 10, 2026 at 5:24 pm)Fake Messiah Wrote: Oh no. Are you spending too much time on AF? Well maybe that's why you don't have any kids.
It probably has more to do with the fact that if I had to choose between kids and hemorrhoids, I would have a sore butt right now. Thankfully, I never had to make that choice.
Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former.
She claims that consciousness “exists in a field” and that scientists agree with her.
“I’ve been listening to physicists are thinking about the difficult question of consciousness and deciding that what makes the most sense is its consciousness is not in here [the brain]. It exists in a field, the field that is everywhere. But it’s not in here.”
“Neuroscientists are saying the brain is a great filter, especially this front part… Once you make the filter a little more permeable, you’re getting access to some things. And creativity is one of those things that maybe doesn’t start here [the head], but it comes in when you’re in a flow.”
teachings of the Bible are so muddled and self-contradictory that it was possible for Christians to happily burn heretics alive for five long centuries. It was even possible for the most venerated patriarchs of the Church, like St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas, to conclude that heretics should be tortured (Augustine) or killed outright (Aquinas). Martin Luther and John Calvin advocated the wholesale murder of heretics, apostates, Jews, and witches. - Sam Harris, "Letter To A Christian Nation"
How WHEN you lost your virginity could increase your risk of dying young, cancer and silent killer
A team of scientists in the US and China wanted to understand how people’s earliest sexual encounters could help to predict long-term health and the age at which you die.
Interestingly, their study suggested that losing your virginity at an earlier age may be linked to “accelerated ageing”.
Published in the Healthcare and Rehabilitation journal, it also said that earlier first-time sex encounters have been associated with chronic stress, psychiatric disorders, cardiovascular diseases and cancers.
The researchers said: “Age at first sexual encounter not only signifies the start of an individual’s sexual development, but may also exert a profound influence on the ageing process of multiple pathways.”
teachings of the Bible are so muddled and self-contradictory that it was possible for Christians to happily burn heretics alive for five long centuries. It was even possible for the most venerated patriarchs of the Church, like St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas, to conclude that heretics should be tortured (Augustine) or killed outright (Aquinas). Martin Luther and John Calvin advocated the wholesale murder of heretics, apostates, Jews, and witches. - Sam Harris, "Letter To A Christian Nation"
Could Invisible Planet Flybys Have Triggered Earth’s Mass Extinctions?
The dinosaur-killing Chicxulub impact is the best-known example, partly because it left a clear scar in the geological record and opened ecological space for mammals. But not every extinction has such an obvious trigger. Daniele Fargion, a research professor from Rome University and the Osservatorio Astronomico di Capodimonte in Naples, argues that some ancient crises may have involved a less direct kind of cosmic disturbance: the tidal pull from large objects passing near Earth.
Fargion presents the idea in a conference proceedings paper titled “Mass Extinctions by Gravitational Tides,” which was presented at the ‘Multi-frequency Behavior of High Energy Cosmic Sources’ conference in Palermo, June 2025.
The proposed culprit is not only an asteroid impact, but also the gravitational effect of large wandering bodies. Fargion points to the outer Solar System, where Pluto is just one member of a much larger population of dwarf planet-sized objects. Many of these bodies may travel on elongated orbits, and gravitational disturbances could occasionally push some toward the inner Solar System.
A direct collision would be rare, although the early Solar System offers examples of major impacts, including the event thought to have formed the Moon when Earth and Theia collided. A near pass would be more likely. In Fargion’s proposal, such flybys could still matter because the gravity of a planetary mass object might tug on Earth strongly enough to disturb oceans, crust, climate, and nearby populations of smaller space rocks.
“Such passages may have left strong tidal signatures: giant waves, large volcanic episodes, sea regressions, coherent meteor showers, and major climatic perturbations,” Fargion writes. “These mechanisms could have contributed to several major biological mass extinctions over the past 600 million years, as suggested by peculiar correlations in the geological record.”
Fargion explains that Earth’s major mass extinctions correlate in time with huge changes in the planetary climate, meteoric impacts, and enormous volcanic eruptions. Correlation is one thing, but finding the definitive links between them is more difficult. “The reason for that is not clear. Meteoritic impacts alone, volcanic eruptions alone or sea regressions alone could not have caused all the major mass extinctions,” he writes.
While there’s plenty of evidence, including the iridium anomaly, that an impact wiped out the dinosaurs and created a mass extinction about 64 million years ago, the causes of other mass extinctions aren’t so clear.
The largest known extinction occurred 251 million years ago, and pinpointing its cause continues to be difficult. “But, neither an iridium anomaly, nor a large meteoritic crater have been dated back to the Permian/Triassic (P/T) mass extinction, 251 ? ? ago, which was the largest known extinction in the history of life, where global species extinction ranged between 80% to 95%,” the author explains.
“Here we suggest that tidal effects of planetary-mass objects which pass near Earth could have caused all of these and can explain the complex geological records of the major biological mass extinctions,” Fargion explains.
There are many anomalies in the inner Solar System that can be attributed to flybys of, collisions with, or captures of planetary mass objects from the outer Solar System. Uranus is tilted on its side, and that could be from a collision. Triton, Neptune’s largest moon, appears to be a captured Kuiper Belt Object. And the Late Heavy Bombardment may have been caused by perturbations from a planetary-mass flyby. The Solar System also features several retrograde-orbit moons, a feature that still awaits an explanation.
It’s unreasonable to think that Earth was unaffected by similar events.
“Passage of such objects near Earth could have generated on it gigantic tidal waves, large volcanic eruptions, and drastic changes in global climate and sea level,” writes Fargion. “Moreover, upon crossing the asteroids and Kuiper belts, these planetary mass objects could have diverted large meteorites and asteroids into a collision course with Earth. Thus, visits of distant planets may be the common cause for the various catastrophes that were jointly responsible for the major biological mass extinctions.”
Some evidence for past flybys can be seen in the Earth-Moon system, according to the author.
“Fossil corals show that the rate of decrease in the number of diurnal rings during annual cycles, i.e. the rate of decrease in the number of days in a year, has changed suddenly into a slower rate at the end of the Devonian,” Fargion writes. “Since the lengthening of the day is due to the slowing of the rotation of Earth by the well-understood Moon’s tidal forces, it implies that at the end of the Devonian the moon-Earth distance increased suddenly by a significant fraction.”
A collision couldn’t do that because it’s so sudden and would create an instantaneous change. But a flyby could. “Such an increase could have been induced by a tidal pull in a nearby passage of a visiting planet/moon,” Fargion explains. That tidal pull could also generate global tsunamis, and generate powerful tides that lasted years. It would also deform the crust and generate tidal heating in the planet’s interior, which could have triggered massive volcanic eruptions.
These events were all a long time ago, and it’s challenging to estimate how many flybys there were and how massive the objects were. “A reliable estimate of the masses and the flux of the visiting planets/planetesimals is not possible yet,” writes Fargion.
But Jupiter may provide a way to understand. Jupiter is slightly tilted on its axis, and also seems to have an unaccounted for energy source that helps it have such a high surface temperature. Fargion calculates that Jupiter has suffered 16 collisions with objects of 0.5 Earth masses in its history.
“Similar estimates for other planets, although yielding the correct order of magnitude for the tilts of their spins, are less reliable because the inferred number of accreted planets is too small,” Fargion explains. “We note, however, that the past dwarf planet population, four billion years ago, could be more heavier than the present one, which is mostly dominated by lighter Moon-like dwarf planet mass.”
teachings of the Bible are so muddled and self-contradictory that it was possible for Christians to happily burn heretics alive for five long centuries. It was even possible for the most venerated patriarchs of the Church, like St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas, to conclude that heretics should be tortured (Augustine) or killed outright (Aquinas). Martin Luther and John Calvin advocated the wholesale murder of heretics, apostates, Jews, and witches. - Sam Harris, "Letter To A Christian Nation"
Is There Alien Debris on the Moon? Some Scientists Plan to Find Out.
Imagine an alien civilization that runs on dazzling technologies far more advanced than our own. Picture city-size starships, planet-wide mines or swarms of solar panels that harvest energy directly from a star.
As these aliens go about their otherworldly business, the erosive forces of space wear down their infrastructure, loosening tiny bits of debris that detach and drift into the cosmos. If the civilization collapses, its remains degrade even faster. Clouds of particles might be unleashed into the galaxy, akin to the microplastics in Earth’s oceans, sprinkling countless worlds with the detritus of an extraterrestrial society.
Some of these particles, if they exist, may have even wafted through our solar system, perhaps settling on the surface of the moon, proposes a team of scientists focused on the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, or SETI. In their provocative study, which is in peer review for the International Journal of Astrobiology, they suggest that searching for these microscopic remnants in lunar soil could resolve one of humanity’s great questions: Are we alone in the universe?
In the study, the team showed how alien infrastructure might weather and erode into tiny particles and modeled how they would be dispersed through the galaxy. This process is already well observed here on Earth: Satellites, for example, shed microscopic material into space.
Dr. Pinault and his colleagues modeled the possible trajectories of the particles through the galaxy, showing how they might intersect with our solar system over time. They speculate that some particles might survive impacts with the moon, leaving traces of alien societies that may have already gone extinct.
“If you concede that looking for alien intelligences is a legitimate part of science, which clearly it is, then looking for the technological products — a.k.a artifacts of these intelligences — ought to be just as scientifically valid as looking for their radio emissions,” said Ian Crawford, a professor of planetary science at Birkbeck College, University of London and a co-author on the study.
Each star could have had multiple civilizations that were generating debris, Dr. Pinault said. He added that aliens “may have become starfarers who are developing similar technologies around each star system that they go to, so the potential of there being quite a bit of interesting debris in the galaxy is pretty high.”
The researchers also considered the possibility that aliens might have dispatched microscopic machines for surveillance purposes or other types of active missions. They called these operational objects “Bracewell particles” after the physicist Ronald Bracewell, who proposed the idea of autonomous alien probes in the 1960s.
Jason Wright, a professor of astronomy and astrophysics at Penn State and a SETI researcher, called the preprint “impressive” and “extremely thorough” and said the approach was worth a shot.
To test their hypothesis, the scientists propose sending a mission to the surface of the moon to sift through about a cubic meter (35 cubic feet) of soil as a starting point — a tall ask. Specialized instruments would then comb through the soil searching for artificial particles, perhaps by screening for metals and other manufactured substances.
Even if artificial grains were identified, there would be a high chance that they were of human origin. Many spacecraft parts have crashed into the moon over the decades, so it would not be surprising to find micron-scale debris from our own defunct missions. To determine whether a particle came from Earth or from some alien world, scientists would need to analyze the chemical fingerprint of the object.
Finding even one alien technosignature in one lunar sample is a long shot, Dr. Crawford said. But if one were found in the moon’s dust — and confirmed to be genuinely alien, rather than rubbish from our own civilization — it would answer the tantalizing mystery of whether life exists beyond Earth.
teachings of the Bible are so muddled and self-contradictory that it was possible for Christians to happily burn heretics alive for five long centuries. It was even possible for the most venerated patriarchs of the Church, like St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas, to conclude that heretics should be tortured (Augustine) or killed outright (Aquinas). Martin Luther and John Calvin advocated the wholesale murder of heretics, apostates, Jews, and witches. - Sam Harris, "Letter To A Christian Nation"
Looking for signs of alien intelligence via their discarded rubbish is probably a pretty reasonable approach. They'll just have to screen out the bits of Elon's rocket.
