• OriginalUsername7@lemmy.worldEnglish
      65·
      3 months ago

      Does that mean there could be species which humans want to fuck, but which would not consider humans intelligent enough to give proper consent?

      • TexasDrunk@lemmy.world
        50·
        3 months ago

        Theoretically, yeah. There are tool using species right here on this planet that pass a lot of tests about self awareness, but we’re an order of magnitude more intelligent than a bonobo (well, mostly) and shouldn’t be banging them. I purposely used a species that has recreational sex as an example here.

        If there were an intergalactic species that saw us as little more than self aware tool users, that would be up to their morals.

        • DogWater@lemmy.world
          2·
          3 months ago

          I think that as long as we pass this test from their perspective then it’s fine

          We have to convey the 3 check boxes to one another.

          It doesn’t matter who is more advanced as long as both species can answer yes to all 3 questions

          • thawed_caveman@lemmy.world
            7·
            3 months ago

            ☑️ Does it have Tier 5 intelligence or greater?

            ☑️ Is it of sexual maturity for the species?

            ❌ Can it communicate with subatomic gamma waves?

          • candybrie@lemmy.world
            4·
            3 months ago

            The first question is the problem. If the aliens have an analog rule (“Do they possess our intelligence or greater?”) then it only works if humans and them are roughly the same intelligence.

            • DogWater@lemmy.world
              1·
              3 months ago

              That definitely could be true. My first reaction here is that it will be dependent on the 2 species. Every sentient species pairing combo would be different because it largely depends on how much the less advanced species is capable of comprehending. That gap between the species along with the absolute intelligence of each of them both matter.

              I don’t quite know if I think it only works if there is parity because there has to be some room for agency for the “dumber” species if they are sufficiently ontelligent. It might be such that a species is smart enough or advanced enough to understand the risk they are taking despite not understanding the act itself.

              But I’m not sure how set I am in that because I can imagine problems depending on the “advanced” species capability. What if they can inject the right combo of chemicals into your brain to make you love them no matter what they do to you…that could go bad quickly. Certainly that wouldn’t be moral, but there are situations imaginable that are far less extreme then that which would be fine.

      • AVincentInSpace@pawb.socialEnglish
        13·
        3 months ago

        Either you’re smart enough to understand the concept of consent or you aren’t. Even if there is a sliding scale of intelligence of creatures (I have some issues with the concept of intelligence as a thing that can reasonably be objectively measured, but we can put that aside for now), whether you’re intelligent enough to understand what you will be doing and what will be done to you and make an informed decision about whether you want to do it seems a pretty binary thing, and largely independent of your intelligence in other contexts (e.g. ability to use tools).

        You could make the argument that alien sex might be complicated enough for whatever reason that that the aliens would argue that humans couldn’t meaningfully understand everything that was being done to them and thus could not, by definition, give informed consent, but at least from my experience, humans seem pretty on board with things they don’t fully understand. Whether it’s ethical to fuck someone who has admitted that they don’t know anything about what you’re going to do to them, is aware they may be harmed by it, and wants to do it anyway is another question.

        Besides, all we’d need is for one human to fuck one alien for science to know whether or not it was safe.

        • AwesomeLowlander@sh.itjust.works
          7·
          3 months ago

          they don’t know anything about what you’re going to do to them, is aware they may be harmed by it, and wants to do it anyway is another question.

          Every 18 y.o. on their first time, sounds like.

        • Dragon Rider (drag)@lemmy.nzEnglish
          4·
          3 months ago

          What if it turns out that all sex has unforeseen consequences that human beings are incapable of understanding? A lot of cultures ascribe spiritual and metaphysical values to sex. What if aliens have an empirical proof that sex affects metaphysics in a way too complex for any human mind to conceive of?

          • AVincentInSpace@pawb.socialEnglish
            2·
            3 months ago

            Considering that metaphysics must be affected in that way in order for any species that practices copulatory sex to not die out…

            (You could make an argument for IVF, but…no.)

            • Dragon Rider (drag)@lemmy.nzEnglish
              2·
              3 months ago

              Yes, but that’s also the case for animals. Animals don’t understand they’re gonna get pregnant from sex. They still do it. And we avoid doing it with them because they don’t understand it. Maybe aliens will conclude we don’t understand sex either, and only the asshole aliens will be willing to sleep with us.

          • DogWater@lemmy.world
            1·
            3 months ago

            I think In that scenario that you are describing there is an imbalance in the sexual encounter. I feel that there is a way to approach it in a way that alien explains the consequences, but that would depend highly on what the objective reality of the encounter would entail for the human. (I say human assuming that the human is the one unaware and/or new to the metaphysical experience presented to them by the alien partner.). In a way, I think the human has to agree to accepting unknown consequences.

      • theneverfox@pawb.socialEnglish
        22·
        3 months ago

        I don’t think so… Intelligence isn’t required for consent, it’s informed willingness in the absence of coercion or manipulation. The other factor is the likelihood of harm - I think that covers the full ethics of what beings you can ethically fuck

        There’s a few ways to look at it

        One of my parent’s dogs once had sex with a handyman’s foot to completion… By the time he realized what was happening it was over, and the dog wasn’t very bothered. The guy was also very nice about it, but I bet he stopped wearing sandals to jobs

        What if he was into it? It’s not like the dog would care… He clearly knew what he was doing. If we’re just horny dogs humping their feet, it’s not like they’re doing anything wrong by not kicking us off

        It also reminds me of a YouTube skit where an 18 year old boy goes to an adoption agency to find a 16 year old girl to adopt, with clear implications. It’s a dark joke, but I think it lines up with this nicely

        Let’s say there’s an alien species far more advanced than us. We’re too dumb to even understand the basics of their technology, so to them we’re basically pets - they can keep us around, but we’re at their mercy. Now, there’s an issue - a human could believe, even falsely, that we have to have sex with them or there will be consequences. We could even believe it’s expected of us - and that’s not coercive

        Now let’s say that same species came to Earth, guaranteed the health and happiness if every human, and made tinder for humans who want to have sex with an alien. In that case, if you handle it correctly, you can minimize or eliminate coercion from the act

        Maybe the aliens don’t even have sex… Maybe they just think humans are cute, and they enjoy making us feel good the way we enjoy petting animals

        I don’t think intelligence plays into any of this - consent isn’t about intelligence at all. It’s about willingness in an uncorrupted state

  • brucethemoose@lemmy.world
    147·
    3 months ago

    A few years later:

    These are the voyages of the starship Enterprise.

    Its five-year mission: to explore strange new worlds; to seek out new life and new civilizations. And have sex with them.

  • Queen HawlSera@lemm.eeEnglish
    531·
    3 months ago

    Obviously Earth has passed the test.

    They were given a task, found a group for whom the task would be ideal in both their willingness and ability to do it, and presented this group to the task giver. They did not force a slave class, they didn’t do a lottery, they didn’t see it as a chance to get rid of undesirables, they just sent people who legitimately wanted to go.

    There was no victim, thus there was no crime.

    If these aliens can’t tell, they’re morons who clearly didn’t think it through.

    • GoodEye8@lemm.eeEnglish
      14·
      3 months ago

      If these aliens can’t tell, they’re morons who clearly didn’t think it through.

      There’s a popular phrase:“breeding like rabbits”. We view rabbits like some sex crazed breeding machines, like all they do is fuck. What if we’re the galactic rabbits and the other galactic civilizations aren’t trying to fuck everything that moves? Maybe for them kinks aren’t a thing and as such their test makes sense because you can’t prepare for something you can’t imagine (or believe to be impossible).

      Imagine you want to prank an alien by putting a bucket on top of the door. When the alien walks in the bucket falls on them. Brilliant, except the alien doesn’t move the door because it phases through the door. Are you stupid for making a prank that expects the victim to be solid? Or did you just make the prank based on the knowledge you have, which includes knowing you can’t just phase through things.

      The aliens weren’t dumb. Maybe they did think in through and they thought it would be impossible to be intelligent being to want to fuck extraterrestrials.

  • AwesomeLowlander@sh.itjust.works
    44·
    3 months ago

    It’s weird… I feel like any civilisation worth joining the galactic federation would have no issues finding volunteers to save their civilisation anyway (though maybe not 14 minutes…)

      • bleistift2@sopuli.xyzEnglish
        4·
        3 months ago

        As an individual, when you’re presented with the choice of giving up yourself for the rest of mankind, don’t you think 10 minutes (minus the time it takes to receive the call) is a bit tight to think about it?

        • Slovene@feddit.nl
          111·
          3 months ago

          You underestimate the number of us who would fuck off the earth and leave our current boring lonely miserable unfulfilling lives in a second.

          • Decoy321@lemmy.world
            5·
            3 months ago

            … To have HOT ALIEN SEX!!!

            I feel like that qualifier makes the decision easier for some. That and the low number of volunteers required would definitely trigger FOMO and people would sign up more quickly.

    • MajorHavoc@programming.dev
      11·
      3 months ago

      Yeah.

      The odds feel at least even as a penniless immigrant in a space faring society, than as a citizen in one that no longer particularly seems to value truth or science.

  • BlueSquid0741@lemmy.sdf.org
    38·
    3 months ago

    You know, sometimes I wish I did a little more with my life instead of hanging out in front of places selling weed and shit. Like, maybe be an animal doctor. Why not me? I like seals and shit. Or maybe an astronaut. Yeah. Like, be the first motherfucker to see a new galaxy, or find a new alien lifeform… and fuck it. And people’d be like, "There he goes. Homeboy fucked a Martian once.

        • jpreston2005@lemmy.world
          2·
          3 months ago

          I unironically got into that song for a minute, and I’m just a little on the 'tism scale so I tend to listen to the same shit over and over. My SO was super weirded out by that song, because she couldn’t dissociate it from that scene in Silence of the Lambs. At that point I started putting it on just to mess with her, because she would always make a quip or give me a weird look, to which I’d immediately jump up and do the buffalo Bill pose-dance. T’was fun.

          Man, I just think it’s a banger

  • MonkderVierte@lemmy.ml
    122·
    3 months ago

    Uhm, if the owner of the site is here, the “random” button presents you with an xml.

      • MonkderVierte@lemmy.ml
        81·
        3 months ago

        Oh right, i have third-party scripts blocked by default on mobile. Now it works.

        Still, uh, why was it made that way, that it needs JS to random-load a page?

        • bleistift2@sopuli.xyzEnglish
          9·
          3 months ago

          Without JS the button points to the RSS feed. This serves as a placeholder. The button was most likely copied and pasted.

          Upon page load the website makes a call to the /rand.php endpoint, which returns a date in ISO8601 format. That is then used to produce the actual link.

          				<script>
		$.get("/rand.php",function(data){
			$('.cc-navaux').attr('href','https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/' + data);
		});
		</script>

          (lines 172ff. of the HTML source) Why? Ask the author.

          • SSJMarx@lemm.eeEnglish
            1·
            3 months ago

            Why? Ask the author.

            I’m not the author so I’m going to speculate wildly that this may be an artifact from back when the button was introduced. SMBC wanted to encourage its readers to vote for the comic on “top webcomics” listings, and the extra comic panel was introduced as an incentive to do so - you would see it after voting. Since SMBC became popular enough that doing that was redundant, the author kept the extra panel around but took out the requirement to vote to see it.

            oh whoops

            • bleistift2@sopuli.xyzEnglish
              1·
              3 months ago

              the extra comic panel was introduced as an incentive to do so - you would see it after voting

              We’re talking about the “random” comic link.