It’s called “Buttballs”

nonbinary pride flag sampled from cohost ui
for fun 🏳‍🌈

warning: very long post. the conclusion is just to be cool to aliens or we're all going to go extinct. if that's not obvious feel free to read on though.

i'm still watching the blue gay wolf play earth defense force. he's really, really good at it. he seems to be having a great time. i'm having a great time, but i still wanted to type things. if someone doesn't like that, well, too bad, just tell me and i'll stop i swear oh god

i'm just typing with no drafts or i won't write anything. however, this conclusion is likely to be more tenuously supported because it pertains to radios, talking to animal-like creatures, gamma ray bursts, and the universality of joy. i don't do those things. if i get something blatantly wrong and you hate that, please inform me immediately and i will do my best to fix things. again, i don't do anything useful for a living, i don't know how to do those things, and i'm barely alive, so my expertise is limited. thank you.

if it's wrong and you think that's really funny, i'm happy for you too

talking in space is hard. the ping's really bad out there, again thanks to our old friend, the light barrier. i did a really fast internet search and it apparently takes about 40 minutes either way to talk to jupiter from earth, give or take depending on where we happen to be. the nearest stars are on the order of light years away. if we broadcast hololive and nijisanji to alpha centauri, they would barely be aware of how popular they are.

a few hundred years ago, 95% or so of my native ancestors were wiped out by what people now believe to have been smallpox, introduced into the americas. it did not kill that many europeans because the eurasian supercontinent had been dealing with it for millenia prior. it nonetheless killed that many of us as after 10,000 years, give or take, humanity did not so greatly diverge that the same diseases were not just as effective in an immunity-naive population. (it's now back again, i'd like it if you could maybe do something about that, thanks)

if we broadcast nijisanji and hololive to a star 10,000 light years away, one or both of us may be unaware of the ipv6 protocol, as classical latin was unintelligible to the early natives, and one or both of us may have grown beyond the limitations of the ipv4 protocol. notably, starlink, as of this writing, and to the best of my terrible attempt at research, only tenuously supports ipv6.

the diameter of the milky way is around 100,000 light years across. i once heard somewhere (citation needed) that the odds of being hit by a gamma ray burst or some other horrible random space laser increase considerably as one approaches the galactic core, so you might not want to spend the 100,000 years it takes to get through there. ....so, half the radius of the galactic disk is around 150-someodd-000 light years away. fortunately, light itself was never bothered by the space weather, so it can go ahead and take the straight on path.

if we broadcast nijisanji and hololive to a star 100,000 light years away, even assuming humanity was placed here yesterday with no memories by a civilization capable of light speed travel which also resides in that place, one or both of us may be unaware of live streams by the time it arrives. it's said that neanderthals may have lived in smaller groups than modern humans. i often wonder, if neanderthals had internet, whether they would like idols from other groups, or even if they would see the appeal in idols at all. indeed, many humans already don't see the appeal, even without the potential of divergent evolution under the pressures of surviving in space.

if those humans who dropped us off yesterday are sailing back now, the short way, hashtag yolo, it is likely that all three of our groups will be pretty alien to each other by the time they arrive back home. if said humans decide, like some of us, that they should bring some chili along, the alien humans separated by 200,000 years of time may misinterpret the gesture. already, some humans with no such divergent evolution are capable of the same.

andromeda is 2.537 million light years away. we are barely able to communicate with our relatives separated by such time. our local group is maybe 10 million light years or so in diameter; same deal. the more humanity pushes itself into the universe, the more alien they all become to one another. the only thing that can possibly unite such disparate groups is shared history, shared senses, and shared biological needs; these, too, could be forgotten or diverge wildly at distances which could still be traversed several times at any given point within the lifetime of our universe.

if you look at a funny website that ends in hub and starts with the wacky sequence of characters sci, and tell it something along the lines of 10.1364/JOCN.3.000514 then you might run into a cool webpage that's basically going to tell you that the number of bits you can transmit through deep space is a countable number of South Koreans if you use both of your hands, which the alien descendants of humanity, separated by such time and distance, may or may not still have.

imagine lucy, the australopithecus, was a vtuber. that probably wasn't their name. that might not have been their gender. we don't know if lucy's relatives would know how to use a computer, or even if lucy would have made it through the audition process. we don't know if australopithecus would have liked idols, or even if they would have liked mukbang. would you watch lucy's virtual avatar eat termites? yeah, i probably would, but also that's one of the very few things you'd have enough bandwidth for across deep space.

the blue gay wolf i'm watching on twitch since i wrote lemma 1 is still doing great as air raider. he's still doing an amazing job fighting the aliens. when the alien leader dies, the aliens will be sad. if we die, we will be sad. i can already feel the caffeine of 12 cups of tea wearing off, so i should probably try to wrap this up, but i will say that our only common memory in the deep future, if we live that long, will be forged in these hundreds of years we have together today. with high probability, if we hope to not destroy one another piecemeal, the civilizations they build must be pretty cool. and that means, we need to be cool. it's entirely possible some of us will deplete all local resources and be forced to move (see lemma 1.) some people may have moved longer before settling. both of those groups of people may look nothing like each other. perhaps, only spacefaring subgroups will survive in the long term; whatever, anthropology is like that sometimes. if they can understand each other, maybe they can try to teach them or something, whatever. they still need to be cool.

i've met dogs with strong preferences in human television programming. if dogs knew how to create content, i wonder how many humans would want to perceive it. i'm not even certain dog-produced content for dogs would be visual. i don't know what encoding scheme they would settle on, how many channels they would use for brightness of each cone cell, or if someone from their renaissance would mischaracterize the sense and the encoding based on that would become standard, or if the broadcast would be sound, or even tactile, or chemosynthetic.

a dog did once watch an episode of star trek, see data's arm being removed on trial, and the dog nibbled my arm in confusion. i politely informed the dog that it doesn't work like that. we played it cool. in space, you can't tell the space dogs you're not interested in that programming in order to save the limited bandwidth, because the ping is pretty bad out there. it won't matter because dogs have a right to express themselves, and besides, your neighbors might have been into that.

also, the current methods for allocating ipv6 aren't gonna last even the time it takes to cross the galaxy and the latency between various ip address allocation groups is going to be off the charts so you might want to settle on something that's going to keep working for a little while longer. like seriously, you have all those bits and just 48 of them by convention are the macs? come on people