No. No, they didn't. They might have, perhaps, if they were there and had seen it. But they didn't, because they weren't there. You were.

I'm trying to decide whether to keep being there, or whether to go away (IDK, sell my house buy a sailboat and just stay away from land from there on out)

I think the takeaway here is that you can choose to go away if you have the option and the privilege to do so. No one will hold it against you and those who do will be gone around the same time you will, give or take a few years. But you don't leave things in more capable hands. The people you idolize exist and are doing what they're doing irrespective of you. Their motivations are their own, however. There's no guarantee that they are willing to or interested in solving the problems you want to solve or see solved. There's no guarantee they even view them as problems. On this ship I think we can do with all hands on deck, but that is me being optimistic and looking for reasons to hold on just as much as you.

I do not idolize Elon Musk and I definitely do not idolize Mitch McConnel. I acknowledge that they have vastly more power than I do. In Musk's case, specifically, he has been doing most of the stuff I've been doing, only better (I doubt he writes intentionally cheesy sci-fi, or designs free board games). I don't think I can cope with that.

You can't be a better Elon Musk than Elon Musk. Don't try.

But Elon Musk can't be a better you than you are, either. OK, there's some overlap. Be you anyway - all of you, the parts that overlap and the parts that don't. You can't do what Musk is doing in rockets? OK. Don't give up in despair. Especially don't give up on all of you because someone is doing what a part of you wanted to do. Take that part of you and find a worthwhile place to use it.

OK, but objectively, he's succeeding at being a better me than I am.

No, he really isn't. Last I checked you're not into exporting a million slaves to mars and then blockading the earth with space junk. I hope?

Tempting, but I don't think I'm sufficiently ruthless to actually go thru with it. I think me going overboard on generosity in the past has shown that.

Anyway, I clearly don't have the right skill set :)

There's enough things to do for it not to be a hindrance, imo.

How do you mean? Who/what is "it" in your sentence?

"It" being the things Elon or whoever else is doing better than you at the moment. There is a finite set of things they can do, and an even smaller subset that they are interested in doing, and an EVEN smaller subset of that that they would end up doing in their lifetimes. The set of problems that humanity is facing seems much larger to me, and I would assume it's just a matter of either putting your weight behind something you care about as you have been doing, because every worthy cause can do with as much support as it gets, or you find something more niche that others haven't thrown their weight behind for example.

Thank you! I tried to help with OSMS last year. It felt unsatisfying. I'd turn stuff in, send out new designs, and people would thank Gui. Gui's a good guy but this made me like him less, although I'm rational enough to know that it's not his fault.

Not as far as I know, which is puzzling.

Don't be puzzled. They have finite time. They have finite information. You're placing them on too high a pedestal, higher than they deserve. They aren't God; they're just people with some fame.

And even God doesn't usually just fix things. He uses people to do the fixing. Even the biggest fix - salvation - was wrapped in flesh.

I don't think you'd like my theology, but just in case you do, have you read Left Beyond?

https://www.deviantart.com/spiritplumber/art/Left-Beyond-Add...

I have not. Summary?

Summary: The Rapture happens in 1996, as described by the Left Behind novels. As has been made fun in Fred Clark's extensive liveblogging/review of those novels, the Antichrist hires some hypercompetent person to run the new world order's FCC / cable / internet company.

This is the story of that person and, most importantly, of that organization. They have 7 years in which to figure out how to cancel the Apocalypse even as it happens all around them. Beating up God is hard, especially if God has control of the narrative...

It's hard, but it's been done. Here's a story about Jacob literally having fisticuffs with God in a dark alley, and kicking His butt. After, Jacob freaks out realizing he met God face to face, beat Him up, and got rewarded instead of disappeared.

https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Genesis%2032%3A...

According to the ending, Jacob's only injury is a really big thing:

"Therefore to this day the Israelites do not eat the tendon attached to the socket of the hip, because the socket of Jacob’s hip was touched near the tendon."

It would be interesting to see if that is still true. And a theory of what Jacob did to make God call "Give!"

Yep. I actually use that in my story: armor and weapons turn out to be essentially useless against Angels, so the agency has to start a martial arts program.

There are exceptions, such as Terry Pratchett's meteoric-iron sword (taken to have Captain Carrot's characteristic of "being the least magical sword you could think of"); retrieving it is in itself a subplot. :)

You can find the whole thing (stories and RPG worldbooks) here: https://www.deviantart.com/spiritplumber/art/Left-Beyond-Add...

Interesting premise for a novel. But you tied this to your theology. Do you believe that?

I'm a Deist, personally.

I do however believe that IF a Devil or a God or a Thanos were to show up and try to kill most of humanity (Which... if it's an actual divine being, incidentally would mean that I'm wrong about being a Deist, but I can live with that!) it would be a moral imperative to prevent them from doing so.

In that sense Avengers Endgame is a better Rapture movie than the Left Behind movies...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yn7KTOLbyfQ&t=1s

To some degree, I think God agrees with you. That's what the cross means - God trying to prevent sin from killing humanity, at an incredible cost. (I note that I'm writing this on Good Friday.)

But as you were charitable and suspected that I wouldn't like your theology, I recognize that you probably won't like mine, either...

I was raised Catholic and Evangelical, became an Atheist as soon as I could get out, and became a Deist after working with cosmologists a little. The only theology I actively dislike is Calvinism and its offshoots (Presuppositionalism and so on), mainly because they effectively paint God as playing a single-player game with humanity as the NPCs.