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Cake day: July 1st, 2023

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  • There isn’t any animal that is even remotely comparable in intelligence to what we see Pokemon capable of, so it’s not really fair to make that comparison.

    Dolphins and Chimpanzees are widely considered the next most intelligent species after us, but they’re still far below us. You can teach a Chimp basic sign language, but you still can’t have a proper conversation with them, let alone come up with complex plans with them.

    By comparison, Meowth is not only capable of all that, he’s better at it than J&J; iirc, most of their plans that almost succeeded were his ideas. Plus he’s extremely capable at subterfuge, considering he once successfully convinced Ash & Co. that he was done with Team Rocket and gained their trust, only for it to be yet another scheme. Not to mention his ability to operate highly complex machinery.

    And mind you, there’s zero indication that Team Rocket’s Meowth is any more intelligent than any other Meowth, he’s just vastly more ambitious. They very clearly show that his more human like tendencies are a conscious choice, not something inherent to him. Other Meowths could learn English, they just choose not to(and at least one thinks TR Meowth is weird for doing so).


  • I don’t think you can answer this question for Pokemon in general, I think it would be species specific.

    Meowth is clearly of human intelligence, for example. Hell, he’s smarter than Jessie & James.

    Then you have the extreme end, where Alakazam has an IQ of 5000. We’re basically ants to them.

    Not to mention pretty much every psychic pokemon in the anime can have proper conversations with humans using telepathy.


  • Sure, that’s an option. It doesn’t really change my overall point though that anything beyond galactic colonization is unrealistic on any time scale. Our next nearest neighbor, the Andromeda Galaxy, is over 2.5 MILLION light years away, over 10 times farther than my “crossing the milky way” example, with nothing in-between to make a pit stop if needed, you have to cross the true void of space to get there.

    And that’s just to get the next nearest galaxy. Current estimates suggest the observable universe contains 2 TRILLION galaxies.


  • There doesn’t need to be more to it than that. The observable universe is over 93 billion light years in diameter. That means even at the speed of light, it would take over 6.5x longer than the universe has even existed for anything to cross that distance… except the universe is expanding faster than the speed of light, so actually you need to go significantly faster than light to make it across. FTL is, sadly, still firmly in the realm of science fiction, so to the best of our current knowledge most of the universe is permanently inaccessible.


  • Not really, no. Generational ships might make colonizing the nearest star systems possible, but even colonizing our own galaxy would require some kind of suspended animation. The milky way is between 100,000-200,000 light years in diameter so even at the speed of light, you’re looking at a travel time that is ~33-66% of the time that humanity has even existed(homo sapiens are currently estimated to have become a distinct species 200,000-300,000 years ago)… just to go to ONE star system out of the hundreds of BILLIONS that exist in our galaxy. You’re gonna need generational ships so self-sustaining and capable that the generation that actually arrives at the destination will have long forgotten the point of the trip and might not want to leave the comfort of the ship.

    Still, colonizing our own galaxy is at least theoretically possible, given enough time. The real filter is just how unimaginably large the universe is. The vast, VAST majority of the observable universe is FOREVER out of our reach, as it is expanding away from us faster than the speed of light. Then there’s the unobservable universe, which could literally be infinitely bigger than the observable universe for all we actually know.















  • The issue is it has to fit the overall outfit. A fedora can still look really good if you have a well tailored suit to match it, while most of the things that look good with a cloak are, frankly, uncomfortable to wear everyday compared to modern clothing. This is why it’s essentially only done for cosplay and larping nowadays, looking like that is fun every now and then but not so fun that you’d want to go about daily life dressed that way.