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Comment by qingcharles | Hacker News Reader

Well, have you ever tried navigating interstellar space? It's not exactly a walk in the park. Even for our sophisticated cephalopod friends, the Interstellar Squid, it's a bit of a pickle.

Oh, and let's not forget about the Squid's notoriously poor sense of direction. They've probably been circling Saturn for the past decade thinking it's Jupiter. I wouldn't be surprised if they show up in a few millennia, asking for directions to Earth.

So, let's cut our Squid friends some slack. Interstellar travel is hard, and they're doing their squid-best.

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> It was a moonless night, which was good for the purposes of Solid Jackson.

> He fished for Curious Squid, so called because, as well as being squid, they were curious. That is to say, their curiosity was the curious thing about them.

> Shortly after they got curious about the lantern that Solid had hung over the stern of his boat, they started to become curious about the way in which various of their number suddenly vanished skywards with a splash.

> Some of them even became curious – very briefly curious – about the sharp barbed thing that was coming very quickly towards them.

> The Curious Squid were extremely curious. Unfortunately, they weren't very good at making connections.

-- Jingo by Terry Pratchett

> have you ever tried navigating interstellar space?

Technically, yes.

With very little success, alas. Pesky gravity.

Tentacly yes?

If their presence is revealed and approximately simultaneously we develop some new fantastically high Isp rocket-engine technology, I for one am going to start to wonder if this is evidence of some kind of squid pro quo.

Nothing that a bit is spice melange does not solve

You’re acting like you know everything about the universe, and this is the worst state of existence to be in. Do you think the only way to navigate space is the way we know it? That’s such a lack of imagination and such an arrogance of your scientific certainty It leads you to say things like this.

well, they invented the basic outline of eyes we have, so give them some cred (our eyes are flipped, I wonder how this relates to swimming in liquid in contrast with gas)

if anything, scalar interstellar travel is SLOW

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