Edit: I'm sorry, I'm being a little vague here, so let me clarify: biology is what decides our appearance, and our appearance then influences how we interact with people. If ones appearance contradicts ones inner sense of personhood, how can that person ever truly connect with other people? And if they cannot connect, then how can they love and be loved (which if I remember correctly is one of the two major commandments in your religion)?

I just cannot reconcile the idea of personhood being valuable with reducing humans to mere biology.

0. https://www.catholic.com/qa/the-churchs-position-on-transgen...

One could also argue that certain genres simply won't ever work as an arthouse movie.

> "They've accepted optimizing pressures for centuries now. Genius and freedom and knowledge of the past have kept them safe, but finally the optimizations have taken them to the point of fragility. The megalopolis moons allowed the richest networking in Human Space, but they are also a choke point. . . ."

> "But we knew-I mean, they knew that. There were always safety margins."

> Namqem was a triumph of distributed automation. And every decade it became a little better. Every decade the flexibility of the governance responded to the pressures to optimize resource allocation, and the margins of safety shrank. The downward spiral was far more subtle than the Dawn Age pessimism of Karl Marx or Han Su, and only vaguely related to the insights of Mancur Olson. The governance did not attempt direct management. Free enterprise and individual planning were much more effective. But if you avoid all the classic traps of corruption and central planning and mad invention, still-"In the end there will be failures. The governance will have to take a direct hand." If you avoided all other threats, the complexity of your own successes would eventually get you.

(note that this is a flashback scene within a larger story; Vinge put into mere footnotes what others would use to write entire novels)

0. https://github.com/fuzzballcat/milliForth/ 1. https://github.com/cesarblum/sectorforth/

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And sure, a chip layout can be shrunk; but that requires a whole new recertification cycle.

There’s also the issue of older process nodes not being profitable enough anymore, which explaines why at the height of the chip supply crunch older ARM chips were in short supply but there was ample stock of the 20nm feature-sized RP2040.

And the nice part is that it wasn't just one person deciding this but the collective intellectual leap of all those people throughout our history who decided to reproduce with the less violent and more cooperative members of the opposite sex.

And it must have been intellectual, because on the animal level being more capable of violence is surely an individual advantage.