Wouldn't be amazing if we could charge like doctors?

User: good morning engie, just here for my checkup.
Engie: everything seems to be working perfectly with your laptop. That would be 70 bucks.

Not comparing professions just a random thought.

You guys ever thought about the concept that our universe might be a simulation written by some alien kid for a school project and got a C- for it?

Yeah...perhaps I should go to sleep

!dev
It's funny to think that in a world where we keep telling ourselves that each of us are unique, we are always forced to follow societal norms. And I'm not just talking about stuff like sexuality, even people with small quirks have to bend themselves in order to be accepted by the masses...

IDK, man.. It feels like we're stuck.

Looking back at 19xx we got the Moon landing, basically, all the computer protocols that are the essence of what we have today, all the inventions' ideas patented (started even earlier -- 18xx), ...

To me, it feels like scientific progress was at its peak in the past 200 years and has now slowed down considerably.

IDK, perhaps I'm living under a rock, but all I can see is building consumerism on top of what's been discovered/created in the past 200 years and not actually creating/doing anything new and original and actually useful.

Don't you feel like we're stuck in the age where we're enjoying the fruits of discoveries made by our grandparents and are too lazy to make new ones?

If so, then what's next? When are we going to (if ever) get bored by the comfort zone we are in now? What follows then? Progress or regress? Or the MadMax IRL?

What do you lads think?

Very Long, random and pretentiously philosphical, beware:

Imagine you have an all-powerful computer, a lot of spare time and infinite curiosity.
You decide to develop an evolutionary simulation, out of pure interest and to see where things will go. You start writing your foundation, basic rules for your own "universe" which each and every thing of this simulation has to obey. You implement all kinds of object, with different attributes and behaviour, but without any clear goal. To make things more interesting you give this newly created world a spoonful of coincidence, which can randomely alter objects at any given time, at least to some degree. To speed things up you tell some of these objects to form bonds and define an end goal for these bonds:
Make as many copies of yourself as possible.
Unlike the normal objects, these bonds now have purpose and can actively use and alter their enviroment. Since these bonds can change randomely, their variety is kept high enough to not end in a single type multiplying endlessly. After setting up all these rules, you hit run, sit back in your comfy chair and watch.
You see your creation struggle, a lot of the formed bonds die and desintegrate into their individual parts. Others seem to do fine. They adapt to the rules imposed on them by your universe, they consume the inanimate objects around them, as well as the leftovers of bonds which didn't make it. They grow, split and create dublicates of themselves. Content, you watch your simulation develop. Everything seems stable for now, your newly created life won't collapse anytime soon, so you speed up the time and get yourself a cup of coffee.
A few minutes later you check back in and are happy with the results. The bonds are thriving, much more active than before and some of them even joined together, creating even larger bonds. These new bonds, let's just call them animals (because that's obviously where we're going), consist of multiple different types of bonds, sometimes even dozens, which work together, help each other and seem to grow as a whole. Intrigued what will happen in the future, you speed the simulation up again and binge-watch the entire Lord of the Rings trilogy.
Nine hours passed and your world became a truly mesmerizing place. The animals grew to an insane size, consisting of millions and billions of bonds, their original makeup became opaque and confusing. Apparently the rules you set up for this universe encourage working together more than fighting each other, although fights between animals do happen.
The initial tools you created to observe this world are no longer sufficiant to study the inner workings of these animals. They have become a blackbox to you, but that's not a problem; One of the species has caught your attention. They behave unlike any other animal. While most of the species adapt their behaviour to fit their enviroment, or travel to another enviroment which fits their behaviour, these special animals started to alter the existing enviroment to help their survival. They even began to use other animals in such a way that benefits themselves, which was different from the usual bonds, since this newly created symbiosis was not permanent. You watch these strange, yet fascinating animals develop, without even changing the general composition of their bonds, and are amazed at the complexity of the changes they made to their enviroment and their behaviour towards each other.
As you observe them build unique structures to protect them from their enviroment and listen to their complex way of communication (at least compared to other animals in your simulation), you start to wonder:
This might be a pretty basic simulation, these "animals" are nothing more than a few blobs on a screen, obeying to their programming and sometimes getting lucky. All this complexity you created is actually nothing compared to a single insect in the real world, but at what point do you draw the line? At what point does a program become an organism?
At what point is it morally wrong to pull the plug?