"Half-Life 2 has surpassed our expectations in every sense -- its high-quality graphics, ground-breaking physics and immersive first-person shooter gameplay set a new standard for PC action games," said Bruce Hack, CEO of VU Games. Half-Life 2 will go down as one of the best-selling PC titles, and we are thrilled to deliver this ground-breaking title to the worldwide gaming community this fall."
Wow, that's really ground-breaking! Maybe his Random Hyperbole Generator(tm) got stuck on a bad random seed.
Well.... actually, I think the order of magnitude of carbon and other greenhouse gases being added to the atmosphere IS without precedence in the earth's history. I wonder how many acres of rainforest burning would be equivilant to all the exhaust put out by cars and other gas engines? But even more importantly- engine exhaust is ON TOP OF all the usual forest fires and burning peat bogs that usually occur. We have diesel soot microparticles from boats and trucks landing on the polar icecaps, reducing their albeda. In even the most volcanic periods of earth's biological history, did soot manage to find its ways to the poles? I don't know.
Also, as a smaller issue there are chemicals like CFCs which don't have any precedent in nature.
I think the point is, perhaps when your body is killed and your "spirit" joins the Force, you can appear as however you want to appear. You appear as how you see yourself.
Obi-Wan and Yoda were at peace with their older selves, their older selves embodied the wisdom they had gained over their lifetimes, so that's how they appeared.
Maybe Anakin wanted to see the Force Image of himself as when he was young and in the prime of his life, before he turned to the Dark Side, instead of the burned, crippled nightmare body he died as. The crippled ghost has a certain amount of pathos, though, because it says he lived so long with that image of himself it carried into his afterlife. I guess it's up to you to decide which you think fits best.
The HD Loader software allowed you to install a hard drive in the PS2 and run games from it without a mod chip.
This method of piracy is so popular that I none of my piracy savvy friends network has ever bothered to use it! Not to disagree with you that it exists, and seems pretty handy. It's just I sure hope Sony isn't shooting themselves in the foot to prevent what from my point of view is a form of piracy I've never seen anyone use. (They can already burn pirated CD-ROMS- and they hardly even care enough to do that.)
I hate to be a wet blanket, and a redundant one at that, but unfortunately, this is a derivative work and as such the original owners can demand royalties.
Okay, suppose they get 100% of gross profits of $0?
By all trustworthy accounts, your 2-sentence review hits the nail on the head with a giant paladin's maul. While I appreciate that they made it the best EverQuest style experience possibly, I really wish they would have managed to transcend it with an even more fun and organic experience.
I guess now they're owned by Vivendi Universal, and the MMORPG market being expensive and risky as it is, Vivendi decided to take the safest road, stick with the known, and do Everquest +1.
First the good. You could download the game and play for free to see if you liked it. This is a very, very good thing. That the Star Wars Galaxies & others don't do this says a lot.
SWG doesn't have a free trial? Sure, if you discount the "14 Day Free Trial".
It's virtually a prerequisite for complex mathematical thought,
There are hundreds of thousands of women mathematicians. Are they all "mutants" with male brains? If not, that does not seem like a "prerequisite" to me. RISC and CISC CPU architectures are different but can both execute programs.
Yes, it really is social "software differences", including phrases such as "sense of isolation" (and nothing more) that are holding women back. I simply can't accept even the implication that in the case of mental tasks like computer science or even chess, hardware differences between males and females are involved. That is true in something like weightlifting because there is a specific, obvious hardware difference- testosterone in the building of bone and muscle mass. That difference explains why male Olympic athletes have higher maximum potentials at certain sports than females. The strongest males simply have different bodies than the strongest females. Try though they might, no women cross over into the "male" realm in this regard. (Short of major surgery +hormones.) It's a real, physical, hardware barrier.
But in the Computer Science, plenty of women DO cross into the "male" realm. Like the article says, there are women circuit design engineers working at Intel, women PhDs and women professors in computer science. Like 27% women, not.0001% These women aren't outliers, "mutant" women who somehow have "male" neurology or whatever pathway you're even hinting at might explain the professional gender descrepency. These are just your normal women who trained their brains to code, just like men do. There are women with women's brains and bodies who like geek tech as much as any guy. So it's not the hardware.
It's the "software"- social things like traditions, attitudes, desires, and emotions. These things are ephemeral and exist only as long as we keep believing in them, accepting them and reinforcing them. We can change our social software. If more girls and women are shown and encouraged to enjoy the fun of working with computers and solving problems, they'll be capable of enjoying computers just as much as men in that regards.
As for your chess examples, how many of the top 500 players in the world are black? What percent have red hair? A low percentage? I'm not even remotely prepared to reach the conclusion that people with black skin or red hair are somehow less equipped to play chess. Neither with women in computing. I'm strongly guessing it's not that women's hardware doesn't handle chess- it's just that it's socially less acceptable for women to "waste" thousands of hours tinkering with little toy pieces on a checkerboard. They're told they have families to raise and careers to pursue.
If girls and women are told that tinkering with chess toys is a waste of time, and when they try join in anyway, all the male chess geeks are rude/inept to them, they probably won't try for long.
IF girls and women are told that tinkering around with computer toys is a waste of time, and when they try to join in anyway, all the compuer geeks are rude/inept to them, they probably won't try for long.
I would be kind of fun to do a reverse-SETI project. Make a satellite or moon surface radio unit that just screams at the top of its lungs out into space. See what, if anything, we can attract in a few hundred years.
As Audio Director for Flashbang Studios, I have been happy to grab some fame and recognition by taking precisely the approach so opposed in this article. In Beesly's Buzzwords, we managed to receive a nomination to Finalist in the Audio Innovation for Web/Downloadable at the Independent Games Festival at Game Developer's Conference 2004.
While one can never truly get in the minds of the judges, I believe we made it to Finalist precisely because we made our music sound MORE like a symphony orchestra and less like $20 Casio-tone keyboard. The web/downloadable category in large part represents the emerging "casual games" market. The audio budgets, both in cash and file size, can often be quite tiny. As such, synthy, repetitive pseudo-techno is often the norm. A similar game, Pop Cap's Bookworm, has a single in-game loop that's maybe two minutes long. It's synthy and happy and kind of nice, but after playing, I mean "researching" the game for an hour, I wanted to scrub my mind clean of that song.
Keeping that in mind, we gave Beesly four distinct songs, taking a cue from Vivaldi's The Four Seasons. Winter and Spring are light and airy piano songs on sampled grand piano, and Summer and Fall are full (sampled) orchestrations that sound a bit like Copland if I want to be generous. Which I do, since it's my own project. At the time, my friends Paul and Jon and myself were working on a shoe-string budget. We couldn't afford an orchestra (if we could I would have gone for it), but we could afford a few hundred dollars of sampled Akai CDs. The majority of people who commented on the music for Buzzwords said that they find the it "soothing" and "nice". Some have even gone as far as to say it's the first casual game they haven't simply turned off the music in a few minutes.
There's a reason many people like the sound of the symphony instruments more then synth-phony instruments. (Zing!) That reason is that the mainstays of the symphony orchestra, the brass (Trumpet, french horn), the woodwinds (clarinet oboe bassoon), the strings (violin viola cella bass) are all time-tested in a brutal darwinian competition for survival. For centuries composers have competed for funding and commissions, and in that competitive environment, only the sounds with waveforms and harmonics most naturally suited to some kind of average human ear have survived. Different cultures might find different timbers more appealing, but the surviving instruments have had centuries to settle upon overall pleasing sounds. (I am drawing heavily on a book called Music, the Brain, and Ecstasy here by Robert Jourdain. Slashdot is having trouble with the Amazon.com link.)
Synth instruments are relatively new, having mere decades of darwinian refinement by comparison. Let's take food and wine as an example. Not everyone knows how to cook, but everyone knows what they like. Chefs have had thousands of years to study what human neurology will like in the way of food. Now let's add in the metaphor for synthetics. Tang is vaguely like orange juice, but few people would say it is somehow as tasty or as rich as the real organic thing. Grape Kool-Aid can be tasty in its own right, but wouldn't most people with refined tastes would prefer a fine wine or at least real fruit juice?
Someday artificial foods may somehow surpass real foods, but they'll have to do really well to fool our highly evolved tastes. Take the Replicators on Star Trek- they could in theory replicate any food anyone could want or imagine. Thousands of tastes all at once that leave your taste buds reeling. So what do people usually replicate? Simple and familiar things. Steak and potatoes, coffee, or their old favorites from whatever planet they're from. And we'll use our cheap, flexibile digital hardware to try and make the best symphony sound we can for our next games. With luck,
With used copies selling as low as $3, our schools can't afford NOT to purchase
The Typing of the Dead
for the students of tommorrow. How else will they improve their zombie-blasting typing reflexes? (Might also be able to fulfill anatomy and/or religion requirements.)
I took some typing in like 5th grade, with some program called PAWS or something.
That taught me the basics of correct typing (or at least enough to fake something like it), but what really honed my typing speed was when AIM and other instant messengers came out. Having a good, fun reason to type made me WANT to type faster automatigically. Kids today will grow up with a lot of these, and a little bit of typing class, like one week in 4th or 5th grade, seems like it would be worth the minimal time investment.
Digging tunnels through the underground, filling them with your minions. Looking down on your minions or put your soul in their bodies and see through their eyes. Defeat the goodly lords and corrupt the land.
I pull this off my bookcase about once every year or two for a play through. Plays even better on newer machines, although can take a bit of fidgeting to run.
Where's 3? I've written about 40 pages of a game doc for it but gotten no further. ; -)
It becomes even more interminable if you take this back route through an alley on, I think, Day 3. If you do that, you miss the LineDef that triggers one of the scripted fights and...
Well actually, you go into this weird "Groundhog's Day" loop where you can work the job again and again, getting pay increases each repeated day until you hit the max rate. That's actually making enough money to buy the plane ticket you're not supposed to be able to afford in reasonable time. I've been meaning to test that.
The forklift is an interesting mechanic. My brother said that as he was playing it, he was wondering how his in-game girlfriend was feeling while he drove boxes around. Developer-designed down time for thinking.
We can't communicate with dolphins because we have no common frames of reference of any sort.
I thought about this a little more, and we CAN communicate with dolphins. We can ask them to jump through certain hoops and let us ride them. There are even advanced marine biology experiements where we can ask them to point to a silhuoette of a collection of pipes. "Point to the silhouette that looks like three interwoven rings, please!" An interesting point on that is the dolphins can make a mental concept of Three Rings if they see it with their eyes, OR even if it's behind a wall- they can "feel" its shape with their natural sonar.
What does this interview want- spoken language comparable to our own sentient thought? We're not likely to find that- Dolphins probably aren't quite at the point we'd consider sentient.
Dogs and cats, and parrots- we can all communicate basic ideas with them. Parrots can even mimic our language, with some understanding of context. Dogs and cats can also even empathize with our emotional states- they have some understanding when we are happy or sad, and can relate to it at least a little (without words or sentient thought.)
So if we can't "speak" with dolphins, it's more likely because they "aren't sentient" than "we could never understand another sentient being." And sentience is, after all, a sliding scale.
They've never screwed up like we did and had the 'Fall' - so they have no concept of good or evil - in which case I doubt any meeting would be allowed to occur.
The Fall from the Garden of Eden is just a story about how some people switched from hunter-gatherer to agricultural. Basically someone said "Hey! Instead of gathering fruit about five hours a week and just relaxing with our friends all day, does anyone here want to switch to a 60-hour week of backbreaking toil farming the fields? Also, we'll need to dig up metal and study that to make farm implements."
The Fall from Grace story was just invented to explain why anyone would make such a crazy choice. It was quite possibly invented by their enemies to explain why the Workaholics with their metal weapons were such ill-tempered jerks to everyone else all the time. To their way of thinking, it must have been some powerful, vengeful God cursing them to make them into Workaholics- no sane person would choose it of their own free will. But of course they did choose it all on their own, in bits and pieces, one hour more of work per week at a time.
The upside to our workaholic lifestyle is that farming allowed for specialization and research in metalcraft and science. Refining and iterating on that allowed us science and technology that allowed us space travel. (Although if technology is so great, why can't we do something about that 60-hour workweek required to maintain said technology?)
The point is, fundamentally, the decision to become Workaholics with Technology allows us to go into space. Any civilization with the technology to come here must have made some kind of similar choice in their civilization.
But unlike us, they must have learned how to handle such powerful technology without the "Road Rage" to have destroyed themselves with same technology. They were workaholics but also valued space programs above planetary war and conquest- and they worked together enough to get out of their solar system. By definition, if they had enough technology to come to our solar system, they found a way to work together and overcome civil unrest, terrorism, religious extremism and gigantic, economy-draining wars. (Iraq)
Whether or not we'll accomplish a similar feat remains to be seen.
Slashdot Mirror
"Half-Life 2 has surpassed our expectations in every sense -- its high-quality graphics, ground-breaking physics and immersive first-person shooter gameplay set a new standard for PC action games," said Bruce Hack, CEO of VU Games. Half-Life 2 will go down as one of the best-selling PC titles, and we are thrilled to deliver this ground-breaking title to the worldwide gaming community this fall."
Wow, that's really ground-breaking! Maybe his Random Hyperbole Generator(tm) got stuck on a bad random seed.
Can't I just keep it in my wallet or embedded in my shoes or on my car keys or something?
Well.... actually, I think the order of magnitude of carbon and other greenhouse gases being added to the atmosphere IS without precedence in the earth's history. I wonder how many acres of rainforest burning would be equivilant to all the exhaust put out by cars and other gas engines? But even more importantly- engine exhaust is ON TOP OF all the usual forest fires and burning peat bogs that usually occur. We have diesel soot microparticles from boats and trucks landing on the polar icecaps, reducing their albeda. In even the most volcanic periods of earth's biological history, did soot manage to find its ways to the poles? I don't know.
Also, as a smaller issue there are chemicals like CFCs which don't have any precedent in nature.
As if it's not enough work to get proper aging/muscle growth/facial features in
I think the point is, perhaps when your body is killed and your "spirit" joins the Force, you can appear as however you want to appear. You appear as how you see yourself.
Obi-Wan and Yoda were at peace with their older selves, their older selves embodied the wisdom they had gained over their lifetimes, so that's how they appeared.
Maybe Anakin wanted to see the Force Image of himself as when he was young and in the prime of his life, before he turned to the Dark Side, instead of the burned, crippled nightmare body he died as. The crippled ghost has a certain amount of pathos, though, because it says he lived so long with that image of himself it carried into his afterlife. I guess it's up to you to decide which you think fits best.
The HD Loader software allowed you to install a hard drive in the PS2 and run games from it without a mod chip.
This method of piracy is so popular that I none of my piracy savvy friends network has ever bothered to use it! Not to disagree with you that it exists, and seems pretty handy. It's just I sure hope Sony isn't shooting themselves in the foot to prevent what from my point of view is a form of piracy I've never seen anyone use. (They can already burn pirated CD-ROMS- and they hardly even care enough to do that.)
He lied to me through Poetry! I HATE when people do that!!
Yup. Like Goku, your power level will just keep increasing over time.
I hate to be a wet blanket, and a redundant one at that, but unfortunately, this is a derivative work and as such the original owners can demand royalties.
Okay, suppose they get 100% of gross profits of $0?
That would be like using religion as a basis to justify murder, even mass murder which of course could NEVER, EVER....
Never mind. Example withdrawn.
By all trustworthy accounts, your 2-sentence review hits the nail on the head with a giant paladin's maul. While I appreciate that they made it the best EverQuest style experience possibly, I really wish they would have managed to transcend it with an even more fun and organic experience.
I guess now they're owned by Vivendi Universal, and the MMORPG market being expensive and risky as it is, Vivendi decided to take the safest road, stick with the known, and do Everquest +1.
Virtual Girlfriend may actually serve a theraputic purpose.
Yeah right, and the part where the company nags the user for more money "to buy myself gifts" is part of their role as The Rapists. I mean therapists.
From the article:
All virtual girls will look the same - but each girl will behave differently - depending on how much money is spent on her.
First the good. You could download the game and play for free to see if you liked it. This is a very, very good thing. That the Star Wars Galaxies & others don't do this says a lot.
SWG doesn't have a free trial? Sure, if you discount the "14 Day Free Trial".
http://starwarsgalaxies.station.sony.com/
It's virtually a prerequisite for complex mathematical thought,
There are hundreds of thousands of women mathematicians. Are they all "mutants" with male brains? If not, that does not seem like a "prerequisite" to me. RISC and CISC CPU architectures are different but can both execute programs.
Yes, it really is social "software differences", including phrases such as "sense of isolation" (and nothing more) that are holding women back. I simply can't accept even the implication that in the case of mental tasks like computer science or even chess, hardware differences between males and females are involved. That is true in something like weightlifting because there is a specific, obvious hardware difference- testosterone in the building of bone and muscle mass. That difference explains why male Olympic athletes have higher maximum potentials at certain sports than females. The strongest males simply have different bodies than the strongest females. Try though they might, no women cross over into the "male" realm in this regard. (Short of major surgery +hormones.) It's a real, physical, hardware barrier.
.0001% These women aren't outliers, "mutant" women who somehow have "male" neurology or whatever pathway you're even hinting at might explain the professional gender descrepency. These are just your normal women who trained their brains to code, just like men do. There are women with women's brains and bodies who like geek tech as much as any guy. So it's not the hardware.
But in the Computer Science, plenty of women DO cross into the "male" realm. Like the article says, there are women circuit design engineers working at Intel, women PhDs and women professors in computer science. Like 27% women, not
It's the "software"- social things like traditions, attitudes, desires, and emotions. These things are ephemeral and exist only as long as we keep believing in them, accepting them and reinforcing them. We can change our social software. If more girls and women are shown and encouraged to enjoy the fun of working with computers and solving problems, they'll be capable of enjoying computers just as much as men in that regards.
As for your chess examples, how many of the top 500 players in the world are black? What percent have red hair? A low percentage? I'm not even remotely prepared to reach the conclusion that people with black skin or red hair are somehow less equipped to play chess. Neither with women in computing. I'm strongly guessing it's not that women's hardware doesn't handle chess- it's just that it's socially less acceptable for women to "waste" thousands of hours tinkering with little toy pieces on a checkerboard. They're told they have families to raise and careers to pursue.
If girls and women are told that tinkering with chess toys is a waste of time, and when they try join in anyway, all the male chess geeks are rude/inept to them, they probably won't try for long.
IF girls and women are told that tinkering around with computer toys is a waste of time, and when they try to join in anyway, all the compuer geeks are rude/inept to them, they probably won't try for long.
We can change this!
I would be kind of fun to do a reverse-SETI project. Make a satellite or moon surface radio unit that just screams at the top of its lungs out into space. See what, if anything, we can attract in a few hundred years.
As Audio Director for Flashbang Studios, I have been happy to grab some fame and recognition by taking precisely the approach so opposed in this article. In Beesly's Buzzwords, we managed to receive a nomination to Finalist in the Audio Innovation for Web/Downloadable at the Independent Games Festival at Game Developer's Conference 2004.
While one can never truly get in the minds of the judges, I believe we made it to Finalist precisely because we made our music sound MORE like a symphony orchestra and less like $20 Casio-tone keyboard. The web/downloadable category in large part represents the emerging "casual games" market. The audio budgets, both in cash and file size, can often be quite tiny. As such, synthy, repetitive pseudo-techno is often the norm. A similar game, Pop Cap's Bookworm, has a single in-game loop that's maybe two minutes long. It's synthy and happy and kind of nice, but after playing, I mean "researching" the game for an hour, I wanted to scrub my mind clean of that song.
Keeping that in mind, we gave Beesly four distinct songs, taking a cue from Vivaldi's The Four Seasons. Winter and Spring are light and airy piano songs on sampled grand piano, and Summer and Fall are full (sampled) orchestrations that sound a bit like Copland if I want to be generous. Which I do, since it's my own project. At the time, my friends Paul and Jon and myself were working on a shoe-string budget. We couldn't afford an orchestra (if we could I would have gone for it), but we could afford a few hundred dollars of sampled Akai CDs. The majority of people who commented on the music for Buzzwords said that they find the it "soothing" and "nice". Some have even gone as far as to say it's the first casual game they haven't simply turned off the music in a few minutes.
There's a reason many people like the sound of the symphony instruments more then synth-phony instruments. (Zing!) That reason is that the mainstays of the symphony orchestra, the brass (Trumpet, french horn), the woodwinds (clarinet oboe bassoon), the strings (violin viola cella bass) are all time-tested in a brutal darwinian competition for survival. For centuries composers have competed for funding and commissions, and in that competitive environment, only the sounds with waveforms and harmonics most naturally suited to some kind of average human ear have survived. Different cultures might find different timbers more appealing, but the surviving instruments have had centuries to settle upon overall pleasing sounds. (I am drawing heavily on a book called Music, the Brain, and Ecstasy here by Robert Jourdain. Slashdot is having trouble with the Amazon.com link.)
Synth instruments are relatively new, having mere decades of darwinian refinement by comparison. Let's take food and wine as an example. Not everyone knows how to cook, but everyone knows what they like. Chefs have had thousands of years to study what human neurology will like in the way of food. Now let's add in the metaphor for synthetics. Tang is vaguely like orange juice, but few people would say it is somehow as tasty or as rich as the real organic thing. Grape Kool-Aid can be tasty in its own right, but wouldn't most people with refined tastes would prefer a fine wine or at least real fruit juice?
Someday artificial foods may somehow surpass real foods, but they'll have to do really well to fool our highly evolved tastes. Take the Replicators on Star Trek- they could in theory replicate any food anyone could want or imagine. Thousands of tastes all at once that leave your taste buds reeling. So what do people usually replicate? Simple and familiar things. Steak and potatoes, coffee, or their old favorites from whatever planet they're from. And we'll use our cheap, flexibile digital hardware to try and make the best symphony sound we can for our next games. With luck,
With used copies selling as low as $3, our schools can't afford NOT to purchase The Typing of the Dead for the students of tommorrow. How else will they improve their zombie-blasting typing reflexes? (Might also be able to fulfill anatomy and/or religion requirements.)
I took some typing in like 5th grade, with some program called PAWS or something.
That taught me the basics of correct typing (or at least enough to fake something like it), but what really honed my typing speed was when AIM and other instant messengers came out. Having a good, fun reason to type made me WANT to type faster automatigically. Kids today will grow up with a lot of these, and a little bit of typing class, like one week in 4th or 5th grade, seems like it would be worth the minimal time investment.
How could we forget Dungeon Keeper 2?!
Digging tunnels through the underground, filling them with your minions. Looking down on your minions or put your soul in their bodies and see through their eyes. Defeat the goodly lords and corrupt the land.
I pull this off my bookcase about once every year or two for a play through. Plays even better on newer machines, although can take a bit of fidgeting to run.
Where's 3? I've written about 40 pages of a game doc for it but gotten no further. ; -)
It becomes even more interminable if you take this back route through an alley on, I think, Day 3. If you do that, you miss the LineDef that triggers one of the scripted fights and...
Well actually, you go into this weird "Groundhog's Day" loop where you can work the job again and again, getting pay increases each repeated day until you hit the max rate. That's actually making enough money to buy the plane ticket you're not supposed to be able to afford in reasonable time. I've been meaning to test that.
The forklift is an interesting mechanic. My brother said that as he was playing it, he was wondering how his in-game girlfriend was feeling while he drove boxes around. Developer-designed down time for thinking.
since a race would tend to fill up in a geometric progression
Maybe most space-faring races understand the value of birth control.
I prefer false negatives (spam messages that end up in my inbox) over false positives (real mail that end up in the bin)
Sooo... you're saying you'd prefer to have a bin laden with spam messages?!
Allright FREEZE!!!! Get down on the ground!
We can't communicate with dolphins because we have no common frames of reference of any sort.
I thought about this a little more, and we CAN communicate with dolphins. We can ask them to jump through certain hoops and let us ride them. There are even advanced marine biology experiements where we can ask them to point to a silhuoette of a collection of pipes. "Point to the silhouette that looks like three interwoven rings, please!" An interesting point on that is the dolphins can make a mental concept of Three Rings if they see it with their eyes, OR even if it's behind a wall- they can "feel" its shape with their natural sonar.
What does this interview want- spoken language comparable to our own sentient thought? We're not likely to find that- Dolphins probably aren't quite at the point we'd consider sentient.
Dogs and cats, and parrots- we can all communicate basic ideas with them. Parrots can even mimic our language, with some understanding of context. Dogs and cats can also even empathize with our emotional states- they have some understanding when we are happy or sad, and can relate to it at least a little (without words or sentient thought.)
So if we can't "speak" with dolphins, it's more likely because they "aren't sentient" than "we could never understand another sentient being." And sentience is, after all, a sliding scale.
They've never screwed up like we did and had the 'Fall' - so they have no concept of good or evil - in which case I doubt any meeting would be allowed to occur.
The Fall from the Garden of Eden is just a story about how some people switched from hunter-gatherer to agricultural. Basically someone said "Hey! Instead of gathering fruit about five hours a week and just relaxing with our friends all day, does anyone here want to switch to a 60-hour week of backbreaking toil farming the fields? Also, we'll need to dig up metal and study that to make farm implements."
The Fall from Grace story was just invented to explain why anyone would make such a crazy choice. It was quite possibly invented by their enemies to explain why the Workaholics with their metal weapons were such ill-tempered jerks to everyone else all the time. To their way of thinking, it must have been some powerful, vengeful God cursing them to make them into Workaholics- no sane person would choose it of their own free will. But of course they did choose it all on their own, in bits and pieces, one hour more of work per week at a time.
The upside to our workaholic lifestyle is that farming allowed for specialization and research in metalcraft and science. Refining and iterating on that allowed us science and technology that allowed us space travel. (Although if technology is so great, why can't we do something about that 60-hour workweek required to maintain said technology?)
The point is, fundamentally, the decision to become Workaholics with Technology allows us to go into space. Any civilization with the technology to come here must have made some kind of similar choice in their civilization.
But unlike us, they must have learned how to handle such powerful technology without the "Road Rage" to have destroyed themselves with same technology. They were workaholics but also valued space programs above planetary war and conquest- and they worked together enough to get out of their solar system. By definition, if they had enough technology to come to our solar system, they found a way to work together and overcome civil unrest, terrorism, religious extremism and gigantic, economy-draining wars. (Iraq)
Whether or not we'll accomplish a similar feat remains to be seen.