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Our country (USA) is responsible for almost none of the plastic in the ocean.

"Almost none"? Not even remotely true. Not the majority but we certainly contribute plenty. We are in the top 20 as far as plastic polluting countries go so, let's not get too proud of ourselves for not being the worst of the worst.

We do lead by example by generally not littering, by reusing bags, by recycling them, and by disposing of them properly.

Are you shitting me? We litter plenty - just spend a little time cleaning up along a highway if you don't believe me. I have. In 2014 the US produced approximately 100 billion plastic bottles and an estimated 14% of those ended up as litter. We litter a huge amount. Just because you don't see it where you live doesn't mean it doesn't happen.

Literally almost every grocery store in the US uses tens of thousands of disposable plastic one use bags every day and we certainly don't dispose of an awful lot of them properly. (protip - a landfill is not proper disposal of a plastic bag in most cases) Reportedly we use about 1 million of them per minute on average. 91% of plastic we use isn't recycled and plastic bags are certainly a non-trivial piece of that 91%. About 40% of plastic is used for packaging of one sort or another.

Banning plastic bags (and straws) here would change very, very little in waste except make it more inconvenient for most people.

We already have paper bags and people can bring their own and we already have paper straws and people can bring their own of those too. Exactly who is being inconvenienced here? Now paper to be fair has its own pollution problems, but let's not pretend we're putting some huge burden on anyone. Nobody is claiming banning plastic straws is some cure-all but it's a low hanging fruit that does solve a measurable part of the problem. Your argument is that we shouldn't solve a small part of the problem just because we haven't solved the bigger parts of the problem yet. That's idiotic.

I imagine styrofoam is more of a problem, anyway.

What you imagine is irrelevant and in this case wrong as well. You appear to lack the data to really understand the problem.

And who wants more CO2 @1950 ppm, you know, to make all those plants and trees convert that CO2 into a higher O2! Who wants that! And we DON'T want the massive biodiversity of the Jurassic, no, we don't want more plants and animals and trees, no.

Even if your incoherent rambling made any sense at all, how is the extra CO2 in the atmosphere going to help plants and trees and more biodiversitym, considering the rate at which we are also destroying forests?
Here, educate yourself a bit.

Existing CO2 can be removed from the atmosphere pretty quickly by photosynthesis.

Yes, and the primary CO2 sinks (aka trees) get paid in sunshine and water, and don't make any noise. There's just one problem: we're killing them faster than they can grow back.

From the article linked above: "If tropical deforestation were a country, according to the World Resources Institute, it would rank third in carbon dioxide-equivalent emissions, behind China and the U.S."

I think the earth is flat but I don't *think* they send human to the moon. Everything is just wrong. Have you imagine the complexity of flying back out of the moon where you not only need to bring the fuel to fly but also the oxygen as there is no atmosphere there. The landing would have been a crash just like when we send rover to mars... it's not a soft vertical landing ready to fly back! I'm not 100% convince of that but it's pretty weird that decades later with all the tech we have, they are not able to anything remotely close to do it again. It was a political promise and they realized it in the last year. Missing selfy with earth or sun or stars in the background, Why we can see the hover there with our telescope? The more I read about the more question get raised with little to back the claim. The flaw earth on the sense is more like: I don't trust any of the fact given that I can't proved myself. Obviously unlike you want to cross the Antarctica by foot yourself you can't really do it. At least Colin O'Brady did it before us. https://www.nationalgeographic...

The man single-handedly planted a 550 hectare forest over a period of 30 years which, oddly enough, brought back animals and even a stream to the barren land.

He has gone on to plant another 150 hectares of land nearby.

In 2016, India planted 50 million trees (saplings of various types) as part of its deal with the Paris Climate Accord.

Has anyone tied this, snowball earth and the great nonconformity together? the eons roughly match.

Yes there was a news story about this three weeks ago.

The old religions have known about fasting for millennia. Science is way behind.

Great, if you had a handy decoder ring to help separate the few things they got right from all the other batshit they didn't.

The modern definition of "known about" means that you have substantive evidence where you don't need to resort to a telepathic-genie powered decoder ring.

We know that Einstein's correction to Newton improves on Newton's original predictions of celestial motions. This will never change. We might come up with yet a better prediction than Einstein's, but nothing we could feasibly learn will cause Newton's old predictions to suddenly regain the lead.

The substantive import of "known about" has improved just a smidgen over the past 3000 years.

Nearly a Billion People Still Defecate Outdoors. Here's Why. — August 2017 CE

No, I did not drop the B from BCE, or write "billion" when I meant "million".

Over the last 300m years the ocean PH has averaged around 8.2
Today it is 8.1
ref: https://www.nationalgeographic...

the EPA recommends municipal drinking water be kept between 6.5 and 8.5

Ref: https://www.epa.gov/dwregdev/d...

If we continue this break-neck pace, the oceans will leave the EPA recommended range for municipal drinking water shortly before the earth is consumed by the sun.
(300m*16=4.8b Red Giant ~10b - current age(4.6b) = 5.4b giving us roughly 600m years between ocean ph dropping below 6.5 before the sun is a full-sized red giant)

Ref: https://study.com/academy/less...

I guess it depends on how you define pattern matching.

That is a good point. To me, what a single neuron or collection of neurons does is pattern matching, in the sense that the output of a neuron or collection thereof can be regarded as identifying a certain (abstracted, meaningful) pattern within the universe.

Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) to me are definitely showing signs of that. Just look at Nvidia's latest stuff:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

A more sophisticated intelligent system is probably going to need more structure for both the problem and the solution.

Will it, though?

The difference between us and apes in intelligence is huge, but in terms of biological evolution and makeup we're not that far apart. Finding the differences between the brain of a bonobo and a human is pretty hard. If there is a 'special sauce' to intelligence, it must be a fairly small (yet very significant) variation on the theme of the chimp biological neural network.

I'm not sure where I'd put current artificial neural networks exactly on an analogous evolutionary scale, but I'd say we are past invertebrate and into insect levels of potency (although perhaps not complexity just yet). Consider advances in science like this:
- https://www.sciencedaily.com/r...
- https://www.nationalgeographic...
Moving ANNs up the evolutionary scale is going to be far from trivial, but I'd say there is a pretty clear path forward.

Repeating a claim isn't demonstrating it. Perhaps you could start with a link to a scientific study which shows the negative harms, if that isn't too much trouble?

For example, a quick Google search turns up a claim based on a Scient article that Orca's are in danger because of PCBs, which are not microplastics. The article lists the top three threats to their populations and again, no microplastics in the list.

So where are you getting this information?

Wow, I'm so concerned.

How about Jupiter? There is a good chance the Great Red Spot will be gone in a few decades.
Maybe we could drop in a few thermonuclear weapons in the right spot to give it a kick?

That kind of puts the 100 million years for the rings in perspective.

https://news.nationalgeographi...

Data shows that coral-based islands (like the Marshalls) are growing. Eighty percent are either stable or growing. Tuvalu has added 3% more land in the last 50 years, and the Maldives, which famously held a cabinet meeting underwater to show their nation is doomed has no change in land area over the last 60 years.

Coral atolls grow higher when sea levels rise. The question is one of rates. As long as the sea level rises are slow enough, the atolls will be more or less fine. But if the water rises faster than the corals can grow, they'll be inundated. Massive corals of the sort that make up these atoll reefs can grow up to 5mm per year. Over the 20th century the average annual sea level increase was 1.7mm. No problem, they can keep up with that. Since the 90s the rate has averaged 3.2mm per year. The corals can handle that, too... but the rate doesn't have to accelerate much more to overwhelm them.

Indeed, even at current rates, islands are having problems. I was on Rarotonga last month, in the Cook Islands. Natives there told me that their lagoons used to be two to three times deeper than they are now. The problem is that seas are crashing higher over the reefs and depositing more sand, causing the lagoons to fill in. This has created problems for fishing and for the tourist industry (snorkeling in a foot of water isn't much fun). However, it's expected that over the next 20 years the waves will rise higher yet and begin removing sand from the lagoons and the beaches, reversing the shallowing trend and then beginning to eat away at the island. Rarotonga will be fine; it's volcanic and rises over 2000 feet above sea level at its highest point. At worst people will have to move inland a little bit. But it could easily devastate the already-fragile island economy.

I was also on Mangaia and they're facing a different problem. Much of the island's fresh water supply comes from inland lakes which flow through tunnels in the makatea (fossil coral) to the ocean. But sea levels have risen enough that during storms water now flows in through the tunnels, turning the lakes brackish. This is having serious effects on the island ecosystems as well as making fresh water harder to come by.

The bottom line is that for many islanders, climate change is already having very real and very visible effects, mostly due to rising sea levels. And it's going to get much worse. And many low-lying coral atolls may just disappear when the rate of sea level rise exceeds the rate at which the corals can grow.

Data shows that coral-based islands (like the Marshalls) are growing. Eighty percent are either stable or growing. Tuvalu has added 3% more land in the last 50 years, and the Maldives, which famously held a cabinet meeting underwater to show their nation is doomed has no change in land area over the last 60 years.

Same thing with dinosaur-related discoveries. New tools mean access to data (and thereby new discoveries) never before available.

Species die when they lose habitat and their numbers fall below a certain threshold. At that point, they become inbred and lose vitality, then perish. This is happening to the Tasmanian Devil:

Once abundant throughout Australia, Tasmanian devils are now indigenous only to the island state of Tasmania. ...Efforts in the late 1800s to eradicate Tasmanian devils, which farmers erroneously believed were killing livestock (although they were known to take poultry), were nearly successful. In 1941, the government made devils a protected species, and their numbers have grown steadily since.

https://www.nationalgeographic...

and

Approximately 600 years ago, the devil went extinct on Australia’s mainland, which is thought to be due to its predation by dingoes and indigenous Australians. ...Since the Tasmanian Devil population has been nearly decimated by several previous population bottlenecks, all devils are very genetically similar. Consequently, the genes that normally confer the ability to differentiate between ‘self’ and ‘non-self’ (e.g. the MHC genes) are so similar between individuals that it is believed that their immune systems can no longer differentiate between tissues from themselves and other devils. Similarly, this is thought to be a cause behind why devils cannot recognize the DFTD cancer, they cannot distinguish the DFTD cancer.

http://tasmaniandevil.psu.edu/...

So to be logically consistent, do you also reject the concepts of good and evil?

Why is this logically consistent? Good and evil are labels, simplifications, coming from humans. The represent a model of the way that humans behave. "all models are wrong but some are useful". In this case the model is, often useful. Where do you think religious people get the concept from? It's almost certainly a fairly basic evolved trait (plenty of other animals show clear forms of morality - for example vampire bats) .

The truly scary people are the people who think that atheists should have no morality. What they are saying is that, if the big sky man wasn't looking at them, they would do whatever they felt like.

A small addition of seaweed to cow diets virtually eliminates methane:

The crucial research, by Robert Kinley of CSIRO and Rocky De Nys, professor of aquaculture at Australiaâ(TM)s James Cook University, and colleagues, involved testing some 20 different species of seaweed in artificial cow stomachsâ"that is, a mix of rumen and microbes that mimics the behavior of a cow stomach in a bottle. When grass or feed is added to this in vitro tummy, fermentation takes place and the scientists are able to measure the resulting methane output. In the presence of Asparagopsis taxiformisâ"described by De Nys as âoea real stand-outâ among the tested seaweedsâ" methane production was cut by 99 percent. Experiments in sheep showed that if dried Asparagopsis taxiformis seaweed made up just 2 percent of total feed, methane emissions drop by 70 percent. It can be added as a sprinkle, De Nys says, just as you might add a smattering of herbs to roast chicken.

Asparagopsis is so effective because it contains a chemical called bromoform (CHBr3) that interferes with the microbial digestive enzymes responsible for methane manufacture. ... Seaweed experiments in Canada were inspired by observations that seaside cattle, who periodically chowed down on storm-tossed seaweed, were both heftier and healthier than their inland relatives. Less belched-out methane, in other words, makes for more on-the-hoof meat.

Cattle's methant emissions are estimated to be about 10% of GHG emissions, and it would take 30,000 sq . km of seaweed growing to eliminate that, or 2,000 sq. km for the US.

Talk about hyperbole. But you sound pretty serious about your feelings, so let me address each of your points one at a time.

1) We've been evolving into omnivores for at least a million years.

Not quite. Homo sapiens has been evolving for about 250,000 years, give or take. And we evolved into omnivores mostly because gathering plants and fruits was easier, safer, more reliable, and a more dependable source of food. Meat from hunting was a high-risk-high-reward method of feeding oneself; while more caloric-dense, hunting took days, risks, and many people to do, and many times the hunters came back empty-handed. Evolving into omnivores allowed us to diversify our diets, giving us a greater chance of survival.

2) You can't just decide you're going to be strict vegetarian and not expect to have health problems related to that.

Says who? There's plenty of research supporting the benefits of vegan diets. As long as people watch what they eat to make sure they're consuming appropriate amounts of vitamins, proteins, and lipids, it really doesn't matter what diet they consume.

3) How about instead of screwing with people's diets, we create a timeline to eliminate fossil fuel use entirely, and stick to it?

No complaints. Maybe eliminating fossil fuel use entirely is a bit of a stretch, especially given our dependence on plastics and petro-chemicals, but a significant reduction needs to start now. But when thirty-six percent of the food we grow is fed to livestock, you're fooling yourself if you think that you can do that while advocating for meat consumption.

4) Also how about we stop destroying existing forests and start re-planting them?

Great idea. But then, where will we get the farmland for animal feed?

5) And start controlling our population growth, seeing as how the planet can clearly and objectively only support so many humans at once?

Well, good luck convincing everyone on the planet to stop procreating. Though, in a pure sense of supply-and-demand economics, it's our ability to improve agriculture production that allows us to sustain our population. After all, humans can't live if we can't grow food to feed them. Probably the most important man that nobody's ever heard of is Fritz Haber. It's his invention of the industrial production of nitrogen fertilizer that allowed the population of the planet to quadruple in one hundred years.

6) Why do we need 10 BILLION people alive at the same time? Can we get the nutjob 'quiverfull' religious types to knock it the hell off?

While -some- religious groups have population growth greater than average, most do not. The most influential variables in the United States are youth, fertility, and immigration. So, feel free to complain about the Mexicans, but the religious nutjobs, not so much.

Now that I've addressed your points, I'll take just a moment to make a few of my own. We eat far more than we need to. Given how many resources it consumes, as the parent article references, reducing our meat intake is not a bad t

From TFA: On Earth, the sublimation of massive ice deposits at equatorial latitudes under cold and dry conditions in the absence of any liquid melt leads to the formation of spiked and bladed textures eroded into the surface of the ice.

That sounds like something that's going on today, but AFAIK, the last time the Earth's equatorial latitudes were the sites of "massive ice deposits" was about 700 million years ago.

I know right? Two links in the summary, both pointing to the silly article. We're map buffs, not RTFA'ers!

https://www.nationalgeographic...

Probably, but that doesn't mean it isn't worth performing scientific/engineering experiments like this to learn from. There are plenty of similar experiments to turn seawater into fresh, sun/wind/rain/tides/geothermal into electricity, to split atoms, to fuse atoms, etc. Some are (still) failures and some (eventually) turn into successes, but overall there are enough successes to keep humanity moving forward.

The most expensive failure so far is probably sustainable nuclear fusion, but the lure of the enormous payoff for getting that one right will keep billions pouring in to fund research for it. Hopefully we will eventually get it right, but it's possible we may blow ourselves up before we get there.

I still like this one. Sure my reasons are a bit juvenile, but I'm hoping at least some of the successes look flashy and cool like this:

https://news.nationalgeographi...

Although it sounds like maybe this could work, what about the sea life of Antartica that might rely on that particular niche to live?

Besides the ice shelves holding back the glaciers are not melting underneath like scientists thought they would, so I think we need to understand better what is really going on before we fuck up the last mostly pure continent.

I was watching some show about waste disposal, and I think they said something like "All the waste put together would fill a FOOTBALL FIELD!!!!1!!11!!!1one"

A freight train 1 and 1/2 times the circumference of the Earths equator.

Eight million tons of plastic is dumped into the Pacific every year, mostly by third-world countries. This floating boom is estimated to collect 150,000lb (68 tons) a year. So to stand still, you'd need 8000000/68 of them, i.e. 117,647 multimillion-dollar floating booms. Let's be generous and say they cost $2m each. That's $235,294,118,000.

As there are 195 countries in the world, it would be cheaper and far more effective to use that $235bn so that each country in the world runs a $1bn campaign to recycle/replace all plastic. Though considering that most of the plastic comes from just 10 countries...

No, a global campaign to minimise the use of packaging plastic and recycle what cannot be done away with would only be a good start. One way to do that would be to float the idea to slap tariffs on the products of polluter countries (which should play well in the current White House) unless they clean up their act over a given grace period. Once the flow of plastic has been drastically reduced it will still be necessary to clean up the oceans. It is utterly impractical to send the bill for the clean up to these 10 countries however culpable they may be since most of them could ill afford the cleanup according to your numbers so the cleanup would never get done. It is, however, in everybody's interest to invest in such an ocean cleanup since we harvest the oceans for food and it's generally not a good idea to dump garbage into your food supply.

Eight million tons of plastic is dumped into the Pacific every year, mostly by third-world countries. This floating boom is estimated to collect 150,000lb (68 tons) a year. So to stand still, you'd need 8000000/68 of them, i.e. 117,647 multimillion-dollar floating booms. Let's be generous and say they cost $2m each. That's $235,294,118,000.

As there are 195 countries in the world, it would be cheaper and far more effective to use that $235bn so that each country in the world runs a $1bn campaign to recycle/replace all plastic. Though considering that most of the plastic comes from just 10 countries...

Here's a great Nat Geo article about the Netherlands and the future (for everyone else) of farming.

https://www.nationalgeographic...

1. Nothing "Solves" climate change. The climate is going to keep changing no matter what.

Agreed.

2. Nuclear in this context is meant to eliminate CO2 emissions which are measured in megatons vs Rad waste which is measured in tons.

Current stockpiles of pu239 is 70,000 tons, current stockpiles of u235 is 700,000 plus tons, current stockpiles of radioactive mine tailings is also in megatons. Can you point to any Nuclear Industry experts who specialize in dealing with these issues?

The various mechanisms the man made radio isotope make it into the foodchain is process called bio-accumulate. If that wasn't a problem then we would be able to swim in places like Lake Karachay. Then there is the National Geographic article which took an inventory of the world nuclear waste and found that there is enough to fill a freight train that goes 1 and a half times around the equator of the earth.

Since the nuclear industry do not have a solution to this issue Nuclear energy is not a viable solution to the worlds energy needs. All it means is we have two problems instead of one.

3. Nuclear provides the best energy return currently available

No. The peer reviewed science from over 10 universities around the world beg to differ in a study that uses established methods for industrial energetic input. Nuclear power provides no energetic return on energy invested.

4. Nuclear power current designs hit 45% efficiency https://energyeducation.ca/enc...

Speaking of context, lets go back to the original context of what I said: This is mainly because water cooled reactors are less than one percent efficient wrt the energy potential in the fuel. Specifically I am referring to burnup rate of the nuclear fuel in the once through cycle. Now the wiki article is particularly generous saying that it is 5%, which I don't agree with however it makes my point adequately.

Second I read the page you sent, thank you. The 45% you are referring to are for reactors that are not deployed and not licensed to produce electricity. Any scaling of Gen IV reactor technology will be occurring very slowly *IF* and thats a big *IF* the materials technology come through to produce them (which I hope it does come through).

So much wrong in so short a post.

If I post an opinion on Nuclear Power, I check my facts before I post.

Thank you for being an example.

No, Thank you!

Tech workers are routinely stricken by [ego], especially here on slashdot.

Come on, every field is full of blowhards and egos.

There is some evidence narcissism may have an evolutionary advantage under the right circumstances.

See, evolution made me an asshole, it's not my fault ;-)

Maybe...

...they thought they had discovered evidence of actual life...not just organics.

NASA had three separate experiment modules on the Viking lander. One of them was a labelled release (LR) experiment that worked by collecting Martian soil and adding a drop of liquid water that contained nutrients and radioactive carbon atoms. The experiment was that if the soil contained microbes those microbes would metabolize the water with nutrients and release either radioactive carbon dioxide or methane gas which would be detected by a radiation detector on the experiment module...and voila, you have proof of living organisms. This was one of the three experiments and the science standard for the mission was to crosscheck results of each experiment with the others.

The LR experiment came back strongly positive and, at the time, made the news as "possible life on Mars" only to be dialed back as a false positive because the other two experiments came back negative.

But this is all old news. National Geographic did a story on this several years back (edit: 2012). As I wrote this I Googled and found it here: https://news.nationalgeographi...

I was 10 at the time the Viking lander arrived at Mars and wanted to be an Astronaut so this stuff was very much on my radar back then. I recall the news that they found life on Mars as being quite exciting for 2 or 3 days until they retracted the claim.

What bullshit is this?

Your inability to use google is bullshit.

links?

Here you go. Not only are chinese panels dirtier if landfilled, but there's twice as much CO2 in their production.

$3 trillion is a drop in the bucket and sounds way too good to be true, so I think you've got your numbers wrong. Climate change is projected to cost the world economy $33 trillion a year by 2050, and already costs the USA alone $300B a year (couldn't find a figure for current worldwide annual cost, but you can assume that it must in the trillions).

The US "only" uses 500 million straws per DAY.

And straws pose certain threats to animal life than other shaped plastics.

Here's more info:
https://news.nationalgeographi...

Something in bold isn't a fact!

Essentially all Nuclear Waste storage is water permeable. Only uranacite crystals offer a mechanism to store radioactive waste that isn't water permeable. They are so rare in nature I'm not even sure I'm spelling it correctly and we certainly haven't figured out how to make them for long term storage.

As for your bold statement it maybe more believable if you were to show us how a Russian issue like Lake Karachay isn't an international problem if it dumps 140 million curies (IIRC) into the Atlantic Ocean?

Of course you can look at the excellent National Geographic article on The state of Nuclear waste for the US perspective. Something they describe as a freight train that would be one and a half times the circumference of the equator of the earth.

Wow, anything specific factually incorrect or trollish about my post to warrant a downmod? Well at least we see Nuclear PR in action, if it's too close to the truth, best suppress it.

Ok, look up vitrification to start. Water permeable it is not, so your statement is incorrect by omission. It's like saying, "hey, why don't we dump this crap in a lake?", then assuming that is the ONLY option available, and then saying, "see? I was RIGHT! It's all wet and getting in the ground water!"

The biggest conflation I hear about waste is how long-lived it is. The problem with that particular lack of logic is that low-level radiation in nature is pretty common. Go outside on a sunny day, fly international, explore a cave, etc. You cannot live your life avoiding all radiation. What you want to avoid is large amounts of high-energy radiation. These tend to be associated with something called a short half-life. Low-level => long half-life, high-level => short half-life. The dangerous stuff tends to "burnout" after days or minutes. The stuff that lasts tens of thousands of years is literally less harmful than getting a sunburn at the beach.

Those "train loads of waste" are not high-energy fuel rods. It's things like disposable gloves. Hardly dangerous levels, and not nearly as large of a problem to handle safely as the alarmists want everybody to think.

Bringing up Chernobyl and Karachay does not help your case. All that proves is how bad the USSR was. Do you seriously think any government on the planet, 60 years later, is that stupid?

Something in bold isn't a fact!

Essentially all Nuclear Waste storage is water permeable. Only uranacite crystals offer a mechanism to store radioactive waste that isn't water permeable. They are so rare in nature I'm not even sure I'm spelling it correctly and we certainly haven't figured out how to make them for long term storage.

As for your bold statement it maybe more believable if you were to show us how a Russian issue like Lake Karachay isn't an international problem if it dumps 140 million curies (IIRC) into the Atlantic Ocean?

Of course you can look at the excellent National Geographic article on The state of Nuclear waste for the US perspective. Something they describe as a freight train that would be one and a half times the circumference of the equator of the earth.

Wow, anything specific factually incorrect or trollish about my post to warrant a downmod? Well at least we see Nuclear PR in action, if it's too close to the truth, best suppress it.

Something in bold isn't a fact!

Essentially all Nuclear Waste storage is water permeable. Only uranacite crystals offer a mechanism to store radioactive waste that isn't water permeable. They are so rare in nature I'm not even sure I'm spelling it correctly and we certainly haven't figured out how to make them for long term storage.

As for your bold statement it maybe more believable if you were to show us how a Russian issue like Lake Karachay isn't an international problem if it dumps 140 million curies (IIRC) into the Atlantic Ocean?

Of course you can look at the excellent National Geographic article on The state of Nuclear waste for the US perspective. Something they describe as a freight train that would be one and a half times the circumference of the equator of the earth.

So your argument in a nutshell:

1. Pilots are highly trained. Agree.

2. Because pilots are highly trained, they understand what an "autopilot" will and will not do for them. Generally agree, though there are of course exceptions.

3. American drivers are not highly trained, and therefore don't generally understand what an "autopilot" will or will not do for them. Agree.

4. Thus, there's no harm in a car manufacturer naming a highly limited driver assistance system "autopilot," and any overestimation of its capabilities by drivers based on that name is their own damn fault. Huh, what?

Or, it's clear to most thinking mammals, and I'm including whales, dolphins, and at least one spider that new tech autopilot isn't yet the you don't have to pay attention driving mode.

Maybe the Tesla autopilot feature is just designed to cull out some of the stupid money.

It can't have escaped your home page that really dumb people can inexplicably have lots of money. It's bad enough that the rich intelligent people get to make policy for the rest of us. It's downright intolerable when the wealthy with IQ's south of room temperature get to do so.

"It's not true anyway. A better designed house that maintains a pleasant temperature with less HVAC is going to save you money. Your life gets better because of it."

Maybe, maybe not. My geothermal heat/cool cost $31.5K. I'm 70, got it 2 years ago, probably not going to get good ROI, although going from heating oil bills of up to $630 for 1 month to $175 on the absolute worst month for _all_ the electricity I use, which is usually $65 - $85 without heating / cooling expense, is just about breaking even. I mean the loan I took to get the geo is about $220 / mo, so its probably not quite breaking even throughout the year. But its great to know that the oil prices going thru the roof is not going to affect me any more.

Of course the AGW alarmists will still be pissed at me 'cuz my house still uses fossil fuels, in part, for heat / cool. And of course, the objective of 0 fossil fuel use is still not happening here.

"Same with electric vehicles. They are getting very affordable now and will continue to get cheaper. The air you breathe gets cleaner, you spend less on healthcare and cleaning your house. Life gets better for you."

Electric vehicles are not yet practical, and won't be until they can do everything an internal combustion powered vehicle can do. Range / recharge time is preventing this right now. My recent vacation to Arizona involved an 800 mile drive the 1st day. Nope, no electric car will do that. Take an hour or 2 to recharge it and then I'm too tired to continue to 800 miles in the same day. It still takes gasoline to do that. There's the supercapacitor that may make this happen, since they can be recharged extremely rapidly, but its still made of unobtanium for now. Recent breakthroughs:

https://news.nationalgeographi...

may yet pan out for electric cars, electrical grids powered by intermittent sources like solar and wind, etc.

Do Animals Go To War?

In the brutal animal kingdom, chimpanzees gang up to expand territory and ants raid other colonies to take slaves.

Cuttlefish can most definitely camouflage as well as octopuses, in fact they can change match the color of their backgrounds in almost complete darkness. https://news.nationalgeographi...

Have I missed something? Is there now no water or water ice on Mars? https://www.space.com/17048-wa... More recently: https://news.nationalgeographi... Or was that just a really poor troll that baited me to post?

and not heavy training from a young age?

RTF Study summary:

Using a comparative genomic study, we show that natural selection on genetic variants in the PDE10A gene have increased spleen size in the Bajau, providing them with a larger reservoir of oxygenated red blood cells. We also find evidence of strong selection specific to the Bajau on BDKRB2, a gene affecting the human diving reflex.

So yes, there is a genetic basis for part of the different abilities between races, and we are starting to find it.
I wonder if National Geographic will one day be apologising for how racist they were to print this?

https://www.nationalgeographic...

Not at all. There's a ton of good environmental news out there. It's just we never hear about it

I dunno, I recall reading lots of good news about environmental issues. But the reality is, things are getting worse faster than they're getting better. The news reflects that.

These microscopic plastic particles eventually break down but it takes a really long time.

Another one with no citation so here's the same link again. Why are you lying about this? Pollution is bad enough without lies. Stop fucking lying.

We're taking about the plastics breaking down naturally which - as demonstrated by photos of seas full of plastic - *is* slow.

No citation. Here's one for *full* biodegradation happening in a few years.

Unless you're suggesting that we dump all our plastic waste in the English channel.

False dichotomy. I'm strongly against polluting just like I'm strongly against liars. Your "photos of seas full of plastic" and the original author's "centuries it takes in the oceans" are both lies. Stop fucking lying.

This includes 1.5 tonne monstrosities like Yutyrannus Huali, (related to Tyranosaurous Rex) https://news.nationalgeographi...

Discoveries and detailed analysis of recent dinosaur fossils indicate that they were covered with feathers long before flight evolved. And they are now believed to have been warm-blooded. this is confirmed by CT scans of well-preserved fossils (e.g. 600 pound herbivore) showing a 4-chambered heart with *ONE* aorta http://contenidopatrocinado.cn... This is a physiological sign of a warm blooded animal.

So dinosaurs had feathers and were warm blooded. Birds have feathers and are warm blooded. Birds are one group of dinosaurs that survived the asteroid. This was probably due to small size and being able to scavenge scarce food right after the impact.

1. 1. Humans can engineer random mutations to create a viable population. I'd bet a lot of those variations are just going to be immune factors (we can also engineer mono-culture like bananas, apples and lab mice if needed.) The world of genetic engineering post CRISPR is never going to be the same again.
2. 2. Humans, unlike every other species, has both the capacity and intention to craft a custom environment to ensure continence if not flourishing of a revived species (insert rants about the Zoo here.) Darwin built an ecology out of imported species on Ascension Island over a hundred years before Jurassic Park was filmed.
3. 3. There is limited time, space and ability to 'save' everything. We can save and store what we can. The common (incorrect) statement is that there are three widely used crops that feed the world but around 50,000 edible species of plants. Even if you could ensure a solid founder population with only 10 diverse seeds that's a half-million storage containers you have to manage. This is not even touching on how to preserve the gametes, blastulas or embryos of the animal kingdom.

As for the question of should one only has to consider the fossil record. If you do not learn how to bring the extinct back then the best you can hope is that someone somewhere stepped in the wrong sand pit and it currently leaving a really nice impression as they petrify.

I expect that once field ready PCR is available some kind of public Merkel tree of DNA codes should be assembled. (Insert DNAcoin cryptocurrency joke here.) Just the deltas need to be kept like in this "Git repository of code" the same way we do with human DNA records. It's a literal tree of life. Then the race is on to scan in everything you can before it dies.

After that it is just a matter of making tools that can turn the DNA back into living stuff. Now you have an instant backup of the planet's ecosystem, from bacteria and virii and molds to your neighbor Steve and his dog. Throw it in a can attached to a light sail. Stop worrying about the death of the Sun.

Start worrying about competing with other species that had the same idea and are about to show up on your doorstep.

Considering that 80% of Americans can't see the Milky Way galaxy, it's easy to forget that a single point of light is lost among the shiny sea of starlight.

You left out the Sahara.... https://news.nationalgeographi...

What you are describing is a world where trees evolved independently of the organisms which break down wood.

The Fantastically Strange Origin of Most Coal on Earth.