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Stephen Hawking Asks The Internet a Question
An anonymous reader writes "Dr. Stephen Hawking received about 15000 answers to a question he posted 2 days ago on Yahoo Answers. His question was 'How can the human race survive the next hundred years?'." I imagine you can do better than 'It Can't.' How would you answer Dr. Hawking's question?
'How can the human race survive the next hundred years?'
Birthcontrol, ween of dependence on high energy consumption and colonise the solar system, because we sure aren't going to get along forever on this rock alone.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Given those three issues, it seems probable that we may not make it another hundred years without severe loss of life. I don't think the loss of life will be complete with the death of all humans but I think there is a high probability for a large loss of our populations in one country or another. I don't mean thousands like natural disasters but I mean a hundred million or more.
We'll survive, just not at a luxury like we've known. Honestly, if a lot of major religions and their leaders could start coming to terms with each other. You know, make it so that it's not like a death sentence when you don't believe in God or Allah? You could also reveal to everyone that our leaders should be more like Gandhi and less like Hitler. That would probably help with those first two problems. In every country, to be a successful politician you need a lot of financial support. Unfortunately, the ideal people leading us are those with no interest in padding their own pockets.
As for the third problem you listed, we're screwed. We're screwed because our numbers are reaching epic proportions that the earth cannot sustain and there's really no way around it aside from birth control. I don't support enforced birth control as far as the Chinese have taken it but you have to admit it certainly curbed their population growth rate. If nature fails us or vice versa, things will be pretty bad though I doubt we would become extinct entirely.
Of course, there are an infinite number of universes and I'm sure there exists one which doesn't have any of those three problems
*loads a bullet into the chamber of his handgun*
My work here is dung.
Keep on doing what we have been doing for the last 100,000 or so years. Eating, pooping, fornicating, killing each other and creating stuff. Stick to the basics and we will do just fine. Don't believe the doomsday predictions Stevie, there is always going to be a guy with a sign that says, "The end of the world is nigh".
Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government.
As silly as it sounds...we will survive just like we always have. One day at a time.
There have been plenty of forecasters of doom saying that the earth would run out of space, food, energy and whatnot and the population continues to expand.
We'll muddle our way through the next 100 years just like we have the few thousand prior to this one.
Any one trying to answer this question seriously is breaking out the 50 cent words. Did he say 100 years? In the past 100 years there's been two world wars, super bombs have been invented, a cold war, etc. Real question should be: "How did we survive the last 100 Years?" If we survived through all that we'll survive the next 100 years just fine.
Answer: By shear force of will
If he wants a more detailed answer than that, he should ask a more detailed question. As any historian can tell you, the "social, political, and environmental chaos" he refers to is absolutely nothing new. The only difference between then and now is that our toys are bigger and shinier.
Pick any period in human history, and I think you'll find that it's easy to define "social, political, and environmental chaos" that worked against the residents of the period. In fact, the conditions that humans have found acceptable in past periods of history are regularly referred to as "squalor" in this day and age. Yet there are precious few examples of civilizations that were wiped out by such conditions.
Yes, the human race makes a lot of messes. Sometimes we stumble across messes that aren't our own doing. Any way you cut it, though, humans will always react to a problem before it reaches the level of self-destruction. Our instict for survival is too strong to do otherwise.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
Humans have survived through ice ages and famine. People often underestimate our ability to adapt and survive. We will survive because we don't want to die
I see the glass as full with a FoS of 2.
The best way to survive the next 100 years is to stop running from the imaginary boogeymen of the LAST 100 years. We have this suicidal fascination with birth control and population reduction. In reality, birth rates are plumetting all over the world. An if it wasn't for immigration, the population of most propserous nations would be in rapid decline. In the U.S. the average couple has only 1.4 children. Without immigration from third world countries, the U.S. would be depopulating at a rate of 30% every 25 years.
Exacerbating this is the profile of who is reproducing. In our welfare state, we pay the least functional and arguably least intelligent segments of our population (this is not racist - 75% of welfare recipients are not african americans) to sit around and breed. The only part of the population demographic that is growing is the poor and dependent.
The crisis of the next 100 years will not be global warming or toxic waste or nuclear fallout. It will be vast armies of stupid belligerent parasites with their hands out demanding to be fed and clothed by a shrinking pool of intelligent functional human beings.
The next world crisis is the crisis of de-evolution!
To survive, we must institute emergency programs of tax relief and education to encourage intelligent people to BREED, for the sake of humanity.
"Sic Semper Path of Least Resistance"
>> I imagine you can do better than 'It Can't.'
Sometimes the correct answer is really boring.
but I think that consumption purely for the sake of consumption is our biggest problem.
I vehemently disagree. Messes are a problem, not consumption. Why do we have this new puritanism taking over in certain places? I don't want conservation. I want to live in a Utopia of plentiful abundance, and there is no intrinsic reason why we can't have it.
The solution to all our problems is more technology, not less. You claim to be a "metropolitan technologist", but you appear to be a "guilty metropolitan technologist". Well, I say we shed the guilt and embrace civilization. We just need to make being less messy a higher priority.
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
First, educate all women until 20, minimum. Educated women raise daughters with higher ambitions who have smaller families. Female education is probably the most successful family planning technique and the reason (IMO) for the so-called fertility drop-off in many countries.
/Posting anonymously
Second, provide free extreme sports for guys between the ages of 15 and 25, without safety equipment.
From Yahoo answers, my personal answer:
Humanity has shown itself capable of adapting to an incredible variety of situations, conditions, and hardships. One way or another, I am quite confident that humanity will endure through the next one hundred years.
That being said, the circumstances of this continued survival may be quite different or unpleasant compared to what many people experience today. I believe that humanity needs to come together in a constructive manner and really address some of the many problems we as a species face, from global climate change to the vast poverty, hunger, and disease suffered by much of the world. Until a truly unified approach is taken by all the world's nations, any progress will be piecemeal and incremental.
Alternatively, as you yourself suggested, human colonization of extra-terrestrial worlds by a subset of humanity is an option, however under today's socio-political climate, such an endeavor would likely be limited to a few of the world's more wealthy nations.
I know there's more than enough cynicism to go around, but Dr. Hawking's question was only asking how the human race can survive the next 100 years. Not 1000 or 10,000.
Does anyone really think that there is even the slightest chance of the human race becoming extinct in the next 100 years? (Excepting act of God events like a large asteroid strike or supervolcano) Even the most dire global warming alarmists don't predict the extinction of mankind in the next century.
I expect that in 100 years civilization will look a lot like it does today. India and China will be richer, the US and Europe will be a little poorer and the geeks of the future will have some toys that would make us green with envy.
The real question is, how can any of us reading this survive another 100 years?
Never ever say "That's something we don't want/need to know." Investigate and study everything.
I think in the coming century, we'll continue to see the world's population increase. It will come in a different kind of environmental revolution; we won't just be changing the environment around us anymore, we'll start changing the environment in us. We'll become more resilient, self-relient, and broaden the conditions in which we can exist in an enviroment and when that happens, we'll be able to inhabit new places on the globe and start to move beyond.
Demented But Determined.
I think the pattern is that humans follow a path of least resistance until a need arises. It is understandable to look at humankind and say that we are headed for a crisis, and there will most likely be one. But what happens at that crisis period is a matter of debate. When global warming becomes an obvious crisis to nearly every human on the planet there will be change. Once the need for unification becomes apparent, it will happen. Whether circumstances will allow reversal is a question beyond my ken, but my feeling is that humans will continue doing what we're doing until we hit a critical point. Then people will change, as needed, until the next crisis. Populations will grow, people will die, and problems will be dealt with locally until it is necessary for things to change. And I don't have any particular faith in humanity, except that we do what is necessary when problems arise.
100,000 years ago up until the 1930s, there were no nuclear bombs. We only had technology to inflict localized damage on our fellow man and planet. Now there are enough nukes to wreck the planet, advancement in biology such that we now have the capability to create biological weapons on a wide scale. Also, in the last 200 and 300 years, industrial society has exploded and we've seen rapid deforestation and ecological carelessness on a massively wide scale.
The situation is vastly different, and failing to acknowledge that is naive.
The problem is not having everything, the problem is it is cheaper ( and culturally acceptable ) to just throw something out rather than get it fixed. My wife works with children, and one day she asked one of them where his new bike was, he said it was broken, after several minutes of explainiation my wife determened that the tire went flat and would no longer hold air. The child thought the bike was trash.
I feel we need to raise the price of items to make it more economical to fix it than to trash it, or simply tax the item to make it cheaper to fix then to trash.
-- tim
TKrabec Pahh
I want to live in a Utopia of plentiful abundance
What is that?
Plentiful food, a place to stay, and little to no threat of death?
Take a look around. Plenty of housed, fat, old people, and getting fatter and older!
You can wash and reuse Swiffer cloths, actually, if you want to. But, of course, they don't advertise this. You can also wash and reuse things like Ziplock bags and lots of other disposable items. So why don't more people do these things? Probably because the time it takes is more valuable to them than the few cents for a new one.
Warning: Apple/Nintendo fangirl. Likes her electronics cute & cuddly. May be rabid.
Obviously. So that excludes many /. readers.
Oh my god talk about hyperbole and idiotic moderators. The human race isn't going to die out. I mean come on. There may well be a few billion deaths, but there are billions more humans on the planet so lets face it, we're not facing a global extinction event...
The question you should be asking is how do I make sure that my family are the survivors in the coming tough times... Make sure the genes continue.
Deleted
The human race has evolved in such a way that now we are capable of really fucking up the planet and eventually extinguishing all life on it. But let's see what mechanisms we have for that.
On one hand, we have nuclear weapons of gargantuan power. If we start a nuclear war, we can easily kill half of the population and make life incredibly miserable for those who survive... but wait, that implies that billions of people will actually survive, so the race isn't really eliminated.
We have also produced technology that is capable of affecting the planet in a serious, perhaps irreversible way. The effect that mostly concerns us now is global warming. Because of our actions the weather may go really wacky, potentially causing the death of millions. The ice caps may melt, slowly sinking a very significant portion of the land, precisely where most of the population lives. But that process will take many, many decades, and even though millions may die, most people will have time to move away. This will cause the overpopulation of the current high lands, with enormously devastating effects. Furthermore, eventually the climate changes may make the planet completely inhabitable (at least by humans), but that will take several centuries to take place. Meanwhile, the human race will survive.
We can go on and on, analysing the different ways that we may fuck up. But we will always find the same answer: in order to actually eliminate the human race we have to make all our habitats inhabitable, and we still can't do that within 100 years from now. We need something like a giant meteor striking the planet or the sun exploding, or some other phenomena out of our control.
My point is: Stephen Hawking is a very smart guy, but this time he managed to make a question that is wrongly formulated:
Duh, how can the human race not survive the next hundred years?
Agreed: hyper-consumption is the western world's biggest problem. However, evolution has preferenced the survival of the tribal and the gluttonous. Good luck undoing 1,000,000 years of that.
Indeed, the human race will survive the next 100 years no matter what happens, and probably the next thousand or zillion after that. But plain survival doesn't necessarily have to be comfortable. A species can survive for a long time in really adverse and sucky conditions.
Seems that many people interpreted the question (as may have been intended) to be: "How can the human race survive the next 100 years and come out the other end comfortable and thriving?"
Well, let's think about that. Pick any 100 year span in history. I would bet that, at the end of any 100 year span, most of humanity is merely surviving in really adverse and sucky conditions. A small fraction of the whole of humanity actually thrives. That is as true today as ever.
Maybe the question should rightly be interpreted as "How can the small fraction of humanity which is today thriving continue to thrive through the next 100 years and never mind the people who are already scrabbling for survival today." Because that's really the only question anyone has ever truly asked.
Web 2.0 == Giant Blogspam Circle Jerk
Why is he suddenly getting so philosophical? Has he just gotten too old to make any advances in physics and decided to move on to metaphysics? First his urgent call for space colonies, now this. It reminds me of actors who give political speeches. It's not their field of expertise, but people listen to them anyway. It also reminds me of the late career wanderings of other greats like Linus Pauling or Cary Mullis or Issac Newton. idk, I guess he's entitled to muse about whatever he wants, but it's weird to hear him waxing about humanity like a college girl.
How do you promote this kind of compassion? Can you teach it in a school? We need to care about our communities but instead we have become more and more isolated.
SOYLENT!
Enjoy Soylent Physicist, now with anti-oxidants!
There exists no way of exchanging information without making judgments. --Bene Gesserit Axiom
If the first fifty posts here constitutes our "best and brightest" the human race is doomed for certain. Majority of the posts mention "population". Haven't our attitudes toward population created the majority of our present mess in the first place? And what lever do we have to influence population (and global distribution of wealth), over such a short time window (four generations), that doesn't light more fires than it puts out? Certainly population must be *understood* to formulate any useful ideas, but that's about as far as wisdom dictates.
What I believe must happen is that we come up with many thousands of small ideas that do more to put out fires than start them. Even if you chase a non-convergent series across the x-axis, it isn't going to stay put long enough to matter.
The real thinking involves determining which kinds of interventions are convergent (on average, to a best guess, or with good prospects surrounding constuctive failure--the mine fields of good intentions abound) and which interventions are not (and not necessarily through any fault of their own, but with full acceptance of how "each of us is smarter than all of us" and all that poster-slogan implies).
If I were to reason by analogy to the manifest failures of the human condition that lead us to this point in time, I would guess that the easy redemption slips through our fingers as it always does. We'll end up in the situation where the solution or its mechanisms are fully understood, but the news of the solution is perpetually one step behind the shock front it could have mitigated.
I see this shaping up as a foot race between human resourcefulness and ingenuity and the resonating stress fronts: resources, politics, environment.
My view is that we should be focussing our attention on running the best foot race we can possibly run when it comes to crunch time. What are the mechanisms that aid or impinge on this vital capacity?
I'm still contemplating this problem. I have one certain item on my list thus far: the patent system. As the patent system stands, we have routed one of our most potent weapons--our technical ingenuity--across the Manitoba marsh lands (read about the Great Canadian Railway). All the smart people will have constructive ideas, and all of the constructive ideas will be hung up in the patent system, which is bad enough, and the truly reprehensible litigation environment that surrounds it. Did anyone see that remark yesterday that certain personal awards were upheld in the tabacco verdict, while one was overturned because the statute of limitations had expired as the legal system spun its wheels with great precedent and determination into the soft wet sand?
The usual human response is to fix an institution such as our patent and legal system only *after* its liabilities have culminated in catastrophe. The problem is that we can already the future setting up such that the prime catastrophe is the world around us, and the bloody-mindedness of our legal system is just the *secondary* catastrophe that we will soon have the pleasure of addressing after the berms are breached.
That's the kind of circumstance that stretches human resourcefulness to the breaking point at the exact moment in time the human race can least afford it.
In my view, it's a clear failure of the American constitution that the American legal system was not constitutionally mandated to achieve *proactive* self-reform.
And worst of all, the American legal system is being globalized following exactly the same model as the American power grid. Only Quebec had the good sense to DC couple their grid to that horrible mass of wires and dominoes (and do not fail to observe the contributions of the regulatory and legal environment in shaping the engineering decisions and sand-sucking ostrich behaviours).
Presently, through the global treaty process, American legal process is being aggressively exported using the club of economic integration with the world's most consumeristic popu
Dear Mr Hawking,
I cannot understand why war, overpopulation, global warming and other doomsday theories dominate your views on social science. The fact is that intelligence does not make you an authority on anything requiring knowledge outside your sphere.
War
War is, to me, the only thing likely to be the end of civilization besides an extinction level planetary impact, as over time, advances in science increasingly enable us to affect our environment and control energy using the levers of natural law, but whether this can be universalized over time to the extent that a country like North Korea could destroy the usefulness of the entire world to humans and counter attempts by all the others wanting to detect and thwart those efforts is yet to be seen. Getting back to reality, each country has a somewhat static threshold for war which is governed by a combination of roughly three things from the top of my head:
-The resources at hand to fight the war
-The collective will of the populace, as expressed by the sum of all its knowledge, ignorance, logic and insanity
-The will of the leadership, as expressed by the knowledge, ignorance, logic and insanity of the leadership
Sooner or later, however you see it, enough of all of those things erode to the point of being unwilling to continue with war, someone surrenders or is obliterated, and then the population continues to survive despite whatever costs are incurred.
The fact is that civilizations will continue to decide that someone else shouldn't have the freedoms they have, shouldn't exist, or should exist under their rule, and those who would be subject to those whims SHOULD fight! Anyone who says that there should never be war either thinks that fascist countries should always get their way, or thinks that there obviously are no countries that would destroy or take over a peaceful nation. That's just utopian bullshit.
Overpopulation
It is a fact that as a civilization becomes more advanced and established that the birthrate shrinks. We in the united states require immigration even to keep our population growth even with our death rate. How does a 1.5 children per two adults equal population growth? China and Japan are heading towards massive population shrinkage, even to the point of crisis.
Global Warming
I guess I'd rather not go into global warming, but there is debate as to man's level of involvement on that front. Further, the effect is along the lines of lots of death in third world countries, massive shifts in land values leading to lots of bankruptcy in more developed countries, and possibly other natural disasters. There are some theories about how the flora and fauna would be affected, but the earth's mammalian population seems well suited to survive ice ages and climate shift as evidenced by the past.
Fabric of the universe? Sure, go for it. Cause-headed ignorance and feel-good statements only good for warm fuzzies? Leave it to the idiots with the super-short memories.
Compared to war, all other forms of human endeavor shrink to insignificance. God, how I love it. - Gen. George Patton
Pol Pot tried to implement your solution of banning religion and reducing consumerism.
This question makes it sound like it's a foregone conclusion that we *won't* survive the next hundred years, and what can we do to change that.
What will we do to survive the next hundred years? My answer: we'll keep doing what we've been doing: make new stuff, cure some diseases, find new ways and reasons to kill each other, and overall, everything will more or less balance out, and we'll survive the next 100 years without trying, in any particular way, to survive. I mean, as long as people keep eating and fucking, we'll probably be around.
My personal plan is to keep eating fast food, use the bathroom as needed, enjoy the benefits of modern medicine, and live another ~40 years. I imagine my descendants will do the same, and after a couple rounds of that, we'll be at the 100 year mark, safe and sound.
At a micro level, all humans, individually, will eat food, drink lots of fluids when we get sick, treat injuries, etc.--in other words, do all that human-nature stuff which, almost by definition, living beings do on an individual basis to survive. On a macro level... I don't know, maybe I'll raise my kids and pay some taxes.
As for the question "What can I, J. Random Slashdot User, do to prevent Bush from nuking the world and ending human existence," the answer is "absofuckinglutely nothing." So what's the point of this question again?
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
I don't think survival is the important part of the question, especially for such a short time (well, 100 years is only one generation), and we are good survivors. The important part is the "how", i.e. what circumstances, life quality, political and economical climate, human rights, energy situation will our grandchildren have. And honestly, I'm not optimistic. All I can think of, is really not good. Still, hundred years can be a relatively long time, just think back what was here a hundred years ago, and we just might not be able to even concieve the level of changes these hundred years could bring us. I just hope we (well, not we as persons but we as a population) will live to see it without many epidemics, religious or political wars, energy crises and Earth turning into a semi-Arrakis (i.e. desert planet without spice). Then we'll do fine.
I am putting myself to the fullest possible use, which is all I can think that any conscious entity can ever hope to do.
I used to think this way until my $100 Wal-Mart bicycle failed catastrophically while I was riding it. That bicycle is not just inexpensive enough to be disposable. It is inexpensive because the materials and craftsmanship used in its construction result in a dangerously fragile bicycle. Yes, you could get four Wal-Mart bicycles for the price of the bicycle I have now, but they're hazardous. Maybe a cheap cell phone isn't likely to hurt you when it fails, but there are plenty of other goods that are. For examplke, in addition to bicycles: knives, toasters, and ladders can all be dangerous when they fail. We have come to expect that goods be inexpensive and disposable and we have lost our appreciation for quality, even so far as it relates to safe use of the good.
Virtue finds and chooses the mean.
Aristotle, Ethica Nichomachea
I agree completely. Technology based decentralized self sufficiency is the key. I do like the idea of producing my own food, energy, etc. much more than waiting for this weeks soylent ration. Petroleum shortages are going to hurt cities much more than the sticks because modern centralized food production is heavily dependent on oil for transportation, cultivation and fertilizer. Living within walking distance of 50 restaurants and supermarkets won't help much in the face of food shortages and twenty dollar tomatoes.
I am not sure why anyone who believes we are about to run out of oil would be living in a city. You will end up at the mercy of the government and other parties outside of your control for basic subsistence along with the psychological subservience necessary for such an arrangement. There seems to be this idea that the only people who will be affected by oil shortages are suburbanite McMansion owners with a 50 mile commute and that somehow cities will remain untouched. If I believed transportation energy costs were about to skyrocket why would I move to a place without access to soil, the water table or sunlight?
In a manufacturing based society with poor communication systems and cheap transportation costs it makes sense to centralize and move to a city. In an information based society with good communication systems and expensive transportation costs it makes sense to decentralize.
I've been reading for 10 minutes, in the answers in yahoo and then here on slashdot, and not a single (modded) answer "Of course it will survive!". You sir are _very_ right. Right now we are at the best of our history with resources unimaginable until 200 years ago. If, and a say _if_, somehow, we'll hit a real crisis (and I really don't think we will) a reduction of 80% in our production capabilities would mean... tadam... no games consoles, no new blockbuster movies, no new cars etc. The basic things necesary for our survival are so cheap it's almost imposible to run out of them, globally. A meal at McDonalds may cost 10$, but the ingridients, bulk, cost about a buck. And the cheapest caloric equivalent would probably be a penny or less. With 100$ one could buy food for a couple of years. So people are trying to tell me there is a chance we won't SURVIVE?!
I'm not going to list every imaginable end-of-the-world scenario and debunk it, but instead i will note that all the answers i've seen so far imply a serious lack of imagination. People are really incapable of picturing the world spinning 100 years from now... after they're dead and buried. Well it will spin and it'll be a whole lot better then now. After all, that's what we are all working for right? At least most of us here in slashdot.
And as a conclusion, when I think about 100 years in the future the image that pops into my head is Kusanagi Motoko. True, it's a personal image, but I'm glad I can picture a future that is at the same time strange and beautiful.
Only by asking ourselves (the masses) that very question. He didn't just post it to his closest or wisest peers. Maybe this was the answer Dr. Hawking already had.
The question is too broad and essentially meaningless. It is, at best, an unanswerable rhetorical question.
That said, the question is still important. Not because there is an answer (there are, in fact, several correct answers), but because by asking it, Dr Hawking is using his stature to attempt to raise social consciousness just a tiny bit. This is a case where the act of asking the question is more important that obtaining an answer. It's like asking, "What is the meaning of Life, the Universe, and Everything?" Yeah, yeah... the answer is 42. A non-sensical answer to a non-sensical question. But by asking the question, movement is created. Some paths lead towards suicide (or, if you're pessimistic, all paths lead towards suicide) but asking the question causes people to move about, discover things, and make changes.
So how will the human race survive the next 100 years? I don't know. I do not even know that we will. But by asking the question, a certain amount of energy is introducd to the system that could very well create a path for the survival of our species. ...for just a bit longer.
I won't argue that religion has been used to justify awful behaviour, but "the largest source"? I think you may be overlooking nationalism. For examples of fevent nationalism run amok, see WW1 and WW2. Talk about your blood baths. In WW1 it wasn't uncommon for countries like England to lose tens of thousands of men a day. With that comparison, Al-Queda seems to pose a threat closer to that of your average serial killer than to a war.
If the human race is to survive: social, financial, and physical elements must be equalized.
Why?
Ever notice how quickly poor and undernourished people reproduce? As an instinct for survival of their genes.
By equalizing Social Elements, racism and separation of social elements will dwindle, thus providing people with a positive existence, and resulting in more commonalities such as knowledge sharing, and working toward common goals.
By equalizing Financial Elements, the human existence will focus heavier upon the right to live, the right to exist, and will therefore work toward a common goal.
By equalizing physical elements such as starvation and poor water supplies (resulting from the above) -- people will survive, and will reproduce less.
Humanity will work towards common goals, and will lessen outright demented war efforts and we will find ways to solve our common problems such as the environment, and our reaching out into space.
It's pretty obvious Dr Hawking isn't interested in the answer, or at least not the answers bandied about by people on the forums.
First off, it's a loaded question. It implies that something needs to be done for us to survive the next 100 years. In answering the question we are buying into his assumption. Now, I don't know whether it is a valid assumption, but I think we should be conscious of what we buy into in answering the question.
Secondly, he already has an answer in mind - he thinks that for the human race to survive we need to colonise the solar system. So in essence, this isn't an attempt to generate meaningful answers, it's a way for him to persuade us there is a problem that needs addressing.
I rode a $120 Walmart bike to pieces in an hour on a mild wooded trail.
They took it back, and I spent four times as much at a bike shop on a schwinn. (This was before the name got bought by pacific bicycles, and started appearing at walmart.)
I've beat the crap out of that thing ever since on some nasty trails, and I've only really had to do routine maintanence on it. One part broke outright, but the bike shop fixed it for free.
It's been said that it takes a rich man to buy cheap goods, and in a lot of cases (ie, walmart goods) it's true.
Walmart stuff breaks so often on you that you need to buy things alot more frequently. If you spent two or three times as much at the outset on an item, and occasionally maintained it, you'd never have to replace it.
That's why I buy very, very few things at walmart. Stuff were the durability is hard to screw up (and even then they suprise me from time to time.) I just don't want to keep rebuying the same things.
Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms should be the name of a store, not a government agency.
I was a born-again Christian for over 20 years and thought the same way as the above poster. I left religion / christianity about 6 years ago and I have to say I have never been happier! I realize now how very much I was missing the point (much like above poster)! Atheists aren't violent criminals doing thing for selfish needs, that does not make sense... but that is what the religious mindset teaches you to believe. You believe this to the point where you can only see "good" as coming from following the Bible, which is utterly ridiculous. Many so-called Christians go the opposite way and become evil for the very reason that they can no longer tell that true morals are not based on some set of rules from a God on high. Morals come from living and learning... education. You do good, people do good to you. There is nothing to gain if everyone is out for themselves! This is why I see Christianity as so hyprocritcal these days... they are exactly what they think the secular world is... evil! And they can't see past that.
Meh.