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Huge Reservoir Discovered Beneath Asia
anthemaniac writes "Seismic observations reveal a huge reservoir of water in Earth's mantle beneath Asia. It's actually rock saturated with water, but it's an ocean's worth of water ... as much as is in the whole Arctic Ocean. How did it get there? A slab of water-laden crust sank, and the water evaporated out when it was heated, and then it was trapped, the thinking goes. The discovery fits neatly with the region's heavy seismic activity and fits neatly with the idea that the planet's moving crustal plates are lubricated with water."
From the linked article:
Scientists have very few answers, but they do know that the impact of a Yellowstone eruption is terrifying to comprehend. Huge areas of the USA would be destroyed, the US economy would probably collapse, and thousands might die.
Thousands . . . might? In that situation I'd say "hundreds of thousands will" is far, far more likely.
They're either hilariously overexaggerating the first part or hilariously underexaggerating the second.
Breaking Into the Industry - A development log about starting a game studio.
It's hard to say, though it does seem like an incredibly lowball estimate. Still, a major disaster that hits the US doesn't seem to cause anywhere near the same level of fatalities as it does in other areas, though a heck of a lot of damage is done.
I would have thought that a Yellowstone eruption was going to wipe out a few states, and pretty much anyone in them. The ash makes helicopter operation practically imposible and hot chunks of rubble will just sear through tires, leaving not much to evacuate with, assuming that the CO2 and sulfur emissions don't choke.
If the only thing you need to kick ass was mineral wealth, Japan should have just thrown themselves upon a sword and given up from day 1. Japan has absolutely no mineral wealth, nor does Hong Kong. Taiwan is pretty sparse in mineral wealth as well. Plenty of African nations are up to their necks in valuable things you can dig out of the ground.
Mineral wealth is nice, but it is hardly a deal maker. China has some serious, crippling problems that is going to keep it from being the magical fairy tail land that people hope for. The demographic imbalances of China in the male to female ratio are horrifying and an invitation to civil strife. China's bureaucracy is corrupt and crippling to industry. China is very lucky it has 1.2 billion people running around it, because unlike the US, China's xenophobia does a handy job preventing it from doing a world wide brain drain as the US is so notorious for. China's government has its hands so far up the ass of its own economy that one incompetent move on the government could spell disaster for the entire nation's economy. We saw and example of this yesterday when the Chinese stock market dumped 10% of its value on a rumor that the government was about to do something dumb.
China has some very sever problems. True, China is a big growth engine right now, but a lot of that has to do with the fact that China was so desperately poor in the past. The Chinese government has done some things right in opening up their markets. They have also managed to keep law and order (which set them well ahead of most of Africa) which counts for a lot. That said, China has some very sever organizational problems with their government. Unless China commits to a real restructuring of their government, I really don't fear all that much for the US position of #1 in the world economy.
OK, that doesn't really change my point. If the ENTIRE worlds ecosystem was destroyed it would take some time to revive it (probably millions of years) if it wasn't beyond recovery. They were told to take enough food for the year on the arc, what did they eat when they stepped foot onto a completely world. it takes about 4 months for carrots to grow from seed (for example) that's a long time to go without food. When the water did "recede" there would be no fresh water anywhere anymore, plants don't grow well in salty soil and we don't do well drinking salt or "salty" water. If there were no fish left, where did the current ones come from? I don't believe Noah had any fish tanks on the ark.
If you could reason with religious people, there would be no religious people
Just FYI...I'm sure that's true for many people out there, but for myself, yes, of course there could be evidence to convince me that Jesus wasn't God. Partly that means that if some of the evidence we do have were different, I wouldn't believe. But as for the Cameron documentary--if the ossuary belonging to the guy named Jesus still had the bones in it, and those bones showed nail holes from crucifixion... Well, I would wait for verification the bones hadn't been tampered with, but there's fair chance I would no longer be a Christian after that. Combining the names with crucifixion would be a bit much.
I haven't seen the documentary or read the book yet, so I can only evaluate the statements they've made so far, but they've said some truly silly things, so I'm not expecting much from the documentary. (For example, Cameron claimed on the Today Show that a document called the Acts of Phillip "definitely identifies Mary Magdalene as Mariamne". Go look up the text online, it's linked from the Wikipedia article. It includes a woman named Mariamne, but it definitely doesn't identify her as Mary Magdalene. The word "Magdalene" doesn't even appear. The Mariamne in the story is the sister of Phillip, and she turns into a glass box full of light and fire when she's threatened. Some scholars think that she's Mary Magdalene, others identify her as Mary of Bethany...But it's all quite speculative.)