Not even human habitation - think of the opportunity with sample return missions for example. Figuring out if we could deploy automated rocket factory's on the moon or Mars for example would be a massive step forward in exploration, and require some considerable innovation in various manufacturing techniques. And, it would both open the door for manned exploration, and let us much more easily do sample return.
Also the reality is, if we put our minds to it "oxygen" is a pretty easy problem to solve. There are plenty of ways to use electrical or solar energy to make O2 from CO2 (plus the old fallback of "use actual plants").
This is over-simplifying it though, since Antarctica has a number of things which mean we haven't even really tried to colonize it.
For one: it's close. Really close. A few hours flying from Australia or New Zealand. It is not that isolated. The marginal cost of trying to establish infrastructure, compared to just flying stuff in means a lot of things aren't worth the setup cost.
Secondly: it's considered a nature preserve. There are treaty commitments and scientific interest in not contaminating for significantly changing it. The whole place is treated very much like a wild-life perserve.
When the Antarctic treaty expires in the near future, then the ball will really go up for grabs since suddenly it'll be legal to declare Antarctica sovereign territory and to go after it's natural resources. It's likely then that infrastructure will go up, since suddenly we're going to want to put a whole lot more people there for a whole lot longer.
By virtue of distance and cost, I'd say it's very likely that Mars exploration would in fact involve a significant colonization effort purely because the extreme distance and cost would mean it's a hell of a lot cheaper then shipping things in. Milder weather too.
Corporations only have the amount of power they currently enjoy and can only act as criminally as they do without real fear because the government has power they can co-opt, and are able to do it safely because of the sheer size of government. If the government wasn't so all-encompassing and huge, corporations wouldn't have the power they do.
This makes absolutely no sense.
It's not capitalism that's given corporations the power they have these days as so many like the OWS protesters scream about, it's a too-large government that by it's very nature of being so large & powerful, attracts corruption and covers up corruption in it's labyrinthine maze of finger-pointers, always blaming something/someone else and muddying the waters such that curbing corruption is impossible. It becomes a circular self-reinforcing system until it collapses and leaves the poor sucker citizens to suffer the consequences.
And this is akin to saying "the problem with all this crime is that we have laws!"
The risk of a young child getting infected with hepatitis B in Canada, in low risk circumstances (ie: average middle class, non-infected parents) is *extremely* low. (In my particular case the risk is even lower). The risk of adverse reactions from the hepatitis B vaccine is (comparatively) much higher.
My own doctor (prestigious and staunchly PRO immunization) agrees that the infant hep B immunization is not necessary in most cases. If you took the time to look into this topic a little deeper, you'd know this to be true.
And all of those things are only true because the vast majority of people are vaccinated against Hep B.
When do you plan to give your children the Hep B vaccine? Ever?
How about you stop vaguely fearmongering about vaccination and cite your statistical sources that brought you to these conclusions. You trotted off a list of things you felt were a waste of time to vaccinate against - measles - as in, the disease which is spread through aerosol contact and is highly contagious? And kills 3 in every 1000 people who get it, and frequently has complications? Mumps? Another highly contagious disease spread through aerosols that causes pain and suffering to children? Rubella? A highly contagious disease, spread through aerosols, skin contact - well pretty much everything really, that can cause pregnant women's children to be born with a range of serious, incurable conditions?
So go on, tell us about the serious side-effects you think vaccination might have that justifies putting your children and others at risk of these diseases. Vaccination doesn't work everyone, herd immunity is vital, and most of these diseases are not the kind which one simply eradicates like polio (which amazing, is resurgent yet again).
As opposed to fiscal compulsion by private corporations?
There is no functional difference - money is fungible. Private insurance demanding higher rates is the same as public insurance or government programs or whatever else.
Or are you laughably admitting that 'vaccination' doesn't actually WORK?
It's almost like across an enormous population, individual variability might mean there's a set of people for whom vaccines do not work - in which case, the herd immunity protections from disease are their only defense.
So let me get this straight, a disease that has infected 2/7th's of the ENTIRE world population, which has millions of chronic carriers, who's acute form can result in death and - oh yeah - the chronic form can give you liver cancer which is pretty much untreatable.
Oh - it gets better. The disease is far worse in children. Young children only clear the virus at 30%, compared to 95% of higher for adults. Newborns - 5%. That means if your newborn gets Hep B, they have a 19/20 chance of becoming a chronic carrier, with a 40% lifetime risk of then getting liver cancer (and dying of it).
But no, you continue spouting off your ignorant opinion, in a world where 5 minutes of Google could have properly informed you.
I hope to fucking christ you don't have children - for their sake.
No one is forcing them to do anything, unless they feel that fiscally they really want that money. And since the healthcare system is government funded, this is in fact no different to if an insurance company raised your rates because you represent a greater risk (only somewhat more extensive since we can price in the effect on the rest of our population easily).
The greater good to contract childhood diseases which can lead to life-long disabilities or you know, kill a person.
Did you know vaccination doesn't actually always work? There's a small % of the population in whom for whatever reason it just doesn't take, or is less effective. Herd immunity does wonders in protecting them. What about their freedom?
As long as there are people living in poverty, the idea that your child could be earning money instead of being in school becomes a very, very interesting prospect.
As long as there are people living in poverty, the idea that your child becoming educated is the single best thing one can do to get out of poverty instead of working in a sweatshop, becomes a very, very interesting prospect.
The idea that if your child works you'll have enough money to feed them is usually a more interesting prospect.
Seriously what do people think "poverty" means. Coz it sure as fuck isn't associated with having the means readily available to support yourself.
Well, I suppose you might, but the cost-tradeoff is usually an organism which can't survive any sort of competition, or possibly can't live outside that environment.
Most of the exotic extremephiles that live in hot vents or the like, when you put them in a normal environment actually do far worse because they're very bad at competing with species adapted for the purpose.
Once those antibodies attach, your done. No passing go, no collecting 200$, no passing on your genes so that the next generation can evolve to fight back.
Once they attach – the next generation evolves from the few that survive because the antibodies didn't attach;)
No they don't.
Look, your immune system is keyed to murder every non-self thing in your body. It's why implants and organ transplants are so hard to do.
Infections depend on overwhelming the immune system - infecting enough cells that by the time the immune response is mounted (i.e. by the time an antibody which can attach to the pathogen is generated via our natural mechanism for permutating them) that there is an enormous number of virus or bacteria to deal with (i.e. you're sick). Usually, the immune system wins under these conditions (if it doesn't you die and game over).
Vaccination shortcuts the process - exposes the immune system to the pathogen so that the antibody type needed is already known and remembered (i.e. some base amount of it is always in your blood). When the first pathogen hits, an antibody finds it, binds to it, and the immune system almost immediately produces a huge amount of the exact right antibody - the infection never takes hold.
But that isn't all that happens: because the infection can't take hold, the infection never gets a chance to mutate from reproducing. And any mutations present are unlikely to be dramatic - that is to say, while surviving 1% longer might be the start of an evolutionary path way to resisting the antibodies (say, taking slightly longer to bind, or producing a weaker binding) - if that mutation never gets a chance to become an established infection then it simply doesn't matter - it's just as dead. And because the immune system is also permutating around the core motif, any minor variation is incredibly likely to be just as easily destroyed.
Most viruses and bacteria simply can't rapidly change their structure - there's a big energy cost to it, or it's too great an evolutionary gap to jump (i.e. there's no pathway which lets them have 100% resistance immediately - which means that, without becoming established infections, they might as well be completely non-resistant).
Too many people don't understand how antibiotic resistance works: there's no problem with using antibiotics if you use them as a full-course and thoroughly eradicate an infection. However, since you can't always do this, every time we use them (and in the idiotic ways they've been used previously) what we've done is not wipe-out whole infections, but only kill off say, 99% of them, leaving a harbor of 1%.
The 1% that survive, then end up restarting the infection - but now, it's the 1% that were, for whatever reason ever so slightly more resistant to the antibiotic used then the entire population. They don't have to be completely resistant - just a little. But now, the next time you use the antibiotics it's just that little bit slower to kill off the population - and if you again leave a harbor, well, now you've just selected for even more resistance.
Vaccines are very different, because the immune system itself is designed to be able to vary it's response to target mutants. The immune system has a built in evolutionary system to permute through antibody combinations, so it's very good at wiping out not just the things it's seen, but any subtle variants it hasn't. Only a very few organisms can elude the immune system, and they do so by expressing a similar behavior - having a library of proteins they can rapidly shuffle.
The whole point of a vaccine is that since the immune system is initially primed to the disease, it wipes out most of it before an infection can be established, and natural immunity then quickly destroys variants. No resistance can be formed, because the organism never gets a chance to create off-spring with mutations before the immune system has annihilated it from the body.
Actually 1.7 to 2.6 due to a doubling of CO2 is fantastic. It means with the current trajectory we're only going to get the "expected" unavoidable warming (2 degrees C) even if we do nothing till 2050 or later.
Basically, we let Peak Oil kill off the internal-combustion engine automobile and ride out solar/battery improvements for stationary energy. It changes a lot.
Eh. Not even that - it's literally a few decades of higher taxes (gasp) while we spam wind/solar/tidal plants everywhere and maybe ignore a few environmental impact studies in the process.
Zero emissions Australia is priced at about $370 billion total, which you amortize over 10 years to 3% of GDP - then reap the benefit since all the upkeep costs are enormously lower.
2. Nuclear does not look promising, but it is an interesting one. Currently we get less than 3% of our daily Western life energy from nuclear plants. Nuclear would last 1000 years if we each used 0.55 kWh per day. But we don't - Westerners use about 250 kWh per day. We would need to ramp up production 40 times to cover our current daily usage. If we tried to cover all of our energy needs with nuclear, we will run out in of (currently known) recoverable reserves in 25 years. Ocean extraction of uranium is possible, but currently costs 10 times more than mining ore. Maintaining our current life styles on 10x energy cost isn't feasible: we would need some major technology developments here...
These numbers aren't right. The 25 year number in particular I've heard a lot, and it's true assuming (1) no breeder reactors and (2) no fuel reprocessing (because the US shut it all down for some reason related to nuclear proliferation - hah!).
Factor in reprocessing alone, and the number jumps to the hundreds of years range, with breeder reactors - thousands of years. With thorium it's tens of thousands and sea-water processing pushes it to hundreds of thousands.
The "only 25 years" number has been created by Greenpeace and over environmental lobby groups to add a "why bother" aspect to nuclear power which simply isn't true.
Actually it's because people oppose nuclear waste repositories every time we propose them. Yet nuclear waste is still being generated.
For example: every hospital in Australia, as well as every university, has a shed or basement filled with nuclear waste. It's vital stuff for research and medicine, and not actually very dangerous individually, but it needs to be stored somewhere safe. And since even low and medium level stores can't be built, instead it's distributed everywhere.
We could have simply shut down nuclear power plants after the first run of fuel when it became apparent that storage was not incoming, but they're far too useful for that and people don't want to spend the money to build or be near coal powerplants. So instead, out-of-sight-out-of-mind has prevailed. And the product? Global warming - climate change. Arsenic poisoning of local lands and the huge radiation release of brown coal powerplants. Soot choked air, heavy metal choked rivers.
Nuclear is not the only power source to have this problem, but it has the most irrational fear attached to it while no one seems to worry about heavy metals in their water ways or soil (even though that's actually worse, since it's as bad as radiation, but undetectable remotely).
Probably more importantly, if the public weren't continuously and perpetually out to shut down nuclear power plants, then we could create a regulatory and oversight environment which was above board.
As it stands, there's incredible drive to keep things quiet because literally any hint of a problem is used as an excuse to demand the immediate shut down of the entire industry in any country. That is not an environment conducive to effective oversight.
Slashdot Mirror
Not even human habitation - think of the opportunity with sample return missions for example. Figuring out if we could deploy automated rocket factory's on the moon or Mars for example would be a massive step forward in exploration, and require some considerable innovation in various manufacturing techniques. And, it would both open the door for manned exploration, and let us much more easily do sample return.
Also the reality is, if we put our minds to it "oxygen" is a pretty easy problem to solve. There are plenty of ways to use electrical or solar energy to make O2 from CO2 (plus the old fallback of "use actual plants").
This is over-simplifying it though, since Antarctica has a number of things which mean we haven't even really tried to colonize it.
For one: it's close. Really close. A few hours flying from Australia or New Zealand. It is not that isolated. The marginal cost of trying to establish infrastructure, compared to just flying stuff in means a lot of things aren't worth the setup cost.
Secondly: it's considered a nature preserve. There are treaty commitments and scientific interest in not contaminating for significantly changing it. The whole place is treated very much like a wild-life perserve.
When the Antarctic treaty expires in the near future, then the ball will really go up for grabs since suddenly it'll be legal to declare Antarctica sovereign territory and to go after it's natural resources. It's likely then that infrastructure will go up, since suddenly we're going to want to put a whole lot more people there for a whole lot longer.
By virtue of distance and cost, I'd say it's very likely that Mars exploration would in fact involve a significant colonization effort purely because the extreme distance and cost would mean it's a hell of a lot cheaper then shipping things in. Milder weather too.
Corporations only have the amount of power they currently enjoy and can only act as criminally as they do without real fear because the government has power they can co-opt, and are able to do it safely because of the sheer size of government. If the government wasn't so all-encompassing and huge, corporations wouldn't have the power they do.
This makes absolutely no sense.
It's not capitalism that's given corporations the power they have these days as so many like the OWS protesters scream about, it's a too-large government that by it's very nature of being so large & powerful, attracts corruption and covers up corruption in it's labyrinthine maze of finger-pointers, always blaming something/someone else and muddying the waters such that curbing corruption is impossible. It becomes a circular self-reinforcing system until it collapses and leaves the poor sucker citizens to suffer the consequences.
And this is akin to saying "the problem with all this crime is that we have laws!"
To elaborate a little more...
The risk of a young child getting infected with hepatitis B in Canada, in low risk circumstances (ie: average middle class, non-infected parents) is *extremely* low. (In my particular case the risk is even lower). The risk of adverse reactions from the hepatitis B vaccine is (comparatively) much higher.
My own doctor (prestigious and staunchly PRO immunization) agrees that the infant hep B immunization is not necessary in most cases. If you took the time to look into this topic a little deeper, you'd know this to be true.
And all of those things are only true because the vast majority of people are vaccinated against Hep B.
When do you plan to give your children the Hep B vaccine? Ever?
How about you stop vaguely fearmongering about vaccination and cite your statistical sources that brought you to these conclusions. You trotted off a list of things you felt were a waste of time to vaccinate against - measles - as in, the disease which is spread through aerosol contact and is highly contagious? And kills 3 in every 1000 people who get it, and frequently has complications? Mumps? Another highly contagious disease spread through aerosols that causes pain and suffering to children? Rubella? A highly contagious disease, spread through aerosols, skin contact - well pretty much everything really, that can cause pregnant women's children to be born with a range of serious, incurable conditions?
So go on, tell us about the serious side-effects you think vaccination might have that justifies putting your children and others at risk of these diseases. Vaccination doesn't work everyone, herd immunity is vital, and most of these diseases are not the kind which one simply eradicates like polio (which amazing, is resurgent yet again).
As opposed to fiscal compulsion by private corporations?
There is no functional difference - money is fungible. Private insurance demanding higher rates is the same as public insurance or government programs or whatever else.
Or are you laughably admitting that 'vaccination' doesn't actually WORK?
It's almost like across an enormous population, individual variability might mean there's a set of people for whom vaccines do not work - in which case, the herd immunity protections from disease are their only defense.
From wikipedia:
More than 2 billion people have been infected with the hepatitis B virus, and this includes 350 million chronic carriers of the virus.
Do your own reading.
So let me get this straight, a disease that has infected 2/7th's of the ENTIRE world population, which has millions of chronic carriers, who's acute form can result in death and - oh yeah - the chronic form can give you liver cancer which is pretty much untreatable.
Oh - it gets better. The disease is far worse in children. Young children only clear the virus at 30%, compared to 95% of higher for adults. Newborns - 5%. That means if your newborn gets Hep B, they have a 19/20 chance of becoming a chronic carrier, with a 40% lifetime risk of then getting liver cancer (and dying of it).
But no, you continue spouting off your ignorant opinion, in a world where 5 minutes of Google could have properly informed you.
I hope to fucking christ you don't have children - for their sake.
It's a TAX benefit.
No one is forcing them to do anything, unless they feel that fiscally they really want that money. And since the healthcare system is government funded, this is in fact no different to if an insurance company raised your rates because you represent a greater risk (only somewhat more extensive since we can price in the effect on the rest of our population easily).
You can say you're whatever you want, won't stop what you posted being idiotic - you should just feel more embarrassed about it.
Bachmann certainly isn't poor.
But she's definitely very willing to lie; and possible dumber than a box of rocks as well.
Or you know, straight up repeat on national television unverified heresay from a random person on the street.
The same category of person who insisted "black people" carved a B in her face last election?
Oh so wait...revoking family TAX BENEFITS is a serious issue of personal rights, so instead let's just refuse admission to schools?
Would you also like to complain about this clear government mandate to have children?
The problem with statistics they have and always will be complete bull shit.
No the problem is that without accurate context and knowledge of methodology, they're bullshit.
The greater good to contract childhood diseases which can lead to life-long disabilities or you know, kill a person.
Did you know vaccination doesn't actually always work? There's a small % of the population in whom for whatever reason it just doesn't take, or is less effective. Herd immunity does wonders in protecting them. What about their freedom?
As long as there are people living in poverty, the idea that your child could be earning money instead of being in school becomes a very, very interesting prospect.
As long as there are people living in poverty, the idea that your child becoming educated is the single best thing one can do to get out of poverty instead of working in a sweatshop, becomes a very, very interesting prospect.
The idea that if your child works you'll have enough money to feed them is usually a more interesting prospect.
Seriously what do people think "poverty" means. Coz it sure as fuck isn't associated with having the means readily available to support yourself.
Well, I suppose you might, but the cost-tradeoff is usually an organism which can't survive any sort of competition, or possibly can't live outside that environment.
Most of the exotic extremephiles that live in hot vents or the like, when you put them in a normal environment actually do far worse because they're very bad at competing with species adapted for the purpose.
Once those antibodies attach, your done. No passing go, no collecting 200$, no passing on your genes so that the next generation can evolve to fight back.
Once they attach – the next generation evolves from the few that survive because the antibodies didn't attach ;)
No they don't.
Look, your immune system is keyed to murder every non-self thing in your body. It's why implants and organ transplants are so hard to do.
Infections depend on overwhelming the immune system - infecting enough cells that by the time the immune response is mounted (i.e. by the time an antibody which can attach to the pathogen is generated via our natural mechanism for permutating them) that there is an enormous number of virus or bacteria to deal with (i.e. you're sick). Usually, the immune system wins under these conditions (if it doesn't you die and game over).
Vaccination shortcuts the process - exposes the immune system to the pathogen so that the antibody type needed is already known and remembered (i.e. some base amount of it is always in your blood). When the first pathogen hits, an antibody finds it, binds to it, and the immune system almost immediately produces a huge amount of the exact right antibody - the infection never takes hold.
But that isn't all that happens: because the infection can't take hold, the infection never gets a chance to mutate from reproducing. And any mutations present are unlikely to be dramatic - that is to say, while surviving 1% longer might be the start of an evolutionary path way to resisting the antibodies (say, taking slightly longer to bind, or producing a weaker binding) - if that mutation never gets a chance to become an established infection then it simply doesn't matter - it's just as dead. And because the immune system is also permutating around the core motif, any minor variation is incredibly likely to be just as easily destroyed.
Most viruses and bacteria simply can't rapidly change their structure - there's a big energy cost to it, or it's too great an evolutionary gap to jump (i.e. there's no pathway which lets them have 100% resistance immediately - which means that, without becoming established infections, they might as well be completely non-resistant).
Too many people don't understand how antibiotic resistance works: there's no problem with using antibiotics if you use them as a full-course and thoroughly eradicate an infection. However, since you can't always do this, every time we use them (and in the idiotic ways they've been used previously) what we've done is not wipe-out whole infections, but only kill off say, 99% of them, leaving a harbor of 1%.
The 1% that survive, then end up restarting the infection - but now, it's the 1% that were, for whatever reason ever so slightly more resistant to the antibiotic used then the entire population. They don't have to be completely resistant - just a little. But now, the next time you use the antibiotics it's just that little bit slower to kill off the population - and if you again leave a harbor, well, now you've just selected for even more resistance.
Vaccines are very different, because the immune system itself is designed to be able to vary it's response to target mutants. The immune system has a built in evolutionary system to permute through antibody combinations, so it's very good at wiping out not just the things it's seen, but any subtle variants it hasn't. Only a very few organisms can elude the immune system, and they do so by expressing a similar behavior - having a library of proteins they can rapidly shuffle.
The whole point of a vaccine is that since the immune system is initially primed to the disease, it wipes out most of it before an infection can be established, and natural immunity then quickly destroys variants. No resistance can be formed, because the organism never gets a chance to create off-spring with mutations before the immune system has annihilated it from the body.
Actually 1.7 to 2.6 due to a doubling of CO2 is fantastic. It means with the current trajectory we're only going to get the "expected" unavoidable warming (2 degrees C) even if we do nothing till 2050 or later.
Basically, we let Peak Oil kill off the internal-combustion engine automobile and ride out solar/battery improvements for stationary energy. It changes a lot.
Eh. Not even that - it's literally a few decades of higher taxes (gasp) while we spam wind/solar/tidal plants everywhere and maybe ignore a few environmental impact studies in the process.
Zero emissions Australia is priced at about $370 billion total, which you amortize over 10 years to 3% of GDP - then reap the benefit since all the upkeep costs are enormously lower.
2. Nuclear does not look promising, but it is an interesting one. Currently we get less than 3% of our daily Western life energy from nuclear plants. Nuclear would last 1000 years if we each used 0.55 kWh per day. But we don't - Westerners use about 250 kWh per day. We would need to ramp up production 40 times to cover our current daily usage. If we tried to cover all of our energy needs with nuclear, we will run out in of (currently known) recoverable reserves in 25 years. Ocean extraction of uranium is possible, but currently costs 10 times more than mining ore. Maintaining our current life styles on 10x energy cost isn't feasible: we would need some major technology developments here...
These numbers aren't right. The 25 year number in particular I've heard a lot, and it's true assuming (1) no breeder reactors and (2) no fuel reprocessing (because the US shut it all down for some reason related to nuclear proliferation - hah!).
Factor in reprocessing alone, and the number jumps to the hundreds of years range, with breeder reactors - thousands of years. With thorium it's tens of thousands and sea-water processing pushes it to hundreds of thousands.
The "only 25 years" number has been created by Greenpeace and over environmental lobby groups to add a "why bother" aspect to nuclear power which simply isn't true.
The fridge you buy today, compared to the 1960's is about 3 times as large, and uses 3 times less power.
Actually it's because people oppose nuclear waste repositories every time we propose them. Yet nuclear waste is still being generated.
For example: every hospital in Australia, as well as every university, has a shed or basement filled with nuclear waste. It's vital stuff for research and medicine, and not actually very dangerous individually, but it needs to be stored somewhere safe. And since even low and medium level stores can't be built, instead it's distributed everywhere.
We could have simply shut down nuclear power plants after the first run of fuel when it became apparent that storage was not incoming, but they're far too useful for that and people don't want to spend the money to build or be near coal powerplants. So instead, out-of-sight-out-of-mind has prevailed. And the product? Global warming - climate change. Arsenic poisoning of local lands and the huge radiation release of brown coal powerplants. Soot choked air, heavy metal choked rivers.
Nuclear is not the only power source to have this problem, but it has the most irrational fear attached to it while no one seems to worry about heavy metals in their water ways or soil (even though that's actually worse, since it's as bad as radiation, but undetectable remotely).
Well don't worry, Greenpeace has also pre-emptively ramped up it's "anti-nuclear" campaign to include opposition to the use of nuclear fusion.
Probably more importantly, if the public weren't continuously and perpetually out to shut down nuclear power plants, then we could create a regulatory and oversight environment which was above board.
As it stands, there's incredible drive to keep things quiet because literally any hint of a problem is used as an excuse to demand the immediate shut down of the entire industry in any country. That is not an environment conducive to effective oversight.