Within the next hundred years the population of the earth has a pretty good chance of going to nearly zero. It's just going to be due to things like the Americans ramping up production of low yield nuclear weapons or purposeful gene editing on viruses like smallpox and not human breeding habits.
Yes, but let's look at the details. It takes around 10k USD in patent attorney fees to file the simplest of patents, 30-100k is more typical. Trying to do them yourself is a recipe for disaster as you broadcast your ideas without substantial protections. Patent attorneys are so expansive because they need a law degree and typically have a degree in the field they are writing the patent for, so in this case physics or engineering. After your 65k initial investment, if your idea or product becomes popular, many companies will start to copy it which is where defending your IP comes in. It's first to file so he may either be a reason other patents are denied or can start sending cease and desist letters to any offenders.
Contrary to popular belief, patent law cases are far less about being right or wrong than simply using superior legal firepower to overwhelm your opponent. A small company sending a cease and desist to another small company may bleed them into stopping, this won't work against large companies. Against a company like Apple, Samsung, or a university with a law college you will massively lose 98% of the time unless you have similar resources to fight. A good patent challenge starts at around 500k and can easily climb past tens of millions USD in fees you keep needing to pay up front. This overwhelms any small company or inventor and they are cooked. That's why most small companies and inventors simply skip the patent and try to stay on top with nimble innovation (a competitive advantage for the small entity) and through obscurity. The system is really broken.
This is a different but serious problem to antivaxxers. The majority of antibiotic resistance comes from agricultural practices. Animals are fed antibiotics even when healthy so that even more can be crammed into smaller spaces, and increase yields slightly. Short of a weapons grade bioengineering lab, this ranks among the fastest ways to reduce the effectiveness of antibiotics. If you want to help the best ways are to let your politicans know, and to purchase meats that are antibiotic free. Oftentimes these antibiotic free meats don't even cost more at the grocery store.
Americans have it easy today. Women don't die in child birth in any significant numbers. You don't need to have 6 babies to see 3 reach thier teenage years. Almost no one gets horrible diseases that kill, cripple, disfigure, and often cause unending pain for the remainder of your life. When every person either had family or friends that they watched contract horrible diseases like polio, they were scared shitless of suffering the same fate. When the first vaccines came out, people lined up around the block and people fought shortages to keep up with demand. It was hailed as a miracle, and people couldn't believe they might finally be free of these unimaginable afflictions plaguing humanity.
Nowadays, with vaccinations keeping these diseases under control, very few have had a family member who has been crippled, had a lifelong friend die, or even seen the afflicted in person. They lack the imagination necessary to place themselves in this world lost to medical progress and have become complacent, ignorant, and lazy with regard to the seriousness of the situation. It's absolutely disgusting.
You can't immunize babies for measles under one year of age, and a very small subset of the population with compromised immune systems. Further not every last person who gets the mmr vaccine develops the same level of immunity. All of these people have thier lives riding on the people who have no valid excuse to help prevent them from becoming ill and suffering possible permemant damage or death. Even people who survive, especially children, can be affected years later called subacute sclerosing panencephalitis or SSPE. You get an incurable brain infection, seizures, deteriorating function, and then (so far) a 100% chance of death. It's not even as uncommon as once thought. So even survivors don't have a rosy future.
It's not. Medicare (provided by the government) has a proven track record as being among the lowest overhead in the world and everyone seems to love it. It's about 2% and much lower than private insurance companies for whom greater internal expenses mean the same business but more billable expenses and thus profits. The current system of private insurance is too opaque and poorly regulated for any free market to kick in.
The Koch brothers paid for a study to prove Medicare for all costs more. Unfortunately for them the cost we pay now is 34 trillion per decade and the cost of healthcare for all, with everyone using it and using it more often, is 32 trillion per decade. How do we afford something 2 trillion dollars cheaper?!? IDK but maybe we can do it by taking the money we spend now, but use less of it. The insurance companies have a market valuation of 940 billion per year, that's not what they pay out to hospitals and doctors, its overhead and profits. Disbanding them all would save 9.4 trillion dollars and since they are only leaches that contribute nothing, are the thing you are looking for that we cannot keep paying for. Yes it increases taxes but you don't have those massive payments to insurance taken out of your paycheck so the result is better care for less. You know, like the rest of the world does it.
I hope you are correct. Unfortunately the humidity issue is real. It's a simple extension from the linked data to assume these changes will cause mass refugee crises around the world. resouces are limited now and are probably the main reason most wars are fought. Combine mass migration with resource destabilizing climate and it could easily trigger war. This is going to be the most problematic with any nuclear powers that think they have nothing to lose anymore. I'm pretty sure the UAE and the Saudis are going to get hit really hard, and become a wasteland. Hope they don't get nuclear capabilities.
Has your country become almost uninhabitable because humidity moved in where before it was dry heat? Can you no longer farm or produce on your land? What do you think might happen if this country was a nuclear power and surrounding countries reject the millions of refugees seeking relief? These are the biggest problems with climate change, the hundreds of millions of climate refugees and the possible destabilization of middle eastern nuclear powers. Wars are already fought over resources, reducing the amount and shuffling them around could start WW3.
60% of republicans want Medicare for all, 90% of democrats do too. Even a poll on Fox News bore this out. Yet somehow all the right talking heads on tv say communists are the only ones that want socialized healthcare. The real reason we don't have it, or a lot of the other issues we all agree on is America is a representative democracy that only seems to represent moneyed interests and not citizens.
I wish more Americans were involved in foreign politics, they would realize this is very true. Also it's why everyone complains social media sites are all left wing because they get traffic from all over the world. America's far left are centrists in the eyes of the world.
The Japanese are already running out of squid to harvest because of increased temperature and over fishing. The way we are headed, remind me to buy the last can of anchovies as an investment vehicle.
Both the DOD and insurance companies have taken climate change seriously for over 20 years now. Neither can afford to deny reality because it directly affects thier bottom line.
Don't be stupid, they don't just dump circuit boards like that!!! They have valuable metals in them. You burn them in a smoking heap, and when you can get close enough without hacking your lungs up, you recover the valuable bits. Then you dump it somewhere.
For probably as long as humans have been able to communicate, they expressed the desire to take on the traits of others around them. Strength, speed, looks, intelligence... But the scientific systematic understanding of the menutica involved. Early attempts became frustrated when nothing worked and more and more radical means were tested infringing on the well being of innocents while bringing no actual change of benefit. Obviously eugenics works, poodles aren't found in the wild, but attempting to force people to breed against thier will, for authoritarian purposes, dosent work out well for the obvious reasons and still the principles were not well understood. This has poisoned the well to the point common wisdom is any change is bad, even attempting anything is both fruitless at best and worse - just going to cause far more problems than it solves.
But the reality is once these technologies become widespread and ubiquitous, effective and cheap, possibly even reversable as the tech matures, they won't fall under the original assumptions of why they are bad. I myself have a severe dietary condition, a delayed bleeding disorder, and nearly debilitating migraines and would definately allow these to be edited out of my children, it's not wrong and god helps those who help themselves. There is nothing inherently wrong with it as it is possible to form a moral framework. Eventually it will be possible to change things like skin and hair color, then likely even reversible at any age (including heritablity). Perhaps this will even be seen eventually as a positive thing, in a similar fashion to the Dr.Seuss story about how many stars on your belly denotes social status and they only wake up when the mobility between these states illustrates they are only skin deep.
It's not disingenuous at all to use mass to calculate the odds here. Let's not forget that while the artificial satellite percentage is as above, it's diluted by perhaps 11 more orders of magnitude as each star system has similar debris. The sheer number of things you would need to see, given a random homogeneous distribution before you saw something is truly so large the chances are nearly zero of ever seeing one. Even if it's not random, such as with a spacecraft, it's still infinitesimal because of the sheer number of natural objects. So no, rule out everything first, any serious scientist would do that first. I can imagine a case where you could get a significant course correction, such as having a high rate of rotation and the thermal stresses cause a piece to break off. Any credible observer, such as at an observatory, would not only have the instrument data, but many employees work at the same time providing corroboration. Additionally, there are mechanisms to have observations verified in short timeframes, so I'd assume at this unusually slow speed that wouldn't be an issue. The worst that would happen is an equipment check, no one is going to have a carrer ended over presenting the data in raw form. Typically you would ask for options as to what else it could be outside of your guess.
One has to make assumptions, especially so if you want a one paragraph answer. Mostly I was pointing out how physics dosent allow for any type of fast travel, in fact it's so slow the universe will age out and die around you before you even have gone very far.
as for being a piece of space junk we have maybe one million tons of it, our solar system (sans sol) weighs roughly 10^25 tons. Even if you take off planets and moons (which could collide and be reduced to debris at some point) we are talking 0.0000000000000000001% of stuff is artificial. Even an advanced species would likely utilize only a tiny fraction of the mass around them or this would be evident already. So the vast vast vast vast majority are naturally occurring objects. As to mundane, yes aliens aren't super natural, but I don't think indisputable proof intelligent aliens are here now would be buried on page 27 of the newspaper on a Tuesday then forgotten. It would probably rip apart so many world views so quickly as to cause the biggest disruption to human life in the history of ever. Given these fairly rock solid assumptions, its best to rule out the far more likely causes before jumping to ET.
The best case for it not being artificial is still the incredibly vast distances in space between star systems. You cannot physically carry enough fuel, even if you carry a large % of mass as antimatter, to even get to Alpha Cenuri system in a human lifetime. You couldn't explore at all unless you are talking millions of years and even communicating the latency can take tens of thousands of years. Not impossible, but so improbable as to make one want to rule every mundane explanation to at least a five sigma confidence level.
The problem is the world is exactly what you believe it to be, from an internal perspective. Therefore there is nothing pushing back against ignorance if there is no equal and opposite force of critical thinking being applied.
Slashdot Mirror
Within the next hundred years the population of the earth has a pretty good chance of going to nearly zero. It's just going to be due to things like the Americans ramping up production of low yield nuclear weapons or purposeful gene editing on viruses like smallpox and not human breeding habits.
Damn, and I was looking forward to having a single atom of jumbonium as a paper weight for my desk sometime soon.
Instructions unclear... asked the wife to shit in the litter box and now not only is there no sex, I'm sleeping in the doghouse.
Yes, but let's look at the details. It takes around 10k USD in patent attorney fees to file the simplest of patents, 30-100k is more typical. Trying to do them yourself is a recipe for disaster as you broadcast your ideas without substantial protections. Patent attorneys are so expansive because they need a law degree and typically have a degree in the field they are writing the patent for, so in this case physics or engineering. After your 65k initial investment, if your idea or product becomes popular, many companies will start to copy it which is where defending your IP comes in. It's first to file so he may either be a reason other patents are denied or can start sending cease and desist letters to any offenders.
Contrary to popular belief, patent law cases are far less about being right or wrong than simply using superior legal firepower to overwhelm your opponent. A small company sending a cease and desist to another small company may bleed them into stopping, this won't work against large companies. Against a company like Apple, Samsung, or a university with a law college you will massively lose 98% of the time unless you have similar resources to fight. A good patent challenge starts at around 500k and can easily climb past tens of millions USD in fees you keep needing to pay up front. This overwhelms any small company or inventor and they are cooked. That's why most small companies and inventors simply skip the patent and try to stay on top with nimble innovation (a competitive advantage for the small entity) and through obscurity. The system is really broken.
This is a different but serious problem to antivaxxers. The majority of antibiotic resistance comes from agricultural practices. Animals are fed antibiotics even when healthy so that even more can be crammed into smaller spaces, and increase yields slightly. Short of a weapons grade bioengineering lab, this ranks among the fastest ways to reduce the effectiveness of antibiotics. If you want to help the best ways are to let your politicans know, and to purchase meats that are antibiotic free. Oftentimes these antibiotic free meats don't even cost more at the grocery store.
Americans have it easy today. Women don't die in child birth in any significant numbers. You don't need to have 6 babies to see 3 reach thier teenage years. Almost no one gets horrible diseases that kill, cripple, disfigure, and often cause unending pain for the remainder of your life. When every person either had family or friends that they watched contract horrible diseases like polio, they were scared shitless of suffering the same fate. When the first vaccines came out, people lined up around the block and people fought shortages to keep up with demand. It was hailed as a miracle, and people couldn't believe they might finally be free of these unimaginable afflictions plaguing humanity.
Nowadays, with vaccinations keeping these diseases under control, very few have had a family member who has been crippled, had a lifelong friend die, or even seen the afflicted in person. They lack the imagination necessary to place themselves in this world lost to medical progress and have become complacent, ignorant, and lazy with regard to the seriousness of the situation. It's absolutely disgusting.
You can't immunize babies for measles under one year of age, and a very small subset of the population with compromised immune systems. Further not every last person who gets the mmr vaccine develops the same level of immunity. All of these people have thier lives riding on the people who have no valid excuse to help prevent them from becoming ill and suffering possible permemant damage or death. Even people who survive, especially children, can be affected years later called subacute sclerosing panencephalitis or SSPE. You get an incurable brain infection, seizures, deteriorating function, and then (so far) a 100% chance of death. It's not even as uncommon as once thought. So even survivors don't have a rosy future.
It's not. Medicare (provided by the government) has a proven track record as being among the lowest overhead in the world and everyone seems to love it. It's about 2% and much lower than private insurance companies for whom greater internal expenses mean the same business but more billable expenses and thus profits. The current system of private insurance is too opaque and poorly regulated for any free market to kick in.
Medicare for all has a 2% overhead cost. It's among the lowest and most efficient in the world.
The Koch brothers paid for a study to prove Medicare for all costs more. Unfortunately for them the cost we pay now is 34 trillion per decade and the cost of healthcare for all, with everyone using it and using it more often, is 32 trillion per decade. How do we afford something 2 trillion dollars cheaper?!? IDK but maybe we can do it by taking the money we spend now, but use less of it. The insurance companies have a market valuation of 940 billion per year, that's not what they pay out to hospitals and doctors, its overhead and profits. Disbanding them all would save 9.4 trillion dollars and since they are only leaches that contribute nothing, are the thing you are looking for that we cannot keep paying for. Yes it increases taxes but you don't have those massive payments to insurance taken out of your paycheck so the result is better care for less. You know, like the rest of the world does it.
It's why the DOD has been taking this seriously since forever.
I hope you are correct. Unfortunately the humidity issue is real. It's a simple extension from the linked data to assume these changes will cause mass refugee crises around the world. resouces are limited now and are probably the main reason most wars are fought. Combine mass migration with resource destabilizing climate and it could easily trigger war. This is going to be the most problematic with any nuclear powers that think they have nothing to lose anymore. I'm pretty sure the UAE and the Saudis are going to get hit really hard, and become a wasteland. Hope they don't get nuclear capabilities.
Has your country become almost uninhabitable because humidity moved in where before it was dry heat? Can you no longer farm or produce on your land? What do you think might happen if this country was a nuclear power and surrounding countries reject the millions of refugees seeking relief? These are the biggest problems with climate change, the hundreds of millions of climate refugees and the possible destabilization of middle eastern nuclear powers. Wars are already fought over resources, reducing the amount and shuffling them around could start WW3.
60% of republicans want Medicare for all, 90% of democrats do too. Even a poll on Fox News bore this out. Yet somehow all the right talking heads on tv say communists are the only ones that want socialized healthcare. The real reason we don't have it, or a lot of the other issues we all agree on is America is a representative democracy that only seems to represent moneyed interests and not citizens.
I wish more Americans were involved in foreign politics, they would realize this is very true. Also it's why everyone complains social media sites are all left wing because they get traffic from all over the world. America's far left are centrists in the eyes of the world.
The Japanese are already running out of squid to harvest because of increased temperature and over fishing. The way we are headed, remind me to buy the last can of anchovies as an investment vehicle.
Both the DOD and insurance companies have taken climate change seriously for over 20 years now. Neither can afford to deny reality because it directly affects thier bottom line.
Don't be stupid, they don't just dump circuit boards like that!!! They have valuable metals in them. You burn them in a smoking heap, and when you can get close enough without hacking your lungs up, you recover the valuable bits. Then you dump it somewhere.
For probably as long as humans have been able to communicate, they expressed the desire to take on the traits of others around them. Strength, speed, looks, intelligence... But the scientific systematic understanding of the menutica involved. Early attempts became frustrated when nothing worked and more and more radical means were tested infringing on the well being of innocents while bringing no actual change of benefit. Obviously eugenics works, poodles aren't found in the wild, but attempting to force people to breed against thier will, for authoritarian purposes, dosent work out well for the obvious reasons and still the principles were not well understood. This has poisoned the well to the point common wisdom is any change is bad, even attempting anything is both fruitless at best and worse - just going to cause far more problems than it solves.
But the reality is once these technologies become widespread and ubiquitous, effective and cheap, possibly even reversable as the tech matures, they won't fall under the original assumptions of why they are bad. I myself have a severe dietary condition, a delayed bleeding disorder, and nearly debilitating migraines and would definately allow these to be edited out of my children, it's not wrong and god helps those who help themselves. There is nothing inherently wrong with it as it is possible to form a moral framework. Eventually it will be possible to change things like skin and hair color, then likely even reversible at any age (including heritablity). Perhaps this will even be seen eventually as a positive thing, in a similar fashion to the Dr.Seuss story about how many stars on your belly denotes social status and they only wake up when the mobility between these states illustrates they are only skin deep.
The fact aquaman is grossing over a billion dollars worldwide so soon ahead of so many other titles is proof we are now in an alternate timeline.
It's not disingenuous at all to use mass to calculate the odds here. Let's not forget that while the artificial satellite percentage is as above, it's diluted by perhaps 11 more orders of magnitude as each star system has similar debris. The sheer number of things you would need to see, given a random homogeneous distribution before you saw something is truly so large the chances are nearly zero of ever seeing one. Even if it's not random, such as with a spacecraft, it's still infinitesimal because of the sheer number of natural objects. So no, rule out everything first, any serious scientist would do that first. I can imagine a case where you could get a significant course correction, such as having a high rate of rotation and the thermal stresses cause a piece to break off. Any credible observer, such as at an observatory, would not only have the instrument data, but many employees work at the same time providing corroboration. Additionally, there are mechanisms to have observations verified in short timeframes, so I'd assume at this unusually slow speed that wouldn't be an issue. The worst that would happen is an equipment check, no one is going to have a carrer ended over presenting the data in raw form. Typically you would ask for options as to what else it could be outside of your guess.
One has to make assumptions, especially so if you want a one paragraph answer. Mostly I was pointing out how physics dosent allow for any type of fast travel, in fact it's so slow the universe will age out and die around you before you even have gone very far.
as for being a piece of space junk we have maybe one million tons of it, our solar system (sans sol) weighs roughly 10^25 tons. Even if you take off planets and moons (which could collide and be reduced to debris at some point) we are talking 0.0000000000000000001% of stuff is artificial. Even an advanced species would likely utilize only a tiny fraction of the mass around them or this would be evident already. So the vast vast vast vast majority are naturally occurring objects. As to mundane, yes aliens aren't super natural, but I don't think indisputable proof intelligent aliens are here now would be buried on page 27 of the newspaper on a Tuesday then forgotten. It would probably rip apart so many world views so quickly as to cause the biggest disruption to human life in the history of ever. Given these fairly rock solid assumptions, its best to rule out the far more likely causes before jumping to ET.
The best case for it not being artificial is still the incredibly vast distances in space between star systems. You cannot physically carry enough fuel, even if you carry a large % of mass as antimatter, to even get to Alpha Cenuri system in a human lifetime. You couldn't explore at all unless you are talking millions of years and even communicating the latency can take tens of thousands of years. Not impossible, but so improbable as to make one want to rule every mundane explanation to at least a five sigma confidence level.
Woosh....
The problem is the world is exactly what you believe it to be, from an internal perspective. Therefore there is nothing pushing back against ignorance if there is no equal and opposite force of critical thinking being applied.