That a popular article doesn't give a perfectly accurate description shouldn't be shocking but if you go to the actual research article http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/2017GL075571/full?wol1URL=/doi/10.1002/2017GL075571/full there concern is pretty clear about airborne and water soluble organic mercury compounds which are far more dangerous than metallic mercury or most inorganic mercury compounds. Metallic mercury and inorganic mercury is pretty safe. You can hold a ball of mercury in your hand without any real consequences. But organic mercury compounds can be much more dangerous. It took just a drop of dimethyl mercury https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dimethylmercury on the outside of a glove to kill https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karen_Wetterhahn. Of course, no one is going to directly die from this, but an increase in atmospheric and oceanic mercury levels could have a real negative impact on both the ecosystems and general human health.
I remember one of my favorite computer games from the 1990s was Masters of Orion II, and classic galaxy exploration and colonization game. One of the things was no matter how advanced your technology to find if a star system had a planet around it, you had to send a ship to that system. Only a few years after that game came out, the detection of extrasolar planets started being a thing and really took off. And now we're finding planets in other galaxies. The degree to which our technology has outpaced the science fiction expectation here is really impressive.
I agree that offshore wind has frequent political problems; but they aren't nearly as severe as those for nuclear power, and again, once approval is given, building of wind power takes much less time.
I agree that in the long-term nuclear is a pretty good idea. But right now, isn't practically an option; the politics of building new nuclear plants are extreme and it can end up taking a decade or two to build them. We need carbon neutral power sources now. Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good.
Yeah, buy 140 kg is a suborbital lob, and that's not nearly as insanely small. The Davy Crockett has a mass of around 40 kg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Davy_Crockett_(nuclear_device). That involved pretty heavy miniaturization, but a warhead with slightly higher yield and slightly less miniaturization and a size of around 140 kg isn't implausible. Detonating a nuke the size of Davy Crockett on New York still does some pretty serious damage http://nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap/?&kt=0.04&lat=40.72422&lng=-73.9961&airburst=0&hob_ft=0&zm=16 and if one increases the size even a little bit, the damage starts looking pretty extreme. And the US was able to build the DC in the 1950s, so some components even North Korea would be able to automatically get smaller (such as the electronics). And DC was a variable yield weapon, so if one takes out the extra stuff for that, one also gets a little bit more. That said, it does look like as of right now, the smallest nukes that North Korea has are still much too big to fit on this sort of rocket.
I know reading TFA is hard, but at least read the summary. These were private investigators doing this in their own time. The team includes a whole bunch of former FBI and other former government people, but none of your tax money is going to this.
Sure, here are two that we really enjoy. (I'm copying them below and you'll probably notice a substantial difference in writing style- one is my write up and one is my wife's write up):
Recipe 1: Cheese-Tomato Pasta (serves 2-4)
8-10 ounces of pasta (I recommend rotini but other pastas will work well also).
2 ounces of mozzarella
2 medium tomatoes
Granulated garlic
Chopped dried onions
Olive oil
Instructions:
While pasta water is boiling
Chop tomatoes and mozzarella. The mozzarella should be chopped so that pieces are about 1-3 cubic centimeters.
Mix tomatoes and mozzarella with garlic, onions and a dash of olive oul (the exact amount for each of these
may depend on taste, I recomend small dashes of each. For most dried chopped onion containers, about 2-3 shakes seems to be a good amount. For garlic, a similar amount works. Olive oil is more important if one is planning on
storing the pasta for later, or bringing to an event or the like since it will help prevent things from drying out. If not, about a half teaspoon of olive oil will do but again, individual taste may matter.
By this time, water should probably be boiling, so put pasta in.
When pasta is done, drain pasta as usual and put pasta into bowl with mixture, mix thoroughly, wait 5 minutes to serve.
Note: If one wants more of the cheese to melt, one easy trick is to mix the mixture in a metal bowl, then refill the pot that had the pasta with a small amount of water (maybe.5 inches) which you bring to a soft boil (or use another pot if you don't mind doing an extra dish, although this actually helps slightly getting the pasta gunk off the pot). Then cover the the bowl with the pasta mixture with aluminum foil, and then place on top of the boiling pot. Then wait about 5-10 minutes, and the cheese should be nicely melted.
One option if you want a spicier version is to add zatar, but this isn't always easy to come by, and it seems like what people call zatar varies a bit. I recommend the Pereg brand zatar which is tasty, can be ordered online, and can be added to lots of different things with good results.
Recipe 2: Spinach Curry:
Here's our curry recipe. I make it in a cast iron pan on
medium-low so everything gets a chance to simmer and blend.
Once pan is warmed up.
1. Chunk of butter, like a 1" x 1" x 2" piece. When half melted, add
cumin. Integrate well into melted butter. You can also use your favorite vegetable oil.
2. Add one onion, chopped into small pieces and saute until
golden/translucent (depending on the onion).
3. Add several cloves of garlic, minced.
4. Add a can of diced tomatoes. We have used both plain and the kind
that comes with basil, onion and garlic added. Both are tasty. When
the tomatoes start looking cooked/creamy, add tumeric.
5. Add thawed spinach[1] and minced ginger. Cook through.
6. Add garam masala (either the mix or dashes of cardamom, cloves,
cinnamon, nutmeg, pepper, coriander- go ahead, dump half of your spice
cabinet in there. Experiment.). Stir in.
7. Cook for about 10 more minutes. When it smells really good, it's time to eat!
[1]The smoother the spinach, the better. You can accomplish this by
taking the bag, while still frozen, and throwing it on the
table/whacking it with a blunt object. Since the leaves are frozen,
they break, rather than squish so you get lots of tiny pieces. Let it
thaw and voila, chopped spinach without a food processor!
Since part of this is caused by an increase in agriculture, a big one is to eat less meat. This doesn't mean be a complete vegetarian, but just eat less meat and more non-meat options. The acreage used for meat as a food is much much higher than the same for most vegetarian options https://www.nrcs.usda.gov/Internet/FSE_DOCUMENTS/stelprdb1097070.pdf and this also helps shrink one's carbon footprint http://shrinkthatfootprint.com/food-carbon-footprint-diet. Given that many meat substitutes are cheap, this can pay off nicely. Moreover, in the US now there are many more genuinely tasty vegetarian options than there used to be both in terms of store-bought items and in terms of available high quality recipes. I remember when I was a little kid and we went to my vegetarian aunt's for Thanksgiving, and it was awful. The situation now is very different.
I think this is pretty accurate in general about what utilities are likely to do. My objection is to the statement that "Trump is about to focus on geo-thermal, along with nuclear power." What the utilities want/do and what Trump focuses on are not the same thing.
The idea that Trump is going to do any focus on geo-thermal or nuclear power does not seem justified given how much he talks about and pushes for coal unfortunately. It is too bad though; I agree that both would be very good for baseload issues.
Too bad you didn't look it up, because that isn't quite true. In the US, CO2 emission has been trending downwards for the last few years. While this is primarily due to natural gas use this is also due to the use of wind and solar power (which combine really well with natural gas since gas plants have very fast spin-up times) and more efficient cars. See https://www.technologyreview.com/s/601415/carbon-dioxide-emissions-keep-falling-in-the-us/. And two years in a row, global CO2 production declined http://physicstoday.scitation.org/do/10.1063/PT.5.1067/full/. So no, we are actually succeeding, not as fast as we need to, but the general trend is in the right direction. We can solve this, but if people keep falsely claiming that all we can do is mitigation then we're going to be in very bad shape. Moreover, the budgets for mitigation have been tiny in many locations.
But some aspects will help. Some amount of CO2 removal along with switching to carbon neutral power sources and increasing energy efficiency will go a long way.
If one wants to help directly with helping reducing CO2 production then donating to solar and wind charities is the best bet. For solar, the best two seem to be Everybody Solar https://www.everybodysolar.org/ (which gets solar panels for non-profits like museums and homeless shelters), and the Solar Electric Light Fund https://self.org/ which gets solar panels for people in developing countries. Right now, I haven't seen a specific wind charity that seems to be absolutely ideal, but of those in the US, the best one seems to be the New England Wind Fund https://www.massenergy.org/the-wind-fund.
Most Americans care about and are concerned about climate change https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/most-americans-want-climate-change-policies/, but right now, the federal government isn't doing much. In the long-run, actually solving this is, as with the ozone hole problem and as with acid rain going to take a combination of government, market forces, charity, and new research. Until the current US administration is removed, the best most of us can do is focus on the charity aspect.
Actually, Musk has reported that this one came down intact enough that they are going to actually try and tow it back to shore https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/958847818583584768. They don't normally leave the landing legs on for the rockets they don't want to reuse, but this one was apparently being used for an experimental hard burn, and it looks like they wanted to keep the aerodynamics the same to get better information about that. Given that this one managed to survive, it tentatively suggests that whatever they did differently for this "landing" worked pretty well.
"Paleo" is nonsense. Low carb or low sugar diets may make sense, but Paleo isn't even well-defined. Almost none of our modern food cultivars resemble their paleolithic counterparts and already by the paleolithic different locations have wildly different diets. See this excellent talk for a good primer https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BMOjVYgYaG8.
Well, they are going to get click through simply from some people wondering if the $11 was a typo and they meant some larger quantity. Also, to put this in perspective in the last few days, there have been submissions for Rocket Lab's successful test of the kick stage rocket(my own submission) as well as a submission from someone else about Ariane 5's launch anomaly, both of which were apparently declined. If I go to the Firehose from a few days ago, I imagine I'll see many similar things getting zero coverage.
It would be one thing if they had made off with 11 million dollars worth of cryptocurrency, but this is literally $11. I got scammed out of $20 last year by a con-artist. That's not newsworthy, and having the same thing happen for about half that doesn't magically become newsworthy because it happened with a cryptocurrency.
Small objects can stay very close to each other without stationkeeping if they are at the same altitude. The classic example of this is the Vostok 3 and Vostok 4 missions. In general, satellites at nearly the same altitude stay very close to where they were to each other. They will of course move out of alignment but if launched all together this will take a long time, on the order of weeks or months, more than enough time for a big giant M to be seen all around the world.
The problem is the sort of general precedent and concern about what happens in the long-term as launch costs go down even further. This object is deliberately bright, unlike the ISS which just happens to be bright because it is big. What happens if McDonald's decides to put a set of 30 of these shiny balls that form a constellation in the shape of an M?
Space-X is alive only because of the money it got upfront from NASA for launches they may or may not deliver.
This is just not true. SpaceX has had a wide variety of non-NASA customers. Falcon 9 launched 18 times in 2017, which is 20% of all launches globally and about 2/3rds of all US launches , and the vast majority of those launches were not for NASA http://space.skyrocket.de/doc_chr/lau2017.htm. Moreover, SpaceX has delivered cargo launches to the ISS repeatedly for NASA, and with the exception of one launch in 2015, all of those have been successful.
Launching a car into space as part of the Falcon Heavy test is certainly a P.T. Barnum sort of thing to do, but the Falcon Heavy test needs to launch some sort of mass simulator.
We're dealing with small sample sizes for anthropology in this context not because anyone wants to but because we don't have a choice. There's a limited set of samples. So, when we don't find anything past a certain point, we tentatively conclude that there weren't people there. When we find a person, we change and conclude that it was farther back. If you read a decent anthropology textbook, it will be careful to phrase things by generally giving upper and lower bounds. For example, they'll say something like "At least by X years ago, humans had reached Y."
I'm going to respond to some of these comments in a slightly different order if you don't mind. First, I'm essentially in agreement with the Heinlein quote: Getting people to actually act well is very, very tough. That's why I'm in favor of a revenue neutral carbon tax- we only got to the specifics of what people could do on this topic at a tangential level: I'm not generally in the habit of telling people what they can/should do on such issues.
I take the position that whatever harm is done by use of the truck is outweighed by the benefit of having versatile transport available for immediate use. I am much more likely to need to move objects than persons. I have owned autos in the past and the truck is simply more useful. Certainly one could for example rent at need... but one must consider cost ( in both time and money ) of the rental process itself and the uncertain availability of a suitable vehicle at any given time.
Sure, these are all considerations that are completely valid. This is why for example I have a friend who lives in a suburb of Boston with a large car that stays in the garage most of the time- most days they use the public transit to get two and from work, but the option of having the car is really helpful. And obviously, some things make it even more so: if my wife and I end up having kids, we're probably going to need to get a car.
I am somewhat dubious about Uber and similar systems. Consider the history of "piecework" and the imbalance of power between employer and employees...er "independant contractors".
I agree that this sort of thing has other, pretty serious problems. I think in the long-term we're going to have to come up with new regulations to make sure that people in such positions aren't screwed over.
Leaded Gasoline is thankfully obsolete. Human ingenuity has come up with a better solution.
Not really. The anti-knock effects of lead are by many metrics better than modern systems, and certainly less expensive.
If I could, I would prefer that my truck be a truck, electrically powered, rechargeable from the rooftop solar that we have already installed at home.
If you already have rooftop solar you are already doing more to reduce your CO2 output than the vast majority of people. In that context, even if one is using the air conditioner at whatever temperature you need to work, what you do is your own thing, but you are already being pretty damn helpful. And of course, where one lives matters a lot. How much heat or air one needs varies a lot by location to location; in the long-term as we get a better grid and better storage, we'll be in a position where this sort of thing will be less of an issue. Unfortunately, those sorts of systemic changes aren't really happening in the US as much as they should be.
I'm not sure what exactly you are trying to claim here. Are you claiming that individuals as individuals aren't going to make a big difference? Sure- that's inevitably the case when one is dealing with a planetary population in the billions. But that doesn't mean that individual actions can't help, or more to the point, that if one cares about things, that one can reasonably try to offset carbon output directly through the methods outlined. So what is your argument exactly?
No, as the US stands right now, without massive changes, it is completely impossible to do effective public transport in rural areas, and forcing people to move is unreasonable. People there are doing necessary jobs providing the food for everyone else among other things. As for bikes, if you are the same AC as before, then you mentioned bikes before I did, but I agree that they aren't great in rural areas either. If the vast majority of people driving cars are the people who are in rural areas like that, and the city dwellers don't that by itself would do a massive job on our carbon footprint. Everyone should do what they can, and expecting people to do things which are extremely inconvenient is not reasonable nor fair. That said, there are other things one can do to reduce one's carbon footprint if one is living in a rural area, and many of them, such as getting solar panels or insulating one's house, will in fact pay for themselves.
Slashdot Mirror
That a popular article doesn't give a perfectly accurate description shouldn't be shocking but if you go to the actual research article http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/2017GL075571/full?wol1URL=/doi/10.1002/2017GL075571/full there concern is pretty clear about airborne and water soluble organic mercury compounds which are far more dangerous than metallic mercury or most inorganic mercury compounds. Metallic mercury and inorganic mercury is pretty safe. You can hold a ball of mercury in your hand without any real consequences. But organic mercury compounds can be much more dangerous. It took just a drop of dimethyl mercury https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dimethylmercury on the outside of a glove to kill https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karen_Wetterhahn. Of course, no one is going to directly die from this, but an increase in atmospheric and oceanic mercury levels could have a real negative impact on both the ecosystems and general human health.
I remember one of my favorite computer games from the 1990s was Masters of Orion II, and classic galaxy exploration and colonization game. One of the things was no matter how advanced your technology to find if a star system had a planet around it, you had to send a ship to that system. Only a few years after that game came out, the detection of extrasolar planets started being a thing and really took off. And now we're finding planets in other galaxies. The degree to which our technology has outpaced the science fiction expectation here is really impressive.
I agree that offshore wind has frequent political problems; but they aren't nearly as severe as those for nuclear power, and again, once approval is given, building of wind power takes much less time.
I agree that in the long-term nuclear is a pretty good idea. But right now, isn't practically an option; the politics of building new nuclear plants are extreme and it can end up taking a decade or two to build them. We need carbon neutral power sources now. Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good.
Yeah, buy 140 kg is a suborbital lob, and that's not nearly as insanely small. The Davy Crockett has a mass of around 40 kg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Davy_Crockett_(nuclear_device). That involved pretty heavy miniaturization, but a warhead with slightly higher yield and slightly less miniaturization and a size of around 140 kg isn't implausible. Detonating a nuke the size of Davy Crockett on New York still does some pretty serious damage http://nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap/?&kt=0.04&lat=40.72422&lng=-73.9961&airburst=0&hob_ft=0&zm=16 and if one increases the size even a little bit, the damage starts looking pretty extreme. And the US was able to build the DC in the 1950s, so some components even North Korea would be able to automatically get smaller (such as the electronics). And DC was a variable yield weapon, so if one takes out the extra stuff for that, one also gets a little bit more. That said, it does look like as of right now, the smallest nukes that North Korea has are still much too big to fit on this sort of rocket.
I know reading TFA is hard, but at least read the summary. These were private investigators doing this in their own time. The team includes a whole bunch of former FBI and other former government people, but none of your tax money is going to this.
Recipe 1: Cheese-Tomato Pasta (serves 2-4)
8-10 ounces of pasta (I recommend rotini but other pastas will work well also). 2 ounces of mozzarella 2 medium tomatoes Granulated garlic Chopped dried onions Olive oil
Instructions: While pasta water is boiling Chop tomatoes and mozzarella. The mozzarella should be chopped so that pieces are about 1-3 cubic centimeters. Mix tomatoes and mozzarella with garlic, onions and a dash of olive oul (the exact amount for each of these may depend on taste, I recomend small dashes of each. For most dried chopped onion containers, about 2-3 shakes seems to be a good amount. For garlic, a similar amount works. Olive oil is more important if one is planning on storing the pasta for later, or bringing to an event or the like since it will help prevent things from drying out. If not, about a half teaspoon of olive oil will do but again, individual taste may matter.
By this time, water should probably be boiling, so put pasta in.
When pasta is done, drain pasta as usual and put pasta into bowl with mixture, mix thoroughly, wait 5 minutes to serve.
Note: If one wants more of the cheese to melt, one easy trick is to mix the mixture in a metal bowl, then refill the pot that had the pasta with a small amount of water (maybe .5 inches) which you bring to a soft boil (or use another pot if you don't mind doing an extra dish, although this actually helps slightly getting the pasta gunk off the pot). Then cover the the bowl with the pasta mixture with aluminum foil, and then place on top of the boiling pot. Then wait about 5-10 minutes, and the cheese should be nicely melted.
One option if you want a spicier version is to add zatar, but this isn't always easy to come by, and it seems like what people call zatar varies a bit. I recommend the Pereg brand zatar which is tasty, can be ordered online, and can be added to lots of different things with good results.
Recipe 2: Spinach Curry:
Here's our curry recipe. I make it in a cast iron pan on medium-low so everything gets a chance to simmer and blend.
Once pan is warmed up.
1. Chunk of butter, like a 1" x 1" x 2" piece. When half melted, add cumin. Integrate well into melted butter. You can also use your favorite vegetable oil.
2. Add one onion, chopped into small pieces and saute until golden/translucent (depending on the onion).
3. Add several cloves of garlic, minced.
4. Add a can of diced tomatoes. We have used both plain and the kind that comes with basil, onion and garlic added. Both are tasty. When the tomatoes start looking cooked/creamy, add tumeric.
5. Add thawed spinach[1] and minced ginger. Cook through.
6. Add garam masala (either the mix or dashes of cardamom, cloves, cinnamon, nutmeg, pepper, coriander- go ahead, dump half of your spice cabinet in there. Experiment.). Stir in.
7. Cook for about 10 more minutes. When it smells really good, it's time to eat!
[1]The smoother the spinach, the better. You can accomplish this by taking the bag, while still frozen, and throwing it on the table/whacking it with a blunt object. Since the leaves are frozen, they break, rather than squish so you get lots of tiny pieces. Let it thaw and voila, chopped spinach without a food processor!
Since part of this is caused by an increase in agriculture, a big one is to eat less meat. This doesn't mean be a complete vegetarian, but just eat less meat and more non-meat options. The acreage used for meat as a food is much much higher than the same for most vegetarian options https://www.nrcs.usda.gov/Internet/FSE_DOCUMENTS/stelprdb1097070.pdf and this also helps shrink one's carbon footprint http://shrinkthatfootprint.com/food-carbon-footprint-diet. Given that many meat substitutes are cheap, this can pay off nicely. Moreover, in the US now there are many more genuinely tasty vegetarian options than there used to be both in terms of store-bought items and in terms of available high quality recipes. I remember when I was a little kid and we went to my vegetarian aunt's for Thanksgiving, and it was awful. The situation now is very different.
I think this is pretty accurate in general about what utilities are likely to do. My objection is to the statement that "Trump is about to focus on geo-thermal, along with nuclear power." What the utilities want/do and what Trump focuses on are not the same thing.
The idea that Trump is going to do any focus on geo-thermal or nuclear power does not seem justified given how much he talks about and pushes for coal unfortunately. It is too bad though; I agree that both would be very good for baseload issues.
Too bad you didn't look it up, because that isn't quite true. In the US, CO2 emission has been trending downwards for the last few years. While this is primarily due to natural gas use this is also due to the use of wind and solar power (which combine really well with natural gas since gas plants have very fast spin-up times) and more efficient cars. See https://www.technologyreview.com/s/601415/carbon-dioxide-emissions-keep-falling-in-the-us/. And two years in a row, global CO2 production declined http://physicstoday.scitation.org/do/10.1063/PT.5.1067/full/. So no, we are actually succeeding, not as fast as we need to, but the general trend is in the right direction. We can solve this, but if people keep falsely claiming that all we can do is mitigation then we're going to be in very bad shape. Moreover, the budgets for mitigation have been tiny in many locations.
If one wants to help directly with helping reducing CO2 production then donating to solar and wind charities is the best bet. For solar, the best two seem to be Everybody Solar https://www.everybodysolar.org/ (which gets solar panels for non-profits like museums and homeless shelters), and the Solar Electric Light Fund https://self.org/ which gets solar panels for people in developing countries. Right now, I haven't seen a specific wind charity that seems to be absolutely ideal, but of those in the US, the best one seems to be the New England Wind Fund https://www.massenergy.org/the-wind-fund.
Most Americans care about and are concerned about climate change https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/most-americans-want-climate-change-policies/, but right now, the federal government isn't doing much. In the long-run, actually solving this is, as with the ozone hole problem and as with acid rain going to take a combination of government, market forces, charity, and new research. Until the current US administration is removed, the best most of us can do is focus on the charity aspect.
Actually, Musk has reported that this one came down intact enough that they are going to actually try and tow it back to shore https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/958847818583584768. They don't normally leave the landing legs on for the rockets they don't want to reuse, but this one was apparently being used for an experimental hard burn, and it looks like they wanted to keep the aerodynamics the same to get better information about that. Given that this one managed to survive, it tentatively suggests that whatever they did differently for this "landing" worked pretty well.
"Paleo" is nonsense. Low carb or low sugar diets may make sense, but Paleo isn't even well-defined. Almost none of our modern food cultivars resemble their paleolithic counterparts and already by the paleolithic different locations have wildly different diets. See this excellent talk for a good primer https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BMOjVYgYaG8.
Well, they are going to get click through simply from some people wondering if the $11 was a typo and they meant some larger quantity. Also, to put this in perspective in the last few days, there have been submissions for Rocket Lab's successful test of the kick stage rocket(my own submission) as well as a submission from someone else about Ariane 5's launch anomaly, both of which were apparently declined. If I go to the Firehose from a few days ago, I imagine I'll see many similar things getting zero coverage.
It would be one thing if they had made off with 11 million dollars worth of cryptocurrency, but this is literally $11. I got scammed out of $20 last year by a con-artist. That's not newsworthy, and having the same thing happen for about half that doesn't magically become newsworthy because it happened with a cryptocurrency.
Small objects can stay very close to each other without stationkeeping if they are at the same altitude. The classic example of this is the Vostok 3 and Vostok 4 missions. In general, satellites at nearly the same altitude stay very close to where they were to each other. They will of course move out of alignment but if launched all together this will take a long time, on the order of weeks or months, more than enough time for a big giant M to be seen all around the world.
What am I missing about how orbits work?
The problem is the sort of general precedent and concern about what happens in the long-term as launch costs go down even further. This object is deliberately bright, unlike the ISS which just happens to be bright because it is big. What happens if McDonald's decides to put a set of 30 of these shiny balls that form a constellation in the shape of an M?
Space-X is alive only because of the money it got upfront from NASA for launches they may or may not deliver.
This is just not true. SpaceX has had a wide variety of non-NASA customers. Falcon 9 launched 18 times in 2017, which is 20% of all launches globally and about 2/3rds of all US launches , and the vast majority of those launches were not for NASA http://space.skyrocket.de/doc_chr/lau2017.htm. Moreover, SpaceX has delivered cargo launches to the ISS repeatedly for NASA, and with the exception of one launch in 2015, all of those have been successful.
Launching a car into space as part of the Falcon Heavy test is certainly a P.T. Barnum sort of thing to do, but the Falcon Heavy test needs to launch some sort of mass simulator.
We're dealing with small sample sizes for anthropology in this context not because anyone wants to but because we don't have a choice. There's a limited set of samples. So, when we don't find anything past a certain point, we tentatively conclude that there weren't people there. When we find a person, we change and conclude that it was farther back. If you read a decent anthropology textbook, it will be careful to phrase things by generally giving upper and lower bounds. For example, they'll say something like "At least by X years ago, humans had reached Y."
I take the position that whatever harm is done by use of the truck is outweighed by the benefit of having versatile transport available for immediate use. I am much more likely to need to move objects than persons. I have owned autos in the past and the truck is simply more useful. Certainly one could for example rent at need... but one must consider cost ( in both time and money ) of the rental process itself and the uncertain availability of a suitable vehicle at any given time.
Sure, these are all considerations that are completely valid. This is why for example I have a friend who lives in a suburb of Boston with a large car that stays in the garage most of the time- most days they use the public transit to get two and from work, but the option of having the car is really helpful. And obviously, some things make it even more so: if my wife and I end up having kids, we're probably going to need to get a car.
I am somewhat dubious about Uber and similar systems. Consider the history of "piecework" and the imbalance of power between employer and employees ...er "independant contractors".
I agree that this sort of thing has other, pretty serious problems. I think in the long-term we're going to have to come up with new regulations to make sure that people in such positions aren't screwed over.
Leaded Gasoline is thankfully obsolete. Human ingenuity has come up with a better solution.
Not really. The anti-knock effects of lead are by many metrics better than modern systems, and certainly less expensive.
If I could, I would prefer that my truck be a truck, electrically powered, rechargeable from the rooftop solar that we have already installed at home.
If you already have rooftop solar you are already doing more to reduce your CO2 output than the vast majority of people. In that context, even if one is using the air conditioner at whatever temperature you need to work, what you do is your own thing, but you are already being pretty damn helpful. And of course, where one lives matters a lot. How much heat or air one needs varies a lot by location to location; in the long-term as we get a better grid and better storage, we'll be in a position where this sort of thing will be less of an issue. Unfortunately, those sorts of systemic changes aren't really happening in the US as much as they should be.
I'm not sure what exactly you are trying to claim here. Are you claiming that individuals as individuals aren't going to make a big difference? Sure- that's inevitably the case when one is dealing with a planetary population in the billions. But that doesn't mean that individual actions can't help, or more to the point, that if one cares about things, that one can reasonably try to offset carbon output directly through the methods outlined. So what is your argument exactly?
No, as the US stands right now, without massive changes, it is completely impossible to do effective public transport in rural areas, and forcing people to move is unreasonable. People there are doing necessary jobs providing the food for everyone else among other things. As for bikes, if you are the same AC as before, then you mentioned bikes before I did, but I agree that they aren't great in rural areas either. If the vast majority of people driving cars are the people who are in rural areas like that, and the city dwellers don't that by itself would do a massive job on our carbon footprint. Everyone should do what they can, and expecting people to do things which are extremely inconvenient is not reasonable nor fair. That said, there are other things one can do to reduce one's carbon footprint if one is living in a rural area, and many of them, such as getting solar panels or insulating one's house, will in fact pay for themselves.