I have advocated for years in support of scientific research and my comments consistently show that position. Are you aware of what the research paper contains? If this was a stock issue research report there never would have been controversy to begin with. Research into dangerous things has been done for decades and it is necessary. The controversy in this case was whether or not it was appropriate to publish to the public at large. The issue was serious enough the government accepted that this needed a high level review to see whether or not someone could weaponize the bird flu with the results of this study.
While I certainly have an axe to grind against communism, the only thing it has to do with my comment was to try to give people a grasp for the sheer scale of the number of people previously killed by the flu. Communism is the only thing short of natural causes that I can think of that has somewhere in large enough numbers to offer any comparison at all. Hell even all of our wars combined from the last century don't come close.
In sum the communist probably have murdered something like 110,000,000, or near two-thirds of all those killed by all governments, quasi-governments, and guerrillas from 1900 to 1987. Of course, the world total itself it shocking. It is several times the 38,000,000 battle-dead that have been killed in all this century's international and domestic wars.
Yes, there are nutcases that believe NASA never landed on the moon. Six percent of the population disbelieves the most widely televised event in history. If the rhetoric keeps up global warming is going to be placed into the same category.
To answer your question 48% of the American public thinks climate change is exaggerated. That number has actually/risen/ by over half in four years. Climate change is considered by most people to be a catch-all for environmental stewardship. As "people" lose faith in climate change they correspondingly also lose faith in environmental stewardship. The result is that environmental standards and causes are actually losing public support. The result is we have things like real world concrete pollution standards actually being lowered.
I will clarify my point. This is not about being 'right' or 'wrong', or the accuracy of one study versus another. This is not about scientific consensus (which is over-rated and shown to be a bad way to judge the validity of something time and time again throughout history). This is about trying to shift focus away from an abstract with a publically perceived questionable foundation. Instead we need to focus on concrete things that people can relate to and understand. The public understands that lead paint is bad, that mercury in their drinking water is terrifying and so on. Because the public could relate to these we had enough public support to legislate doing something about it.
The only thing that matters is the public perception, or as I put it "people" - not scientists. The public at large cannot conceive the difference between climate and weather. Climate change is simply too abstract for the public to understand or accept. Shift the focus back onto basics like pollution, sustainability, recycling and the like. Fight pollution for the sake of fighting pollution, this is something that people can relate too. By doing this many of the goals and concerns that relate to 'climate change' will be addressed as a beneficial side affect.
That isn't what I said or implied, your argument is completely off base. I talked about a very specific danger, one that has a track record of killing more people than anything short of communism. This also happens to have a fairly low barrier of entry compared to conventional weapons of mass destruction. Biological warfare in WWII killed far more people than the atomic bombs ever did.
I'm not aware of anything in Chemistry that would allow something to propagate on it's own and kill people by the millions. The hard reality is that their have been biological out breaks from secured environments (african honey bees in Brazil for example) a number of times throughout history. People are rising up against this paper, where they don't rise up against things like nukes because they can relate to the flu spreading from person to person and being helpless to do a damn thing about it.
People got alarmist over global cooling. I never said that there was scientific consensus, I am well aware that there wasn't. My argument concerns public perception, and that argument stands. The present media hype over climate change is harming environmental needs in terms of public perception. Focus on pollution, living sustainably, things that can be quantified, measured and reported on.
I stand by my statements about carbon being over-rated. There have been times with much higher levels of C02 than we have now. I believe things like coal power plants are far worse for the environment than carbon emissions. Research needs to put into things like bringing up Thorium power plants to replace Coal power plants.
Climate change is absolutely inevitable, I have already provided citations for this. The continents will drift, Antarctica will move away from it's polar position and into a warmer climate. The ice will melt from that alone. The sun will continue to slowly get closer to the earth changing our spot in the Goldilocks zone. Climate change is the only thing consistent about the earths history, from snowball earth to a large desert filled continent. I live two thousand miles from an ocean find sea shells in my back yard from time to time.
This doesn't mean that I advocate that we should be wreck-less with the environment. This means that were focusing on trying to preserve our world in the state it was for before the industrial revolution. There couldn't be a more unnatural position to take with regards to our environment. Climate change will happen and there isn't a damn thing we can do about it. We need to focus on being good planetary stewards, reducing pollution and ways to live sustainably.
I don't know why I bother with a troll, but here is a link with a fair number of citations to back up "people got alarmist". You have yet to attack the argument that I made, go troll elsewhere.
I claimed that "people got alarmist over Global Cooling", and I will back up my claim with sources. I never claimed there was scientific consensus, there wasn't. I never claimed that scientists were the ones behind the alarmist public message.
Now if your going to attack my argument, by all means go ahead and do so, but don't attack a position that I did not take. Quit putting words in my mouth and pay attention to what I wrote, not what you think I wrote.
Yeah, it's not like variations of the flu have killed more people than all of our wars combined. It's not like we have a lack of organizations that believe in terror or widespread murders. Heck, we don't even have any environmental radicals that just might look at a world wide population reduction as the best possible thing that could happen to the environment. Nope, no reason at all to be concerned about this....
People got alarmist over Global Cooling then Global Warming and then Climate Change when the first two didn't pan out by name at hyped levels. The biggest problem is that people are fighting the wrong fight, being too concerned about CO2 levels. These energies are well intentioned, however they are misplaced.
Climate change is inevitable no matter what we as a species do or don't do. We have a fossil record going back billions of years proving this, forces like plate tectonics and changes from our own solar system or even supernova's all impact our climate.
People have forgotten their environmental basics and in their zeal have created a self feeding hype machine. Scheduled catastrophes kept turning out to be false alarms. The problem is that this is causing a loss of credibility in scientists and science. People need to be concerned about pollution, for the sake of fighting pollution.
Were spending so much time worrying about whether or not the concrete being poured for a windmill is going to have the proper carbon offset. As a result were forgetting about bigger things like rampant unregulated coal power plants in China and the smelting of old electronics by hand in Africa.
We need to get back to science, back to fighting pollution and away from the hype.
If you don't protect a computer (whatever shape that computer comes in), some hacker somewhere will hack it just because they can. The fact that the computer controls a piece of factory equipment, city sewer system, a person's pacemaker or any other thing is irrelevant. Someone will hack it because they can, that's just the way the hacker works.
Companies have a habit of saying something can't be hacked, would be impractical to hack, or no one would want to hack our/whatever/ for decades. Hackers than have a habit of exposing the exploit when said company ignores their work. Why does the form factor make a difference?
You make an excellent point on the food pyramid, I can't argue that one at all. In a case like the food pyramid example where politics were put above science (meat is politically bad, therefore let's try to have people eat very little of it) there needs to be accountability. The need for accountability doesn't change my point though.
For the average lay person they need to have a way of knowing whether or not someone is qualified without having to a SME themselves. For that the lay person needs to be able to rely the qualifying agency to put needs above politics. It is simply not reasonable to ask each person to be an expert in all the things they might encounter, is that bridge safe, is that food safe, is that doctor qualified, is that car safe and so on.
The news is a commodity, the associated press and Reuters have made it so, even if by accident. There are only two ways for a news source to avoid being a commodity:
User experience: Can I browse your news source and have a better experience that another site? Does you website annoy me with interactive ads, does it have a good layout etc?
Original material: Can I get original high quality material from your news source that I can't get elsewhere? Look at the Wall Street Journal, lots of original content, and lots of high quality content.
These are the only two factors that will influence whether any given news source will thrive or whether away. Newspapers that have survived over a hundred years have folded because they could not address these two points acceptably. Meanwhile other news sources that were once considered dinosaurs (Wall Street Journal) are thriving because they/have/ addressed these two issues.
Everything else is moot, politics (left wing, right wing etc), name, location, they are all nothing more than that which get's your foot in the door. If someone is a political news junkie and can't get the content and experience they want from one news source, they will go where they can (CNN was once considered the gold standard and now Fox beats them). Different political views don't change a thing, Newsweek, once a bastion of the liberal side was recently sold for a dollar as those that could not get the content and experience simply switched to different channels (meanwhile the Huffington Post which addressed the very two things I listed is thriving).
Is he qualified to do what he is doing? Does this guy have a degree in nutrition or certification from a third party? Is he running a business? To put it bluntly, how do I know that he isn't a crackpot?
They want this guy to prove he isn't a crackpot in offering what is effectively medical advice. How is this a free speech issue? I'm not a doctor, so I have no place being in a business offering medical advice. The entire point of having things like certification boards is to keep people like this person from simply hanging a sign and going into business without the necessary qualifications.
If this person is qualified, than I'm much more inclined to think that the state can bugger off.
Define better, are you referring to happiness and contentedness in life? Are you referring to job prospects, rights, medical care or some other metric? Look at historical data for things like job satisfaction and you will see that many things are far from better than they have ever been. Things like mass censorship aren't supposed to be possible, yet people as notable as Sergey Brin have recently talked about how it is actually getting worse.
Certainly in many ways things are better than they have ever been. Take the example of slavery, now outlawed in every country on earth, yet it still roars it's ugly head by the tens of millions all over the world. Things like cars have been improved dramatically, when I was younger a car with a 100,000 miles on it was considered high risk and ready for the junk yard. Nowadays a car with a 100,000 miles on it can still be worth quite a bit of money. However in that same period of time we've gone from having cars like a honda crx, ford festiva and chevy sprint that got 40-50 mpg to cars that are breaking 40+ mpg and they are touted as the greatest thing since sliced bread. We traded safety for fuel economy, who am I to judge which is the better?
The car example could be used to show that we are safer, yet we've had more wars since the end of the cold war than during the entire cold way combined. Do you define safety by the body count on the freeway or field?
Understand I believe that there is a future in science, this has always been the case. A society that emphasizes technology tends to benefit and become stronger. I don't argue the merits of the benefits of science and technology. I argue the logistical practicalities of going into a field when your society has chosen that the field does not have value. I work at one of the largest universities in the world, our masters and phd programs are full of students - from places like China. These students will go home, be valued and turn China into the next powerhouse. They will do so because our society would simply outsource them at first opportunity to gain a short term profit instead of a long term gain.
The futures grim, but it has jack squat to do with science fiction stories. Instead it has to do with the cold hard realities of outsourcing and a lack of jobs. People don't want to go into a field without a future, especially when the people who would go into such a field tend to be more logic bound than passion bound to begin with. Why would anyone go into a field when society places no value in doing so?
Just a thought here, but I don't think re-entry would be that challenging for bacteria based life to survive. Most people think that what left of an asteroid is really hot when they land, but that just isn't the case. In fact asteroids have been touched right after landing and described as 'cool' in temperature.
If bacteria were in the core part of the asteroid that survived impact it should be reasonable to assume that the part that is cool to the touch never got hot enough to kill any bacteria that were inside it. The other two questions than become what kind of shock (g-forces) can bacteria survive? We know they can survive the shock of being launched into space, and without the squishy bodies that we have they may well survive the shock of re-entry.
If we could determine the answers to those questions than really the only questions remaining are can bacteria adapt to their new home? We already know they live in places on earth that are very inhospitable by our standards. The only other real question is how long can they survive in space? We have documented cases of bacteria surviving in space for years at a time. If there is no real limit to how long they can survive in space than cross solar system colonization is all but inevitable.
I don't think you were trolling, which I think some of the other posters may have assumed. In essence, I'm conceding your point that for any given piece of debris to make it to a given location is absurdly low, even by astronomical standards. Certainly the odds are so bad that the bet probably would not be legal is Las Vegas.
The thing that makes this paper viable though is that I don't have one piece of debris or just one shot. A large impact like the one that wiped out the dinosaurs could make millions of pieces of debris large enough to survive entry. Repeat this enough times over the years, take into account natural gravity paths between objects and/some/ of those pieces are going to make it to other planets. Give enough time and some of those pieces will even make it to other solar systems.
The meat of the matter is calculating all the "x's" and "y's" that make up the equations. Think of it as being similar to the Drake equation. The more we learn about things like the popularity of planets in other solar systems, the better we can place a value on the given "x" or "y" that is used to come up with the answer.
Or to use your gambling scenario in Las Vegas. Chances are really good for any given bet (piece of debris) that it's going to lose and that the house will win. Certainly in the long run the house is the consistently safer bet to put your money on.
That being said, if you have enough gamblers (pieces of debris) gambling enough times (another piece of debris) eventually someone will win a jackpot (bacteria survives re-entry). How big that jackpot is (bacteria can live and reproduce on another planetary body) and whether or not it become headline producing (bacteria evolves into intelligent life) are entirely up to conjecture. The logic is scientifically sound, the only question is what are the odds, and that is what the scientific paper was trying to address.
More like hitting a cockroach with a needle from across a football stadium, and you have millions of needles being launched at speeds well high enough to leave orbit. And then every so often you fire your needle cannon again and again.
To put this in perspective, all you have to do is look at the moon. The chances of any given spot on the moon being hit by an impact are incredibly small, so small they are astronomical. However when you look at the moon, you can see the entire thing is covered with impact craters. Your proverbial needle is being fired at your proverbial cockroach in large quantities, again and again. Sooner or later your cockroach/is/ going to get hit by a needle, a second needle and so on.
It also helps that their are what you could conceptually think of as gravity highways in space. Now you've discovered that your needles aren't just firing across the stadium randomly, but that the cannon is at least firing in their general direction.
Sony, how is that war against your customers going for you? At some point you need to wake up and realize that your customers are not your enemies, they are your boss.
Wake up Sony, you could be one of the greatest and most profitable companies on earth with a few policies changes.
Dear itchy trigger finger types in the nations capital.
Don't shoot! She's a homeless vet that has seen her glory days fall behind her. Just because she has an explosive / rocket filled history doesn't mean she's about to go go off again. they are taking her to a group home where they take care of her kund. She wont hurt anybody in her wheelchair, she's just touring the sites like any other tourist.
How is your war on users going? Is that working out for you the way you expected? Perhaps, just perhaps, your customers are not your enemies? Think about this please, you could be such a great company if not for a small handful of policies.
People make the NSA the boogey man of the average US citizen thinking that they are being spied on by them. People forget one very simply point and let logic go out the window. If the US government wants to spy on a given citizen they just have the FBI or a local law enforcement agency do it. Why bother going through the NSA when you just ring your local FBI office?
Forbes had a really good article explaining why this was inevitable a few months ago. The author was absolutely dead right about his central point contrasting best buy and amazon.
He makes the point that it isn't about money, it's about the customer experience and he is absolutely right. Amazon goes to extremes to make the customer have a better experience. Best Buy goes to extremes to make the customer more profitable. Best Buy needs to drop their customer as the enemy mentality and learned to embrace the customer instead of alienating them on a routine basis.
It's a shame that Einstein would disapprove of. He was fond of bucking the establishment and encouraged future scientists to challenge his work. Science should never be afraid of going against what is established, known and popularly accepted as dogma.
I think the Opera study results were wrong. Similar reports were seen in the mine in Soudan in Minnesota and they felt that the margin of error was wide enough to that they could not substantiate their results. The opera study didn't make this same decision and they should have. That being said the followed process, didn't hype it and did things the right way. There was no attempt at fraud or deceit and there is nothing to apologize for.
All this resignation will do is discourage others from challenging what is accepted dogma. That is the scientific shame, not the fact that the scientists at Opera got things wrong.
Slashdot Mirror
I have advocated for years in support of scientific research and my comments consistently show that position. Are you aware of what the research paper contains? If this was a stock issue research report there never would have been controversy to begin with. Research into dangerous things has been done for decades and it is necessary. The controversy in this case was whether or not it was appropriate to publish to the public at large. The issue was serious enough the government accepted that this needed a high level review to see whether or not someone could weaponize the bird flu with the results of this study.
While I certainly have an axe to grind against communism, the only thing it has to do with my comment was to try to give people a grasp for the sheer scale of the number of people previously killed by the flu. Communism is the only thing short of natural causes that I can think of that has somewhere in large enough numbers to offer any comparison at all. Hell even all of our wars combined from the last century don't come close.
Here's a source for you to start looking at:
Yes, there are nutcases that believe NASA never landed on the moon. Six percent of the population disbelieves the most widely televised event in history. If the rhetoric keeps up global warming is going to be placed into the same category.
To answer your question 48% of the American public thinks climate change is exaggerated. That number has actually /risen/ by over half in four years. Climate change is considered by most people to be a catch-all for environmental stewardship. As "people" lose faith in climate change they correspondingly also lose faith in environmental stewardship. The result is that environmental standards and causes are actually losing public support. The result is we have things like real world concrete pollution standards actually being lowered.
I will clarify my point. This is not about being 'right' or 'wrong', or the accuracy of one study versus another. This is not about scientific consensus (which is over-rated and shown to be a bad way to judge the validity of something time and time again throughout history). This is about trying to shift focus away from an abstract with a publically perceived questionable foundation. Instead we need to focus on concrete things that people can relate to and understand. The public understands that lead paint is bad, that mercury in their drinking water is terrifying and so on. Because the public could relate to these we had enough public support to legislate doing something about it.
The only thing that matters is the public perception, or as I put it "people" - not scientists. The public at large cannot conceive the difference between climate and weather. Climate change is simply too abstract for the public to understand or accept. Shift the focus back onto basics like pollution, sustainability, recycling and the like. Fight pollution for the sake of fighting pollution, this is something that people can relate too. By doing this many of the goals and concerns that relate to 'climate change' will be addressed as a beneficial side affect.
There are hundreds of thousands of dead victims of world war two that would care to disagree with you.
That isn't what I said or implied, your argument is completely off base. I talked about a very specific danger, one that has a track record of killing more people than anything short of communism. This also happens to have a fairly low barrier of entry compared to conventional weapons of mass destruction. Biological warfare in WWII killed far more people than the atomic bombs ever did.
I'm not aware of anything in Chemistry that would allow something to propagate on it's own and kill people by the millions. The hard reality is that their have been biological out breaks from secured environments (african honey bees in Brazil for example) a number of times throughout history. People are rising up against this paper, where they don't rise up against things like nukes because they can relate to the flu spreading from person to person and being helpless to do a damn thing about it.
People got alarmist over global cooling. I never said that there was scientific consensus, I am well aware that there wasn't. My argument concerns public perception, and that argument stands. The present media hype over climate change is harming environmental needs in terms of public perception. Focus on pollution, living sustainably, things that can be quantified, measured and reported on.
I stand by my statements about carbon being over-rated. There have been times with much higher levels of C02 than we have now. I believe things like coal power plants are far worse for the environment than carbon emissions. Research needs to put into things like bringing up Thorium power plants to replace Coal power plants.
Climate change is absolutely inevitable, I have already provided citations for this. The continents will drift, Antarctica will move away from it's polar position and into a warmer climate. The ice will melt from that alone. The sun will continue to slowly get closer to the earth changing our spot in the Goldilocks zone. Climate change is the only thing consistent about the earths history, from snowball earth to a large desert filled continent. I live two thousand miles from an ocean find sea shells in my back yard from time to time.
This doesn't mean that I advocate that we should be wreck-less with the environment. This means that were focusing on trying to preserve our world in the state it was for before the industrial revolution. There couldn't be a more unnatural position to take with regards to our environment. Climate change will happen and there isn't a damn thing we can do about it. We need to focus on being good planetary stewards, reducing pollution and ways to live sustainably.
I don't know why I bother with a troll, but here is a link with a fair number of citations to back up "people got alarmist". You have yet to attack the argument that I made, go troll elsewhere.
http://www.climatedepot.com/a/3213/Dont-Miss-it-Climate-Depots-Factsheet-on-1970s-Coming-Ice-Age-Claims
I claimed that "people got alarmist over Global Cooling", and I will back up my claim with sources. I never claimed there was scientific consensus, there wasn't. I never claimed that scientists were the ones behind the alarmist public message.
Now if your going to attack my argument, by all means go ahead and do so, but don't attack a position that I did not take. Quit putting words in my mouth and pay attention to what I wrote, not what you think I wrote.
Yeah, it's not like variations of the flu have killed more people than all of our wars combined. It's not like we have a lack of organizations that believe in terror or widespread murders. Heck, we don't even have any environmental radicals that just might look at a world wide population reduction as the best possible thing that could happen to the environment. Nope, no reason at all to be concerned about this....
People got alarmist over Global Cooling then Global Warming and then Climate Change when the first two didn't pan out by name at hyped levels. The biggest problem is that people are fighting the wrong fight, being too concerned about CO2 levels. These energies are well intentioned, however they are misplaced.
Climate change is inevitable no matter what we as a species do or don't do. We have a fossil record going back billions of years proving this, forces like plate tectonics and changes from our own solar system or even supernova's all impact our climate.
People have forgotten their environmental basics and in their zeal have created a self feeding hype machine. Scheduled catastrophes kept turning out to be false alarms. The problem is that this is causing a loss of credibility in scientists and science. People need to be concerned about pollution, for the sake of fighting pollution.
Were spending so much time worrying about whether or not the concrete being poured for a windmill is going to have the proper carbon offset. As a result were forgetting about bigger things like rampant unregulated coal power plants in China and the smelting of old electronics by hand in Africa.
We need to get back to science, back to fighting pollution and away from the hype.
If you don't protect a computer (whatever shape that computer comes in), some hacker somewhere will hack it just because they can. The fact that the computer controls a piece of factory equipment, city sewer system, a person's pacemaker or any other thing is irrelevant. Someone will hack it because they can, that's just the way the hacker works.
Companies have a habit of saying something can't be hacked, would be impractical to hack, or no one would want to hack our /whatever/ for decades. Hackers than have a habit of exposing the exploit when said company ignores their work. Why does the form factor make a difference?
You make an excellent point on the food pyramid, I can't argue that one at all. In a case like the food pyramid example where politics were put above science (meat is politically bad, therefore let's try to have people eat very little of it) there needs to be accountability. The need for accountability doesn't change my point though.
For the average lay person they need to have a way of knowing whether or not someone is qualified without having to a SME themselves. For that the lay person needs to be able to rely the qualifying agency to put needs above politics. It is simply not reasonable to ask each person to be an expert in all the things they might encounter, is that bridge safe, is that food safe, is that doctor qualified, is that car safe and so on.
The news is a commodity, the associated press and Reuters have made it so, even if by accident. There are only two ways for a news source to avoid being a commodity:
User experience: Can I browse your news source and have a better experience that another site? Does you website annoy me with interactive ads, does it have a good layout etc?
Original material: Can I get original high quality material from your news source that I can't get elsewhere? Look at the Wall Street Journal, lots of original content, and lots of high quality content.
These are the only two factors that will influence whether any given news source will thrive or whether away. Newspapers that have survived over a hundred years have folded because they could not address these two points acceptably. Meanwhile other news sources that were once considered dinosaurs (Wall Street Journal) are thriving because they /have/ addressed these two issues.
Everything else is moot, politics (left wing, right wing etc), name, location, they are all nothing more than that which get's your foot in the door. If someone is a political news junkie and can't get the content and experience they want from one news source, they will go where they can (CNN was once considered the gold standard and now Fox beats them). Different political views don't change a thing, Newsweek, once a bastion of the liberal side was recently sold for a dollar as those that could not get the content and experience simply switched to different channels (meanwhile the Huffington Post which addressed the very two things I listed is thriving).
Is he qualified to do what he is doing? Does this guy have a degree in nutrition or certification from a third party? Is he running a business? To put it bluntly, how do I know that he isn't a crackpot?
They want this guy to prove he isn't a crackpot in offering what is effectively medical advice. How is this a free speech issue? I'm not a doctor, so I have no place being in a business offering medical advice. The entire point of having things like certification boards is to keep people like this person from simply hanging a sign and going into business without the necessary qualifications.
If this person is qualified, than I'm much more inclined to think that the state can bugger off.
Define better, are you referring to happiness and contentedness in life? Are you referring to job prospects, rights, medical care or some other metric? Look at historical data for things like job satisfaction and you will see that many things are far from better than they have ever been. Things like mass censorship aren't supposed to be possible, yet people as notable as Sergey Brin have recently talked about how it is actually getting worse.
Certainly in many ways things are better than they have ever been. Take the example of slavery, now outlawed in every country on earth, yet it still roars it's ugly head by the tens of millions all over the world. Things like cars have been improved dramatically, when I was younger a car with a 100,000 miles on it was considered high risk and ready for the junk yard. Nowadays a car with a 100,000 miles on it can still be worth quite a bit of money. However in that same period of time we've gone from having cars like a honda crx, ford festiva and chevy sprint that got 40-50 mpg to cars that are breaking 40+ mpg and they are touted as the greatest thing since sliced bread. We traded safety for fuel economy, who am I to judge which is the better?
The car example could be used to show that we are safer, yet we've had more wars since the end of the cold war than during the entire cold way combined. Do you define safety by the body count on the freeway or field?
Understand I believe that there is a future in science, this has always been the case. A society that emphasizes technology tends to benefit and become stronger. I don't argue the merits of the benefits of science and technology. I argue the logistical practicalities of going into a field when your society has chosen that the field does not have value. I work at one of the largest universities in the world, our masters and phd programs are full of students - from places like China. These students will go home, be valued and turn China into the next powerhouse. They will do so because our society would simply outsource them at first opportunity to gain a short term profit instead of a long term gain.
The futures grim, but it has jack squat to do with science fiction stories. Instead it has to do with the cold hard realities of outsourcing and a lack of jobs. People don't want to go into a field without a future, especially when the people who would go into such a field tend to be more logic bound than passion bound to begin with. Why would anyone go into a field when society places no value in doing so?
Just a thought here, but I don't think re-entry would be that challenging for bacteria based life to survive. Most people think that what left of an asteroid is really hot when they land, but that just isn't the case. In fact asteroids have been touched right after landing and described as 'cool' in temperature.
http://impact.arc.nasa.gov/news_detail.cfm?ID=1
If bacteria were in the core part of the asteroid that survived impact it should be reasonable to assume that the part that is cool to the touch never got hot enough to kill any bacteria that were inside it. The other two questions than become what kind of shock (g-forces) can bacteria survive? We know they can survive the shock of being launched into space, and without the squishy bodies that we have they may well survive the shock of re-entry.
If we could determine the answers to those questions than really the only questions remaining are can bacteria adapt to their new home? We already know they live in places on earth that are very inhospitable by our standards. The only other real question is how long can they survive in space? We have documented cases of bacteria surviving in space for years at a time. If there is no real limit to how long they can survive in space than cross solar system colonization is all but inevitable.
I don't think you were trolling, which I think some of the other posters may have assumed. In essence, I'm conceding your point that for any given piece of debris to make it to a given location is absurdly low, even by astronomical standards. Certainly the odds are so bad that the bet probably would not be legal is Las Vegas.
The thing that makes this paper viable though is that I don't have one piece of debris or just one shot. A large impact like the one that wiped out the dinosaurs could make millions of pieces of debris large enough to survive entry. Repeat this enough times over the years, take into account natural gravity paths between objects and /some/ of those pieces are going to make it to other planets. Give enough time and some of those pieces will even make it to other solar systems.
The meat of the matter is calculating all the "x's" and "y's" that make up the equations. Think of it as being similar to the Drake equation. The more we learn about things like the popularity of planets in other solar systems, the better we can place a value on the given "x" or "y" that is used to come up with the answer.
Or to use your gambling scenario in Las Vegas. Chances are really good for any given bet (piece of debris) that it's going to lose and that the house will win. Certainly in the long run the house is the consistently safer bet to put your money on.
That being said, if you have enough gamblers (pieces of debris) gambling enough times (another piece of debris) eventually someone will win a jackpot (bacteria survives re-entry). How big that jackpot is (bacteria can live and reproduce on another planetary body) and whether or not it become headline producing (bacteria evolves into intelligent life) are entirely up to conjecture. The logic is scientifically sound, the only question is what are the odds, and that is what the scientific paper was trying to address.
More like hitting a cockroach with a needle from across a football stadium, and you have millions of needles being launched at speeds well high enough to leave orbit. And then every so often you fire your needle cannon again and again.
To put this in perspective, all you have to do is look at the moon. The chances of any given spot on the moon being hit by an impact are incredibly small, so small they are astronomical. However when you look at the moon, you can see the entire thing is covered with impact craters. Your proverbial needle is being fired at your proverbial cockroach in large quantities, again and again. Sooner or later your cockroach /is/ going to get hit by a needle, a second needle and so on.
It also helps that their are what you could conceptually think of as gravity highways in space. Now you've discovered that your needles aren't just firing across the stadium randomly, but that the cannon is at least firing in their general direction.
http://www.popsci.com/military-aviation-amp-space/article/2009-09/scientists-map-out-gravitational-space-highways
Sony, how is that war against your customers going for you? At some point you need to wake up and realize that your customers are not your enemies, they are your boss.
Wake up Sony, you could be one of the greatest and most profitable companies on earth with a few policies changes.
Dear itchy trigger finger types in the nations capital.
Don't shoot! She's a homeless vet that has seen her glory days fall behind her. Just because she has an explosive / rocket filled history doesn't mean she's about to go go off again. they are taking her to a group home where they take care of her kund. She wont hurt anybody in her wheelchair, she's just touring the sites like any other tourist.
How is your war on users going? Is that working out for you the way you expected? Perhaps, just perhaps, your customers are not your enemies? Think about this please, you could be such a great company if not for a small handful of policies.
People make the NSA the boogey man of the average US citizen thinking that they are being spied on by them. People forget one very simply point and let logic go out the window. If the US government wants to spy on a given citizen they just have the FBI or a local law enforcement agency do it. Why bother going through the NSA when you just ring your local FBI office?
The whole thing is much ado about nothing.
They should take their self righteous ass off of the the Internet too. Darpa has funded many, many things that have gone on to serve the public good.
Forbes had a really good article explaining why this was inevitable a few months ago. The author was absolutely dead right about his central point contrasting best buy and amazon.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/larrydownes/2012/01/02/why-best-buy-is-going-out-of-business-gradually/
He makes the point that it isn't about money, it's about the customer experience and he is absolutely right. Amazon goes to extremes to make the customer have a better experience. Best Buy goes to extremes to make the customer more profitable. Best Buy needs to drop their customer as the enemy mentality and learned to embrace the customer instead of alienating them on a routine basis.
It's a shame that Einstein would disapprove of. He was fond of bucking the establishment and encouraged future scientists to challenge his work. Science should never be afraid of going against what is established, known and popularly accepted as dogma.
I think the Opera study results were wrong. Similar reports were seen in the mine in Soudan in Minnesota and they felt that the margin of error was wide enough to that they could not substantiate their results. The opera study didn't make this same decision and they should have. That being said the followed process, didn't hype it and did things the right way. There was no attempt at fraud or deceit and there is nothing to apologize for.
All this resignation will do is discourage others from challenging what is accepted dogma. That is the scientific shame, not the fact that the scientists at Opera got things wrong.