In the nomenclature of high-energy physics it _is_ a new particle, just as a proton is a different particle from delta+, even though for low mass quarks it can get a little bit more complicated because of mixing (for example the eta is a mixture of all the low mass quarks) the Chi_b(1S) has a very different mass than the Chi_b(3p), different decay modes and quantum numbers... From what I read of the paper (I just skimmed it) the value of its mass is in agreement with theory - note that to analytically calculate the mass of the system bound by the strong force is very difficult, it is only for the high mass quarks (charm, top and bottom) that you can get a simple model to work, conceptually the model is like two masses bound together by a spring as opposed to an inverse square law like gravity or electromagnetism. As far as I know nobody has really convincingly calculated the masses of all the light hadrons using a model, or successfully predicted the full spectrum of light hadrons and their decay modes - the problem is the strong force consists of the three charges (and anticharges) mediated by 8 quarks and the charges (quarks) are moving around at relativistic speeds - for heavy quarks the problem is simpler since you can use a non-relativstic model, and use a simple quasi empirical approximation for the complex stuff going on in the field...
I disagree, we spend about the same amount on almost everything as we did before the recession - we can argue about whether we spend too much or too little but regardless of that argument we spend about the same as when we had a much smaller deficit compared to now. The only source of major spending increases during the recession came from unemployment and medicaid, which make sense since there are a lot more people unemployed, spending is supposed to go up for those programs when unemployment is high. In addition, the only reason we even had a deficit during the bulk of the Bush years was because we cut taxes and spent more money on overseas adventures - so we are really doing nothing now that differently than we did before deficits were large and if anything you could argue our deficit was completely under control before the tax cuts and wars.... The larger philosophical argument about what is the right level of spending is different from the causes of our current deficit, in other words the fact that we have a deficit does not automatically mean we spend too much or even that we tax too little, it just means, well, we have a deficit - I am just arguing that not much changed from 2007-2010 in terms of the spending side, esp. if you take into account that even though the gov't spends more on unemployment states are laying off lots of people, net gov't spend didn't go anywhere.
You realize interest rates are at an all time low? The government pays less in interest payments now than it did in the 90s even with the "exploding, unsustainable deficit" you also realize the US can borrow 1Trillion dollars and pay only 10B in interest a year - in classical economics governments should borrow money when in a recession and pay off debt during the boom times - right now the US has a very high unemployment rate, that means their is lots of unused capacity in the system, the US should borrow money to build infrastructure (which incidentally is an asset with long term value), when the unemployment rate drops the US should start paying off the debt it accumulated - BTW Clinton did this, we were paying off the debt at 0.5T/year, Greenspan was worried we were paying off the debt too fast. The reason why we now have a deficit of 1T/year is not because _spending_ increased it is because tax revenue _decreased_ however every time I try to explain basic, classical economics to a true believer I get, the same old shit, people are impervious to rational argument.
Actually this particle is a b anti-b pair(b_bar), and particles consisting of b b_bar have been observed before - what makes this particle different from the others is that the b b_bar are in a different state of excitation (3P) - Just like having hydrogen ( consisting of a proton and an electron) in its ground state (1S) you can have hydrogen in an excited state (2S, 1P, 3S, 2P.. etc..) where the electron is in a higher energy state or orbital. With the strong force a large amount of the mass of most particles is tied up in the field binding the two quarks together, so a quarkonium "atom" in a different excited state can have a vastly different mass than the same "atom" in the ground state. For light quarks (uds) almost all the mass of particles made from these quarks comes from the binding energy of the strong force, a neutron consisting of d u d has a mass of around 1GeV but the mass of each of the light quarks is less than 0.001GeV...(1MeV) - this article really isn't that big news, people routinely find these excitations all the time - the heavy quark excitations are interesting in that the masses of these particles can be predicted relatively easily and can be used to test models of the strong force...
The DARPA program mangers I have worked with tended to be at best clueless or at worst idiots who think our technology development roadmap should be driven by what they saw in movies, not based in our current understanding of science and engineering - I am not kidding - sure the idea of DARPA sounds great but they need some managers with real technical knowledge
There used to be a non-partisan congressionally funded organization, the OTA, mean specifically to advise congress on congressional issues - similiar to the CBO on budget issues - it was disbanded under Newt Gingrich's contract for america - can't let fact and expert opinion get in the way of profits and campaign donations! PS Newt wants to disband the CBO too
I agree, this is a stupid waste of money used to revive a rich man's childhood dreams and ego. The money would be much better spent funding grants at the NIH, they are peer reviewed by actual scientists who have a better feel for what ideas might work or not than some plutocrat who had a part in a company that had a def facto monopoly on operating systems..
I think the fermi paradox can be used to put a limit on how far away the nearest spacefaring civilization is - since we cannot detect them they have not got a chance to visit us yet - if their spacecraft travel at 10% the speed of light, an alien spacefaring civilization will expand at roughly 10% the speed of light, so a conservative estimate might be 100M light years (arose 1Billion years ago) to up to as much as 1Billion light years (if they developed shortly after the big bang) . The distance to them gets even farther away if you assume you could detect their radio emissions, or any mega engineering projects.... In any event it puts them well outside our local group of galaxies, and if they are that far away it would tend to favor the rare earth hypothesis. On the other hand if you don't believe the rare earth hypothesis then you have to assume we will go extinct shortly if you think it through (see: the great filter), so as an optimist, I prefer the rare earth hypothesis.
Ding ding ding - we have a winner. A few additional points 1) companies to NOT exist to make jobs, they exist to make money for their owners, jobs are an unfortunate cost from the point of view of the owners, any reduction in labor cost goes straight to profit - I am so sick about hearing about "job creators" - company exectives don't give a shit about creating jobs 2) Since employees are an unfortunate cost of doing business companies want to keep them as weak as possible - of course they hate unions, and they love high unemployment - exporting jobs to low wage countries is another way to keep your foot on the throat of labor 3) Since companies don't give a shit about jobs, having faith on them restoring full employment is a cruel joke, the only other player with a sufficient amount of resources and motivation to improve things is the goverment 4) We all seem to love corporate profits, but really profit is just ineffiency in the market, in a truely competetive marketplace profits go to zero, the only people who make money are the ones who actually do the work, as a corallary when you see huge profits and exec. bonuses you can bet there is either market ineffiency or fraud
mod up - this is a great link and helps explain some of the apparent parodoxes in the behavior of authoritarian leaders and follower, a key feature in totalitarian followers is their compartmentalization of knowledge, a leader can say "Obama is ineffective and weak" in one sentance and "Obama is a evil dictator who controls everythng" in the next and followers will have no problem holding these two thoughts in their head at the same time.
I did not know the christian God was not part of our universe, did it say that in the bible? is the easter bunny in our universe? because then I might have to be agnostic about its existence... maybe Thor isn't in our universe either... in any event the christian god apparently interacts with our universe, because if he didn't we could not in any way know of its existence - and I have seen no convincing evidence of the christian god's hand in anything past or present. People tend to misunderstand the word "proof" you can prove something mathematically given a set of assumptions but that is very different than saying those assumptions are true or not. When talking about reality you only have models, of varying degrees of accuracy or utility - there is no proof, ever - some models - like quantumelectrodynamics are quite useful and accurate, others, like believing that you will be dammed for eating a particular animal or having sex before marriage are at best useless and at worst deceptive, maladaptive or serving the best interests of someone in power, like the immune system you have to be able to effectively weed out and discard useless models and use the useful ones - I choose to discard crappy useless models as quickly as possible.
just curious are you agnositc an atheist about the existence of Thor? Zeus? Athena? or how about the easter bunny? Santa Claus? elves? ghosts? I cannot disprove the existence of any of these entities but I have seen no evidence for any of them - but I am not agnostic about them, I feel safe in saying I am an atheist about the existence of the easter bunny because if I withheld judgement on the existence any creature or phenomina people claimed without evidence my head would be so full of shit I wouldn't be able to think straight, so why is the christian God any different than any of these entitites?
OMFG I didn't realize the oil and coal companies are being _persecuted_ on such a massive scale by the big bad gubernment and those lazy scientists, how would they ever defend themselves... maybe with profits from oil and gas? http://www.businessweek.com/news/2011-10-27/exxon-mobil-profit-tops-10-billion-on-crude-oil-price-surge.html Exxonmobil made (net) 10 billion in the last quarter alone - don't worry I think the big boys can take care of themselves, they can petition the government (lobby) against regulation, run ads and fund any scientists who take their money. Maybe the government spends more money on global warming research because it is an observable phenomena. Your argument about AGW funding could be the same as that of a believer in phlogiston theory http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phlogiston_theory complaining the government isn't spending on phlogiston research...
Several people saw the crash coming (Krugman, Stigliz et. al.) the problem was lots of people were getting paid really well to justify what their bosses were doing to make boatloads of cash. It is called control fraud - look it up. I am ashamed scientific american is trying to blur this crystal clear problem.
I may be dense here - you mean the government right? Since the govt was the driving force behind almost all of those innovations (moon, internet/DARPA, highway system etc...)
I think you are off by a few orders of magnitude, rougly speaking to accellerate a ton of matter to a significant fraction of the speed of light, requires about 1 ton of antimatter, so your 10000 ton spaceship would require about 10000 tons of antimatter - this is a key problem with interstellar travel - think of it this way, when you are near the speed of light your kinetic energy is on par with your rest energy.... this is part of the reason why nuclear rockets can't really get much above 10% of the speed of light, an H-bomb only converts about 1g of matter to energy, yet it weighs 100kg..
They understood GPS and used it to synchronize their clocks - if you read the paper the GPS error was still on the order of 100ns - they had to then sychronize their clocks by taking an atomic clock and moving it from one location to the other to determine an additional correction term - the problem the author points out is that correction term is _path_ dependent - it depends on the exact route of the journey and if any stops are made along the way - in addition I believe the author points out that the neutrinos took a different path causing another issue - this does put some doubt in my mind about the CERN results as it is unclear to me how to generate the correction term in a one way measurement.- BTW I am a physicist, looks like a valid critique to me
I like it - the top 0.1% of the population of the country owns 40% of the nations wealth the top 1% owns 60% and the top 10% owns 80% of the wealth. So the top 10% would pay 80% of the taxes... (by the way the bottom 50% have _negative_ wealth) Just like you pay taxes on your home to protect it (police, fire dept, streets) you should pay taxes on your assets, after all the government is the system that allows you to keep your assest from being taken and provides a stable currency so you should pay to protect those assets.
Yearly debt and total debt always increase during recessions as revenue plummets from consumer austerity, most economists agree that the government should go into deficit spending during recessions and save during the boom years as it is especially attractive for the government to borrow at low rates during recessions - yet all we hear about now is the debt, however 10 years ago we had a surplus which we turned into a deficit through tax giveaways and needless wars - we should be borrowing more money now to spend on infrastructure projects as interest rates are near zero - not laying off more government employees in the hope that that will improve unemployment (how stupid is that?), and what reduce interest rates? to what? below zero? - the whole narrative has been taken over by the right wing, why is the debt being higher than it has for the past 60 years such an immediate problem when we are paying less in interest payments since the early 1990s? you are being played suckers!
Hey everyone worrying about the debt is being played - the US can borrow money at 1.25% that means the interest paid on a trillion of debt is 12.5Billion dollars, which is rounding error in the US budget - the US now pays less interest on debt than it did during Bush I. Also people fail to recall that if you borrow money to create assets, such as roads and infrastructure it is not the same as borrowing money to spend on hookers and blow - since that assets you create have some long term value. We, as a people, are getting played by the rich and the powerful - it is very sad to see this country getting played by a bunch of ultra-rich right wing plutocrats who create one phony crisis after another to scare us into enriching them further.
You mean unfair compensation like a CEO who earns a 50M bonus? or unfair like asking for a share of the profits? or unfair like asking for health care? Yeah GM went bankrupt because of unions, not because they made crappy cars (remember cadilacs what were just buicks with a different trim) and not because the US did not have universal health care - seems to me successful car companies come from highly unionized countries ever hear of VW, BMW or MB?
This is a good point, and I tend to favor 3.(we are the first civ within about 100 million light years) - our earth is only habitable for 5 billion years and it used up 4.4 billion to create intelligent life, we barely made it before the oceans boiled on a geologic time scale - and as you pointed out the universe is only 13 so billion years old, and many of those billions of years there were no heavy elements in the universe to create life, also, many galaxies are significantly younger than 4 billion years old making them unlikely candidates for intelligent life, the milky way is somewhat exceptional in that it is so old... There are many other things that make earth and our solar system unique that point to intelligent life being rare (note I am restricting my comments to intelligent life, single celled life is probably quite common, as it formed almost immediately after the earth cooled)
- the sun's orbit about the galaxy is almost circular and minimizes the time spent in the spiral arms
- the metal content of our sun is very high
- We are sufficiently distant from the center of the galaxy to avoid nearby stars passing by and disrupting the orbits of the planets
Finally, if there was a spacefaring civilization in our region of space that choose to use nuclear rockets (capable of 10% of the speed of light) they would have completely overrun the galaxy in less than half a million years - a blink of the eye on a geologic time scale.
So I hope the answer is we are the first within our region of space because the other answers I get are unsettling - something like Greg Bear's Forge of God, or that we will wipe ourselves out
Tidally locked planets (like this one) have one side in permanent darkness, unless there is some sort of massive recirculation of the oceans or atmosphere one side of the planet will freeze out -i.e. the atmosphere will eventually freeze out on the night side like a big cold trap. Red dwarf stars are common but unlikely candidates for finding habitable planets because of this issue, the planet orbits too close to the parent star causing them to be tidally locked.
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In the nomenclature of high-energy physics it _is_ a new particle, just as a proton is a different particle from delta+, even though for low mass quarks it can get a little bit more complicated because of mixing (for example the eta is a mixture of all the low mass quarks) the Chi_b(1S) has a very different mass than the Chi_b(3p), different decay modes and quantum numbers... From what I read of the paper (I just skimmed it) the value of its mass is in agreement with theory - note that to analytically calculate the mass of the system bound by the strong force is very difficult, it is only for the high mass quarks (charm, top and bottom) that you can get a simple model to work, conceptually the model is like two masses bound together by a spring as opposed to an inverse square law like gravity or electromagnetism. As far as I know nobody has really convincingly calculated the masses of all the light hadrons using a model, or successfully predicted the full spectrum of light hadrons and their decay modes - the problem is the strong force consists of the three charges (and anticharges) mediated by 8 quarks and the charges (quarks) are moving around at relativistic speeds - for heavy quarks the problem is simpler since you can use a non-relativstic model, and use a simple quasi empirical approximation for the complex stuff going on in the field...
I disagree, we spend about the same amount on almost everything as we did before the recession - we can argue about whether we spend too much or too little but regardless of that argument we spend about the same as when we had a much smaller deficit compared to now. The only source of major spending increases during the recession came from unemployment and medicaid, which make sense since there are a lot more people unemployed, spending is supposed to go up for those programs when unemployment is high. In addition, the only reason we even had a deficit during the bulk of the Bush years was because we cut taxes and spent more money on overseas adventures - so we are really doing nothing now that differently than we did before deficits were large and if anything you could argue our deficit was completely under control before the tax cuts and wars.... The larger philosophical argument about what is the right level of spending is different from the causes of our current deficit, in other words the fact that we have a deficit does not automatically mean we spend too much or even that we tax too little, it just means, well, we have a deficit - I am just arguing that not much changed from 2007-2010 in terms of the spending side, esp. if you take into account that even though the gov't spends more on unemployment states are laying off lots of people, net gov't spend didn't go anywhere.
You realize interest rates are at an all time low? The government pays less in interest payments now than it did in the 90s even with the "exploding, unsustainable deficit" you also realize the US can borrow 1Trillion dollars and pay only 10B in interest a year - in classical economics governments should borrow money when in a recession and pay off debt during the boom times - right now the US has a very high unemployment rate, that means their is lots of unused capacity in the system, the US should borrow money to build infrastructure (which incidentally is an asset with long term value), when the unemployment rate drops the US should start paying off the debt it accumulated - BTW Clinton did this, we were paying off the debt at 0.5T/year, Greenspan was worried we were paying off the debt too fast. The reason why we now have a deficit of 1T/year is not because _spending_ increased it is because tax revenue _decreased_ however every time I try to explain basic, classical economics to a true believer I get, the same old shit, people are impervious to rational argument.
Actually this particle is a b anti-b pair(b_bar), and particles consisting of b b_bar have been observed before - what makes this particle different from the others is that the b b_bar are in a different state of excitation (3P) - Just like having hydrogen ( consisting of a proton and an electron) in its ground state (1S) you can have hydrogen in an excited state (2S, 1P, 3S, 2P.. etc..) where the electron is in a higher energy state or orbital. With the strong force a large amount of the mass of most particles is tied up in the field binding the two quarks together, so a quarkonium "atom" in a different excited state can have a vastly different mass than the same "atom" in the ground state. For light quarks (uds) almost all the mass of particles made from these quarks comes from the binding energy of the strong force, a neutron consisting of d u d has a mass of around 1GeV but the mass of each of the light quarks is less than 0.001GeV...(1MeV) - this article really isn't that big news, people routinely find these excitations all the time - the heavy quark excitations are interesting in that the masses of these particles can be predicted relatively easily and can be used to test models of the strong force...
The DARPA program mangers I have worked with tended to be at best clueless or at worst idiots who think our technology development roadmap should be driven by what they saw in movies, not based in our current understanding of science and engineering - I am not kidding - sure the idea of DARPA sounds great but they need some managers with real technical knowledge
There used to be a non-partisan congressionally funded organization, the OTA, mean specifically to advise congress on congressional issues - similiar to the CBO on budget issues - it was disbanded under Newt Gingrich's contract for america - can't let fact and expert opinion get in the way of profits and campaign donations! PS Newt wants to disband the CBO too
I agree, this is a stupid waste of money used to revive a rich man's childhood dreams and ego. The money would be much better spent funding grants at the NIH, they are peer reviewed by actual scientists who have a better feel for what ideas might work or not than some plutocrat who had a part in a company that had a def facto monopoly on operating systems..
I think the fermi paradox can be used to put a limit on how far away the nearest spacefaring civilization is - since we cannot detect them they have not got a chance to visit us yet - if their spacecraft travel at 10% the speed of light, an alien spacefaring civilization will expand at roughly 10% the speed of light, so a conservative estimate might be 100M light years (arose 1Billion years ago) to up to as much as 1Billion light years (if they developed shortly after the big bang) . The distance to them gets even farther away if you assume you could detect their radio emissions, or any mega engineering projects.... In any event it puts them well outside our local group of galaxies, and if they are that far away it would tend to favor the rare earth hypothesis. On the other hand if you don't believe the rare earth hypothesis then you have to assume we will go extinct shortly if you think it through (see: the great filter), so as an optimist, I prefer the rare earth hypothesis.
Ding ding ding - we have a winner. A few additional points
1) companies to NOT exist to make jobs, they exist to make money for their owners, jobs are an unfortunate cost from the point of view of the owners, any reduction in labor cost goes straight to profit - I am so sick about hearing about "job creators" - company exectives don't give a shit about creating jobs
2) Since employees are an unfortunate cost of doing business companies want to keep them as weak as possible - of course they hate unions, and they love high unemployment - exporting jobs to low wage countries is another way to keep your foot on the throat of labor
3) Since companies don't give a shit about jobs, having faith on them restoring full employment is a cruel joke, the only other player with a sufficient amount of resources and motivation to improve things is the goverment
4) We all seem to love corporate profits, but really profit is just ineffiency in the market, in a truely competetive marketplace profits go to zero, the only people who make money are the ones who actually do the work, as a corallary when you see huge profits and exec. bonuses you can bet there is either market ineffiency or fraud
mod up - this is a great link and helps explain some of the apparent parodoxes in the behavior of authoritarian leaders and follower, a key feature in totalitarian followers is their compartmentalization of knowledge, a leader can say "Obama is ineffective and weak" in one sentance and "Obama is a evil dictator who controls everythng" in the next and followers will have no problem holding these two thoughts in their head at the same time.
Does that explain why CEOs make so much money?
I guess unions are why Germany is such a failure in manufacturing...
I did not know the christian God was not part of our universe, did it say that in the bible? is the easter bunny in our universe? because then I might have to be agnostic about its existence... maybe Thor isn't in our universe either... in any event the christian god apparently interacts with our universe, because if he didn't we could not in any way know of its existence - and I have seen no convincing evidence of the christian god's hand in anything past or present. People tend to misunderstand the word "proof" you can prove something mathematically given a set of assumptions but that is very different than saying those assumptions are true or not. When talking about reality you only have models, of varying degrees of accuracy or utility - there is no proof, ever - some models - like quantumelectrodynamics are quite useful and accurate, others, like believing that you will be dammed for eating a particular animal or having sex before marriage are at best useless and at worst deceptive, maladaptive or serving the best interests of someone in power, like the immune system you have to be able to effectively weed out and discard useless models and use the useful ones - I choose to discard crappy useless models as quickly as possible.
just curious are you agnositc an atheist about the existence of Thor? Zeus? Athena? or how about the easter bunny? Santa Claus? elves? ghosts? I cannot disprove the existence of any of these entities but I have seen no evidence for any of them - but I am not agnostic about them, I feel safe in saying I am an atheist about the existence of the easter bunny because if I withheld judgement on the existence any creature or phenomina people claimed without evidence my head would be so full of shit I wouldn't be able to think straight, so why is the christian God any different than any of these entitites?
OMFG I didn't realize the oil and coal companies are being _persecuted_ on such a massive scale by the big bad gubernment and those lazy scientists, how would they ever defend themselves... maybe with profits from oil and gas? http://www.businessweek.com/news/2011-10-27/exxon-mobil-profit-tops-10-billion-on-crude-oil-price-surge.html Exxonmobil made (net) 10 billion in the last quarter alone - don't worry I think the big boys can take care of themselves, they can petition the government (lobby) against regulation, run ads and fund any scientists who take their money. Maybe the government spends more money on global warming research because it is an observable phenomena. Your argument about AGW funding could be the same as that of a believer in phlogiston theory http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phlogiston_theory complaining the government isn't spending on phlogiston research...
Several people saw the crash coming (Krugman, Stigliz et. al.) the problem was lots of people were getting paid really well to justify what their bosses were doing to make boatloads of cash. It is called control fraud - look it up. I am ashamed scientific american is trying to blur this crystal clear problem.
I may be dense here - you mean the government right? Since the govt was the driving force behind almost all of those innovations (moon, internet/DARPA, highway system etc...)
I think you are off by a few orders of magnitude, rougly speaking to accellerate a ton of matter to a significant fraction of the speed of light, requires about 1 ton of antimatter, so your 10000 ton spaceship would require about 10000 tons of antimatter - this is a key problem with interstellar travel - think of it this way, when you are near the speed of light your kinetic energy is on par with your rest energy.... this is part of the reason why nuclear rockets can't really get much above 10% of the speed of light, an H-bomb only converts about 1g of matter to energy, yet it weighs 100kg..
They understood GPS and used it to synchronize their clocks - if you read the paper the GPS error was still on the order of 100ns - they had to then sychronize their clocks by taking an atomic clock and moving it from one location to the other to determine an additional correction term - the problem the author points out is that correction term is _path_ dependent - it depends on the exact route of the journey and if any stops are made along the way - in addition I believe the author points out that the neutrinos took a different path causing another issue - this does put some doubt in my mind about the CERN results as it is unclear to me how to generate the correction term in a one way measurement.- BTW I am a physicist, looks like a valid critique to me
I like it - the top 0.1% of the population of the country owns 40% of the nations wealth the top 1% owns 60% and the top 10% owns 80% of the wealth. So the top 10% would pay 80% of the taxes... (by the way the bottom 50% have _negative_ wealth) Just like you pay taxes on your home to protect it (police, fire dept, streets) you should pay taxes on your assets, after all the government is the system that allows you to keep your assest from being taken and provides a stable currency so you should pay to protect those assets.
Yearly debt and total debt always increase during recessions as revenue plummets from consumer austerity, most economists agree that the government should go into deficit spending during recessions and save during the boom years as it is especially attractive for the government to borrow at low rates during recessions - yet all we hear about now is the debt, however 10 years ago we had a surplus which we turned into a deficit through tax giveaways and needless wars - we should be borrowing more money now to spend on infrastructure projects as interest rates are near zero - not laying off more government employees in the hope that that will improve unemployment (how stupid is that?), and what reduce interest rates? to what? below zero? - the whole narrative has been taken over by the right wing, why is the debt being higher than it has for the past 60 years such an immediate problem when we are paying less in interest payments since the early 1990s? you are being played suckers!
Hey everyone worrying about the debt is being played - the US can borrow money at 1.25% that means the interest paid on a trillion of debt is 12.5Billion dollars, which is rounding error in the US budget - the US now pays less interest on debt than it did during Bush I. Also people fail to recall that if you borrow money to create assets, such as roads and infrastructure it is not the same as borrowing money to spend on hookers and blow - since that assets you create have some long term value. We, as a people, are getting played by the rich and the powerful - it is very sad to see this country getting played by a bunch of ultra-rich right wing plutocrats who create one phony crisis after another to scare us into enriching them further.
You mean unfair compensation like a CEO who earns a 50M bonus? or unfair like asking for a share of the profits? or unfair like asking for health care? Yeah GM went bankrupt because of unions, not because they made crappy cars (remember cadilacs what were just buicks with a different trim) and not because the US did not have universal health care - seems to me successful car companies come from highly unionized countries ever hear of VW, BMW or MB?
This is a good point, and I tend to favor 3.(we are the first civ within about 100 million light years) - our earth is only habitable for 5 billion years and it used up 4.4 billion to create intelligent life, we barely made it before the oceans boiled on a geologic time scale - and as you pointed out the universe is only 13 so billion years old, and many of those billions of years there were no heavy elements in the universe to create life, also, many galaxies are significantly younger than 4 billion years old making them unlikely candidates for intelligent life, the milky way is somewhat exceptional in that it is so old... There are many other things that make earth and our solar system unique that point to intelligent life being rare (note I am restricting my comments to intelligent life, single celled life is probably quite common, as it formed almost immediately after the earth cooled) - the sun's orbit about the galaxy is almost circular and minimizes the time spent in the spiral arms - the metal content of our sun is very high - We are sufficiently distant from the center of the galaxy to avoid nearby stars passing by and disrupting the orbits of the planets Finally, if there was a spacefaring civilization in our region of space that choose to use nuclear rockets (capable of 10% of the speed of light) they would have completely overrun the galaxy in less than half a million years - a blink of the eye on a geologic time scale. So I hope the answer is we are the first within our region of space because the other answers I get are unsettling - something like Greg Bear's Forge of God, or that we will wipe ourselves out
Tidally locked planets (like this one) have one side in permanent darkness, unless there is some sort of massive recirculation of the oceans or atmosphere one side of the planet will freeze out -i.e. the atmosphere will eventually freeze out on the night side like a big cold trap. Red dwarf stars are common but unlikely candidates for finding habitable planets because of this issue, the planet orbits too close to the parent star causing them to be tidally locked.