Calling them intelligent is mild. You know their actual scientific translates as "the wise man"... arrogant much ? We may be, on occasion, intelligent but wisdom is the single rarest attribute you'll ever observe in us. It occurs sometimes, once in a century or so - but it's hardly an attribute of the species. It's an attribute that, very rarely, a single member of the species may briefly acquire.
>We have a single instance of intelligent life, some hints that single cellular life is fairly common, and that's it. We've also found life in every environment we've looked, no matter how inhospitable it seems. Life lives everywhere it can't. And intelligence is such a generic trick that it has independently evolved multiple times on earth. You mean we have a single example of technologically advanced life, that's not the same thing as intelligent life. Octopi are intelligent life. And I'm prepared to bet the only thing Octopi need to be as technologically advanced as us is the right evolutionary survival pressures and time.
>Throw in the many-worlds hypothesis and multi-cellular life culminating in intelligence may be an event that occurs with a frequency of much less than once per universe, we simply don't have the data to make a meaningful prediction That's a silly question. The entire universe is setup so life can evolve - it's the inverse of the anthropic principle though - life exists BECAUSE that is the kind of universe this is. But to assume that only once did that universal set of coincidences succeed is to bet on impossible odds. It smacks of religiosity. Even string theory predicts that universes that can support life are an inevitable occurrence.
>Claiming a second instance is a very extraordinary claim. Claiming that a second instance must be an extraordinary claim is the most extraordinary claim imaginable.
>More than that, a civilization capable of building a Dyson sphere in visual range would bring up a lot of awkward questions concerning the Fermi paradox Forget the Fermi paradox, it's idiotic. The biggest stain on the man's career. For starters - the 'paradox' may not even be true - who says we HAVEN'T found a signal from another civilization ? Odds are if we did we wouldn't have known it - because the chances that their methods of communication are even recognizable as such by us are vanishingly small. Communication develops from biology - we have no reason to assume that another civilization would have senses like hearing or sight or if they do that their communication would be based on that. This being the case for most (not all) earthbound species is a result of the specific conditions on earth favoring them in evolution - nothing about that can be extrapolated. A civilization far more advanced than us could communicate entirely by pheromones - or some process we've never encountered or imagined.
More-over - if this is a Dyson sphere they did NOT happen 'at the same time' - that star is 1300 light years away. That means what we're seeing now was 1300 years ago. There are plenty of starts within 10 light years of us - do you really think we'd head to somewhere 1300 light years away before we do those ? It's quite far enough that they could well have explored nearby stars without ever coming near us. If they are seeing us- they would see virtually no evidence that this planet is inhabited. None of the things we did which may be recognizable evidence of technologically advanced life even EXISTED 1300 years ago. We did most of them in just the last 70 years. Even if they have sufficient technology to peer through our atmosphere - they are watching the VIkings raid England - there is nothing there to make them think we're worth visiting - a primitive, violent species with nothing worth trading.
>Did we just happen to pop up in the same cosmic instant as they finished that structure but before they expanded? The structure is NOT finished - Observations fit a Dyson sphere under construction - not a completed one. Now it's possible that by now it is done, but that's not what we're seeing. It's just as possible that they went extinct before it was completed. Life is amazingly resilient, species are terrible fragile. Or hell they got halfway and ran out of money - it's happened to some pretty prestigious projects we've done. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... And for all you know - they ARE our ancestors. Cosmic seeding is a legitimate hypotheses.
You give way too much credence to Fermi and not nearly enough to Drake.
Its not an extraordinary claim bevause we already have absolute proof that life can and do exist in this universe.
Our not finding it is likely more of a testament to how limited our looking is tgan to life's abundance. The evidence from earth us life lives everywhere it can't
A thousand years ago economic rationality meant something utterly different to what it means now. Multiple utterly different things in fact - what it meant to Aztecs has nothing in common with what it meant in Europe and neither had any resemblence to ours. You cannot predict what it will mean in another thousand years.
Well that or we have to build it really, really thin....
Or, since matter can be converted into energy and vice versa - why not build the Dyson sphere out of matter made from solar energy ?
The thing is, we're talking thousands of years in the future. There is hardly a piece of technology in your life that wouldn't have been deemed impossible - even magical - just a century ago. Now imagine what it would look like to an Aztec ? To a Roman ?
We have no way of predicting what will be possible in a thousand years.
Only Americans try that. If you want good service in Paris - the answer is really easy, don't speak English. It doesn't matter what you DO speak - as long as it's not English.
Parisian waiters are the most polite and courteous in the world - to anybody who speaks any language other than English. They will spend however much time they need to understand what you wish to order, as long as it's not being done in English.
Once you've confirmed that you speak a language other than English - you can then switch to it if it's your only common tongue with no repercussion - you just need to prove you're neither British nor American.
There's a problem with that - you haven't explained the weird part. The weird part isn't the regularity, plenty of things orbit regularly. The weird part is that we can't see it. Every natural object we know off would, when absorbing light, heat up. 20% of a star's light output it s about 30 megafucktons (to use the proper metric unit) of photons. That will make that thing really hot, we'd be able to see that heat pattern.
Now perhaps we WILL see a heat pattern if we look with more telescopes now - but we've not seen one before. One possible explanation for whatever's blocking the light not heating up - is if that energy is instead being turned into something other than heat, like kinetic or electrical energy. That fits the dyson-sphere idea, but nothing we know of in nature.
I don't think we have enough information to rule it out, and it DOES fit the observed evidence. We don't have enough information to confirm it either - hopefully more information will let us settle on an answer.
And we don't need evidence of extraterestrial life to be forced to consider it a possibility - we have evidence of life in this universe. That alone proves that life is possible in this universe.
>No, but odds are good that it's possible, since intelligence is useful for all kinds of tasks.
Not to mention that intelligence has all the earmarks of an evolutionary universal - a generic trick independently evolved several times. Octopi are as smart as cats - and the rest of the molusc kingdom is mostly things as stupid as clams (literally). Cats and Octopi didn't inherit their brains from a common ancestor (Their last common ancestor didn't have much of a brain) - they developed it independently.
So if intelligence can develop multiple times, independently, that fits the idea that it's so generically useful that evolution will favor it whenever a mutation arises that assists it.
Humans took it a step further, and so far the evidence suggests nothing else has done so except under influence FROM humans (literally - when interacting with us, their brains are pushed to learn to think a bit more like ours) which is to become self-referential. It's not just that we're smart, it's that we can think about WHAT we think, think about HOW we think - and even come up with ways to do it more effectively - that seems to be unique. And we took it one step further yet again. We didn't end at inteligence - we developed EXTELIGENCE, the ability to store our thoughts outside ourselves where they could outlive us. The first tool for this was complex communication: speech, which made it possible to convey our thoughts to others, and store it in their memories. The next step was writing, and so on and so forth until the current peak of exteligence: the internet. Now these two things appear to be utterly unique to our species. We didn't just learn to use and make tools - but to share those techniques across societies, and allow others to improve on our progress over time. Since, here on earth, that looks like a uniquely human achievement - it's a lot harder to extrapolate that it will have happened elsewhere. At the same time - since it DID happen here at LEAST once - we cannot dismiss the possibility either. The odds of it being possible is 1. It has happened, therefore it is possible.
Mmm, not sure I agree. It would take 1300 years for the message to get there. Lets say there is somebody listening. We won't have any common language. Hell they may not even have anything we would recognize as our primary senses for communication (hearing and sight). There are many other senses (even humans have about 20 of them, we tend to forget that 'sense of ballance' is a sense). So we need to be on the generous level in how long it takes them to translate the language, even with advanced science they are starting at a major disadvantage. It took about a century to fully translate the Rosetta stone - and that was from earlier languages by members of our own species ! So lets double that. 200 years to figure out the question. Okay, then they have to send the answer back - which will take another 1300 years.
So that means it will take at least 2800 years to get an answer, and right now we have no idea if one will ever arrive at all !
I'm pretty sure our own Neutrino detection technology will advance fast enough that, by the time we receive those blueprints, they will already be obsolete since we'll have figured it out already. Hell in 2800 we may be busy building our own Dyson Sphere.
Except that I'm pretty sure nobody has made that claim. What has been said is: "What is being observed is consistent with a partially constructed dyson sphere, and thus far it is not consistent with any other explanation we've had".
Now it's possible that this recurrence will allow for more observations, allowing us to learn more - and narrow things down further. That could easily end up with "We're now quite certain that 1300 years ago there was a partially constructed Dyson sphere around Tabby's star". And the likely assumption that, right now, that sphere is complete (or the project failed and it was never pushed past halfway and there's just a few floating bits of scattered construction equipment now.
The thing is - until there is more evidence, even if something else fitted the observations the odds of it being a Dyson sphere is NO LOWER than that other thing. No, it really is not. We have absolute PROOF that intelligent life can exist in the universe. We have absolute proof that SPACEFARING life can exist in the universe. We have absolute physical proof that spacefaring life can CONSTRUCT things in space in the universe. The absolute proof is that we're here and we've done ALL THOSE THINGS. We've also had the theoretical design for a Dyson sphere for 40 years, we're a long way from building one but there is no theoretical reason whatsoever why, with sufficient technology, it could not be done.
So lets say the new observations STILL fit a Dyson Sphere in progress but ALSO fits a "weird meteor cloud" or something - you have absolutely no grounds to assume the weird meteor cloud is more likely - in fact it's less likely since we've got no evidence that such a meteor cloud can form, no theory for how it may have formed and no evidence for their existence.
Jumping to "There is alien life" would be a mistake, but jumping to "there is NOT alien life involved" is the EXACT SAME mistake.
Right now, the available evidence is consistent with one thing that would require alien life to exist, and not consistent with anything else. This may change - but right now the odds are, very slightly, in favor of aliens.
And the ONLY reason ALL THREE did NOT kill you is because of the warnings of the threats they hold - those warnings lead to interventions (some technological, some regulatory, some a combination of both) which changed the conditions and prevented them from happening.
When a scientist says "If X then Y" and you change X and Y doesn't happen - it makes the scientist RIGHT not wrong.
You can ONLY claim he was wrong if Y fails to happen after NOBODY DID ANYTHING ABOUT X.
Nobody just said "Acid rain will destroy all our crops" - they said "Acid rain is caused by polutants (and here follows a list of the biggest problems), and if we don't reduce or end those polutants then acid rain will cause severe damage" So we reduced those polutants - and acid rain was largely averted.
Scientists warned that CFCs were harming the Ozone layer which could have serious negative effects on human health, laws were made to ban CFCs, new technologies developed to replace them - and the problem was averted and eventually solved.
Scientists discovered a problem with the long habit in many computer designs of storing the century as a 2-digit number, a problem that would hit peak-damage as we moved into a new century. They warned. Huge numbers of technologists from engineers to sysadmins spent years working long hours to implement ways to avert the problem - by replacing hardware with models that did store 4-digit centuries, and upgrading software with 4-digit modifications. It paid off - the Y2K problem was almost entirely solved - among the worst of what did happened was one 102-year old lady who had to go to court to get permission to vote because the voting machines thought she was 2 years old.
These successes PROVE the validity of the 'doomsday' predictions. Those predictions aren't made out of schadenfreude. The people making them do not WANT those scenarios to happen. They aren't making them to scare you. They are making scientific predictions: if X then Y and asking that we change X so that Y does not happen. This history VALIDATES their approach - it proves that, given such warning, people ARE in fact capable of changing X and preventing Y and we've done it numerous times.
Oh dream on. The American military only EVER shows up to help in a disaster if there's money in it for American companies. Where the fuck were they when Mozambique flooded ?The South African military saved thousands of lives - America refused to show up, America has more helicoptes on a single aircraft carrier than the entire South African fleet private AND military COMBINED ! If America had heeded the Mozambiquan's begging for help - the death toll would have been 1% of what it ended up being.
I'd rather spend the money that goes to the military to decent rescue services, and it's entirely possible to have a deterrent without a standing Army. Sweden pulls it off perfectly - and even Hitler was too shitscared to invade them. How well did that massive American military work at scaring of the Japanese again ?
If you must have a defense do what Sweden does. Train everybody to fight, then take the guns away and lock them up. If you are ever invaded: that is when you hand them out and fight. Never outside your own borders. Never for anything but defense against an invasion already in progress. And result: nobody ever invades Sweden. Even Hitler was too scared to try.
Killimg is wrong whether done for duty, fun or profit. I would rather be defenseless than pay for a bullet that will most likely kill an innocent civilian.
Funny how normally - the rightwingers make the exact OPPOSITE argument. I actually agree that, generally, government should not be a la carte - you pay your taxes, you pay for the whole deal.
But I also understand that there are edge cases. Some things clearly people who don't like it just have to put up with. I want ZERO of my tax dollars to EVER go to the military - but I cannot demand that. A lot of rightwingers don't want any of their taxes going to rehab programs (or food stamps or whatever their issue is this week) - but they can't demand that either.
All we can both do is try to sway the government to our way of thinking through who we vote for every few years.
But then, some things are contentious edge cases - where there is genuine reason to believe that a large portion of the public want something different - why NOT ask the public then ? This falls into that category. You could argue the people are not educated enough to have a say - you've presented NO EVIDENCE WHATSOEVER to back that up, and in fact the evidence suggests otherwise since the previous citizen-version in November failed (the public, correctly, determined that it was too ambitious and thus likely to cause problems). This has big knock-on effects, it's not just about providing power - it's about a thousand other things the people have a legitimate interest in: their famous countryside (one of their biggest revenue sources) staying reasonably unspoilt for example. The people did not write this bill or this plan - when an ordinary citizen tried that it was shot down, this is a plan - prepared by the very same government experts you're so fond of and deemed, by them, to be viable. It's not IDENTICAL to the alternative, but it's viable - and they have different pros and cons. Not on the main topic - energy but on all the knock-on stuff.
Why NOT let the people choose between equivalent solutions that have different side effects and select the side effects the people are most happy to live with ?
Sweden didn't let the man in the street write their power designs - they offered the man in the street a viable alternative power design and asked them if they wanted it. That's a VERY different thing - arguably the sanest idea I have ever heard in fact.
But it IS tax money being spent and that means it's THEIR (the voter's) money - the government believed there was contention about how the energy part of that budget was spent - gave the voters the option to weigh in on spending priorities and must now honor their decision.
If voters would rather be funding solar than nuclear - then that's their right because it's done with their money.
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Calling them intelligent is mild. You know their actual scientific translates as "the wise man"... arrogant much ?
We may be, on occasion, intelligent but wisdom is the single rarest attribute you'll ever observe in us. It occurs sometimes, once in a century or so - but it's hardly an attribute of the species. It's an attribute that, very rarely, a single member of the species may briefly acquire.
>We have a single instance of intelligent life, some hints that single cellular life is fairly common, and that's it.
We've also found life in every environment we've looked, no matter how inhospitable it seems. Life lives everywhere it can't.
And intelligence is such a generic trick that it has independently evolved multiple times on earth. You mean we have a single example of technologically advanced life, that's not the same thing as intelligent life. Octopi are intelligent life. And I'm prepared to bet the only thing Octopi need to be as technologically advanced as us is the right evolutionary survival pressures and time.
>Throw in the many-worlds hypothesis and multi-cellular life culminating in intelligence may be an event that occurs with a frequency of much less than once per universe, we simply don't have the data to make a meaningful prediction
That's a silly question. The entire universe is setup so life can evolve - it's the inverse of the anthropic principle though - life exists BECAUSE that is the kind of universe this is. But to assume that only once did that universal set of coincidences succeed is to bet on impossible odds. It smacks of religiosity. Even string theory predicts that universes that can support life are an inevitable occurrence.
>Claiming a second instance is a very extraordinary claim.
Claiming that a second instance must be an extraordinary claim is the most extraordinary claim imaginable.
>More than that, a civilization capable of building a Dyson sphere in visual range would bring up a lot of awkward questions concerning the Fermi paradox
Forget the Fermi paradox, it's idiotic. The biggest stain on the man's career. For starters - the 'paradox' may not even be true - who says we HAVEN'T found a signal from another civilization ? Odds are if we did we wouldn't have known it - because the chances that their methods of communication are even recognizable as such by us are vanishingly small. Communication develops from biology - we have no reason to assume that another civilization would have senses like hearing or sight or if they do that their communication would be based on that. This being the case for most (not all) earthbound species is a result of the specific conditions on earth favoring them in evolution - nothing about that can be extrapolated. A civilization far more advanced than us could communicate entirely by pheromones - or some process we've never encountered or imagined.
More-over - if this is a Dyson sphere they did NOT happen 'at the same time' - that star is 1300 light years away. That means what we're seeing now was 1300 years ago. There are plenty of starts within 10 light years of us - do you really think we'd head to somewhere 1300 light years away before we do those ? It's quite far enough that they could well have explored nearby stars without ever coming near us. If they are seeing us- they would see virtually no evidence that this planet is inhabited. None of the things we did which may be recognizable evidence of technologically advanced life even EXISTED 1300 years ago. We did most of them in just the last 70 years. Even if they have sufficient technology to peer through our atmosphere - they are watching the VIkings raid England - there is nothing there to make them think we're worth visiting - a primitive, violent species with nothing worth trading.
>Did we just happen to pop up in the same cosmic instant as they finished that structure but before they expanded?
The structure is NOT finished - Observations fit a Dyson sphere under construction - not a completed one. Now it's possible that by now it is done, but that's not what we're seeing. It's just as possible that they went extinct before it was completed. Life is amazingly resilient, species are terrible fragile. Or hell they got halfway and ran out of money - it's happened to some pretty prestigious projects we've done. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
And for all you know - they ARE our ancestors. Cosmic seeding is a legitimate hypotheses.
You give way too much credence to Fermi and not nearly enough to Drake.
Its not an extraordinary claim bevause we already have absolute proof that life can and do exist in this universe.
Our not finding it is likely more of a testament to how limited our looking is tgan to life's abundance. The evidence from earth us life lives everywhere it can't
I have not tried those... but I am willing to bet it does.
A thousand years ago economic rationality meant something utterly different to what it means now. Multiple utterly different things in fact - what it meant to Aztecs has nothing in common with what it meant in Europe and neither had any resemblence to ours.
You cannot predict what it will mean in another thousand years.
Well that or we have to build it really, really thin....
Or, since matter can be converted into energy and vice versa - why not build the Dyson sphere out of matter made from solar energy ?
The thing is, we're talking thousands of years in the future. There is hardly a piece of technology in your life that wouldn't have been deemed impossible - even magical - just a century ago. Now imagine what it would look like to an Aztec ? To a Roman ?
We have no way of predicting what will be possible in a thousand years.
Only Americans try that. If you want good service in Paris - the answer is really easy, don't speak English.
It doesn't matter what you DO speak - as long as it's not English.
Parisian waiters are the most polite and courteous in the world - to anybody who speaks any language other than English. They will spend however much time they need to understand what you wish to order, as long as it's not being done in English.
Once you've confirmed that you speak a language other than English - you can then switch to it if it's your only common tongue with no repercussion - you just need to prove you're neither British nor American.
I didn't claim it does - in fact I addressed that in the very next line which you conveniently ignored.
There's a problem with that - you haven't explained the weird part. The weird part isn't the regularity, plenty of things orbit regularly. The weird part is that we can't see it. Every natural object we know off would, when absorbing light, heat up. 20% of a star's light output it s about 30 megafucktons (to use the proper metric unit) of photons. That will make that thing really hot, we'd be able to see that heat pattern.
Now perhaps we WILL see a heat pattern if we look with more telescopes now - but we've not seen one before. One possible explanation for whatever's blocking the light not heating up - is if that energy is instead being turned into something other than heat, like kinetic or electrical energy. That fits the dyson-sphere idea, but nothing we know of in nature.
I don't think we have enough information to rule it out, and it DOES fit the observed evidence. We don't have enough information to confirm it either - hopefully more information will let us settle on an answer.
And we don't need evidence of extraterestrial life to be forced to consider it a possibility - we have evidence of life in this universe. That alone proves that life is possible in this universe.
Crap. Yeah. You're right. The asswipes all look the same to me.
I don't know, those United guys seem to have pretty fast fists.
>No, but odds are good that it's possible, since intelligence is useful for all kinds of tasks.
Not to mention that intelligence has all the earmarks of an evolutionary universal - a generic trick independently evolved several times. Octopi are as smart as cats - and the rest of the molusc kingdom is mostly things as stupid as clams (literally). Cats and Octopi didn't inherit their brains from a common ancestor (Their last common ancestor didn't have much of a brain) - they developed it independently.
So if intelligence can develop multiple times, independently, that fits the idea that it's so generically useful that evolution will favor it whenever a mutation arises that assists it.
Humans took it a step further, and so far the evidence suggests nothing else has done so except under influence FROM humans (literally - when interacting with us, their brains are pushed to learn to think a bit more like ours) which is to become self-referential. It's not just that we're smart, it's that we can think about WHAT we think, think about HOW we think - and even come up with ways to do it more effectively - that seems to be unique. And we took it one step further yet again. We didn't end at inteligence - we developed EXTELIGENCE, the ability to store our thoughts outside ourselves where they could outlive us. The first tool for this was complex communication: speech, which made it possible to convey our thoughts to others, and store it in their memories. The next step was writing, and so on and so forth until the current peak of exteligence: the internet.
Now these two things appear to be utterly unique to our species. We didn't just learn to use and make tools - but to share those techniques across societies, and allow others to improve on our progress over time. Since, here on earth, that looks like a uniquely human achievement - it's a lot harder to extrapolate that it will have happened elsewhere. At the same time - since it DID happen here at LEAST once - we cannot dismiss the possibility either. The odds of it being possible is 1. It has happened, therefore it is possible.
Mmm, not sure I agree.
It would take 1300 years for the message to get there.
Lets say there is somebody listening. We won't have any common language. Hell they may not even have anything we would recognize as our primary senses for communication (hearing and sight). There are many other senses (even humans have about 20 of them, we tend to forget that 'sense of ballance' is a sense).
So we need to be on the generous level in how long it takes them to translate the language, even with advanced science they are starting at a major disadvantage. It took about a century to fully translate the Rosetta stone - and that was from earlier languages by members of our own species ! So lets double that. 200 years to figure out the question.
Okay, then they have to send the answer back - which will take another 1300 years.
So that means it will take at least 2800 years to get an answer, and right now we have no idea if one will ever arrive at all !
I'm pretty sure our own Neutrino detection technology will advance fast enough that, by the time we receive those blueprints, they will already be obsolete since we'll have figured it out already. Hell in 2800 we may be busy building our own Dyson Sphere.
Except that I'm pretty sure nobody has made that claim.
What has been said is: "What is being observed is consistent with a partially constructed dyson sphere, and thus far it is not consistent with any other explanation we've had".
Now it's possible that this recurrence will allow for more observations, allowing us to learn more - and narrow things down further. That could easily end up with "We're now quite certain that 1300 years ago there was a partially constructed Dyson sphere around Tabby's star". And the likely assumption that, right now, that sphere is complete (or the project failed and it was never pushed past halfway and there's just a few floating bits of scattered construction equipment now.
The thing is - until there is more evidence, even if something else fitted the observations the odds of it being a Dyson sphere is NO LOWER than that other thing. No, it really is not. We have absolute PROOF that intelligent life can exist in the universe. We have absolute proof that SPACEFARING life can exist in the universe. We have absolute physical proof that spacefaring life can CONSTRUCT things in space in the universe.
The absolute proof is that we're here and we've done ALL THOSE THINGS. We've also had the theoretical design for a Dyson sphere for 40 years, we're a long way from building one but there is no theoretical reason whatsoever why, with sufficient technology, it could not be done.
So lets say the new observations STILL fit a Dyson Sphere in progress but ALSO fits a "weird meteor cloud" or something - you have absolutely no grounds to assume the weird meteor cloud is more likely - in fact it's less likely since we've got no evidence that such a meteor cloud can form, no theory for how it may have formed and no evidence for their existence.
Jumping to "There is alien life" would be a mistake, but jumping to "there is NOT alien life involved" is the EXACT SAME mistake.
Right now, the available evidence is consistent with one thing that would require alien life to exist, and not consistent with anything else. This may change - but right now the odds are, very slightly, in favor of aliens.
Oh crud. Yes, yes I did. Must be getting old.
And the ONLY reason ALL THREE did NOT kill you is because of the warnings of the threats they hold - those warnings lead to interventions (some technological, some regulatory, some a combination of both) which changed the conditions and prevented them from happening.
When a scientist says "If X then Y" and you change X and Y doesn't happen - it makes the scientist RIGHT not wrong.
You can ONLY claim he was wrong if Y fails to happen after NOBODY DID ANYTHING ABOUT X.
Nobody just said "Acid rain will destroy all our crops" - they said "Acid rain is caused by polutants (and here follows a list of the biggest problems), and if we don't reduce or end those polutants then acid rain will cause severe damage"
So we reduced those polutants - and acid rain was largely averted.
Scientists warned that CFCs were harming the Ozone layer which could have serious negative effects on human health, laws were made to ban CFCs, new technologies developed to replace them - and the problem was averted and eventually solved.
Scientists discovered a problem with the long habit in many computer designs of storing the century as a 2-digit number, a problem that would hit peak-damage as we moved into a new century. They warned. Huge numbers of technologists from engineers to sysadmins spent years working long hours to implement ways to avert the problem - by replacing hardware with models that did store 4-digit centuries, and upgrading software with 4-digit modifications. It paid off - the Y2K problem was almost entirely solved - among the worst of what did happened was one 102-year old lady who had to go to court to get permission to vote because the voting machines thought she was 2 years old.
These successes PROVE the validity of the 'doomsday' predictions. Those predictions aren't made out of schadenfreude. The people making them do not WANT those scenarios to happen. They aren't making them to scare you. They are making scientific predictions: if X then Y and asking that we change X so that Y does not happen.
This history VALIDATES their approach - it proves that, given such warning, people ARE in fact capable of changing X and preventing Y and we've done it numerous times.
If you're beating the average driver you're cutting accidents in half.
How many of them do you think *own* the rigs they drive ? Because it's incredibly few.
And don't forget - if you choose NOT to freeze to death, Jeff Sessions believes that's grounds for firing you !
Oh dream on. The American military only EVER shows up to help in a disaster if there's money in it for American companies. Where the fuck were they when Mozambique flooded ?The South African military saved thousands of lives - America refused to show up, America has more helicoptes on a single aircraft carrier than the entire South African fleet private AND military COMBINED ! If America had heeded the Mozambiquan's begging for help - the death toll would have been 1% of what it ended up being.
I'd rather spend the money that goes to the military to decent rescue services, and it's entirely possible to have a deterrent without a standing Army. Sweden pulls it off perfectly - and even Hitler was too shitscared to invade them. How well did that massive American military work at scaring of the Japanese again ?
Killing the "bad guy" is still murder.
If you must have a defense do what Sweden does. Train everybody to fight, then take the guns away and lock them up. If you are ever invaded: that is when you hand them out and fight. Never outside your own borders. Never for anything but defense against an invasion already in progress.
And result: nobody ever invades Sweden. Even Hitler was too scared to try.
Killimg is wrong whether done for duty, fun or profit.
I would rather be defenseless than pay for a bullet that will most likely kill an innocent civilian.
Funny how normally - the rightwingers make the exact OPPOSITE argument.
I actually agree that, generally, government should not be a la carte - you pay your taxes, you pay for the whole deal.
But I also understand that there are edge cases. Some things clearly people who don't like it just have to put up with. I want ZERO of my tax dollars to EVER go to the military - but I cannot demand that. A lot of rightwingers don't want any of their taxes going to rehab programs (or food stamps or whatever their issue is this week) - but they can't demand that either.
All we can both do is try to sway the government to our way of thinking through who we vote for every few years.
But then, some things are contentious edge cases - where there is genuine reason to believe that a large portion of the public want something different - why NOT ask the public then ?
This falls into that category. You could argue the people are not educated enough to have a say - you've presented NO EVIDENCE WHATSOEVER to back that up, and in fact the evidence suggests otherwise since the previous citizen-version in November failed (the public, correctly, determined that it was too ambitious and thus likely to cause problems).
This has big knock-on effects, it's not just about providing power - it's about a thousand other things the people have a legitimate interest in: their famous countryside (one of their biggest revenue sources) staying reasonably unspoilt for example.
The people did not write this bill or this plan - when an ordinary citizen tried that it was shot down, this is a plan - prepared by the very same government experts you're so fond of and deemed, by them, to be viable. It's not IDENTICAL to the alternative, but it's viable - and they have different pros and cons. Not on the main topic - energy but on all the knock-on stuff.
Why NOT let the people choose between equivalent solutions that have different side effects and select the side effects the people are most happy to live with ?
Sweden didn't let the man in the street write their power designs - they offered the man in the street a viable alternative power design and asked them if they wanted it. That's a VERY different thing - arguably the sanest idea I have ever heard in fact.
Oh and you know - Andalusia, Spain between 1920 and 1940...
But it IS tax money being spent and that means it's THEIR (the voter's) money - the government believed there was contention about how the energy part of that budget was spent - gave the voters the option to weigh in on spending priorities and must now honor their decision.
If voters would rather be funding solar than nuclear - then that's their right because it's done with their money.