>Typhoons and earthquakes are a matter of picking a stable locaction. In this scenario - there is no such thing, and even if there was - you can't know WHERE it would be. Hint: it won't be anywhere that's stable NOW. We're talking about events that can move CONTINENTS around, Hell there are events on the list that can CREATE new continents !
>Tell me again, what is the largest volcano in the solar system? You don't need to build near that - on earth you can't AVOID it. A volcanic superplume could turn cover ANYWHERE in magma.
>There is no drinkable water on Mars. Period. Full stop. There's plenty of evidence of water on Mars, it may not be drinkable but it can be MADE drinkable. You can't be sure there will be any water on earth in an ELE scenario - full stop. Or whats there could be irradiated and frozen solid. At best this one is a tie.
>Which sounds like a non-starter for your colony. The colony doesn't HAVE to be self sustainable - it has to be MARS sustainable, that's a much easier target. Not easy - but easier.
>Neither can your colony. I can still rely on ore and other local resources. You can't GET to the ones on earth.
>After an ELE, we're not particularly worried about environmental impact. So we can just toss the waste out a hatch. You're assuming you can survive opening a hatch. Not an assumption that is safe, or even likely. Besides - I wasn't worried about environmental impact - I was worried about your bunker dwellers dying from radiation sickness.
>You don't need potable water to cool a reactor In this scenario water is too scarce for ANY to be deemed non-potable. You have recycle every drop - and the best systems we have for that leaves nothing to spare for non-essentials. You sure can't go making the stuff radioactive.
>How are you planning to cool a reactor on Mars again? On Mars - you can use solar power. As the man-made tools on Mars ALREADY DO. Sure they don't work as well as on earth - but they DO work. After an ELE they won't work on Earth.
>You have less sunlight that Earth would have. No - in a nuclear winter scenario - you have maybe 5% of the sunlight you're used to - if that much. Last I checked 50% is more than 5%.
Oh -and I was the one who suggested we do the Moon over Mars - because it makes sense to start where it's a bit easier.
>My vault dwellers can go out and collect far more resources than your colonies Can they do that on Venus ? No ? Then no.
>Not as cold as Mars. Which is sub-antarctic temperatures every single day. No - colder than that - continuously for decades, perhaps centuries, at least one Mars it's not PERMANENTLY sub-zero.
>I guess you're screwed on Mars. Because the soil on Mars already is already toxic. A Mars colony would need a way to extract and add to the water supply - in an ELE there are potentially ZERO options for this on earth, but it's one of the first things we'd figure out before attempting Mars, in fact we'd have automated systems already having done so for some time before we land humans. At best- another tie.
>And you have to deal with radiation every day because there is no magnetosphere. We're already pretty good at this - we deal with it in space travel all the time.
>Every single objection to a bunker applies to your colony Nope - quite a few are harder. But there's no risk of an earthbound asteroid scoring a direct hit on a colony. More critically - colonizing is a PROVEN way for mankind to increase it's resilience, we've been using it for a hundred thousand years. Bunkering down is a proven way to destroy societies -every one that's tried THAT is extinct.
> If we are betting on the survival of the human race, then on a dollar for dollar basis, which plan makes more sense? If ever there was a question where money should not be a consideration - this is that question. The COST is not a factor you should care about. But even if you do - and even if Mars will cost more (ho
Okay -first lets consider the conditions we want it to survive. It needs to be proof against storms that make the worst typhoons we've ever seen look like sprightly breeze. It needs to be proof against volcanoes far beyond anything we've ever seen. Proof against earthquakes a hundred times as big as the highest point on the Richter scale. Actually just take conditions on Venus and make it proof against that. Venus was once as habitable as Earth by the way - so it's a good model for what a post ELE earth may look like. In case you were wondering- the technology to build this bunker doesn't exist - and it's not certain it's even possible to develop it. On Mars - you don't have to worry about any of those things.
Next point: survival - your bunker cannot rely on ANY outside resources, it needs to be an entirely self-sustaining environment. You don't know that there will BE drinkable water afterwards. In fact, you cannot even assume SUNLIGHT is available - the vast majority of ELE's involve decades or even centuries without the sun. We tried to build a self-sustaining environment in the 1990s - it was called Biosphere 2, it was a complete disaster. And that was EASY - because it was allowed to replace broken equipment from outside and it had sunlight. Now you have none, and any parts that break - if you can't manufacture a replacement INSIDE the bunker - you don't have it anymore. So you need a whole lot of manufacturing capacity, and a whole lot of raw materials kept spare, and you need to feed the people - that means growing crops. With no sunlight - so that means you need electric lighting, and you have no outside energy sources. Your only real options is to build it on the shoreline for tidal power (problem for making it Tsunami proof) or somewhere there's geothermal (the LAST place you want to be is anywhere geologically active enough to power it). You can't even do nuclear - you have no way to dispose of the waste, no source of new nuclear fuel - and you can't spare the water to cool it, in fact any system that relies on boiling water to generate power is right out - and you'll need a LOT of power, because you have no other options for heating it in there and trust me, it's going to get very, very cold. If your soil gets overplanted - you're screwed because you can't know the soil outside isn't toxic or radioactive.
Basically - you want to build something that is probably completely impossible.
Now of course, a colony will have some of the same challenges - but it does NOT have to be completely sealed off from the outside world, it does not have to function without even SUNLIGHT, it has access to external resources for raw materials and soil. It will be difficult, extremely so - nobody doubts that. But unlike your bunker - it's actually within the realm of conceivable possibility.
Nothing we can do in the next few centuries (perhaps millennia) would - but that's not the point, the point is that there are threats we are unable to stop. But we can defend our species against at least some of them by spreading to more worlds.
Of course that's not the first choice - giant rock comes hurling, we let it hit and repopulate the earth from a colony a few decades later when it's possible is an absolute last resort idea. It means sacrificing billions of lives - we should definitely not take that approach if there is any way in hell of stopping that thing. But that may not be possible. There are things we can do to increase the odds. Better early warning systems are crucial - the further out we detect a problem rock the less energy you need to shift it's path enough to prevent a collision - the closer it gets the more difficult it becomes. Destroying one - while popular in movies- is perhaps the least practical of the options we may explore. It's a lot easier to redirect a giant rock than to blow it into harmless pieces.
Even then, there are things that could wipe us out we have no real way to control. A volcanic superplume could easily lead to the extinction of human life on earth - it's as bad as the biggest rocks the universe has (and some studies suggest they have a nasty habit of happening together) - and there is nothing in our technological arsenal that can stop one of those. We can't even stop an ordinary volcano that wants to blow it's top, let alone thousands of them blowing at once... And we know that can happen because it HAS happened before (not in the time we humans have been here - but more than once in the past before us).
Spreading out is a key part of human survival - we spread over the entire planet because that's in our genes, it's how we ensured our survival. There's archeological evidence that at least three settlements in modern day yemen died out before the one which succeeded and ultimately spread out to Europe and Asia and the Americas. It's HARD to spread beyond where you have been comfortable, leaving Africa was a painful process that cost great effort and many lives - but ultimately, we as a species were more resilient for it. That's how I see planetary colonization - it's the next step in what has been a driving force of human evolution for as long as there has been something you could call human. The earliest known proper human fossils are about a hundred thousand years old - in Ethiopia. There are fossils and artifacts from proper human settlement in caves of Cape Point that date from 95-thousand years ago. In just five-thousand years we spread across the entire continent of Africa - Africa is HUGE, you could fit all of North America (So USA, Canada and half of Mexico) into it four times over ! It's who we are. And it's the best chance we have of there being an us to be who we are.
Your calculation would be correct if you bought a house there, made improvements and sold to make a profit - solar rooftiles, not a good choice to put among those improvements.
But that ROI is the combined factor of all benefits. It's the saving in your energy bills while you live there plus every other advantage mentioned above plus whatever value increase there is in your house. True that value increase is likely to be depressed in that neighbourhood and it's may be less than the cost of the install - but you aren't looking ONLY at the sale point to make a return. If you live there ten years, you have ten years of use out of them - and still make a bunch of the money back on sale.
Two years ago I bought a house in a similar neighbourhood for 850K ZAR. I made about 100KZAR in improvements, some of them premium things like high grade galvanized iron security fencing. I just sold it for 1-million ZAR. There was about 821K left on the bond so total profit of about 80K ZAR - which is really not bad for just 2 years, and that's without factoring in that I got to USE those improvements for 2 years. For 2 years that fence let me not worry about my family while I'm out at work. For 2 years I could park safely in the secure car park I built. For 2 years I could free up room in the house by keeping the laundry in the outhouse I added. All in all - the REAL profit if you work out what these comforts were worth - is more like 150K ZAR - which is really, really good for a 2 year investment (it's 15% actually) - and my improvements made it so sought after that I sold it on the very first day I started marketing for MORE than my asking price (I was wanting 950K - getting more than your asking price is unheard of here - somebody actually offered me more just to give him first option for 24 hours !). I also had another property where I did damn near nothing, I just bought it cheap in a very wealthy area a few years ago, sold it as well - for a profit that was almost 80% of the original sale price (I bought it for 450K and just sold it after 6 years for 840K). Even after fees and taxes I made enough to put down a deposit on a fantastic 4 bedroom double-story practically-a-mansion in an area with fibre, close to work where my family could live in luxury for the next several decades.
It's easy to make money from property - but you do need to know how to do the maths right.
So what do you think of the particular ethics rules that CloudFlare is citing in this case ? Do you agree that it's a good rule ? That there should be a distinction between the attorney and the client ? It seems to make sense to me that a lawyer should not buy a stake in his client's case - for various reasons. Some types of trade should, rightly, be restricted - just like it shouldn't be legal for me to be allowed to take out fire insurance on your house, it would create too great an incentive for me to burn your house down.
But then, you're the lawyer so I'm interested in your views. If you think this particular rule is bad, I would love to know why you think so, and how you would imagine it could be improved ?
Having said all that - WHY do you think humans have proven so resilient? Because we're good at adapting the environment to ourselves. That's also why we COULD survive an event like that, by having people who have adapted environments to themselves where the event did NOT occur.
That's entirely a matter of perspective. You're thinking in human time - and that's sily here. You need to look at deep time - and you'll find that very bloody frequently life on earth has had to start over from a few scraps. Life is incredibly resilient says the fossil record, but species aren't. Sheer, dumb, random luck determines what survives the next extinction level event. One day you're at the top of the food chain, the next day the corpses of your entire species are being nibbled on by shrew like creatures whose descendents will rule the world one day - however briefly.
By the way - the average lifespan of a species is about 10-million years. We're already at the average and depending how you define 'human' we're at ten times the average. Don't feel cheered though - the odds of a species continuing actually DECLINES the further past the average they go. It's not a promise of future success - it shows how well adapted you are to the world thus far, the whole point of an ELE is that it completely and utterly changes what counts as 'well adapted'. It's entirely possible that the next ELE will leave nothing alive but a single species of extremeophile bacteria around an undersea volcanic vent somewhere.
That's only useful for extinction causing things we can actually do something about. Just what exactly is your plan for dealing with a direct hit from a Gamma-Ray burst ? One of those would sterilise everything on earth it doesn't kill, it would pass right through the planet so you wouldn't even be safe at the bottom of a mine - and they travel at the speed of light to so the laws of physics actually declare it impossible to build a warning system for them. You can NEVER get a warning to earth faster than the thing you're warning about gets there.
Most scientists are quite sure that the former is the easier one of the two- because there's time. We can build that colony over a matter of years before the first humans even arrive. If we actually hit an extinction level event on earth - we're unlikely to have very much warning. 5 years at most (and more likely much less than that). A volcanic superplume would make earth unlivable for anything like us for many years. There's no TIME to develop survival technologies in.
A colony - they would already HAVE their survival technologies.
The history of earth is one of mass extinctions and life starting over with whatever scraps are left. That could be a few extremophile bacteria and life will go on. But any particular species has very little chance. You used the K/T event - but that wasn't even all that dramatic an extinction. The Permian/Triassic extinction wiped out 97% of all the species on the planet at the time. It wasn't evolutionary advantage that made the difference for the other 3% - it was dumb, random luck.
1) Living on the moon is not the same as VISITING the moon. I was talking about colonies. Colonization requires radically new technology we've not done before - but we would be able to reuse a lot of the tech we build for colonizing the moon to colonize mars later.
2) Only a factor if you think it's critical the colony trade with earth from natural resources. Not really a factor if the major point of the colony is to exist - colonists can always trade with each other, and they'll certainly develop other things to trade with us later.
3) You're wrong about how space works. There's a reason we say "low earth orbit is halfway to anywhere" - once you're in orbit the cost of changing orbit is relatively low compared to the massive cost of getting into orbit. Mars may be closer to the asteroid belt but I'm willing to bet it's actually cheaper to mine them with launches off the moon. You can't launch from Mars for anywhere close to how cheaply you can do it from the lunar surface.
4) Erm - my whole point was to ask why that would be ? There is basically nothing that the moon lacks which Mars does not also lack. You cannot answer me questioning an assumption by restating that same assumption without providing any new information.
5) And if you understand why that is true, you understand why you're wrong in number 3. But it DOES take a lot less energy to LAND on the moon than on Mars - you have a much smaller gravitational force to overcome with your slow-down actions. And it takes a GREAT deal less to get back up again (whether to mine an asteroid, ship trading goods to earth or whatever). A colony means landing a great deal of extremely heavy things - the kind of things parachutes aren't much help with (and the thin Atmosphere on Mars makes them only a little useful anyway) - it's going to be mostly rocket-braking to land anything safely. The moon is a MUCH easier target for that.
None of those meet the reason why colonizing elsewhere is a good idea: so that the next time the universe throws a giant rock at earth this isn't the only place in the universe where humans exist.
It's important to protect this planet, it will be home to the vast majority of humans for the foreseeable future. We should not destroy our home. But there are things we cannot protect against. The planet wil be fine. Life will bounce back. It probably won't include us. The only defense around that is to live in more places than earth.
That said - I'm not sure what makes Mars more attractive than the moon for a first colony. Most of the difficulties about living on the Moon are present on Mars as well - and it's a lot easier to get to. More-over, if we do build a permanent settlement there - with launch capability, then suddenly further expansion becomes a great deal cheaper. You need a lot less fuel to launch from the moon than from earth since the gravity is way lower and there's no atmospheric drag.
Trump is fairly well convinced that if he sits down other people call that 'nighttime'. In his mind, the sun shines out of his own gigantic, wrinkled asshole.
It's worth remembering one of the few things that Trump has repeatedly said which I believe (Indeed I am utterly convinced it is the unadulterated truth): the he thinks Andrew Jackson was his favorite past president.
Nevermind that a lot of what he thinks he knows ABOUT Jackson is plain old bullshit, I believe him when he says that Jackson is his favorite past president.
A genocidal maniac ? Yep, Trump would LOVE to be that. The question is whether the USA will let him.
The only dem who can't admit that is Hillary Rodham Clinton and she's been getting blasted throughout even far-left publications like New Republic over that. The left in general is adamant that while Comey certainly made things worse - her campaign was terrible, she was a terrible candidate (above all - she didn't inspire or represent the base of her own party) and that she made a series of incredibly stupid blunders: like failing to campaign in the rust belt. Sure Russia deserves a bit of blame, Comey deserves a bit of blame but the bulk of the blame and ALL the responsibility lies with Clinton. Here's hoping that this fuckup finally gets the dems to slowly start to realize that their survival depends on actually BEING a leftwing party whom the liberal majority will bother to show up at the polls for. The base is energized, they want to fight back -they want to end the current republican monoparty government - all they need to do so is inspiring, leftwing, candidates who represent them. And Sanders/Warren (or better yet Warren/Sanders) in 2020.
Well, the thing is - it's difficult to know if Trump really lies per se. One definition of "lie" is to tell something inconsistent with observable reality - Trump does that all the time. But the other (the one that applies in courts for example) is to tell something inconsistent with what you sincerely believe the truth to be (or to put it in legal terms 'to the best of your knowledge').
Trump may not be violating the latter in fact - it's just that his sincere beliefs, the best of his knowledge, bares no resemblance whatsoever to observable reality or, for that matter, to what he sincerely believed an hour ago.
All of which would have justified a firing - in the first few weeks of the Trump administration. NOT in the middle an investigation of the very same man who now fired him - and DEFINITELY not a mere 48 hours after he requested additional resources for that same investigation.
The simple answer is that Comey was idiotic in how he handled the public relations aspect of investigating politicians - and Trump loved this when it played against his election opponent. But Comey, for all his stupidity, was even-handed, and Trump hated that when it was HIM being investigated.
The real kicker is going to be who Trump appoints in his stead. Somehow I doubt it will be a beloved and respected law enforcement officer with a history of investigating powerful elites without fear or favor. If it's Chris Christie (as is being rumoured) then democracy in America is, frankly, fucked.
I wouldn't know as I don't watch any cable news. I prefer to get my news in written form - where there is a lot more space and it allows for a great deal more nuance - and I try to limit my consumption to publications that abide by old-fashioned journalistic ethics standards which preclude making claims without verification and a name big enough that there is a reasonable chance they'll get sued if they deliberately make stuff up. Even then I know that they will still, sometimes, make embarrassing mistakes - but at least I can be somewhat confident those mistakes won't be deliberate attempts at deception.
>It's hard to find solid analysis, instead it's all hysterical In the case of this particular bill - I've read several dozen analysis and trust me - the hysteria is entirely warranted. More critically - you can't blame the media for the fact that analysis was slow-coming - that was directly caused by the republicans rushing the bill through congress (they did not even let the CBO have time to analise it) and flat out lying about what is in the bill - let alone it's likely consequences. It's hard to do analysis when a bill is being rushed through congress faster than even the congressmen can read it and those pushing it are flagrantly and openly lying about what is in it. After-the-fact analysis is the only option left. https://newrepublic.com/articl... Then again last week I was reading a Trump supporter defending the bill and basically next to every tax cut in it he concluded 'likely to increase insurance participation' - because apparently he sincerely believes that when rich people pay less taxes poor people can afford insurance more easily. I never did quite figure out how he came to the conclusion that regressive tax cuts gives money to POOR people, but he was quite adamant that he believes it.
In the end though my personal opinion is that those who dismiss the entire thing are wrong. Those who say "all the politicians are bought and sold", who speak of "republicrats" - they are wrong. Sure NEARLY all politicians are bought and sold - but the few who aren't (Warren, Sanders et all) - they're all on the same side. The last one the republicans had was Ron Paul and he's long gone. But more importantly - even the rest are not bought and sold by the SAME PEOPLE. So there is still value in voting right now - because you can vote for the ones who are bought by the rich people whose interests most closely align with your own. That's far from getting to vote for what YOU believe in - but it's not as bad as those people make out either, and it doesn't make voting completely useless.
More critically - the bad laws that allow this full scale plutocratic selling of laws to exist, can only be fixed by the government - and the only way to force them to do that is at the ballot box. And, once again, the few there who will drive finance reform laws are all in the same party, what voters can do in 2018 -is to give them a MUCH BIGGER TEAM. There are maybe 5 of them now, we need enough to pass a bill that every other member of both houses will hate.
That was just a list of a few representative samples. And there is no conspiracy theory here- nobody thinks they are conspiring to rule the country. They are just DOING it - by buying laws.
>Well, actually, they did want that lol. They specifically only allowed land-owners to vote. Actually no - that was not the intent of that restriction, and they FEARED that an aristocracy would arise and took steps to PREVENT just that. Jefferson for example instituted the estate tax specifically to try and prevent that.
Slashdot Mirror
Anything that's not INSIDE your bunker... doesn't exist.
>Typhoons and earthquakes are a matter of picking a stable locaction.
In this scenario - there is no such thing, and even if there was - you can't know WHERE it would be. Hint: it won't be anywhere that's stable NOW. We're talking about events that can move CONTINENTS around, Hell there are events on the list that can CREATE new continents !
>Tell me again, what is the largest volcano in the solar system?
You don't need to build near that - on earth you can't AVOID it. A volcanic superplume could turn cover ANYWHERE in magma.
>There is no drinkable water on Mars. Period. Full stop.
There's plenty of evidence of water on Mars, it may not be drinkable but it can be MADE drinkable. You can't be sure there will be any water on earth in an ELE scenario - full stop. Or whats there could be irradiated and frozen solid. At best this one is a tie.
>Which sounds like a non-starter for your colony.
The colony doesn't HAVE to be self sustainable - it has to be MARS sustainable, that's a much easier target. Not easy - but easier.
>Neither can your colony.
I can still rely on ore and other local resources. You can't GET to the ones on earth.
>After an ELE, we're not particularly worried about environmental impact. So we can just toss the waste out a hatch.
You're assuming you can survive opening a hatch. Not an assumption that is safe, or even likely. Besides - I wasn't worried about environmental impact - I was worried about your bunker dwellers dying from radiation sickness.
>You don't need potable water to cool a reactor
In this scenario water is too scarce for ANY to be deemed non-potable. You have recycle every drop - and the best systems we have for that leaves nothing to spare for non-essentials. You sure can't go making the stuff radioactive.
>How are you planning to cool a reactor on Mars again?
On Mars - you can use solar power. As the man-made tools on Mars ALREADY DO. Sure they don't work as well as on earth - but they DO work. After an ELE they won't work on Earth.
>You have less sunlight that Earth would have.
No - in a nuclear winter scenario - you have maybe 5% of the sunlight you're used to - if that much. Last I checked 50% is more than 5%.
Oh -and I was the one who suggested we do the Moon over Mars - because it makes sense to start where it's a bit easier.
>My vault dwellers can go out and collect far more resources than your colonies
Can they do that on Venus ? No ? Then no.
>Not as cold as Mars. Which is sub-antarctic temperatures every single day.
No - colder than that - continuously for decades, perhaps centuries, at least one Mars it's not PERMANENTLY sub-zero.
>I guess you're screwed on Mars. Because the soil on Mars already is already toxic.
A Mars colony would need a way to extract and add to the water supply - in an ELE there are potentially ZERO options for this on earth, but it's one of the first things we'd figure out before attempting Mars, in fact we'd have automated systems already having done so for some time before we land humans. At best- another tie.
>And you have to deal with radiation every day because there is no magnetosphere.
We're already pretty good at this - we deal with it in space travel all the time.
>Every single objection to a bunker applies to your colony
Nope - quite a few are harder. But there's no risk of an earthbound asteroid scoring a direct hit on a colony. More critically - colonizing is a PROVEN way for mankind to increase it's resilience, we've been using it for a hundred thousand years. Bunkering down is a proven way to destroy societies -every one that's tried THAT is extinct.
> If we are betting on the survival of the human race, then on a dollar for dollar basis, which plan makes more sense?
If ever there was a question where money should not be a consideration - this is that question. The COST is not a factor you should care about. But even if you do - and even if Mars will cost more (ho
Fine, let's analyze your 'bunker'.
Okay -first lets consider the conditions we want it to survive. It needs to be proof against storms that make the worst typhoons we've ever seen look like sprightly breeze. It needs to be proof against volcanoes far beyond anything we've ever seen. Proof against earthquakes a hundred times as big as the highest point on the Richter scale. Actually just take conditions on Venus and make it proof against that. Venus was once as habitable as Earth by the way - so it's a good model for what a post ELE earth may look like. In case you were wondering- the technology to build this bunker doesn't exist - and it's not certain it's even possible to develop it. On Mars - you don't have to worry about any of those things.
Next point: survival - your bunker cannot rely on ANY outside resources, it needs to be an entirely self-sustaining environment. You don't know that there will BE drinkable water afterwards. In fact, you cannot even assume SUNLIGHT is available - the vast majority of ELE's involve decades or even centuries without the sun. We tried to build a self-sustaining environment in the 1990s - it was called Biosphere 2, it was a complete disaster. And that was EASY - because it was allowed to replace broken equipment from outside and it had sunlight. Now you have none, and any parts that break - if you can't manufacture a replacement INSIDE the bunker - you don't have it anymore. So you need a whole lot of manufacturing capacity, and a whole lot of raw materials kept spare, and you need to feed the people - that means growing crops. With no sunlight - so that means you need electric lighting, and you have no outside energy sources. Your only real options is to build it on the shoreline for tidal power (problem for making it Tsunami proof) or somewhere there's geothermal (the LAST place you want to be is anywhere geologically active enough to power it). You can't even do nuclear - you have no way to dispose of the waste, no source of new nuclear fuel - and you can't spare the water to cool it, in fact any system that relies on boiling water to generate power is right out - and you'll need a LOT of power, because you have no other options for heating it in there and trust me, it's going to get very, very cold. If your soil gets overplanted - you're screwed because you can't know the soil outside isn't toxic or radioactive.
Basically - you want to build something that is probably completely impossible.
Now of course, a colony will have some of the same challenges - but it does NOT have to be completely sealed off from the outside world, it does not have to function without even SUNLIGHT, it has access to external resources for raw materials and soil. It will be difficult, extremely so - nobody doubts that. But unlike your bunker - it's actually within the realm of conceivable possibility.
No bunker would even slightly work.
Nothing we can do in the next few centuries (perhaps millennia) would - but that's not the point, the point is that there are threats we are unable to stop. But we can defend our species against at least some of them by spreading to more worlds.
Of course that's not the first choice - giant rock comes hurling, we let it hit and repopulate the earth from a colony a few decades later when it's possible is an absolute last resort idea. It means sacrificing billions of lives - we should definitely not take that approach if there is any way in hell of stopping that thing. But that may not be possible. There are things we can do to increase the odds. Better early warning systems are crucial - the further out we detect a problem rock the less energy you need to shift it's path enough to prevent a collision - the closer it gets the more difficult it becomes. Destroying one - while popular in movies- is perhaps the least practical of the options we may explore. It's a lot easier to redirect a giant rock than to blow it into harmless pieces.
Even then, there are things that could wipe us out we have no real way to control. A volcanic superplume could easily lead to the extinction of human life on earth - it's as bad as the biggest rocks the universe has (and some studies suggest they have a nasty habit of happening together) - and there is nothing in our technological arsenal that can stop one of those. We can't even stop an ordinary volcano that wants to blow it's top, let alone thousands of them blowing at once... And we know that can happen because it HAS happened before (not in the time we humans have been here - but more than once in the past before us).
Spreading out is a key part of human survival - we spread over the entire planet because that's in our genes, it's how we ensured our survival. There's archeological evidence that at least three settlements in modern day yemen died out before the one which succeeded and ultimately spread out to Europe and Asia and the Americas. It's HARD to spread beyond where you have been comfortable, leaving Africa was a painful process that cost great effort and many lives - but ultimately, we as a species were more resilient for it. That's how I see planetary colonization - it's the next step in what has been a driving force of human evolution for as long as there has been something you could call human.
The earliest known proper human fossils are about a hundred thousand years old - in Ethiopia. There are fossils and artifacts from proper human settlement in caves of Cape Point that date from 95-thousand years ago.
In just five-thousand years we spread across the entire continent of Africa - Africa is HUGE, you could fit all of North America (So USA, Canada and half of Mexico) into it four times over ! It's who we are. And it's the best chance we have of there being an us to be who we are.
Okay, that doesn't accord with what I read - but I could just be remembering wrong, so let's assume you're right.
As you point out though - it wouldn't make much difference to our survival odds.
You're miscalculating the ROI.
Your calculation would be correct if you bought a house there, made improvements and sold to make a profit - solar rooftiles, not a good choice to put among those improvements.
But that ROI is the combined factor of all benefits. It's the saving in your energy bills while you live there plus every other advantage mentioned above plus whatever value increase there is in your house.
True that value increase is likely to be depressed in that neighbourhood and it's may be less than the cost of the install - but you aren't looking ONLY at the sale point to make a return. If you live there ten years, you have ten years of use out of them - and still make a bunch of the money back on sale.
Two years ago I bought a house in a similar neighbourhood for 850K ZAR. I made about 100KZAR in improvements, some of them premium things like high grade galvanized iron security fencing. I just sold it for 1-million ZAR. There was about 821K left on the bond so total profit of about 80K ZAR - which is really not bad for just 2 years, and that's without factoring in that I got to USE those improvements for 2 years. For 2 years that fence let me not worry about my family while I'm out at work. For 2 years I could park safely in the secure car park I built. For 2 years I could free up room in the house by keeping the laundry in the outhouse I added.
All in all - the REAL profit if you work out what these comforts were worth - is more like 150K ZAR - which is really, really good for a 2 year investment (it's 15% actually) - and my improvements made it so sought after that I sold it on the very first day I started marketing for MORE than my asking price (I was wanting 950K - getting more than your asking price is unheard of here - somebody actually offered me more just to give him first option for 24 hours !). I also had another property where I did damn near nothing, I just bought it cheap in a very wealthy area a few years ago, sold it as well - for a profit that was almost 80% of the original sale price (I bought it for 450K and just sold it after 6 years for 840K). Even after fees and taxes I made enough to put down a deposit on a fantastic 4 bedroom double-story practically-a-mansion in an area with fibre, close to work where my family could live in luxury for the next several decades.
It's easy to make money from property - but you do need to know how to do the maths right.
So what do you think of the particular ethics rules that CloudFlare is citing in this case ? Do you agree that it's a good rule ? That there should be a distinction between the attorney and the client ? It seems to make sense to me that a lawyer should not buy a stake in his client's case - for various reasons.
Some types of trade should, rightly, be restricted - just like it shouldn't be legal for me to be allowed to take out fire insurance on your house, it would create too great an incentive for me to burn your house down.
But then, you're the lawyer so I'm interested in your views. If you think this particular rule is bad, I would love to know why you think so, and how you would imagine it could be improved ?
Having said all that - WHY do you think humans have proven so resilient? Because we're good at adapting the environment to ourselves. That's also why we COULD survive an event like that, by having people who have adapted environments to themselves where the event did NOT occur.
That's entirely a matter of perspective. You're thinking in human time - and that's sily here. You need to look at deep time - and you'll find that very bloody frequently life on earth has had to start over from a few scraps. Life is incredibly resilient says the fossil record, but species aren't. Sheer, dumb, random luck determines what survives the next extinction level event.
One day you're at the top of the food chain, the next day the corpses of your entire species are being nibbled on by shrew like creatures whose descendents will rule the world one day - however briefly.
By the way - the average lifespan of a species is about 10-million years. We're already at the average and depending how you define 'human' we're at ten times the average. Don't feel cheered though - the odds of a species continuing actually DECLINES the further past the average they go. It's not a promise of future success - it shows how well adapted you are to the world thus far, the whole point of an ELE is that it completely and utterly changes what counts as 'well adapted'. It's entirely possible that the next ELE will leave nothing alive but a single species of extremeophile bacteria around an undersea volcanic vent somewhere.
That's only useful for extinction causing things we can actually do something about.
Just what exactly is your plan for dealing with a direct hit from a Gamma-Ray burst ? One of those would sterilise everything on earth it doesn't kill, it would pass right through the planet so you wouldn't even be safe at the bottom of a mine - and they travel at the speed of light to so the laws of physics actually declare it impossible to build a warning system for them. You can NEVER get a warning to earth faster than the thing you're warning about gets there.
Most scientists are quite sure that the former is the easier one of the two- because there's time. We can build that colony over a matter of years before the first humans even arrive. If we actually hit an extinction level event on earth - we're unlikely to have very much warning. 5 years at most (and more likely much less than that). A volcanic superplume would make earth unlivable for anything like us for many years. There's no TIME to develop survival technologies in.
A colony - they would already HAVE their survival technologies.
The history of earth is one of mass extinctions and life starting over with whatever scraps are left. That could be a few extremophile bacteria and life will go on. But any particular species has very little chance. You used the K/T event - but that wasn't even all that dramatic an extinction. The Permian/Triassic extinction wiped out 97% of all the species on the planet at the time. It wasn't evolutionary advantage that made the difference for the other 3% - it was dumb, random luck.
They were a quarter inch long.
I was predicting the time from the story hitting the frontpage.
That's my story and I'm sticking to it.
Habitable by life ? Sure.
By HUMAN life ? Not a fucking chance.
1) Living on the moon is not the same as VISITING the moon. I was talking about colonies. Colonization requires radically new technology we've not done before - but we would be able to reuse a lot of the tech we build for colonizing the moon to colonize mars later.
2) Only a factor if you think it's critical the colony trade with earth from natural resources. Not really a factor if the major point of the colony is to exist - colonists can always trade with each other, and they'll certainly develop other things to trade with us later.
3) You're wrong about how space works. There's a reason we say "low earth orbit is halfway to anywhere" - once you're in orbit the cost of changing orbit is relatively low compared to the massive cost of getting into orbit. Mars may be closer to the asteroid belt but I'm willing to bet it's actually cheaper to mine them with launches off the moon. You can't launch from Mars for anywhere close to how cheaply you can do it from the lunar surface.
4) Erm - my whole point was to ask why that would be ? There is basically nothing that the moon lacks which Mars does not also lack. You cannot answer me questioning an assumption by restating that same assumption without providing any new information.
5) And if you understand why that is true, you understand why you're wrong in number 3. But it DOES take a lot less energy to LAND on the moon than on Mars - you have a much smaller gravitational force to overcome with your slow-down actions. And it takes a GREAT deal less to get back up again (whether to mine an asteroid, ship trading goods to earth or whatever). A colony means landing a great deal of extremely heavy things - the kind of things parachutes aren't much help with (and the thin Atmosphere on Mars makes them only a little useful anyway) - it's going to be mostly rocket-braking to land anything safely. The moon is a MUCH easier target for that.
None of those meet the reason why colonizing elsewhere is a good idea: so that the next time the universe throws a giant rock at earth this isn't the only place in the universe where humans exist.
It's important to protect this planet, it will be home to the vast majority of humans for the foreseeable future. We should not destroy our home. But there are things we cannot protect against. The planet wil be fine. Life will bounce back. It probably won't include us.
The only defense around that is to live in more places than earth.
That said - I'm not sure what makes Mars more attractive than the moon for a first colony. Most of the difficulties about living on the Moon are present on Mars as well - and it's a lot easier to get to. More-over, if we do build a permanent settlement there - with launch capability, then suddenly further expansion becomes a great deal cheaper. You need a lot less fuel to launch from the moon than from earth since the gravity is way lower and there's no atmospheric drag.
Trump is fairly well convinced that if he sits down other people call that 'nighttime'. In his mind, the sun shines out of his own gigantic, wrinkled asshole.
It's worth remembering one of the few things that Trump has repeatedly said which I believe (Indeed I am utterly convinced it is the unadulterated truth): the he thinks Andrew Jackson was his favorite past president.
Nevermind that a lot of what he thinks he knows ABOUT Jackson is plain old bullshit, I believe him when he says that Jackson is his favorite past president.
A genocidal maniac ? Yep, Trump would LOVE to be that. The question is whether the USA will let him.
The only dem who can't admit that is Hillary Rodham Clinton and she's been getting blasted throughout even far-left publications like New Republic over that. The left in general is adamant that while Comey certainly made things worse - her campaign was terrible, she was a terrible candidate (above all - she didn't inspire or represent the base of her own party) and that she made a series of incredibly stupid blunders: like failing to campaign in the rust belt.
Sure Russia deserves a bit of blame, Comey deserves a bit of blame but the bulk of the blame and ALL the responsibility lies with Clinton. Here's hoping that this fuckup finally gets the dems to slowly start to realize that their survival depends on actually BEING a leftwing party whom the liberal majority will bother to show up at the polls for.
The base is energized, they want to fight back -they want to end the current republican monoparty government - all they need to do so is inspiring, leftwing, candidates who represent them.
And Sanders/Warren (or better yet Warren/Sanders) in 2020.
Well, the thing is - it's difficult to know if Trump really lies per se. One definition of "lie" is to tell something inconsistent with observable reality - Trump does that all the time.
But the other (the one that applies in courts for example) is to tell something inconsistent with what you sincerely believe the truth to be (or to put it in legal terms 'to the best of your knowledge').
Trump may not be violating the latter in fact - it's just that his sincere beliefs, the best of his knowledge, bares no resemblance whatsoever to observable reality or, for that matter, to what he sincerely believed an hour ago.
All of which would have justified a firing - in the first few weeks of the Trump administration. NOT in the middle an investigation of the very same man who now fired him - and DEFINITELY not a mere 48 hours after he requested additional resources for that same investigation.
The simple answer is that Comey was idiotic in how he handled the public relations aspect of investigating politicians - and Trump loved this when it played against his election opponent. But Comey, for all his stupidity, was even-handed, and Trump hated that when it was HIM being investigated.
The real kicker is going to be who Trump appoints in his stead. Somehow I doubt it will be a beloved and respected law enforcement officer with a history of investigating powerful elites without fear or favor. If it's Chris Christie (as is being rumoured) then democracy in America is, frankly, fucked.
it will take approximately 25 seconds before some idiot antivaxxer holds this study up as somehow vindicating Andrew Wakefield...
I wouldn't know as I don't watch any cable news. I prefer to get my news in written form - where there is a lot more space and it allows for a great deal more nuance - and I try to limit my consumption to publications that abide by old-fashioned journalistic ethics standards which preclude making claims without verification and a name big enough that there is a reasonable chance they'll get sued if they deliberately make stuff up.
Even then I know that they will still, sometimes, make embarrassing mistakes - but at least I can be somewhat confident those mistakes won't be deliberate attempts at deception.
>It's hard to find solid analysis, instead it's all hysterical
In the case of this particular bill - I've read several dozen analysis and trust me - the hysteria is entirely warranted. More critically - you can't blame the media for the fact that analysis was slow-coming - that was directly caused by the republicans rushing the bill through congress (they did not even let the CBO have time to analise it) and flat out lying about what is in the bill - let alone it's likely consequences.
It's hard to do analysis when a bill is being rushed through congress faster than even the congressmen can read it and those pushing it are flagrantly and openly lying about what is in it. After-the-fact analysis is the only option left. https://newrepublic.com/articl...
Then again last week I was reading a Trump supporter defending the bill and basically next to every tax cut in it he concluded 'likely to increase insurance participation' - because apparently he sincerely believes that when rich people pay less taxes poor people can afford insurance more easily. I never did quite figure out how he came to the conclusion that regressive tax cuts gives money to POOR people, but he was quite adamant that he believes it.
In the end though my personal opinion is that those who dismiss the entire thing are wrong. Those who say "all the politicians are bought and sold", who speak of "republicrats" - they are wrong. Sure NEARLY all politicians are bought and sold - but the few who aren't (Warren, Sanders et all) - they're all on the same side. The last one the republicans had was Ron Paul and he's long gone. But more importantly - even the rest are not bought and sold by the SAME PEOPLE.
So there is still value in voting right now - because you can vote for the ones who are bought by the rich people whose interests most closely align with your own.
That's far from getting to vote for what YOU believe in - but it's not as bad as those people make out either, and it doesn't make voting completely useless.
More critically - the bad laws that allow this full scale plutocratic selling of laws to exist, can only be fixed by the government - and the only way to force them to do that is at the ballot box. And, once again, the few there who will drive finance reform laws are all in the same party, what voters can do in 2018 -is to give them a MUCH BIGGER TEAM. There are maybe 5 of them now, we need enough to pass a bill that every other member of both houses will hate.
That was just a list of a few representative samples.
And there is no conspiracy theory here- nobody thinks they are conspiring to rule the country. They are just DOING it - by buying laws.
>Well, actually, they did want that lol. They specifically only allowed land-owners to vote.
Actually no - that was not the intent of that restriction, and they FEARED that an aristocracy would arise and took steps to PREVENT just that. Jefferson for example instituted the estate tax specifically to try and prevent that.