Obama's fault for not trying to appoint anyone to the Supreme Court
Yes, he did. And they blocked it. So what the hell should he have done? Thrown congress in jail unless they complied? Read the Wikipedia article about the process - they did try to peel off Republicans, but they only tightened ranks. So then what? What exactly are they supposed to have done to stop it?
Obama's fault for not trying to appoint anyone to the Supreme Court
Speaking of living in an alternative reality...
Obama nominated Merrick Garland three quarters of a year ago. It has been official republican strategy to block his nomination until the election so that there would be a chance that the next president might be a Republican and they could get a more conservative court instead. A strategy that ultimately paid off.
I don't think there should be censorship. But a little tag that pops up under the story preview with "This story's accuracy is doubtful; see more info here" wouldn't go awry. With of course a procedure to contest incorrect claims of fakery, and a procedure to flag other stories as being fake.
The alt-right is posting more fake stories than the alt-left - 38% to 19%. Now, a lot of people will point to that as a "right is more gullible for fake news than the left!" point, but I see it as "even 19% is really bloody terrible".
A lot of the BS, mind you, isn't to say maliciously done; it's a consequence of the clickbait era that we live in. Many people - including even teens in Macedonia - have learned that if you make up something with dramatic language and a sensationalist headline, people click and share it, and they get ad revenue. Factual accuracy doesn't come into equation - if you can sensationalize a real story: great; if you have to make up a story from whole cloth: also great! A single widely shared article can earn them $3k in a day. So they create fake news sites like "WorldPoliticus.com", "USADailyPolitics.com", etc and fill them with clickbait. Early on many of them did it about equally with the left and right, but they found that they got more clicks and shares from the right.
The most recent fake one that I've seen, with its supports absolutely adamant that it's real, is the "Clinton didn't really win the popular vote, Trump did!" thing. They defend it to the day they die, despite the fact that it's flatly contradicted by all official sources, can be traced back to the guy who made it up, and is based around factually incorrect statements about how votes are tabulated.
Not that the left is innocent in all of this. I still keep seeing that fake quote about Trump saying that Republican voters are idiots who will believe anything. How many times do you have to point out that it's fake for people to stop circulating it?
We need more fact checks, period. It bugs me to no end that news stations just broadcast politicians giving speeches and pundits making claims, wherein they may reiterate a dozen different things that have literally zero basis in reality... and just let it go uncorrected. That's journalistic malpractice, plain and simple. I know they want to jeep the pace of coverage up, but they're willfully letting their viewers get misinformed in order to do so.
He didn't exactly have an idyllic childhood. His mother was schizophrenic, seriously in cloud-cookoo land until she was hospitalized and put on heavy medication. It mostly controlled it after that, but she became very inattentive. She was also alcoholic. His parents divorced when he was a child. As a teen, he initially did most of his work at his father and stepmother's place, but as they became increasingly concerned by the danger level of his experiments, they began cracking down and disposing of any chemicals they found. So he switched his base of operations to his mothers' place.
He could have handled it so much better. Particularly as an adult. He kept on carrying on in the same manner he did as a child. Nuclear physics isn't about just randomly jamming things together, you do calculations and simulations to see how your idea will work. You determine your radiation hazards, you look up your material handling guidelines, you permit (okay, I'd forgive him for skipping that one, he'd never get approval), then you build.
As an adult he apparently wanted to invent an always-on nuclear lightbulb. Of course, we already have those with tritium-lit exit signs, but he had some design of his own in mind, something bright (and almost certainly obscenely dangerous)
The 1000 number is from the original "radioactive boy scout" article and has been cited by a number of article since then.
Regardless, when you're dealing with "well over 2.4 sievert", it would be bad for you to be spending great amounts of time in that environment. Surely not what killed him, though. He's not going to get sores on his face like that just from having spent time near his "reactor" in the shed. That looks like small radiation ulcers, like he was getting material on his skin. Probably americium dioxide from his repeated smoke detector dissections. He was probably also inhaling and ingesting the stuff.
It's funny how on this site you see a policy of "overreact in the opposite direction" on a wide range of things. Just like there's a crowd here that responded to the negative hydrogen perception from the Hindenberg by taking a "hydrogen is harmless, hardly even burns!" stance, some seem to have responded to radiation panic with a "radiation is harmless, even for people who are opening up smoke detectors" attitude.
I've never seen an exact level, but it's been described as "well over 1000 times normal background radiation". That would mean "well over 2,4 sievert per year". No comments on exactly where a person had to be standing to receive that - assumedly in the shed right by the "reactor" ("target" would be a better description). You certainly wouldn't want to be sleeping there every night. But if you're in the next house over, no, it's probably pretty insignificant. Unless he had a fire or something and aerosolized it.
Still... just that radium paint alone, you wouldn't want the teen next door to have something like that...
He ended up being hospitalized for bipolar disorder and paranoid schizophrenia, and had been on medication for schizophrenia ever since. His mother was also schizophrenic. He led an interesting life...
He had this "Oh Shit! What Have I gotten myself into." look on his face.
I hope so.
I don't have to live in America, but I do have to share the world with the rest of you, and I'm not looking forward to your guy nihilistically firebombing it. If he comes to the decision to simply listen to the rest of the Republican party and puts in place standard conservative policies... hey, another George Bush, we survived the last one. If he starts tearing down every major international institution on economics and security alliances? The potential chaos is almost unlimited.
Amazing how easy it is to get hens to vote for foxes these days. Just point out some connection, any sort, no matter how tenuous, between a candidate you want to defeat and some unpopular entity, and you can write off their entire voting record no matter how long it is. So we can write off that Clinton has always been one of the leading sponsors of net neutrality, including being a cosponsor of the Internet Freedom Preservation Act of 1996 and having voted for every net neutrality bill while she was a Senator.
No, just point out that Viacom donated money to an international charity that her husband founded and which she does not work for, and all of the sudden, forget about how she actually, consistently voted - instead, vote for the guy who literally promises to overturn net neutrality.
I wish it was just this one issue, but the whole campaign has been like this on virtually every issue.
I'm not sure I'd describe him as a "liberal"; he's rather mixed. You can probably get your best sense of who he is by looking at the things he said before he got involved in politics, because after that, it's anything goes.
* He always seemed rather ambivalent about politics in general. He seemed to prefer Bill Clinton to either of the Bushes, although you got a sense that that was mainly just because the economy was good and he felt that Bill was being persecuted for sex. * He really does genuinely not seem to understand why people are concerned with Russia. He doesn't appear to have ever really followed anything about any of the assassinations, invasions, etc over the course of the last decade, and he's worked with, done business with, and generally gotten to know a number of oligarchs over the years. * He was pro-choice before he got involved in politics, so that's probably his real personal stance. * He does have a troubling history with racism that long predates involvement in politics, so that is probably legitimate. * He does genuinely seem to have broadly isolationist sentiments, but can be swayed to support military conflicts. * He does not genuinely appear to have anti-trade views; he made many statements in favor of reduced barriers and outsourcing before he got involved in politics * He does not appear to have had anything against LGBT individuals * He has a mile long rap sheet with women predating involvement in politics, so that one appears to be who he is.
With Trump, since he has no record and since he seems allergic to both clarity and consistency, looking at the sort of things he was saying before he got involved in politics seems to really be the only viable option. And what you come across is a person who's not very political, anything but wonkish about domestic or international policy, but does have opinions on various issues.
Can we drop the hyperbole here? For all the bluster in the abortion debate, it really stems down to a very basic worldview difference. Do you 1) believe that a person's humanity - their thoughts, their feelings, opinions, memories, hopes, dreams, everything that makes them them - is embodied by a soul granted at the moment of conception; or do you 2) believe that all of the above stems from thoughts within one's brain (regardless of whether you also believe in a soul or not)?
If you take view #1, then of course you're going to consider abortion murder, at any stage. If you take view #2, then of course you're not going to consider early-term abortion murder, because the fertilized egg doesn't even have a single nerve cell, let alone a brain. It takes six weeks just to organize a brain enough to manage to beat a heart, let alone think. So of course they're not going to see it as murder. Because they don't share your worldview.
Do you understand that?
Now things get more complicated the further along you get into pregnancies... in some ways. But they also in other ways get simpler.
As you get into a later term pregnancy, you start getting to the point where you have a cerebrum that's managing thought to some degree - and hence there start to be more moral issues which arise in a person with the latter worldview. Now, you're probably wanting to portray it as pro-life people saying "there's no moral issue right up birth, but 100% moral issues after birth". But that's your misunderstanding of how abortion works that's the problem.
"Late term" abortions are a vague term. It can be defined as beginning as early as the start of the second trimester, or as late as beginning near the end of the second trimester. Most pro-life people focus, when describing abortion, on D&E (Dilation and Extraction). Except that this is rarely the preferably route, and more to the point can't be conducted late in a pregnancy, the maximum cutoff usually being somewhere around the end of the second trimester. The preferable route, whenever the pregnancy is advanced enough to support it, is induced labour. So there's no such thing as a "8 or 9 month abortion" - that's known as a birth. And by both law, and by medical standards that existed independently of law, if a fetus is delivered alive and viable, all reasonable attempts are to be made to keep it alive, the same as for any other person regardless of their age. You can probably point to some counterexamples, like Dr. Kermit Gosnell. But then I'd have to point out that Gosnell was sentenced to life in prison for murder for killing viable fetuses delivered during abortions. I'll reiterate, for stress: abortions conducted late enough to deliver potentially viable pregnancies are done through birth, through induced labor, and a lack of attempt to save a viable fetus is murder.
The other issue at hand is that you should have an understanding of how common late-term abortions are, and why they're conducted. Just over 1% of abortions are "late term" (note the ambiguity above on how to define it). The later you're talking about, the rarer they get, by significant margins. Contrary to the pro-life myth that they're elective, or the pro-choice myth that they're for maternal health, the vast majority are conducted due to the inviability of the fetus. Randomly jumbling together genes is an inherently fault-prone process. Nearly half of all fertilized eggs miscarry before the mother even knows she was pregnant. Many pregnancies miscarry later. But some pregnancies don't miscarry, despite the fetus not being viable. Perhaps its brain never developed, or its lungs are deformed and ineffective. So put yourself in that mother's position. You're going around every day, people are smiling, asking you when you're due, etc, and you have to explain to each of them that the child that you've been looking so forward to meeting will
His positions on almost everything don't exist. On virtually every topic his position has been:
"Our current policy is such a mess. Total disaster. We're going to completely repeal it and replace it with 'Something Great(TM)'. It's going to be so great, let me tell you..."
Of course, you would need some technology to "decant" them (a la Brave New World),
That's really the problem. We're nowhere close to such a technology. We could speculate that it will exists in a hundred years or so, and it might well - or it might not. By contrast, there's no obvious barriers to having a fully closed environment that can be kept operating for hundreds of years. But it's obviously a lot more cost / work. So first, there's the question is whether you get that "moonshot" (pardon the pun) technology breakthrough or not.
At present, we've only just recently had the first child born after a uterine transplant.
Another issue that comes up with the "Brave New World" approach is that you'd need an automated rearing system. Infants don't tend to themselves or learn to survive on their own. Developing such a system can surely be done (although robotics is never trivial, and failure is not acceptable). But any institute that seeks to develop such a system will face a lot of objections on moral grounds. Technically a generation ship should also hit some moral grounds objections on its own, since children will be born into a highly dangerous, likely cramped environment with reduced lifespan, few opportunities in life and no chance to leave. But I don't think you'd find nearly as many objections as you would with experiments to develop automated childrearing systems.
Lastly, you still need a habitat for them on the far side, unless you're incredibly lucky and we can confirm a habitable-zone, solid-surface, earthlike-pressure oxygenated-atmosphere nontoxic planet from a distance. And the concept of making a ship that can robotically build a habitat (with the massive dependency chains involved in modern industrial technology production being met) is a much greater challenge than simply sending a habitat that's already made and designed to be able to maintain itself, and expand at a slow, measured pace, one production technology after the next.
That said, I fully agree that no matter what you want to send embryos and/or eggs/sperm, regardless of the technology. Even with a generation ship, to keep the size down, you want the minimal crew size that's not likely to die out along the way due to accidents, disease, infertility, crew opposition to reproduction, etc. Aka, ideally 100% small-statured women with a good family history of fertility, with reproduction done by implantation of similar female embryos. I imagine a crew size around 5 would be reasonable, with ages staggered so that there's always 2-3 women of reproductive age. For genetic diversity upon arrival (including males), you need gametes or embryos in storage. The same thing can also be done with livestock: bring the smallest breeds of each species available, with stored gametes / embryos to increase size and other desirable properties on the other end. You don't need to do this with many types of plants, whose seeds can remain frozen for hundreds of years (although not all, some don't freeze well)
Except that there was no malfunction here. Like most of these Autopilot stories, Autopilot wasn't actually in use.
But wait, I hear you saying, the article says:
In September, Tesla revealed the death of a man in one of its cars in a crash in the Netherlands and said that the "autopilot" software's role in the accident was being investigated.
"In the moments leading up to the collision, there is no evidence to suggest that Autopilot was not operating as designed and as described to users: specifically, as a driver assistance system that maintains a vehicle's position in lane and adjusts the vehicle's speed to match surrounding traffic," Tesla said in a blog post at the time.
The article is talking bollocks. That quote isn't from Tesla describing the Netherlands crash, it's describing the same old May 16th tractor-trailer-across-both-lanes, driver-watching-Harry-Potter crash. Autopilot was not in use in the Netherlands crash (and more to the point, the driver was driving 155 kph). So far, there's only been one confirmed death from Autopilot (and one person in China who insists that his son was killed by Autopilot but refuses to let Tesla check the logs to see if it was actually on)
Agreed, with almost everything, although I wouldn't limit the technologies that can enable interstellar travel so much. Technically anything can take you on interstellar missions, although your scaling factor is directly proportional to your ISP, hence the focus on the extreme end. But if you're willing to accept a larger scaling factor, some of the high-end fission and fusion technologies might also be options.
And for humans, agreed that at present it's a multi-hundred year journey. Which means being able to keep people alive in space-like environments without any connection to Earth for hundreds of years, with extreme levels of recycling and local production of consumables and parts for repair and maintenance - all at minimal mass penalty. Which means first developing one or more off-Earth colonies in our solar system, since if you can't do that on a colony, you certainly can't do it in deep space.
Amazing how the same tiny group of people can continually embarrass NASA by dragging their name into this EmDrive nonsense. Seriously, check the names on the top of the (stress: unpublished) paper. Google them and "EmDrive". Same people as before.
Slashdot Mirror
You wrote:
Yes, he did. And they blocked it. So what the hell should he have done? Thrown congress in jail unless they complied? Read the Wikipedia article about the process - they did try to peel off Republicans, but they only tightened ranks. So then what? What exactly are they supposed to have done to stop it?
Speaking of living in an alternative reality...
Obama nominated Merrick Garland three quarters of a year ago. It has been official republican strategy to block his nomination until the election so that there would be a chance that the next president might be a Republican and they could get a more conservative court instead. A strategy that ultimately paid off.
For more details, Wikipedia has a full article on the fight, with 88 references.
I don't think there should be censorship. But a little tag that pops up under the story preview with "This story's accuracy is doubtful; see more info here" wouldn't go awry. With of course a procedure to contest incorrect claims of fakery, and a procedure to flag other stories as being fake.
Actually, that statement is itself based around fake news. Funny, that.
The alt-right is posting more fake stories than the alt-left - 38% to 19%. Now, a lot of people will point to that as a "right is more gullible for fake news than the left!" point, but I see it as "even 19% is really bloody terrible".
A lot of the BS, mind you, isn't to say maliciously done; it's a consequence of the clickbait era that we live in. Many people - including even teens in Macedonia - have learned that if you make up something with dramatic language and a sensationalist headline, people click and share it, and they get ad revenue. Factual accuracy doesn't come into equation - if you can sensationalize a real story: great; if you have to make up a story from whole cloth: also great! A single widely shared article can earn them $3k in a day. So they create fake news sites like "WorldPoliticus.com", "USADailyPolitics.com", etc and fill them with clickbait. Early on many of them did it about equally with the left and right, but they found that they got more clicks and shares from the right.
The most recent fake one that I've seen, with its supports absolutely adamant that it's real, is the "Clinton didn't really win the popular vote, Trump did!" thing. They defend it to the day they die, despite the fact that it's flatly contradicted by all official sources, can be traced back to the guy who made it up, and is based around factually incorrect statements about how votes are tabulated.
Not that the left is innocent in all of this. I still keep seeing that fake quote about Trump saying that Republican voters are idiots who will believe anything. How many times do you have to point out that it's fake for people to stop circulating it?
We need more fact checks, period. It bugs me to no end that news stations just broadcast politicians giving speeches and pundits making claims, wherein they may reiterate a dozen different things that have literally zero basis in reality... and just let it go uncorrected. That's journalistic malpractice, plain and simple. I know they want to jeep the pace of coverage up, but they're willfully letting their viewers get misinformed in order to do so.
He didn't exactly have an idyllic childhood. His mother was schizophrenic, seriously in cloud-cookoo land until she was hospitalized and put on heavy medication. It mostly controlled it after that, but she became very inattentive. She was also alcoholic. His parents divorced when he was a child. As a teen, he initially did most of his work at his father and stepmother's place, but as they became increasingly concerned by the danger level of his experiments, they began cracking down and disposing of any chemicals they found. So he switched his base of operations to his mothers' place.
He could have handled it so much better. Particularly as an adult. He kept on carrying on in the same manner he did as a child. Nuclear physics isn't about just randomly jamming things together, you do calculations and simulations to see how your idea will work. You determine your radiation hazards, you look up your material handling guidelines, you permit (okay, I'd forgive him for skipping that one, he'd never get approval), then you build.
As an adult he apparently wanted to invent an always-on nuclear lightbulb. Of course, we already have those with tritium-lit exit signs, but he had some design of his own in mind, something bright (and almost certainly obscenely dangerous)
Alpha and neutron, mainly.
The 1000 number is from the original "radioactive boy scout" article and has been cited by a number of article since then.
Regardless, when you're dealing with "well over 2.4 sievert", it would be bad for you to be spending great amounts of time in that environment. Surely not what killed him, though. He's not going to get sores on his face like that just from having spent time near his "reactor" in the shed. That looks like small radiation ulcers, like he was getting material on his skin. Probably americium dioxide from his repeated smoke detector dissections. He was probably also inhaling and ingesting the stuff.
It's funny how on this site you see a policy of "overreact in the opposite direction" on a wide range of things. Just like there's a crowd here that responded to the negative hydrogen perception from the Hindenberg by taking a "hydrogen is harmless, hardly even burns!" stance, some seem to have responded to radiation panic with a "radiation is harmless, even for people who are opening up smoke detectors" attitude.
I've never seen an exact level, but it's been described as "well over 1000 times normal background radiation". That would mean "well over 2,4 sievert per year". No comments on exactly where a person had to be standing to receive that - assumedly in the shed right by the "reactor" ("target" would be a better description). You certainly wouldn't want to be sleeping there every night. But if you're in the next house over, no, it's probably pretty insignificant. Unless he had a fire or something and aerosolized it.
Still... just that radium paint alone, you wouldn't want the teen next door to have something like that...
He wasn't looking well the last tine he was arrested for... wait for it... stealing once again to try to get material for a new reactor.
He ended up being hospitalized for bipolar disorder and paranoid schizophrenia, and had been on medication for schizophrenia ever since. His mother was also schizophrenic. He led an interesting life...
I hope so.
I don't have to live in America, but I do have to share the world with the rest of you, and I'm not looking forward to your guy nihilistically firebombing it. If he comes to the decision to simply listen to the rest of the Republican party and puts in place standard conservative policies ... hey, another George Bush, we survived the last one. If he starts tearing down every major international institution on economics and security alliances? The potential chaos is almost unlimited.
Amazing how easy it is to get hens to vote for foxes these days. Just point out some connection, any sort, no matter how tenuous, between a candidate you want to defeat and some unpopular entity, and you can write off their entire voting record no matter how long it is. So we can write off that Clinton has always been one of the leading sponsors of net neutrality, including being a cosponsor of the Internet Freedom Preservation Act of 1996 and having voted for every net neutrality bill while she was a Senator.
No, just point out that Viacom donated money to an international charity that her husband founded and which she does not work for, and all of the sudden, forget about how she actually, consistently voted - instead, vote for the guy who literally promises to overturn net neutrality.
I wish it was just this one issue, but the whole campaign has been like this on virtually every issue.
News flash: coal isn't coming back in the US. Under Trump or anyone else. Wind, solar and natural gas have gotten too cheap.
Don't like Goldman Sachs? Then by all means don't this second go and google who's the leading contender for Trump's treasury secretary.
What, did you actually convince yourself that the billionaire who literally plates everything around him in gold was a "man of the people"? If so:
***Check out these awesome magic beans!!!!!***
Corr: that should read Dilation and Evacuation, not Extraction.
I'm not sure I'd describe him as a "liberal"; he's rather mixed. You can probably get your best sense of who he is by looking at the things he said before he got involved in politics, because after that, it's anything goes.
* He always seemed rather ambivalent about politics in general. He seemed to prefer Bill Clinton to either of the Bushes, although you got a sense that that was mainly just because the economy was good and he felt that Bill was being persecuted for sex.
* He really does genuinely not seem to understand why people are concerned with Russia. He doesn't appear to have ever really followed anything about any of the assassinations, invasions, etc over the course of the last decade, and he's worked with, done business with, and generally gotten to know a number of oligarchs over the years.
* He was pro-choice before he got involved in politics, so that's probably his real personal stance.
* He does have a troubling history with racism that long predates involvement in politics, so that is probably legitimate.
* He does genuinely seem to have broadly isolationist sentiments, but can be swayed to support military conflicts.
* He does not genuinely appear to have anti-trade views; he made many statements in favor of reduced barriers and outsourcing before he got involved in politics
* He does not appear to have had anything against LGBT individuals
* He has a mile long rap sheet with women predating involvement in politics, so that one appears to be who he is.
With Trump, since he has no record and since he seems allergic to both clarity and consistency, looking at the sort of things he was saying before he got involved in politics seems to really be the only viable option. And what you come across is a person who's not very political, anything but wonkish about domestic or international policy, but does have opinions on various issues.
Can we drop the hyperbole here? For all the bluster in the abortion debate, it really stems down to a very basic worldview difference. Do you 1) believe that a person's humanity - their thoughts, their feelings, opinions, memories, hopes, dreams, everything that makes them them - is embodied by a soul granted at the moment of conception; or do you 2) believe that all of the above stems from thoughts within one's brain (regardless of whether you also believe in a soul or not)?
If you take view #1, then of course you're going to consider abortion murder, at any stage. If you take view #2, then of course you're not going to consider early-term abortion murder, because the fertilized egg doesn't even have a single nerve cell, let alone a brain. It takes six weeks just to organize a brain enough to manage to beat a heart, let alone think. So of course they're not going to see it as murder. Because they don't share your worldview.
Do you understand that?
Now things get more complicated the further along you get into pregnancies... in some ways. But they also in other ways get simpler.
As you get into a later term pregnancy, you start getting to the point where you have a cerebrum that's managing thought to some degree - and hence there start to be more moral issues which arise in a person with the latter worldview. Now, you're probably wanting to portray it as pro-life people saying "there's no moral issue right up birth, but 100% moral issues after birth". But that's your misunderstanding of how abortion works that's the problem.
"Late term" abortions are a vague term. It can be defined as beginning as early as the start of the second trimester, or as late as beginning near the end of the second trimester. Most pro-life people focus, when describing abortion, on D&E (Dilation and Extraction). Except that this is rarely the preferably route, and more to the point can't be conducted late in a pregnancy, the maximum cutoff usually being somewhere around the end of the second trimester. The preferable route, whenever the pregnancy is advanced enough to support it, is induced labour. So there's no such thing as a "8 or 9 month abortion" - that's known as a birth. And by both law, and by medical standards that existed independently of law, if a fetus is delivered alive and viable, all reasonable attempts are to be made to keep it alive, the same as for any other person regardless of their age. You can probably point to some counterexamples, like Dr. Kermit Gosnell. But then I'd have to point out that Gosnell was sentenced to life in prison for murder for killing viable fetuses delivered during abortions. I'll reiterate, for stress: abortions conducted late enough to deliver potentially viable pregnancies are done through birth, through induced labor, and a lack of attempt to save a viable fetus is murder.
The other issue at hand is that you should have an understanding of how common late-term abortions are, and why they're conducted. Just over 1% of abortions are "late term" (note the ambiguity above on how to define it). The later you're talking about, the rarer they get, by significant margins. Contrary to the pro-life myth that they're elective, or the pro-choice myth that they're for maternal health, the vast majority are conducted due to the inviability of the fetus. Randomly jumbling together genes is an inherently fault-prone process. Nearly half of all fertilized eggs miscarry before the mother even knows she was pregnant. Many pregnancies miscarry later. But some pregnancies don't miscarry, despite the fetus not being viable. Perhaps its brain never developed, or its lungs are deformed and ineffective. So put yourself in that mother's position. You're going around every day, people are smiling, asking you when you're due, etc, and you have to explain to each of them that the child that you've been looking so forward to meeting will
Bill Maher had an excellent bit going over "his people".
His positions on almost everything don't exist. On virtually every topic his position has been:
"Our current policy is such a mess. Total disaster. We're going to completely repeal it and replace it with 'Something Great(TM)'. It's going to be so great, let me tell you..."
That's really the problem. We're nowhere close to such a technology. We could speculate that it will exists in a hundred years or so, and it might well - or it might not. By contrast, there's no obvious barriers to having a fully closed environment that can be kept operating for hundreds of years. But it's obviously a lot more cost / work. So first, there's the question is whether you get that "moonshot" (pardon the pun) technology breakthrough or not.
At present, we've only just recently had the first child born after a uterine transplant.
Another issue that comes up with the "Brave New World" approach is that you'd need an automated rearing system. Infants don't tend to themselves or learn to survive on their own. Developing such a system can surely be done (although robotics is never trivial, and failure is not acceptable). But any institute that seeks to develop such a system will face a lot of objections on moral grounds. Technically a generation ship should also hit some moral grounds objections on its own, since children will be born into a highly dangerous, likely cramped environment with reduced lifespan, few opportunities in life and no chance to leave. But I don't think you'd find nearly as many objections as you would with experiments to develop automated childrearing systems.
Lastly, you still need a habitat for them on the far side, unless you're incredibly lucky and we can confirm a habitable-zone, solid-surface, earthlike-pressure oxygenated-atmosphere nontoxic planet from a distance. And the concept of making a ship that can robotically build a habitat (with the massive dependency chains involved in modern industrial technology production being met) is a much greater challenge than simply sending a habitat that's already made and designed to be able to maintain itself, and expand at a slow, measured pace, one production technology after the next.
That said, I fully agree that no matter what you want to send embryos and/or eggs/sperm, regardless of the technology. Even with a generation ship, to keep the size down, you want the minimal crew size that's not likely to die out along the way due to accidents, disease, infertility, crew opposition to reproduction, etc. Aka, ideally 100% small-statured women with a good family history of fertility, with reproduction done by implantation of similar female embryos. I imagine a crew size around 5 would be reasonable, with ages staggered so that there's always 2-3 women of reproductive age. For genetic diversity upon arrival (including males), you need gametes or embryos in storage. The same thing can also be done with livestock: bring the smallest breeds of each species available, with stored gametes / embryos to increase size and other desirable properties on the other end. You don't need to do this with many types of plants, whose seeds can remain frozen for hundreds of years (although not all, some don't freeze well)
Except that there was no malfunction here. Like most of these Autopilot stories, Autopilot wasn't actually in use.
But wait, I hear you saying, the article says:
The article is talking bollocks. That quote isn't from Tesla describing the Netherlands crash, it's describing the same old May 16th tractor-trailer-across-both-lanes, driver-watching-Harry-Potter crash. Autopilot was not in use in the Netherlands crash (and more to the point, the driver was driving 155 kph). So far, there's only been one confirmed death from Autopilot (and one person in China who insists that his son was killed by Autopilot but refuses to let Tesla check the logs to see if it was actually on)
Agreed, with almost everything, although I wouldn't limit the technologies that can enable interstellar travel so much. Technically anything can take you on interstellar missions, although your scaling factor is directly proportional to your ISP, hence the focus on the extreme end. But if you're willing to accept a larger scaling factor, some of the high-end fission and fusion technologies might also be options.
And for humans, agreed that at present it's a multi-hundred year journey.
Which means being able to keep people alive in space-like environments without any connection to Earth for hundreds of years, with extreme levels of recycling and local production of consumables and parts for repair and maintenance - all at minimal mass penalty.
Which means first developing one or more off-Earth colonies in our solar system, since if you can't do that on a colony, you certainly can't do it in deep space.
Amazing how the same tiny group of people can continually embarrass NASA by dragging their name into this EmDrive nonsense. Seriously, check the names on the top of the (stress: unpublished) paper. Google them and "EmDrive". Same people as before.
They did sell me this amazing Wimbli's Trident!