That right there is just one of the many reasons why the concept of settling other planets is so *#$#@$* difficult.
To live on another planet -- to merely stay alive -- requires a whole raft of modern technology. And each modern technological component has a whole chain of component inputs for parts and manufacturing consumables, and each of those has a whole chain, and each of those, and so on down the line. And as much as we might like to pretend that we can just narrow things down to just a few parts or materials, you really can't. Try substituting nylon for teflon in a container that holds hydrofluoric acid or teflon for nylon in a high-abrasion part and see how well things go for you, for example.
Plastics are a key critical part of modern technology, and there's thousands of them. Perhaps you could do with a couple dozen -- *maybe*, if you engineered each and every component carefully (a massive undertaking when you're saying, basically, "reinvent our modern industrial base"). So we need to have whole oil refineries and chemical plants operating on... wait, what? Oil, Mars?
Right. So before you can even get to those oil refineries and chemical plants -- launched at absurdly expensive prices -- you have to have a way to make oil in the first place, on a planet that has none. This means some combination of the Fischer-Tropsch/Sabatier processes. Which means taking in and compressing the trace atmosphere, isolating the CO2 from the other gasses, reacting it with a steady stream of hydrogen from a water electrolyzer (fed by an ice mine) over a catalyst bed at high temperatures, and then fed into the refinery. And of course, every part will steadily corrode, moving parts will break, etc, and you need supply chains to produce *each and every part*. Every seal, every coil, every valve, every surface coating, every lubricant, every hydraulic fluid, every sensor, everything. In your whole refinery and chemical plant. And everything that goes into making those parts/materials -- not just their raw materials, but their production-process consumables? You have to be able to make them, too. And so on down the line.
It's really a horribly daunting challenge, a colony that can completely support itself. Mostly support itself, with freighters of parts and replacement equipment/low level consumables showing up every few months? That's not that bad. *Completely* independent? That's centuries in the future at best.
A while back I did a whole series going into this sort of stuff in more detail over here:
Colonizing other planets is *WAY* more difficult than geoengineering Earth where our entire industrial base is. The atmosphere is a super-thin skin over all of us.
I like to help people picture how easy it is to change CO2 levels this way. Picture you have the Hindenburg full of pre-industrial-revolution air. How much gasoline would you have to burn to bring its CO2 levels up from that to modern CO2 levels?
Pre-industrial CO2 was around 280PPM. Today's are around 100ppm more. The Hindenburg held 200,000 cubic meters of gas. STP air density is about 1.2kg/m^3, so the Hindenburg would hold about 240,000kg of air. 100ppm of CO2 from that is 24kg. The carbon content of CO2 is 30%, so that's 7.2kg of carbon. Gasoline has 2.4kg of carbon per gallon. So three gallons of gasoline.
In short, a single fill of a gas tank on your average car could raise the CO2 content of a volume of air the size of *three* Hindenburgs to modern levels (+36%). When something is as diffuse as air, and when you're talking about gasses that are trace even within that, it becomes very easy to mess with them, even when you're talking about an area the size of the planet.
The downside to most geoengineering projects, however, is that they're merely masking. Most of them -- not all, but most -- simply try to hide the effects of one symptom of CO2 rise or another (usually the heat, ignoring the ocean acidification). Several problems come from this. One, you need ever-greater measures to keep masking the CO2 rise, with ever-greater side effects from whatever side-effects that method has, and ever-greater costs. And two, if you ever stop, or your system ever fails, or you discover that the side effects are too great, or whatnot, there's a sudden surge in temperatures as all of the effects you'd been hiding take full force. Really, you need to address the cause, not the symptom. You don't treat cancer with Tylenol.
There are some geoengineering projects, however, that do work on getting the CO2 out of the atmosphere. At the same time, they shouldn't be rushed without further study, or you risk causing more problems than you're trying to solve. The classic CO2 elimination proposal is of seeding the oceans with iron. Some wishful thinkers like to hope that as CO2 levels rise, plant growth will just correspondingly rise and eat up the additional CO2. But most of the world's surface area is not CO2-limited, but nutrient limited -- in the oceans, usually iron; proposing that CO2 will just increase global plant growth is like proposing that adding more sunlight to a desert will increase its plant growth. For most of the oceans, extra CO2 is simply an acidifier, which reduces maximum biomass. So the concept goes, add iron and you increase photosynthetic activity, and thus sequestration, turning the dead zones into oases of life. It's a neat concept, but a lot of things are still widely open for debate. Do you actually increase the sequestration rate, or does the additional bloom all just rot before it can be deposited? Do you cause hypoxia and severely negative downstream conditions from it? Do you rob the ocean of other minerals and cause severely negative downstream conditions from that? Etc. Basically, ocean seeding is something that bears investigation, but not a rush project. We need to know just what we're getting into before we get into it.
The facts are, that the coverage of this storm *was* accurate. Apart from the error in windspeed forecasts, which is a *well known* challenge with hurricanes (getting it either too low or too high), and the corresponding change in surge, the reporting was correct. It was warned that the main threat would be flooding and downed trees. There was widespread flooding and downed trees. It was warned that there would be 10' of surge in parts of New Jersey. There was 10' of surge in parts of New Jersey. It was warned that it would be the worst hurricane in decades. It was the worst hurricane in decades (mind you, that's pretty easy for a region that rarely gets hurricanes). And given how many people died even with the evacuations, I'd say they were totally warranted (plus you don't want people around while you're trying to handle cleanup).
Nobody is psychic. Nobody knows whether a storm will be a Katrina or a fizzle. But you prepare anyway. And Irene, despite having her eyewall collapse as she approached NC, still was one of the worst storms to hit the region. Mendo, VT had nearly a *foot* of rain, the single greatest single-day rain event in Vermont's history. Durham, NY nearly broke NY's all-time rain record. She was the third-most deadly tropical system to strike the US since 1980, and the count could still rise. And on and on.
And, FYI, to the people who wrote the article: almost *always* tropical systems don't have winds measured lower than the nominal peak. The nominal peak is estimated based on assuming that there are spots that you haven't measured that have stronger winds than what you did. And that's especially expected when a storm skims you with its weaker western side only until it weakens.
You're (A) grossly misunderstanding that paper, and (B) grossly overattributing it. Especially your "SWV is about 30% as effective as a GHG" line. Actually, WV is a much more effective GHG than CO2. It's the main reason why Earth isn't a snowball as a simple albedo calculation would suggest; over 2/3rds of Earth's greenhouse effect is due to WV. But it also has a very short atmospheric residency, and hence can't act as a driver (forcing), only a feedback.
The whole issue of global warming is not about what happens on the inter-annual or even short-interdecadal timeframe. It's about the change in long-term forcings.
One paper overturns all of climate science, really?;) You can't be serious.
If you'd spend less time on denier blogs, you'd be aware of the vast breadth of research papers on each topic. And how Lindzen and Choi don't exactly have the best record out there. That paper was first rejected from the Journal of Geophysical Research. Then it was rejected by the Proceedings of the National Academies of Sciences, and only later accepted by a rather no-name journal (Asia-Pacific Journal of Atmospheric Sciences). Here's PNAS's rejection of it.
Obligatory graph. That shows the different climate forcings, their medians, and their error bars. What the current study is working on is cloud formation. You'll notice that cloud formation has a pretty huge error bar; we're not very good at modelling it, and there's a lot of research to try to improve that. But note that even if you assume the best-case cooling effect from clouds, rather than the median (or the worst, for that matter), you're still not cancelling out the other forcings. Note the error bars on the net result at the bottom.
This whole endeavor seems a bit like a cargo cult to me. I see no signs of actual scientific rigour, and instead just a "let's build things that superficially look like things we've seen before" attitude.
People have been leaving out my biggest annoyance with having to use tablet (bigger than the lack of keyboard annoyance): having to find a way to prop the thing up while I use it on the couch. I never wanted a tablet, but had to buy one for my company to use to give demos (as a mockup of a touchscreen embedded in a device). I figured it'd grow on me after a while. Just the opposite happened.:P
Laptops are just a logical design. Give the user a keyboard (so they can feel what they type), a mouse (so they don't have to block the screen and mess it up with their fingers, as well as having finer location control), and use that part of the device to hold the screen up when you're using it.
I wonder if it's actually the exercise causing the life extension, or simply the maintaining of a healthier weight. Aka, would caloric restriction likewise extend your life? I lost ~25 kilos and got down to the lower end of the healthy weight range (instead of where I started -- the upper end of "overweight", just under "obese") simply by reducing portion sizes. No change in exercise levels.
Little in Libya is free either. $200 is still poverty in Libya. Which is why as soon as people saw an opening, spontaneous revolts broke out in nearly every city in the country. Gadhaffi then crushed most of them, and would probably have driven over the remaining ones had NATO not stepped in.
As for the videos you refer to from (with the background of people shouting things like "la haram!" (It's forbidden!) and telling them to stop.... would you kindly explain to me how the Transitional National Council, which formed on Feb. 27th, ordered said events on the riots that overthrew Gadhaffi's control of Benghazi on Feb. 17th? Beyond that, if your main source of information is unconfirmed videos on YouTube, how do you reconcile that with the fact that Gadhaffi has been caught over and over and over again by reporters pumping out fake anti-rebel propaganda, from the planted bodies at the bombing sites to the "confiscated drugs" (from his bizarre claim that the rebels were just gangs hopped up on drugs) which were medicines his soldiers took from a local hospital? Do you really think that someone who's been caught practically every day doing stuff like that wouldn't set up YouTube videos?
And its not just about freight. They'd almost certainly piggyback power transmission lines and oil pipelines into the tunnel. The oil should be especially profitable, taking the need for tankers out of the equation and increasing Russia's exports to the US.
I can't wait until we can have large HVDC lines running from Buenos Aires and Halifax to Cape Town and Dublin. Actually, make that latter one "Reykjavík". Heck, put "Reykjavík" on the other side of that statement, too;)
What on Earth about this "seems to be an Islamic republic"? Have you not paid attention to a single thing stated by the TNC? Read any of their draft documents? They're pushing more liberal policies than we have here in the US.
The reason those students can't cover their rent, FYI, is because in this "wealthy" country, the average personal income is a mere $200 a month, and maintained that way by law #15. Programs like those to fund students overseas affect a tiny percentage of the population, and exist in order to bring educated talent back to the country (to run industry, etc).
You honestly can't tell the difference between people getting your money because you bought a product from them and people getting your money because they have a gun to your head?
Your red herring aside, can you really not understand why people living on $200 a month would be upset with a murderous strongman stealing 80% of their country's wealth to live in absurd showy luxury and rebel the first time they get the chance?
But really, back to your red herring -- can you not tell the difference between a successful businessman and a dictator who controls every aspect of a country's life by military force?
And then what? Instead of a victorious march on the capital, we've seen six months of brutal fighting with towns shifting back and forth. Given NATO backing and its complete air superiority, this cannot be reasonably ascribed merely to loyalists' better equipment. The only meaningful explanation, then, is that a significant part of the population actually backed Gaddafi, and these provided the manpower for his forces to match that of the rebels.
So I'll repeat:
Wait... because a bunch of schoolteachers and engineers with scavenged weapons can't hold ground against a trained militia, therefore people love Gadhaffi? Run that by me again?
Wait... because a bunch of schoolteachers and engineers with scavenged weapons can't hold ground against a trained militia, therefore people love Gadhaffi? Run that by me again?
Do you not know what the CIA World Factbook is? It's basically an encyclopedia (and is frequently cited in research papers). And it's not exactly some sort of a secret that Libya's wealth doesn't trickle down. The minimum wage in Libya is about $120 a month.. Law #15 maintains the average salary at about $200 a month. Yet the per-capita GNP works out to about $1200 a month. So, well, you do the math as to where most of the money is going.
The UN HDI for Libya is biased by their very high GNI per capita (due to being one of the world's largest oil producers). But little of this actually makes it to the population (as noted by the CIA Factbook article on Libya).
In Libya, the most oil-rich country in Africa, one of the world's largest oil producers, has the highest GDP to population ratio in Africa, but little of the money actually makes it down to the general population. It's a cleptocracy.
Here, how about this. Picture we've got a bunch of people in other countries telling you, "Oh, Americans are too irresponsible or stupid to handle democracy. America should just have a strongman who brutalizes and robs from his people for decades." What would you think of a person who thought that of you?
Despite the efforts of Gadhaffi to try to pit one tribe against another, this revolt still happened. There are no tribal lines in the rebellion. It's doctors, teachers, engineers, students, just a cross-section of society. Imagine that, people being sick of a murderous 40-year cleptocracy.
But no, those dumb towel-heads can't handle democracy, right? They need a brutal, oppressive strongman to keep their primitive rage in check, right?
Yeah, but how creepy is it, having a doctor tell you, in as couched terms as possible of course, "The dog smells death on you"? I mean, I guess it could be worse; they could bring in a vulture to do the job (most vultures have an excellent sense of smell as well). Or the doctor could name the dog after the Cn Annwn;)
As for the whole intelligence/smell inverse correlation, it seems to hold with parrots. The research I've read suggests that parrots (among the most intelligent of birds, up there with the corvids) have no better of a sense of smell than we do, and that seems to hold true in my household. But don't corvids (ravens, crows, etc) have a good sense of smell, too? Yet they're better tool-makers/users than parrots (although not as good at communication).
Really? You think child abuse doesn't vary from place to place? You think victims not being able to seek protection doesn't change the abuse dynamic?
FYI, we're not talking about islands, but largely about spar platforms, ships, and the like. Tiny specs in vast open oceans, where nobody knows what's going on inside them.
Slashdot Mirror
That right there is just one of the many reasons why the concept of settling other planets is so *#$#@$* difficult.
To live on another planet -- to merely stay alive -- requires a whole raft of modern technology. And each modern technological component has a whole chain of component inputs for parts and manufacturing consumables, and each of those has a whole chain, and each of those, and so on down the line. And as much as we might like to pretend that we can just narrow things down to just a few parts or materials, you really can't. Try substituting nylon for teflon in a container that holds hydrofluoric acid or teflon for nylon in a high-abrasion part and see how well things go for you, for example.
Plastics are a key critical part of modern technology, and there's thousands of them. Perhaps you could do with a couple dozen -- *maybe*, if you engineered each and every component carefully (a massive undertaking when you're saying, basically, "reinvent our modern industrial base"). So we need to have whole oil refineries and chemical plants operating on... wait, what? Oil, Mars?
Right. So before you can even get to those oil refineries and chemical plants -- launched at absurdly expensive prices -- you have to have a way to make oil in the first place, on a planet that has none. This means some combination of the Fischer-Tropsch/Sabatier processes. Which means taking in and compressing the trace atmosphere, isolating the CO2 from the other gasses, reacting it with a steady stream of hydrogen from a water electrolyzer (fed by an ice mine) over a catalyst bed at high temperatures, and then fed into the refinery. And of course, every part will steadily corrode, moving parts will break, etc, and you need supply chains to produce *each and every part*. Every seal, every coil, every valve, every surface coating, every lubricant, every hydraulic fluid, every sensor, everything. In your whole refinery and chemical plant. And everything that goes into making those parts/materials -- not just their raw materials, but their production-process consumables? You have to be able to make them, too. And so on down the line.
It's really a horribly daunting challenge, a colony that can completely support itself. Mostly support itself, with freighters of parts and replacement equipment /low level consumables showing up every few months? That's not that bad. *Completely* independent? That's centuries in the future at best.
A while back I did a whole series going into this sort of stuff in more detail over here:
Beyond The Space Elevator: A Glimpse Of Alternative Methods For Space Launch
The Colonization Of Other Worlds: Where Will We Begin?
The Colonization Of Other Worlds: Who Will Bring It About And Why?
The Colonization Of Other Worlds: The Industry Dilemma
Colonizing other planets is *WAY* more difficult than geoengineering Earth where our entire industrial base is. The atmosphere is a super-thin skin over all of us.
I like to help people picture how easy it is to change CO2 levels this way. Picture you have the Hindenburg full of pre-industrial-revolution air. How much gasoline would you have to burn to bring its CO2 levels up from that to modern CO2 levels?
Pre-industrial CO2 was around 280PPM. Today's are around 100ppm more. The Hindenburg held 200,000 cubic meters of gas. STP air density is about 1.2kg/m^3, so the Hindenburg would hold about 240,000kg of air. 100ppm of CO2 from that is 24kg. The carbon content of CO2 is 30%, so that's 7.2kg of carbon. Gasoline has 2.4kg of carbon per gallon. So three gallons of gasoline.
In short, a single fill of a gas tank on your average car could raise the CO2 content of a volume of air the size of *three* Hindenburgs to modern levels (+36%). When something is as diffuse as air, and when you're talking about gasses that are trace even within that, it becomes very easy to mess with them, even when you're talking about an area the size of the planet.
The downside to most geoengineering projects, however, is that they're merely masking. Most of them -- not all, but most -- simply try to hide the effects of one symptom of CO2 rise or another (usually the heat, ignoring the ocean acidification). Several problems come from this. One, you need ever-greater measures to keep masking the CO2 rise, with ever-greater side effects from whatever side-effects that method has, and ever-greater costs. And two, if you ever stop, or your system ever fails, or you discover that the side effects are too great, or whatnot, there's a sudden surge in temperatures as all of the effects you'd been hiding take full force. Really, you need to address the cause, not the symptom. You don't treat cancer with Tylenol.
There are some geoengineering projects, however, that do work on getting the CO2 out of the atmosphere. At the same time, they shouldn't be rushed without further study, or you risk causing more problems than you're trying to solve. The classic CO2 elimination proposal is of seeding the oceans with iron. Some wishful thinkers like to hope that as CO2 levels rise, plant growth will just correspondingly rise and eat up the additional CO2. But most of the world's surface area is not CO2-limited, but nutrient limited -- in the oceans, usually iron; proposing that CO2 will just increase global plant growth is like proposing that adding more sunlight to a desert will increase its plant growth. For most of the oceans, extra CO2 is simply an acidifier, which reduces maximum biomass. So the concept goes, add iron and you increase photosynthetic activity, and thus sequestration, turning the dead zones into oases of life. It's a neat concept, but a lot of things are still widely open for debate. Do you actually increase the sequestration rate, or does the additional bloom all just rot before it can be deposited? Do you cause hypoxia and severely negative downstream conditions from it? Do you rob the ocean of other minerals and cause severely negative downstream conditions from that? Etc. Basically, ocean seeding is something that bears investigation, but not a rush project. We need to know just what we're getting into before we get into it.
The facts are, that the coverage of this storm *was* accurate. Apart from the error in windspeed forecasts, which is a *well known* challenge with hurricanes (getting it either too low or too high), and the corresponding change in surge, the reporting was correct. It was warned that the main threat would be flooding and downed trees. There was widespread flooding and downed trees. It was warned that there would be 10' of surge in parts of New Jersey. There was 10' of surge in parts of New Jersey. It was warned that it would be the worst hurricane in decades. It was the worst hurricane in decades (mind you, that's pretty easy for a region that rarely gets hurricanes). And given how many people died even with the evacuations, I'd say they were totally warranted (plus you don't want people around while you're trying to handle cleanup).
Nobody is psychic. Nobody knows whether a storm will be a Katrina or a fizzle. But you prepare anyway. And Irene, despite having her eyewall collapse as she approached NC, still was one of the worst storms to hit the region. Mendo, VT had nearly a *foot* of rain, the single greatest single-day rain event in Vermont's history. Durham, NY nearly broke NY's all-time rain record. She was the third-most deadly tropical system to strike the US since 1980, and the count could still rise. And on and on.
And, FYI, to the people who wrote the article: almost *always* tropical systems don't have winds measured lower than the nominal peak. The nominal peak is estimated based on assuming that there are spots that you haven't measured that have stronger winds than what you did. And that's especially expected when a storm skims you with its weaker western side only until it weakens.
You're (A) grossly misunderstanding that paper, and (B) grossly overattributing it. Especially your "SWV is about 30% as effective as a GHG" line. Actually, WV is a much more effective GHG than CO2. It's the main reason why Earth isn't a snowball as a simple albedo calculation would suggest; over 2/3rds of Earth's greenhouse effect is due to WV. But it also has a very short atmospheric residency, and hence can't act as a driver (forcing), only a feedback.
The whole issue of global warming is not about what happens on the inter-annual or even short-interdecadal timeframe. It's about the change in long-term forcings.
One paper overturns all of climate science, really? ;) You can't be serious.
If you'd spend less time on denier blogs, you'd be aware of the vast breadth of research papers on each topic. And how Lindzen and Choi don't exactly have the best record out there. That paper was first rejected from the Journal of Geophysical Research. Then it was rejected by the Proceedings of the National Academies of Sciences, and only later accepted by a rather no-name journal (Asia-Pacific Journal of Atmospheric Sciences). Here's PNAS's rejection of it.
Anthropomorphic climate change? Like this? ;)
Obligatory graph. That shows the different climate forcings, their medians, and their error bars. What the current study is working on is cloud formation. You'll notice that cloud formation has a pretty huge error bar; we're not very good at modelling it, and there's a lot of research to try to improve that. But note that even if you assume the best-case cooling effect from clouds, rather than the median (or the worst, for that matter), you're still not cancelling out the other forcings. Note the error bars on the net result at the bottom.
This whole endeavor seems a bit like a cargo cult to me. I see no signs of actual scientific rigour, and instead just a "let's build things that superficially look like things we've seen before" attitude.
People have been leaving out my biggest annoyance with having to use tablet (bigger than the lack of keyboard annoyance): having to find a way to prop the thing up while I use it on the couch. I never wanted a tablet, but had to buy one for my company to use to give demos (as a mockup of a touchscreen embedded in a device). I figured it'd grow on me after a while. Just the opposite happened. :P
Laptops are just a logical design. Give the user a keyboard (so they can feel what they type), a mouse (so they don't have to block the screen and mess it up with their fingers, as well as having finer location control), and use that part of the device to hold the screen up when you're using it.
I wonder if it's actually the exercise causing the life extension, or simply the maintaining of a healthier weight. Aka, would caloric restriction likewise extend your life? I lost ~25 kilos and got down to the lower end of the healthy weight range (instead of where I started -- the upper end of "overweight", just under "obese") simply by reducing portion sizes. No change in exercise levels.
Little in Libya is free either. $200 is still poverty in Libya. Which is why as soon as people saw an opening, spontaneous revolts broke out in nearly every city in the country. Gadhaffi then crushed most of them, and would probably have driven over the remaining ones had NATO not stepped in.
As for the videos you refer to from (with the background of people shouting things like "la haram!" (It's forbidden!) and telling them to stop.... would you kindly explain to me how the Transitional National Council, which formed on Feb. 27th, ordered said events on the riots that overthrew Gadhaffi's control of Benghazi on Feb. 17th? Beyond that, if your main source of information is unconfirmed videos on YouTube, how do you reconcile that with the fact that Gadhaffi has been caught over and over and over again by reporters pumping out fake anti-rebel propaganda, from the planted bodies at the bombing sites to the "confiscated drugs" (from his bizarre claim that the rebels were just gangs hopped up on drugs) which were medicines his soldiers took from a local hospital? Do you really think that someone who's been caught practically every day doing stuff like that wouldn't set up YouTube videos?
And its not just about freight. They'd almost certainly piggyback power transmission lines and oil pipelines into the tunnel. The oil should be especially profitable, taking the need for tankers out of the equation and increasing Russia's exports to the US.
I can't wait until we can have large HVDC lines running from Buenos Aires and Halifax to Cape Town and Dublin. Actually, make that latter one "Reykjavík". Heck, put "Reykjavík" on the other side of that statement, too ;)
What on Earth about this "seems to be an Islamic republic"? Have you not paid attention to a single thing stated by the TNC? Read any of their draft documents? They're pushing more liberal policies than we have here in the US.
The reason those students can't cover their rent, FYI, is because in this "wealthy" country, the average personal income is a mere $200 a month, and maintained that way by law #15. Programs like those to fund students overseas affect a tiny percentage of the population, and exist in order to bring educated talent back to the country (to run industry, etc).
You honestly can't tell the difference between people getting your money because you bought a product from them and people getting your money because they have a gun to your head?
Your red herring aside, can you really not understand why people living on $200 a month would be upset with a murderous strongman stealing 80% of their country's wealth to live in absurd showy luxury and rebel the first time they get the chance?
But really, back to your red herring -- can you not tell the difference between a successful businessman and a dictator who controls every aspect of a country's life by military force?
No, *that's* not what he said. I'll quote:
So I'll repeat:
Wait... because a bunch of schoolteachers and engineers with scavenged weapons can't hold ground against a trained militia, therefore people love Gadhaffi? Run that by me again?
Do you not know what the CIA World Factbook is? It's basically an encyclopedia (and is frequently cited in research papers). And it's not exactly some sort of a secret that Libya's wealth doesn't trickle down. The minimum wage in Libya is about $120 a month.. Law #15 maintains the average salary at about $200 a month. Yet the per-capita GNP works out to about $1200 a month. So, well, you do the math as to where most of the money is going.
The UN HDI for Libya is biased by their very high GNI per capita (due to being one of the world's largest oil producers). But little of this actually makes it to the population (as noted by the CIA Factbook article on Libya).
In Libya, the most oil-rich country in Africa, one of the world's largest oil producers, has the highest GDP to population ratio in Africa, but little of the money actually makes it down to the general population. It's a cleptocracy.
Here, how about this. Picture we've got a bunch of people in other countries telling you, "Oh, Americans are too irresponsible or stupid to handle democracy. America should just have a strongman who brutalizes and robs from his people for decades." What would you think of a person who thought that of you?
Despite the efforts of Gadhaffi to try to pit one tribe against another, this revolt still happened. There are no tribal lines in the rebellion. It's doctors, teachers, engineers, students, just a cross-section of society. Imagine that, people being sick of a murderous 40-year cleptocracy.
But no, those dumb towel-heads can't handle democracy, right? They need a brutal, oppressive strongman to keep their primitive rage in check, right?
Yeah, but how creepy is it, having a doctor tell you, in as couched terms as possible of course, "The dog smells death on you"? I mean, I guess it could be worse; they could bring in a vulture to do the job (most vultures have an excellent sense of smell as well). Or the doctor could name the dog after the Cn Annwn ;)
As for the whole intelligence/smell inverse correlation, it seems to hold with parrots. The research I've read suggests that parrots (among the most intelligent of birds, up there with the corvids) have no better of a sense of smell than we do, and that seems to hold true in my household. But don't corvids (ravens, crows, etc) have a good sense of smell, too? Yet they're better tool-makers/users than parrots (although not as good at communication).
Really? You think child abuse doesn't vary from place to place? You think victims not being able to seek protection doesn't change the abuse dynamic?
FYI, we're not talking about islands, but largely about spar platforms, ships, and the like. Tiny specs in vast open oceans, where nobody knows what's going on inside them.
Should we bother to pretend that such seagoing micronations wouldn't be havens for child abuse and the like?
Abuser to victim: "Where are you going to go? The neighbors? The police?"