Your question has a lot of what you want, not what he wants. So ponder that for a moment:
I was searching down the thread from the start, waiting for the first person to say that, but I got bored. So I started from the bottom and worked up.
I hope, for the sake of the children of SlashDotters, that you're not the first person to have pointed out this fundamental fact - that kids may not have the same interests as their parents, but are often quite good about concealing this from the parents. But, to be honest, I wouldn't be terribly surprised if you were.
for visibility of Sagittarius A. From my location, I'll be able to see it on Dec 21, 2012, around 2pm, low to the south. It'll be kinda bright, so unless the sun happens to burn out I won't be seeing much other than blue skies.
Hmmm, and Eta Carinae is in the same general area of the sky as Saggitarius (speaks the northern-hemisphericist, using a broad brush). If *that* star pops at *that* time (in Earth's reference frame, I for one hail our new hypernova-wielding-JWSmythe overlords!
strike with deadly, serious, respected force when we are fucked with. The war in Afghanistan should have been swift, brutal, and left lots of people dead. The result should have been utter fear to ever fuck with the US again, lest your country end up as a post-nuclear holocaust wasteland.
Errr, refresh my memory - when was the last time that the PEOPLE of Afghanistan ever did anything to the people of America, apart form growing a large proportion of the world's supply of heroin precursors, then selling it to all-too-willing buyer who re-sell it in America (in the process exemplifying the American Dream of "fuck anyone as long as I profit").
On the same basis, I'm sure you'd welcome the Protestant population of Ulster launching a shock and awe campaign to destroy the American people who contributed mightily to paying for 30 years of guerilla warfare by the Provisional IRA (and minor offshoots).
Oh, what's that - you don't like applying your own purported standards back to yourself? Ah well, what a surprise. And you wonder why people hate you?
Have you considered moving to a location that does not need a sump pump?
I had been wondering why one would need a sump pump in a domestic dwelling - the only person I'd ever known who needed one was a publican, who had one in his cellar (in both "bottom of the house" and "beer storage" senses) which popped, banged and fizzled one Saturday evening, and I had to fix it's electrics at work that evening (only well enough to last until Monday, when the hardware store opened.
Might get you out of a flood plain.
[SIGH] Which part of the phrase "flood plain" do people think really mean "flood, but that doesn't really apply to me, because I can walk on water". Long ago (like, 20 years ; when I became BSc(Hons)Geology) I gave up arguing with such people ; it's a Waste Of Money, Brains And Time. I decline to waste breath, brains or sympathy on such people.
Gigabit cabling isn't. Or to be more precise, ripping up the carpets and skirting boards in the living room and bedroom without the wife noticeing and complaining isn't an option. So, no gigabit for me, until the wife discovers something that she wants to do that saturates the network. And I don't think that's going to happen in the foreseeable future - I think we'll move to a different country first and I'll cable in gigabit or 10gig directly. To be honest though - I've not encountered anything apart from backing up the file server where 100-base-T is a limitation. And the file server I backup by hooking the USB drives to it, then telnetting in and running the process natively on the box itself. (Wireless? Meh. Tempest isn't a worry; wireless security holes are a worry; and I have to maintain explosives compatibility on my machines. Who needs it?
Well, you clearly don't know the difference between.co.uk and.com !
Not necessarily true, and you know it : the "first post" (at least at my level of comment acceptance) links to google.com, but the injunction in the summary was to "search for [whatever it was]". Some people (I'm one) keep a browser tab open on Google, so if I'd been interested to do the experiment I'd have clicked into the summary, Ctrl-left to the start of the phrase, Shift-Ctrl-Right'd until I'd selected the search term, Ctrl-c to copy it, Ctrl-Tab to the Google page, Ctrl-v to paste it, Enter to search. And that'd have taken me to the google.co.uk version (despite me being in Korea) Why not click on the link? Oh, c'mon, didn't your mummy tell you to not click on random links on web pages without reading the link, parsing it and looking for malware (including Goatse) before clicking through? You're as bad as my daughter, who is facing a Christmas and New Year without a computer because she's got virused (again) and I'm not around to do her IT support for her. Maybe a month or so without IM will teach her to not click on random links in messages she receives. (But I doubt it will.)
Safe Mode does fine enough for most people. I've been cleaning out viruses for almost a decade now
... then you're doing something pretty drastically wrong. Try this for size : stop getting viruses. Then, shock horror, you'd not need to be "cleaning out viruses" for the next ten years.
I know, I know : "it's impossible", "it'll never work", "will nobody think of the poor AV vendors?", "bloody lusers couldn't avoid a virus even if you switched the computer off and arc-welded the removable drive bays shut".
I got fed-the-fuck up with worrying about getting viruses back in the late '80s. So I started to be careful-the-fuck about what-the-fuck I did with my computer. The last virus I had to remove from one of *my* machines was a trojan sent from a friend's mail account (he'd been using an Abu Dhabi Internet cafe and forgot to log out of his account when he left... [sigh]) in (IIRC) 1997. Still using the 'net ; still doing a lot of work. Viruses - someone else's problem. It's not rocket science.
(It's going to be a fun month or two at work - in the middle of a Korean office full of viruses. That's OK - data comes in on their memory sticks, the stick goes into my Linux laptop ; the data goes onto a "sheep-dipped" memory stick ; the sheep-dip goes into the works machine ; the virused memory stick goes back to it's owner. It's almost as much fun as taking lucky dip in the unconscious-VD-patient ward.)
At the very least spend a good deal of time arguing with them, being as difficult and angry a customer as possible, thus driving up their support costs a bit as a kind of aggregate 'penalty' for behavior like this.
[SIGH] First sensible comment of the thread. OK, I'll admit that I still can't understand what the fuck you'd need a search engine on a phone for - it's a phone after all, and if you want to use WWW browsing, then don't you already have a bookmarks file for your normal operations? But yeah, sure - if the terms of service are so shitty, then don't sign the contract. If the terms have been changed under your feet, then change your number to a new service provider while fighting the contract that they've broken. (I assume that you've got these basic options ; if not, change countries and/ or legislations) And if those options are not acceptable, turn the phone off, cancel the standing payments and fight the contract. It's only a mobile phone ; it's not like it's your life or something. [/self remembers to switch phone on check if I'd left the battery charged - yes, I did. OK, turn it off until I next need a camera, or am in a place where there is phone service. Mid- to late- January, looks a good first guess for the service ; the camera, I can't tell.]
I have friends all over the country (and in a few other countries), so my phone book almost looks like an index of all the area codes in the US.
That sounds to me like an ideal opportunity to get pulled up by the Border Police. Such an extensive collection of contacts all over the country "... sure sounds like terr'st activity to me, Bud. You setting up some sort of 'sleeper cell' here or something? No sir, don't try putting your phone back in to your pocket ; keep those hands where I can see them!" Ha ha. But serious. If the first entry in your address book is "Abdul"... you're in deep doo-doo.
I'll go RTFM now. bearing in mind that Charlie Stross lived in Edinburgh the last tie I heard, he may have something relevant to say.
1) TFA mentions that you would start this mission decades before a possible impact. You wouldn't know for sure that it would impact yet. Much less would you know where the impact would occur.
to know that there is going to be an impact, you need to have the asteroid and the Earth within (to a first approximation, for the description not for the calculation) 6360km of each other AT THE SAME TIME. The Earth's orbital velocity is around 100000km/hour ; to get Earth and asteroid in the same place at the same time, you need to have your asteroid crossing the Earth's orbit within a window about 7 minutes in duration. During 7 minutes, the Earth's equator travels around 100km. If we know (or have high confidence) that there's going to be an impact, then we know to a quite close location where it's going to hit. Remembering that we're not really concerned about small impacts, but ones with a nation or continent obliterating potential, then we can assure destruction of "Ground Zero". (The back-of the envelope calculations are assuming that the asteroid comes in perpendicular to the Earth's orbit; a grazing or low-angle impact is considered more likely, I think.
2) If the asteroid's initial trajectory is going to hit the Earth, then there's a 70% chance (roughly) that it will hit water.
If it's going to hit, we'll know Ground Zero to within a few hundred kilometers, as discussed above. But the level of damage that a "civilisation threat" would do makes the water-vs-land impact question pretty trivial. A water impact may well be worse than a land impact.
I'd like your grandchildren to pay for my despoliation of their ecosystem before they were conceived, please. Isn't that a nice, symmetrical distribution of costs and benefits ; I take the benefits and they pay the costs. But if you wanted to make things less uneven, you can't ask my grandchildren to pay for your despoliation of their ecosystem unless you manage to reverse my sterilisation without me noticing it (as a side topic, you'd have to persuade my wife to carry the sprog(s) to term, which is a whole 'nother task).
(Yes, I did detect the sarcasm in the original post. "Do unto others...")
I wonder if there was life on Earth before it was struck by the object that "splashed" to become the moon?
Impossible? No. Implausible? Yes.
If so, could it mean that life has developed here twice?
It's fairly mainstream (as much as there is a "mainstream" in OOL (Origin Of Life) studies) that, if life could develop on an Earth-like planet in a hundred million years (end of Late Heavy Bombardment around 3800 Mya ; first generally-accepted fossils either 3200 Mya or 3500 Mya, depending on which mainstream you paddle in ; controversial claims of "biological signatures" as early as 3700 Mya), then it could plausibly have developed several times during the Late Heavy Bombardment, but been blown/ boiled/ baked away repeatedly. So, postulating that life could have originated on Earth multiple times is not an unrealistic position to defend.
There's a PhD thesis in there, if you want to go for it and you've got a spare 3-4 years.
The problem with your assertion is that it is an appeal to authority type logical fallacy, in and of itself; 1) The scientists have the data, so 2) they must know more about the data than we do, so 3) we should trust them implicitly in their interpretations of that data.
Given a choice between trusting scientists of whom I know almost nothing, and trusting a hyper-opinionated (see above quoted self-description) journalist working for a neo-fascist turd-rag with a century-long reputation for treating anything that doesn't address money (making and taking thereof) as the only thing that matters... I'd only piss on the journalist if he had lots of open wounds and I had some particularly nasty bladder infection.
What we need is sunshine on the raw data;
Yeah, nice idea. As a scientist working in industry, I wish you well in your desire to take on a second and third full-time job learning what data you're looking at and it's intricacies ; personally I like to spend my 3 to 4 hours of spare time per day sleeping, and when I'm not at work, I'll think of you in your quest. A little. Enjoy. What's that - Oh, I see, you were thinking you'd be able to open the "raw data" in a spreadsheet, throw a couple of basic statistical tools at it, and say "Shazam". But didn't you realise that the raw data you're desiring is probably going to be in 37 differently laid out families of ASCII files, which change in format each time the director of a Oblast's Metrological Service retires or is replaced (there are 47 Oblasts to play with, so you'd get several changes of management per year overall. And don't forget the non-Oblast areas). And of course, half of it'll be in Russian and the other half in various different "helpful" translations into English ; your guess is as good as mine on what languages the "informative" notes will be in. But fortunately there'll only be a few dozen different types of the sensors in use for any particular parameter, and they'll all have different idiosyncrasies. Calibrations will be carried out on Mondays at some institutions, Tuesdays at others... so no problem there checking for drift.
Enjoy your self-appointed voluntary task - meanwhile I'll enjoy getting paid to do a much simpler task and getting a few hours sleep a day.
In Basel, they deliberately fractured an active fault that had previously destroyed the city. Nobody is going to be dumb enough to do that again.
Without having RTFA (it's opening in another tab as I type), as a geologist I'd say that you've got to add several significant caveats to your "nobody is going to be dumb enough" assertion: - the destruction of Basel, late 15th century IIRC, was something of a surprise to all concerned, and something of a fluke ; the area didn't (and doesn't) have much of a record of vigorous seismicity (compared to California, for example), and the destruction of the city was IIRC mostly by lake tsunamis generated by a relatively modest quake. - define "active fault", please. One that has had quakes on it in the last decade? or the last century, or the last millennium, or the last ten thousand years? Human lifespans are not really long enough to well address this question, because the Earth can and does operate on much longer timescales. If the last significant quake on the Basel fault had been a mere millennium ago, would we even have sufficient historical records to even be sure that it was a quake? If the last significant quake was 5000 years ago, one could make a reasonable case that it was a response to the stresses of deglaciation of the Alps, and thus unlikely to recur ; it would be very hard to argue against such a claim and would require a lot of detailed (i.e. expensive) field investigation to refute it. There could well be people drilling test wells in what we don't know are seismically threatening areas, and they simply wouldn't know about it.
OK, I'll RTFA now. [...] Hmm, very little detail. I'd guess that what risk assessment work they did, and what the Swiss government's risk assessments are, would be major features of the evidence to be presented. There may be a case to be made for "reckless conduct" (i.e. not making any reckoning of the risks), or there may be a case to be made for having been wrong in the quantification of the risks involved. The former would, rightly, be reprehensible. But if a risk assessment had been made that resulted in them taking out insurances for (say) 20M, and they found themselves paying out 9M, then you (or their lawyers) could make a strong defence that they had indeed reckoned the risks reasonably.
(Yes, I am a geologist. And I've now got to go to a risk assessment meeting for a few hundred thousand dollars of equipment rental.)
So space will be colonized by people with dysfunctional families?
That is practically certain - at least, for as long as the Earth is at least marginally inhabitable to "normal" families. While it is, only dysfunctional people (families or not) would want to leave the planet on such long, probably one-way, trips.
If I google for my name, I get a lot of mailing list posts that I've written and each one appears several times in the search results.
That is because a mailing list that has archives open for anyone to read is a gold-mine for someone wanting to generate content for a website. Read and parse the archive to slurp it into your database, and you'll start to garner hits.
Become an active participant on multiple forums, everything from albacore tuna fishing to zoology (avoid politics and religion).
But... the politics of tuna fishing is horrendously complex (it's tied up with multi-national disputes over borders in the sea, the distressing habit that fish have of not carrying passports and of bypassing passport-control, the fish are probably suffering from range changes consequent on global warming, and their fishing is tied up with organised crime - i.e. local politics)... while zoology, being founded on evolution, is interpreted in some religions as an assault on their brand of delusional approach to reality.
Become a sports commentator - it's slightly less inflammatory.
the alternative: that they were informed they did something wrong and then voluntarily did the right thing, regardless of how enforceable the license is.
By their (in-)actions, they've just made it considerably more enforceable.
FYI: I an not an accosiate of doty energy, it;s investors, nor do I have a stake in the company, and am compensated in NO WAY for my comments.
Given the care and attention that you give to spelling and grammar, I'm not surprised that you're not being paid. In fact, if you're trying to encourage people to read what you're proposing (which doesn't sound an utterly incredible system, though I suspect that it's no where near as good as your summary), then you might find it better to use some writing tools to check before you post. You've done harm to the people you are proselytising for. Well done.
I would say it is a Darwin award even if he already has kids. This prevents him from further polluting the gene pool.
Once the gene pool is polluted, the only way it is going to be cleansed is by killing (without issue) all descendants of the offending genome. This is eminently do-able - war is a popular way of achieving this - but it would fall foul of most populist systems of ethics. It would be morally equivalent to punishing the children for the sins of the parents, something rightly disavowed by all civilised societies. Fancy organising a book-burning? There's a heretical, disgusting religion that avows this exact policy ; obviously it's books should be burned (to provide kindling for burning the proselytes of the religion, before you put the run-of-the-mill followers on the pyre).
Which would have been more impressive? The defeat of 300 Spartans by the million-strong army of Xerxes, or the defeat of 300! Spartans by a million-strong Persian army? (In the first case the Spartans are outnumbered 3000 to one ; in the latter case, the Persians are outnumbered some 10^600 to one. That's a lot.
If and only if... he'd not already polluted the gene pool with his mess.
Allegedly one of the former analysts at my father's employer had been in the habit of keeping a beaker of water on the bench for a drink while he was doing an analysis. (This was back in the days of real wet chemical analysis, not automated analytical machines.) One day, doing analysis that involved potassium cyanide solution... he took a drink from the wrong beaker. Dead in minutes, despite prompt first aid, properly prepared iron hydroxide, etc. I don't know if it's a true story - literally "before I was born" - but I learned the lesson.
Care to elaborate? It has 95% of earth's mass, and as it orbits at 0.72 au, it suffers from roughly twice the radiation from the sun. (assuming all radiation follows 1/r^2) I assume that if it had a magnetic field, it should be able to hold on to it's hydrogen
The magnetic field of Venus is much weaker than that of Earth.
Why? Well, if we knew exactly how the Earth's field is generated (it's a self-exciting dynamo ; but the exact details are still somewhat obscure, because the physics are very complex), we'd perhaps know why Venus doesn't have one ; it could be because of relatively small differences in composition (affecting viscosities in the core, affecting flow rates, affecting currents affecting the magnetic field), or simply because of the much less vigorous rotation of Venus (affecting flow rates etc etc.)
Large scale terraforming is a distinct possibility in the future.
Could you elaborate on the meaning of the "small scale terraforming" concept that you imply exists?
I take it that you're implying something like : 1- we fuck Earth's environment ; 2- we terraform Mars, creating an environment that's significantly more robust than Earth's ; 3- we ship Earth's population from Earth to Mars, fitting them onto 28% of the surface area ; 4-... 5- profit ?
Or possibly, at step 3 we select 72% of the Earth's population to die in situ, and only ship enough people to populate Mars to the then-current density on Earth. Good luck getting that through in anything resembling a democracy.
But that caveat doesn't really matter.
Certainly before step 3, and probably long before we can even start to produce reasonable plans for step 2, our understanding of what it takes to make a stable environment will have to drastically improve. And at that point, we're in a situation where we can realistically start producing asteroid colonies, interstellar generation ships and a wide variety of other options that will probably be easier than terraforming a planet that is fundamentally different to "Terra".
We could be doing the basic research and experimentation for this now.
Slashdot Mirror
I was searching down the thread from the start, waiting for the first person to say that, but I got bored. So I started from the bottom and worked up.
I hope, for the sake of the children of SlashDotters, that you're not the first person to have pointed out this fundamental fact - that kids may not have the same interests as their parents, but are often quite good about concealing this from the parents. But, to be honest, I wouldn't be terribly surprised if you were.
Hmmm, and Eta Carinae is in the same general area of the sky as Saggitarius (speaks the northern-hemisphericist, using a broad brush).
If *that* star pops at *that* time (in Earth's reference frame, I for one hail our new hypernova-wielding-JWSmythe overlords!
Errr, refresh my memory - when was the last time that the PEOPLE of Afghanistan ever did anything to the people of America, apart form growing a large proportion of the world's supply of heroin precursors, then selling it to all-too-willing buyer who re-sell it in America (in the process exemplifying the American Dream of "fuck anyone as long as I profit").
On the same basis, I'm sure you'd welcome the Protestant population of Ulster launching a shock and awe campaign to destroy the American people who contributed mightily to paying for 30 years of guerilla warfare by the Provisional IRA (and minor offshoots).
Oh, what's that - you don't like applying your own purported standards back to yourself? Ah well, what a surprise. And you wonder why people hate you?
I had been wondering why one would need a sump pump in a domestic dwelling - the only person I'd ever known who needed one was a publican, who had one in his cellar (in both "bottom of the house" and "beer storage" senses) which popped, banged and fizzled one Saturday evening, and I had to fix it's electrics at work that evening (only well enough to last until Monday, when the hardware store opened.
[SIGH] Which part of the phrase "flood plain" do people think really mean "flood, but that doesn't really apply to me, because I can walk on water". Long ago (like, 20 years ; when I became BSc(Hons)Geology) I gave up arguing with such people ; it's a Waste Of Money, Brains And Time. I decline to waste breath, brains or sympathy on such people.
Not necessarily true, and you know it : the "first post" (at least at my level of comment acceptance) links to google.com, but the injunction in the summary was to "search for [whatever it was]". Some people (I'm one) keep a browser tab open on Google, so if I'd been interested to do the experiment I'd have clicked into the summary, Ctrl-left to the start of the phrase, Shift-Ctrl-Right'd until I'd selected the search term, Ctrl-c to copy it, Ctrl-Tab to the Google page, Ctrl-v to paste it, Enter to search. And that'd have taken me to the google.co.uk version (despite me being in Korea)
Why not click on the link? Oh, c'mon, didn't your mummy tell you to not click on random links on web pages without reading the link, parsing it and looking for malware (including Goatse) before clicking through? You're as bad as my daughter, who is facing a Christmas and New Year without a computer because she's got virused (again) and I'm not around to do her IT support for her. Maybe a month or so without IM will teach her to not click on random links in messages she receives. (But I doubt it will.)
Try this for size : stop getting viruses.
Then, shock horror, you'd not need to be "cleaning out viruses" for the next ten years.
I know, I know : "it's impossible", "it'll never work", "will nobody think of the poor AV vendors?", "bloody lusers couldn't avoid a virus even if you switched the computer off and arc-welded the removable drive bays shut".
I got fed-the-fuck up with worrying about getting viruses back in the late '80s. So I started to be careful-the-fuck about what-the-fuck I did with my computer. The last virus I had to remove from one of *my* machines was a trojan sent from a friend's mail account (he'd been using an Abu Dhabi Internet cafe and forgot to log out of his account when he left ... [sigh]) in (IIRC) 1997. Still using the 'net ; still doing a lot of work. Viruses - someone else's problem. It's not rocket science.
(It's going to be a fun month or two at work - in the middle of a Korean office full of viruses. That's OK - data comes in on their memory sticks, the stick goes into my Linux laptop ; the data goes onto a "sheep-dipped" memory stick ; the sheep-dip goes into the works machine ; the virused memory stick goes back to it's owner. It's almost as much fun as taking lucky dip in the unconscious-VD-patient ward.)
[SIGH] First sensible comment of the thread.
OK, I'll admit that I still can't understand what the fuck you'd need a search engine on a phone for - it's a phone after all, and if you want to use WWW browsing, then don't you already have a bookmarks file for your normal operations?
But yeah, sure - if the terms of service are so shitty, then don't sign the contract. If the terms have been changed under your feet, then change your number to a new service provider while fighting the contract that they've broken.
(I assume that you've got these basic options ; if not, change countries and/ or legislations)
And if those options are not acceptable, turn the phone off, cancel the standing payments and fight the contract. It's only a mobile phone ; it's not like it's your life or something.
[/self remembers to switch phone on check if I'd left the battery charged - yes, I did. OK, turn it off until I next need a camera, or am in a place where there is phone service. Mid- to late- January, looks a good first guess for the service ; the camera, I can't tell.]
FTFY.
That sounds to me like an ideal opportunity to get pulled up by the Border Police. Such an extensive collection of contacts all over the country "... sure sounds like terr'st activity to me, Bud. You setting up some sort of 'sleeper cell' here or something? No sir, don't try putting your phone back in to your pocket ; keep those hands where I can see them!" ... you're in deep doo-doo.
Ha ha. But serious.
If the first entry in your address book is "Abdul"
I'll go RTFM now. bearing in mind that Charlie Stross lived in Edinburgh the last tie I heard, he may have something relevant to say.
to know that there is going to be an impact, you need to have the asteroid and the Earth within (to a first approximation, for the description not for the calculation) 6360km of each other AT THE SAME TIME.
The Earth's orbital velocity is around 100000km/hour ; to get Earth and asteroid in the same place at the same time, you need to have your asteroid crossing the Earth's orbit within a window about 7 minutes in duration. During 7 minutes, the Earth's equator travels around 100km.
If we know (or have high confidence) that there's going to be an impact, then we know to a quite close location where it's going to hit. Remembering that we're not really concerned about small impacts, but ones with a nation or continent obliterating potential, then we can assure destruction of "Ground Zero".
(The back-of the envelope calculations are assuming that the asteroid comes in perpendicular to the Earth's orbit; a grazing or low-angle impact is considered more likely, I think.
If it's going to hit, we'll know Ground Zero to within a few hundred kilometers, as discussed above. But the level of damage that a "civilisation threat" would do makes the water-vs-land impact question pretty trivial. A water impact may well be worse than a land impact.
I'd like your grandchildren to pay for my despoliation of their ecosystem before they were conceived, please. Isn't that a nice, symmetrical distribution of costs and benefits ; I take the benefits and they pay the costs.
But if you wanted to make things less uneven, you can't ask my grandchildren to pay for your despoliation of their ecosystem unless you manage to reverse my sterilisation without me noticing it (as a side topic, you'd have to persuade my wife to carry the sprog(s) to term, which is a whole 'nother task).
(Yes, I did detect the sarcasm in the original post. "Do unto others ...")
Impossible? No.
Implausible? Yes.
It's fairly mainstream (as much as there is a "mainstream" in OOL (Origin Of Life) studies) that, if life could develop on an Earth-like planet in a hundred million years (end of Late Heavy Bombardment around 3800 Mya ; first generally-accepted fossils either 3200 Mya or 3500 Mya, depending on which mainstream you paddle in ; controversial claims of "biological signatures" as early as 3700 Mya), then it could plausibly have developed several times during the Late Heavy Bombardment, but been blown/ boiled/ baked away repeatedly. So, postulating that life could have originated on Earth multiple times is not an unrealistic position to defend.
There's a PhD thesis in there, if you want to go for it and you've got a spare 3-4 years.
Given a choice between trusting scientists of whom I know almost nothing, and trusting a hyper-opinionated (see above quoted self-description) journalist working for a neo-fascist turd-rag with a century-long reputation for treating anything that doesn't address money (making and taking thereof) as the only thing that matters ... I'd only piss on the journalist if he had lots of open wounds and I had some particularly nasty bladder infection.
Yeah, nice idea. As a scientist working in industry, I wish you well in your desire to take on a second and third full-time job learning what data you're looking at and it's intricacies ; personally I like to spend my 3 to 4 hours of spare time per day sleeping, and when I'm not at work, I'll think of you in your quest. A little. Enjoy. ... so no problem there checking for drift.
What's that - Oh, I see, you were thinking you'd be able to open the "raw data" in a spreadsheet, throw a couple of basic statistical tools at it, and say "Shazam". But didn't you realise that the raw data you're desiring is probably going to be in 37 differently laid out families of ASCII files, which change in format each time the director of a Oblast's Metrological Service retires or is replaced (there are 47 Oblasts to play with, so you'd get several changes of management per year overall. And don't forget the non-Oblast areas). And of course, half of it'll be in Russian and the other half in various different "helpful" translations into English ; your guess is as good as mine on what languages the "informative" notes will be in. But fortunately there'll only be a few dozen different types of the sensors in use for any particular parameter, and they'll all have different idiosyncrasies. Calibrations will be carried out on Mondays at some institutions, Tuesdays at others
Enjoy your self-appointed voluntary task - meanwhile I'll enjoy getting paid to do a much simpler task and getting a few hours sleep a day.
Without having RTFA (it's opening in another tab as I type), as a geologist I'd say that you've got to add several significant caveats to your "nobody is going to be dumb enough" assertion:
- the destruction of Basel, late 15th century IIRC, was something of a surprise to all concerned, and something of a fluke ; the area didn't (and doesn't) have much of a record of vigorous seismicity (compared to California, for example), and the destruction of the city was IIRC mostly by lake tsunamis generated by a relatively modest quake.
- define "active fault", please. One that has had quakes on it in the last decade? or the last century, or the last millennium, or the last ten thousand years? Human lifespans are not really long enough to well address this question, because the Earth can and does operate on much longer timescales. If the last significant quake on the Basel fault had been a mere millennium ago, would we even have sufficient historical records to even be sure that it was a quake? If the last significant quake was 5000 years ago, one could make a reasonable case that it was a response to the stresses of deglaciation of the Alps, and thus unlikely to recur ; it would be very hard to argue against such a claim and would require a lot of detailed (i.e. expensive) field investigation to refute it.
There could well be people drilling test wells in what we don't know are seismically threatening areas, and they simply wouldn't know about it.
OK, I'll RTFA now. [...] Hmm, very little detail. I'd guess that what risk assessment work they did, and what the Swiss government's risk assessments are, would be major features of the evidence to be presented. There may be a case to be made for "reckless conduct" (i.e. not making any reckoning of the risks), or there may be a case to be made for having been wrong in the quantification of the risks involved. The former would, rightly, be reprehensible. But if a risk assessment had been made that resulted in them taking out insurances for (say) 20M, and they found themselves paying out 9M, then you (or their lawyers) could make a strong defence that they had indeed reckoned the risks reasonably.
(Yes, I am a geologist. And I've now got to go to a risk assessment meeting for a few hundred thousand dollars of equipment rental.)
That is practically certain - at least, for as long as the Earth is at least marginally inhabitable to "normal" families. While it is, only dysfunctional people (families or not) would want to leave the planet on such long, probably one-way, trips.
That is because a mailing list that has archives open for anyone to read is a gold-mine for someone wanting to generate content for a website. Read and parse the archive to slurp it into your database, and you'll start to garner hits.
But ... the politics of tuna fishing is horrendously complex (it's tied up with multi-national disputes over borders in the sea, the distressing habit that fish have of not carrying passports and of bypassing passport-control, the fish are probably suffering from range changes consequent on global warming, and their fishing is tied up with organised crime - i.e. local politics) ... while zoology, being founded on evolution, is interpreted in some religions as an assault on their brand of delusional approach to reality.
Become a sports commentator - it's slightly less inflammatory.
By their (in-)actions, they've just made it considerably more enforceable.
Given the care and attention that you give to spelling and grammar, I'm not surprised that you're not being paid. In fact, if you're trying to encourage people to read what you're proposing (which doesn't sound an utterly incredible system, though I suspect that it's no where near as good as your summary), then you might find it better to use some writing tools to check before you post.
You've done harm to the people you are proselytising for. Well done.
Once the gene pool is polluted, the only way it is going to be cleansed is by killing (without issue) all descendants of the offending genome. This is eminently do-able - war is a popular way of achieving this - but it would fall foul of most populist systems of ethics. It would be morally equivalent to punishing the children for the sins of the parents, something rightly disavowed by all civilised societies.
Fancy organising a book-burning? There's a heretical, disgusting religion that avows this exact policy ; obviously it's books should be burned (to provide kindling for burning the proselytes of the religion, before you put the run-of-the-mill followers on the pyre).
Oh, sorry, were you joking? I wasn't.
Which would have been more impressive? The defeat of 300 Spartans by the million-strong army of Xerxes, or the defeat of 300! Spartans by a million-strong Persian army? (In the first case the Spartans are outnumbered 3000 to one ; in the latter case, the Persians are outnumbered some 10^600 to one.
That's a lot.
If and only if ... he'd not already polluted the gene pool with his mess.
Allegedly one of the former analysts at my father's employer had been in the habit of keeping a beaker of water on the bench for a drink while he was doing an analysis. (This was back in the days of real wet chemical analysis, not automated analytical machines.) One day, doing analysis that involved potassium cyanide solution ... he took a drink from the wrong beaker. Dead in minutes, despite prompt first aid, properly prepared iron hydroxide, etc.
I don't know if it's a true story - literally "before I was born" - but I learned the lesson.
The magnetic field of Venus is much weaker than that of Earth.
Why?
Well, if we knew exactly how the Earth's field is generated (it's a self-exciting dynamo ; but the exact details are still somewhat obscure, because the physics are very complex), we'd perhaps know why Venus doesn't have one ; it could be because of relatively small differences in composition (affecting viscosities in the core, affecting flow rates, affecting currents affecting the magnetic field), or simply because of the much less vigorous rotation of Venus (affecting flow rates etc etc.)
Could you elaborate on the meaning of the "small scale terraforming" concept that you imply exists?
I take it that you're implying something like : ...
1- we fuck Earth's environment ;
2- we terraform Mars, creating an environment that's significantly more robust than Earth's ;
3- we ship Earth's population from Earth to Mars, fitting them onto 28% of the surface area ;
4-
5- profit ?
Or possibly, at step 3 we select 72% of the Earth's population to die in situ, and only ship enough people to populate Mars to the then-current density on Earth. Good luck getting that through in anything resembling a democracy.
But that caveat doesn't really matter.
Certainly before step 3, and probably long before we can even start to produce reasonable plans for step 2, our understanding of what it takes to make a stable environment will have to drastically improve. And at that point, we're in a situation where we can realistically start producing asteroid colonies, interstellar generation ships and a wide variety of other options that will probably be easier than terraforming a planet that is fundamentally different to "Terra".
We could be doing the basic research and experimentation for this now.