In Kyiv (South of Chernobyl) housewives shop with dosimeters to ensure the food is safe.
Never heard that story. Some evidence would be a good idea - especially considering that a dosimeter is quite an expensive piece of kit.
Travelers are advised to brush their teeth with bottled water as the water is believed to be radioactive.
People who travel almost anywhere outside north America and Western Europe are advised to use bottled water for tooth brushing for reasons completely unrelated to radioactivity. Certainly, I was advised so on my 3 visits to work in the FSU, and the closest I got to Chernobyl was flying over it at 9km altitude.
Electrical cables and switchgear which have remained unmaintained for 30-odd years? Hmmm, I'm not so sure that would be much of a benefit.
I used to have fiends working in the (UK) national grid's infrastructure, who worked on the basis of a 50-year working lifetime for his gear. So if Chernobyl were built before 2016 - 50 = 1966... then the existing links aren't likely to be much benefit. [Wiki] "Construction began 15 August 1972" ; not so helpful - there's going to be that much repair work that tearing down and rebuilding from scratch might be more effective.
At this point its giving me second thoughts about keeping backups on their cloud
Google's cloud in particular, or any company's cloud?
I keep my backups as patterns of rust on portable hard drives in a ziplock bag in a friend's cellar. The friend does the same. Our backups work, and do not depend on any internet service working tomorrow.
This is a GREAT wake-up call for all those people that think that ANY cloud service is a great place to be the only repository for all your photos and other things...
My original title was something like "the iron fist pokes out of the velvet glove".
the only way to produce drought-resistant species is to have a serious drought, a big fire to clear out all the dead species, and then re-seed them with the drought resistant ones.
Err, no. The scenario you describe would re-seed the area with more fire-tolerant strains of tree, not more drought tolerant ones. You want an extended drought during which only drought-tolerant saplings can mature, then sufficient normal-ish weather for that cohort of drought-tolerant trees to mature, then a fire which takes out the drought-tolerant and drought-susceptible trees at more-or less similar rates, after which the increased number of the drought-tolerant trees would dominate the seed load from which future generations will grow. Lather, rinse, repeat.
Would you describe the flu as an STD, because you can transmit it by swapping spit with a partner while shagging them? Or would flu remain a droplet transmission disease to which you've identified a possible sexual method of transmission.
I thought that "STDs" are diseases whose main method of transmission is through sexual routes, which has never been the case for Zika. By your criterion, Ebola is also an STD because cases have been reported of it's sexual transmission months after the infection source had recovered from the disease and felt up to fucking his wife.
And there I was intending to do my bit with the moderation system. But this AC is so poor I can't leave it be.
The OP mentioned "outgassing", and the AC responded:
Metal doesn't just vaporise. It takes a lot of energy to free atoms from a metal lattice, which would require the metal to be visibly glowing hot, which is not what happens in the drive.
Outgassing is not vapourisation of metal, freeing (metal) atoms from the lattice, etc. It is the loss of volatile "foreign" atoms (or molecules) from the near-surface of a metal (or indeed, any solid or liquid). For a domestic example, pour some water into a transparent pan, let it settle for a few minutes (for the bubbles of entrained air to settle out to the surface), then put it onto the stove. As the water increases from tap temperature (10-15C, very locally variable), you'll see lots of small bubbles forming on the surface between the water and the pan material. Then this bubble formation will stop as the temperature continues to rise, until finally you again start to form (and collapse) bubbles at the water-pan interface as the boiling point of the water is approached. That first flush of bubbles is gas dissolved in the water outgassing from the liquid. Not boiling (the process the AC describes) - outgassing. They're different processes, which is why they have different names.
Metals can outgas too. Many metals can form an adsorbed layer of oxygen and-or nitrogen molecules or atoms when exposed to air, and then take a very long time to desorb those gases when exposed to high vacuum. (Just as an example of why this is an important topic, some metals become much more prone to vacuum welding once that adsorbed layer has gone. Things which used to slide and then started to stick have stopped more than a few spacecraft working over the years.)
Atmospheric gases are not the only ones that can cause problems. A considerable number of metals form interesting compounds with carbon monoxide, for example (look at the Mond process for refining nickel). So if they're exposed to carbon dioxide then there is the possibility of carbon monoxide forming by reduction of the dioxide by the metal. Et voila - another candidate for a potential outgassing compound.
This apparatus includes a disc of a polyethylene 5.4cm thick by 15.6cm wide (odd dimensions!) mounted with it's largest face normal to the rotation axis of the test apparatus (it's there in the paper - that's what papers are for - reading). Since that should be a insulator, and it's exposed to significant microwave intensities as part of the experiment, then I certainly wouldn't rule out generating high electrical fields on it's surface, and that's a damned good environment for accelerating atoms off the surface into the vacuum. I'd look at that, very carefully.
Then I'd also look extremely carefully at every joint in the "test article" - both electrical and mechanical - which was made with any sort of soldering technique. Because soldering uses "flux," and that is typically the sort of moderate (few hundred deg C) melting point organic compound that is going to be really good at slowly outgassing at moderate temperatures.
But hey - I'm not a physicist. I'm just a rock-botherer who has seen steam ("boiling point" of 100 degC) coming off 800 degC lava and thought about the millions of years outgassing takes in real environments ; I've had solder melt into my fingertips as the flux bubbles and boils. I've had low-vacuum lab equipment which wouldn't seal unless you wiped the "plastic" surfaces down with trike immediately before assembly, because of skin oils. Equipment can be tricky. And measuring a microNewton force in an apparatus that weighs tens of kilos is not going to be easy.
I've since been told that Google are indeed rolling back to some degree on this. (Been doing thing in "real life" for the last couple of days, so haven't been online.)
OTOH, Even if the roll back this time, they still retain the capacity to do this again in the future. Which is why I trust them as much as I trust any other online (or indeed, real-world) company. And I maintain my backups on organised rust, keep email addresses in multiple countries, and bank accounts in multiple countries too. Online banking... I do by going to the counter to tell them to disable online banking (again!) and do whatever seems necessary at the time.
It has been that long since I actually saw more than a few minutes of an episode that I don't know what his "show persona" is. But he says enough, of dangerous viciousness, when he's not on the show and professes to be portraying his personal opinions that he attracts opprobium and attack. So, that's what he gets.
But not in a shitheel kind of way.
That's certainly not what his behaviour in he last few weeks at the Beeb suggest. Assault on a colleague is definitely ground for dismissal, as a shitheel.
Line 1 : Nobody trusted the Americans to not switch their GPS system back to military-only operation at the drop of a military or financial hat.
Line 2 : The Russians responded by building their own system.
Line 3 : GOTO Line 1 ; s/Americans/Russians/ ; s/GPS/GLONASS/ ; GOTO Line 2 ; s/Russians/Chinese/ ; ECHO Line 1 ; ECHO Line 2.
Line 4 : GOTO Line 1 ; s/Russians/Chinese ; s/GLONASS/Chinese\ system/ ; GOTO Line 2 ; s/Chinese/Europeans/ ; ECHO Line 1 ; ECHO Line 2.
You might claim that no one thinks the Americans, Russians or Chinese would be insane enough to do that. But making that claim while looking at Trump AND Putin AND keeping a straight face is going to be hard to achieve. Whether the swarms of Chinese and European apparatchiks would be any less insane en masse... well that's a good question. Personally, I still know how to navigate with a map and compass. And drawing my own map first would be a "not again", not a "how?"
A shit could not be given about non-PC content. It's Clarkson's encouragement of lethal force against workers trying to improve their working conditions that turned him from "public buffoon" to "dangerous person to whom I will do as much harm as I can". Since my only input to the creative media is as a consumer of adverts, then the only legal channel I have for harming him is by trying to damage his sale value to the advertising industry. So I do that. Unfortunately, that will result in harm to people who hitch their flags to his. Tough shit boys - get an external career (which the one with the memorable name has made some attempt at doing).
That makes two of us. Say, ten beer's worth of whatever currency fits. 999998 more people that interested and we'd probably have a workable level of funding.
This was the way corporate labor worked before the advent of labor unions, and certainly in some industries including mining and agriculture.
You missed the bit about people being paid in "Company Scrip", which would be the only currency that would be accepted at the Company Store. And the Company Store is the only store that operates in the Company Town!
Trade Unions fought to stop this and ensure that wages were paid in national currency. People died in those fights. But they'll be back before long.
when it comes to deep space travel, cryo storing people might be the most sensible way to say colonize a distant planet where the ship is going to take 1,000 years to get there. Yes, yes, I know there's a WHOLE shitload of technical hurdles, but if we got the cryo stuff right it would give us that option.
Cryostoring sex cells and/ or pre-screened embryos, then building a womb once your robots have built an in-space habitat isn't far beyond our current technology and is much simpler.
Why?
Well, (1) because it's doable today (whereas cryostoring anything much bigger than a mouse isn't), so will always retain a decade or century of development time over the vapourware that is cryo-revival. And (2) what possible reason would you have for putting your company's (or government's) resources into shipping people who might have their own agendas, when you can grow people in your own controlled environment. As the Jesuits used to say, "give me the boy at seven, and I will give you the man". Or something like that.
And (3) if you ship a citizen out, you have a moral and possibly legal problem if one of them says "I want to go home" a week after the turnover point. With locally-grown embryos, they are "home" already. Hell, you can control their environment to the point that they might not even know there is another planet until the second generation are about to go into the Soylent Mincer. (Actually, that might be a point against taking embryos - in most legal systems today, they have parents who have rights. It's a lot more varied for jizz and unfertilised eggs. Even more so for testicle tissue and ovarian tissue from which you can produce sex cells.)
I feel slightly sorry for James May, who has made a decent stab at having his own career, but while he's still hitched to the repulsive Clarkson, then he's not going to get eyeball-seconds from me.
Who's the other one? The nondescript one with no life outside Clarkson's shadow.
Casualties likely in certain areas, but mostly just expensive to fix and restore services.
Anything less than a gigadeath would only put us back into the 1990s. Literally, it wouldn't be noticed in the archaeological record. (Unless it left some interesting volcanic rocks. Or cosmogenic isotopes embedded in exposed rock surfaces.)
1: Killer Asteroid, Happens multiple times per billion years. Hasn't extinguished life yet, and hasn't come within 4% of extinguishing complex (metazoan) life in a quarter billion years. Might be able to kill off our species, but otherwise, [SHRUG].
2: Black Hole, If one has happened in the past, it hasn't left any detectable traces.
3: Rogue Planet, Hasn't happened yet. Except in Velikovsky's fiction.
4: Nuclear War, Yeah, that's likely to be a good one. Whether it would destroy the species, as opposed to simply bombing us back to the stone age. Which would be what - 10,000 years set back, or 20,000 years. Negligible in the longer term view of things.
5: Solar Storm, If it has happened previously, it hasn't had noticeable effects. The 1859 Carrington event was certainly full of potent possibilities for damaging our present technologies, and prudent engineers would be acting to mitigate those effects. Let's be pessimistic and say that all electrical power and communications systems are destroyed and... 6 billion people die. That would put us back to around the position our species was in around about 1900. With a significant number of printed technical records around the planet. Big fucking deal.
6: Mega Eruption,Happens on a regular basis. Toba (circa 70,000 years ago) had a crack at reducing our early population to a few thousands... and no with humans dispersed over the entire globe, "Big fucking deal." Again.
7: Gamma Ray Burst, Now that's an interesting one. Statistics are awfully thin on the ground, and arguments about the likelihood are very much on an knife edge. Which is a good reason for looking for geological evidence for if it has happened in the past. Oddly, people are doing just that - while continuing with studies of exposure ages of rock surfaces, sediments etc as part of the process of understanding basin erosion- and fill- rates. Tedious geological work, being done by oil companies around the world for their own very good reasons.
8: Earth Out of Orbit,Hasn't happened yet. On the order of a 1% chance of it happening this side of the Sun going red giant. Not a high probability outcome. And definitely not going to happen without a few hundreds of (Earth) orbits of warning.
9: Alien Invasion,I refer the honourable gentleman to Mr Fermi's comments on this subject.
10: Deep Sea Disaster WTF is that meant to mean? I'll guess the putative ocean anoxic event at the Permian-Triassic boundary. Which is also argued to be an impact event (Manicougain + other near-simultaneous impacts). Or the Siberian traps LIP (Large Igneous Province). Or the coincidence of all three in a short time period. See comments for (1) above. Big fucking deal.
Go back and RTFA again (or more likely, for the first time. Most of the content of that article is the reporter's opinion or interpretation, not what Hawkins actually said himself.
The (first) give-away is the use of the nonsensical phrase "mass extinction" in both the article and summary (all hail copy'n'paste without the intervention of one moment of consideration!) ; a species is either extinct or not extinct. A species can suffer mass deaths but as long as one genome remains, it isn't extinct (sex does make this a little more complex) even if 99.9999999% of the species has died.
What I can read between the comment presented by the article is that Hawkins thinks that humankind needs to get some (a breeding population - say a thousand or so genomes) of it's population off this planet and out into space. Which is a very different thing than the impossible task of moving a significant proportion of the planet's population to live on another planet.
It's really easy to imagine that games would permeate our lives much the way digital music does today.
I.E. almost completely not at all. (I did put a couple of tunes on the juke box in the pub about 3 weeks ago).
The amount of eggs [...] might mean that I get more juice in Need for Speed.
Not in any game experience that I'm going to buy. Oh, just a second - when did I last buy a game? I think I brought a Tomb Raider compilation (first 3 or 4 games) for a tenner about a decade ago. Give or take a few years. I don't think there's been anything tempting since.
A week or so ago I had the amusing (but highly unlikely) idea of one production team (writers, directors, actors, SFX-techs) doing both Starship Troopers and Forever War more-or less simultaneously.
It would be interesting. Very unlikely, but interesting.
At the time she did it, she knew that it was no more unhealthy than any other boiling up of tonnes of rock in fuming nitric acid. Which is not the healthiest of occupations, but not because of the radioactivity of fuming nitric acid.
Actually, radiologists who've since examined the case suggest that Marie Curie's fatal cancer was most likelt due to her medal-winning work as a volunteer X-ray operator during the Great War. (advertised as "The War to End War" without a word of irony. That time.) Those battlefield X-ray machines had no shielding for the operator, again because no one was aware of a hazard at the time. It wasn't until a decade or so later that the epidemiology started to show evidence of harm.
Slashdot Mirror
Never heard that story. Some evidence would be a good idea - especially considering that a dosimeter is quite an expensive piece of kit.
People who travel almost anywhere outside north America and Western Europe are advised to use bottled water for tooth brushing for reasons completely unrelated to radioactivity. Certainly, I was advised so on my 3 visits to work in the FSU, and the closest I got to Chernobyl was flying over it at 9km altitude.
Ummm, no, forget I said that.
I used to have fiends working in the (UK) national grid's infrastructure, who worked on the basis of a 50-year working lifetime for his gear. So if Chernobyl were built before 2016 - 50 = 1966 ... then the existing links aren't likely to be much benefit. [Wiki] "Construction began 15 August 1972" ; not so helpful - there's going to be that much repair work that tearing down and rebuilding from scratch might be more effective.
Excuses not accepted.
Google's cloud in particular, or any company's cloud?
I keep my backups as patterns of rust on portable hard drives in a ziplock bag in a friend's cellar. The friend does the same. Our backups work, and do not depend on any internet service working tomorrow.
My original title was something like "the iron fist pokes out of the velvet glove".
Err, no. The scenario you describe would re-seed the area with more fire-tolerant strains of tree, not more drought tolerant ones. You want an extended drought during which only drought-tolerant saplings can mature, then sufficient normal-ish weather for that cohort of drought-tolerant trees to mature, then a fire which takes out the drought-tolerant and drought-susceptible trees at more-or less similar rates, after which the increased number of the drought-tolerant trees would dominate the seed load from which future generations will grow. Lather, rinse, repeat.
I thought that "STDs" are diseases whose main method of transmission is through sexual routes, which has never been the case for Zika. By your criterion, Ebola is also an STD because cases have been reported of it's sexual transmission months after the infection source had recovered from the disease and felt up to fucking his wife.
The OP mentioned "outgassing", and the AC responded :
Outgassing is not vapourisation of metal, freeing (metal) atoms from the lattice, etc. It is the loss of volatile "foreign" atoms (or molecules) from the near-surface of a metal (or indeed, any solid or liquid). For a domestic example, pour some water into a transparent pan, let it settle for a few minutes (for the bubbles of entrained air to settle out to the surface), then put it onto the stove. As the water increases from tap temperature (10-15C, very locally variable), you'll see lots of small bubbles forming on the surface between the water and the pan material. Then this bubble formation will stop as the temperature continues to rise, until finally you again start to form (and collapse) bubbles at the water-pan interface as the boiling point of the water is approached. That first flush of bubbles is gas dissolved in the water outgassing from the liquid. Not boiling (the process the AC describes) - outgassing. They're different processes, which is why they have different names.
Metals can outgas too. Many metals can form an adsorbed layer of oxygen and-or nitrogen molecules or atoms when exposed to air, and then take a very long time to desorb those gases when exposed to high vacuum. (Just as an example of why this is an important topic, some metals become much more prone to vacuum welding once that adsorbed layer has gone. Things which used to slide and then started to stick have stopped more than a few spacecraft working over the years.)
Atmospheric gases are not the only ones that can cause problems. A considerable number of metals form interesting compounds with carbon monoxide, for example (look at the Mond process for refining nickel). So if they're exposed to carbon dioxide then there is the possibility of carbon monoxide forming by reduction of the dioxide by the metal. Et voila - another candidate for a potential outgassing compound.
This apparatus includes a disc of a polyethylene 5.4cm thick by 15.6cm wide (odd dimensions!) mounted with it's largest face normal to the rotation axis of the test apparatus (it's there in the paper - that's what papers are for - reading). Since that should be a insulator, and it's exposed to significant microwave intensities as part of the experiment, then I certainly wouldn't rule out generating high electrical fields on it's surface, and that's a damned good environment for accelerating atoms off the surface into the vacuum. I'd look at that, very carefully.
Then I'd also look extremely carefully at every joint in the "test article" - both electrical and mechanical - which was made with any sort of soldering technique. Because soldering uses "flux," and that is typically the sort of moderate (few hundred deg C) melting point organic compound that is going to be really good at slowly outgassing at moderate temperatures.
But hey - I'm not a physicist. I'm just a rock-botherer who has seen steam ("boiling point" of 100 degC) coming off 800 degC lava and thought about the millions of years outgassing takes in real environments ; I've had solder melt into my fingertips as the flux bubbles and boils. I've had low-vacuum lab equipment which wouldn't seal unless you wiped the "plastic" surfaces down with trike immediately before assembly, because of skin oils. Equipment can be tricky. And measuring a microNewton force in an apparatus that weighs tens of kilos is not going to be easy.
I've since been told that Google are indeed rolling back to some degree on this. (Been doing thing in "real life" for the last couple of days, so haven't been online.)
OTOH, Even if the roll back this time, they still retain the capacity to do this again in the future. Which is why I trust them as much as I trust any other online (or indeed, real-world) company. And I maintain my backups on organised rust, keep email addresses in multiple countries, and bank accounts in multiple countries too. Online banking ... I do by going to the counter to tell them to disable online banking (again!) and do whatever seems necessary at the time.
That's certainly not what his behaviour in he last few weeks at the Beeb suggest. Assault on a colleague is definitely ground for dismissal, as a shitheel.
Line 1 : Nobody trusted the Americans to not switch their GPS system back to military-only operation at the drop of a military or financial hat.
Line 2 : The Russians responded by building their own system. Line 3 : GOTO Line 1 ; s/Americans/Russians/ ; s/GPS/GLONASS/ ; GOTO Line 2 ; s/Russians/Chinese/ ; ECHO Line 1 ; ECHO Line 2. Line 4 : GOTO Line 1 ; s/Russians/Chinese ; s/GLONASS/Chinese\ system/ ; GOTO Line 2 ; s/Chinese/Europeans/ ; ECHO Line 1 ; ECHO Line 2.
You might claim that no one thinks the Americans, Russians or Chinese would be insane enough to do that. But making that claim while looking at Trump AND Putin AND keeping a straight face is going to be hard to achieve. Whether the swarms of Chinese and European apparatchiks would be any less insane en masse ... well that's a good question. Personally, I still know how to navigate with a map and compass. And drawing my own map first would be a "not again", not a "how?"
A shit could not be given about non-PC content. It's Clarkson's encouragement of lethal force against workers trying to improve their working conditions that turned him from "public buffoon" to "dangerous person to whom I will do as much harm as I can". Since my only input to the creative media is as a consumer of adverts, then the only legal channel I have for harming him is by trying to damage his sale value to the advertising industry. So I do that. Unfortunately, that will result in harm to people who hitch their flags to his. Tough shit boys - get an external career (which the one with the memorable name has made some attempt at doing).
That makes two of us. Say, ten beer's worth of whatever currency fits. 999998 more people that interested and we'd probably have a workable level of funding.
You missed the bit about people being paid in "Company Scrip", which would be the only currency that would be accepted at the Company Store. And the Company Store is the only store that operates in the Company Town!
Trade Unions fought to stop this and ensure that wages were paid in national currency. People died in those fights. But they'll be back before long.
Cryostoring sex cells and/ or pre-screened embryos, then building a womb once your robots have built an in-space habitat isn't far beyond our current technology and is much simpler.
Why?
Well, (1) because it's doable today (whereas cryostoring anything much bigger than a mouse isn't), so will always retain a decade or century of development time over the vapourware that is cryo-revival.
And (2) what possible reason would you have for putting your company's (or government's) resources into shipping people who might have their own agendas, when you can grow people in your own controlled environment. As the Jesuits used to say, "give me the boy at seven, and I will give you the man". Or something like that.
And (3) if you ship a citizen out, you have a moral and possibly legal problem if one of them says "I want to go home" a week after the turnover point. With locally-grown embryos, they are "home" already. Hell, you can control their environment to the point that they might not even know there is another planet until the second generation are about to go into the Soylent Mincer. (Actually, that might be a point against taking embryos - in most legal systems today, they have parents who have rights. It's a lot more varied for jizz and unfertilised eggs. Even more so for testicle tissue and ovarian tissue from which you can produce sex cells.)
This is "Pascal's Wager". There are versions that pre-date Pascal.
I feel slightly sorry for James May, who has made a decent stab at having his own career, but while he's still hitched to the repulsive Clarkson, then he's not going to get eyeball-seconds from me.
Who's the other one? The nondescript one with no life outside Clarkson's shadow.
Anything less than a gigadeath would only put us back into the 1990s. Literally, it wouldn't be noticed in the archaeological record. (Unless it left some interesting volcanic rocks. Or cosmogenic isotopes embedded in exposed rock surfaces.)
1: Killer Asteroid, Happens multiple times per billion years. Hasn't extinguished life yet, and hasn't come within 4% of extinguishing complex (metazoan) life in a quarter billion years. Might be able to kill off our species, but otherwise, [SHRUG]. ... 6 billion people die. That would put us back to around the position our species was in around about 1900. With a significant number of printed technical records around the planet. Big fucking deal.
... and no with humans dispersed over the entire globe, "Big fucking deal." Again.
2: Black Hole, If one has happened in the past, it hasn't left any detectable traces.
3: Rogue Planet, Hasn't happened yet. Except in Velikovsky's fiction.
4: Nuclear War, Yeah, that's likely to be a good one. Whether it would destroy the species, as opposed to simply bombing us back to the stone age. Which would be what - 10,000 years set back, or 20,000 years. Negligible in the longer term view of things.
5: Solar Storm, If it has happened previously, it hasn't had noticeable effects. The 1859 Carrington event was certainly full of potent possibilities for damaging our present technologies, and prudent engineers would be acting to mitigate those effects. Let's be pessimistic and say that all electrical power and communications systems are destroyed and
6: Mega Eruption,Happens on a regular basis. Toba (circa 70,000 years ago) had a crack at reducing our early population to a few thousands
7: Gamma Ray Burst, Now that's an interesting one. Statistics are awfully thin on the ground, and arguments about the likelihood are very much on an knife edge. Which is a good reason for looking for geological evidence for if it has happened in the past. Oddly, people are doing just that - while continuing with studies of exposure ages of rock surfaces, sediments etc as part of the process of understanding basin erosion- and fill- rates. Tedious geological work, being done by oil companies around the world for their own very good reasons.
8: Earth Out of Orbit,Hasn't happened yet. On the order of a 1% chance of it happening this side of the Sun going red giant. Not a high probability outcome. And definitely not going to happen without a few hundreds of (Earth) orbits of warning.
9: Alien Invasion,I refer the honourable gentleman to Mr Fermi's comments on this subject.
10: Deep Sea Disaster WTF is that meant to mean? I'll guess the putative ocean anoxic event at the Permian-Triassic boundary. Which is also argued to be an impact event (Manicougain + other near-simultaneous impacts). Or the Siberian traps LIP (Large Igneous Province). Or the coincidence of all three in a short time period. See comments for (1) above. Big fucking deal.
The (first) give-away is the use of the nonsensical phrase "mass extinction" in both the article and summary (all hail copy'n'paste without the intervention of one moment of consideration!) ; a species is either extinct or not extinct. A species can suffer mass deaths but as long as one genome remains, it isn't extinct (sex does make this a little more complex) even if 99.9999999% of the species has died.
What I can read between the comment presented by the article is that Hawkins thinks that humankind needs to get some (a breeding population - say a thousand or so genomes) of it's population off this planet and out into space. Which is a very different thing than the impossible task of moving a significant proportion of the planet's population to live on another planet.
I.E. almost completely not at all. (I did put a couple of tunes on the juke box in the pub about 3 weeks ago).
Not in any game experience that I'm going to buy. Oh, just a second - when did I last buy a game? I think I brought a Tomb Raider compilation (first 3 or 4 games) for a tenner about a decade ago. Give or take a few years. I don't think there's been anything tempting since.
It would be interesting. Very unlikely, but interesting.
Actually, radiologists who've since examined the case suggest that Marie Curie's fatal cancer was most likelt due to her medal-winning work as a volunteer X-ray operator during the Great War. (advertised as "The War to End War" without a word of irony. That time.) Those battlefield X-ray machines had no shielding for the operator, again because no one was aware of a hazard at the time. It wasn't until a decade or so later that the epidemiology started to show evidence of harm.
Except for their future employers.