Mercury seems to be quite cold in certain regions. According to the Wikipedia article, there's craters where it's believed there's ice. Those would be good locations for human habitats. I don't know why anyone would want to live there, however, except for research and for mining, but it looks like it could be done.
As I said just above, Venus could be terraformed (though not anytime soon obviously) to make it cooler and replace the atmosphere with a human-breathable one. It'd be a great candidate for it. Mercury is likely too hot (and not as easy to terraform, it's just too close to the Sun). However, there's plenty of moons that might be habitable by humans, though of course we'd probably have to always stay in airtight habitats. There's tons of asteroids and dwarf planets (like Ceres) that might be good candidates for mining. There's quite a few very large moons around Saturn and Jupiter, and of course there's our own Moon which has 1/6g gravity; Io, Ganymede, Titan, Europa, and Callisto all have about the same gravity.
The guy sounds like an idiot. Venus doesn't have to be hellishly hot; with sufficient technology and robotic probes, it's possible to terraform it. (Obviously, this is a ways off from our current technology.) Venus would be a great planet to terraform most likely: it's almost exactly the same size as Earth, and has almost exactly the same gravity. It's closer to the sun, so it might be warm, but getting rid of the dense atmosphere would help that a lot, plus there's ideas for giant solar shades which could be used there to reduce the sunlight that reaches the surface. It might be a slow process, but I'll bet terraforming Venus might be more technically feasible than a lot of interstellar missions.
You don't even need multiple generations, you just need to invent "hypersleep" or "suspended animation". There's already been research in this area, with cryogenics.
If you think it IS in fact possible, then you fundamentally do not understand what the speed of light is, why it is, or how space-time works.
Bullshit. You don't know how space-time works, and no one on this planet knows how space-time works. We humans don't even understand how gravity works. We have no clue why we don't drift off into space, instead of being held to the ground. All we know is there's an invisible force and it correlates with mass.
Saying that FTL is "impossible" when you haven't the faintest clue about how gravity or space-time work is pure idiocy.
Not exactly. A trip to another star would be faster than you think, and certainly not hundreds of thousands of years (unless you're limited to today's chemical propulsion). With appropriate nuclear engines and constant acceleration halfway there (and then constant deceleration the other half), and a destination to one of our nearby neighbors esp. Alpha Centaurus, it could probably be done in a decade, maybe less. There's a catch, however: during that ~decade that the people on board experience, hundreds of years may pass on Earth.
Interestingly, even ultra-Utopian Star Trek says the same thing: in that mythos, humans have a horribly devastating World War III right about now, and the survivors are able to rebuild and one of them invents warp drive, attracting the attention of a much more rational alien species.
As for mining minerals on Mars, it seems like it'd be easier and cheaper to just mine minerals on the Moon or on earth-crossing asteroids. Wasn't there recently some group of billionaires talking about starting a venture to develop asteroid-mining technology? Mars is very far away (even farther at some times than others, it's probably relatively close right now), but the moon never gets out of easy visual distance.
I'm sorry, I don't buy it. There's no way that there's only one single way to make a certain vaccine; there have to be multiple ways, multiple formulations possible. With different preservatives, if you make only two different formulations, it's very unlikely anyone (far under 1% of the population) would be allergic to both versions. So no, there's no valid reason for a small but significant portion of the population to not get immunized (there's a lot of people who are allergic to eggs).
If I take the kids to a clinic, they get it for "free". I put free in quotes because obviously they take my money forcibly through taxes, then roll it around in a federal bureaucracy, reducing the value of the money, and then buy vaccine with it.
No need to use quotes; it should be obvious that that's what "free" means when you're talking about receiving a benefit from the government without paying any additional money up-front. That's one of the proper functions of government: taking money in taxes, and then providing services to the people that benefit the society at large. If herd immunity though public vaccinations are important for public health (and for the people worried about money so much, benefit the economy greatly by extending lifespans and reducing production delays due to sickness), then taking money in taxes and buying vaccines for everyone is most certainly a valid government benefit, far better than giving poor people money to sit on their asses and not work or giving money to rich people to cover their blunders in the financial industry. Even better, the government is allowed to regulate industries, so for something so vital to public health, they can force manufacturers to lower their prices, to share their engineering/design information with other mfgrs so that multiple companies can make the vaccine, and if that doesn't work, they can even forcibly nationalize those industries. Nothing wrong with any of this.
Hey, I never said I liked it, but that's basically how it is. The courts have mostly ruled that schools (and other government institutions) have to cater to religious beliefs to a certain extent. They can't force all girls/women to wear burqas for instance, but they can force the schools to allow Muslim girls to wear them despite any dress codes to the contrary. They can't force school cafeterias to only serve kosher food, but they can force them to provide kosher meals for kids that want them. They can't force Creationism to be taught (yet, though that may change as majorities get a lot more preferential treatment than minorities), but they can force schools to allow parents to disallow their kids to take science class because of it.
Unlike France, for instance, we do not have a society and laws that uphold secularism. We talk a lot about it (at least the secularists do, in good terms, and the anti-secularists complain about the perceived secularism saying that "this is a Christian nation"), but we don't actually have any laws guaranteeing that, and the most we have is some Supreme Court decisions interpreting the 1A that way, but there's been many actions to accommodate various religions with actions like those I listed above, unlike France, where they actively ban certain religious practices in schools (and then catch a lot of flak for it from America).
They do? Seems to me that most people (at least in the middle class) have to pay for their vaccines (though I don't have kids, so I can't really speak from experience, maybe I'm wrong about this). They sure don't give flu vaccines out for free, and the vaccines I got myself in recent (within 15) years I had to pay for myself or with insurance, though admittedly they weren't the childhood vaccines like MMR.
Where is it written the "public schools are supposed to be secular"? I'm not aware of any law or passage in the Constitution that says that.
And they don't have to forbid foods for everyone, they just have to have different menus for every religion. Sure, it'll be expensive as hell (esp. if they demand the food be prepared in separate kitchens to avoid contamination), but that's the price of religious diversity and a guarantee that government can't interfere in peoples' religion (which can be argued that public schools have to provide an environment that meets religious standards, e.g. providing lunches that are acceptable to people in that religion, if they're going to provide lunches at all).
Maybe the First Amendment wasn't that great an idea after all...
And if we had a government that handled public health like they do in civilized countries, this wouldn't be such a problem. If you're going to make everyone pay for their own vaccine, then you have no right to tell them they need to get vaccinated, nor do you have any right to talk about "herd immunity". If herd immunity is that important, give out the vaccines for free.
Actually, what I wrote is based on what I've read in earlier Slashdot discussions about this same topic. What it all boils down to is that many vaccines are made with stuff from eggs, and a certain percentage of the population is allergic to eggs, so they can't take the vaccine. So why not make the vaccine with something else? Because that costs more. So are we interested in saving money, or getting everyone vaccinated? We can afford to spend trillions on wars and bankster bailouts and marijuana prohibition, but we can't afford to develop an alternative vaccine so we can vaccinate almost everyone?
What are you talking about? Public school is supposed to be for everyone, plus I thought that in most places you were required to send kids to school under a certain age. So if the government is going to make school mandatory, then it has to cater to everyone's nutty religious beliefs.
As for Uganda, no, obviously it isn't like that, yet. It's headed there, though. Or more accurately, Somalia. Didn't Jared Diamond write a book about how civilizations collapse, and how it can frequently be very sudden? He'll probably need to write a 2nd Edition of that eventually, to cover the USA.
I'm just curious: why hasn't this happened with any other diseases besides Smallpox? We've been vaccinating against polio, measles, mumps, etc. for ages now, probably longer than the time the smallpox vaccine was used.
The anti-vaccine people aren't always uneducated, many of the ones that I encountered were college grads. I guess they slept through biology class.
To be fair, I'm college educated, and I never had any biology classes in college, only chemistry and physics (and of course lots of engineering classes, like statics and dynamics and materials science). I only took biology classes in high school. It's not that I didn't want to, but there just wasn't time; maybe if they hadn't made me waste time taking that horrible Philosophy of Science class for my humanities credit (holy shit, what a boring class that was), I could have fit in a college-level biology class.
We need to get rid of trains. Hitler was a big proponent of trains, and was liked because he got the trains to run on time.
We also need to get rid of economical automobiles. Hitler was a proponent of that, and commissioned Ferdinand Porsche to design the Beetle, a car that was highly inexpensive so that nearly everyone could afford one (and was called the "People's Car": "Volkswagen").
We also need to get rid of jet aircraft; Hitler's army worked hard to develop jet engines, and deployed a few aircraft with them at the end of the war, though it was too late by then.
Finally, we need to get rid of all recordings of music by Wagner, since Hitler was a big fan of his music.
Or, you could just make different or better versions of the vaccine, which don't have eggs or the other allergenic components (or at least different components, so that two versions of the vaccine should cover almost everyone as so few people would be allergic to both kinds).
But this would require funding, and for pharma companies to not be concerned about profit ueber alles.
What I'm curious about is why the polio cases increased, between 1937 and 1954. The population didn't increase that much between those two years, I don't think; that's a 4-fold increase. Sanitation should have been better in 1954 than in 1937. So why the sudden outbreak? According to Wikipedia, it was only first recognized in 1840 (though it existed for thousands of years), and epidemics were unknown before the late 19th century, but suddenly in the 20th century it's a giant menace. I wonder why it never turned into an epidemic before; people didn't just start living in cities only in the 20th century.
This sounds like a failure of the government and pharma companies to me. There's no way to be allergic to some dead viruses. Instead, they're allergic to some other component of the vaccine. So the solution is simple: there should be alternate forms of the vaccine, so that everyone is covered. If there aren't, it's due to the pharma companies being cheap-asses and the government failing in its role as regulator.
Actually, there is a vaccine against stupid. Unfortunately, it only works on subsequent generations, not on the people who take the vaccination. It's called "vasectomy".
Unfortunately, the people who this vaccine would work best for, almost never take it, and many of them refuse it on religious grounds.
Sorry, but it's possible we can't really do that here. Our First Amendment prohibits government interference in religion (or at least it's been interpreted that way), and this is frequently a religious matter.
As for America becoming Uganda, you haven't been here lately, have you? Surely just reading the news about this place should make it obvious that we're quickly becoming like that.
Slashdot Mirror
Mercury seems to be quite cold in certain regions. According to the Wikipedia article, there's craters where it's believed there's ice. Those would be good locations for human habitats. I don't know why anyone would want to live there, however, except for research and for mining, but it looks like it could be done.
As I said just above, Venus could be terraformed (though not anytime soon obviously) to make it cooler and replace the atmosphere with a human-breathable one. It'd be a great candidate for it. Mercury is likely too hot (and not as easy to terraform, it's just too close to the Sun). However, there's plenty of moons that might be habitable by humans, though of course we'd probably have to always stay in airtight habitats. There's tons of asteroids and dwarf planets (like Ceres) that might be good candidates for mining. There's quite a few very large moons around Saturn and Jupiter, and of course there's our own Moon which has 1/6g gravity; Io, Ganymede, Titan, Europa, and Callisto all have about the same gravity.
The guy sounds like an idiot. Venus doesn't have to be hellishly hot; with sufficient technology and robotic probes, it's possible to terraform it. (Obviously, this is a ways off from our current technology.) Venus would be a great planet to terraform most likely: it's almost exactly the same size as Earth, and has almost exactly the same gravity. It's closer to the sun, so it might be warm, but getting rid of the dense atmosphere would help that a lot, plus there's ideas for giant solar shades which could be used there to reduce the sunlight that reaches the surface. It might be a slow process, but I'll bet terraforming Venus might be more technically feasible than a lot of interstellar missions.
You don't even need multiple generations, you just need to invent "hypersleep" or "suspended animation". There's already been research in this area, with cryogenics.
If you think it IS in fact possible, then you fundamentally do not understand what the speed of light is, why it is, or how space-time works.
Bullshit. You don't know how space-time works, and no one on this planet knows how space-time works. We humans don't even understand how gravity works. We have no clue why we don't drift off into space, instead of being held to the ground. All we know is there's an invisible force and it correlates with mass.
Saying that FTL is "impossible" when you haven't the faintest clue about how gravity or space-time work is pure idiocy.
Not exactly. A trip to another star would be faster than you think, and certainly not hundreds of thousands of years (unless you're limited to today's chemical propulsion). With appropriate nuclear engines and constant acceleration halfway there (and then constant deceleration the other half), and a destination to one of our nearby neighbors esp. Alpha Centaurus, it could probably be done in a decade, maybe less. There's a catch, however: during that ~decade that the people on board experience, hundreds of years may pass on Earth.
Interestingly, even ultra-Utopian Star Trek says the same thing: in that mythos, humans have a horribly devastating World War III right about now, and the survivors are able to rebuild and one of them invents warp drive, attracting the attention of a much more rational alien species.
As for mining minerals on Mars, it seems like it'd be easier and cheaper to just mine minerals on the Moon or on earth-crossing asteroids. Wasn't there recently some group of billionaires talking about starting a venture to develop asteroid-mining technology? Mars is very far away (even farther at some times than others, it's probably relatively close right now), but the moon never gets out of easy visual distance.
No, we don't go to Ceti Alpha V because we might mistake it for Ceti Alpha VI, and get caught by Khan and have insects put in our brains.
I'm sorry, I don't buy it. There's no way that there's only one single way to make a certain vaccine; there have to be multiple ways, multiple formulations possible. With different preservatives, if you make only two different formulations, it's very unlikely anyone (far under 1% of the population) would be allergic to both versions. So no, there's no valid reason for a small but significant portion of the population to not get immunized (there's a lot of people who are allergic to eggs).
If I take the kids to a clinic, they get it for "free". I put free in quotes because obviously they take my money forcibly through taxes, then roll it around in a federal bureaucracy, reducing the value of the money, and then buy vaccine with it.
No need to use quotes; it should be obvious that that's what "free" means when you're talking about receiving a benefit from the government without paying any additional money up-front. That's one of the proper functions of government: taking money in taxes, and then providing services to the people that benefit the society at large. If herd immunity though public vaccinations are important for public health (and for the people worried about money so much, benefit the economy greatly by extending lifespans and reducing production delays due to sickness), then taking money in taxes and buying vaccines for everyone is most certainly a valid government benefit, far better than giving poor people money to sit on their asses and not work or giving money to rich people to cover their blunders in the financial industry. Even better, the government is allowed to regulate industries, so for something so vital to public health, they can force manufacturers to lower their prices, to share their engineering/design information with other mfgrs so that multiple companies can make the vaccine, and if that doesn't work, they can even forcibly nationalize those industries. Nothing wrong with any of this.
Hey, I never said I liked it, but that's basically how it is. The courts have mostly ruled that schools (and other government institutions) have to cater to religious beliefs to a certain extent. They can't force all girls/women to wear burqas for instance, but they can force the schools to allow Muslim girls to wear them despite any dress codes to the contrary. They can't force school cafeterias to only serve kosher food, but they can force them to provide kosher meals for kids that want them. They can't force Creationism to be taught (yet, though that may change as majorities get a lot more preferential treatment than minorities), but they can force schools to allow parents to disallow their kids to take science class because of it.
Unlike France, for instance, we do not have a society and laws that uphold secularism. We talk a lot about it (at least the secularists do, in good terms, and the anti-secularists complain about the perceived secularism saying that "this is a Christian nation"), but we don't actually have any laws guaranteeing that, and the most we have is some Supreme Court decisions interpreting the 1A that way, but there's been many actions to accommodate various religions with actions like those I listed above, unlike France, where they actively ban certain religious practices in schools (and then catch a lot of flak for it from America).
They do? Seems to me that most people (at least in the middle class) have to pay for their vaccines (though I don't have kids, so I can't really speak from experience, maybe I'm wrong about this). They sure don't give flu vaccines out for free, and the vaccines I got myself in recent (within 15) years I had to pay for myself or with insurance, though admittedly they weren't the childhood vaccines like MMR.
Where is it written the "public schools are supposed to be secular"? I'm not aware of any law or passage in the Constitution that says that.
And they don't have to forbid foods for everyone, they just have to have different menus for every religion. Sure, it'll be expensive as hell (esp. if they demand the food be prepared in separate kitchens to avoid contamination), but that's the price of religious diversity and a guarantee that government can't interfere in peoples' religion (which can be argued that public schools have to provide an environment that meets religious standards, e.g. providing lunches that are acceptable to people in that religion, if they're going to provide lunches at all).
Maybe the First Amendment wasn't that great an idea after all...
And if we had a government that handled public health like they do in civilized countries, this wouldn't be such a problem. If you're going to make everyone pay for their own vaccine, then you have no right to tell them they need to get vaccinated, nor do you have any right to talk about "herd immunity". If herd immunity is that important, give out the vaccines for free.
Actually, what I wrote is based on what I've read in earlier Slashdot discussions about this same topic. What it all boils down to is that many vaccines are made with stuff from eggs, and a certain percentage of the population is allergic to eggs, so they can't take the vaccine. So why not make the vaccine with something else? Because that costs more. So are we interested in saving money, or getting everyone vaccinated? We can afford to spend trillions on wars and bankster bailouts and marijuana prohibition, but we can't afford to develop an alternative vaccine so we can vaccinate almost everyone?
What are you talking about? Public school is supposed to be for everyone, plus I thought that in most places you were required to send kids to school under a certain age. So if the government is going to make school mandatory, then it has to cater to everyone's nutty religious beliefs.
As for Uganda, no, obviously it isn't like that, yet. It's headed there, though. Or more accurately, Somalia. Didn't Jared Diamond write a book about how civilizations collapse, and how it can frequently be very sudden? He'll probably need to write a 2nd Edition of that eventually, to cover the USA.
Wow, that's a pretty remarkable insight there.
I'm just curious: why hasn't this happened with any other diseases besides Smallpox? We've been vaccinating against polio, measles, mumps, etc. for ages now, probably longer than the time the smallpox vaccine was used.
The anti-vaccine people aren't always uneducated, many of the ones that I encountered were college grads. I guess they slept through biology class.
To be fair, I'm college educated, and I never had any biology classes in college, only chemistry and physics (and of course lots of engineering classes, like statics and dynamics and materials science). I only took biology classes in high school. It's not that I didn't want to, but there just wasn't time; maybe if they hadn't made me waste time taking that horrible Philosophy of Science class for my humanities credit (holy shit, what a boring class that was), I could have fit in a college-level biology class.
We need to get rid of trains. Hitler was a big proponent of trains, and was liked because he got the trains to run on time.
We also need to get rid of economical automobiles. Hitler was a proponent of that, and commissioned Ferdinand Porsche to design the Beetle, a car that was highly inexpensive so that nearly everyone could afford one (and was called the "People's Car": "Volkswagen").
We also need to get rid of jet aircraft; Hitler's army worked hard to develop jet engines, and deployed a few aircraft with them at the end of the war, though it was too late by then.
Finally, we need to get rid of all recordings of music by Wagner, since Hitler was a big fan of his music.
Or, you could just make different or better versions of the vaccine, which don't have eggs or the other allergenic components (or at least different components, so that two versions of the vaccine should cover almost everyone as so few people would be allergic to both kinds).
But this would require funding, and for pharma companies to not be concerned about profit ueber alles.
What I'm curious about is why the polio cases increased, between 1937 and 1954. The population didn't increase that much between those two years, I don't think; that's a 4-fold increase. Sanitation should have been better in 1954 than in 1937. So why the sudden outbreak? According to Wikipedia, it was only first recognized in 1840 (though it existed for thousands of years), and epidemics were unknown before the late 19th century, but suddenly in the 20th century it's a giant menace. I wonder why it never turned into an epidemic before; people didn't just start living in cities only in the 20th century.
This sounds like a failure of the government and pharma companies to me. There's no way to be allergic to some dead viruses. Instead, they're allergic to some other component of the vaccine. So the solution is simple: there should be alternate forms of the vaccine, so that everyone is covered. If there aren't, it's due to the pharma companies being cheap-asses and the government failing in its role as regulator.
Actually, there is a vaccine against stupid. Unfortunately, it only works on subsequent generations, not on the people who take the vaccination. It's called "vasectomy".
Unfortunately, the people who this vaccine would work best for, almost never take it, and many of them refuse it on religious grounds.
Sorry, but it's possible we can't really do that here. Our First Amendment prohibits government interference in religion (or at least it's been interpreted that way), and this is frequently a religious matter.
As for America becoming Uganda, you haven't been here lately, have you? Surely just reading the news about this place should make it obvious that we're quickly becoming like that.