Yeah. Although I'll grant that your post was informative, it only strengthens my opinion that, in all ways that matter, Guantanamo Bay is US territory. A treaty with a previous government (whose president was a US citizen and was the only candidate in the election) doesn't hold a lot of weight after a revolution. The simple facts of your answer is that Guantanamo bay is territory militarily occupied by the US which they might give back someday once Cuba has replaced its government with one the US doesn't have a grudge against.
No, no I don't think that. I think that US military bases are treated as US territory in virtually every way, even when they're located in other countries. I thought that was fairly obvious from my posts.
Now, milatary personnel on military bases are subject to military law. What about civilians: contractors, visitors, non-POW prisoners? Are they subject to Cuban law and jurisdiction while on the base? If there's a vending machine there, and they buy a snack, are they violating the trade embargo with Cuba? For that matter, if they buy anything on base, are they charged sales tax? Cuban sales tax? Are the prisoners then prisoners of the nation of Cuba? Can they appeal to Cuban courts for release?
I think you've underexplained just a little there. The part about it being Cuban territory is extremely confusing in light of the political state of affairs between Cuba and the US. Are you saying it's under Cuban Jurisdiction? Can they send their police officers in there to arrest US soldiers for breaking cuban law? And how does that lease thing even work in light of the fact that it's illegal for US citizens to even travel to Cuba. And what about all of the prisoners being held there who they've determined they have no cause to hold any more? If they're already in Cuba, why can't they just walk out the front gate and take a bus into town?
I think your explanation oversimplifies things just a little bit.
I think you're missing the point that, if they constructed their claim to legitimacy before the territorial waters expanded, the expansion can't ex-post facto remove that legitimacy.
Only if their claim to legitimacy is itself legitimate
I think you missed the point again. I _said_ it only matters if their claim is legitimate in the first place. I'll try this again:
* They made a claim to sovereignty while they were in international waters.
* If their claim was legitimate, then they stopped being in international waters and started being in their own waters.
* Later, the UK expanded its territorial waters.
* If their claim was illegitimate, then the expansion didn't change anything, so it's irrelevant to their legitimacy.
* If their claim was legitimate, then the expansion didn't change anything, since the expansion of the territorial waters of the UK over Sealand's territorial waters would have been illegitimate, so the expansion is irrelevant to their legitimacy.
That was my point. The expansion of the UK's territorial waters that you brought up is irrelevant to the legitimacy of Sealand's sovereignty. Either Sealand wasn't sovereign anyway, or the expansion over their waters wasn't legitimate.
If they were sovereign
That's a mighty big if - because their whole claim rests on the decision of a Court that is neither competent (in the legal sense of the word) nor has the standing to rule on the sovereignty claim. Not that the Court ruled on the sovereignty issue anyhow... not having jurisdiction over a person or the location a crime was committed is not the same as pronouncing their soi disant 'nation' sovereign. Sealand's whole claim is based on the wistful hope that nobody ever notices that.
Oh it's a huge if, no doubt about that. I was just constructing a logical argument and considering all possibilities. The problem ultimately is that there aren't really any courts competent to rule on the claim. Nations may have laws, but when it comes to their dealings with other nations they act on principles of anarchy, might-makes-right, loose agreement and CYA. Pretty much all nations sovereignty is based on soi dire. Sealand's claim isn't based on the wistful hope that no-one notices the court doesn't have a particular power since no-one has that power. The best anyone can get is UN recognition and that's not necessarily binding on anyone. Ask Taiwan and China. What makes a sovereign nation a nation is that it's self-evidently a nation. That can mean all kinds of things. If Sealand built an approximately 19-mile wall around themselves and pumped out the water, "recovering" about 28 square miles of land, then moved in 50,000 people, made them citizens and bought a few thousand tons of military hardware, all of a sudden their claims of being a sovereign nation would have a lot more weight. Their claim from last century to be sovereign would be evaluated in light of present circumstances too. Now, that's not very likely to happen because the UK would squash them before they even got close. If they weighed anchor (I don't know if the original pontoon system is in any condition to be re-floated) and moved outside the 12 miles (if there's anywhere shallow enough) and then did that, however, who knows what could happen? It would cost tens of billions of dollars, but it woul be a very interesting experiment.
In the end Sealand is a nation in the same way that Pastafarianism or Discordianism are religions. Its existence throws the entire idea of what a sovereign nation actually is into sharp relief. In hundreds of years, for all we know, most of the world might be living under a brutal noodly theocracy and the Atlantic empire of Sealand might be one of the last democratic states. Likely? No. Entirely impossible? Knowing humanity, not a chance.
What about the Netherlands? Tokyo Bay? Most of Boston? Kansai airport in Japan? All of those are on reclaimed land. Does it count as territory? Kansai airport is basically a big concrete box in the ocean filled in with dirt and rock. Does it count as territory? What about the Santa Monica pier? Is it territory? It's certainly considered real estate. Where exactly is the line drawn between territory and not territory?
Fort Roughs, which is now Sealand, is basically a sort of super awkward boat with two large columns on it that was sunk onto a sandbar. The columns are hollow and contain living space above and below sea level. A platform is supported on top of the columns. So, from a certain point of view, Sealand consists of two small islands of reclaimed land with circular dikes around them and a pier-like structure built off those islands. In that way, it's equivalent to large parts of the Netherlands.
Now, you could work off the theory that, land or not, you need a certain minimum size to support a claim of sovereignty, but you'd probably be picking the size based merely to exclude Sealand. The next time some country wants to use an even smaller rock to extend its fishing rights, there would be an argument over it (or an exception granted that ignores the fact that it's unfair to Sealand). The other argument you could make is that reclaimed land can only be territory if it's added to existing territory rather than made. That is, again, essentially designed just to discriminate against Sealand.
I think you're missing the point that, if they constructed their claim to legitimacy before the territorial waters expanded, the expansion can't ex-post facto remove that legitimacy. No-one can say that they're inside UK territorial waters and therefore not sovereign, they have to go back to the founding and work forward to the present. If they were sovereign, then the expansion of the territorial waters of the UK doesn't apply to them as they have their own territorial waters that intersect with those of the UK and they have to find a diplomatic way to split the difference (even big, clearly established sovereign nations have a _lot_ of trouble doing this with each other). If Sealand's original claim to sovereignty is illegitimate, then the expansion of the territorial waters of the UK is irrelevant since it changed nothing.
I'm not so sure that's ironic. It's only ironic if you consider Wikileaks to be an enemy of those Western nations who seeks to destroy them. A free press has traditionally been regarded as one of the things that helps keep free nations free.
I wasn't the one who brought up the heat death of the universe. The post I originally replied to said:
"Except that just delays the inevitable. The universe is going to end in heat death, so DNA is not going to avoid extinction. I do not understand why I should care about what you are proposing, when it only delays the inevitable by a bit."
I replied to this nihilistic attitude by saying:
"The heat death of the universe is a very, very, very long way off. It'll be about an order of magnitude beyond the current age of the universe before the current crop of red dwarf stars even start to die off."
Somehow though, you've read that as me being idiotically fixated on the end of the universe. I'm actually worried about much more near term problems and I'm saying that the (very) long term futility of trying to survive doesn't preclude trying to survive in the here and now and the near term.
Ok. If you say so. I guess we know everything. So we'll have many year notice of anything that's going to hit us... Of course, we're still completely incapable of doing anything about it when it does.
I don't think you understand what you're talking about. That 93 percent is only near earth objects. That means things orbiting the sun in the ecliptic at about the same distance from the sun as Earth. And the survey you're talking about has located them, but not actually figured out all of their orbits yet. In any case, those objects are only a tiny fraction of what's actually out there. The stuff that's further away, and thus harder to spot, would also be moving about an order of magnitude faster if it ever hit us. That means that it doesn't need to be as big to cause as much damage.
Oh I definitely really want to know. All you seem to get though is empty assurances from people who assure you that the problem is well understood and it's not a problem, but who don't seem to actually know the details of the problem well enough to really make such a statement.
You seem to be pretty knowledgeable on the subject and it appears that you don't think that the problem has been studied enough (or that poorly trained and educated TSA agents are going to make good radiation techs).
I'm not as confident as you about the obviousness of cooking someone though. Going by UV damage to human skin it seems that people can get by without obvious damage for years and years as it builds up (looking at people who never burn, but just get a glorious golden tan, but look like old leather after thirty years of it). If the pattern of exposure is new and untested, I don't feel comfortable with people declaring it safe without actually testing it. Plus, I want the testing to be done by an independent laboratory hired by an independent third party, rather than directly by the TSA. I remember someone describing posters at Dulles airport advertising some "independent" lab which were basically directly stating that they would deliver whatever result they were paid to.
That's not really the point though. The point is that the war on drugs isn't working. People can still get the drugs - even after they've been sent to prison - and still destroy their lives with them. Thanks to the war on drugs, it's actually about ten times easier for them to destroy their lives with drugs. There certainly are reasons to discourage people from taking drugs but the policies of the drug war are literally killing tens of thousands of people a year, wasting massive amounts of money, creating all kinds of extra crime, and not achieving their stated goals. So why continue this abysmal failure?
How easy? When the police get a warrant to search an apartment, the landlord isn't obligated to search the apartment for them, and certainly not on an ongoing basis for months, even for monetary compensation. To the best of my understanding - and I'm not a lawyer - the landlord isn't even required to open the door for them or give them the key, although it's in their best interest since the police are within their rights to break in.
To wiretap, the police used to have to literally tap wires in a utility closet or out on a pole. It's more convenient for them, and for the phone companies (to avoid damage to their equipment) to just be able to get a direct feed from the phone company servers. Somehow, however, it's become a right of the police. This is pretty much the same as a search warrant requiring a landlord to do the searching for the police and it's bad for all of us. For one thing, for the sake of privacy and security, we should probably all be using encryption by now. With the current state of the law, I'm pretty sure that it's not even legal for telecoms to facilitate that for their customers without a back door that breaks the whole thing.
So, I'm not saying that telecoms should be obstructing the police when they have a warrant, but why should they be required to bend over backwards to facilitate things for the police?
How is is the GP wrong? You seem to be in agreement. The GP said all people seem to be born as xenophobes. This seems to be perfectly in line with xenophobia being based in genetics. Perhaps you just disagree that people even can learn better because it's genetic adaptation? If that's what you think, then you haven't considered the fact that people can overcome all sorts of biological predispositions with higher reasoning. For example, many people can overcome their instinctive fear of heights and walk across a glass floor dozens of stories above the ground because they know they are actually safe. For that matter, while xenophobia is almost certainly an adapted trait, mechanisms for overcoming xenophobia are almost certainly built in as well.
That doesn't quite add up. The number of smartphones out there is on the same order as the number of high-speed connections in homes. The connection of cell phone towers to the backbone is extremely direct compared to high-speed connections in homes. And, finally, the total monthly bandwidth used by the typical phone is a lot less than the total monthly bandwidth of a home connection. So how is the backbone usage the issue when it's the same backbone as the home connections?
The post I was replying to was from someone who said they work in radiation safety for the government who was claiming that all that matters is the dose. I was just trying to point out (admittedly in a long-winded fashion) that they were ignoring the fact that one dose is spread through the whole body and delivered over a span of hours and the other is concentrated in a tiny fraction of the body and delivered over a span of seconds. I believe apples and oranges can be compared, but I have a hard time believing it can be done with one simple fruit scalar value.
I think I understand radiation very well. If you actually read my post, you'll note that I discussed situations in which electromagnetic radiation between 560 to 490 nm. I picked those wavelengths because they constitute what's normally known as the color green. It's smack dab in the middle of the visible spectrum which is considered to be some of the most harmless radiation there is. Then I pointed out how, in the right concentrations, even safe doses of the safest radiation could kill you or even cause cancer. I'm aware that the frequencies used in the TSA backscatter machines are inherently more dangerous. The point I was making is that the post I was replying was incorrect in its assumption that absolute dose averaged across the entire volume of the body is the only thing you need to look at when assessing radiation danger.
I'm trying to get at the fact that the GP was saying that quantity X (radiation exposure from scanners) is less than quantity Y (radiation exposure from a plane flight) without addressing the facts that X and Y are not the same types of radiation, occur over a drastically different timescale, and in drastically spatial concentrations. My examples were merely meant to illustrate dramatically that the harm radiation can do to a human body is not exclusively determined by an absolute dosage. Statistical radiation safety methods are based on assumptions about the situation. Those assumptions may very well not hold in the specific case of these scanners. If the GP is a radiation safety expert, then I think we would all appreciate an explanation that addresses those points.
I'm worried about the death of the sun and the heat death of the universe and a lot of things that could wipe us out before then. The thing is, escaping the death of the sun and all of the much nearer term potential disasters is actually within our current technological capacity. The heat death of the universe is potentially beyond any solution. The best you can do is kill off stars to save fuel and slow the formation of new stars (beyond current technology, but not necessarily beyond theoretical possibility).
It's all beyond any of our lifetimes, but space travel is something that we accomplish as a collective and we could still be around for this stuff as a collective. In fact, space colonization might be our only chance to be around for this stuff (and maybe after).
No. Not wrong by a long shot. You really are living in a fantasy land. We've only found a tiny fraction of the objects in our solar system big enough to cause a global extinction. Space is really, really big and objects big enough to cause global extinctions are still tiny compared to planets and moons and the really big asteroids. The things we've spotted so far are mostly low-hanging fruit. We could be easily clobbered by something out of the black from a direction we're not looking. Sure, we'd probably see it before it hit us, especially if it's a comet, but not necessarily very long before.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't think any of those definitions disagree with our usage so far. The article you linked to is all over the map on its definition.
Yeah. Although I'll grant that your post was informative, it only strengthens my opinion that, in all ways that matter, Guantanamo Bay is US territory. A treaty with a previous government (whose president was a US citizen and was the only candidate in the election) doesn't hold a lot of weight after a revolution. The simple facts of your answer is that Guantanamo bay is territory militarily occupied by the US which they might give back someday once Cuba has replaced its government with one the US doesn't have a grudge against.
No, no I don't think that. I think that US military bases are treated as US territory in virtually every way, even when they're located in other countries. I thought that was fairly obvious from my posts.
I thought the US pretty much did seize the Panama canal.
Now, milatary personnel on military bases are subject to military law. What about civilians: contractors, visitors, non-POW prisoners? Are they subject to Cuban law and jurisdiction while on the base? If there's a vending machine there, and they buy a snack, are they violating the trade embargo with Cuba? For that matter, if they buy anything on base, are they charged sales tax? Cuban sales tax? Are the prisoners then prisoners of the nation of Cuba? Can they appeal to Cuban courts for release?
I don't think your explanation is satisfactory.
I think you've underexplained just a little there. The part about it being Cuban territory is extremely confusing in light of the political state of affairs between Cuba and the US. Are you saying it's under Cuban Jurisdiction? Can they send their police officers in there to arrest US soldiers for breaking cuban law? And how does that lease thing even work in light of the fact that it's illegal for US citizens to even travel to Cuba. And what about all of the prisoners being held there who they've determined they have no cause to hold any more? If they're already in Cuba, why can't they just walk out the front gate and take a bus into town?
I think your explanation oversimplifies things just a little bit.
I think you're missing the point that, if they constructed their claim to legitimacy before the territorial waters expanded, the expansion can't ex-post facto remove that legitimacy.
Only if their claim to legitimacy is itself legitimate
I think you missed the point again. I _said_ it only matters if their claim is legitimate in the first place. I'll try this again:
* They made a claim to sovereignty while they were in international waters.
* If their claim was legitimate, then they stopped being in international waters and started being in their own waters.
* Later, the UK expanded its territorial waters.
* If their claim was illegitimate, then the expansion didn't change anything, so it's irrelevant to their legitimacy.
* If their claim was legitimate, then the expansion didn't change anything, since the expansion of the territorial waters of the UK over Sealand's territorial waters would have been illegitimate, so the expansion is irrelevant to their legitimacy.
That was my point. The expansion of the UK's territorial waters that you brought up is irrelevant to the legitimacy of Sealand's sovereignty. Either Sealand wasn't sovereign anyway, or the expansion over their waters wasn't legitimate.
If they were sovereign
That's a mighty big if - because their whole claim rests on the decision of a Court that is neither competent (in the legal sense of the word) nor has the standing to rule on the sovereignty claim. Not that the Court ruled on the sovereignty issue anyhow... not having jurisdiction over a person or the location a crime was committed is not the same as pronouncing their soi disant 'nation' sovereign. Sealand's whole claim is based on the wistful hope that nobody ever notices that.
Oh it's a huge if, no doubt about that. I was just constructing a logical argument and considering all possibilities. The problem ultimately is that there aren't really any courts competent to rule on the claim. Nations may have laws, but when it comes to their dealings with other nations they act on principles of anarchy, might-makes-right, loose agreement and CYA. Pretty much all nations sovereignty is based on soi dire. Sealand's claim isn't based on the wistful hope that no-one notices the court doesn't have a particular power since no-one has that power. The best anyone can get is UN recognition and that's not necessarily binding on anyone. Ask Taiwan and China. What makes a sovereign nation a nation is that it's self-evidently a nation. That can mean all kinds of things. If Sealand built an approximately 19-mile wall around themselves and pumped out the water, "recovering" about 28 square miles of land, then moved in 50,000 people, made them citizens and bought a few thousand tons of military hardware, all of a sudden their claims of being a sovereign nation would have a lot more weight. Their claim from last century to be sovereign would be evaluated in light of present circumstances too. Now, that's not very likely to happen because the UK would squash them before they even got close. If they weighed anchor (I don't know if the original pontoon system is in any condition to be re-floated) and moved outside the 12 miles (if there's anywhere shallow enough) and then did that, however, who knows what could happen? It would cost tens of billions of dollars, but it woul be a very interesting experiment.
In the end Sealand is a nation in the same way that Pastafarianism or Discordianism are religions. Its existence throws the entire idea of what a sovereign nation actually is into sharp relief. In hundreds of years, for all we know, most of the world might be living under a brutal noodly theocracy and the Atlantic empire of Sealand might be one of the last democratic states. Likely? No. Entirely impossible? Knowing humanity, not a chance.
What about the Netherlands? Tokyo Bay? Most of Boston? Kansai airport in Japan? All of those are on reclaimed land. Does it count as territory? Kansai airport is basically a big concrete box in the ocean filled in with dirt and rock. Does it count as territory? What about the Santa Monica pier? Is it territory? It's certainly considered real estate. Where exactly is the line drawn between territory and not territory?
Fort Roughs, which is now Sealand, is basically a sort of super awkward boat with two large columns on it that was sunk onto a sandbar. The columns are hollow and contain living space above and below sea level. A platform is supported on top of the columns. So, from a certain point of view, Sealand consists of two small islands of reclaimed land with circular dikes around them and a pier-like structure built off those islands. In that way, it's equivalent to large parts of the Netherlands.
Now, you could work off the theory that, land or not, you need a certain minimum size to support a claim of sovereignty, but you'd probably be picking the size based merely to exclude Sealand. The next time some country wants to use an even smaller rock to extend its fishing rights, there would be an argument over it (or an exception granted that ignores the fact that it's unfair to Sealand). The other argument you could make is that reclaimed land can only be territory if it's added to existing territory rather than made. That is, again, essentially designed just to discriminate against Sealand.
I think you're missing the point that, if they constructed their claim to legitimacy before the territorial waters expanded, the expansion can't ex-post facto remove that legitimacy. No-one can say that they're inside UK territorial waters and therefore not sovereign, they have to go back to the founding and work forward to the present. If they were sovereign, then the expansion of the territorial waters of the UK doesn't apply to them as they have their own territorial waters that intersect with those of the UK and they have to find a diplomatic way to split the difference (even big, clearly established sovereign nations have a _lot_ of trouble doing this with each other). If Sealand's original claim to sovereignty is illegitimate, then the expansion of the territorial waters of the UK is irrelevant since it changed nothing.
I'm not so sure that's ironic. It's only ironic if you consider Wikileaks to be an enemy of those Western nations who seeks to destroy them. A free press has traditionally been regarded as one of the things that helps keep free nations free.
How about military bases? An explanation of the territorial status of Guantanamo bay would be appreciated.
I wasn't the one who brought up the heat death of the universe. The post I originally replied to said:
I replied to this nihilistic attitude by saying:
Somehow though, you've read that as me being idiotically fixated on the end of the universe. I'm actually worried about much more near term problems and I'm saying that the (very) long term futility of trying to survive doesn't preclude trying to survive in the here and now and the near term.
Ok. If you say so. I guess we know everything. So we'll have many year notice of anything that's going to hit us... Of course, we're still completely incapable of doing anything about it when it does.
I don't think you understand what you're talking about. That 93 percent is only near earth objects. That means things orbiting the sun in the ecliptic at about the same distance from the sun as Earth. And the survey you're talking about has located them, but not actually figured out all of their orbits yet. In any case, those objects are only a tiny fraction of what's actually out there. The stuff that's further away, and thus harder to spot, would also be moving about an order of magnitude faster if it ever hit us. That means that it doesn't need to be as big to cause as much damage.
Oh I definitely really want to know. All you seem to get though is empty assurances from people who assure you that the problem is well understood and it's not a problem, but who don't seem to actually know the details of the problem well enough to really make such a statement.
You seem to be pretty knowledgeable on the subject and it appears that you don't think that the problem has been studied enough (or that poorly trained and educated TSA agents are going to make good radiation techs).
I'm not as confident as you about the obviousness of cooking someone though. Going by UV damage to human skin it seems that people can get by without obvious damage for years and years as it builds up (looking at people who never burn, but just get a glorious golden tan, but look like old leather after thirty years of it). If the pattern of exposure is new and untested, I don't feel comfortable with people declaring it safe without actually testing it. Plus, I want the testing to be done by an independent laboratory hired by an independent third party, rather than directly by the TSA. I remember someone describing posters at Dulles airport advertising some "independent" lab which were basically directly stating that they would deliver whatever result they were paid to.
That's not really the point though. The point is that the war on drugs isn't working. People can still get the drugs - even after they've been sent to prison - and still destroy their lives with them. Thanks to the war on drugs, it's actually about ten times easier for them to destroy their lives with drugs. There certainly are reasons to discourage people from taking drugs but the policies of the drug war are literally killing tens of thousands of people a year, wasting massive amounts of money, creating all kinds of extra crime, and not achieving their stated goals. So why continue this abysmal failure?
How easy? When the police get a warrant to search an apartment, the landlord isn't obligated to search the apartment for them, and certainly not on an ongoing basis for months, even for monetary compensation. To the best of my understanding - and I'm not a lawyer - the landlord isn't even required to open the door for them or give them the key, although it's in their best interest since the police are within their rights to break in.
To wiretap, the police used to have to literally tap wires in a utility closet or out on a pole. It's more convenient for them, and for the phone companies (to avoid damage to their equipment) to just be able to get a direct feed from the phone company servers. Somehow, however, it's become a right of the police. This is pretty much the same as a search warrant requiring a landlord to do the searching for the police and it's bad for all of us. For one thing, for the sake of privacy and security, we should probably all be using encryption by now. With the current state of the law, I'm pretty sure that it's not even legal for telecoms to facilitate that for their customers without a back door that breaks the whole thing.
So, I'm not saying that telecoms should be obstructing the police when they have a warrant, but why should they be required to bend over backwards to facilitate things for the police?
How is is the GP wrong? You seem to be in agreement. The GP said all people seem to be born as xenophobes. This seems to be perfectly in line with xenophobia being based in genetics. Perhaps you just disagree that people even can learn better because it's genetic adaptation? If that's what you think, then you haven't considered the fact that people can overcome all sorts of biological predispositions with higher reasoning. For example, many people can overcome their instinctive fear of heights and walk across a glass floor dozens of stories above the ground because they know they are actually safe. For that matter, while xenophobia is almost certainly an adapted trait, mechanisms for overcoming xenophobia are almost certainly built in as well.
That doesn't quite add up. The number of smartphones out there is on the same order as the number of high-speed connections in homes. The connection of cell phone towers to the backbone is extremely direct compared to high-speed connections in homes. And, finally, the total monthly bandwidth used by the typical phone is a lot less than the total monthly bandwidth of a home connection. So how is the backbone usage the issue when it's the same backbone as the home connections?
The post I was replying to was from someone who said they work in radiation safety for the government who was claiming that all that matters is the dose. I was just trying to point out (admittedly in a long-winded fashion) that they were ignoring the fact that one dose is spread through the whole body and delivered over a span of hours and the other is concentrated in a tiny fraction of the body and delivered over a span of seconds. I believe apples and oranges can be compared, but I have a hard time believing it can be done with one simple fruit scalar value.
I think I understand radiation very well. If you actually read my post, you'll note that I discussed situations in which electromagnetic radiation between 560 to 490 nm. I picked those wavelengths because they constitute what's normally known as the color green. It's smack dab in the middle of the visible spectrum which is considered to be some of the most harmless radiation there is. Then I pointed out how, in the right concentrations, even safe doses of the safest radiation could kill you or even cause cancer. I'm aware that the frequencies used in the TSA backscatter machines are inherently more dangerous. The point I was making is that the post I was replying was incorrect in its assumption that absolute dose averaged across the entire volume of the body is the only thing you need to look at when assessing radiation danger.
I'm trying to get at the fact that the GP was saying that quantity X (radiation exposure from scanners) is less than quantity Y (radiation exposure from a plane flight) without addressing the facts that X and Y are not the same types of radiation, occur over a drastically different timescale, and in drastically spatial concentrations. My examples were merely meant to illustrate dramatically that the harm radiation can do to a human body is not exclusively determined by an absolute dosage. Statistical radiation safety methods are based on assumptions about the situation. Those assumptions may very well not hold in the specific case of these scanners. If the GP is a radiation safety expert, then I think we would all appreciate an explanation that addresses those points.
Well said. Aside from being practical for humanity in the long run, space exploration is also a way to make the most of being here.
I'm worried about the death of the sun and the heat death of the universe and a lot of things that could wipe us out before then. The thing is, escaping the death of the sun and all of the much nearer term potential disasters is actually within our current technological capacity. The heat death of the universe is potentially beyond any solution. The best you can do is kill off stars to save fuel and slow the formation of new stars (beyond current technology, but not necessarily beyond theoretical possibility).
It's all beyond any of our lifetimes, but space travel is something that we accomplish as a collective and we could still be around for this stuff as a collective. In fact, space colonization might be our only chance to be around for this stuff (and maybe after).
No. Not wrong by a long shot. You really are living in a fantasy land. We've only found a tiny fraction of the objects in our solar system big enough to cause a global extinction. Space is really, really big and objects big enough to cause global extinctions are still tiny compared to planets and moons and the really big asteroids. The things we've spotted so far are mostly low-hanging fruit. We could be easily clobbered by something out of the black from a direction we're not looking. Sure, we'd probably see it before it hit us, especially if it's a comet, but not necessarily very long before.