Many people are aware of the Weak and Strong Anthropic Principles. The Weak One says, basically, that it was jolly amazing of the universe to be constructed in such a way that humans could evolve to a point where they make a living in, for example, universities, while the Strong One says that, one the contrary, the whole point of the universe was that humans should not only work in universities by also write for huge sums books with words like `cosmic’ and `chaos’ in the titles.
And they are correct. The universe clearly operates for the benefit of humanity This can be readily seen from the convenient way the sun comes up in the morning, when people are ready to start the day.
The UU Professor of Anthropics had developed the Special and Inevitable Anthropic Principle, which was that the entire reason for the existence of the universe was the eventual evolution of the UU Professor of Anthropics. But this was only a formal statement of the theory which absolutely everyone, with only some minor details of a `Fill in name here’ nature, secretly believes to be true.
Hasn't dark matter been observed through gravitational lensing? It seems more and more that most of the matter in the universe actually is some sort of otherwise invisible non-baryonic matter.
The concept of hierarchy can be very useful, but seems to be pretty much absent in Unity. Offce applications are the perfect example. You should be able, if you want, to have one LibreOffice icon and, when you click it, you should be presented with a submenu with all the individual LibreOffice programs
I assume that you mean in some sort of situation where the food were guaranteed to run out, otherwise rational people would take steps to ensure that they acquired more food. So, you must mean a hypothetical situation like a becalmed sailing vessel. Purely rational people in that situation would probably devise a way to sort out who gets to die right away and be eaten, thereby freeing up existing provisions that those people would otherwise eat and providing extra nutrition. They would be careful to keep it to the safe minimum. Irrational people would behave in all sorts of ways. Some of them would sacrifice themselves, and some of them would sacrifice others (possibly forcibly). There would probably be less actual cannibalism, and a lot more killing. Which way is best is left as an exercise for the reader.
Regarding modems on the shelves of Best Buy not working because of the date: years back, I had a tech support job for CompUSA. I forget what the date actually was (pretty sure it wasn't any time in 2000), but there was an entire family of HP desktops whose modems (this was back when most people didn't have some form of broadband) all stopped working at the same time. It was a driver issue, and they rushed out a new driver to fix it, but most of the people with the problem didn't have a way to download it without a functioning modem. The workaround was easy, however, just set the computers clock back to before the problem started and restart the computer and the driver would function. I never knew the exact nature of the bug, but it was clearly in the same vein as the Y2K issues. Datestamp related issues don't have to be Y2K ones but also Y2K bugs could actually strike both before and after Midnight on December 31st 1999.
Only a tiny fraction of the people who had the problem actually called us. Some of the rest might have found the solution to the problem, but many probably took their systems in for expensive repair or outright scrapped them. The damage from simple little bugs like that can actually be pretty large. As for industrial control systems in potentially dangerous equipment like nuclear reactors - if any sort of bug like that is even suspected, a code review is just plain old due diligence. It's not scaremongering to suggest that someone at least check to make sure there isn't a problem. A year ago, you probably would have considered it scaremongering if someone were screaming from the rooftops that coastal nuclear power plants might be at risk of nuclear accidents in the event of a tsunami. You would have said that nuclear plants are designed and built by really competent engineers and that the plants would be just fine after a tsunami. If the people doing the "scaremongering" had yelled loudly enough, then you would probably still be able to say that nuclear power plants are totally safe from tsunamis with a straight face because there wouldn't have been a severe accident at Fukushima.
Stac? Eolas? Alcatel-Lucent MP3 patent? I'm pretty sure Microsoft lost all of those in court in the last decade. The holier-than-thou attitude from their legal department is hypocritical.
Software patents shouldn't be valid anyway, or at the very least should be held to extremely tough standards to pass through the system. They're only a marginal step above business method patents. The fact that the USPTO allows business method patents (traditionally, the canonical example of what _can't_ be patented), just shows that whole system is just a farce. Business methods, or rather, business sectors are where lettres patent originated, of course. Back in those days, they were royal proclamations granting monopolies (for example, on spice trade from the West Indies) to cronies. Today's supposedly meritocratic system (still more of a plutocracy since patent dominance goes to whoever has the most money to spam the system with applications and to litigate.
Frankly, I don't understand why anyone would support a system for which 99.9% of the real world usage is abuse. There are valid reasons for the patent system to exist, but it is, after all, a system for granting absolute monopolies. For monopolies to be allowed to exist in a free economy, there has to be a very strong justification. Given how terrible the system is, some pretty amazing justifications should need to be demonstrated for it to continue to exist.
Ultimately, I suppose it's a matter of taste. Even hard usability data from intensive studies is subjective because different people have different ways of interacting and different abilities and skills so what's straightforward for one person, or even 90% of average users, might not be for another person. We might as well be discussing Vi vs. Emacs. Speaking for myself, I don't like what I've experienced of Unity so far. There are some things about it that bother me that aren't really interface design issues that I might be holding unfairly against it (the hideous video corruption that occurs when I switch to a virtual terminal with ctrl-alt-F# then switch back is probably an Nvidia driver issue). Still, I'm going to play around with it for a bit and see if it grows on me. I still think it will just slow me down, or force me to work around it rather than with it, however.
I never used the word "retarded", so I'm not sure who you're quoting. As for how discoverable the interface is, menus are easy to scan quickly. I just don't see how a bunch of icons that you have to scan side to side and line by line can possibly be faster. I suppose I'm prejudiced against the search feature because it seems that the direction in computer interfaces lately has been towards hiding structure and organisation. Reliance on a magical search feature just rubs me the wrong way. Especially considering how frequently search features seem to fail in what should be trivial cases. I can't even count the number of times I've tried to use the search feature in Microsoft Windows and it's been bizarrely unable to find things that are actually right there. That reduces my confidence in the whole idea. Unity just feels like a set of square training wheels that are built permanently into your bicycle.
The problem then becomes developing robots that are anywhere near as capable as a human being. A human on Mars would take a lot more support than, for example, Spirit and Opportunity, but would be able to cover all the ground they've covered in a small fraction of the time they've taken.
Engineered "people" that are at the least space-adapted (can take much more hard radiation, don't need gravity, etc.) should be our goal.
Don't forget to replace their feet with a second set of hands, since the extra set of hands will be useful and you don't need feet in freefall. _Falling Free_ was a pretty good book. Of course, the genetically adapted for freefall humans in that book run into an obsolescence problem when artificial gravity is invented.
I've used Unity. So far, I dislike it. Sorting applications in various ways is nice. Personally, I like sorting them into easy and quick to navigate menus. You wrote that you "think typing "Te" into the search box and selecting "Terminal" is much faster than navigating a menu structure". That's what my comment was directed towards. I might as well also point out that the steps you have to go through in your example aren't actually all that quick compared to other methods. Keeping a terminal window around and typing the command with tab completion, adding an ampersand, then hitting enter seems faster to me.
Overall, I agree. I'm not, however, as confident in current nuclear tech as you are. Then again, the length of time it takes to even build a nuclear plant means that all operating plants are using decades old technology, so a new plant started tomorrow will be more advanced. Newer designs greatly reduce the possibility of a Chernobyl or Fukushima style accident or worse. One problem is that they pretty much need to be built next to a large water supply: rivers, lakes, seaside. In other words, real estate that people want for other things, and frequently don't want to share with a nuclear power plant. Accidents do occur as well, although that's a given for most large industrial installations and it's unlikely a nuclear plant accident will ever match, for example, the Union Carbide catastrophe in Bhopal. The big problem I always see with nuclear power is how heavily subsidized it always seems to need to be in order to remain viable. It seems to be one of those endeavours where the ability to estimate costs breaks down. Plants always seem to come in at three times their original estimate or so. Maybe newer plants will be more cost effective, but I'm not 100% confident.
In any case, nuclear power is at least net energy positive, although the fuel for current designs won't last forever either. If we can get thorium reactors going, then we have buckets of fuel. If we could actually get sustained fusion working we'd be all set.
That's Unity you were using, not Gnome 3, but gods yes I have to agree with you on the interface. I just installed Ubuntu 11.10 on a system, and my jaw dropped at how awful things are. To get to a terminal, you have to go to the Ubuntu "Dash" button on the side dock thingy, then open it up and use the search function to search for it. Or, you hit the icon at the bottom of the Dash overlay thingy for applications (which you have to guess at since it's not labelled and doesn't seem to have any tooltips). Then, in the middle layer, you have to expand it to show all the applications and search among all the big icons with little labels for it...
Now that I describe it, it doesn't actually _sound_ as bad once you've actually learned how it's laid out, but it is bad. It's bad because, as long as you can read, there's no need for an interface like this. It's slow and throws up too many obstacles to get to what you want. The docky thing on the side is stupid. Having the icons that you use to launch programs in the same place and serving the same function as the icons representing running programs is stupid. All kinds of menu options that should be there when you right-click aren't there when they should be. Having one menu bar across the top that transforms into the menu for whatever application you have open like a Mac is stupid. The way it's structured seems like a good idea, provided you're the type that only ever uses a few particular applications. The way the virtual desktop switcher is stupid. The whole thing is all the worst interface "innovation" from Macs and recent versions of Windows. There's just no reason for it, it's just change for the sake of change (and to imitate Microsoft and Apple), replacing perfectly good, time-tested, interface elements with ones that just don't work as well and aren't as well thought out.
Thankfully, the deficiencies in the Unity interface can be fixed by installing gnome 3. Then, some of the deficiencies in gnome 3 can be fixed with further tweaking. Unity, at least in its current form, just makes me feel dirty.
I love the GE coal ad from a few years back with the attractive models mining coal, and the song "16 tons", which is all about how exploitive and evil coal-mining companies are, playing in the background. here it is on YouTube. Who exactly they're targeting with that commercial, or what they were thinking, I have no idea.
We haven't exhausted all the possibilities for producing fuel from the environment by a long shot. For example, I would consider farming algae and making fuel from that to count as such a method. If the method doesn't need to be net energy-positive, that makes it all the easier. In such a method, the physical resources that make up the algae in the first place, get returned eventually to where the algae got them in the first place. Doing it that way, may actually technically take more energy than refining oil shales since the algae requires energy to grow, but that energy comes more or less "for free", so the only energy expenditure you have to count is the energy to refine it, which very well might work out to less than the oil shales. At the very least, we should certainly look into recycling all of our waste plastics and other materials as you point out. It might, for example, turn out to be more efficient to convert human waste into fuels than to extract oil from some of those oil shale deposits.
In the long run, we'll have to switch away from oil, and the technologies to do so could take decades or even centuries to develop. If necessity is the mother of invention, and we know for certain that there _will_ be a necessity in the future, we should get started with the inventing now before it becomes dire necessity. Better, safer, more economically viable nuclear power would be nice (Mr. Fusion should only be 4 more years away according to _Back to the Future_), but while we work on that, we should look at various methods of solar power production, which are already net energy positive without needing to use magic, and are therefore easily competitive with oil shales.
As for global warming/climate change... Those who prefer to absolutely deny that it's happening tend to be fairly low in credibility in my list because they almost always seem to draw the insane conclusion that, if anthropogenic climate change isn't happening, then no environmental concerns are valid. Humans as a species are screwing up the environment we live in fast enough that we need to be concerned. Greenhouse gases are not the only concern. People who say that everything is all right and that the environmentalist doomsayers are just a bunch of whackjobs are the real whackjobs. The reason is simple. It's easy to predict doom and be correct in the long run. People who predict that everything will turn out all right are living in Cloudcuckooland. As a simple example, we're currently putting mercury into our water supplies and oceans faster than it can be naturally removed. Obviously it will eventually reach some sort of equilibrium point where the level doesn't increase any more. Long before we reach that point, the water will become fatally toxic. From an optimistic viewpoint, it's therefore self-regulating because the species causing the pollution dies off, or at least dies back enough for the rate of poisoning to decrease. This is an inevitable unless we either do something about the problem, or we die off/back and/or fall back to a pre-industrial civilization (which can't really happen without a huge die-off). This view of things is simply correct. There's no sane way to look at the facts and say that this won't eventually happen unless something is done. It's a long time coming before it could kill us all, long after everyone alive now would be dead of natural causes, but the fact that our behaviour now will eventually kill us unless it's corrected is easy to see. Anyway, that kind of got away from me, but the point is that, even if anthropogenic global climate change isn't happening, there's enough of a chance that it is, and enough other reasons (such as simple energy independence, as you say) to take the steps that would curb it, that we should, if we may err, err on the side of caution, rather than wild, carefree abandon.
Ok, for direct personal experience that only leaves 4 of the 10 I listed if you replace the Fukushima reactors with one of the other horribly radioactive environments humans have worked in, like the Chernobyl reactor after it blew. People have been to the deepest depths of the ocean, they've been in Antarctic storms, they've worked in extremely radioactive environments, and they've walked around in erupting volcanos (I remember watching this documentary with an artist who sculpted raw lava with tools on long poles, utterly insane, but pretty cool). Many of those people have died, because those are pretty harsh environments. The point is, there are much more hostile environments right here on Earth than the surface of the moon. There are environments that don't have any breathable air. There are environments that are functionally colder (-153 degrees celcius is colder than the -89 degrees celcius you could get in the Antarctic, but the Antarctic is functionally colder because there's little heat loss through air conduction and convection on the moon) than the moon. There are environments that are hotter than the moon. There are environments that are more radioactive than the moon. There aren't any environments with air pressure as low as the moon, but the top of Everest, where humans routinely visit (and routinely die), can get 80% of the way there. The odds of a fatal meteorite strike are also probably a lot higher on the moon, but we don't yet know how high those odds really are. Probably low enough to not be the primary safety factor.
I can conceive of work on the moon being routine because it has been done. It's wasn't frequently enough to be "routine", but 600 man-hours across six missions that landed 12 astronauts on the moon is plenty to establish some sort of baseline. Hundreds of thousands of man-hours, if not millions, have been spent in similar pressure suits by astronauts in training. The various things that can go wrong are well understood. Long term radiation exposure and the dangers of suit failure can be mitigated by safety equipment - radiation shades to limit exposure could be set up at worksites, and support vehicles could carry a safe emergency environment as well as air and power reserves. Additionally, most surface work could be done via heavy equipment operated via telepresence. There's just nothing so far to suggest that the moon is such a hostile environment that we can't work and live there with the protection of our technology.
The question then becomes, if you have to use another energy source to extract the oil, can you use that other energy source to make an oil equivalent from, for example, water and atmospheric CO2? If you can, is it possible to do it with less energy? Also, if factors such as convenience play a role, then factors such as environmental impact (which equates to convenience in the long term) should as well. So even if alternate energy source to extract oil is cheaper than alternate energy source to synthesize oil, is alternate energy source to extract oil + negative environmental impact cheaper than alternate energy source to synthesize oil?
Does the term "recoverable" mean "economically recoverable"? And if it is economically recoverable, how do the economics of recovering it compare to other methods? For example, will it end up being cheapest to build solar plants to power the recovery of oil from oil shales for raw materials to make plastics?
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I'm pretty sure this is some kind of troll-bot.
From Terry Pratchett’s Hogfather:
Hasn't dark matter been observed through gravitational lensing? It seems more and more that most of the matter in the universe actually is some sort of otherwise invisible non-baryonic matter.
The concept of hierarchy can be very useful, but seems to be pretty much absent in Unity. Offce applications are the perfect example. You should be able, if you want, to have one LibreOffice icon and, when you click it, you should be presented with a submenu with all the individual LibreOffice programs
I assume that you mean in some sort of situation where the food were guaranteed to run out, otherwise rational people would take steps to ensure that they acquired more food. So, you must mean a hypothetical situation like a becalmed sailing vessel. Purely rational people in that situation would probably devise a way to sort out who gets to die right away and be eaten, thereby freeing up existing provisions that those people would otherwise eat and providing extra nutrition. They would be careful to keep it to the safe minimum. Irrational people would behave in all sorts of ways. Some of them would sacrifice themselves, and some of them would sacrifice others (possibly forcibly). There would probably be less actual cannibalism, and a lot more killing. Which way is best is left as an exercise for the reader.
Regarding modems on the shelves of Best Buy not working because of the date: years back, I had a tech support job for CompUSA. I forget what the date actually was (pretty sure it wasn't any time in 2000), but there was an entire family of HP desktops whose modems (this was back when most people didn't have some form of broadband) all stopped working at the same time. It was a driver issue, and they rushed out a new driver to fix it, but most of the people with the problem didn't have a way to download it without a functioning modem. The workaround was easy, however, just set the computers clock back to before the problem started and restart the computer and the driver would function. I never knew the exact nature of the bug, but it was clearly in the same vein as the Y2K issues. Datestamp related issues don't have to be Y2K ones but also Y2K bugs could actually strike both before and after Midnight on December 31st 1999.
Only a tiny fraction of the people who had the problem actually called us. Some of the rest might have found the solution to the problem, but many probably took their systems in for expensive repair or outright scrapped them. The damage from simple little bugs like that can actually be pretty large. As for industrial control systems in potentially dangerous equipment like nuclear reactors - if any sort of bug like that is even suspected, a code review is just plain old due diligence. It's not scaremongering to suggest that someone at least check to make sure there isn't a problem. A year ago, you probably would have considered it scaremongering if someone were screaming from the rooftops that coastal nuclear power plants might be at risk of nuclear accidents in the event of a tsunami. You would have said that nuclear plants are designed and built by really competent engineers and that the plants would be just fine after a tsunami. If the people doing the "scaremongering" had yelled loudly enough, then you would probably still be able to say that nuclear power plants are totally safe from tsunamis with a straight face because there wouldn't have been a severe accident at Fukushima.
They passed the the patent reform act ("America Invents Act"). Unfortunately, their idea of reform is to make the situation worse.
The little people being walked all over and the big corporations being the only ones who get listened to is the way politics is _meant_ to work?
Stac? Eolas? Alcatel-Lucent MP3 patent? I'm pretty sure Microsoft lost all of those in court in the last decade. The holier-than-thou attitude from their legal department is hypocritical.
Actually, the guy seemed to be Windows XP fan, not a Linux fan.
Software patents shouldn't be valid anyway, or at the very least should be held to extremely tough standards to pass through the system. They're only a marginal step above business method patents. The fact that the USPTO allows business method patents (traditionally, the canonical example of what _can't_ be patented), just shows that whole system is just a farce. Business methods, or rather, business sectors are where lettres patent originated, of course. Back in those days, they were royal proclamations granting monopolies (for example, on spice trade from the West Indies) to cronies. Today's supposedly meritocratic system (still more of a plutocracy since patent dominance goes to whoever has the most money to spam the system with applications and to litigate.
Frankly, I don't understand why anyone would support a system for which 99.9% of the real world usage is abuse. There are valid reasons for the patent system to exist, but it is, after all, a system for granting absolute monopolies. For monopolies to be allowed to exist in a free economy, there has to be a very strong justification. Given how terrible the system is, some pretty amazing justifications should need to be demonstrated for it to continue to exist.
Ultimately, I suppose it's a matter of taste. Even hard usability data from intensive studies is subjective because different people have different ways of interacting and different abilities and skills so what's straightforward for one person, or even 90% of average users, might not be for another person. We might as well be discussing Vi vs. Emacs. Speaking for myself, I don't like what I've experienced of Unity so far. There are some things about it that bother me that aren't really interface design issues that I might be holding unfairly against it (the hideous video corruption that occurs when I switch to a virtual terminal with ctrl-alt-F# then switch back is probably an Nvidia driver issue). Still, I'm going to play around with it for a bit and see if it grows on me. I still think it will just slow me down, or force me to work around it rather than with it, however.
I never used the word "retarded", so I'm not sure who you're quoting. As for how discoverable the interface is, menus are easy to scan quickly. I just don't see how a bunch of icons that you have to scan side to side and line by line can possibly be faster. I suppose I'm prejudiced against the search feature because it seems that the direction in computer interfaces lately has been towards hiding structure and organisation. Reliance on a magical search feature just rubs me the wrong way. Especially considering how frequently search features seem to fail in what should be trivial cases. I can't even count the number of times I've tried to use the search feature in Microsoft Windows and it's been bizarrely unable to find things that are actually right there. That reduces my confidence in the whole idea. Unity just feels like a set of square training wheels that are built permanently into your bicycle.
The problem then becomes developing robots that are anywhere near as capable as a human being. A human on Mars would take a lot more support than, for example, Spirit and Opportunity, but would be able to cover all the ground they've covered in a small fraction of the time they've taken.
Don't forget to replace their feet with a second set of hands, since the extra set of hands will be useful and you don't need feet in freefall. _Falling Free_ was a pretty good book. Of course, the genetically adapted for freefall humans in that book run into an obsolescence problem when artificial gravity is invented.
I've used Unity. So far, I dislike it. Sorting applications in various ways is nice. Personally, I like sorting them into easy and quick to navigate menus. You wrote that you "think typing "Te" into the search box and selecting "Terminal" is much faster than navigating a menu structure". That's what my comment was directed towards. I might as well also point out that the steps you have to go through in your example aren't actually all that quick compared to other methods. Keeping a terminal window around and typing the command with tab completion, adding an ampersand, then hitting enter seems faster to me.
Overall, I agree. I'm not, however, as confident in current nuclear tech as you are. Then again, the length of time it takes to even build a nuclear plant means that all operating plants are using decades old technology, so a new plant started tomorrow will be more advanced. Newer designs greatly reduce the possibility of a Chernobyl or Fukushima style accident or worse. One problem is that they pretty much need to be built next to a large water supply: rivers, lakes, seaside. In other words, real estate that people want for other things, and frequently don't want to share with a nuclear power plant. Accidents do occur as well, although that's a given for most large industrial installations and it's unlikely a nuclear plant accident will ever match, for example, the Union Carbide catastrophe in Bhopal. The big problem I always see with nuclear power is how heavily subsidized it always seems to need to be in order to remain viable. It seems to be one of those endeavours where the ability to estimate costs breaks down. Plants always seem to come in at three times their original estimate or so. Maybe newer plants will be more cost effective, but I'm not 100% confident.
In any case, nuclear power is at least net energy positive, although the fuel for current designs won't last forever either. If we can get thorium reactors going, then we have buckets of fuel. If we could actually get sustained fusion working we'd be all set.
Like other people have mentioned, you might as well just use a terminal with tab completion to launch everything you need.
That's Unity you were using, not Gnome 3, but gods yes I have to agree with you on the interface. I just installed Ubuntu 11.10 on a system, and my jaw dropped at how awful things are. To get to a terminal, you have to go to the Ubuntu "Dash" button on the side dock thingy, then open it up and use the search function to search for it. Or, you hit the icon at the bottom of the Dash overlay thingy for applications (which you have to guess at since it's not labelled and doesn't seem to have any tooltips). Then, in the middle layer, you have to expand it to show all the applications and search among all the big icons with little labels for it...
Now that I describe it, it doesn't actually _sound_ as bad once you've actually learned how it's laid out, but it is bad. It's bad because, as long as you can read, there's no need for an interface like this. It's slow and throws up too many obstacles to get to what you want. The docky thing on the side is stupid. Having the icons that you use to launch programs in the same place and serving the same function as the icons representing running programs is stupid. All kinds of menu options that should be there when you right-click aren't there when they should be. Having one menu bar across the top that transforms into the menu for whatever application you have open like a Mac is stupid. The way it's structured seems like a good idea, provided you're the type that only ever uses a few particular applications. The way the virtual desktop switcher is stupid. The whole thing is all the worst interface "innovation" from Macs and recent versions of Windows. There's just no reason for it, it's just change for the sake of change (and to imitate Microsoft and Apple), replacing perfectly good, time-tested, interface elements with ones that just don't work as well and aren't as well thought out.
Thankfully, the deficiencies in the Unity interface can be fixed by installing gnome 3. Then, some of the deficiencies in gnome 3 can be fixed with further tweaking. Unity, at least in its current form, just makes me feel dirty.
I love the GE coal ad from a few years back with the attractive models mining coal, and the song "16 tons", which is all about how exploitive and evil coal-mining companies are, playing in the background. here it is on YouTube. Who exactly they're targeting with that commercial, or what they were thinking, I have no idea.
We haven't exhausted all the possibilities for producing fuel from the environment by a long shot. For example, I would consider farming algae and making fuel from that to count as such a method. If the method doesn't need to be net energy-positive, that makes it all the easier. In such a method, the physical resources that make up the algae in the first place, get returned eventually to where the algae got them in the first place. Doing it that way, may actually technically take more energy than refining oil shales since the algae requires energy to grow, but that energy comes more or less "for free", so the only energy expenditure you have to count is the energy to refine it, which very well might work out to less than the oil shales. At the very least, we should certainly look into recycling all of our waste plastics and other materials as you point out. It might, for example, turn out to be more efficient to convert human waste into fuels than to extract oil from some of those oil shale deposits.
In the long run, we'll have to switch away from oil, and the technologies to do so could take decades or even centuries to develop. If necessity is the mother of invention, and we know for certain that there _will_ be a necessity in the future, we should get started with the inventing now before it becomes dire necessity. Better, safer, more economically viable nuclear power would be nice (Mr. Fusion should only be 4 more years away according to _Back to the Future_), but while we work on that, we should look at various methods of solar power production, which are already net energy positive without needing to use magic, and are therefore easily competitive with oil shales.
As for global warming/climate change... Those who prefer to absolutely deny that it's happening tend to be fairly low in credibility in my list because they almost always seem to draw the insane conclusion that, if anthropogenic climate change isn't happening, then no environmental concerns are valid. Humans as a species are screwing up the environment we live in fast enough that we need to be concerned. Greenhouse gases are not the only concern. People who say that everything is all right and that the environmentalist doomsayers are just a bunch of whackjobs are the real whackjobs. The reason is simple. It's easy to predict doom and be correct in the long run. People who predict that everything will turn out all right are living in Cloudcuckooland. As a simple example, we're currently putting mercury into our water supplies and oceans faster than it can be naturally removed. Obviously it will eventually reach some sort of equilibrium point where the level doesn't increase any more. Long before we reach that point, the water will become fatally toxic. From an optimistic viewpoint, it's therefore self-regulating because the species causing the pollution dies off, or at least dies back enough for the rate of poisoning to decrease. This is an inevitable unless we either do something about the problem, or we die off/back and/or fall back to a pre-industrial civilization (which can't really happen without a huge die-off). This view of things is simply correct. There's no sane way to look at the facts and say that this won't eventually happen unless something is done. It's a long time coming before it could kill us all, long after everyone alive now would be dead of natural causes, but the fact that our behaviour now will eventually kill us unless it's corrected is easy to see. Anyway, that kind of got away from me, but the point is that, even if anthropogenic global climate change isn't happening, there's enough of a chance that it is, and enough other reasons (such as simple energy independence, as you say) to take the steps that would curb it, that we should, if we may err, err on the side of caution, rather than wild, carefree abandon.
Ok, for direct personal experience that only leaves 4 of the 10 I listed if you replace the Fukushima reactors with one of the other horribly radioactive environments humans have worked in, like the Chernobyl reactor after it blew. People have been to the deepest depths of the ocean, they've been in Antarctic storms, they've worked in extremely radioactive environments, and they've walked around in erupting volcanos (I remember watching this documentary with an artist who sculpted raw lava with tools on long poles, utterly insane, but pretty cool). Many of those people have died, because those are pretty harsh environments. The point is, there are much more hostile environments right here on Earth than the surface of the moon. There are environments that don't have any breathable air. There are environments that are functionally colder (-153 degrees celcius is colder than the -89 degrees celcius you could get in the Antarctic, but the Antarctic is functionally colder because there's little heat loss through air conduction and convection on the moon) than the moon. There are environments that are hotter than the moon. There are environments that are more radioactive than the moon. There aren't any environments with air pressure as low as the moon, but the top of Everest, where humans routinely visit (and routinely die), can get 80% of the way there. The odds of a fatal meteorite strike are also probably a lot higher on the moon, but we don't yet know how high those odds really are. Probably low enough to not be the primary safety factor.
I can conceive of work on the moon being routine because it has been done. It's wasn't frequently enough to be "routine", but 600 man-hours across six missions that landed 12 astronauts on the moon is plenty to establish some sort of baseline. Hundreds of thousands of man-hours, if not millions, have been spent in similar pressure suits by astronauts in training. The various things that can go wrong are well understood. Long term radiation exposure and the dangers of suit failure can be mitigated by safety equipment - radiation shades to limit exposure could be set up at worksites, and support vehicles could carry a safe emergency environment as well as air and power reserves. Additionally, most surface work could be done via heavy equipment operated via telepresence. There's just nothing so far to suggest that the moon is such a hostile environment that we can't work and live there with the protection of our technology.
A bit more likely to be giant shanty-towns full of refugees than cleaner and nicer new cities don't you think?
The question then becomes, if you have to use another energy source to extract the oil, can you use that other energy source to make an oil equivalent from, for example, water and atmospheric CO2? If you can, is it possible to do it with less energy? Also, if factors such as convenience play a role, then factors such as environmental impact (which equates to convenience in the long term) should as well. So even if alternate energy source to extract oil is cheaper than alternate energy source to synthesize oil, is alternate energy source to extract oil + negative environmental impact cheaper than alternate energy source to synthesize oil?
Does the term "recoverable" mean "economically recoverable"? And if it is economically recoverable, how do the economics of recovering it compare to other methods? For example, will it end up being cheapest to build solar plants to power the recovery of oil from oil shales for raw materials to make plastics?