Not disputing your area * depth calculation... or even factoring in ice vs. water density. No doubt there is a LOT of water there... I just figure there's more to calculating its liquid water yield (if it melted) than this simple calculation.... air included in the volume of ice (snow) and what-not.
The order-of-magnitude difference comes into how I'm interpreting the values for ice caps, glaciers, etc. in the website I referenced... It lists roughly 24 million cubic kilometers TOTAL... for all ice caps and glaciers everywhere. Your calculation was just for Greenland and Antarctica - and was on par with what the USGS website lists for the entire globe.
Meh... who knows. The USGS figures could be old. Forgive me for being skeptical. I'm just old enough remember when 'scientists' were warning of another impending ice age that would destroy civilization as we know it.
1. I don't know where your figures for mean depth of ice are coming from, but your calculations defy logic. It's a little more complex than multiplying the thickness of the ice by the surface area of a continent to calculate the volume of liquid water stored there. Also, your values for surface area, appear to include areas of ice shelf already in the ocean for both Antarctica and Greenland.
2. I got my value for the volume of water included in the polar ice caps and glaciers from http://ga.water.usgs.gov/edu/earthhowmuch.html. While I still don't have 100% confidence in my government's ability to put together a bullet-proof presentation on these values... I'm going to assume whomever put these together did a little more research and math than multiplying two numbers together. Your calculations would put the total ice cap, glacier, permanent snow on the Earth an order of magnitude or more out of sync with the values reported here.
3. Common sense. Think. All that ice in Antarctica is not likely to melt in anything less than geologic time-scales... When the temperature at the Antarctic interior never gets above -25C even in the middle of summer... The melting ice would be the least of our problems if the global average temperature got high enough for it to do so... In other words, a few degree rise in temperature != automatic melting of Greenland and Antarctica.
I got curious... so I calculated the numbers based on the data I've got available... This is a VERY rough calculation... definitely not something I'd put fourth in any kind of scientific study... some rounding is present that could lead to a significant margin of error... but it should be enough to get a general idea of the numbers we are talking about here... By the way AC... There's no need to get ugly. We're just talking about silly numbers and math here.
Mean radius of the earth at sea-level: 6371 kilometers Convert to meters: 6371 * 1000 = 6371000 Volume of the earth: (4/3) 3.14 * radius cubed ~= 1083206916845753600000 cubic meters Volume of the earth with 20 meters added to radius = 1083217118167215900000 cubic meters Difference: 10201321462300000 cubic meters Subtract 30% (3060396438690000) to account for land area not covered by water = 7,140,925,023,610,000 approximate total cubic meters of water required to raise sea-level by 20 meters.
If I've done my maths correctly, this equates to nearly TWO MILLION CUBIC MILES of water (1,713,200 cubic miles | 7,140,925 cubic kilometers)... and could easily surpass two million cubic miles if land inundation were taken into account.
Now... I did a little further looking and some - apparently credible - websites cite as much as 6-7 million cubic miles of ice caps, glaciers, permanent snow, etc... so it is plausible that my previous assertion that there isn't enough water on land to pull this off is incorrect. However - even if that's true - we'd have to lose a HUGE portion of it to melting... plus... I believe that 6-7 million figure includes ice caps and glaciers already in the water - which would not contribute to sea-level rise if they melted.
So... I'm just sayin... all the hand-wringing about sea-level rise is a bit overblown IMHO. Guess what! The Earth is a dynamic system. It changes over time. Get used to it! Chances are, if this EVER becomes a problem - you and I will have been dead far too long to give a rip about our beach house.
I did a rough calculation for this sort of thing a number of years ago... In fact, I may have even posted it here on/. - but I'm too lazy to search. My recollection is that the volume of water in discussion here - 20 meters of sea-level rise - is patently absurd. There simply isn't that much water on the entire planet that isn't ALREADY at or below sea-level. Consider a simplistic way of calculating the necessary volume of water required:
-Even though the Earth isn't a perfect sphere.. one could consider it so for the purposes of calculating the volume of water required for an AVERAGE of a 20 meter rise in sea-level globally... Therefore... -Calculate the spherical volume of the globe given the average radius of the Earth at sea-level. -Do the same with 20 meters added to the radius -Subtract the first from the latter -Subtract 30% from this value to account for land-mass not covered by water -That would get you the approximate MINIMUM volume of water required (if the shore-lines remained in place they are now.. (Imagine walking to the ocean's edge now and a 20 meter wall of water held back by an invisible force field) -Note: Accounting for additional shore-line inundation would require lots more math and access to elevation data and averages to which I don't have... but keep in mind - to get the same level of sea rise it would require that much MORE water. But if memory serves, draining every drop of surface water on-land (including every lake, river and glacier) wouldn't even come close to the first number. Only 30% of the Earth's surface is above present sea-level... and only a small fraction of that land is covered in any type of standing water (or ice). The oceans are just sooooooooooo very vast... and that's a LOT of surface area to pile an additional 20 meters of water on top of it.
A replica? Uh... That just doesn't make any sense to me. But, then, there are a lot of laws here and there that don't make any sense.
So, does that mean a handgun with, say, the hammer spring removed (or broken) is considered a replica and therefore illegal? Seems like that's one of those laws that would be easy to circumvent and difficult or impossible to enforce.
I think you and I may disagree on how one may accurately measure LOWER prices and BETTER outcomes.
An individual in any given European country, for example, where healthcare is totally (or very nearly) socialized may not be out-of-pocket very much for minor or even major medical issues... but it doesn't mean that healthcare costs less to provide. The burden of cost is on the whole society through higher taxes - and the individuals are forced to pay these costs whether they want to or not - indeed whether or not they EVER need healthcare in their entire lives they are still forced to pay.
And 'better outcomes'? I know how that trick works... Socialist medicine country has, say, 95% success rate for some major procedure - an artificial transplant of some kind, for example - whereas in the U.S. it's only 78%... Sounds like a win for socialist medicine, right?... That is until one learns that 38% of the people who needed the procedure under the socialist system died while they were on the waiting list... leaving only the more healthy individuals (more likely to survive the procedure) to be counted in the statistic... rather than everybody being counted in the U.S. because there was no waiting list.
What I said still stands... I don't even need causation for my point to stand. When a government program fails (lower healthcare costs, for example) the liberal answer is always more government... another bigger, more comprehensive program is needed. And when that one fails... the next attempt is even bigger! And on... and on... and on... It's like you've got brain damage or something and can't comprehend that more and more government control over things such as healthcare may actually doing more harm than good!
You obviously do not realize that the REASON medical care is so expensive in the U.S. to begin with is largely because of government interference. The level of government regulation in the healthcare business (and healthcare insurance) nationally has been consistently INCREASING over the past 30 years or so... and it keeps getting more and more expensive. Are you seeing a pattern here?
You liberal retards kill me. Additional government control fails to lower prices... What's your answer? MORE GOVERNMENT!
One will generally not find a "White People are Evil" or "Conservatism Sucks and Liberalism Rocks" entitled as such on the class schedule at most universities... It does not mean it's not in the curriculum. And it is certainly not entirely avoidable.
For example, World Geography 101 my freshman year in college - part of the core curriculum and a general education REQUIREMENT - consisted of less geography and more of the professor pontificating about his Liberal political views... Deprecation of Caucasians in-general, inherent evil of corporations, global warming, etc. etc.
This is a serious problem. It's endemic in virtually all higher education institutions. If you disagree with me, you are simply wrong. So, there.:-)
Good thoughts... Of course one always has to allow for possibilities beyond our current realm of understanding - or even comprehension. That's one reason I, personally, don't accept the idea that 'life' evolved - spontaneously - on this rock. Chance - is not a scientifically workable solution (in my opinion). But its not my intention to start a 'creationist' debate here.:-)
I think you have misinterpreted what my logic assumes.... We have many odd-ball 'types' of life that exist on Earth NOW - not dependent on oxygen, etc, etc. Many species of which have only been discovered recently. IF the theory of evolution is true - in the sense that we humans evolved from primitive life-forms... it follows that such a process takes millions upon millions of years - even billions of years! This requires some level of stability in the system in which it develops over a VERY long time-scale. Presuming the laws of physics are the same throughout the universe (and have been here through the history of the Earth) - life - of ANY type - is dependent on complex forms of chemistry. Afterall, DNA is just a strand of chemicals bound together in a very specific way... There are boundaries (such as temperature) outside of which these complex forms of chemistry break-down and will not work. At all. (That's why boiling water destroys ALL of the run-of-the-mill-type bacteria in it.) Even if one did have a hypothetical planet where life did spontaneously generate itself at some point in time... its chances of evolving into something like a human that consumes all kinds of energy just to stay alive and feed our massively intelligent brains - even if it IS based on something other than a DNA molecule - aren't very good if its host star blows itself up after only a few million years, incinerating the planet in the process... or if it gets swallowed by a black hole... or the magnetic field disappears and the 'life molecules' begin to be blasted apart by solar radiation, etc. etc.
Indeed. I've often found it fascinating when we discover a new piece of the puzzle here on Earth - that of a condition peculiar to our situation - that is absolutely essential to sustain life (or at least intelligent human-type life as we know it). One of the more recent examples that comes to mind is the existence of our moon and its mass ratio to the Earth... stabilizing the progression of Earth's axis. Life could not exist for very long without it. And there are hundreds of conditions like this that are absolutely essential - likely lots more yet to be discovered: Right kind of star, right distance from star, right orbit, proper chemical composition of planet, magnetic field, proximity of solar system to non-life-friendly cosmic events (supernovas, etc),
And when it comes down to calculating the probabilities of all these conditions happening in one place... the numbers become stupid insane big - like 1 chance in greater than the number of sub-atomic particles in the entire universe big. The reason is because of "irreducible complexity"... You see, it doesn't do you any good to have the right type of star if you don't have a planet with the right orbit... and if you DO have the right kind of star with the right kind of orbit, it doesn't do you any good if you don't have a planet with the right kind of magnetic field to protect the atmosphere and life that may be on it... Any life that may exist wouldn't last very long.
Want to see how fast the probabilities decrease? Let's assign some arbitrary (certainly underestimated) numbers: Chance of having the right kind of star: 1 in 100 Chance of having proper orbit: 1 in 500 Chance of having appropriate chemical compisition of planet: 1 in 1000 Chance of being in the right place in the galaxy: 1 in 5000
100 x 500 = 50,000 x 1000 = 50,000,000 x 5000 = 1 chance in 2.5x10^11
So, you see... with ONLY 4 parameters the chances of having the right conditions to sustain life are very remote. And there are LOTS of parameters to figure into the entire calculation. It is INDEED very much possible - even probable - that our little blue dot is the only place like it in the entire universe.
Here here! In Arkansas -most- folks generally get along pretty well. Instances of racism are encountered occasionally... but rarely in my experience (I'm pretty pale-skinned). In any event, although pockets of racism may be found in a wide-spread geographic distribution, one doesn't generally find institutional-type discrimination anymore here in the 'South'... You'll run into an occasional crack-pot (of any color) here or there... but I've personally encountered a seemingly - alarmingly - high incidence of racist white folks up north. Once on a business trip with a black co-worker of mine, we even encountered somebody who, apparently, had never met a black person face-to-face before. So, I'm quite disappointed when I hear people - who likely live in the North - make disparaging remarks of how racist white people in the south are.
It's also important to note - there are many geographic regions here in the South where a white person is the minority... I've been to many of those places in my travels. Some of them are the most welcoming environments I've ever visited... Other places, I'll walk into a gas station, restaurant, or what have you... and all of the black folks just stare at me. So, it goes both ways... Your mileage may vary, however, depending on where you go.:-)
Who are these pompous erudite jerks that think they are so much smarter than me as to dictate my choices in what I drive, how much I should pay for fuel, and enact punitive measures upon me if I choose differently than what they deem proper? I am sick and tired of people like this who look down on us as some flock of sheep that are too stupid to make or do for ourselves. So what a lot of people drive vehicles that don't get the best gas-mileage? Who are you to tell us we don't NEED to? I've got a good reason for driving an SUV... Don't punish me just because lots of people also drive one when you don't think they've got a good reason. GRRRRRRRR!!!!!
Actually, the jury awarded the plaintiff $2.5 million. So, the civil case is over and Crystal L Cox was found guilty of libel. She doesn't have that kind of money to pay, however... and she said she will appeal the decision. I'll bet she doesn't even stop blogging about this guy and she ends up in jail after being found in contempt of court.
Do a google search on Crystal L Cox. I think you'll find she's a bit more 'crazy-person-y' than you realize. She has literally hundreds of blogs/websites bashing just as many people and companies. Her sole purpose is to drive traffic to her sites - which, indeed, she has done.
In a more perfect world than the one in which we live I would tend to agree with you.... However, she is very smart. And knows where the lines are - and which ones not to cross - inasmuch as extortion goes. i.e. Offering to sell the offending domain name to the company or individual rather than outright saying "If you pay me $10,000 I'll stop posting negative blogs about you." And the thing is, what she posts are misrepresentations of the truth... In other words, many of the blog posts are based on actual events - but she twists the facts and draws erroneous conclusions.
And, then, you have to keep in mind... It's a mad woman who pays maybe $6.00 per year to register the domain name vs. a company potentially spending tens of thousands on a court case which is difficult to win at best. The owners of the company for which I worked made the decision to ignore her. Do a google search on Crystal L Cox. Do it! I submit to you if you are a rational individual (which I'm sure you are) you will recognize she is a particularly disturbed human being. And woe unto you if you ever have the misfortune of crossing her path yourself.
formorsucks.com is the domain she registered against my employer... she also registered similar domain names based upon the names of the owners - and even some of the employees! Fortunately, I don't think she knows who I am. Oh, and I'm smart enough to already have myname.com registered.
You are presuming that her purposes in blogging are to actually communicate something to the public. It's her business model. She sets up these blogs, gets highly ranked in google and attempts to extort money out of those whom she attacks. Think about it. Sometimes it's worth paying her $5,000 or so to a business to have her turn over the domain name than to pay a lawyer to go after her. If she cons just 1 person/business into doing that per month - that's not a bad living.
I know from personal experience, this particular woman (Crystal Cox) either needs to be locked away - or never allowed to use a computing device attached to the Internet again.... or pay a price so high she will never have the financial means to even buy a computer. What she does is register [a company or person that made me mad]sucks.com... She creates a blog and posts all kinds of nasty things about them. She did it to my former employer - and she's VERY good at getting her blogs up in the google results. She tried to extort money out of them several times! The result is, she (in part) destroyed their business because anybody who did a google search about the company saw that garbage.... It ultimately resulted in me being laid off as their Information Technology Director a few months ago. So.... her irresponsible actions have real-world results.
Kinda makes you wonder if there might be more of our space probes coasting through the cosmos... put up there by a long forgotten civilizations that collapsed.
All the recent news about the possibility of leaving ISS uninhabited got me to thinking....
Is there a lock on the door? I know it's far-fetched, but assuming someone had the capability - what would keep some 'rouge' entity (nation or otherwise) from launching themselves into orbit, occupying the thing and... well... at worst, de-orbiting it into a population center or at best causing a huge political embarrassment - say, by claiming the thing as their own?
Slashdot Mirror
Not disputing your area * depth calculation... or even factoring in ice vs. water density. No doubt there is a LOT of water there... I just figure there's more to calculating its liquid water yield (if it melted) than this simple calculation.... air included in the volume of ice (snow) and what-not.
The order-of-magnitude difference comes into how I'm interpreting the values for ice caps, glaciers, etc. in the website I referenced... It lists roughly 24 million cubic kilometers TOTAL... for all ice caps and glaciers everywhere. Your calculation was just for Greenland and Antarctica - and was on par with what the USGS website lists for the entire globe.
Meh... who knows. The USGS figures could be old. Forgive me for being skeptical. I'm just old enough remember when 'scientists' were warning of another impending ice age that would destroy civilization as we know it.
1. I don't know where your figures for mean depth of ice are coming from, but your calculations defy logic. It's a little more complex than multiplying the thickness of the ice by the surface area of a continent to calculate the volume of liquid water stored there. Also, your values for surface area, appear to include areas of ice shelf already in the ocean for both Antarctica and Greenland.
2. I got my value for the volume of water included in the polar ice caps and glaciers from http://ga.water.usgs.gov/edu/earthhowmuch.html. While I still don't have 100% confidence in my government's ability to put together a bullet-proof presentation on these values... I'm going to assume whomever put these together did a little more research and math than multiplying two numbers together. Your calculations would put the total ice cap, glacier, permanent snow on the Earth an order of magnitude or more out of sync with the values reported here.
3. Common sense. Think. All that ice in Antarctica is not likely to melt in anything less than geologic time-scales... When the temperature at the Antarctic interior never gets above -25C even in the middle of summer... The melting ice would be the least of our problems if the global average temperature got high enough for it to do so... In other words, a few degree rise in temperature != automatic melting of Greenland and Antarctica.
I got curious... so I calculated the numbers based on the data I've got available... This is a VERY rough calculation... definitely not something I'd put fourth in any kind of scientific study... some rounding is present that could lead to a significant margin of error... but it should be enough to get a general idea of the numbers we are talking about here... By the way AC... There's no need to get ugly. We're just talking about silly numbers and math here.
Mean radius of the earth at sea-level: 6371 kilometers
Convert to meters: 6371 * 1000 = 6371000
Volume of the earth: (4/3) 3.14 * radius cubed ~= 1083206916845753600000 cubic meters
Volume of the earth with 20 meters added to radius = 1083217118167215900000 cubic meters
Difference: 10201321462300000 cubic meters
Subtract 30% (3060396438690000) to account for land area not covered by water
= 7,140,925,023,610,000 approximate total cubic meters of water required to raise sea-level by 20 meters.
If I've done my maths correctly, this equates to nearly TWO MILLION CUBIC MILES of water (1,713,200 cubic miles | 7,140,925 cubic kilometers)... and could easily surpass two million cubic miles if land inundation were taken into account.
Now... I did a little further looking and some - apparently credible - websites cite as much as 6-7 million cubic miles of ice caps, glaciers, permanent snow, etc... so it is plausible that my previous assertion that there isn't enough water on land to pull this off is incorrect. However - even if that's true - we'd have to lose a HUGE portion of it to melting... plus... I believe that 6-7 million figure includes ice caps and glaciers already in the water - which would not contribute to sea-level rise if they melted.
So... I'm just sayin... all the hand-wringing about sea-level rise is a bit overblown IMHO. Guess what! The Earth is a dynamic system. It changes over time. Get used to it! Chances are, if this EVER becomes a problem - you and I will have been dead far too long to give a rip about our beach house.
I did a rough calculation for this sort of thing a number of years ago... In fact, I may have even posted it here on /. - but I'm too lazy to search. My recollection is that the volume of water in discussion here - 20 meters of sea-level rise - is patently absurd. There simply isn't that much water on the entire planet that isn't ALREADY at or below sea-level. Consider a simplistic way of calculating the necessary volume of water required:
-Even though the Earth isn't a perfect sphere.. one could consider it so for the purposes of calculating the volume of water required for an AVERAGE of a 20 meter rise in sea-level globally... Therefore...
-Calculate the spherical volume of the globe given the average radius of the Earth at sea-level.
-Do the same with 20 meters added to the radius
-Subtract the first from the latter
-Subtract 30% from this value to account for land-mass not covered by water
-That would get you the approximate MINIMUM volume of water required (if the shore-lines remained in place they are now.. (Imagine walking to the ocean's edge now and a 20 meter wall of water held back by an invisible force field)
-Note: Accounting for additional shore-line inundation would require lots more math and access to elevation data and averages to which I don't have... but keep in mind - to get the same level of sea rise it would require that much MORE water. But if memory serves, draining every drop of surface water on-land (including every lake, river and glacier) wouldn't even come close to the first number. Only 30% of the Earth's surface is above present sea-level... and only a small fraction of that land is covered in any type of standing water (or ice). The oceans are just sooooooooooo very vast... and that's a LOT of surface area to pile an additional 20 meters of water on top of it.
A replica? Uh... That just doesn't make any sense to me. But, then, there are a lot of laws here and there that don't make any sense.
So, does that mean a handgun with, say, the hammer spring removed (or broken) is considered a replica and therefore illegal? Seems like that's one of those laws that would be easy to circumvent and difficult or impossible to enforce.
Huh?
I think you and I may disagree on how one may accurately measure LOWER prices and BETTER outcomes.
An individual in any given European country, for example, where healthcare is totally (or very nearly) socialized may not be out-of-pocket very much for minor or even major medical issues... but it doesn't mean that healthcare costs less to provide. The burden of cost is on the whole society through higher taxes - and the individuals are forced to pay these costs whether they want to or not - indeed whether or not they EVER need healthcare in their entire lives they are still forced to pay.
And 'better outcomes'? I know how that trick works... Socialist medicine country has, say, 95% success rate for some major procedure - an artificial transplant of some kind, for example - whereas in the U.S. it's only 78%... Sounds like a win for socialist medicine, right?... That is until one learns that 38% of the people who needed the procedure under the socialist system died while they were on the waiting list... leaving only the more healthy individuals (more likely to survive the procedure) to be counted in the statistic... rather than everybody being counted in the U.S. because there was no waiting list.
What I said still stands... I don't even need causation for my point to stand. When a government program fails (lower healthcare costs, for example) the liberal answer is always more government... another bigger, more comprehensive program is needed. And when that one fails... the next attempt is even bigger! And on... and on... and on... It's like you've got brain damage or something and can't comprehend that more and more government control over things such as healthcare may actually doing more harm than good!
You obviously do not realize that the REASON medical care is so expensive in the U.S. to begin with is largely because of government interference. The level of government regulation in the healthcare business (and healthcare insurance) nationally has been consistently INCREASING over the past 30 years or so... and it keeps getting more and more expensive. Are you seeing a pattern here?
You liberal retards kill me. Additional government control fails to lower prices... What's your answer? MORE GOVERNMENT!
One will generally not find a "White People are Evil" or "Conservatism Sucks and Liberalism Rocks" entitled as such on the class schedule at most universities... It does not mean it's not in the curriculum. And it is certainly not entirely avoidable.
For example, World Geography 101 my freshman year in college - part of the core curriculum and a general education REQUIREMENT - consisted of less geography and more of the professor pontificating about his Liberal political views... Deprecation of Caucasians in-general, inherent evil of corporations, global warming, etc. etc.
This is a serious problem. It's endemic in virtually all higher education institutions. If you disagree with me, you are simply wrong. So, there. :-)
Good thoughts... Of course one always has to allow for possibilities beyond our current realm of understanding - or even comprehension. That's one reason I, personally, don't accept the idea that 'life' evolved - spontaneously - on this rock. Chance - is not a scientifically workable solution (in my opinion). But its not my intention to start a 'creationist' debate here. :-)
I think you have misinterpreted what my logic assumes.... We have many odd-ball 'types' of life that exist on Earth NOW - not dependent on oxygen, etc, etc. Many species of which have only been discovered recently. IF the theory of evolution is true - in the sense that we humans evolved from primitive life-forms... it follows that such a process takes millions upon millions of years - even billions of years! This requires some level of stability in the system in which it develops over a VERY long time-scale. Presuming the laws of physics are the same throughout the universe (and have been here through the history of the Earth) - life - of ANY type - is dependent on complex forms of chemistry. Afterall, DNA is just a strand of chemicals bound together in a very specific way... There are boundaries (such as temperature) outside of which these complex forms of chemistry break-down and will not work. At all. (That's why boiling water destroys ALL of the run-of-the-mill-type bacteria in it.) Even if one did have a hypothetical planet where life did spontaneously generate itself at some point in time... its chances of evolving into something like a human that consumes all kinds of energy just to stay alive and feed our massively intelligent brains - even if it IS based on something other than a DNA molecule - aren't very good if its host star blows itself up after only a few million years, incinerating the planet in the process... or if it gets swallowed by a black hole... or the magnetic field disappears and the 'life molecules' begin to be blasted apart by solar radiation, etc. etc.
Indeed. I've often found it fascinating when we discover a new piece of the puzzle here on Earth - that of a condition peculiar to our situation - that is absolutely essential to sustain life (or at least intelligent human-type life as we know it). One of the more recent examples that comes to mind is the existence of our moon and its mass ratio to the Earth... stabilizing the progression of Earth's axis. Life could not exist for very long without it. And there are hundreds of conditions like this that are absolutely essential - likely lots more yet to be discovered: Right kind of star, right distance from star, right orbit, proper chemical composition of planet, magnetic field, proximity of solar system to non-life-friendly cosmic events (supernovas, etc),
And when it comes down to calculating the probabilities of all these conditions happening in one place... the numbers become stupid insane big - like 1 chance in greater than the number of sub-atomic particles in the entire universe big. The reason is because of "irreducible complexity"... You see, it doesn't do you any good to have the right type of star if you don't have a planet with the right orbit... and if you DO have the right kind of star with the right kind of orbit, it doesn't do you any good if you don't have a planet with the right kind of magnetic field to protect the atmosphere and life that may be on it... Any life that may exist wouldn't last very long.
Want to see how fast the probabilities decrease? Let's assign some arbitrary (certainly underestimated) numbers:
Chance of having the right kind of star: 1 in 100
Chance of having proper orbit: 1 in 500
Chance of having appropriate chemical compisition of planet: 1 in 1000
Chance of being in the right place in the galaxy: 1 in 5000
100 x 500 = 50,000 x 1000 = 50,000,000 x 5000 = 1 chance in 2.5x10^11
So, you see... with ONLY 4 parameters the chances of having the right conditions to sustain life are very remote. And there are LOTS of parameters to figure into the entire calculation. It is INDEED very much possible - even probable - that our little blue dot is the only place like it in the entire universe.
Are you insane? Didn't you receive that message transmitted from space back in 2010? It plainly said of Europa: "Attempt no landing there!"
Shaka, when the walls fell. :-(
Here here! In Arkansas -most- folks generally get along pretty well. Instances of racism are encountered occasionally... but rarely in my experience (I'm pretty pale-skinned). In any event, although pockets of racism may be found in a wide-spread geographic distribution, one doesn't generally find institutional-type discrimination anymore here in the 'South'... You'll run into an occasional crack-pot (of any color) here or there... but I've personally encountered a seemingly - alarmingly - high incidence of racist white folks up north. Once on a business trip with a black co-worker of mine, we even encountered somebody who, apparently, had never met a black person face-to-face before. So, I'm quite disappointed when I hear people - who likely live in the North - make disparaging remarks of how racist white people in the south are.
It's also important to note - there are many geographic regions here in the South where a white person is the minority... I've been to many of those places in my travels. Some of them are the most welcoming environments I've ever visited... Other places, I'll walk into a gas station, restaurant, or what have you... and all of the black folks just stare at me. So, it goes both ways... Your mileage may vary, however, depending on where you go. :-)
Technology break-though in Urbana, Illinois? That is also where the HAL 9000 was created.
Who are these pompous erudite jerks that think they are so much smarter than me as to dictate my choices in what I drive, how much I should pay for fuel, and enact punitive measures upon me if I choose differently than what they deem proper? I am sick and tired of people like this who look down on us as some flock of sheep that are too stupid to make or do for ourselves. So what a lot of people drive vehicles that don't get the best gas-mileage? Who are you to tell us we don't NEED to? I've got a good reason for driving an SUV... Don't punish me just because lots of people also drive one when you don't think they've got a good reason. GRRRRRRRR!!!!!
Actually, the jury awarded the plaintiff $2.5 million. So, the civil case is over and Crystal L Cox was found guilty of libel. She doesn't have that kind of money to pay, however... and she said she will appeal the decision. I'll bet she doesn't even stop blogging about this guy and she ends up in jail after being found in contempt of court.
Do a google search on Crystal L Cox. I think you'll find she's a bit more 'crazy-person-y' than you realize. She has literally hundreds of blogs/websites bashing just as many people and companies. Her sole purpose is to drive traffic to her sites - which, indeed, she has done.
In a more perfect world than the one in which we live I would tend to agree with you.... However, she is very smart. And knows where the lines are - and which ones not to cross - inasmuch as extortion goes. i.e. Offering to sell the offending domain name to the company or individual rather than outright saying "If you pay me $10,000 I'll stop posting negative blogs about you." And the thing is, what she posts are misrepresentations of the truth... In other words, many of the blog posts are based on actual events - but she twists the facts and draws erroneous conclusions.
And, then, you have to keep in mind... It's a mad woman who pays maybe $6.00 per year to register the domain name vs. a company potentially spending tens of thousands on a court case which is difficult to win at best. The owners of the company for which I worked made the decision to ignore her. Do a google search on Crystal L Cox. Do it! I submit to you if you are a rational individual (which I'm sure you are) you will recognize she is a particularly disturbed human being. And woe unto you if you ever have the misfortune of crossing her path yourself.
formorsucks.com is the domain she registered against my employer... she also registered similar domain names based upon the names of the owners - and even some of the employees! Fortunately, I don't think she knows who I am. Oh, and I'm smart enough to already have myname.com registered.
Well.... not a bad living for sitting around on your butt blogging all day long.
You are presuming that her purposes in blogging are to actually communicate something to the public. It's her business model. She sets up these blogs, gets highly ranked in google and attempts to extort money out of those whom she attacks. Think about it. Sometimes it's worth paying her $5,000 or so to a business to have her turn over the domain name than to pay a lawyer to go after her. If she cons just 1 person/business into doing that per month - that's not a bad living.
I know from personal experience, this particular woman (Crystal Cox) either needs to be locked away - or never allowed to use a computing device attached to the Internet again.... or pay a price so high she will never have the financial means to even buy a computer. What she does is register [a company or person that made me mad]sucks.com... She creates a blog and posts all kinds of nasty things about them. She did it to my former employer - and she's VERY good at getting her blogs up in the google results. She tried to extort money out of them several times! The result is, she (in part) destroyed their business because anybody who did a google search about the company saw that garbage.... It ultimately resulted in me being laid off as their Information Technology Director a few months ago. So.... her irresponsible actions have real-world results.
Kinda makes you wonder if there might be more of our space probes coasting through the cosmos... put up there by a long forgotten civilizations that collapsed.
If you've never done something to cause a kernel panic then you have nothing to brag about. ;-)
All the recent news about the possibility of leaving ISS uninhabited got me to thinking....
Is there a lock on the door? I know it's far-fetched, but assuming someone had the capability - what would keep some 'rouge' entity (nation or otherwise) from launching themselves into orbit, occupying the thing and... well... at worst, de-orbiting it into a population center or at best causing a huge political embarrassment - say, by claiming the thing as their own?