There are very few Shaqs in the general population, so the BMI remains a good statistical indicator. In individual cases, you should always use your brains to decide whether you may be an exception to the guidelines.
When you're talking about inevitable in the long term, exactly what time scale are we talking about ? I'm guessing more than a few million years, because the chance to get hit in the next couple million years is still quite small. When you're talking about millions of years, there's no rush to do anything this century. Let's first worry about peak oil, peak phosphate, superbugs, food supply, water supply, climate change, resource wars, and a dozen other things that will threaten us in the next decades. When we can successfully deal with that, we may be in a better position to deal with asteroids. And if we're in a worse position, any effort you do right now will be wasted anyway.
You'd still need to build the rockets on Earth and launch them to get to the fuel. This means the majority of the rocket mass will still be fuel. Plus, you'll need to bring an empty tank to the refilling station.
Make that 'extremely-low-probability'... if you make a list of all the probable causes of death "being hit by an asteroid" is way down on the list, and it wouldn't warrant spending high amounts of money on.
Exactly, The Cray Y-MP that I was drooling over in 1988 has processors with a 167 MHz clock and 512MB of main memory. Now you can fit a faster CPU in your shirt pocket.
Of course, nothing is ever sure in science so the qualification is usually implied. People say all the time things like: if you drop that vase it will break, and don't bother to qualify it with the obligatory "assuming that gravity will still work the way we've observed it doing before". Slashdot is an informal medium, so you're supposed to read between the lines.
None of this, however, takes anything away from my original point that it is impossible that humans have been put on this planet, unless these same aliens also put all our 'siblings' on this planet that have a significantly similar cellular structure.
Even though only the fittest (or 'fit enough') survive, the mutations are random. So, there's no goal or progress. Different individuals have different complexity. Imagine that you introduce a complexity scale, where 0 means the simplest possible, and higher numbers mean increasingly complex individuals/species.
Now, when evolution first started, complexity was very near 0, because the first life forms had to have happened by chance, and only simple things can happen by chance. As these organisms start to multiply, and populate the earth, it's very likely that some of the more complex ones produce even more complex offspring, so the upper bound on complexity keeps growing. The lower bound is fixed at zero.
All lifeforms use DNA and protein synthesis using almost identical mechanisms. It is extremely unlikely that these mechanisms evolved in parallel, so they must have shared a common ancestor.
Of course, as soon as you introduce the concept of a deity guiding the universe in any way, you have an incompatibility. And without guiding, the whole point of the existence of a creator is pointless.
Evolution doesn't progress from simple to complex, but it just spreads in random directions. However, if you start really simple (by necessity) then it is very likely that you'll see increased complexity over time.
Slashdot Mirror
For starters, he's an Apple user...
any fuel that is spent beyond Earth orbit doesn't need to be launched from Earth
Very few rockets need to go beyond Earth orbit. Except for some research on other planets, there's nothing out there.
Obviously this poses a problem for vertically staged rocket designs, but not others
Are there other types in use ?
There are very few Shaqs in the general population, so the BMI remains a good statistical indicator. In individual cases, you should always use your brains to decide whether you may be an exception to the guidelines.
When you're talking about inevitable in the long term, exactly what time scale are we talking about ? I'm guessing more than a few million years, because the chance to get hit in the next couple million years is still quite small. When you're talking about millions of years, there's no rush to do anything this century. Let's first worry about peak oil, peak phosphate, superbugs, food supply, water supply, climate change, resource wars, and a dozen other things that will threaten us in the next decades. When we can successfully deal with that, we may be in a better position to deal with asteroids. And if we're in a worse position, any effort you do right now will be wasted anyway.
Poor people could even save more by eating less. The money saved could be used to buy some vegetables.
You'd still need to build the rockets on Earth and launch them to get to the fuel. This means the majority of the rocket mass will still be fuel. Plus, you'll need to bring an empty tank to the refilling station.
Make that 'extremely-low-probability'... if you make a list of all the probable causes of death "being hit by an asteroid" is way down on the list, and it wouldn't warrant spending high amounts of money on.
Why not let fully automated mining machines dig deeper here on Earth ? At least when they break, it's cheap to send a mechanic.
Before they can put ads in the stream, they would need to prevent random skipping. And not being able to skip randomly would make the videos unusable.
Just like Lord Voldemort.
Imagine the world as a minecraft game. It's possible to make a map before you start the game engine.
Large swaths are covered with desserts
That's actually a good indication of divine creation if that were the case.
Youtube works fine. Maybe your ISP doesn't.
Single celled organisms are even quite a step up from the very beginnings. Self replicating molecules is where he should look first.
You can use a real cloud to see if it's going to rain.
The fact that the weather is weird and different than what you're used to doesn't mean it isn't predictable for the next couple of days.
Nature uses a grid based algorithm to run the weather, so it shouldn't be a surprise that it works.
A NOP on the 6502 takes two cycles, so it was only half a million.
Exactly, The Cray Y-MP that I was drooling over in 1988 has processors with a 167 MHz clock and 512MB of main memory. Now you can fit a faster CPU in your shirt pocket.
Of course, nothing is ever sure in science so the qualification is usually implied. People say all the time things like: if you drop that vase it will break, and don't bother to qualify it with the obligatory "assuming that gravity will still work the way we've observed it doing before". Slashdot is an informal medium, so you're supposed to read between the lines. None of this, however, takes anything away from my original point that it is impossible that humans have been put on this planet, unless these same aliens also put all our 'siblings' on this planet that have a significantly similar cellular structure.
Even though only the fittest (or 'fit enough') survive, the mutations are random. So, there's no goal or progress. Different individuals have different complexity. Imagine that you introduce a complexity scale, where 0 means the simplest possible, and higher numbers mean increasingly complex individuals/species. Now, when evolution first started, complexity was very near 0, because the first life forms had to have happened by chance, and only simple things can happen by chance. As these organisms start to multiply, and populate the earth, it's very likely that some of the more complex ones produce even more complex offspring, so the upper bound on complexity keeps growing. The lower bound is fixed at zero.
All lifeforms use DNA and protein synthesis using almost identical mechanisms. It is extremely unlikely that these mechanisms evolved in parallel, so they must have shared a common ancestor.
Of course, as soon as you introduce the concept of a deity guiding the universe in any way, you have an incompatibility. And without guiding, the whole point of the existence of a creator is pointless.
Evolution doesn't progress from simple to complex, but it just spreads in random directions. However, if you start really simple (by necessity) then it is very likely that you'll see increased complexity over time.
might well have been a spaceship from another planet or solar system, colonializing earth with humans and various animal species.
Unless they populated Earth with every single lifeform, that wouldn't be possible, since all lifeforms have a single family tree.