Why does the concept of another category, dwarfs, enrage people?
I don't think it does but for the definition to work it will have to have some sort of sensible criteria to separate them from asteroids. However clearly the notion that Pluto is not a planet really upsets a lot of people which is something I find hard to understand. Does it really matter that much how we classify it? Indeed it seems such a silly, unimportant thing to be arguing over again when there is real science to be done that it makes me wonder if the astronomers involved have lost their grant funding and so have nothing better to do with their research time.
No, they won't. They will believe based on observations and known history.
Actually if we program that information into their memory before turning them on then they will actually know who created them. That's one difference with computers - they can be easily programmed.
not everyone has the money to pay the teachers. Nor are there enough people educated to be teachers.
True enough but in that case how are they going to have the money to buy computers and have people educated enough to be able to support them and keep them running? Not to mention the electrical power to run them let alone a network connection. It seems to me that if they have what they need to purchase and keep running all these computers they probably have what they need to teach basic literacy and arithmetic without computers.
I look at the sky every night, knowing the light is hundreds of years old. Half of the stars might have gone supernova already.
The life cycle of even the largest stars is still in the 10-100 million year range. The chance that one of them has exploded in the last few hundred years is tiny. Galaxy-wide we expect one supernova roughly every century so, unless you get really lucky, practically every star you can see with the naked eye has an extremely good chance of still being there...even Betelgeuse which they estimate has a 100k year lifespan remaining and is only 600 light years away. Of course if you had RTFA you would have known most of this...hope you appreciate the irony!
Firstly I don't think you read my post correctly. Secondly while that may be true for us physicists I doubt the average biologist can explain from first principles how GPS works and the corrections that are needed (since this involves GR) but I bet they have a very good idea about its position accuracy. You need to know how the apparatus works and performs but that does not mean that you need to know every detail from the level of fundamental physics and upwards.
He argues about climate denial, and resorts to insults attempting to make the point. Antagonizing people is probably the worst method of teaching them.
Yes but he is at least honest about that: he is one of America's foremost science educators and he grades America's science education as an 'F' so exactly how good a teacher did you think he was going to be?
An astronomer might know a little about the optics inside his/her telescope, but the level of understanding that a physicist would have is simply not in scope.
Actually I would expect an astronomer to have a level of understanding of the optics in their telescope comparable to that of a physicist's understanding of their own experimental apparatus. If you don't understand the apparatus you use to collect the data then that data is useless because you won't know whether some interesting feature of the data is due to some new phenomena never before observed or because you forgot to plug in your GPS cable properly.
Maybe, it's more than just laws about how easy or hard it is to get a firearm?
Undoubtedly it is - historically neither the US nor Europe had strict gun control laws and neither appeared to need them. However given that both now have a problem with violence in society it is undoubtedly the case that gun control limits the damage of that violence. Having strict gun control laws in one region is useless: it is trivially easy to go outside that region, purchase what you want, and return with it with almost zero chance of being caught. It's like a "dry country": everyone there just drives a few kilometres to the county next door to purchase alcohol.
Restrictions on items only work when you implement them throughout a region where there is some border control e.g. at the national level. Once you have this there is a reasonable chance of being caught and/or the expense to avoid detection limits the number of criminal enterprises who can get around the law and so limits supply.
How about removing that rule as a first step? 'Gun free zones' are instant targets.
You might possibly have had a point if we were considering an armed robbery of the mall, although the fact that countries with strict gun control laws have murder rates that are a tiny fraction of the US suggests that the downsides far, far outweigh any small benefit.
However I really don't understand how a civilian armed with a gun will stop a terrorist bomb. Having armed civilians wandering around a shopping mall shooting anyone with a backpack, bag or briefcase who looks "suspicious" frankly sounds like a far more terrifying prospect than a terrorist with a bomb and one likely to result in far more deaths. What we need is a plan to stop them from causing "terror", not one where you do it for them
Anyway I don't know why a parent should not be a good parent if he looks for extra means of protecting his children, other than what you can do every day.
What is being asked for is not a form of protection but a dangerous abdication of responsibility. Indeed we've known it is bad for so long that we actually have a fairytale we read to our children which cautions against it. Remember the tale of sleeping beauty who was to prick her finger on a spinning wheel before falling asleep and so the king banished all spinning wheels from the kingdom. Since it was impossible to completely enforce the blockade the result was that when she saw a spinning wheel she was so curious abut it she ended pricking her finger.
The same applies to the internet: you cannot block everything. Instead you can just use the same approach that you use for everything else in life: set out the rules, supervise them so you have a reasonable chance of noticing any serious violations (if your kids are human there will be violations and you will not catch all of them), make sure there are consequences for those serious violations you do catch and finally teach them how to deal with any inappropriate content which they do manage to see.
Nobody suggests that we should combine HHGTTG and Google Glass to make glasses for kids that will turn black and the first sign of anything deemed inappropriate occurring in real life. Indeed we set up rules for our kids to help avoid such situations and we make sure that our kids know how to handle such situations if they do occur (e.g. say no to strangers, don't do drugs etc.). So why don't we take the same approach to parenting with the internet?
The gluino plays a similar naturalness role as the stop, at 2-loop level.
Do you have a paper to back that up? It seems very surprising that a 2-loop level effect would have the same constraints as something at the tree level.
Just beyond the limits is not an arbitrary choice. Given our current limits already, naturalness points to these masses being as low as possible.
Not quite. Given our current understanding it would appear more natural to have SUSY at a lower mass scale but if we find SUSY at 10TeV all that means is that SUSY is perhaps less natural than it could have been. It's like tossing a coin: how many heads in a row do you need to get before you conclude that the coin is weighted? You can draw an arbitrary line in the sand and say '5 sigma' but it is just that an arbitrary line in the sand. With SUSY we have the same problem: you can put an arbitrary line on the energy scale and say "above X TeV it is unnatural" but it is just that: an arbitrary line. You might be happier if SUSY existed at a lower energy scale (I would be too!) but the universe is not there just to make us happy.
Therefore I prefer to look at it experimentally, i.e. wrt our current limits. If the gluino and stop are just beyond our current limits, then, according to my previous posts (which apparenntly completely missed the point...) the gluino will jump in our face
How is making an arbitrary choice that stop and gluino are both just beyond the current limits "looking at it experimentally"? What's to prevent stop being just beyond our detection range with the gluino being far above it? The argument for a light stop is that the top has a large correction to the Higgs mass due to its strong coupling: I'm not aware of any such argument for the gluon since it is massless. Natural SUSY does not place any hard limits on the upper bounds: things just get less natural as the masses increase but there is no line in the sand where the models cease to be natural. You could perhaps argue that it is unnatural by the time you get to ~10TeV or higher without SUSY but, as you say, it is purely subjective and not at all 'experimental'.
Each second we can see another 186 thousand miles, revealing new 'observable universe'.
Actually that is not quite true. The size of the universe that we can see is actually shrinking. This very counterintuitive result is due to the fact that the universe's expansion is accelerating due to Dark Energy. Hence a distant point in space that is currently moving away from us very close to the speed of light today due to the expansion of space will actually be moving away from us faster than the speed of light tomorrow and so will become causally disconnected from us. So with time our horizon will shrink.
In the very distant future the horizon may shrink to the subatomic level and eventually arrive at the planck length itself at which point nobody has a clue as to what will happen since it needs quantum gravity to understand. This is the so-called "Big Rip" end to the universe.
There is no reason or evidence to suggest that the universe operates in any way that correlates directly to our mathematics
Actually there is a lot of evidence that the universe operates in a way that correlates directly with mathematics. Using our mathematical models of fundamental physics we used them to predict the existence of a new particle, the Higgs boson, to solve the flaws in the model. Similarly the same principle applied to the discovery of quarks and the W and Z bosons before.
The fact that we can use mathematical models of the fundamental nature of the universe so incredibly successfully to predict new fundamental phenomena that we have never seen before is clear evidence that the universe does work in a manner that correlates with our mathematics. Indeed I would say that this is one of the truly remarkable things about the fundamental nature of the universe: we can construct mathematical models of it which agree perfectly within our, admittedly limited, ability to test them.
You are completely missing the point. Consider two scenarios: (a) a 1.25 TeV gluino and a 1 TeV stop and (b) a 5 TeV gluino and a 750 GeV stop. Which of these two possible SUSY models is more likely? (a) or (b)? If the answer is (as I suspect) that they are both roughly equally likely then you are just as likely to see the stop quark first as you are to see a gluino first: in (a) you see the gluino and in (b) you see the stop first.
If you want to say that seeing a gluino is more likely then you have to be able to say that models like (a) are more likely than models like (b). For example we do have theory to support that the stop is probably the lightest of the squarks. Without a prediction of the mass of a gluino relative to the squark masses you have no real basis to say that you will see a gluino first because you no idea what the gluino mass is relative to the stop mass. About the only argument you might make is that there is marginally more available phase space for the stop mass because the current limit is below the gluino mass limit but given that the upper bounds are not well constrained this is not much of an argument.
But it will come again a little later than the gluino.
All these arguments are reasons why it is easier to see stops than gluinos which I'm already aware of. However what you are also assuming here is that the gluino mass is comparable to the squark masses. Is there any justification for that because I've not seen it e.g. if the gluino mass is 3 times that of the squarks it will not be seen first.
Unless there is an argument to say why this is disfavoured you are drawing unwarranted conclusions based on detector sensitivities. It doesn't matter how much more sensitive we are in ATLAS to gluinos or how much faster we can do the analysis if we can't produce any gluinos to detect because their mass is too high.
I'm sorry, but the rest are either stacked with incredible/'winning-powerball-jackpot-two-times-in-a-row' level odds (e.g. asteroid strike)
Actually the odds of you being alive for an extinction level event, while low, are far higher that. The odds of winning the UK national lottery are about one in 14 million. The average life expectancy of a human is ~80 years in the western world so if the rate of extinction-level events only has to be one every ~1.1 billion years for the annual probability of one to mean that there is a higher chance of you being alive when one happens than there is of you winning the lottery.
If you look at the frequency of all mass extinction events given here then you can see that the rate is far higher than that. Unfortunately we don't really know for certain how many, if any, of these were caused by asteroid impacts or massive volcanic eruptions but the rate of these natural extinction events is clearly far higher than one every billion years. Hence the data suggest that you are probably many times more likely to be alive when a natural mass extinction event happens than you are to win the lottery even once, let alone twice.
...and what about squarks? These are strongly coupled and there are some arguments to suggest that the stop squark is most likely to have the lowest mass.
The centre of mass energy is actually going from 8 to 13 TeV so it is not a doubling of the energy. However we are increasing the luminosity (number of protons in the beam) too so we will probably have at least twice the reach in energy that we did before. While the article makes it sound like something new looking for Supersymmetry (SUSY) is something we have been searching for since the start of the LHC.
SUSY is the leading candidate theory to explain why the higgs is so much lower in energy that the energy scale at which gravity becomes important: the Planck scale. While there are good arguments to suppose that SUSY is within range of the LHC energy I would put about as much store in a prediction of which SUSY particle will be discovered first as I would in a 14 day weather forecast: there is some science that goes into it but there are so many unknowns that the prediction is likely to be junk. Worse, while we can be pretty certain that there will be some sort of weather in 14 days there is no guarantee that there is a lightest SUSY particle: SUSY might not exist in nature although this itself would raise some interesting questions.
Why do we have to choose between capitalism and socialism? Both have their benefits and both have their problems but they are NOT mutually exclusive. Most countries used to have a progressive tax system with high rates of tax on high earners. CEOs and the like still made more money than the rest of us and did well for themselves but the higher taxes these people paid helped provide common services that we all used e.g. healthcare, transport infrastructure, free university education etc.
This system put both socialism and capitalism in balance. You have the freedom to use your (free) education to go an make money and will directly benefit yourself from doing that but society also benefits and uses the higher taxes you pay to educate the workers you employ, provide the infrastructure to transport the goods you make etc. The trick is to make sure that the high tax payers also benefit from how the taxes are spent even if they don't necessarily benefit as much.
Yes, but engineering research is not scientific research. Figuring out how to build a vertical take-off jet fighter is engineering research: the science behind it is already understood. The same applies to rail guns: it's engineering problems they are trying to solve, not a scientific ones.
And all we have is written human documentation of your "extinction level event".
No - we have ample evidence in the geological record: mass extinctions where a huge fraction of species die off e.g. the Permian mass extinction which makes the end of the dinosaurs seem positively tame. More than that we have plausible mechanisms to cause such events: meteorite impact, massive volcanic eruptions and catastrophic (but natural) climate change and there is evidence to support the fact that all of these have occurred in Earth's past. Indeed I'm surprised that you believe in evolution if you have trouble believing in these mass extinction events.
Space is dead, it's over, finished.... Fundamental science shows this.
No, fundamental science does not show this. We do not need magic to reach e.g. Mars and indeed we have already sent probes there: no magic needed. Yes space is hard, far harder than boats, but so is flying: many people predicted we would never do that as well. It took us thousands of years to develop boats capable of traversing oceans. We already have mass transit systems - aeroplanes - which transport us for short periods through a medium where life is not possible.
Stephen Hawking may know his astrophysics, but that's all he's qualified for. A simple error of appeal to authority.
It was not an error: appealing to reason was not working for you so authority was another route to try. Indeed if you actually stopped trolling for a second and read the article you linked you'll notice that the author, a physicist like myself, does not dismiss space as 'dead' and 'finished' only that it will be hard, a lot harder than most of the public think and not a solution to our immediate problems but that eventually we'll probably be out there although perhaps in thousands, rather than hundreds, of years. I'd agree.
You seriously think we spend more figuring out how to cure people than how to kill them?
You seriously think much military money goes into scientific research rather than engineering and building bigger/faster/better guns, bombs, planes etc.
Slashdot Mirror
My reaction was why Civ 5? Given the quality of the AIs in it I'm not sure 'intelligence' is really an apt description.
Why does the concept of another category, dwarfs, enrage people?
I don't think it does but for the definition to work it will have to have some sort of sensible criteria to separate them from asteroids. However clearly the notion that Pluto is not a planet really upsets a lot of people which is something I find hard to understand. Does it really matter that much how we classify it? Indeed it seems such a silly, unimportant thing to be arguing over again when there is real science to be done that it makes me wonder if the astronomers involved have lost their grant funding and so have nothing better to do with their research time.
No, they won't. They will believe based on observations and known history.
Actually if we program that information into their memory before turning them on then they will actually know who created them. That's one difference with computers - they can be easily programmed.
not everyone has the money to pay the teachers. Nor are there enough people educated to be teachers.
True enough but in that case how are they going to have the money to buy computers and have people educated enough to be able to support them and keep them running? Not to mention the electrical power to run them let alone a network connection. It seems to me that if they have what they need to purchase and keep running all these computers they probably have what they need to teach basic literacy and arithmetic without computers.
I look at the sky every night, knowing the light is hundreds of years old. Half of the stars might have gone supernova already.
The life cycle of even the largest stars is still in the 10-100 million year range. The chance that one of them has exploded in the last few hundred years is tiny. Galaxy-wide we expect one supernova roughly every century so, unless you get really lucky, practically every star you can see with the naked eye has an extremely good chance of still being there...even Betelgeuse which they estimate has a 100k year lifespan remaining and is only 600 light years away. Of course if you had RTFA you would have known most of this...hope you appreciate the irony!
Firstly I don't think you read my post correctly. Secondly while that may be true for us physicists I doubt the average biologist can explain from first principles how GPS works and the corrections that are needed (since this involves GR) but I bet they have a very good idea about its position accuracy. You need to know how the apparatus works and performs but that does not mean that you need to know every detail from the level of fundamental physics and upwards.
He argues about climate denial, and resorts to insults attempting to make the point. Antagonizing people is probably the worst method of teaching them.
Yes but he is at least honest about that: he is one of America's foremost science educators and he grades America's science education as an 'F' so exactly how good a teacher did you think he was going to be?
An astronomer might know a little about the optics inside his/her telescope, but the level of understanding that a physicist would have is simply not in scope.
Actually I would expect an astronomer to have a level of understanding of the optics in their telescope comparable to that of a physicist's understanding of their own experimental apparatus. If you don't understand the apparatus you use to collect the data then that data is useless because you won't know whether some interesting feature of the data is due to some new phenomena never before observed or because you forgot to plug in your GPS cable properly.
Sorry that should obviously be "dry county"!
Maybe, it's more than just laws about how easy or hard it is to get a firearm?
Undoubtedly it is - historically neither the US nor Europe had strict gun control laws and neither appeared to need them. However given that both now have a problem with violence in society it is undoubtedly the case that gun control limits the damage of that violence. Having strict gun control laws in one region is useless: it is trivially easy to go outside that region, purchase what you want, and return with it with almost zero chance of being caught. It's like a "dry country": everyone there just drives a few kilometres to the county next door to purchase alcohol.
Restrictions on items only work when you implement them throughout a region where there is some border control e.g. at the national level. Once you have this there is a reasonable chance of being caught and/or the expense to avoid detection limits the number of criminal enterprises who can get around the law and so limits supply.
How about removing that rule as a first step? 'Gun free zones' are instant targets.
You might possibly have had a point if we were considering an armed robbery of the mall, although the fact that countries with strict gun control laws have murder rates that are a tiny fraction of the US suggests that the downsides far, far outweigh any small benefit.
However I really don't understand how a civilian armed with a gun will stop a terrorist bomb. Having armed civilians wandering around a shopping mall shooting anyone with a backpack, bag or briefcase who looks "suspicious" frankly sounds like a far more terrifying prospect than a terrorist with a bomb and one likely to result in far more deaths. What we need is a plan to stop them from causing "terror", not one where you do it for them
Anyway I don't know why a parent should not be a good parent if he looks for extra means of protecting his children, other than what you can do every day.
What is being asked for is not a form of protection but a dangerous abdication of responsibility. Indeed we've known it is bad for so long that we actually have a fairytale we read to our children which cautions against it. Remember the tale of sleeping beauty who was to prick her finger on a spinning wheel before falling asleep and so the king banished all spinning wheels from the kingdom. Since it was impossible to completely enforce the blockade the result was that when she saw a spinning wheel she was so curious abut it she ended pricking her finger.
The same applies to the internet: you cannot block everything. Instead you can just use the same approach that you use for everything else in life: set out the rules, supervise them so you have a reasonable chance of noticing any serious violations (if your kids are human there will be violations and you will not catch all of them), make sure there are consequences for those serious violations you do catch and finally teach them how to deal with any inappropriate content which they do manage to see.
Nobody suggests that we should combine HHGTTG and Google Glass to make glasses for kids that will turn black and the first sign of anything deemed inappropriate occurring in real life. Indeed we set up rules for our kids to help avoid such situations and we make sure that our kids know how to handle such situations if they do occur (e.g. say no to strangers, don't do drugs etc.). So why don't we take the same approach to parenting with the internet?
The gluino plays a similar naturalness role as the stop, at 2-loop level.
Do you have a paper to back that up? It seems very surprising that a 2-loop level effect would have the same constraints as something at the tree level.
Just beyond the limits is not an arbitrary choice. Given our current limits already, naturalness points to these masses being as low as possible.
Not quite. Given our current understanding it would appear more natural to have SUSY at a lower mass scale but if we find SUSY at 10TeV all that means is that SUSY is perhaps less natural than it could have been. It's like tossing a coin: how many heads in a row do you need to get before you conclude that the coin is weighted? You can draw an arbitrary line in the sand and say '5 sigma' but it is just that an arbitrary line in the sand. With SUSY we have the same problem: you can put an arbitrary line on the energy scale and say "above X TeV it is unnatural" but it is just that: an arbitrary line. You might be happier if SUSY existed at a lower energy scale (I would be too!) but the universe is not there just to make us happy.
Therefore I prefer to look at it experimentally, i.e. wrt our current limits. If the gluino and stop are just beyond our current limits, then, according to my previous posts (which apparenntly completely missed the point...) the gluino will jump in our face
How is making an arbitrary choice that stop and gluino are both just beyond the current limits "looking at it experimentally"? What's to prevent stop being just beyond our detection range with the gluino being far above it? The argument for a light stop is that the top has a large correction to the Higgs mass due to its strong coupling: I'm not aware of any such argument for the gluon since it is massless. Natural SUSY does not place any hard limits on the upper bounds: things just get less natural as the masses increase but there is no line in the sand where the models cease to be natural. You could perhaps argue that it is unnatural by the time you get to ~10TeV or higher without SUSY but, as you say, it is purely subjective and not at all 'experimental'.
Each second we can see another 186 thousand miles, revealing new 'observable universe'.
Actually that is not quite true. The size of the universe that we can see is actually shrinking. This very counterintuitive result is due to the fact that the universe's expansion is accelerating due to Dark Energy. Hence a distant point in space that is currently moving away from us very close to the speed of light today due to the expansion of space will actually be moving away from us faster than the speed of light tomorrow and so will become causally disconnected from us. So with time our horizon will shrink.
In the very distant future the horizon may shrink to the subatomic level and eventually arrive at the planck length itself at which point nobody has a clue as to what will happen since it needs quantum gravity to understand. This is the so-called "Big Rip" end to the universe.
There is no reason or evidence to suggest that the universe operates in any way that correlates directly to our mathematics
Actually there is a lot of evidence that the universe operates in a way that correlates directly with mathematics. Using our mathematical models of fundamental physics we used them to predict the existence of a new particle, the Higgs boson, to solve the flaws in the model. Similarly the same principle applied to the discovery of quarks and the W and Z bosons before.
The fact that we can use mathematical models of the fundamental nature of the universe so incredibly successfully to predict new fundamental phenomena that we have never seen before is clear evidence that the universe does work in a manner that correlates with our mathematics. Indeed I would say that this is one of the truly remarkable things about the fundamental nature of the universe: we can construct mathematical models of it which agree perfectly within our, admittedly limited, ability to test them.
You are completely missing the point. Consider two scenarios: (a) a 1.25 TeV gluino and a 1 TeV stop and (b) a 5 TeV gluino and a 750 GeV stop. Which of these two possible SUSY models is more likely? (a) or (b)? If the answer is (as I suspect) that they are both roughly equally likely then you are just as likely to see the stop quark first as you are to see a gluino first: in (a) you see the gluino and in (b) you see the stop first.
If you want to say that seeing a gluino is more likely then you have to be able to say that models like (a) are more likely than models like (b). For example we do have theory to support that the stop is probably the lightest of the squarks. Without a prediction of the mass of a gluino relative to the squark masses you have no real basis to say that you will see a gluino first because you no idea what the gluino mass is relative to the stop mass. About the only argument you might make is that there is marginally more available phase space for the stop mass because the current limit is below the gluino mass limit but given that the upper bounds are not well constrained this is not much of an argument.
But it will come again a little later than the gluino.
All these arguments are reasons why it is easier to see stops than gluinos which I'm already aware of. However what you are also assuming here is that the gluino mass is comparable to the squark masses. Is there any justification for that because I've not seen it e.g. if the gluino mass is 3 times that of the squarks it will not be seen first.
Unless there is an argument to say why this is disfavoured you are drawing unwarranted conclusions based on detector sensitivities. It doesn't matter how much more sensitive we are in ATLAS to gluinos or how much faster we can do the analysis if we can't produce any gluinos to detect because their mass is too high.
I'm sorry, but the rest are either stacked with incredible/'winning-powerball-jackpot-two-times-in-a-row' level odds (e.g. asteroid strike)
Actually the odds of you being alive for an extinction level event, while low, are far higher that. The odds of winning the UK national lottery are about one in 14 million. The average life expectancy of a human is ~80 years in the western world so if the rate of extinction-level events only has to be one every ~1.1 billion years for the annual probability of one to mean that there is a higher chance of you being alive when one happens than there is of you winning the lottery.
If you look at the frequency of all mass extinction events given here then you can see that the rate is far higher than that. Unfortunately we don't really know for certain how many, if any, of these were caused by asteroid impacts or massive volcanic eruptions but the rate of these natural extinction events is clearly far higher than one every billion years. Hence the data suggest that you are probably many times more likely to be alive when a natural mass extinction event happens than you are to win the lottery even once, let alone twice.
...and what about squarks? These are strongly coupled and there are some arguments to suggest that the stop squark is most likely to have the lowest mass.
The centre of mass energy is actually going from 8 to 13 TeV so it is not a doubling of the energy. However we are increasing the luminosity (number of protons in the beam) too so we will probably have at least twice the reach in energy that we did before. While the article makes it sound like something new looking for Supersymmetry (SUSY) is something we have been searching for since the start of the LHC.
SUSY is the leading candidate theory to explain why the higgs is so much lower in energy that the energy scale at which gravity becomes important: the Planck scale. While there are good arguments to suppose that SUSY is within range of the LHC energy I would put about as much store in a prediction of which SUSY particle will be discovered first as I would in a 14 day weather forecast: there is some science that goes into it but there are so many unknowns that the prediction is likely to be junk. Worse, while we can be pretty certain that there will be some sort of weather in 14 days there is no guarantee that there is a lightest SUSY particle: SUSY might not exist in nature although this itself would raise some interesting questions.
Why do we have to choose between capitalism and socialism? Both have their benefits and both have their problems but they are NOT mutually exclusive. Most countries used to have a progressive tax system with high rates of tax on high earners. CEOs and the like still made more money than the rest of us and did well for themselves but the higher taxes these people paid helped provide common services that we all used e.g. healthcare, transport infrastructure, free university education etc.
This system put both socialism and capitalism in balance. You have the freedom to use your (free) education to go an make money and will directly benefit yourself from doing that but society also benefits and uses the higher taxes you pay to educate the workers you employ, provide the infrastructure to transport the goods you make etc. The trick is to make sure that the high tax payers also benefit from how the taxes are spent even if they don't necessarily benefit as much.
Yes, but engineering research is not scientific research. Figuring out how to build a vertical take-off jet fighter is engineering research: the science behind it is already understood. The same applies to rail guns: it's engineering problems they are trying to solve, not a scientific ones.
And all we have is written human documentation of your "extinction level event".
No - we have ample evidence in the geological record: mass extinctions where a huge fraction of species die off e.g. the Permian mass extinction which makes the end of the dinosaurs seem positively tame. More than that we have plausible mechanisms to cause such events: meteorite impact, massive volcanic eruptions and catastrophic (but natural) climate change and there is evidence to support the fact that all of these have occurred in Earth's past. Indeed I'm surprised that you believe in evolution if you have trouble believing in these mass extinction events.
Space is dead, it's over, finished. ... Fundamental science shows this.
No, fundamental science does not show this. We do not need magic to reach e.g. Mars and indeed we have already sent probes there: no magic needed. Yes space is hard, far harder than boats, but so is flying: many people predicted we would never do that as well. It took us thousands of years to develop boats capable of traversing oceans. We already have mass transit systems - aeroplanes - which transport us for short periods through a medium where life is not possible.
Stephen Hawking may know his astrophysics, but that's all he's qualified for. A simple error of appeal to authority.
It was not an error: appealing to reason was not working for you so authority was another route to try. Indeed if you actually stopped trolling for a second and read the article you linked you'll notice that the author, a physicist like myself, does not dismiss space as 'dead' and 'finished' only that it will be hard, a lot harder than most of the public think and not a solution to our immediate problems but that eventually we'll probably be out there although perhaps in thousands, rather than hundreds, of years. I'd agree.
You seriously think we spend more figuring out how to cure people than how to kill them?
You seriously think much military money goes into scientific research rather than engineering and building bigger/faster/better guns, bombs, planes etc.