Mr. H. is passe. That's not precisely how the next threat will manifest. The world is too networked for that. I don't have time to read my 1,000 pages for Citations Needed, but basically Mr. H. got as far as he did because of the specific places he was in geography-time.
And that's how you can fail to degodwinize a thread. Hilter was lucky to get where he did, but it wasn't so much a matter of luck that a Hitler rose to power. For example, the German military, almost immediately started violating the terms of the Treaty of Versailles to the point where they apparently were killing people who knew too much of the Treaty violations in the 1920s. As it turned out, one of the leaders who supervised the German military's black ops stuff, a General Kurt von Schleicher, later became the chancellor of Germany prior to the appointment of Adolf Hitler.
Prior to Schleicher, there was Chancellor Franz von Papen whose most notable act of the period was to overthrow the state government of Prussia (one of the bigger obstacles to ending the Weimar Republic). In other words, there were a number of potential Hitlers out there, two which preceded Hitler in the very job by which he took over. The actual Hitler was relatively dangerous, but he was far from unique.
Now, we might see another Charismatic Dangerous Leader, yes. But you can't go just marching along, not today. So the next Bad Guy will be more of a Loose Cannon that needs to be talked down Game Theory style, with VERY clever diplomacy.
Hitler could have been dealt with that very way and he took a great number of risks that could have ended his reign before the Second World War started. For example, the remilitarization of the Rhine in 1936 provided a great opportunity for France and the UK to take him down. The weakness of his primary opponents was just as important as Hitler's qualities.
The answer is don't make helium for sale to party stores.
An alternate solution is simply to let the US surplus run out. Party stores will stop using helium when the price goes up enough.
But it's ridiculous that helium - an inordinately valuable resource at the moment - is just being sold off for parties because the US strategic reserve of the stuff is being dumped onto the market by Congress.
Here's the real problem.
We all benefit from it being cheap, but only if it's used responsibly.
No, we don't. So-called "irresponsible uses" happen precisely because it is cheap. Don't make it cheap and you won't be sending price signals that it is ok to use it frivolously, whatever that may be.
There's no pressing need for lighter-then-air gases to be a feature at parties at all.
Concentration is a better indication of difficulty than boiling point. After all, almost nothing has a boiling point anywhere near helium except neon and hydrogen. So one doesn't have to cool to the boiling point of helium to eliminate almost everything else.
Rockstrom et al estimate global water use is already over the 4,300 km3 estimated global replenishment rate. If only 600 GT of additional carbon are sequestered in biomass (including forests, algae and other biofuels and so on) there will not be enough water for agriculture even using intensive means because of the water sequestered with the carbon.
So what you're saying is that we should take at least two years instead of just one to sequester that much carbon. Keep in mind that the replenishment rate is a rate and 600 GT is a fixed amount. All that is being said is that one can't rush, Manhattan Project-style, carbon sequestration without extracting fresh water from the over 1 billion km3 of sea water that currently exists on Earth.
You also got that figured out without having to evolve first. Recall that the original poster, TapeCutter claims:
In other words, over the next century the adaptation humans will be forced to make as a species will be to aquire the gene that stops them from in their own nest.
My counter is that we've already had all of the genes we need. The problem rather is that the issue isn't as great as TapeCutter claims.
If the EU charges a fixed fraction of Google's global revenue per infraction, including a lot of revenue that's not part of the EU, then why should they get to keep all of it? Instead, this sounds like a protectionist scheme. The fee relative to the amount of business in the EU is much less for a company that does most or all of its business in the EU relative to a foreign company that does a small part in the EU.
For example, suppose I have two businesses each doing a billion euros of business. One is solely in the EU and the other does only ten per cent of its business in the EU. A fine scheme like the above has them paying the same fine for the same crime despite one business having far more business in the EU than the other. That means that the foreign business faces the same risk of fines on a tenth of the business that the other business has.
It's yet another way to block foreign businesses without (as of yet) provoking a response from the WTO or other treaties.
Bush was about putting a useless son on a throne when the Republican party had so many better choices.
Except that the Republican party doesn't choose presidents. The US populace via the Electoral College does that. And a "useless son" got elected twice meaning a lot of people disagreed with you on that matter.
Of course I'm wasting my time here since the North Korea example provided above by grcrumb should have been enough for anybody that was actually paying attention.
Except that North Korea isn't a republic in any sense of the definition. Any claim that they are a republic in any sense of the word is just a lie.
I don't know why you're holding on to this argument or what point you're trying to make. But it strikes me that you aren't getting anything out.
Given how many of the technologies require advances in parallel fields (like computing), the balance of your post is just wishful thinking.
I have to agree with the other replier. What Earth-side technologies are you referring to? For example, we've already demonstrated that we can navigate the Solar System on the computing power of the 60s (Apollo program and the Pioneer spacecraft). Chemical rocket engines already operate near optimal efficiencies. We've already demonstrated that we can launch and assemble complex structures in orbit.
But I get so tired of this idea that space travel is important to the future of our species. Even if the only way we could survive would be through an exodus to other worlds, how does that solve the problems that would lead us to such an exodus? Until we become more enlightened here on Earth and make some progress in the nature of the human heart, we will only bring those problems with us.
It solves the actual problem, namely, that we would die, if we didn't move. And what "progress" is there to make on the human heart? The underlying problem is simply that we aren't a single organism with a single purpose. Our motives and actions naturally conflict because we all have different interests. The temptation to either force others to do what we want or to change the rules of society in a way that benefits us at the expense of others, will always exist. No amount of enlighten will change the game.
Similarly, our points of view are naturally narcissistic and provincial. Having a portion of humanity in space, creating utterly new kinds of stories, would help enlarge that point of view.
What the heck is so important about the survival of our species anyway? Hopefully we'll involve into something more than we are now, but if we die out, that won't be so unusual as far as species go. Do we consider it a tragedy that the dinosaurs evolved into birds?
For the most part, yes, we do consider it a tragedy that the only dinosaur survivors are birds. Something great and powerful left the world long ago and we have but mere impressions in rock to remind us of it.
For example, Michael Crichton attempted to create yet another feeble cautionary tale about human technology. Jurassic Park became a great story about bringing back that which had been lost. It speaks of hope on a scale foreign to us today.
Compared to the vastness, mystery, and awesomeness of the Universe as a whole, we're really insignificant.
How much vastness, mystery, and awesomeness can there be without an observer to appreciate it?
Kingdoms may have nepotism enshrined in law but other systems can get it as well.
"Enshrined in law"? Recall, if you will, the definition of Republic. Namely, that the head of state was hereditary. Occasionally having relatives of former heads of states become heads of state doesn't mean that the position has become hereditary nor even become an instance of nepotism. Speaking of Roman senators and other potentially hereditary positions, which aren't "head of state" positions, turns out to be irrelevant.
However to answer your question with a few examples - the total collapse of Northern hemisphere fish stocks, not enough fish in any ocean, an open arctic ocean, Venice like streets ans Amsterdam style dykes on a global scale.
And the ready answers which we've discovered in the past:
1) "Collapse" of fish stocks? Then stop fishing until the stocks recover.
2) An open Arctic Ocean? You just cut the shipping time from China to Europe in half and your boats no longer have to be small enough to fit in the Panama Canal. In addition, you have opened up the Arctic Ocean to the usual economic activities that greatly benefit us elsewhere. Make bank.
Venice like streets ans Amsterdam style dykes on a global scale.
3) A number of simple solutions present themselves. You already have two of those solutions in your post: a) move to higher ground; b) add dirt or rock to create higher ground in place; c) continue to work in flooded terrain (Venice-like solution); or d) build dykes. They all have their pluses and minuses, so which combination of solutions are best for a region will vary.
AGW is a fairly easy problem to adapt to with modest changes over long time frames (such as a two meter rise in sea level over a century).
If one looks at actual rational attempts to prioritize what global societies should be doing, then AGW barely registers at all. For example, there are only two priorities of the Copenhagen Consensus that are at all AGW-related. It turns out that treating common diseases and parasites, or providing micronutrient supplements to the poor turn out to have a lot more value than any sort of intervention or adaption to AGW (one has to go down to priority #6, "R&D to Increase Yield Enhancements, to decrease hunger, fight biodiversity destruction, and lessen the effects of climate change").
This is the remarkable thing. There's a lot of obsession over AGW, but not a lot of reason to obsess so. There simply are far more important things with a high ROI that should be done now, even if it means making AGW slightly worse over the long term.
there is very little doubt the Sahara and the rest of the sub-tropical deserts will continue to expand
I don't know why anyone would be interested in the absence of doubt. I imagine they are interested in the presence of evidence instead.
I'm not sure that humans can keep pace with the biosphere's adaptations.
Hard to take you seriously at all, when you say stuff like this. What "biosphere adaptation" do you think is going to happen that humanity hasn't already readily adapted to at numerous times in the past?
A society that ignores our impending extinction isn't doing its job.
We have this society expending significant resources on the very problems you seem concerned about. Sure, they seem to have screwed up space development, but they are paying attention and throwing in funding.
My take is also that "This" indicates not just agreement, but also more agreement with this statement than other possibilities. I think of it as a shortened form of "This is the best explanation."
A representative republic. Saying a republic is not particularly informative since one definition of republic is that the government merely doesn't have a hereditary head of state.
Other than He3 it has no natural resources worth going there for.
Less delta v and energy required to achieve either Earth orbit or one of the Lagrange points. It has a variety of useful metals (aluminum, iron, titanium, etc) and oxygen, which is a human consumable and likely to be a propellant in chemical engines for quite some time to come.
You can't trust the American electorate and their political representatives to do what's important for the future of the species.
To elaborate on my rather vague posts earlier, the point of societies is to further the interest of society. For societies, such as ours currently, which are dominated by one species (though it is worth noting that there are a fair number of client species, namely pets, agricultural animals, and endangered species, with non-trivial recognized rights and privileges) furthering the interests of society can coincide with what's important for the human species. But it's also worth noting that society has many other interests and these sometimes conflict.
Second, who decides what is important? The nature of a society is that complete agreement doesn't happen. I don't think it is appropriate to expect society to unconditionally back a pet goal or project. What I do think is appropriate is for those who favor particular space activities to convincingly demonstrate the value of such on their own dime before insisting that society put its resources in.
Frankly if we can't get the Apollo system back on line economically we ought to just fricking buy Soyuz.
I believe skipping the Apollo system altogether would be the far better choice at least until there's enough demand. For me, that threshold would be at least ten launches a year. And it seems to me that one is forgetting US launch vehicles here such as Falcon 9 and Atlas 5.
Because that is the only cause that justifies their existence. Societies exist to facilitate the survival and growth of their population.
That's not the same as "important for the species". Keep in mind both that any given current society is only a part of the "species" and that species is a vague term that will become much more vague for whatever are considered members of society in the near future.
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Mr. H. is passe. That's not precisely how the next threat will manifest. The world is too networked for that. I don't have time to read my 1,000 pages for Citations Needed, but basically Mr. H. got as far as he did because of the specific places he was in geography-time.
And that's how you can fail to degodwinize a thread. Hilter was lucky to get where he did, but it wasn't so much a matter of luck that a Hitler rose to power. For example, the German military, almost immediately started violating the terms of the Treaty of Versailles to the point where they apparently were killing people who knew too much of the Treaty violations in the 1920s. As it turned out, one of the leaders who supervised the German military's black ops stuff, a General Kurt von Schleicher, later became the chancellor of Germany prior to the appointment of Adolf Hitler.
Prior to Schleicher, there was Chancellor Franz von Papen whose most notable act of the period was to overthrow the state government of Prussia (one of the bigger obstacles to ending the Weimar Republic). In other words, there were a number of potential Hitlers out there, two which preceded Hitler in the very job by which he took over. The actual Hitler was relatively dangerous, but he was far from unique.
Now, we might see another Charismatic Dangerous Leader, yes. But you can't go just marching along, not today. So the next Bad Guy will be more of a Loose Cannon that needs to be talked down Game Theory style, with VERY clever diplomacy.
Hitler could have been dealt with that very way and he took a great number of risks that could have ended his reign before the Second World War started. For example, the remilitarization of the Rhine in 1936 provided a great opportunity for France and the UK to take him down. The weakness of his primary opponents was just as important as Hitler's qualities.
The answer is don't make helium for sale to party stores.
An alternate solution is simply to let the US surplus run out. Party stores will stop using helium when the price goes up enough.
But it's ridiculous that helium - an inordinately valuable resource at the moment - is just being sold off for parties because the US strategic reserve of the stuff is being dumped onto the market by Congress.
Here's the real problem.
We all benefit from it being cheap, but only if it's used responsibly.
No, we don't. So-called "irresponsible uses" happen precisely because it is cheap. Don't make it cheap and you won't be sending price signals that it is ok to use it frivolously, whatever that may be.
There's no pressing need for lighter-then-air gases to be a feature at parties at all.
Happy children have a value as well.
Concentration is a better indication of difficulty than boiling point. After all, almost nothing has a boiling point anywhere near helium except neon and hydrogen. So one doesn't have to cool to the boiling point of helium to eliminate almost everything else.
Rockstrom et al estimate global water use is already over the 4,300 km3 estimated global replenishment rate. If only 600 GT of additional carbon are sequestered in biomass (including forests, algae and other biofuels and so on) there will not be enough water for agriculture even using intensive means because of the water sequestered with the carbon.
So what you're saying is that we should take at least two years instead of just one to sequester that much carbon. Keep in mind that the replenishment rate is a rate and 600 GT is a fixed amount. All that is being said is that one can't rush, Manhattan Project-style, carbon sequestration without extracting fresh water from the over 1 billion km3 of sea water that currently exists on Earth.
As long as our rate of breeding is at least twice our GDP
A birth rate larger than the rate of expansion of the economy leads to more poverty. I'm sure someone has advocated it, but not rational economists.
In other words, over the next century the adaptation humans will be forced to make as a species will be to aquire the gene that stops them from in their own nest.
My counter is that we've already had all of the genes we need. The problem rather is that the issue isn't as great as TapeCutter claims.
If the EU charges a fixed fraction of Google's global revenue per infraction, including a lot of revenue that's not part of the EU, then why should they get to keep all of it? Instead, this sounds like a protectionist scheme. The fee relative to the amount of business in the EU is much less for a company that does most or all of its business in the EU relative to a foreign company that does a small part in the EU.
For example, suppose I have two businesses each doing a billion euros of business. One is solely in the EU and the other does only ten per cent of its business in the EU. A fine scheme like the above has them paying the same fine for the same crime despite one business having far more business in the EU than the other. That means that the foreign business faces the same risk of fines on a tenth of the business that the other business has.
It's yet another way to block foreign businesses without (as of yet) provoking a response from the WTO or other treaties.
It's got to be strictly enforced
Of course. And it was precisely cases like the passenger pigeon and the right whale that led to the idea of controlled hunting/fishing of animals.
Bush was about putting a useless son on a throne when the Republican party had so many better choices.
Except that the Republican party doesn't choose presidents. The US populace via the Electoral College does that. And a "useless son" got elected twice meaning a lot of people disagreed with you on that matter.
Of course I'm wasting my time here since the North Korea example provided above by grcrumb should have been enough for anybody that was actually paying attention.
Except that North Korea isn't a republic in any sense of the definition. Any claim that they are a republic in any sense of the word is just a lie.
I don't know why you're holding on to this argument or what point you're trying to make. But it strikes me that you aren't getting anything out.
Given how many of the technologies require advances in parallel fields (like computing), the balance of your post is just wishful thinking.
I have to agree with the other replier. What Earth-side technologies are you referring to? For example, we've already demonstrated that we can navigate the Solar System on the computing power of the 60s (Apollo program and the Pioneer spacecraft). Chemical rocket engines already operate near optimal efficiencies. We've already demonstrated that we can launch and assemble complex structures in orbit.
But I get so tired of this idea that space travel is important to the future of our species. Even if the only way we could survive would be through an exodus to other worlds, how does that solve the problems that would lead us to such an exodus? Until we become more enlightened here on Earth and make some progress in the nature of the human heart, we will only bring those problems with us.
It solves the actual problem, namely, that we would die, if we didn't move. And what "progress" is there to make on the human heart? The underlying problem is simply that we aren't a single organism with a single purpose. Our motives and actions naturally conflict because we all have different interests. The temptation to either force others to do what we want or to change the rules of society in a way that benefits us at the expense of others, will always exist. No amount of enlighten will change the game.
Similarly, our points of view are naturally narcissistic and provincial. Having a portion of humanity in space, creating utterly new kinds of stories, would help enlarge that point of view.
What the heck is so important about the survival of our species anyway? Hopefully we'll involve into something more than we are now, but if we die out, that won't be so unusual as far as species go. Do we consider it a tragedy that the dinosaurs evolved into birds?
For the most part, yes, we do consider it a tragedy that the only dinosaur survivors are birds. Something great and powerful left the world long ago and we have but mere impressions in rock to remind us of it.
For example, Michael Crichton attempted to create yet another feeble cautionary tale about human technology. Jurassic Park became a great story about bringing back that which had been lost. It speaks of hope on a scale foreign to us today.
Compared to the vastness, mystery, and awesomeness of the Universe as a whole, we're really insignificant.
How much vastness, mystery, and awesomeness can there be without an observer to appreciate it?
Kingdoms may have nepotism enshrined in law but other systems can get it as well.
"Enshrined in law"? Recall, if you will, the definition of Republic. Namely, that the head of state was hereditary. Occasionally having relatives of former heads of states become heads of state doesn't mean that the position has become hereditary nor even become an instance of nepotism. Speaking of Roman senators and other potentially hereditary positions, which aren't "head of state" positions, turns out to be irrelevant.
However to answer your question with a few examples - the total collapse of Northern hemisphere fish stocks, not enough fish in any ocean, an open arctic ocean, Venice like streets ans Amsterdam style dykes on a global scale.
And the ready answers which we've discovered in the past: 1) "Collapse" of fish stocks? Then stop fishing until the stocks recover.
2) An open Arctic Ocean? You just cut the shipping time from China to Europe in half and your boats no longer have to be small enough to fit in the Panama Canal. In addition, you have opened up the Arctic Ocean to the usual economic activities that greatly benefit us elsewhere. Make bank.
Venice like streets ans Amsterdam style dykes on a global scale.
3) A number of simple solutions present themselves. You already have two of those solutions in your post: a) move to higher ground; b) add dirt or rock to create higher ground in place; c) continue to work in flooded terrain (Venice-like solution); or d) build dykes. They all have their pluses and minuses, so which combination of solutions are best for a region will vary.
.
AGW is a fairly easy problem to adapt to with modest changes over long time frames (such as a two meter rise in sea level over a century).
If one looks at actual rational attempts to prioritize what global societies should be doing, then AGW barely registers at all. For example, there are only two priorities of the Copenhagen Consensus that are at all AGW-related. It turns out that treating common diseases and parasites, or providing micronutrient supplements to the poor turn out to have a lot more value than any sort of intervention or adaption to AGW (one has to go down to priority #6, "R&D to Increase Yield Enhancements, to decrease hunger, fight biodiversity destruction, and lessen the effects of climate change")
This is the remarkable thing. There's a lot of obsession over AGW, but not a lot of reason to obsess so. There simply are far more important things with a high ROI that should be done now, even if it means making AGW slightly worse over the long term.
there is very little doubt the Sahara and the rest of the sub-tropical deserts will continue to expand
I don't know why anyone would be interested in the absence of doubt. I imagine they are interested in the presence of evidence instead.
I'm not sure that humans can keep pace with the biosphere's adaptations.
Hard to take you seriously at all, when you say stuff like this. What "biosphere adaptation" do you think is going to happen that humanity hasn't already readily adapted to at numerous times in the past?
Well, if you were ever to come up with evidence for your assertions, that would be interesting.
A society that ignores our impending extinction isn't doing its job.
We have this society expending significant resources on the very problems you seem concerned about. Sure, they seem to have screwed up space development, but they are paying attention and throwing in funding.
Or the Republicans that gave you a hereditary head of state in the form of a useless baby Bush
So how is Obama related to the Bushes? If this is a "hereditary head of state", then the heads of state have to be related somehow.
My take is also that "This" indicates not just agreement, but also more agreement with this statement than other possibilities. I think of it as a shortened form of "This is the best explanation."
A representative republic. Saying a republic is not particularly informative since one definition of republic is that the government merely doesn't have a hereditary head of state.
"This."? Is it merely a stupid and lazy way of saying, "I agree with what you have written."?
So a six letter reply (with following space) is a "stupid and lazy way" of typing 32 characters. There's a reason it isn't going to go away.
Other than He3 it has no natural resources worth going there for.
Less delta v and energy required to achieve either Earth orbit or one of the Lagrange points. It has a variety of useful metals (aluminum, iron, titanium, etc) and oxygen, which is a human consumable and likely to be a propellant in chemical engines for quite some time to come.
You can't trust the American electorate and their political representatives to do what's important for the future of the species.
To elaborate on my rather vague posts earlier, the point of societies is to further the interest of society. For societies, such as ours currently, which are dominated by one species (though it is worth noting that there are a fair number of client species, namely pets, agricultural animals, and endangered species, with non-trivial recognized rights and privileges) furthering the interests of society can coincide with what's important for the human species. But it's also worth noting that society has many other interests and these sometimes conflict.
Second, who decides what is important? The nature of a society is that complete agreement doesn't happen. I don't think it is appropriate to expect society to unconditionally back a pet goal or project. What I do think is appropriate is for those who favor particular space activities to convincingly demonstrate the value of such on their own dime before insisting that society put its resources in.
Frankly if we can't get the Apollo system back on line economically we ought to just fricking buy Soyuz.
I believe skipping the Apollo system altogether would be the far better choice at least until there's enough demand. For me, that threshold would be at least ten launches a year. And it seems to me that one is forgetting US launch vehicles here such as Falcon 9 and Atlas 5.
Because that is the only cause that justifies their existence. Societies exist to facilitate the survival and growth of their population.
That's not the same as "important for the species". Keep in mind both that any given current society is only a part of the "species" and that species is a vague term that will become much more vague for whatever are considered members of society in the near future.
Its a perfect formula to accomplish nothing
It's a formula for killing a lot of people.