Or the animals PETA is euthanizing... Over 85% of the animals they take in are killed instead of adopted.
Keep in mind that PETA doesn't approve of the IDEA of pets. As far as they're concerned, they're doing good by preventing adoptions of animals. Killing them is just the easiest way of taking that preventative step.
And why did they do that? What's wrong with States imposing tariffs on the products of other States? Answer, because it hurts the people and their businesses in each state. The founders believed that unfettered interstate commerce was important.
Better answer: because it causes the people of each State to think of their State as their Nation. The founding fathers were trying to get over that particular fixation, which had been enshrined in the Articles of Confederation.
Also, Clinton did produce a balanced budget. It took some years of doing to get there, but he did. It was, of course, immediately trashed by the Bush Administration.
Umm, no. National Debt increased every year of Clinton's terms. Yes, I'm aware that popular mythology has the last year (or two) of Clinton's Presidency "balanced", but whatever the budget says about "deficit", if "debt" increases, the budget wasn't really balanced.
Remember those first five years of the Bush II Presidency, when the Republicans controlled Congress, too...That's were about half the deficit came from.
I did indeed forget that the Republicans didn't lose the Senate till 2006. My bad.
That said, the Debt run up in those six years was more like 1/3 of the debt, not half. Though it was (slightly) more than the debt Obama will be running up in his first two years....
when our party has not produced a single balanced budget in 40 years and ushered in the mega-deficits under Reagan.
It must be noted, for completeness, that the Republicans have had control of the government for two years of the last 40.
It should also be noted that the Democrats haven't produced a single balanced budget in the last 40 years.
As to Reagan's budgets, one might remember the Democrat mantra during the Reagan years as regards the Federal Budget - "Mr President, your budget was DOA in Congress".
So, the Professors were deathly afraid of her morbid comments, which lead to her to be terminated as a student.
Please read TFA. She hasn't been terminated as a student. She has been banned pending a hearing by the Office for Student Conduct and Academic Integrity, who will then decide whether this is important enough to terminate her.
Which latter is unlikely, considering that the police have already talked to her and decided there's nothing worth getting excited about.
Who cares about what happens to the US? The real problem after a super-volcano eruption is the collapse of global agriculture. That is what could easily cause civilization to collapse.
Last time Yellowstone blew, it didn't cause a Permian-scale extinction event. So there's no special reason to believe it will next time either.
Which means that global agriculture may be affected, but it likely won't collapse.
On the other hand, half the USA and a good chunk of Canada is going to be buried in ash. Which means that to the extent that the USA is still crucial to the world's economy (which extent is debatable, but clearly non-zero), the world's economy is going to tank.
That's a good point. Of course, that'd have to be one really nice generation ship if the people preferred to stay on it instead of moving to a planet. But there's one big problem with the generation ship: it's small. Even if you build it big enough for 100,000 people (not very big compared to a modern city), that's as big as it gets. What happens when people want to have more kids and grow?
Well, if they get to 61 Virgo and decide they don't want to get off the ship, they can just go park in a nearby asteroid belt, or near a reasonably small planet.
Then, when the first ship gets a bit crowded, then you clone it - build another (minus the drive if you don't intend to be going anywhere with it). Repeat as needed.
The asteroid belt in this solar system is large enough to have more than 1 million rocks more than one km in diameter. Every one of them could be turned into a 4000+ hectare habitat without even trying. Note "without even trying" is relative to the ability to build the generation ship in the first place, not relative to someone who has a hard time building a treehouse).
When you add in the larger asteroids (thousands 10-100 km in diameter, about a hundred >100 km in diameter), the carrying capacity of our asteroid belt is well over a trillion people.
Reminds me of H. Beam Piper's vision of the future; North America, Europe and Asia devastated by nuclear exchange, with Argentina and South Africa the two new power houses of the world.
And Australia, mustn't forget them - "the Melbourne Times, formerly of London"....
The Phillips head screwdriver is inferior to TORX heads any day of the week.
The Phillips head was developed for use in automated manufacture - it's designed so that the machine driving it will tend to slip the slots rather than over-torque the screw.
And for that purpose it works really well.
What it wasn't designed for is screwing by hand, where any other design works better.
You average Hydrogen bomb has about one megaton. The world has only about 70,000 nuclear bombs (rough estimate, USSR has about 16,000, the USA has about 33,000 - and most are much less powerful than an Hydrogen bomb).
The average hydrogen bomb is a lot closer to 250 kt than to 1 Mt, since most of the USA's arsenal (all hydrogen bombs) are below 200 kt.
Also, I'm curious who you think holds the other 19,000 bombs. Off the top of my head, I can't think of any other nuclear power that has even admitted to 1000 bombs....
I think it's a good bet that such an eruption would mean at least the end of human civilisation (if not human extinction).
It won't mean human extinction. Period.
It may or may not mean the end of human civilization (for the time being). Whether it actually does depends on just how dependent the rest of the world is on the USA. If the collapse of the USA disrupts the rest of civilization enough to bring the whole house of cards crashing down, then civilzation falls.
If, on the other hand, the world has sufficiently recovered from WW2 that the USA is no longer crucial to civilization (note that "not crucial" is NOT the same as "not important"), then civilization will be damaged, but will recover in a relatively short time (say, 30-50 years, like the recovery from WW2).
If I buy a device and it doesn't break, is the extended warranty useless?
I don't think so. The whole point is that _if_ I have a bad device I can get it repaired. Peace of mind has value too.
My wife once worked in a place that sold extended warranties for electronic devices. She told me at the time that the reason they were pushed by the retailers is because the profit margin on them is incredibly high - they're expensive, and they almost never are needed....
With dosimeters and guides keeping you out of the places were radiation has accumulated.
To provide a small amount of perspective on the need for dosimeters in general (not necessarily in this specific case, mind you):
Many years ago, when I was stationed on a submarine, I had to wear a dosimeter all the time. During that entire period, I accumulated a smaller total dose than the average dose I could be expected to acquire on the plane going to and coming back from the boat.
In other words, more often that you might think, a dosimeter is worn to give the wearer a warm fuzzy than it is to actually protect him.
Which is a good thing, really, since a dosimeter serves no purpose other than to tell you just how much of a dose you acquired back when you were wearing it....
The point, my good friend, is that the US complains about how women in some Islamic countries are forced to have most of their body covered, but the same asinine Americans don't realize that some Tribal people would think the same thing how we jail people for indecent exposure.
Alas, I suspect that other than a few feminists, no-one in the USA really cares that women in some Islamic countries are forced to have most of their bodies covered.
I should also point out that, at least in New York, women are allowed to go topless, as long as the toplessness doesn't happen in a commercial context (I guess whores aren't allowed to go topless if they're on the clock).
That said, the fact that most people, American and otherwise (yes, Europeans too), are pretty close-minded about "the established customs of the tribe". Get over it, people are like that - strange things aren't looked on too kindly by most people.
That requires massive infrastructure: factories, mines, etc. To get to that point, you'll need to have bases on many places in the inner solar system, such as Mars, the Moon, etc.
And since I'm all in favour of exploiting the other bodies in the solar system, that's just a bonus as far as I'm concerned.
Which doesn't change the fact that most of what you need for the generation ship won't have ever have to come within a lightsecond of Earth. Realistically (even when we stretch "realistically" as far as building a starship in the 21st Century), building the ship from parts shipped up from Earth wouldn't be practical even if we had a Beanstalk. The beanstalk would just make it easier to build the off-planet infrastructure required to actually build the ship.
This law defines the agent of a foreign principal as someone who:
1. Engages in political activities for or in the interests of a foreign principal;
2. Acts in a public relations capacity for a foreign principal;
3. Solicits or dispenses any thing of value within the United States for a foreign principal;
4. Represents the interests of a foreign principal before any agency or official of the U.S. government.
(. ..)
And after all that, you managed to miss the part where all that the law actually requires is that someone doing any of those things above register himself with the Feds.
No, it doesn't provide for jailing people (even the guy working for Saddam on the Oil For Food thing was only fined).
And note this:
The Department of Justice has found that most violations of this law are unintentional and is attempting to work out problems without legal action.
One does wonder what would happen if an Iranian or Iraqi came into America and provided material means for people to rebel, overthrow, dissent terrorise the American government? Maybe a book on how to achieve things?
Umm, you can buy books like that in bookstores here. And on the web. And check them out of University libraries....
A generation ship wouldn't just be an epic feat of engineering, it would be an epic feat of engineering that has no payoff for centuries (from the point of view of the population assigned to the ship, unless just being on the ship is a payoff for them) or millenia (from the point of view of the rest of the planet.) So, really, where is the huge investment going to come from? Epic engineering projects -- the Panama Canal, for instance -- do happen, but they happen because the people paying for them expect some substantial benefit that will start accruing in a reasonable time.
Yep. See my other comment, where I made rude comments about the likelihood of it ever being done.
That said, one must consider AGW at some point. If we're going to successfully deal with maintaining the climate of the planet at some idealized level (note, by the way, that I don't think that that is either necessary or desirable, but many people do), then we'll have to develop societal structures that allow us to think in very long terms (centuries, at a minimum).
Given that we develop such societal structures, the possibility of spending vast amounts of money with no payoff in sight for centuries becomes a lot more credible. After all, stopping AGW will require the expenditure of trillions of dollars, with no real benefit visible within the lifetime of any now alive.
The potential payoff of a generation ship? Well, if it works, it removes the current limitation on the potential lifespan of humanity (the lifetime of the Sun). And if one of them can work, then we can build another, and another.
Note that constructing one generation ship per millenium from every solar system with more than one billion population would be a relatively trivial undertaking, and would allow us to colonize every place in this galaxy within about half a million years.
Which might sound like a long time, but homo heidelbergensis (what used to be called archaic homo sapiens) lasted longer than that, so there's not much reason to believe that homo sapiens can't survive that long.
I would go so far as to claim that they're all either "short lived" or "long lived". You've defined radioactive material as basically safe, which is demonstrably false.
No, there's a third group. "long enough lived to be around for decades, short enough lived to be dangerous". Short lived radioactives are pretty much a non-issue a week after it appears. Long-lived radioactives aren't radioactive enough to matter - U238? two billion-plus years half-life means you can sleep on a bed of it without a problem.
But that middle group doesn't amount to all that much of the fallout. Too small a neutron capture cross section for much of it to become radioisotopes.
Not being radioactive for very long doesn't really help if you're going to contaminate the majority of the world's farmland. Everyone not eating for only a few months will probably be unpopular.
A few months isn't what I consider "short lived". And the evidence from Hiroshima and Nagasaki is that you can safely move back into the area under the explosion (much less the area the fallout fell on) within a few months.
And if you aren't bothered by long-lived radioactive isotopes, I suggest you move to Pripyat (property is pretty cheap there).
I'm not. I notice from the Wiki article on the place that it's pretty easy to get a guided tour of the place if you want one, so I don't think the radiation levels there are the bugaboo you think they are.
Note that about 3000 people work in that area. Yes, they're monitored for accumulated dose, but it doesn't seem to be the killer you think it is. Plus the 4000 or so working at Chernobyl, mustn't forget them.
Plus the permanent residents. I understand they're mostly dying of old age, since the younger ones left the area when the government told them to. But they don't seem to be dying of radiation-related issues especially.
The problem here is that 1G sustained means your ship will be liveable by humans for those 7 years with no problem. 0.01G is not liveable at all; humans can't survive long-term in microgravity.
And of course it would be impossible to spin the ship, right?
Any ship big enough for a 100 year trip will be more than big enough to spin so that the rim of the ship experiences enough gravity to keep the crew healthy.
Not only that, 100 years is too long; no one will live that long (assuming you launch them when they're 20-25).
I take it you've never heard of the "generation ship" concept?
Humans can't live their entire lives (including their all-important formative years) in a small spacecraft with little social interaction.
And who ever suggested a small spacecraft? If I were designing it, it'd be 20 km long and 5-6 Km in diameter. With a crew of about 100,000.
A generation ship, however, could solve this problem (kids could very conceivably be raised on a giant ship with lakes and forests and a whole functioning mini-society), but as you said, this would require some incredible engineering. Lifting that much material into orbit really needs a space elevator, for starters.
So you DO know about generation ships! Great!
Hint: you don't build a generation ship from Earth. You start with an asteroid, and stock pretty much everything except the lifeforms aboard from other sources than Earth.
Note also that "incredible engineering" really means "expensive". It doesn't necessarily mean "difficult".
And this still doesn't address the gravity problem; those lakes and forests aren't going to work without artificial gravity.
Spin it. If it's six km in diameter, you have to spin it at 0.55 rpm to get 1G on the rim. And note that you have 360 km^2 worth of rim on the ship I described above. With a deck every 100 meters, we're talking a couple hundred thousand hectares at > 0.9G.
Alas, the likelihood of humanity building a generation ship is miniscule.
What passes for government here on Earth can't look far enough ahead. If we KNEW there was an alien species living there, and that they would be willing to give us the secret of FTL if only we sent someone there to collect, we'd still never get one built...
But the only real difficulty with doing so is the drive - the lifesystem, the physical structure, that sort of thing is almost trivial in comparison.
Slashdot Mirror
Keep in mind that PETA doesn't approve of the IDEA of pets. As far as they're concerned, they're doing good by preventing adoptions of animals. Killing them is just the easiest way of taking that preventative step.
Better answer: because it causes the people of each State to think of their State as their Nation. The founding fathers were trying to get over that particular fixation, which had been enshrined in the Articles of Confederation.
For all those "balanced budgets and surpluses in the 90s", one must remember that the National Debt increased every single year in the 90's.
Oddly enough, I always thought that if your budget was balanced or there were a surplus, your debt would go DOWN, not UP. Silly me.
Umm, no. National Debt increased every year of Clinton's terms. Yes, I'm aware that popular mythology has the last year (or two) of Clinton's Presidency "balanced", but whatever the budget says about "deficit", if "debt" increases, the budget wasn't really balanced.
I did indeed forget that the Republicans didn't lose the Senate till 2006. My bad.
That said, the Debt run up in those six years was more like 1/3 of the debt, not half. Though it was (slightly) more than the debt Obama will be running up in his first two years....
No, actually that was put in to prevent States from imposing tariffs on the products of other States.
It must be noted, for completeness, that the Republicans have had control of the government for two years of the last 40.
It should also be noted that the Democrats haven't produced a single balanced budget in the last 40 years.
As to Reagan's budgets, one might remember the Democrat mantra during the Reagan years as regards the Federal Budget - "Mr President, your budget was DOA in Congress".
Please read TFA. She hasn't been terminated as a student. She has been banned pending a hearing by the Office for Student Conduct and Academic Integrity, who will then decide whether this is important enough to terminate her.
Which latter is unlikely, considering that the police have already talked to her and decided there's nothing worth getting excited about.
Last time Yellowstone blew, it didn't cause a Permian-scale extinction event. So there's no special reason to believe it will next time either.
Which means that global agriculture may be affected, but it likely won't collapse.
On the other hand, half the USA and a good chunk of Canada is going to be buried in ash. Which means that to the extent that the USA is still crucial to the world's economy (which extent is debatable, but clearly non-zero), the world's economy is going to tank.
Don't think 2008, think 1929 - a REAL depression.
Well, if they get to 61 Virgo and decide they don't want to get off the ship, they can just go park in a nearby asteroid belt, or near a reasonably small planet.
Then, when the first ship gets a bit crowded, then you clone it - build another (minus the drive if you don't intend to be going anywhere with it). Repeat as needed.
The asteroid belt in this solar system is large enough to have more than 1 million rocks more than one km in diameter. Every one of them could be turned into a 4000+ hectare habitat without even trying. Note "without even trying" is relative to the ability to build the generation ship in the first place, not relative to someone who has a hard time building a treehouse).
When you add in the larger asteroids (thousands 10-100 km in diameter, about a hundred >100 km in diameter), the carrying capacity of our asteroid belt is well over a trillion people.
And Australia, mustn't forget them - "the Melbourne Times, formerly of London"....
The Phillips head was developed for use in automated manufacture - it's designed so that the machine driving it will tend to slip the slots rather than over-torque the screw.
And for that purpose it works really well.
What it wasn't designed for is screwing by hand, where any other design works better.
The average hydrogen bomb is a lot closer to 250 kt than to 1 Mt, since most of the USA's arsenal (all hydrogen bombs) are below 200 kt.
Also, I'm curious who you think holds the other 19,000 bombs. Off the top of my head, I can't think of any other nuclear power that has even admitted to 1000 bombs....
While I appreciate (and agree with) your point, it should be pointed out that the majority of even the first wave on Omaha survived to reproduce.
It won't mean human extinction. Period.
It may or may not mean the end of human civilization (for the time being). Whether it actually does depends on just how dependent the rest of the world is on the USA. If the collapse of the USA disrupts the rest of civilization enough to bring the whole house of cards crashing down, then civilzation falls.
If, on the other hand, the world has sufficiently recovered from WW2 that the USA is no longer crucial to civilization (note that "not crucial" is NOT the same as "not important"), then civilization will be damaged, but will recover in a relatively short time (say, 30-50 years, like the recovery from WW2).
Yes, actually I am, why?
My wife once worked in a place that sold extended warranties for electronic devices. She told me at the time that the reason they were pushed by the retailers is because the profit margin on them is incredibly high - they're expensive, and they almost never are needed....
To provide a small amount of perspective on the need for dosimeters in general (not necessarily in this specific case, mind you):
Many years ago, when I was stationed on a submarine, I had to wear a dosimeter all the time. During that entire period, I accumulated a smaller total dose than the average dose I could be expected to acquire on the plane going to and coming back from the boat.
In other words, more often that you might think, a dosimeter is worn to give the wearer a warm fuzzy than it is to actually protect him.
Which is a good thing, really, since a dosimeter serves no purpose other than to tell you just how much of a dose you acquired back when you were wearing it....
Alas, I suspect that other than a few feminists, no-one in the USA really cares that women in some Islamic countries are forced to have most of their bodies covered.
I should also point out that, at least in New York, women are allowed to go topless, as long as the toplessness doesn't happen in a commercial context (I guess whores aren't allowed to go topless if they're on the clock).
That said, the fact that most people, American and otherwise (yes, Europeans too), are pretty close-minded about "the established customs of the tribe". Get over it, people are like that - strange things aren't looked on too kindly by most people.
And since I'm all in favour of exploiting the other bodies in the solar system, that's just a bonus as far as I'm concerned.
Which doesn't change the fact that most of what you need for the generation ship won't have ever have to come within a lightsecond of Earth. Realistically (even when we stretch "realistically" as far as building a starship in the 21st Century), building the ship from parts shipped up from Earth wouldn't be practical even if we had a Beanstalk. The beanstalk would just make it easier to build the off-planet infrastructure required to actually build the ship.
Actually, he has every right to do so. See First Amendment.
And we have every right to pay no attention to him. See First Amendment.
And after all that, you managed to miss the part where all that the law actually requires is that someone doing any of those things above register himself with the Feds.
No, it doesn't provide for jailing people (even the guy working for Saddam on the Oil For Food thing was only fined).
And note this:
yah, real close parallel....
Umm, you can buy books like that in bookstores here. And on the web. And check them out of University libraries....
Yep. See my other comment, where I made rude comments about the likelihood of it ever being done.
That said, one must consider AGW at some point. If we're going to successfully deal with maintaining the climate of the planet at some idealized level (note, by the way, that I don't think that that is either necessary or desirable, but many people do), then we'll have to develop societal structures that allow us to think in very long terms (centuries, at a minimum).
Given that we develop such societal structures, the possibility of spending vast amounts of money with no payoff in sight for centuries becomes a lot more credible. After all, stopping AGW will require the expenditure of trillions of dollars, with no real benefit visible within the lifetime of any now alive.
The potential payoff of a generation ship? Well, if it works, it removes the current limitation on the potential lifespan of humanity (the lifetime of the Sun). And if one of them can work, then we can build another, and another.
Note that constructing one generation ship per millenium from every solar system with more than one billion population would be a relatively trivial undertaking, and would allow us to colonize every place in this galaxy within about half a million years.
Which might sound like a long time, but homo heidelbergensis (what used to be called archaic homo sapiens) lasted longer than that, so there's not much reason to believe that homo sapiens can't survive that long.
No, there's a third group. "long enough lived to be around for decades, short enough lived to be dangerous". Short lived radioactives are pretty much a non-issue a week after it appears. Long-lived radioactives aren't radioactive enough to matter - U238? two billion-plus years half-life means you can sleep on a bed of it without a problem.
But that middle group doesn't amount to all that much of the fallout. Too small a neutron capture cross section for much of it to become radioisotopes.
A few months isn't what I consider "short lived". And the evidence from Hiroshima and Nagasaki is that you can safely move back into the area under the explosion (much less the area the fallout fell on) within a few months.
And if you aren't bothered by long-lived radioactive isotopes, I suggest you move to Pripyat (property is pretty cheap there).
I'm not. I notice from the Wiki article on the place that it's pretty easy to get a guided tour of the place if you want one, so I don't think the radiation levels there are the bugaboo you think they are.
Note that about 3000 people work in that area. Yes, they're monitored for accumulated dose, but it doesn't seem to be the killer you think it is. Plus the 4000 or so working at Chernobyl, mustn't forget them.
Plus the permanent residents. I understand they're mostly dying of old age, since the younger ones left the area when the government told them to. But they don't seem to be dying of radiation-related issues especially.
And of course it would be impossible to spin the ship, right?
Any ship big enough for a 100 year trip will be more than big enough to spin so that the rim of the ship experiences enough gravity to keep the crew healthy.
I take it you've never heard of the "generation ship" concept?
And who ever suggested a small spacecraft? If I were designing it, it'd be 20 km long and 5-6 Km in diameter. With a crew of about 100,000.
So you DO know about generation ships! Great!
Hint: you don't build a generation ship from Earth. You start with an asteroid, and stock pretty much everything except the lifeforms aboard from other sources than Earth.
Note also that "incredible engineering" really means "expensive". It doesn't necessarily mean "difficult".
Spin it. If it's six km in diameter, you have to spin it at 0.55 rpm to get 1G on the rim. And note that you have 360 km^2 worth of rim on the ship I described above. With a deck every 100 meters, we're talking a couple hundred thousand hectares at > 0.9G.
Alas, the likelihood of humanity building a generation ship is miniscule.
What passes for government here on Earth can't look far enough ahead. If we KNEW there was an alien species living there, and that they would be willing to give us the secret of FTL if only we sent someone there to collect, we'd still never get one built...
But the only real difficulty with doing so is the drive - the lifesystem, the physical structure, that sort of thing is almost trivial in comparison.