It depends on the cost of these things. If each robot is a gazillion dollars then yes, you're right, they'll only be used in the first world. If the price is intermediate then they may well be mounted in military helicopters and mobile facilities to do battlefield surgery beyond the capability of the corpsmen. If they are cheap (comparatively) then they will be widely deployed, never mind the network and security issues, in the Third World. In Peru, which I am most familiar with, the top surgeons tend to prefer to live in Lima or Arequipa, and if you need their services you need to travel there. Most other Third World countries are much the same. If I lived in Machu Picchu and needed heart surgery I would need to travel to Cusco, and then to Lima, three days of travel before I could even be examined. If I can go to Cusco and be examined and treated I would dramatically reduce the travel and expense necessary while still receiving decent care. Even more likely is that advanced medical students will be called in to perform large numbers of basic medical services, like dental treatment and cataract removal, in the smaller towns while still under the supervision of their instructors.
The old saying of, "Never automatically credit to malevolence when stupidity or ignorance is is equally likely." If you can disable or misdirect the tool on purpose, it's likely that it can also be done by accident. In its day having your web site SlashDotted could be more destructive than an organized DOS attack, more than one web server was brought to its knees by being linked to in a SlashDot thread.
The most irritating thing to me is that the people who believe her dreck will continue to believe it even after her and every other huckster selling miracle cures are shown to be charlatans. There is a large overlap between her fans and the anti-vaxxers.
Emily Lakdawalla's blog has quite a bit of good information about what's going on. With pretty pictures.
More problematic than jets coming from the comet (which are pretty diffuse and low speed in reality) is that twice passing comet particles have come close enough to be mistaken for the stars that the spacecraft use to orient themselves. Since it's moving past so fast the spacecraft assumes that something is wrong and puts everything in Safe mode.
Well, if the Electric Universe guys had been correct about even a single prediction or observation since Velikovsky and company came up with it it might be easier to accept. For now it's just quackery, of the same level of science as homeopathy or phrenology.
OK, here is the 'relevant answer', condensed. Plants slow erosion in the short (hundreds/thousands of years) term, but accelerate it in the long (millions of years) term.
Eventually the vast majority of organic material that isn't recycled back into the ecosystem will end up in the benthic depths, deposited on the abyssal plains (and apparently processed exceedingly slowly by a recently discovered class of archea). That's why coal deposits (mostly the remains of swamplands that never eroded downstream) are valuable.
Go up to the mountains some time, I take it you never have before. Look at any tree tearing a boulder out of the hillside. That tree will die, its pieces will wash down the mountain, and once the roots have decayed the rock will follow. That's why the Adirondacks are little bumps today rather than the towering peaks that they once were. The deep jungle, bogs and swamps are pretty much the only place where your "plant's decaying body, (after it dies), will decompose over top of the rock" scenario would hold true. Anywhere with any noticeable slope will erode, even in the Great Plains the glacial rocks are being broken up and washing down the Mississippi today.
Who cares what might happen 40 million years after . . .
Apparently you don't really grasp the time scales involved here. Continents grow and shrink over the course of hundreds of millions of years, not a few tens of millions. India skitters across the lithosphere, floating on the (comparatively) light water-containing mantle material that has been subducted under it, and slams into India, pushing up the Himalayas. Plants climb the mountainside, breaking up the rock, which washes down the Ganges and Mekong, creating enormous deltas. After a few hundreds of millions of years southern Asia is now much larger than it had been. This is the sort of time scale they're talking about.
By the way, the sun will never "explode, blowing apart our planet", it's much too small to go supernova. It will eventually expand into a red giant, probably engulfing Earth within its corona and vaporizing it.
Magical market approaches only work when there is some possibility of an actual market existing. Water supply is a natural monopoly, there is no real way to have more than one source available to a residence unless you're willing to tear up the streets and run several thousand miles of pipes. Any sort of "market-based" approach to water supply in California are likely to replicate the Aguas de Tunari privatization fiasco, where the water company executives had to run for their lives because of the (justifiably) irate customer base was coming.
On the other hand, my grandfather used to ship peaches from Traverse City to Georgia for their Peach Festival, for much the same reason (plus his quality was a lot higher).
The amount of water subducted into the mantle makes a big difference in what is "brought up from below". Water-containing rock melts at a much lower temperature than unaltered rock, is lighter, is less viscous, and would "float" above the heavier original mantle material. The volcanoes above the subduction zones are much more active because of the rock's water content than they would be otherwise. The less-viscous mantle material means that the smaller plates above it, like India, move around more easily than the larger, more stationary plates like Asia, causing uplift events like the Himalayas, Andes and Rockies.
Insightful? What idiots marked this insightful? Plants may prevent erosion short-term, even on an archeological time scale, but on a geologic time scale they accelerate erosion because they break up rocks so efficiently. Make big ones into small ones, and even if the roots hold it in place for 10,000 years that smaller rock is going to start heading for the ocean.
The first space probes were not supposed to carry cameras because it was thought that there would be little useful data returned from the visuals. Fortunately boosters and transmitters had sufficient extra capacity to add cameras, and the project scientists were quickly shown to be wrong.
We don't need proxies for the last hundred and some thousand years, as we have air samples trapped in ice from that entire stretch of time. At no point does it show such a high rate of increase, even when Krakatoa blew up.
Really? What brand did you get? We have a Samsung, and use half the amount of soap we normally would, and adjust the amount of washing time down ~40% from the default. We don't work in restaurants or dig ditches, but even with all the gardening and remodeling we do we never have any problem with clothes not getting clean. And almost any low-flow toilet manufactured in the last 15 years, including the cheapest Home Despot brand, will work better than the old 4-gallon flushers. My brother and brother-in-law are remodelers, they put a lot of them in, and haven't had a complaint about them for a decade.
So the answer is to just continue increasing CO2 emissions and population at an exponential rate because it's inconvenient to do otherwise? Large scale agricultural failure is going to be a lot more inconvenient and a lot more expensive. Third World peoples aren't going to be mired in poverty as much as they're going to die in droves when food gets priced out of their reach.
Actually there were no "new ice age scientists", there were a couple of journalists on a slow news week at Time Magazine who had learned about Milankovich Cycles and found that we should be well into the next glaciation cycle.
Did something like this deliberately once on an internal network, because the person needing access to the files was too inept to follow even the most basic instructions but too highly ranked to ignore. It was supposed to be temporary, but I then **forgot** to turn the security back on in the morning. A month later one of my bosses noticed she could get into HR data that she wasn't supposed to access and raised a red flag. Oops. Thank all the gods that our network didn't have remote access yet.
Much of (if not most of) the medical equipment was never intended to be put on the larger corporate network. For example MRI devices were supposed to write to a DVD and be sneaker-netted to wherever the images were to be analyzed because transferring that much data over a 10 megabit network was unreasonable. Gigabit networks changed the scenery, and manufacturers just slapped a network interface on them and foisted the security issue on hospital IT staff.
Kiddie porn sites have been found on Internet-connected multi-function printers, and at least one has been used as an entrance into a corporate network. An HVAC system was the point of entry for the Target attack. IoT junk will be used, probably sooner rather than later.
If someone is standing outside my door kicking it in there's a good chance one of the neighbors will call the cops, and if they see a broken window it's the same story. If someone walks up to the door and just walks in the neighbors will assume that they belong there. Some guy in a different country might be very interested in unlocking doors for his cousin/friend/business partner, or opening the garage door so that the moving van can back right in, especially if they have verified on your cameras that you're not home, your guard dog is a chihuahua, and the thermostat is set low enough that it's certain you won't be home for a number of hours.
What percentage of the population will be competent to take the thermostat off the wall and cross the wires? My wife would be afraid that she would be electrocuted, even if I were on the phone reassuring her that she wouldn't. A lot of people don't even have a screwdriver in the house. Really sad, but true.
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It depends on the cost of these things. If each robot is a gazillion dollars then yes, you're right, they'll only be used in the first world. If the price is intermediate then they may well be mounted in military helicopters and mobile facilities to do battlefield surgery beyond the capability of the corpsmen. If they are cheap (comparatively) then they will be widely deployed, never mind the network and security issues, in the Third World. In Peru, which I am most familiar with, the top surgeons tend to prefer to live in Lima or Arequipa, and if you need their services you need to travel there. Most other Third World countries are much the same. If I lived in Machu Picchu and needed heart surgery I would need to travel to Cusco, and then to Lima, three days of travel before I could even be examined. If I can go to Cusco and be examined and treated I would dramatically reduce the travel and expense necessary while still receiving decent care. Even more likely is that advanced medical students will be called in to perform large numbers of basic medical services, like dental treatment and cataract removal, in the smaller towns while still under the supervision of their instructors.
The old saying of, "Never automatically credit to malevolence when stupidity or ignorance is is equally likely." If you can disable or misdirect the tool on purpose, it's likely that it can also be done by accident. In its day having your web site SlashDotted could be more destructive than an organized DOS attack, more than one web server was brought to its knees by being linked to in a SlashDot thread.
The most irritating thing to me is that the people who believe her dreck will continue to believe it even after her and every other huckster selling miracle cures are shown to be charlatans. There is a large overlap between her fans and the anti-vaxxers.
And nothing of value was lost . . .
Emily Lakdawalla's blog has quite a bit of good information about what's going on. With pretty pictures.
More problematic than jets coming from the comet (which are pretty diffuse and low speed in reality) is that twice passing comet particles have come close enough to be mistaken for the stars that the spacecraft use to orient themselves. Since it's moving past so fast the spacecraft assumes that something is wrong and puts everything in Safe mode.
Well, if the Electric Universe guys had been correct about even a single prediction or observation since Velikovsky and company came up with it it might be easier to accept. For now it's just quackery, of the same level of science as homeopathy or phrenology.
OK, here is the 'relevant answer', condensed. Plants slow erosion in the short (hundreds/thousands of years) term, but accelerate it in the long (millions of years) term.
Eventually the vast majority of organic material that isn't recycled back into the ecosystem will end up in the benthic depths, deposited on the abyssal plains (and apparently processed exceedingly slowly by a recently discovered class of archea). That's why coal deposits (mostly the remains of swamplands that never eroded downstream) are valuable.
Go up to the mountains some time, I take it you never have before. Look at any tree tearing a boulder out of the hillside. That tree will die, its pieces will wash down the mountain, and once the roots have decayed the rock will follow. That's why the Adirondacks are little bumps today rather than the towering peaks that they once were. The deep jungle, bogs and swamps are pretty much the only place where your "plant's decaying body, (after it dies), will decompose over top of the rock" scenario would hold true. Anywhere with any noticeable slope will erode, even in the Great Plains the glacial rocks are being broken up and washing down the Mississippi today.
Who cares what might happen 40 million years after . . .
Apparently you don't really grasp the time scales involved here. Continents grow and shrink over the course of hundreds of millions of years, not a few tens of millions. India skitters across the lithosphere, floating on the (comparatively) light water-containing mantle material that has been subducted under it, and slams into India, pushing up the Himalayas. Plants climb the mountainside, breaking up the rock, which washes down the Ganges and Mekong, creating enormous deltas. After a few hundreds of millions of years southern Asia is now much larger than it had been. This is the sort of time scale they're talking about.
By the way, the sun will never "explode, blowing apart our planet", it's much too small to go supernova. It will eventually expand into a red giant, probably engulfing Earth within its corona and vaporizing it.
Magical market approaches only work when there is some possibility of an actual market existing. Water supply is a natural monopoly, there is no real way to have more than one source available to a residence unless you're willing to tear up the streets and run several thousand miles of pipes. Any sort of "market-based" approach to water supply in California are likely to replicate the Aguas de Tunari privatization fiasco, where the water company executives had to run for their lives because of the (justifiably) irate customer base was coming.
On the other hand, my grandfather used to ship peaches from Traverse City to Georgia for their Peach Festival, for much the same reason (plus his quality was a lot higher).
The amount of water subducted into the mantle makes a big difference in what is "brought up from below". Water-containing rock melts at a much lower temperature than unaltered rock, is lighter, is less viscous, and would "float" above the heavier original mantle material. The volcanoes above the subduction zones are much more active because of the rock's water content than they would be otherwise. The less-viscous mantle material means that the smaller plates above it, like India, move around more easily than the larger, more stationary plates like Asia, causing uplift events like the Himalayas, Andes and Rockies.
What does that have to do with the parent post? An oxygen-rich atmosphere is hardly necessary for oceans.
Insightful? What idiots marked this insightful? Plants may prevent erosion short-term, even on an archeological time scale, but on a geologic time scale they accelerate erosion because they break up rocks so efficiently. Make big ones into small ones, and even if the roots hold it in place for 10,000 years that smaller rock is going to start heading for the ocean.
The other moons are also comparatively large and fairly close, adding more tidal flexing.
The first space probes were not supposed to carry cameras because it was thought that there would be little useful data returned from the visuals. Fortunately boosters and transmitters had sufficient extra capacity to add cameras, and the project scientists were quickly shown to be wrong.
We don't need proxies for the last hundred and some thousand years, as we have air samples trapped in ice from that entire stretch of time. At no point does it show such a high rate of increase, even when Krakatoa blew up.
Really? What brand did you get? We have a Samsung, and use half the amount of soap we normally would, and adjust the amount of washing time down ~40% from the default. We don't work in restaurants or dig ditches, but even with all the gardening and remodeling we do we never have any problem with clothes not getting clean. And almost any low-flow toilet manufactured in the last 15 years, including the cheapest Home Despot brand, will work better than the old 4-gallon flushers. My brother and brother-in-law are remodelers, they put a lot of them in, and haven't had a complaint about them for a decade.
So the answer is to just continue increasing CO2 emissions and population at an exponential rate because it's inconvenient to do otherwise? Large scale agricultural failure is going to be a lot more inconvenient and a lot more expensive. Third World peoples aren't going to be mired in poverty as much as they're going to die in droves when food gets priced out of their reach.
Actually there were no "new ice age scientists", there were a couple of journalists on a slow news week at Time Magazine who had learned about Milankovich Cycles and found that we should be well into the next glaciation cycle.
Did something like this deliberately once on an internal network, because the person needing access to the files was too inept to follow even the most basic instructions but too highly ranked to ignore. It was supposed to be temporary, but I then **forgot** to turn the security back on in the morning. A month later one of my bosses noticed she could get into HR data that she wasn't supposed to access and raised a red flag. Oops. Thank all the gods that our network didn't have remote access yet.
So you're saying there needs to be an Identification level of Internet of Things, an ID-IoT.
Much of (if not most of) the medical equipment was never intended to be put on the larger corporate network. For example MRI devices were supposed to write to a DVD and be sneaker-netted to wherever the images were to be analyzed because transferring that much data over a 10 megabit network was unreasonable. Gigabit networks changed the scenery, and manufacturers just slapped a network interface on them and foisted the security issue on hospital IT staff.
Kiddie porn sites have been found on Internet-connected multi-function printers, and at least one has been used as an entrance into a corporate network. An HVAC system was the point of entry for the Target attack. IoT junk will be used, probably sooner rather than later.
If someone is standing outside my door kicking it in there's a good chance one of the neighbors will call the cops, and if they see a broken window it's the same story. If someone walks up to the door and just walks in the neighbors will assume that they belong there. Some guy in a different country might be very interested in unlocking doors for his cousin/friend/business partner, or opening the garage door so that the moving van can back right in, especially if they have verified on your cameras that you're not home, your guard dog is a chihuahua, and the thermostat is set low enough that it's certain you won't be home for a number of hours.
What percentage of the population will be competent to take the thermostat off the wall and cross the wires? My wife would be afraid that she would be electrocuted, even if I were on the phone reassuring her that she wouldn't. A lot of people don't even have a screwdriver in the house. Really sad, but true.