My point was that it does not have to be unsustainable.
Yes. If you keep the scale small enough, it can be sustainable. Unfortunately, in that case it also won't be able to produce a lot of stuff, and/or don't produce the stuff that you actually want because it's not suited to rainforest soil.
The mongabay.com site even has direct explanations on why rainforest soil is poor and will wear out very quickly if used for large-scale farming.
Ummm, correct me if I'm wrong, but no one is holding a gun to the farmer's head and forcing him to buy sterile crops.
No one's keeping their neighbor's terminator-polluted seeds away from their still viable crops, either.
If it's too expensive, he'll simply stick with traditional crops and keep the extra money.
He can't, sorry. Once his fields were pollinated with terminator-carrying pollen from his neighbor's field, he's pretty much outta luck and has to pay the corp tax.
However, could it be possible that maybe, just maybe, the productivity benefits from GM crops plus the savings from using fewer *icides more than offsets the extra expense from having to buy seed every year, not to mention the extra expense from paying the patent tax on these new crops?
A lot of the GM plants are engineered to tolerate *icides, so that *icides can be used more liberally.
Last time I checked the US didn't cover a lot of the world that isn't North America. And in other places (especially poor ones) farmers still grow their own seeds.
First, indirect genetic manipulation has wiped out lots of people. Ask anyone who switched to corn as a primary grain but didn't adopt nixtamalization. Oh wait, you can't, they all died.
What does "cooking corn in alkali solution" have to do with "indirect genetic manipulation" (aka selective breeding) ? What bodily orifice did you pull that argument out of ?
Second, direct genetic manipulation hasn't wiped out lots of people or "entire groups of species" at any time in the past, so there's no evidence that it's even as dangerous than indirect manipulation.
And we've got, what, a whopping twenty years worth of experience (as opposed to several orders of magnitude more years for the indirect variant) ?
We also have quite a bit of experience on what happens when you introduce foreign species into some ecosystem where they happen to have a huge advantage. Combine that with GMs ability to create species that are completely foreign to any existing ecosystem and draw some conclusions.
The way that it kills plants it to give them too much growth hormone and that burns the plant out.
Yikes.
Roundup interferes with certain metabolic pathways that only plants have, which produce aromatic amino acids. Basically, the stuff is a nasty poison but only if you're a plant.
Round-Up doesn't kill vertebrates, but interferes with certain hormones, which aren't critical for survival, but it might give guys tits and make them infertile.
I won't disagree per say, but what makes you believe that new foods created by direct genetic manipulation are any more or less dangerous than new foods created by indirect genetic manipulation?
Because "indirect" genetic manipulation has been around for a lot longer than humans have, and it has rarely wiped out entire groups of species within a short span of time.
Same thing goes for the Large Hadron Collider et al. We're pretty sure that they won't create miniature black holes or negative strangelets that will gobble up earth in a matter of days because collisions at the energies produces by these things happen all the time when cosmic rays strike our upper atmosphere. Now, if we were to significantly exceed the energies of cosmic rays with a new particle accelerator, we'd have to be more careful.
"Natural" does not and never has meant "perfectly safe, non-toxic, and actually miraculously good for you!!!!!"
No. It means "it's been around for quite a while and we know fairly well what it does, and/or it changes slowly enough that we'll be able notice any changes before they kill us". Of course, the latter part only goes for organisms with relatively long generation cycles (longer than a few hours).
Even worse, the Terminator genes are dominant. Which has a very devastating effect if introduced by a single farmer in places where farmers still use some of their harvest as seeds for the next year.
Again, they're just going to head on down to Africa and give the formula and modifcation apparatuses out alone the Nile? "Here ya go folks, grow better corn!"
Of course they'll do that. And after everyone has switched over, and the remaining local breeds of corn have been polluted with the terminator pollen from the GM corn, then they'll start charging an arm and a leg for their seeds.
Cleared rainforest land doesn't stay productive for very long due to the very thin layer of fertile soil underneath the rainforest. If you want to keep production up, you need to keep clearing rainforest (until you run out), and essentially leave behind an unproductive desert.
Essentially, you can play this game for maybe a handful of decades, then you're back at the starting point, minus all of the rainforest you started with. I wouldn't call that sustainable, exactly.
Between 30,000 and 50,000 thousand people die of starvation every day.
So ? How is GM going to solve the problems of distribution (as in: how do you get food to people in a frickin war zone ?) ? Starvation isn't a problem of there being not enough food on this planet (not yet, anyways. This might change with the growing world population, overfishing of the oceans and climate change). It's a problem of getting the food where it is needed. Usually, the people there could feed themselves just fines if it weren't for the idiots making war.
Their sole purpose is to protest technological progress.
I wouldn't call whaling "technological progress". Also, I haven't seen Greenpeace protest against technological progress in the field of, say, solar power.
But not about the technology, but about its consequences.
Getting humans to mars is one example. There are dozens of ways it could be done.
Yes. But a story that involves chemical rockets, spacesuits and a sometimes boring and long flight is more "science" than one involving warp drives and holodecks.
And we do not know the consequences of genetic tampering we do.
But the technology to do such tampering exists today. The story might be fiction, but the tools and principles used are not.
The point of science fiction is to speculate about the future, and that nearly always involves technology that is not invented yet,
Pick Science Fiction that involves technology that already exists, but right now isn't being used because of, um, budget constraints or other reasons (ethical, practical, whatever).
Getting humans to Mars and back would be one of the many examples. Sure, if you threw enough money at it, it could be done with todays technology.
Or surveillance societies. Ok, what goes on today is bad enough, but the technology for making things ten times worse exists already.
Or genetics. What would happen if messing around with the human genome wouldn't raise any huge ethical red flags ?
The Copenhagen University researchers argue that biology and medical textbooks that say nerves relay electrical impulses from the brain to the rest of the body are incorrect.
A single nerve cell transmits information by having a depolarized zone travel down the axon, which is an electrochemical process.
Information travels between nerve cells through synapses, which can either be chemical (using a neurotransmitter) or "electric" (electrochemical).
So if these guys claim that biology and medical textbooks talk about electrical impulses, maybe they need to get some real textbooks first and non some pop-sci ones.
gamma knife= bad at best, horrible in practice. There IS NO SAFE LEVEL FOR IONIZING RADIATION.
That's not necessary. The function of tissue_damage(irradiation) only needs to be nonlinear, and preferably start out fairly flat and increase in steepness with increasing irradiation.
Pretty much every effective cancer treatment has fairly nasty side effects. Did you know that the first chemotherapy agents were direct derivatives of mustard gas ?
but is the fired particle small enough to pass through the biological matter ?
Looking at one particle is fairly meaningless.
Some particles will hit stuff inside the target (depending on density, thickness, atomic makeup and such) and be scattered/absorbed, some will hit nothing and emerge at the other end.
Thanks for pointing that out, but I don't believe it for one second.
Radiation is radiation. Matter is matter.
So alpha radiation would be... ?
I know what the article says, but unless they have developed some sort of magical anti-matter beam, this does not solve the problem of selectivity.
It does, to some degree. Different types of radiation have different energy distribution characteristics when they hit the body. Alpha particles pretty much deposit all of their energy within the first few millimeters of tissue (maybe even less), Xrays drop off exponentially and/or are scattered by bones, and some types of particle radiation deliver most of the energy at a point that is a few cm inside the body. Antimatter radiation is one such type.
If you can make sure that the tumor you want to kill is precisely those few cm inside the body, you can kill it fairly selectively without depositing too much energy in healthy tissue.
Because you haven't considered all the implications of it, I guess.
You should be able to peddle whatever you want, as long as it's voluntarily done.
Life and freedom, too ? I'm pretty sure there is a market for deadly gladiator tv shows, vital organs and personal slaves, and people who are desperate/stupid/crazy enough to sign up for them.
Or how about the right to vote ? I'm sure plenty of people would gladly trade it for some extra $$.
No US business is stupid enough to hire someone they know is just going to up and leave in a couple of months when their non-compete runs out.
I'm sure the local burger joint / xyz-Mart wouldn't really care. In fact, that's one less employee who'll want a raise next year.
And I'd consider them fair, since the entire purpose of a contract is to come to a fair agreement.
I'm just glad that where I live, the right to chose your employer is embedded in the constitution and you are prohibited from peddling your constitutional rights to some corporate overlord.
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Yes. If you keep the scale small enough, it can be sustainable. Unfortunately, in that case it also won't be able to produce a lot of stuff, and/or don't produce the stuff that you actually want because it's not suited to rainforest soil.
The mongabay.com site even has direct explanations on why rainforest soil is poor and will wear out very quickly if used for large-scale farming.
No one's keeping their neighbor's terminator-polluted seeds away from their still viable crops, either.
If it's too expensive, he'll simply stick with traditional crops and keep the extra money.
He can't, sorry. Once his fields were pollinated with terminator-carrying pollen from his neighbor's field, he's pretty much outta luck and has to pay the corp tax.
However, could it be possible that maybe, just maybe, the productivity benefits from GM crops plus the savings from using fewer *icides more than offsets the extra expense from having to buy seed every year, not to mention the extra expense from paying the patent tax on these new crops?
A lot of the GM plants are engineered to tolerate *icides, so that *icides can be used more liberally.
Crawl back under your rock, Mr. AC.
Last time I checked the US didn't cover a lot of the world that isn't North America. And in other places (especially poor ones) farmers still grow their own seeds.
What does "cooking corn in alkali solution" have to do with "indirect genetic manipulation" (aka selective breeding) ? What bodily orifice did you pull that argument out of ? Second, direct genetic manipulation hasn't wiped out lots of people or "entire groups of species" at any time in the past, so there's no evidence that it's even as dangerous than indirect manipulation.
And we've got, what, a whopping twenty years worth of experience (as opposed to several orders of magnitude more years for the indirect variant) ?
We also have quite a bit of experience on what happens when you introduce foreign species into some ecosystem where they happen to have a huge advantage. Combine that with GMs ability to create species that are completely foreign to any existing ecosystem and draw some conclusions.
Yikes.
Roundup interferes with certain metabolic pathways that only plants have, which produce aromatic amino acids. Basically, the stuff is a nasty poison but only if you're a plant.
Round-Up doesn't kill vertebrates, but interferes with certain hormones, which aren't critical for survival, but it might give guys tits and make them infertile.
If you don't see it, you need to read a few books on statistics.
Because "indirect" genetic manipulation has been around for a lot longer than humans have, and it has rarely wiped out entire groups of species within a short span of time.
Same thing goes for the Large Hadron Collider et al. We're pretty sure that they won't create miniature black holes or negative strangelets that will gobble up earth in a matter of days because collisions at the energies produces by these things happen all the time when cosmic rays strike our upper atmosphere. Now, if we were to significantly exceed the energies of cosmic rays with a new particle accelerator, we'd have to be more careful.
No. It means "it's been around for quite a while and we know fairly well what it does, and/or it changes slowly enough that we'll be able notice any changes before they kill us". Of course, the latter part only goes for organisms with relatively long generation cycles (longer than a few hours).
Not unless you consider the Bible a valid source. The appropriate quote is about beams and splinters.
Even worse, the Terminator genes are dominant. Which has a very devastating effect if introduced by a single farmer in places where farmers still use some of their harvest as seeds for the next year.
Of course they'll do that. And after everyone has switched over, and the remaining local breeds of corn have been polluted with the terminator pollen from the GM corn, then they'll start charging an arm and a leg for their seeds.
Cleared rainforest land doesn't stay productive for very long due to the very thin layer of fertile soil underneath the rainforest. If you want to keep production up, you need to keep clearing rainforest (until you run out), and essentially leave behind an unproductive desert.
Essentially, you can play this game for maybe a handful of decades, then you're back at the starting point, minus all of the rainforest you started with. I wouldn't call that sustainable, exactly.
So ? How is GM going to solve the problems of distribution (as in: how do you get food to people in a frickin war zone ?) ? Starvation isn't a problem of there being not enough food on this planet (not yet, anyways. This might change with the growing world population, overfishing of the oceans and climate change). It's a problem of getting the food where it is needed. Usually, the people there could feed themselves just fines if it weren't for the idiots making war.
I think you're looking for this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nixtamalization
I wouldn't call whaling "technological progress". Also, I haven't seen Greenpeace protest against technological progress in the field of, say, solar power.
But not about the technology, but about its consequences.
Getting humans to mars is one example. There are dozens of ways it could be done.
Yes. But a story that involves chemical rockets, spacesuits and a sometimes boring and long flight is more "science" than one involving warp drives and holodecks.
And we do not know the consequences of genetic tampering we do.
But the technology to do such tampering exists today. The story might be fiction, but the tools and principles used are not.
Pick Science Fiction that involves technology that already exists, but right now isn't being used because of, um, budget constraints or other reasons (ethical, practical, whatever).
Getting humans to Mars and back would be one of the many examples. Sure, if you threw enough money at it, it could be done with todays technology.
Or surveillance societies. Ok, what goes on today is bad enough, but the technology for making things ten times worse exists already.
Or genetics. What would happen if messing around with the human genome wouldn't raise any huge ethical red flags ?
A single nerve cell transmits information by having a depolarized zone travel down the axon, which is an electrochemical process.
Information travels between nerve cells through synapses, which can either be chemical (using a neurotransmitter) or "electric" (electrochemical).
So if these guys claim that biology and medical textbooks talk about electrical impulses, maybe they need to get some real textbooks first and non some pop-sci ones.
You forgot the costs to actually run the thing.
That's not necessary. The function of tissue_damage(irradiation) only needs to be nonlinear, and preferably start out fairly flat and increase in steepness with increasing irradiation.
Pretty much every effective cancer treatment has fairly nasty side effects. Did you know that the first chemotherapy agents were direct derivatives of mustard gas ?
Some particles will hit stuff inside the target (depending on density, thickness, atomic makeup and such) and be scattered/absorbed, some will hit nothing and emerge at the other end.
Radiation is radiation. Matter is matter.
So alpha radiation would be
I know what the article says, but unless they have developed some sort of magical anti-matter beam, this does not solve the problem of selectivity.
It does, to some degree. Different types of radiation have different energy distribution characteristics when they hit the body. Alpha particles pretty much deposit all of their energy within the first few millimeters of tissue (maybe even less), Xrays drop off exponentially and/or are scattered by bones, and some types of particle radiation deliver most of the energy at a point that is a few cm inside the body. Antimatter radiation is one such type.
If you can make sure that the tumor you want to kill is precisely those few cm inside the body, you can kill it fairly selectively without depositing too much energy in healthy tissue.
Because you haven't considered all the implications of it, I guess.
You should be able to peddle whatever you want, as long as it's voluntarily done.
Life and freedom, too ? I'm pretty sure there is a market for deadly gladiator tv shows, vital organs and personal slaves, and people who are desperate/stupid/crazy enough to sign up for them.
Or how about the right to vote ? I'm sure plenty of people would gladly trade it for some extra $$.
As I said - I can adapt to pretty much any other field. But why should I be forced to do that if my expertise is worth much more on the job market ?
I'm sure the local burger joint / xyz-Mart wouldn't really care. In fact, that's one less employee who'll want a raise next year.
And I'd consider them fair, since the entire purpose of a contract is to come to a fair agreement.
I'm just glad that where I live, the right to chose your employer is embedded in the constitution and you are prohibited from peddling your constitutional rights to some corporate overlord.