OMG HTF can you even speak of prospering when this [Holocene extinction] is happening?
I already told you.
If you think it's some minor thing now, check back in.2K years when the human population has quintupled
Current projections show populations starting to level off.
not to mention the unimaginable social chaos and mass suffering that will no doubt exist
Conditions have generally improved for people as technology has increased. Anyways, you can wail and gnash your teeth all you like, I'd prefer to see humanity go beyond planet Earth and try and make the best of it.
You mean the site whose owner hired prostitutes to do their fact checking for them? Top notch. Oh, that's just "fake news". Or maybe not.
Poltifact? Proof offered has been, to be generous, lacking.
The site owned by a liberal-leaning newspaper, the Tampa Bay Times, that endorsed Clinton and consistently endorsed other Democrats running for office? The site that consistently finds Republicans lie more and more severely? Well, of course! I mean it can't be that they are injecting their own bias into the mix, right?
The right, however, drools, as Conservapedia proves so very well
The right has Conservapedia, and the left has "Rational" Wiki, a cesspit of feminism and other progressive causes.
See, I can smell the bullshit coming from both sides. It's just the mainstream media, as a matter of fact, leans to the left but likes to pretend they are non-partisan.
No, as I said, I believe we should strive to be better stewards of the planet. I'm just putting things into perspective, and don't believe we should flog ourselves into paralysis over it.
And at some point in time, humans will be one of the 99%. Big deal.
To quote myself from elsewhere in this thread: "You could be a nihilist about the whole thing, but others have loftier goals for humanity." And: " If your approach is a form of nihilism then there's nothing to discuss. You'll find that approach compelling, and I will not."
The explorers and immigrants went back, so it was clearly worth it.
They had to get there in the first place without knowing it was "worth it". And other than the fact that the immigrants made the judgment to go back, looking at it from a detached perspective it's hard to make a rational case that it was "worth it" on any individual level.
On the other hand, very few people are attracted to living in Siberia, the Australian outback, the Gobi desert, or Antarctica, all much more pleasant than Mars.
And yet there are people living in all those environments now. It must be "worth it", then. And there are plenty of people who alive right now who would be willing and desire to be a colonist of Mars. So by your own standard, it would be "worth it".
I suggest we wait another 1000 years.
I suggest we make continual baby steps instead of sitting on our hands. In a 1000 years time we might have already terraformed Mars by then.
When I read your comment it makes me feel really sad. If you are so completely blind as to how sick the human species is and to how appalling the destruction that the species is causing to it's home planet that you can speak of things like some kind of higher destiny or evolution with regard to spreading to another planet, you are truly lost.
And when I read your comment it makes me sad, but also somewhat disgusted, too, for your self-loathing. For you are so blind as to believe that humans are somehow unique in our desire to do what life does, which is go forth and prosper, often at the expense of other life. It's just that we're really good at it. You think the universe is some kind of sterile and pristine place that humans should not touch, or that we are "destroying" this planet.
Newsflash for you buddy, the "planet" has gone through much worse and will go through much worse. As just one example:
"Over geologic time sea level has fluctuated by hundreds of meters. Today's interglacial level is near historic highs and is 130 meters above the low level reached during the Last Glacial Maximum 19,000-20,000 years ago."
I can only give you a hint and say that evolution and manifest destiny, for a species that was not competely fucked, would not involve mass destruction of a precious web of life which took many millions of years to evolve because it couldn't ifgure out what the fuck it was doing.
Nature is cruel: "More than 99 percent of all species, amounting to over five billion species, that ever lived on Earth are estimated to be extinct."
It's not that I think we shouldn't strive to be better stewards to the planet, but neither should we sit around and flog ourselves for our failings.
Sad.
Go cry yourself to sleep then, because you typed your comment on a computer that reached my computer through infrastructure developed on an industrial scale, and there are dozens of similar modern conveniences you take for granted on a daily basis.
The Americas weren't exactly an extremely inhospitable desert, like Mars is. The explorers had breathable air, potable water, fertile ground, moderate temperatures, and no deadly radiation.
And yet, for all practical purposes, it was extremely dangerous and "not really worth it".
Our ancestors have survived billions of years here on Earth, going through multiple large impacts.
Yes, but that doesn't rule out the possibility that we'll encounter one we won't survive. But my ultimate argument is for humanity to have loftier goals beyond merely surviving on Earth until the Sun makes the planet inhospitable.
Yeah, well, unless the aliens are watching who's gonna know?
And if we all decided to collectively commit suicide nobody would know, either. I don't think "who's gonna know" is a compelling argument. If your approach is a form of nihilism then there's nothing to discuss. You'll find that approach compelling, and I will not.
Other stars are too far, and going through insane amounts of trouble just to add an extremely inhospitable desert to the Earth isn't really worth it.
Same could be said about explorers, and the immigrants that followed, crossing an ocean to discover and settle the Americas. But I don't think we should go crazy getting to Mars and beyond. If we just keep taking baby steps we'll get there eventually.
If humanity ends here on Earth, then a Mars colony isn't going to last much longer.
If a life-ending asteroid impacted the Earth, Mars could stand a chance as a backup. But even if humanity lasted on Earth until the Sun made it inhabitable, it would be a sad legacy if we never spread our wings beyond our home planet.
And he's still a useful idiot, championing "progressive" causes, even though he's experienced firsthand just how shitty the never-ending grievances from the cult of victimhood can be.
I really can't understand what the fascination with Mars is.
Manifest destiny. To spread humanity beyond planet Earth, to other planets, and ultimately to other stars. You could ask, "Why?", and the likely answer is evolution instilled the desire for life to spread. You could be a nihilist about the whole thing, but others have loftier goals for humanity.
Then maybe you should stop letting people walk all over you while playing the Oppression Olympics. You're not helping anybody. Here, enjoy some Thomas Sowell.
That's an easy thing to say if you're a straight, white male
Maybe you should fuck off with your identity politics, then, and take some personal responsibility for your life instead of playing the Oppression Olympics.
Again, the two parties are not the same: one fights for right, and one fights for evil.
Communists were fighting for the "right" for the people against the "evil" capitalists, and ended up causing more death, destruction, and misery than any other ideology in the 20th century.
the technology is already pretty advanced and the computing power is there to make it work [..] Next gen will already be the one that is "there".
The number one limiting factor with VR is motion sickness and the fact that your body does not experience the motion presented on screen. Solving this would require some sort of at home motion device, and the whole thing just seems too bulky and impractical for widespread adoption.
VR will be "there" when we've got neural implants and a connecting socket on the back of our heads.
Yet you still have to take Mozilla for their word just like Microsoft. Both companies could be lying about what they collect.
One of them is open source, the other is closed source. Furthermore, I don't even run a binary directly from Mozilla, I use a binary from Debian. And finally, while ultimately there is some trust involved, until now Microsoft has been dedicated to non-transparency and being aggressive about collecting information, while Mozilla is relatively straightforward and transparent.
All incidents of data harvesting are equally wrong.
No, the world is not black and white. Otherwise Richard Stallman would be a practical person instead of out on an idealistic island. People like Stallman are useful as standard bearers, but in the real world we deal with practical choices that require us to distinguish between varying degrees of "wrong".
Ok, if the problem is so serious, then why not solve it with climate engineering? It's apparent that solving it by reducing carbon footprint is economically disadvantageous and politically untenable.
Not that it matters though. I believe almost everyone does this nowadays.
Then use an operating system that respects your privacy and TOR. While that probably won't stop the CIA or the NSA, it should opt you out of the vast majority of data collection.
Some open source supporters will make claims like "But they're being transparent!" or "But you can opt out!" or some other nonsense like that.
But guess what? None of that matters!
It does matter. It's relatively trivial to opt out of Mozilla's data collection and to know what's being collected, whereas that's absolutely not the case with Microsoft. So when you say shit like this:
"we cannot consider them to be any better than Windows, or conversely, we can't consider Windows to be any worse than projects like Firefox"
I know you're either shilling for Microsoft or being idealistically stupid about practical differences.
Slashdot Mirror
OMG HTF can you even speak of prospering when this [Holocene extinction] is happening?
I already told you.
If you think it's some minor thing now, check back in .2K years when the human population has quintupled
Current projections show populations starting to level off.
not to mention the unimaginable social chaos and mass suffering that will no doubt exist
Conditions have generally improved for people as technology has increased. Anyways, you can wail and gnash your teeth all you like, I'd prefer to see humanity go beyond planet Earth and try and make the best of it.
Snopes? not a chance
You mean the site whose owner hired prostitutes to do their fact checking for them? Top notch. Oh, that's just "fake news". Or maybe not.
Poltifact? Proof offered has been, to be generous, lacking.
The site owned by a liberal-leaning newspaper, the Tampa Bay Times, that endorsed Clinton and consistently endorsed other Democrats running for office? The site that consistently finds Republicans lie more and more severely? Well, of course! I mean it can't be that they are injecting their own bias into the mix, right?
The right, however, drools, as Conservapedia proves so very well
The right has Conservapedia, and the left has "Rational" Wiki, a cesspit of feminism and other progressive causes.
See, I can smell the bullshit coming from both sides. It's just the mainstream media, as a matter of fact, leans to the left but likes to pretend they are non-partisan.
You're a nihilist regarding 99% of the species.
No, as I said, I believe we should strive to be better stewards of the planet. I'm just putting things into perspective, and don't believe we should flog ourselves into paralysis over it.
I include the other 1% as well.
Congratulations, and good bye.
And at some point in time, humans will be one of the 99%. Big deal.
To quote myself from elsewhere in this thread: "You could be a nihilist about the whole thing, but others have loftier goals for humanity." And: " If your approach is a form of nihilism then there's nothing to discuss. You'll find that approach compelling, and I will not."
The explorers and immigrants went back, so it was clearly worth it.
They had to get there in the first place without knowing it was "worth it". And other than the fact that the immigrants made the judgment to go back, looking at it from a detached perspective it's hard to make a rational case that it was "worth it" on any individual level.
On the other hand, very few people are attracted to living in Siberia, the Australian outback, the Gobi desert, or Antarctica, all much more pleasant than Mars.
And yet there are people living in all those environments now. It must be "worth it", then. And there are plenty of people who alive right now who would be willing and desire to be a colonist of Mars. So by your own standard, it would be "worth it".
I suggest we wait another 1000 years.
I suggest we make continual baby steps instead of sitting on our hands. In a 1000 years time we might have already terraformed Mars by then.
When I read your comment it makes me feel really sad. If you are so completely blind as to how sick the human species is and to how appalling the destruction that the species is causing to it's home planet that you can speak of things like some kind of higher destiny or evolution with regard to spreading to another planet, you are truly lost.
And when I read your comment it makes me sad, but also somewhat disgusted, too, for your self-loathing. For you are so blind as to believe that humans are somehow unique in our desire to do what life does, which is go forth and prosper, often at the expense of other life. It's just that we're really good at it. You think the universe is some kind of sterile and pristine place that humans should not touch, or that we are "destroying" this planet.
Newsflash for you buddy, the "planet" has gone through much worse and will go through much worse. As just one example:
"Over geologic time sea level has fluctuated by hundreds of meters. Today's interglacial level is near historic highs and is 130 meters above the low level reached during the Last Glacial Maximum 19,000-20,000 years ago."
I can only give you a hint and say that evolution and manifest destiny, for a species that was not competely fucked, would not involve mass destruction of a precious web of life which took many millions of years to evolve because it couldn't ifgure out what the fuck it was doing.
Nature is cruel: "More than 99 percent of all species, amounting to over five billion species, that ever lived on Earth are estimated to be extinct."
It's not that I think we shouldn't strive to be better stewards to the planet, but neither should we sit around and flog ourselves for our failings.
Sad.
Go cry yourself to sleep then, because you typed your comment on a computer that reached my computer through infrastructure developed on an industrial scale, and there are dozens of similar modern conveniences you take for granted on a daily basis.
You know the most interesting thing about manifest destiny is that it doesn't exist. It's just a made up thing.
It exists as I laid it out. Maybe for you evolution, instincts, and drives are just a "made up thing".
The Americas weren't exactly an extremely inhospitable desert, like Mars is. The explorers had breathable air, potable water, fertile ground, moderate temperatures, and no deadly radiation.
And yet, for all practical purposes, it was extremely dangerous and "not really worth it".
Our ancestors have survived billions of years here on Earth, going through multiple large impacts.
Yes, but that doesn't rule out the possibility that we'll encounter one we won't survive. But my ultimate argument is for humanity to have loftier goals beyond merely surviving on Earth until the Sun makes the planet inhospitable.
Yeah, well, unless the aliens are watching who's gonna know?
And if we all decided to collectively commit suicide nobody would know, either. I don't think "who's gonna know" is a compelling argument. If your approach is a form of nihilism then there's nothing to discuss. You'll find that approach compelling, and I will not.
Other stars are too far, and going through insane amounts of trouble just to add an extremely inhospitable desert to the Earth isn't really worth it.
Same could be said about explorers, and the immigrants that followed, crossing an ocean to discover and settle the Americas. But I don't think we should go crazy getting to Mars and beyond. If we just keep taking baby steps we'll get there eventually.
If humanity ends here on Earth, then a Mars colony isn't going to last much longer.
If a life-ending asteroid impacted the Earth, Mars could stand a chance as a backup. But even if humanity lasted on Earth until the Sun made it inhabitable, it would be a sad legacy if we never spread our wings beyond our home planet.
Same thing happened with Joss Whedon.
And he's still a useful idiot, championing "progressive" causes, even though he's experienced firsthand just how shitty the never-ending grievances from the cult of victimhood can be.
I really can't understand what the fascination with Mars is.
Manifest destiny. To spread humanity beyond planet Earth, to other planets, and ultimately to other stars. You could ask, "Why?", and the likely answer is evolution instilled the desire for life to spread. You could be a nihilist about the whole thing, but others have loftier goals for humanity.
Straight, white males (myself included)
Then maybe you should stop letting people walk all over you while playing the Oppression Olympics. You're not helping anybody. Here, enjoy some Thomas Sowell.
That's an easy thing to say if you're a straight, white male
Maybe you should fuck off with your identity politics, then, and take some personal responsibility for your life instead of playing the Oppression Olympics.
Again, the two parties are not the same: one fights for right, and one fights for evil.
Communists were fighting for the "right" for the people against the "evil" capitalists, and ended up causing more death, destruction, and misery than any other ideology in the 20th century.
Don't worry, guys. The left has fact-checked itself and determined that they have no bias.
the technology is already pretty advanced and the computing power is there to make it work [..] Next gen will already be the one that is "there".
The number one limiting factor with VR is motion sickness and the fact that your body does not experience the motion presented on screen. Solving this would require some sort of at home motion device, and the whole thing just seems too bulky and impractical for widespread adoption.
VR will be "there" when we've got neural implants and a connecting socket on the back of our heads.
I don't care about the motion sickness
Huh. It's the number one reason I wouldn't pick up a VR headset at this time.
Most people who are upset by SJWs are upset because they've been called out on their bullshit.
They're tired of the never-ending victim brigade over bullshit grievances, like Halloween costumes.
A lot of guys are just too old fashioned to want to here criticism from a woman.
And some guys just want to White Knight for women, regardless of merit.
vile racist troll Bannon
And I'm sure you have evidence that he's racist besides the term being thrown around like popcorn in a movie theater riot.
Yet you still have to take Mozilla for their word just like Microsoft. Both companies could be lying about what they collect.
One of them is open source, the other is closed source. Furthermore, I don't even run a binary directly from Mozilla, I use a binary from Debian. And finally, while ultimately there is some trust involved, until now Microsoft has been dedicated to non-transparency and being aggressive about collecting information, while Mozilla is relatively straightforward and transparent.
All incidents of data harvesting are equally wrong.
No, the world is not black and white. Otherwise Richard Stallman would be a practical person instead of out on an idealistic island. People like Stallman are useful as standard bearers, but in the real world we deal with practical choices that require us to distinguish between varying degrees of "wrong".
Ok, if the problem is so serious, then why not solve it with climate engineering? It's apparent that solving it by reducing carbon footprint is economically disadvantageous and politically untenable.
Not that it matters though. I believe almost everyone does this nowadays.
Then use an operating system that respects your privacy and TOR. While that probably won't stop the CIA or the NSA, it should opt you out of the vast majority of data collection.
Some open source supporters will make claims like "But they're being transparent!" or "But you can opt out!" or some other nonsense like that.
But guess what? None of that matters!
It does matter. It's relatively trivial to opt out of Mozilla's data collection and to know what's being collected, whereas that's absolutely not the case with Microsoft. So when you say shit like this:
"we cannot consider them to be any better than Windows, or conversely, we can't consider Windows to be any worse than projects like Firefox"
I know you're either shilling for Microsoft or being idealistically stupid about practical differences.