Well, okay... but:

I still feel Dyson spheres are wildly implausible, no matter how you try and redefine them ... I feel faster than light travel is at least as implausible as Dyson spheres,

What do your feelings have to do with the issue? One idea violates known physics, and the other is just a massive engineering project-- and that project starts seeming more plausible when you realize it's doable in small stages, e.g. one way you get to a "Dyson sphere" is you start out with a few orbiting solar collectors beaming power to where you need it. If that works for you, you'd build more, right? And if you keep doing that for a hundred years, where would you end up?

Hey, someone actually read the article. Cool.

Yeah, that quote complaining about anti-nuclear hyperbole is one of the things I liked in the story. (You know, I thought that reputable newspapers had standards for words like "disaster", and they would refuse to use it if they didn't have evidence of massive deaths... but the rules are different on anti-nuclear news).

But I've been gradually coming to the conclusion that you want to be careful about making a claim like "no one died because of Fukushima", not because it's wrong (it might not be quite right, but it's certainly a defensible position), but because you can't get anyone to believe you. The people you're trying to convince will just file you in the "crazy" bin, and shut-down their ears. We've got to tug on the edge of the Okrent window a little more gently than that.

It's facing power hungry well financed "green" anti-nuclear lobby, financed by coal and oil, which are loving the Fukushima by the way, they likely paid for most of the lobby financing done in last century just on last two year buildup in Japan and Germany alone.

Hm... well I like a good conspiracy theory, myself, but I was going to caution you that toning this one down would probably help The Cause more, but actually this is the mirror-image of the kind of reasoning that lefties like to use, where money automatically implies corruption... it'd be interesting to see how they respond to this one.

But really, I think that many of the big corporations involved don't really care that much... they don't really specialize in one form of energy, and if you'd rather they make money on nuclear than coal or oil, I doubt they care that much. (On the other hand, "clean coal" is clearly a PR-campaign pipe-dream, if you ask me, so maybe I'm over-simplifying.)

As I understand it, there is a long-standing problem that results from this: the obvious defense of nuclear is that it's way better than coal, but the utility companies refuse to make that argument, because they don't want people taking aim at their coal plants.

TheRealLifeboy:

It will probably have a good effect on life in general and prevent a lot of cancer. This is why no-one has died from radiation sickness at Fukushima and probably won't in future either.

And the link goes to this letter, describing the case of people living exposed to Cobalt-60. TheRealLifeboy is referring to here the question of whether the danger of radioactive exposure scales down to low dosage in a linear way (the assumption our safety rules are based on), or whether the danger levels off at some point, and there's a threshold below which it's not dangerous, and may even be beneficial ("radiation hormeisis").

Myself, I would say that this is essentially an open question, with some evidence pointing either way. More importantly though, it isn't necessary for there to be a "safe threshold" for nuclear power to be safe, relative to other sources of power. Our safety rules make the more conservative assumption, so this isn't really an issue.

And as a fellow pro-nuke kind of guy, take it from me: the Okrent Window is way out there compared to this position. It doesn't matter whether it's true, you don't want to make the assertion because it just sounds too crazy to the people you want to convince. You need to say stuff like "the number of deaths caused by the Fukushima incident are far lower than many people realize", you don't want to say stuff like this:

Radiation (as high as 800 mSv aoording to the original research) is actually good for you!

I was just thinking that this "smart technology" acts like a useful intelligence test: anyone who actually tries to use it while driving is clearly too stupid to be driving (or do anything else). We could improve the state of humanity quite a bit if we executed people who think they can drive while texting. The trouble is you can only use that trick once, after that they'd probably modify their behavior, and you'd have to think of some other way of identifying them in the next generation.

This needs to become part of law and driving instructions. Fiddling with any kind of touch screen when in a driving lane needs to be against the law.

I have a suggestion, instead of creating a new law to cover each new gadget that someone invents, why don't we invent a single category, like say, "distracted driving" and actually enforce it?

And if you don't want people using the features the manufacturer is putting in the car, maybe we could have some laws targeting the manufacturer... or how about we reduce corporate liability shields to the point where the manufacturer begins to worry that their products are killing people?

I am not sure why you guys keep going on about Dyson spheres. Dyson's original concept was a guess that every civilization expands to the point where it needs all the radiation emitted by it's sun, and hence it does something to capture it all (literally building a fixed sphere around it isn't actually necessary). The point then is that rather than looking for civilizations blasting radio waves everywhere, you might look for places where the emitted radiation has been shifted down into the infrared, because everything gets used besides the waste heat.

Dyson spheres are (a) not particularly absurd-- unlike say faster-than-light interstellar travel-- and (b) not particularly easy to identify.

(And by the way... just because someone sounds Very Serious and Skeptical and puts on a debunker's sneer does not at all mean they know what they're talking about.)

I like the "obserd" coinage, but myself I would use it to mean something that's completely absurd, and yet has been observed anyway, and must be accepted as fact.

(You know, like 38% of Republicans are still "tea party supporters".)

The first thing everyone *used* to say to the Fermi Paradox is "maybe they all blow themselves up in nuclear wars".

This kind of remark is very parochial and a clear sign of Not Getting It.

Maybe 99% of them blow themselves up. Maybe another 99% of the ones that slip through that create an eco-catastrophe. Maybe another 99% get nailed by something else we don't know about.

These factors all get applied to a *huge* starting number, they cut the result way down but they don't reduce it to zero, and zero is what we see.

(Or actually, one.)

Smartphones are ubiquitous when people are out.

Yeah, but after they're all hit by buses, we'll need to start over again with something else.

Though progressives often have these strange justifications for more government regulation.

Yes, like this for example. The fact that the US has remarkably bad and horribly expensive health care is just the silliest excuse for government intervention.

(Note: Tea Partiers and Libertarians want other people to spend less. They, themselves, are by far the worst of the pork barrel spenders.)

Who do you think are the Libertarians in Congress? The only one I know of is Justin Amash.

Oh right! "True libertarianism has never been tried", right? It's funny, you know, the socialists say the same things about socialism. Perhaps you would like to go off into the corner and commiserate with them...

(The present crop of Republicans has certainly been acting like they want to drown the government in a bathtub. )

That being said, any fantasy about humanity being at risk for significant biological hardship is ludicrous considering that we can eat almost anything, live almost anywhere, are more resistant and adaptive to toxins and pathogens than most other large animals, and we have this thing called "technology" that allows us to move anything anywhere, radically adjust our environments, etc.

Mm, mmm... jellyfish burgers, my favorite.

And when the guys next door are bombing each other for their oil reserves, you can just get in your SUV and drive away from them.