There's a small technical difference between building floaty things out of sticks that can go some distance in a quite hospitable environment and building flying things capable of 100% support of life in extremely hostile high radiation/zero gravity/no atmosphere/low temperature conditions across distances between stars.

The nearest star is just about 2.5 billion times farther than a 10k mile sea voyage.

Anyway, I didn't say I'd just believe what they said. I said I'd listen very carefully, and very politely.

--PM

I'll listen very carefully. A civilization that has managed to get across the interstellar gulf alive, and chooses to tell us about some religion, well, I'll listen to them with full attention, and as open a mind as I can manage.

And I'll also listen very politely.

--PeterM

To reply to my own post, I did a bit more research:
http://abcnews.go.com/Health/e...

This story says that the person didn't start having symptoms until well after his flight. It's doubtful he contaminated the plane at all. So it's just him and his close contacts from when he started to become show symptoms.

--PM

From what I read it will be necessary to monitor the DIRECT contacts with the sick person, not "the close contacts to all those people", because the close contacts have not yet had time to start having symptoms and become contagious.

So it's a planeload of people, and other people who used that plane.

--PM

What the people on there have said will halfway convince you that Ebola is going to fix our population problem for us.

I mean, is there a good place to PUT IT so that something good can be made to happen? (Instead of pure waste?)

I've regularly seen situations where throwing more money than a certain amount at something simply doesn't help. You can only ramp up programs so fast, bring equipment into operation so fast, get people in, trained, and working productively so fast.

It's quite possible that President Obama asked the people doing the work, "how much money can you absorb right now to accelerate things?" and got told "maybe $30M...?" So he got them $58M.

Adding any more money to their efforts would just be waste. I know that my organization could absorb maybe $20M in "surprise" funding productively in a single year, any more than that and we'd just sit on the money or send it back. (I would hope we wouldn't waste it.)

If we KNEW we were going to get a year-on-year increase, and were given carte blanche to hire people and support so we could write contracts as much as we wanted, we could ramp up over a year or two to use $200M or more productively, but in a single year? No way.

Best,

--PeterM

Add nuclear weapons to the massive societal disruptions you mention, and you might indeed have a situation that's unsurvivable by humans as a species....

--PM

It's exactly what he says it is, a stupid theory, and he knows it!
I don't know HOW he got a +5 interesting moderation on it!

At most a +3 funny.

I mean, can you IMAGINE the dam structure you'd need to create a pool of water deep enough to float a block of stone to the top of the pyramid? Hint, it'd dwarf the pyramid!

Now, for getting the BASE of the pyramid really flat, yeah, a big shallow pool of water might have helped a lot with that, but anything above it? Not so much!

--PM

Subject says it all. Alcohol is considered harmless, but it isn't. That said, I don't support banning it. I just think it mostly isn't a good idea to use it for psychoactive effects.

--PM

You have very good points about the safety and waste disposal issues as advantages of fusion over fission.

Actually, I'm not claiming to KNOW that fusion will be uneconomical. I'm just AFRAID that it might forever be uneconomical. The capital costs seem monumental to me. By posing it as a question I was hoping someone who knew better would weigh in on the topic.

Honestly, I don't have a basis of knowledge on the topic to form any conclusion, and it's quite possible that until it is tried, no one *can* know with any certainty. If the answer is "no one knows", I support going on with fusion research until we figure that out.

--PeterM

Actually, I disagree that a fission plant and a fusion plant of the same capacity are "the same" in terms of complexity.

In a fission reactor:
You don't need superconducting magnets to contain the fuel
The fuel doesn't have to be kept in a near vacuum
You don't need lots of gyrotrons to heat up the fuel
The heat flux doesn't have to be kept away from the superconducing magnets
The neutron flux is stopped pretty much right in the reactor, heating the coolant, whereas in a fusion reactor the neutron flux is stopped mostly by the vacuum containment

I think a case could be made that these problems will translate into increased capital and operating costs that might well make fusion completely uneconomical compared to solar or whatever.

--PeterM

My big worry with fusion is that it'll be shown possible, but the cost per MW of capacity will be so high that you can't pay the interest on the cost of capital by charging competitive rates for electricity. Thus rendering fusion forever uneconomical compared to alternatives.

Nuclear fission seemingly has this problem right now, though much of the expense is due to implacable unreasonable opposition.

--PM

It'd help a lot if the life we're looking for feels like broadcasting really, really powerful modulated EM signals, directed mostly at likely habitats for other life (namely, us.)

--PM

Not necessarily any complete molecules. Water gets broken up and reassembled, by photosynthesis and other chemical processes (water breaks up spontaneously and rejoins, too.) But probably some of the atoms, yes.

--PM

There's a moral difference between CAUSING an abortion and ALLOWING one to happen naturally in the eyes of the religious.

To me, the line is more blurry. Is someone who could prevent something but allows it *completely* innocent, really? I mean, we as a society try to prevent deaths by cancer, why not deaths by natural abortion?

Also, some of the religious may argue that to cause an abortion that wouldn't have happened is to thwart God's Plan, but how do these yahoos know that the abortion wasn't God's plan?

And let's go back to the cancer deaths again. Are we not thwarting God's Plan by saving someone with cancer?

In the end, I think there is a fundamental point, the religious pick an arbitrary line between what they like and what they don't, and it doesn't always make rational sense.

I think the rational argument is that no one should be forced to risk their lives to provide life support to another person. My kidneys are MINE thank you very much, don't hook me up to another person as a dialysis machine against my will, even if it saves that person's life. It puts ME at risk and is a great imposition on me. And even if I agree to it at some point, I can change my mind about continuing to risk my life by providing dialysis.

Pregnancy is very much analogous.

--PM