Why are so many people such jerks?

Whereas in the real world, if you look at published papers rather than magazine articles, scientists predicted warming over cooling by a 6:1 ratio during 1965-1979.

Also, for those who didn't understand greenhouse gasses, cooling would be a natural supposition since we had been in an interglacial for about as long as the previous time. Turns out that interglacials aren't as clockwork as people used to think, but some scientists still think there's an end-interglacial forcing that partly counteracts the anthropogenic forcing in the opposite direction.

Please add these to your list of facts to ignore.

I think he's a better troll than cartoonist.

Look what happened to the British Empire.

Nine out of ten mes agree!

FDA...? Do they consider mosquitos food or drugs?

GRBs clearly haven't prevented life in *our* galaxy, so the Fermi Paradox still stands.

The caluculations probably rule out life in the core of our galaxy, but systems further out would be exposed even less often than ours is. And even though GRBs can periodically sterilize a planet, their directionality means that one burst would not likely sterilize all the planets in an intercellar civilization simultaneously.

So, to modify what someone said above, we can add another term to the Drake equation, but this doesn't do much to answer Fermi.

what with the rabble's concerns boiling over and impinging on the fringes of their attention.

Sorry... I was going for the joke and didn't pitch it very well. My actual views are more like yours.

As for the reality of the subject matter, I would borrow the concept of "probably approximately correct" from machine learning, and give it a 90-95% chance of being ~80% correct. (The 80% is lower to allow room for some more big discoveries like inflation.)

Unfortunately, people will be (hopefully) studying this for thousands of years on top of the <100 we have so far, and none of us will live to see how it turns out in the long term.

And I'm guessing that the publishers who use region codes cry like babies whenever governments impose artificial barriers to free trade.

I always heard it as: "Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me."

And of course, the word of choice usually wasn't "fool".

(Is this really a regional saying?)

Like all esoteric fields of study, we outsiders can't understand it because we don't have The Right Stuff.

(Presumably that's something they smoke.)

My first cynical thought was "shoot them down if they blow up". But one bomber claimed to be on board, so they could have reasonably been concerned that the planes would be hijacked and used as missiles.

Yeah. If you make threats on Slashdot you get picked up by men in white coats instead of black helicopters.

It means no one had died yet, as far as they know.