Comment Benjamin Franklin felt so (Score 1) 234
Benjamin Franklin certainly felt that colder was better. He slept with the window open even in the dead of winter (seriously annoying his travel mates when they had to share rooms in crowded Inns).
Benjamin Franklin certainly felt that colder was better. He slept with the window open even in the dead of winter (seriously annoying his travel mates when they had to share rooms in crowded Inns).
The primary problem we have today is not automation, it is over-concentration of wealth. Automation will destroy jobs to the extent that the people running the companies implementing the automation wish it to. If those companies are run by people who are happy to deliver worse service as long as they can pay fewer people, then, yes, we have a problem, but it is not with the technology.
There is no such thing a technological determinism. It's people all the way down.
Uh, if you look at the correct map and note that the Deccan traps were on the triangular Indian plate sailing around in the middle of the ocean, you'll note that the alignment is actually reasonably good.
Gee, I can't even blame autocorrect :
that the Deccan traps were formed at the antipode of a major impact
Cool, thanks for the reference. (A paper from the time of the modern dinosaurs, when the AGU still had a Spring Meeting in Baltimore.)
It looks like it is even in the right place (see above).
This may revive the theory that the Deccan traps were formed at the antipode of a major eruption - the seismic waves will focus there, and could crack the Earth's crust (for a really big impact).
It seems logical, and the positions more or less fit, but the question was always whether the timing was viable.
Now, where is the crater that formed the Siberian traps. And, did it end the Permian period?
I have come to regard this as basically religious, so this is somewhat like arguing about conservation of mass in transubstantiation, but I have a thick skin.
From what we know, carbon biologies last ~3 billion years or more, silicon biologies have so far 0 years behind them. Bayesians bet on carbon.
By the way, anyone who thinks that robotic / silicon life wouldn't be biological, and wouldn't evolve, doesn't understand evolution. Evolution is like entropy in that you can't get out of the game.
This would not really work. In practice, it would likely mean a return of Alternic system, with multiple roots - i.e., a dark DNS for the dark net, probably temporary DNS extensions for file sharing, etc.
Somewhere, I suspect Eugene Kashpureff is smiling.
This is like a weird case of the Darwin awards; i.e., being so stupid you don't know that Egypt is not going to be interested in replicating the latest state of the art in nuclear-powered aircraft carriers.
We really don't have much idea how much migration goes on in early planetary systems, but it looks like there is a lot. So, a "mirage Earth" won't be a mirage if it sent its formative years further out from its star.
From my observation, the Internet of Things is being sold to companies that want big data and lower costs obtained by monitoring end-users and their gear. Since the end-user is not the customer, it is not surprising that there is lots of very sloppy IoT code and gear out there. A few lawsuits will help this situation, but it is unfortunate that some people will have to suffer for that to happen.
When we had so many political consultants bidding for the contract to make those district maps?
Please quote that provision of the Voting Rights Act.
The point is really that we don't nearly know enough to answer any of these questions. We can provide "best current thinking," but with only 1 actual sample (Earth) and no experience with GRBs, these are just guessitmates at best.
That's not true. We know the luminosity output of GRBs very well, as well as their spectrum across the electromagnetic spectrum. For a number of exoplanets (and the planets in the solar system) we know their main atmospheric content. For each composition of atmospheres you can predict the effects of a GRB for any chosen distance in terms of photo-dissociation, heating and radiation pressure. I don't see great unknowns there.
- How many planets might have other special circumstances that protect their ozone (such as a lack of N2 in their atmosphere, or an ozone generating biology in their stratosphere, etc.)
Not sure. I think it is possible to come up with such scenarios as you stated, but it has to be shown that they are frequent occurrences to be relevant for changing the survival rate of complex life.
Exactly. To say that GRB==doom means that all of these possibilities must be very infrequent indeed, and I just don't see how we can say that at present. That makes me dubious about the hypothesis.
I think it can be argued that due to the luminosity output of GRBs, that "GRB==doom" holds, within a certain radius and for typical orientations. That serves as a useful starting point. For special orientations, or special atmospheres that one could imagine, this may not hold. But then the burden is on the person dreaming up these scenarios to show that these can more happen frequently than expected due to random orientations and atmospheres representative of the gas make-up of observed stellar and star-forming systems (which is well-studied as well, the technical term is metallicity and (heavy) element abundance). Until then, I think "GRB==doom" is a suitable working hypothesis we can adopt.
I do not. The trouble with GRB==doom is that you have to bring in statistics, and we don't know what they are, but we do know that they have to be pretty extreme. For example, a galaxy might have 100 billion "Earths." Suppose that there 1/1000th that number of "warm Venus's," (a Venus type planet, but far enough out from its star that there never was a run-away greenhouse), and that the chance of advanced life forming on such a body is 1/1000th of the typical "Earth," but none of the Venus's are wiped out due to GRBs. That still leaves 100,000 warm Venus's to form complex life. Now, are those numbers reasonable? Sure. Are they true? You guess is as good as mine. However, even if the Venus situation had a probability of one chance in a billion of occurring it would still leave 100 systems where complex life could arise, and that is a lot more than 0.
I think that there are a lot of these situations - I think the proponents of "GRB==doom" have to show that each one has probability 10^-11 or so, and I don't see how they can do that.
As I understand it in order to sustain catastrophic, life eradicating damage from a GRB you need to be looking directly down the "barrel of the gun" so to speak, or rather directly in the line of fire emanating from the star's poles. This forms a fairly narrow beam of intense energy that decreases with distance. It doesn't seem that likely to me that 90% of life supporting planets in the universe would find themselves in just this predicament.
Yes, but all of the GRB we see are "looking down the barrel" and so the statistics already take that into account. (In other words, if each GRB irradiates 1% of the sky, and 100 go off "near" you, you are still likely to be in deep trouble.)
The cost of feathers has risen, even down is up!
