To be fair, there have been times where Earth's temperature changed relatively rapidly.

On the other hand... those times tended not to work out very well for life :

Our current experiment with mass greenhouse gas emissions affecting the climate, Earth itself has kinda done it before, at the Paleocene-Eocene boundary. The associated Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM) left the world such an altered place that we refer to it as a different era (the Eocene). The oceans took the brunt of the hit. Except the differences we have vs. the PETM are *not* to our favour:

  * The arctic was ice-free going into the PETM; ours is not. The presence of ice creates an amplifying feedback process, where the more ice that melts, the more sunlight gets absorbed, creating more heat to melt more ice.

  * We're releasing our carbon an order of magnitude faster (though our methane emissions are similar)

The PETM caused a 5-8C rise over 6000 years, but we're speed-running it, so it's really our best case. The worst case is the K-Pg extinction event

Only the worst excursions in history tend to result in large parts of the earth becoming relative sterile. But they all lead to mass disruptions in ecosystems and waves of global or at least local extinction (but new speciation of the survivors who take their place). Indeed, we probably owe our existence to the PETM - primates diversified and radiated after it. But that's little solace to species that didn't make it. Like, for example, dinoflagellates flourished during the PETM. But do you really want to replace reefs with red tide?

Also, it's actually 1-3 years. The Great Barrier reef underwent mass bleaching events in 2016, 2017, 2020, 2022, and now in 2024.

(To be clear on terminology: colony != reef. A coral colony is a cluster of polyps that bud or divide off from each other, all genetically identical and interconnected by the coenosarc to share resources, with each polyp living for a few years. For a plant analogy, the colony would be a a tree, and the polyps, individual leaves of that tree)

Going through mass bleaching events every 2-3 years is not the "whew, let's relax" event you seem to think it is when corals don't hit reproductive age for ~3-10 years, depending on species, with initial reproduction rates being slow and taking time to accelerate (the longest-lived animals on Earth are coral colonies, with certain individuals documented having lived for thousands of years; most live for decades, or in some species hundreds of years). Let alone the knock-on for all the species that depend on healthy coral for their their habitat, which lead to balance in the ecosystem, which is critical to e.g. preventing explosions of coral predators.

It's like taking an old growth forest in an ecosystem not adapted to regular fires, and burning it down every couple years. There will still be "something" living there, but it's just not going to be the same ecosystem it was.

Or they were just healthier to begin with, or more favourably situated. It doesn't mean that they have an inherent genetic advantage.

Corals are not fast growing. They grow about a centimeter per year, give or take half an order of magnitude. The fastest-reproducing corals still take several years to hit reproductive age, while others take as much as a decade. These aren't like bacteria that can quickly get new genes into the mix, test them, and quickly spread them through the population.

Corals need to get off Tiktok and stop with these unhealthy style trends. You're beautiful the way you are, corals!

Not news to me, either, Drew.

It's also worth noting that even objectively terrible movie treatments (for example, Soylent Green's failure to represent the actual storyline of Harry Harrison's Make Room, Make Room, while also being cheesy and stupid, and Without Remorse's failure to even remotely resemble Tom Clancy's book, while also being... well, lame) didn't hurt those books.

Sir Isaac Newton is the deadliest son of a bitch in space!

Newton submissively begs scraps from Einstein's table, suh.

No. Leave the fucking books alone.

Protip: Just don't buy into new motion pictures based on books. Your problem, solved! Because as you probably will understand if you give it some thought, the existence of a first-time movie treatment of a book doesn't hurt the related book. Quite the contrary, most often.

For those of us who don't want to see yet another Roadhouse or Bladerunner or Poseidon or Total Recall — and for the authors — new motion pictures based on previously untreated stories are a good thing. At least once they're out on physical media. Movie theaters... [shudders] :)

Pretty much all tech we have today is entirely possible without burning fossile[sic] fuels

One of the apparent filters is simply that above a certain level of gravity, chemical rockets will not suffice to reach space. We're near the edge of that condition ourselves. Any number of civilizations might be out there, pinned against their planet's surfaces. The only way that's not true is if there are physics yet to be discovered that can accomplish surface-to-space in high gravity without using chemical rockets. We certainly haven't found any sign of such science/technology here. And fission or fusion powered rockets... the engineering for that is at least completely non-obvious thus far. And before anyone says "nukes against a pressure plate", yeah, a delightfully bang-y notion, but no.

The assumption made in the Fermi paradox that any civilization could reach space if they try may simply be wrong.

As there are so many wonderful books out there just begging for a motion picture treatment, Hollywood will oblige by... releasing more pointless, vapid remakes.

Aaw, I should have told you. Thereâ(TM)s some equation that relates energy, mass, and the speed of light. Probably most physics postdocs have heard of it.

Thanks, Will-O. I quite remember this cia guyâ(TM)s rubber stamp collection with dozens of great stamps: NOFORN, EYES-ONLY, and different fonts of Secret and top secret. Damn, but the guard at the place seized my paper with all those stamps.

On the other hand, I still have a VIP parking pass for the CIA headquarters â" Lets ypu park right at the front steps. Valid, if you have a time machine going back to April 5, 1988.

My warm thoughts fly over to you, Kill (owatt-) Hour â" last weekâ(TM)s eclipse fund me beneath stratus clouds just east of Buffalo, having a wonderful (though cloudy) day with 4 generations of my family. Itâ(TM)s a joy to see how my home town has evolved â" memories of climbing the Michigan Avenue Lift Bridge at midnight and watching them tap the redhot coke ovens at Bethlehem/Lackawanna Steel mills.

Following up, I am honored by the attention and kindness of fellow nerds and online friends. When I first started on that chase in 1986, I had no idea wrhere it would lead me.

A curious accounting error led me through Unix internals, tcp/ip protocols, early Arpanet connections, and backwards to a group of computer hackers working for then Soviet & Stassi agencies. Along the way, I met people from the FBI, NSA, CIA, AFOSI, and plenty of very smart computer jocks.

It was a time of analog phones and dial up modems; when you would carry coins in your pocket to make calls on the street.

Since then, thanks to the support of online friends and math folk, I have explored and shared interests in topology and math. Along the way, Iâ(TM)ve made plenty of mistakes and bloopers; pretty much the same as student times. Goofups in grad school are easier to sweep aside!

To all my friends: May you burdens be light and your purpose high. Stay curious!

- Cliff