That depends on your definition of "reused". The space shuttle cost over $450M to refurbish for each flight - disassembling and replacing large chunks of the orbiter. So, while you are technically correct (the best kind of correct), it was horribly inefficient in comparison to what SpaceX is currently doing. In fact, to refurbish a single orbiter, you could launch literally 4 fully loaded Falcon 9s, and throw them away afterwards and still come out on top.

That's a pile of crap.

They're ending software support for their OS. And they're saying "it might not work properly afterwards this date." What do you expect them to say? Hey, this thing is 10 years old, and we're not supporting it anymore, but it will keep working fine? Of course they're going to say "might not work anymore!"

Old software dies; full stop. Go try running anything else from 2010 that's reached end of life, and see what happens if you have reliability problems. In fact, Microsoft released Windows 7 in October 2009, and EOL'd it in 2020. Does it still work? Sorta. Maybe. Depends on the use case. Want to keep using it? Pay a crapton to Microsoft for extended support. And that is Windows 7, probably the single most ubiquitous operating system of all time. This is BlackBerry OS, something that was nearly obsolete a year after it's last major release.

Fuel costs are so incredibly tiny - like we're talking less than $500k for a falcon heavy. Rocketlab's stick launches for $5m, and negotiated re-flying a used falcon 9 places a flight around $50m without any exceptional costs.

While this is still a small amount of money on an SLS scale, $87.5m would get your satellite to space on a falcon 9, or probably half a dozen launches on Rocketlab's.

It won't get you to orbit on either ULA or Blue Origin though - as ULA costs too much, and Blue Origin doesn't have an Orbit-capable rocket.

Perhaps it is best to learn about, and address injustices within our own culture before going to pass judgement on others? If you think the effects of slavery in the USA have been reasonably mitigated, you're not paying attention.

I'm not saying that issues abroad do not need to be addressed, but as the saying goes, do not focus on the speck in your brother's eye...

A old friend of mine is a climate scientist (Ph.D. in mathematics and weather modeling.) He spent many a year at some of the advanced arctic and antarctic research bases doing climate research.

He left the field some years ago over the politics in the scientific community: too much infighting and not enough science. That's a problem throughout the scientific community, really. The less your proposed research is perceived to fit in with the prevailing ideas the more other scientists will try to stymie your work, and the less your chances of gaining any funding.

His comment to me once was that climate science is an inexact science, that there is an incredible amount of noise in the system, and thus it's very difficult to achieve a theoretical basis that has any significant predictive ability.

That's not how it's portrayed in the media though, they tend to speak in absolutes. Not that American science reporters have ever done anything but an abysmal job informing the public. It's more sensationalism and the art of manipulation than actual reporting. I remember watching some Fox News program where a panel was discussing how untrustworthy scientists are because they're always changing things (thereby evincing a complete lack of understanding of the iterative nature of scientific research, that it is a process of continual refinement) and the token black guy says "I think it's important to just pick a study that supports what you believe" and everyone else just nodded and smiled.

Dafuq?

I think that was why Google's G+ social network had to go. It was connecting too many ordinary citizens with actual scientists and other highly-educated people, allowing them to completely bypass mainstream media on important issues such as climate change. What also impressed me was how many of those researchers and professional people of all stripes were more than willing to answer questions from lay people and answer them in understandable terms. I will never forgive Google for terminating that platform, and doing so with the lame excuse of "we had a security problem." They did us a disservice by doing so.

That presented a problem for those in power however. People began to perceive the difference between official narratives and what the people doing the actual research were saying. I often wonder how different the pandemic response would have been had G+ still been in full operation.

They correctly point out nothing in that context: the West wasn't "allowed" to industrialize and pollute (as if China or anyone else could have stopped that process) it just did what it wanted within its own territories, as did everyone else. The West just figured out how to do it over a century before anyone else, and China and India are simply playing off of the West's initial advantage. One could argue, however, that China, India and other regional powers are being "allowed" to pollute because both were enabled by Western corporatism and its willingness to sell out its own citizenry and shift its manufacturing base to the third-world.

The elephant in the room here is not actually that human civilization and concomitant industrialization cause pollution. No, in fact it is overpopulation, and that is the sole province of the third world. Not that I see many willing to talk about that: no, it's always the United States that is the source of all the world's ills, even when that's just not the case. Were it not for the flood of illegal aliens crossing our southern border, the U.S. would be in a population decline (as is much of Europe.)

That said, you are absolutely correct about poorer nations having little vision of the future, other than trying to achieve a high-energy, high-resource-utilization Western lifestyle for as many of their citizens as possible, even if the collapse of human civilization is brought that much closer.

That's hysterical. I just made a similar comment about that particular Roland Emmerich film but calling it a documentary is genius.

Great. So you're telling me that Roland Emmerich was right? Oh well ... I always figured one of his end-of-civilization-as-we-know-it scenarios would come true sooner or later.

Wait until Alexandria Occasionally-Cortical hears about this.

The problem is, if you kill off too many of the right people (that is, those that develop and maintain the technology that the plebs need to survive) everyone dies anyway. What we need is a good selective plague.

I hope you don't live in New York City.

I'm not sure that China's numbers are accurate: they lie about pretty much everything to do with internal statistics so they're not to be trusted.

Regardless, the civilized West is losing population, indeed many European nations are in a population decline, as is the United States (or would be, were it not for illegal migration.) China currently has almost five times America's population, more people than the U.S. and Europe combined. Worse yet, they have a burgeoning middle class that wants all the cool stuff they can get, from gigatons of fresh seafood stolen from other nation's territorial waters to air conditioning to the very latest i-thing from Apple. China may (or may not) be able to reduce their climate emissions, but they sure as Hell aren't going to be able to reduce their resource consumption. Not if the CCP wants to stay in power.

Face facts: North America and Europe can make all the cute little "accords" they want, but that won't make any difference.

China (and now India, the other rising industrial power) couldn't care less about global environmental concerns. They want a high-energy, resource-intensive Western lifestyle for as many of their people as they can manage, and they don't care about the cost or the damage they're doing. China especially, because China isn't limiting its hunger for more resources to its own territory, and is building more and more coal-fired power plants.

I've long stated that a correction needs to be applied and that it would be best if we were to do it collectively as a species. It doesn't matter though. If we don't stop consuming and reproducing at an ever-accelerating pace (and we won't) Mother Nature will cheerfully make that correction for us. Just remember one thing:

Mother Nature is a bitch.

As an aside, if we bungle it and civilization collapses completely, that may well spell the end. We've already used up all of the easy-to-access raw materials (coal, oil, natural gas, minerals of all kinds) with the remainder requiring more and more sophisticated technology to access. There won't be anything left for the next budding civilization to build on.

You can absolutely choose which vaccine you get here, assuming it is available. Vaccines are going out so fast at this point, you don't get to order off the menu - if you want it, you take what's available or you wait. Most people don't wait.

This is straight up misinformation.