However it would not break the laws of physics to discover that Barbara Eden give stupendous head, after nearly 70 years of practice and being able to take her false teeth out. And finding that out is a credible project. Cue the old Churchill-Astor joke about haggling over the price.

the distances are so vast that it would take decades to get anywhere good which thanks to time dilation would mean when you got back tens of thousands of years would have passed.

Hairyfeet, you have a failure of imagination.

We've had decent medicine for a century and genetics for a half-century. What do you think our active life spans are going to be in 500 years time? Will we have some degree of effective suspended animation? Will we have the cultural maturity to build and operate a generation ship that will take 10 generations to get where it's going?

None of these are ruled out by the laws of physics, even though they're science fiction at the moment.

I sometimes gaze at the stars in wonder, and then cackle "Mine! All MINE!!"

Human Life > Animal Life

The only basis needed is self interest.

Your fist assertion is a blank assertion that may be axiomatic to you, but certainly needs defending to me. (Incidentally, I am human, just in case you're doubting that you need to consider my opinion.) But even so, your second assertion does not necessarily follow from your first.

To mis-quote Hobbes (I think), "no species is an island / complete unto itself" ; every species, including ourselves is part of an ecology, that of Earth. Interdependence is a characteristic of all ecologies that have been reported on (of which I am aware), so I would argue that a valid (to you) basis for caring about the rights of non-human animals would be self-interest in the long term survival of the human species. (Note that I am wearing my traditional "geologist" hard-hat when I am looking to the long term - let's say a million generations instead of our mere tens of thousands to date.)

Is that a firm enough beginning to justify having the argument?

it's considered to be one of the bigger supply-chain problems to come in the future (i.e. we won't have enough).

Oh, people have noticed that little train-wreck ahead, have they. That'll be nice.

Nobody is doing anything about it, of course?

This has been tested in court with the car rental places that have you sign and authorize a final bill, then charge you later (without specific authorization) for parking tickets or speed cam tickets sent to them later.

The law, or rental company policy, may differ in your country to mine, but every time I've hired a car (lesseeeee.... 5 countries on 3 continents) I've read the contract before signing it and seen the authorisation for such charges. (OK, in Russia I had to get it translated for me, but that only took an hour or so.)

I have never had such a charge made against me though. "Not getting caught" being the first rule of driving, at least in my book.

That is the only "ID" they are allowed to check, to keep the process simple and fast, and encourage users to use it.

Again, country and time dependent. In Russia, because I couldn't provide my internal passport (didn't have one ; not Russian) I had to pay with cash. But I gather that is just what happens when you're not in Moscow or St Petersburg - if you're the first non-Russian they've seen, you expect weird things.

No Slashdotter can resist the sense of superiority that comes from correcting a trivial math error. ;-)

The number of Slashdotters who resisted correcting your trivial maths error is not less than one. I didn't correct it, and nor, I note did you. (And you certainly knew about the latter, if not the former.)

Q.E.not-D.

First is the abundant wildlife, with rabies affecting a large part of the population.

This is generally the case in Russia and the former Soviet Union. My first rabies jabs were for going to work in Azerbaijan. My second batch for working in Tanzania. My third round for working in Siberia. By the time I went back to Africa, the recommendations had changed so that I was considered "protected" for life. (Rabies jabs are not a perfect vaccination, but they greatly improve the likelihood of surviving treatment.)

Supposedly the bottom of the Pripyat lake is badly contaminated; if water levels fell, wind would carry contaminated dust.

The lake is in the bottom of a river valley, just upstream from another large lake. Short of the sudden (and wholly unexpected - trust me on this, I am a geologist) emergence of a new volcano, just how are you going to dry the lake out?

As does not decay. It will be there forever.

For certain values of "ever" that may approach the geologically significant. (I am a geologist, but I don't play one on TV. Yet.)

The geological evidence (oh, that dirty, dirty word!) is that the atmospheric response to peta-tonne injections of carbon dioxide takes on the order of 100,000 years. (That's not a model result ; it's an observational result calibrated against 21,000, 41,000 and 100,000 year Milankovitch cycles recorded in magnetostratigraphy. Just in case you have problems with models.) A half-century delay in releasing CO2 is not going to be much help.

That the trees aren't rotting, even after 30 years, is as visual as it gets

You're about the 30th person to mention this little trope, and as with the previous 29, you've plainly not read the article you link to. I'll give you the link again, so that you might just possibly do yourself the honour of reading what you link to, so that you can avoid looking quite so thoroughly like someone who doesn't read what he links to. It is actually a pretty basic skill in sciences and other nerdish occupations.

Have you read it now?

Did you see the bit where they put some numbers to the actual results. Did you see the bit where that said that in the most contaminated areas leaf litter loss was reduced by 40% ; that's a 40% decline, not a 100% decline.

Oh, I'm sorry, I accidentally linked to the original abstract, not to some overblown puff piece written by some click-baiting journalist looking for a scary headline in the confidence that no-one will actually read beyond the headline. The paper title that the authors chose to use is "Highly reduced mass loss rates and increased litter layer in radioactively contaminated areas", which conveys a slightly different impression to "Oh My Invisible Pink Unicorn the Fucking Sky is Falling!" or whatever the original trope was.

Now, I'm not going to claim that a 40% reduction in decomposition rates is insignificant. It is quite a substantial result. But it's also one data point in a steadily changing scenario. In the immediate aftermath of the accident, dose rates would have been much higher (particularly because of the iodine-131 radiation), and that does seem to have had a major effect immediately after the accident. But as the radiation levels have declined, the area is being re-colonised from outside areas (and of course, adaptation of the resident populations to higher radiation)), and as radiation continues to decline the differences between high and low radiation areas will also continue to decline.

In fact, I'd make a prediction : by the time another half-life of caesium-137 has gone by, the differences in decay rate between high and low radiation areas will have disappeared into the statistical noise. You'll note from the news articles and the paper linked to above that there's a 20% variation between litter loss rates in the lowest-contaminated sites studied, so you've got a signal to noise ratio of about 2 at the moment, and that is only going to go down. (Processing the backlog of under-decayed material might take another half-life or so, depending on background decay rates.)

The fieldwork was done in Sept 2007 to July 2008, so just over 20 years after the accident. So I'm revising my above prediction to having negligible difference in decay rates between low and high radiation areas by about 2030.

Since a large part of the original article and this whole thread is about at best shoddy if not out-right biased journalism, you might have thought it would be a good idea to actually watch out for shoddy if not out-right biased journalism in stories people link to. It's the sort of thing I'd rather expect of the nerds and scientists that this site thinks are it's audience.