Here's the real problem with all of this. It isn't economically viable simply because the externalities aren't factored in at the point of initial manufacturing. We have built an economic system that is heavily reliant on basically mortgaging the present and demanding the future pay for it; a sort of vast buy now, pay later (and by later we mean decades). If manufacturing plastics, glass and everything else had the long-term costs factored in up front, I suspect recycling in all cases would look more attractive.

Presuming you could do it at all (and that's a pretty big assumption) it isn't going to be blown away in a few years. It would take hundreds of thousands, perhaps even millions of years for the atmosphere to decay. It certainly would endure long enough for a colonization effort, but that presumes you can pull it off, and again, that's a massive "if". You would need some really huge rockets to intercept and redirect comets and other material to start bulking up the atmosphere.

In a future where we have fusion or some other form of energy, aka Star Trek, I suppose why not. A few decades or centuries of robot spacecraft smunching stuff into Mars wouldn't cost much more than not doing it at all.

What I've heard as a rough estimate is that if somehow someone was able to give Mars a dense atmosphere (thicken it with water vapor, nitrogen and a whole more CO2 to create a greenhouse effect) it would probably endure for a million years, but without replenishment, eventually the solar wind will indeed just blow it away. As to create a sufficient magnetic field, well, I don't see how it's actually possible to create that large a magnetic field without a helluva lot of energy. I don't know if there is an engineering solution without magical far future technology to shield Mars' atmosphere from the solar wind. I've read of some guys suggesting we bombard the planet with comets and other debris to kick start the various cycles (carbon, nitrogen, water) as well as create a whole lot of heat to start melting the large amounts of water, but for that we're talking if not super far future planetary engineering, then at least we're talking about really big rocket engines (probably nuclear) shoving all kinds of gunk at Mars from every corner of the solar system.

Who knows, maybe in a few centuries the technology will exist to pull it off. Mars certainly seems the most likely body in the solar system to terraform. It is, by some estimates, still in the Goldilocks zone, so providing there's a sufficiently dense atmosphere with enough CO2 to actually capture more solar radiation, it might work. But it really would take a whole other level of technology to protect that atmosphere from steadily being eroded, and stop everyone from getting horrible cancers along the way.

Fuck you! I use tar for all my version management. Now get off my lawn!

Yes, well, Democrats didn't use the magic formula "To Protect Our Children!" as in "We Need Everyone To Have Large Capacity Semi-automatics TO PROTECT OUR CHILDREN!" or "We Need To Keep Vomiting Vast Quantities of GHG's Into The Atmosphere And Allow Poisoning Of Water Sheds TO PROTECT THE CHILDREN!"

Republicans, standing for smaller invasive government; unless it involves the use of genitals or what you read on the Internet.

There's also the rather unique aspects of Darwin's theory as opposed to previous theories, such as Lamarck's theory. That organisms seem to fit into hierarchies was in and of itself not a new idea, though I would argue Linnaean taxonomy with its fairly strict methodology was a new innovation. Darwin's key observation wasn't merely that populations evolve, but rather that there is variation exists in all populations, and that some variations will be more favorable than others, and thus more likely to be selected for through differential reproductive success. While he didn't have Mendelian genetics which when plugged in to Natural Selection, provided the hereditary aspects of the theory, but he did make that critical observation that was very different from anyone else's previous stab at some sort of evolutionary process.

I'm not really all that sure that anything resembling Darwin's theory of natural selection could have developed without Linnaean taxonomy, not to mention that unlike much larger biospheres, the Galapagos Islands could be more easily observed, so I think it unlikely that da Vinci would have had the kind of environmental exposure.

Who exactly is cancelling Charles Darwin? This looks like some manufactured outrage, a strawman you can beat endlessly without ever having to get out of your echo chamber.

Jesus, grow up.

That's like saying the hammer is responsible for a badly made table.

But Assange actively took part in committing the crime. You can't commit a crime and then say, "But I'm a journalist, so it's okay!" The notion that that should be legal leads to absurd places.

I'm of two minds of this.

Yes, Assange participated in encouraging hacking.

On the flip side, Assange was outside of US jurisdiction.

So for the argument for absurdism, should everyone be subject to all laws in other countries?

I really don't want to open up the possibility that someone could run a murder-for-hire scheme from another country with lax laws. But I'd also rather not be extradited for saying something like "GLBT people deserve human rights", even if it's against the law in some countries.

There are all sorts of claims that she did not tweet precisely what I quoted, and it is in fact true that the way she phrases her tweet makes it hard to parse. But an honest review of the twitter thread will reveal that the quotation is substantially correct in spirit.