The US can't afford to perform any surgeries. The theoretical important future conflicts you wouldn't be able to afford after pissing it all away invading Afghanistan and Iraq? They were Syria and Ukraine.
Sorry I couldn't hear you over the aftershocks of Mt. Gox's collapse.
Eugenicsy? Maybe. Too slow? Hell yes.
Oh so now the climate's really important to you?
I'll see your reasons for having a nicer climate and raise you 1 mass extinction. What's your plan for that, sprinkle hunger-suppressing drugs into the water?
If we're being responsible, it's not about choosing between cutting sunlight and cutting CO2 emissions, it's about CO2 cuts first and then maybe cutting sunlight. Just cutting sunlight and acting like it's fixing global warming is a joke (the punchline is mass extinction again! Hahaha!).
A good way to keep a few billion people from starving to death is to have a few billion less people in the future. We're starting to get population levels under control, so we're on the right path as long as we never, ever follow the advice of the nutball economists suggesting we should increase poopulation levels to keep their silly game running (I guess we need more unemployed people?).
It was funny the first time, but this is really annoying now.
Then, I ran up to him, shook him around, and screamed, "Where is it!? Where is my computer!?"
I automatically read this in Christian Bale Batman voice XD
So what? They weren't anti-science. They didn't think that science and religion cannot occupy the same space. If they did, they would have been taking chunks out of their god with their work.
I, for one, welcome our new raccoon-descended overlords.
Sounds a lot like the meaning of "wage slave."
We're not so honest with our labels these days.
It does nothing to address global warming's ugly twin brother, ocean acidification. And by presenting the world's public with an apparent techno-fix, it could deflate the movement to reduce carbon emissions.
"For me, my main concern is that we would start doing solar geoengineering while we're still building things with smokestacks and tailpipes," he tells me. "And in that framing, I think the solar geoengineering is just facilitating continued greenhouse gas emissions."
Very well, as long as you know. No point having a nicer climate for a little while as we set the stage for an oceanic mass extinction.
Alternatively we could all be driving 10 liter W-16s, just to save the planet.
At some point in the future, we probably will, but for now we've created for ourselves plenty of margin for error between the current conditions and triggering an ice age.
Furry future? O_O
Well bad news, we've been fucking with it heavily for a couple hundred years with no plan whatsoever, and we're still mostly acting like it's no big deal.
People will be really bitter about that positive sci-fi when those research grants build a powerful AI which is immediately used to make a replica Manna system.
Technology is a neutral force multiplier, and in our society evil is more powerful than good. Unless the AI spontaneously turns evil in the story, as in the Terminator movies, it's not saying AI is scary and dangerous. It's saying our society is scary and dangerous and this is what we'll do with the power of AI.
So maybe it is better if we stay away from some technologies until we're collectively mature enough to do positive things with them instead of using them to make things worse.
I find it funny how people who defend capitalism in this day and age like to say that what we have is "crony capitalism" and if we'd just give real capitalism a try for once it would be super awesome.
What does that sound like?
"If I do not want others to quote me, I do not speak." -- Phil Wayne
