Apparently, about 2000 individuals is enough to rebuild the human race. Because DNA information indicates that at one point there were about that many people alive. (Google 'human population bottleneck' and take the top link returned to Wikipedia.)

--PM

And Mars is the wrong habitat for altered humans. If you're going to fix humanity, remove dependence on uncommon conditions. Instead, make us survivable in common conditions:

high radiation
low temperature
vacuum
microgravity

Then we can go live on asteroids or artificial space habitats and not worry about expending a lot of energy just to leave our home rock and find another one. We can live in orbiting space habitats and move them out of the way if a big rock is coming our way. If one space habitat gets smashed anyway, well, tragic, but ideally we'll have millons.

And these re-engineered humans will have a far, far easier time making it to other solar systems, but not to other "life zone" worlds, but rather to artificial worlds in orbit free of the worst chains of gravity.

--PM

There's a small technical difference between building floaty things out of sticks that can go some distance in a quite hospitable environment and building flying things capable of 100% support of life in extremely hostile high radiation/zero gravity/no atmosphere/low temperature conditions across distances between stars.

The nearest star is just about 2.5 billion times farther than a 10k mile sea voyage.

Anyway, I didn't say I'd just believe what they said. I said I'd listen very carefully, and very politely.

--PM

I'll listen very carefully. A civilization that has managed to get across the interstellar gulf alive, and chooses to tell us about some religion, well, I'll listen to them with full attention, and as open a mind as I can manage.

And I'll also listen very politely.

--PeterM

To reply to my own post, I did a bit more research:
http://abcnews.go.com/Health/e...

This story says that the person didn't start having symptoms until well after his flight. It's doubtful he contaminated the plane at all. So it's just him and his close contacts from when he started to become show symptoms.

--PM

From what I read it will be necessary to monitor the DIRECT contacts with the sick person, not "the close contacts to all those people", because the close contacts have not yet had time to start having symptoms and become contagious.

So it's a planeload of people, and other people who used that plane.

--PM

What the people on there have said will halfway convince you that Ebola is going to fix our population problem for us.

I mean, is there a good place to PUT IT so that something good can be made to happen? (Instead of pure waste?)

I've regularly seen situations where throwing more money than a certain amount at something simply doesn't help. You can only ramp up programs so fast, bring equipment into operation so fast, get people in, trained, and working productively so fast.

It's quite possible that President Obama asked the people doing the work, "how much money can you absorb right now to accelerate things?" and got told "maybe $30M...?" So he got them $58M.

Adding any more money to their efforts would just be waste. I know that my organization could absorb maybe $20M in "surprise" funding productively in a single year, any more than that and we'd just sit on the money or send it back. (I would hope we wouldn't waste it.)

If we KNEW we were going to get a year-on-year increase, and were given carte blanche to hire people and support so we could write contracts as much as we wanted, we could ramp up over a year or two to use $200M or more productively, but in a single year? No way.

Best,

--PeterM

Add nuclear weapons to the massive societal disruptions you mention, and you might indeed have a situation that's unsurvivable by humans as a species....

--PM

It's exactly what he says it is, a stupid theory, and he knows it!
I don't know HOW he got a +5 interesting moderation on it!

At most a +3 funny.

I mean, can you IMAGINE the dam structure you'd need to create a pool of water deep enough to float a block of stone to the top of the pyramid? Hint, it'd dwarf the pyramid!

Now, for getting the BASE of the pyramid really flat, yeah, a big shallow pool of water might have helped a lot with that, but anything above it? Not so much!

--PM

Subject says it all. Alcohol is considered harmless, but it isn't. That said, I don't support banning it. I just think it mostly isn't a good idea to use it for psychoactive effects.

--PM

You have very good points about the safety and waste disposal issues as advantages of fusion over fission.

Actually, I'm not claiming to KNOW that fusion will be uneconomical. I'm just AFRAID that it might forever be uneconomical. The capital costs seem monumental to me. By posing it as a question I was hoping someone who knew better would weigh in on the topic.

Honestly, I don't have a basis of knowledge on the topic to form any conclusion, and it's quite possible that until it is tried, no one *can* know with any certainty. If the answer is "no one knows", I support going on with fusion research until we figure that out.

--PeterM

Actually, I disagree that a fission plant and a fusion plant of the same capacity are "the same" in terms of complexity.

In a fission reactor:
You don't need superconducting magnets to contain the fuel
The fuel doesn't have to be kept in a near vacuum
You don't need lots of gyrotrons to heat up the fuel
The heat flux doesn't have to be kept away from the superconducing magnets
The neutron flux is stopped pretty much right in the reactor, heating the coolant, whereas in a fusion reactor the neutron flux is stopped mostly by the vacuum containment

I think a case could be made that these problems will translate into increased capital and operating costs that might well make fusion completely uneconomical compared to solar or whatever.

--PeterM

My big worry with fusion is that it'll be shown possible, but the cost per MW of capacity will be so high that you can't pay the interest on the cost of capital by charging competitive rates for electricity. Thus rendering fusion forever uneconomical compared to alternatives.

Nuclear fission seemingly has this problem right now, though much of the expense is due to implacable unreasonable opposition.

--PM

It'd help a lot if the life we're looking for feels like broadcasting really, really powerful modulated EM signals, directed mostly at likely habitats for other life (namely, us.)

--PM