Yes, right NOW Ebola isn't a common way to die. Only 8k cases.

WHO projections of an uncontrolled Ebola epidemic have the number of cases up into the millions next year.

So apparently Ebola can become one of the top ten causes of death worldwide within 1 year. It has already overtaken terrorist attacks. In a month or so, it will have overtaken lightning deaths (60k per year worldwide).

I just hope that we can do better than 'uncontrolled'. So far it has not been a happy trend.

--PM

OK, in Texas, we have 1 health care worker infected per 1 patient, so far, and the sick health care worker was aware of the ebola and trying hard not to get it.

In Spain, we have 1 health care worker infected per 1 patient, also aware of ebola and trying hard not to get it.

On the postive side, the West has managed to treat 3 others without any more health care workers getting sick.

So in the West, the score is maybe 5 patients and 2 health care workers sick so far.

I would call that alarming. But wait, it gets worse.

In Africa, health care workers are 5% of the cases overall.
http://time.com/3502002/ebola-...

Presumably they are doing their best not to get infected too.

We need to do better, far better, in protecting health care workers both in the West (where we are doing poorly) and in Africa, where we are doing VERY poorly.

--PM

AIDS doesn't cause contagious blood, spit, diarrhea, and vomit to go everywhere. Ebola does.

AIDS doesn't infect health care workers who are treating patients unless there's a needlestick or sexual contact. Ebola does, with alarming frequency. Even if you DO have sex with someone with AIDS, it's not 100% that you'll get AIDS.

AIDS can't be spread by sneezing or coughing. It's possible Ebola *is*.

In terms of contagiousness, Ebola seems 10x worse. It's like saying "smallpox is no worse than chickenpox". Maybe if you put them both on a logarithmic plot and back up 50 feet!

--PM

I looked it up, an M8 class star (the lightest I could find) is about 1.99e29 kg of mass, jupiter is 1.9e27 kg, so it missed being a star by 100x.

So, it is TWO orders of magnitude from being a star, right in the middle of your range.

--PM

What the Z machine does is zap a little metal box of wires that may contain fusionables with a high voltage/current pulse that is stored in a really enormous bank of capacitors. Naturally that destroys their target and makes kind of a mess in the process.

I think they manage 8 shots/day if they're lucky.
8 shots/day is a far cry from a reasonable power flux. I'm not sure current pulsed power technology (not to mention other engineering) could stand doing this at some reasonable frequency like 1Hz without breaking down in a few minutes.

But at least they put a good fraction of the power input into the target, NOT like laser fusion--the lasers are horribly inefficient. (1%?)

-PM

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