No, unclassified information is NOT necessarily public. There is a lot of stuff US government agencies don't reveal that isn't "classified" as Secret, Top Secret, Confidential or other. Like for example, Privacy Act information (government employees SSNs are one) is NOT public and is NOT classified.

Except on people who are willing to listen to reason and accept evidence. Like for example, take the anti-vaccine crowd.

You show them studies that say that the risk of the vaccine is really tiny and there's no correlation of receiving vaccines with autism. They whip out Jenny McCarthy and other anecdotal evidence, and postulate vast conspiracies by Big Pharma to perpetuate the fantastically profitable vaccine industry even though vaccines are unbelievably dangerous. Fact is, Big Pharma makes its money on Viagra and pills for chronic diseases, not really on vaccines.

If someone wants to believe something, your reasoned arguments and evidence based defense of your facts will never persuade them otherwise. Instead, they just end up believing even harder in what you challenged them on.

--PeterM

I agree, the scenerio I propose of peaceful cooperation and conglomeration is utterly boring. War is so much more dramatic.

However, consider the history of the world since WWII. Lots of little conflicts, no big ones. The costs of the big powers going to war is just too high for everyone (rational) to bear. So instead we trade, more or less peacefully.

How much more so in space? It's very hard to defend a planet and easy to destroy one, or at least render it uninhabitable, for a space-faring civilization. Act aggressively and face terrible retaliation, where anything that could possibly be won via aggression would be less valuable than what would certainly be lost.

--PM

You have this zero sum mindset. Why does one have to come out on top?

How about, two space faring species meet, trade technology, form a conglomerate socieity which is greater than either of them would be alone, culturally richer, with every individual in both societies better off?

Why have conflict when there is so much to gain by cooperation?

And what makes you think that the aggressive culture will survive to get into space in the first place? The only target for their aggression is going to be themselves, and they're going to have some NASTY weaponry available.

--PM

I think there is a lot of merit in what you say, but it's not perfectly true. It's profitable to make weapons of mass destruction, true, but at least in the US, when they were first made, they were made because of a pretty rational fear of a real adversary. To large extent it's perpetuated now by greed and corruption, but there's residual fear and some real persistent external threat, and a lot of inertia.

Greed and corruption are the main factors holding Africa in the dark ages, you've nailed it there.

I think Hawking meant humanity's willingness to use violence and/or deadly force to get what one wants instead of reason and persuasion.

"Aggressive in his battle to conquer cancer..." is far different from "aggressively hitting people because he enjoys other people's pain".

I think energy and determination to achieve a pro-social goal are separable from a willingness to harm or otherwise screw over other people to get what you selfisly want. And I think we can have the former without the latter.

--PM

Why do you think that "anyone out there that we encounter is very likely to be even more aggressive" than humans? D'you realize that a remarkable thing about people is not how aggressive people are, but rather how well people actually get along? Pretty much only colony insects are as capable of getting along as we are. It is not aggressiveness that makes humans globally dominant.

When technology has advanced to the point where an INDIVIDUAL has the power to bring down the entire planetary civilization (and I'd argue that we are at that point right now), low aggression seems like a rather key survival trait. I'd argue that a civilization that has survived longer than us is probably FAR less aggressive, FAR more willing to take the long view, and FAR more willing to work out cooperative everyone-wins solutions rather than indulging in exploitative zero-sum behavior.

--PM

If you can cause the protein to be generated in the blood, why not also treat cells on the brain side of the blood-brain barrier as well to produce the protein and so protect the brain?

If you can do that, you can halt transmission to new people, and halt progression of the disease on both sides of the blood-brain barrier, it's about as close to a cure as could be achieved without actually destroying all the quiescent viruses.

Heck, it might actually cause less damage to the host than destroying all the quiescent viruses--the host cells are still sort of functional, but if you killed them all, their functions would fail completely.

See for example the antiviral treatment in research, which causes infected cells to die:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D...

A worry with this treatment is that many nerve cells are infected with herpesvirus in some people, and simply taking these cells out may result in far more damage than desired. Better to leave infected cells intact and enforce dormancy, which protects hosts and prevents spread.

--PeterM

--PM

I mean, seriously, is there a larger issue than vaccination? Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think disease has the potential of killing a lot more Americans than a foreign invasion does even if we cut our defense spending 90%.

We lose between 3k and 60k of people every year to the flu, and the flu is considered a "mild" contagious illness. Imagine if we had polio, measles, mumps, rubella, pertussis, diptheria, tetanus, and that supreme horror of horrors, smallpox, back in full force.

Is there *really* a larger issue than vaccination, other than perhaps maintaining good sanitation? (Which protects us from cholera and a lot of other waterborne diseases.)

--PeterM

Not the President. All congresspeople and their people, all CEOs, and all the 1%.

--PM

Some of the Asian countries do have cultures that love learning and the very smart. However, they have various other cultural problems.

There's this old joke, heaven is English policemen, German scientists/engineers, Italian lovers, Swiss bankers, and French cooks. Hell is English cooks, German policemen, Italian bankers, Swiss lovers, and, well, I don't suppose French make bad scientists/engineers, but I'm botching the joke some. But the point is that if we could take the very best of all our cultures and fuse them, humanity would advance far faster.

The Chinese have admirable work ethic and love of learning, however, their government needs improvement in inclusiveness and combating corruption. Some of the European governments are far superior in these respects (or so it seems from the outside.) The anti-intellectualism of the USA is rapidly degrading the US political system, its economy, its worldwide power, and its future prospect for maintaining dominance in science/tech/economy/military. However, again, not everywhere in the world does humanity glorify sports or singing and hate learning and intelligence.

Perhaps we can hope that the negative aspect of humanity will cause their own self-destruction without destroying the best aspects of humanity.

Right, "rein". At least I didn't write "rain".

At the moment, at least nominally the government bureaucracy isn't writing the laws. Instead, it's the various congressional bureaucracies that change when the ass occupying the congressional seat changes. However, with government by sortition, I think it'd be a practical necessity that each congressional office have a permanent bureaucracy associated with it to provide expertise and continuinity that would be lacking.

It is this bureaucracy that I think might become problematic and corrupt.

--PM

A half-mile diameter disk isn't going to be easy to rotate and point in different directions, and considerable motion by the light detector is also going to be required.

Frankly, I think these disadvantages so severely reduce the utility of the telescope that I wouldn't want to deal with it.

Not only that, but a half-mile diameter disk is one heck of a target for random space junk.

--PM

I've pondered sortition government, but I wonder how you would reign in the power of the bureaucracy.

As an AC said, the random citizenry isn't going to have the depth to really write good laws, so it'll probably largely fall to a bureaucracy, which might end up with all the real power. I can scarcely see that as an improvement.

However, the sortition has the big benefits you mention:
1) Actually representative of the people, because they ARE the people
2) Don't arrive in office corrupt, aren't beholden to donors

Maybe have the lower house of Government chosen by sortition?

--PM

Yes, you can still get infected, but if you keep running into people who are infected with measles, you'll either get a full-blown case, a mild case, or a subclinical unnoticeable case.

97% chance you'll get a subclinical unnoticeable case. That means you GET measles, but the replication is quickly shut down by your immune system, which is primed to fight it. However, having just fought it, your immune system is EVEN MORE primed to fight it.

And measles in particular is so very, very contagious that if ANYONE near you has it, you're going to be exercising your immunity to it.

So, yeah, it's a "matter of time" until you get infected, but your infection is likely to be such that you don't even notice.

People who have such subclinical infections are probably very unlikely to spread the disease.

--PeterM