Apparently the collision has become more serious than when I was at school, and now it's not going to pass through, but whack together, merging the super-massive black holes into a doubly super-massive black hole.

So get your popcorn ready, it's going to be a show.

We've got a galaxy passing through in about 4 billion years.

So if you're up to star hopping, it'll be a good opportunity to colonize a whole stack of systems getting flung in a whole stack of directions ... assuming we're not sterilized by Gamma Ray Bursts from Andromeda.

That would have gutted me when I was at uni.

Really?

It looks from the aerial photography you link to that they just cut tracks to each turbine.

I look at it from price per unit, insulation from oscillating fuel prices, greenhouse emissions, and production of harmful waste.

It's not as funny as you seem to think.

Men also would rather shock themselves than not shock themselves, if there's nothing else to do for 15 minutes.

> Remember, Hydrogen is really just a battery when you think about it, the power still has to come from somewhere else like coal (though ideally wind or solar). In most cases hydrogen is generated from natural gas, generating, you guessed it, carbon dioxide in the process.

The great thing about the Hydrogen economy, is you can increase the amount of renewable on the grid, and convert excess to hydrogen, when you have an excess, like in the middle of the day and the middle of the night.

Go troops!

I hope no one mentions to them Ebola is in DRC.

I heard that now that the Republicans control the Senate, the US will soon be invading Ebola.

That's pretty well accepted.

The argument you see in textbooks is that the interdepedence of ecological systems is such that at it is difficult to know what species are key to our own survival. so dropping biodiversity is like playing Russian Roulette. (Of course the rich will be able to supplement, but I mean key to our own cheap survival).

But more importantly to me is the intellectual resource. Each species comes with it's unique proteins and biological processes. Losing them without studying them is a permanent loss to our knowledge, and future study is more likely to have useful results than current study, as our understanding of the biochemistry allows fuller understanding and so utilization of the processes observed.

I linked to a paper with this (generalized) result: reduced genetic diversity withing species reduces biodiversity of other species in the ecosystem.

The species in current existence have survived the repeated glaciation cycle of the holocene. The current warming is more rapid, and in the wrong direction.

I think you're ignoring the proofs. If you think one of them is wrong, we can delve into it. But read the paper linking genetic diversity to biodiversity first.

That seems like an isolated abstraction. Do you have any science-based evidence of this claim?

Can you give a few examples?

Do you have any science-based evidence of this claim? I think that it is wrong. When you remove an apex predator, biodiversity crashes.

Saloomy's claim was:

This is not true, using the data set [s]he mentions. We're much warmer than normal, according to the ice core record.

This is not, as you seem to have been suggesting that the Earth is less than a million years old, but that Ice Cores don't go back further than that.

Hmmm.

1.12 males to every female at birth, compared to the world average of 1.07

It could be the epigenetics of a growing economy. If its not, that's 4.5% less girls born that average: 1 in about 22. (Probably more aborted than murdered.)

The link to the ice-core temperature reconstruction data from the Vostok Ice cores?

They only go back 400,000 years. EPICA cores go back a bit further.