1) Life will require energy flow. More fully, life will operate much like a heat pump tapping energy flow between a high entropy or temperature sink to a lower entropy or temperature sink.

2) Life will require an environment it can survive in. This story attempts to address part of that with the idea of climate buffering.

3) As K. S. Kyosuke noted in his reply, life will require some matrix capable of the complex morphological structures and behaviors that life will need to survive.

4) Life will need time or a shortcut (like a creator) in order to develop. Evolution-based life will need time (measured in generations) for adaptation to occur.

For example, let's take an isolated "rogue planet". First, it's an object massive enough to round itself under the force of its own gravity, but not massive enough to undergo fusion. Second, it's not orbiting a star and basically is slowly cooling down to the temperature of the cosmic microwave background (no external energy inputs of note). The driver for any life would have to be heat flow from the interior due to heat of formation and possible radioactive decay. The situation is contrived (but in a way that actually probably appears billions of times in nature, just in our galaxy) so that there is no other means to provide significant energy flow to the system.

Restriction 2) is rather simply solved since the environment is very stable over billions of years (unless the rogue planet happens to get too close to a star or runs into something).

Restriction 3) requires either complex chemistry (from elements other than hydrogen or helium) or structure from say possibly, the interaction of different phases of metallic hydrogen and electromagnetism at the core of a gas giant.

Restriction 4) means that if it's evolution-based life derived from abiogenesis, then it needs to be in a high enough energy flow over large enough volume so that enough generations can pass to evolve to a state where they can technically qualify as life (such as traits/information passed from past organisms to future ones). We don't know how big that would need to be, but bigger and older is better. Similarly, we would need the presence of complex structures, which are more likely in a high energy flow environment (eg, amino acids created by weather-induced lightning).

If it's creator-derived or evolved elsewhere and migrated, who knows. The resulting organism might be able to fuse deterium and/or helium 3 isotopes, for example. That allows for creation of higher weight elements too.

Yes. There's also the matter of the labor unions and the screwed up politics of both Detroit and the state.

I think it'd be far cheaper to move whatever fragment of that workforce which is still "capable" out of Michigan to California or Texas than it would be to build anything there.

Well, some fruit trees give high quality firewood. So they seem likely to be able to provide on that front as well.

Get a job somewhere else other than Tesla. It's not the only employer in existence.

That's boilerplate for "I feel like 1,000 today". There's no reason to expect any of these models to be applicable. My view is that if your estimate is below any detectable threshold, then zero is as good a number as any.

If you're not using it, then it's not valuable. And that carbon concentrates just fine in living plants. The argument that burning coal pollutes is fairly sound. The argument that we have a bunch of highly valuable carbon that we'd be using for some other purpose, if we weren't burning it first, just doesn't make sense.

By banning the activity outright? Somehow I don't buy that at all.

And elves, dwarves, and dragons. Sure, other sources had them, but these races as presented in D&D were of Tolkien's peculiar flavor.

Again, where's the evidence to support your claim? The study doesn't show what you think it shows. I get tired of people who confuse opinion and confirmation bias with evidence.

I didn't say "voluntarily accepted". I said "accepted".

Something can be high risk and still be rationally considered safe.

Sure, it can. We do it all the time, such as in this discussion about radiation exposure.

Unless, of course, that doesn't actually happen to be the case.

Not if the cost is well below background noise.