Lot's of things are taught. That doesn't make them true. The only real difference between then and now is that humanity has a larger impact on its environment.

You need to have scraped your beak against the rock of Svithjod (which is currently a hundred miles high and a hundred miles wide) once every thousand years and wear it down to a nub before you are allowed to make the above argument.

The developed world already solved the problem of overpopulation. Make people wealthy and allow women to have equal opportunity to men rather than be relegated to baby-makers. Most of the native populations of the developed world reproduce at below replacement rate and continued population growth comes from immigration from the rest of the world and the higher fertility of those immigrants.

Further, if humanity has die-offs, those die-offs will be concentrated in the areas that are having the most trouble with population growth. Even enormous mass migrations or the developed world partially sharing in the pain will not change that. The disease will be the cure, if those areas which suffer from overpopulation don't do anything about it.

He's not saying that the extinctions aren 't happening. He's saying that we don't know that they're comparable to the big extinctions of the past. It's worth remembering here that there is a huge problem with comparing modern world extinctions with extinctions in the geological past. First, it is vastly easier to see and catalog species today than in the past where fossilization is an extremely rare event. We can't know what didn't get fossilized.

But creatures which weren't easy to drive extinct, due to numbers, longevity of the species, or widespread habitat, would also be more likely to leave fossils. So we also have that the fossils of the geological past come from species which are more likely to not be threatened by extinction than the usual species today.

Third, species have different meanings in modern and geological terms. Today, we can classify species based on subtle distinctions like behavior, coloration, habitat, and most important, DNA which usually are impossible to determine from fossil records. Fossil species on the other hand, are determined by rather crude morphology traits which can be fossilized. A fossil species is a much bigger grouping than a modern species.

So when you combine all these aspects, you get that extinction of a fossil species is a much bigger deal just on its own than extinction of a modern species and may represent in some cases the extinction of dozens of modern species.

I think a better measure here is extinction at the genus level. Genuses are more likely to have fossil records and we can speak of the relative decline of the number of genuses in a proposed extinction event.

When you do that, I don't think there is a serious comparison at the present between human-caused extinction and geological extinction events. I suspect most genus-level extinctions would be in large terrestrial animals, amphibians, and any genus of organisms particularly susceptible to local habitat destruction. You don't have large scale declines in the number of all land and sea genus-level organisms (which can be fossilized) as are present during major extinction events of the past.

It's a standard application of the First Amendment. The whole point is to allow it no matter how much of a problem you or the powers-that-be have with it.

Of course that is wrong. As ScentCone noted, the law in question was preventing people from pooling their resources (via a corporation, a very common organizational structure for non-profits) to distribute a political message, which is a legitimate application of the First Amendment.

But that mass is not as big a factor as recovering those engines. It's not just not having to build a new set of engines every launch, but also reliability. You have both tested engines in actual flight and some increased ability to recover failed rocket engines.

Actually, it is pretty close to solved. They probably just need to improve the control system a little bit.

Second, they have a reliable vehicle by the standards of current rocketry. They aren't competing head to head with a Boeing 747, but vehicles like the Atlas 5 or Soyuz. And a more reliable vehicle is a matter of using the current reliable vehicle a lot to develop the knowledge to build that vehicle more reliably.

There are two things to note here. First, it's not the most "fuel inefficient" way as your alternative demonstrates (all that crap has to go up as well as come down, that uses far more fuel than the current approach does). Second, fuel efficiency is not that important. The rocket engines that SpaceX is trying to recover are far more costly than the additional propellent required for the current scheme to recover them.

Because salt water is bad for rocket engines.

The US wasn't using drones to assassinate people in Iran. And so what if Iran can do it? It's not the same as someone elsewhere achieving the same feat, particularly without creating a military target in the process. Keep in mind that the US strategy is to always have drones in the air. So it's not that useful to be able to detect drones, because you will always be able to detect drones. Merely detecting drones tells you nothing about whether the controllers of those drones know enough to commit an effective assassination strike.

The Second World War and the Cold War are obvious counterexamples. The US won both wars in large part because its opponents could not afford to match the US's industrial/economic strength. I don't see that working at all with China in the next few decades. And even ignoring the competition from that emerging superpower, we still have that the US military and its ongoing activities are a huge drain on the US.

I think a completely autonomous system will eventually be feasible. But then how would you know that it is working as intended? That implies the involvement of independent sensory systems, which would eventually have humans in the loop.

Further, it runs completely contrary to how modern military systems and strategies work. A key aspect of US military development is the combination of improved intelligence of the enemy with more accurate and precise delivery of military force. Manufactured ignorance which impairs decision makers' knowledge of ongoing military activities runs completely counter to that approach. I don't buy that anyone would allow the entire US military to run autonomously and unsupervised (especially given the many constraints that have been put on the US military over the centuries) just so they could have marginally better plausible deniability when it comes to killing innocents.

Drones were never immune to detection and shutdown. Nor is that their draw at present.

Aircraft that are many times more expensive than drones and which contain a human pilot.

The same reasons that morality would get involved in a weapon system with a human pilot, would get involved with any other weapons system. We see it with landmines, for example. The cost/benefit of remote or autonomous systems is different, but your morality should apply equally.

And humans would still be involved. It's not like they'll throw away all information about the kills the autonomous robots are making. After all, they'll want those robots to be more effective, and you can't make anything more effective by ignoring it.

Just feel good that you'll never be as bad as your children.

Good thing the carve up isn't actually happening then. From 1988-2008, two thirds of humanity increased their income by at least 30%, adjusted for inflation.

Except when that real research doesn't, of course.

My "postulation" is often well documented in the literature of the time such as the documented behavior and infighting of the Roman elite during the centuries of the empires of Rome or similar activities of other large empires of China and Egypt. Famines, disease, etc are often also documented, which may partially support your claims of climate change.