Man you have a seriously literal mind. You wouldn't be Sheldon Cooper by any chance? Read some books not about geology or physics, perhaps a novel :-)

Good point, bad wording, but it was in the context of the idea of a benevolent creator or a nicely designed place for us to be, believed in general by the people subscribing to the most common religions and also by many environuts of the "Gaia is sacred" kind.

Which means you as an individual is not worth saving, but humanity as such, on a scale of millions, I'd say saving those is a worth while goal.

There is hardly anything man can do to seriously damage this planet. Honestly, there isn't. We can do unpleasant things to our environment and we can make the planet uncomfortable for a little while. If we go insane and blast off all of our nuclear weapons some day we can do a decent bit of damage, but nothing like what nature has in store for us. In fact, let's assume someone could detonate all the nuclear weapons on earth at the same time, it would be like a firecracker compared to the K-T Extinction Impact. Since nuclear weapons would be detonated in an all-out war, it is unlikely that more than half would actually explode (the rest being rendered useless by actions of war). Detonating all nuclear weapons would come nowhere near what the K-T Extinction Impact was, and that isn't even that big of an explosion in nature.

Don't believe the 1950s propaganda. An all-out nuclear war will not kill everybody on the planet, probably not even half of the humans on it. It will not cause decades or centuries of unlivable conditions on the earth. Human kind would recover at a reasonable rate and probably thrive in a moderate amount of time. Some places would probably not be seriously affected at all.

Here is a funny factoid to think about - Hiroshima took a direct hit by a nuclear weapon. How long did it take before it was perfectly save to live in Hiroshima after the nuke hit? Answer: a couple of months. It was reasonably safe in the days after the explosion. No serious radiation damage was done to humans in the days and weeks following the explosion. Fetuses in the womb of their mothers during the explosion were adversely affected by radiation, but few or no noticeable radiation damages are known from babies conceived in the time after the bomb dropped.

If you want to imagine a big explosion, think of a Gamma Ray burst in our neighborhood. A decent sized star would release many times more energy in less than a second than our sun will release in its entire lifetime of about 10 billion years.

Compared to "mother nature" the most insane murderous human being ever lived was positively a nice guy/gal.

This is one of the things I don't get with the enviro-nutters and Gaia lovers. They act as if mother nature is a nice old lady that only wants us, and our co-passengers on this space ship, to have a nice time of it. Even looking at Mother Earth (Gaia) on "her" own, describing her as benevolent is wildly inaccurate. A homicidal maniac is more like it. Super volcanoes, virus outbreaks and all of that stuff is all Gaia, and it's all designed to kill as many of us (and our co-passengers) as possible. We live on this planet, not because the good nature of Gaia but in spite of her homicidal nature.

Now add "the rest of the Universe" to "mother nature" and things go from bad to terrifying. Again, I've heard nutters both on the Gaia and the Jesus side of the fence extol the virtues of our universe and how it is specially designed to support us and our happy lives. Balderdash. Gaia and The Universe is spending an enormous amount of energy, inventiveness and "hatred" in trying to kill us all, while we fight them the best we can. Sadly, in the end, we'll lose no mater what we do. In the grand scheme of things "in the end" is not too far away. Looking forward to a gamma ray burst in our neighborhood one of these days? It'll make for one hell of a sun tan.

Seriously?

The dinosaurs thought so too.

The cost of preventing a seriously negative event with an asteroid is negligible. In fact, in the US, people spend more than 20 times the amount needed to save us from a city killer on Starbucks Coffee alone. Basically the B612 foundation is asking us to drop one cup of Starbucks every other week to prevent a city killer from killing a few million of us. Not doing so is moronic.

The most important of all sciences at the moment is getting humans into space. As many as possible, as safely as needed (which is a lot less safe than we are doing now) and as far as possible.

Neither is a nuclear bomb.

No, it wasn't.

We have observed that there appears to be about 1,000 rocks to 1,000,000,000 grains of sand. Everywhere we look that appears to be the ratio. We thought there was 1,000,000,000 grains of sand on the beach, but we were mistaken, there was in fact 10,000,000,000, there was lots of beach we hadn't seen. If the grain of sand to rock theory is correct, then there is in fact 10,000 rocks, 9,000 of them on these stretches of beach that we had missed.

And suddenly half of the worlds geeks go and murder someone to get to the moon. Sounds like a great idea.

This is a good analysis of NASA. It's a good oldie, but it should be read more often.