So because death always wins at the end you want others not to try and not to work towards increasing their own lifespan? Yeah, death always wins, as long as we let it, it wins. We will all die, no question about it. What are you going to do about it, just return to the slime you came out of? You won't even try?

Those who will try, do you know what will happen once (not if, once) they succeed? They will be called 'the rich' (and they may as well be, it will be painfully expensive to achieve those results) and the rest will go to WAR to get a piece of that cake, which they did not bake, which the likes of you are spitting upon in its general direction.

Don't pretend you won't be on this or some other forum should this happen within your life time, yelling and screaming that the rich are the bastards that prevent the rest from having something that they have achieved. Your position right now is most likely in direct contradiction to your future position, should that future materialise, where you will be willing to do just about anything, including murder and theft, anything to get a piece of that.

Guilt for what? Clearly you don't understand why people who are rich are rich in the first place, they are not your 9-5 workers, they are where they are because they always thought outside of your particular box.

They have no guilt, they should have no guilt. If anybody is driven by guilt, it should be those who steal, not those who produce, and the most of those who steal are government and the mob.

Evolution is not more important than individuals, isn't it comparing apples and oranges? I agree with TFA, death is wrong. The author is 27 (I count, since he says in 2045 he'll be 58) and that's much younger than I am and he is thinking about it now, which shows his personal progress, which always a good sign.

In any case, saying that some complex environmental process, like evolution, is more important than lives of individuals that exist strikes me as very foolish. You don't know what will happen in 2 years time, we could have a massive war or disease that would eliminate 90% of population right there, given how interconnected the world is. Should we be waiting for evolution to produce humans that can withstand wars, diseases, environmental changes?

Why?

Who says that humans have any more entitlement to live on this planet than bacteria? And at the end bacteria will win out, and is that a better outcome from our own perspectives? Why should we root for bacteria than for ourselves? You think that evolution will give humans a better chance, I think you don't what you are talking about, evolution could as well lead to our extermination and let jellyfish populate most of the planet. Maybe even ground crawling jellyfish, and from my perspective I prefer to be here rather than having some jellyfish supersede myself.

Anyway, we have brains that allow us to modify our environment and those of us with any sense at all should do everything possible to ensure that our own lifespans are increased. Not lifespans of whatever may or may not come after us, but ourselves. If we don't do that and just disappear into the nothing sooner rather than later, as everything does, then there is no major distinction between us and the rest of the slime out there. As a thinking creature, I refuse to accept that. If we can't figure this out, then too bad for us of-course, but to consciously deny ourselves that very possibility, of extending our own lifespans is nothing but defeatism. The poor of mind and spirit can have that, let them perish. Those who want to reach for more than what we are given by the system that surrounds us must fight to take what we can.

I look for people who are interested in software development, who are willing to take the opportunity to learn on the job and can demonstrate that they can learn, that they are intelligent and that they understand that if they do not possess the skills that allow me to bill my clients for their work, they will not get paid until they acquire those skills. I train my people the way I see fit and within a few weeks they become productive members of the team, at which point they can start commanding a wage.

I have very little interest in their academic achievements, the degree does not matter to me one bit. However I do have a few examples that show that people that drop out of the school that they started are in some cases very flaky. Seriously, I wouldn't have thought that previously, but I have examples where people that were drop outs in computer science also drop off the radar at work! Even the talented can be the most flaky people apparently, it's kind of surprising.

OTOH people who are still students, even if their education has nothing to do with computing, are actually hard working and they show up, which apparently not everybody can do - SHOW UP. It's quite amazing, honestly.

"What they are really afraid of" ....

I just read some of the comments on TFA, at this point 219 comments, I read the top 10. Read them. The only thing you will find there will be hate, hate and more hate. Oh, and jealousy, hate, more hate and jealousy, nothing else.

"tax them", "steal from them", "global warming", "infrastructure", "would have been better if they never had that money", etc.etc.etc.

The commenters are CERTAIN that these guys stole the money that they have, not MADE it, but stole it. They probably believe those guys stole it from them personally, no less. OMFG, I wish I could collect these types of people specifically onto one continent, while the rest could live on another continent and we would have a WALL between us, a wall so tall, they would never have to see the other side again. The problem is, the people on the other side would be coming up with methods to IMPROVE lives of the people on that other continent to try and make more money by GIVING them the fruits of their labour in exchange for something... a promise, I guess, a promise of a fair exchange?

There can be no fair exchange with those people, they produce nothing, they think money is some sort of a limited resource and we are stuck fighting for that one pile, one limited resource. They don't even understand how stupid that is in the article, that explains that people who fund research CREATE NEW STUFF THAT NEVER EXISTED BEFORE. That's how they made their money, that's how they view the world - by changing it and by creating what didn't exist before. Money is MADE, it's not taken from a constant pool. There is no constant pool of money.

When Rockefeller saved the whales by single-handedly growing the kerosene industry into one that could light up the night for everybody pretty much, did he steal something from somebody who already had it? NO. He created the new wealth and others wanted that product, and eventually, as he lowered costs of kerosene over 40 years so much, that others couldn't compete with him, what did they do? Just like these folks, leaving those comments, what did they do?

They got with the government and destroyed an extremely efficient company, because they couldn't compete with it. The prices for kerosene never went down again since that moment in time.

It is very hard to like people, and there is no reason to like people that are that selfish, ignorant, stupid, jealous, thieving, cunning bastards. Very hard to like them indeed and we should not fall for that. Just because they cannot do it themselves does not mean anybody owes anything to them, just because they are incapable of it themselves.

Yet even they get helped by the free market capitalism that allows some people to elevate themselves from the MUD and the slime of the rest and never to stop thinking in terms of creating.

I wonder what effect if any mouthwash (with and without alcohol in it) has on this type of fungus.

That's not the case. The total radiation released by Fukushima Daiichi is far smaller than Mayak or Chernobyl, but there are concentrations of radiation (from Cs-137 and Cs-134) as high as 30M Bq/m2 in the several kilometers of land Northwest of Fukushima Daiichi. This is equivalent 0.8 millicuries which puts it into the ballpark of the Urals EURT areas of 1.8-3.4 millicuries that were studied by the Soviets; high enough to measurably effect the life cycle of saprophage.

The land around Fukushima Daiichi does not fit your terrorist+volcano analogy. The land and around the plant is foothills and the water did not get far inland. The plant itself was build only after the site had been graded to within ~10m of sea level (which is probably the single biggest mistake implicated in the whole event.) So the surface fallout may be studied just fine.

The sea around Fukushima Daiichi may also be meaningfully studied despite the tsunami. One need only establish control areas that are similar to the Fukushima Daiichi area but well away; kilometers or tens of kilometers north and south of the plant and relatively free of radioactive contaminants. Post tsunami recovery of organisms may then be studied and comparisons between Fukushima Daiichi and these control areas can be made.

FYI: this work has been started and is ongoing. Unlike the Soviet case we won't have to wait decades for the cover-up to finally fail and the results to appear, either. Japanese and Western researchers are eager to publish about Fukushima Daiichi.

When the Soviets contaminated over 800 square kilometers with high levels of Strontium 90 in their first big nuclear disaster, post Lysenko geneticists and biologists studied the effects of this radiation on the entire biocoenosis. Z. A. Medvedev wrote about the results of this work in his book, Nuclear Disaster in the Urals (ch.8):

So small critters in the soil that eat leaves are highly sensitive to radioactive contamination. This has been known for a long time now; at least 40 years. Your skepticism is misplaced; that Chernobyl should have caused a big die-out among the creatures the decompose detritus is entirely predictable. Wait a few years and you'll get to read about the same thing around Fukushima, only there we'll learn about the effects on marine life as well.

Oh, really, mass psychosis? How about this: USA is trying desperately to maintain perceived value of its dollar, while it's destroying the current value of it every day with more and more money printing, and now that it can't even hold the dollar price of gold up it's trying to ensure that there is yet another 'crisis' somewhere outside of the US. Worked last time with Europe being in crisis due to Greek bankruptcy and later Cyprus disaster, at that time people rushed into the US dollar.

Now even with the Russian / Ukrainian situation people are not flocking into the dollar. However who in fact started this particular movement in Ukraine? It was a combination of European and American political interests.

You think that the rest of the world is oblivious to these machinations, what you are observing is that while people may not have the information, on a visceral level they get it - there is a strategy behind what is happening in the Eastern European block, what happened in Georgia and now in Ukraine.

You think this is 'mass psychosis', I think it is mass rejection of American intervention. Maybe the USA should stop trying to meddle with everything in the world and then people wouldn't be put into this position.

- oppression.

The word is oppression. How about this: you have your government regulated banks and I have my banks that are not regulated by anybody, that's the way I prefer it.

People don't complain about price hikes in Australia? What are you using for money down there? Friendly smiles? You just grin bigger to cover higher costs? I'll bet that makes your face hurt.

There probably isn't a supply of bio-diesel in the capitol, so they'd have to chopper in the fuel. There is already an ample supply of Jet-A to fuel our hypothetical bio-diesel choppers due to the squadron of giant Marine One Sikorskys the president uses to fly to and from either of his 747s.

So yeah, a bio-diesel car could work among all those turbines, and it'll give the greentards another fine token to hang their hat on.

But since Washington D.C. already has an ample supply of electricity from its notoriously dirty 100+ year old coal burning power station, using a battery powered limo is probably the better choice. Then they can forgo the whole bio-diesel chopper supply thing and nothing says you love the "environment" quite like a genuine coal-powered car.

Then objectivity doesn't exist, outside of some simple math problems. If you think that people have "never truly reached adulthood" until they can do this, then we're living in Never Never Land.

People aren't computers. We're all influenced by our upbringing, our beliefs, our experiences. You can (and should!) expose yourself to new things, and broaden your perspective a bit, but that just means you have a broader base of things to influence your thinking, not that you've become objective.

But "Sunny days when the wind is blowing" energy alone can not power an industrial-technological civilization, which requires 24x7 energy.

I get the impression that destroying our industrial-technological civiliation is considered a feature, not a bug, by many.

The rest are arithmetic deniers.

Besides, the developing world is not going to go back to the subsistence economy they've just begun emerging from. "Been there, done that, didn't like it."