"Refugee papers" OMG I'm dying here...

Biosphere 2 was an attempt at fully closed loop self-regulation. That doesn't work, and is not what is under discussion. The discussion is of using systems to maintain environments.

Production of oxygen is not remotely difficult. Not by plants, but again, industrial systems. Systems to make O2 from CO2 and/or water are TRL10. They exist, you can just buy them off the shelf. Same with reusable CO2 scrubbers (it's a very simple chemical process: cool = absorb CO2, hot = release CO2; they just cycle between cold and hot and whether they're connected to the input or output)..

You seem to have the idea that the proposal is just to have plants and humans life in harmony with no technology. If that were the actual proposal, I would agree with you. But that's not the actual proposal.

Yeah. Because if Mars' gravity is insufficient, and you'd have to live in rotating habitats anyways, then what are you even doing there, instead of being located e.g. on an asteroid where it's much easier to make a rotating habitat, where your surface is much more resource-rich, and where delivery and return of goods is much easier?

Venus, by contrast, I think few people doubt that its gravity would be sufficient for human life. Mars, it's *probably* enough, but it's not well studied. Moon seems like a coin toss at this point.

It's not entirely clear, but it's quite possible, arguably probable, that at least part of Venus's highlands involve fragments of ancient crust (the highlands also have milder conditions for exploration). Venus was Earthlike before Earth was, with vast warm oceans. There's also some arguments for life in the atmosphere based on gases that have been found, although I don't buy them (in the same way that I don't buy the same arguments for current surface life on Mars).

Was the test available at the time? Did other sperm banks check for this mutation?

Way more than that. It was 200 babies, not 200 attempts. The success rate of artificial insemination is about 20%, so that's 1000 squirts.

I was a sperm donor back in the 1990s.

The donors aren't "random".

They are screened for general health, genetic defects, and academic achievement. I had to show my college transcripts, provide a blood sample, and have a medical examination.

TFA describes a screwup that only happened because a test for the condition wasn't available. But many other tests were done, so the odds were still better than an old-fashioned insemination.

Many of the recipients are women in nuclear families, whose husbands have fertility problems.

It's true, seifs are for ease of reading ... but so is Calibri. However, I believe Calibri was created for ease of reading on screens, while this article talks about documents on letterhead. So it's possible the choice of Calibri was misguided to begin with. Furthermore, according to the article, the number of “accessibility-based document remediation cases” – which I take to mean instances where somebody requests a document be reformatted for accessibility reasons – has not declined. So he's saying that, while this is a purely subjective aesthetic choice, the original change to Calibri never helped anything anyway.

At least in the current climate (and quite possibly indefinitely; depending on how prudent their investments are and whether they have any uncontrollably expensive hobby) there's not really any reason for the 'AI' guys to take such a servile attitude.

If you actually need the job, or are invested in the company's mission for some reason, it's a good idea to care at least slightly about how your paycheck doesn't bounce; but that's not really the position these guys are in. Exceptionally in-demand skillset and reputation; existing net worth almost certainly already enough to at least keep them comfortable indefinitely if they feel like quitting the rat race or get fired. Why settle for doing sordid adtech if you think that, best case, your boss in the sort of dumbass who would lose billions of dollars on the idea that Second Life would totally have the GDP of western europe, because reasons, and you can keep him paying you a handsome salary and providing you with the GPU compute time and dubiously sourced datasets that you find personally interesting; and worst case, if you lose the fight, you'll just be told to go sling ads, not fired and blacklisted.

Facebook isn't running a charity; but neither are these guys. Why wouldn't they try to take what they can get? Especially when the actually-profitable business units are fat enough that there's plenty of room for boondoggles, so long as you can sell them, rather than there being fairly tight constraints on how much you can waste before the company starts bleeding out.

It would honestly be more surprising if they signed up with facebook out of a genuine willingness to do adtech swill and sordid 'engagement' hacking; rather than on the assumption that there's enough desperate dumb money sloshing around in Zuckerberg's fear of missing out on the next big thing that they can get paid to pursue their pet projects without much concern for having to deliver short term impact on the bottom line.

I assume that at least some of the tension here is that facebook hired these guys to be the hotshot golden boys of sucking less at AI; so it isn't just an it's-only-money thing. I don't know whether or not this belief is accurate; but Zuck and friends certainly hunted down and paid for the various new AI hires as though they were capable of things that in-house or more readily available alternatives are not, so the battle over where their attention will be focused is presumably being waged on the assumption that having someone else do what they aren't doing isn't really a substitute.

What I would be curious to know is why the 'build god-machine' goal isn't being treated as the obvious winner just because you can have the god machine make facebook more addictive and better at serving ads. Do they think that the AI guys are drinking the kool-aide and the only thing they'll actually be able to deliver is incremental improvements; so they want those churned directly into products? Some degree of confidence that they will eventually manage it; but fear of missing out on some sort of short term advantage means that they don't care about what is achievable in 5-10 years? Genuinely zero interest in anything except making social media more of a hellscape; so they simply don't care?

I suspect that, while it would be socially controversial, planetary colonization would be a very strong case for IVF and some population planning.

For the amount of volume/mass required to ship a single human and support them in transit and on site you could ship a lot of embryos in cryo(it's careful plumbing; but a big dewar flask kept at cryogenic temperatures is downright lightweight compared to a full life support system); and shipping embryos gives you the option of bringing massive genetic diversity, thousands to tens of thousands of genetically screened parents worth of embryos in the space a single person would require.

Unless you've got some sort of advanced growth vats you would obviously need people onsite; but instead of dealing with the probably-impossible task of keeping a tiny breeding population's gene pool in order you'd just be defrosting and gestating specimens from a much larger pool of diverse embryos as needed. Presumably you'd initially go with an all-female colony, and only start defrosting males and trying to maintain a viable natural population once you had at least high single-digit thousands to low-mid tens of thousands.

I'm sure that such an arrangement would freak some people out; and you'd probably need to do some reasonably intense social engineering to keep everyone on-mission; but in terms of efficiency of genetic diversity there's a fairly compelling case to be made.

What sort of disaster do you have in mind that would render earth less habitable than mars?

Short of unstoppable replicator nanites turning the entire crust into grey goo; or very long term issues with the sun reaching EoL that will be an issue for basically anyone in the solar system, it's honestly hard to think of ways you could break it more badly.

Plenty of possibilities that will make people deeply miserable; or cause 80+ percent of the population to die horribly; but you'll still have a planet with the right gravity, an atmosphere and magnetosphere, some sort of ecosystem(even if it's just algal scum and cockroaches); some soil that isn't riddled with perchlorates, and so on.

NO! This is an outrage! [slams table]

Our religious war should be about reader's choice vs writer's choice!

Ok, but which of those things came with the new law? A lot of what you're describing (I suspect all of it) was already in place. What changed for non-banned users?

Oh, so they're doing it the same way I take "good" photographs: by taking a fuckton of mostly-shitty photographs and trawling through them for the rare few which actually look decent.

Vaporware. If this feature doesn't make it into the Open Source driver so that I can know where my computer is, then I'm not going to buy any Nvidia hardware!