This strikes me as a bit of a shakedown, settle with out patent claims or we'll screw up your IPO by creating a new potential liability.

Back in the early days of the personal computer explosion there was a patent for the "XOR cursor" which I hear was used as a trolling operation. Story goes that every time a new hi-tek company was in that sensitive period just as they're about to go public, they'd get a notice that they were believed to be violating that (even if whatever they were doing didn't even involve a display with a cursor, XOR or otherwise) and an offer to license the patent for something substantial but far lower than the cost and risks of fighting it. ($10,000?) So the companies generally paid up rather than derail their IPO.

It was jokingly referred to as a tax on incorporation. There are rumors of discussions of buying a hit on the trolls. Apparently this netted over $50,000,000 before the patent expired. (Also there was apparently prior art discovered - AFTER the expiration.)

And those who made fun of us nerds went on to become succsesful supermarket clerks or heroin addicts instead of silicon valley millionaires or other successful professionals.
There isn't much to gain from idle chit-chat and subjective conversation with drooling idiots who have an opinion on things they never personally experienced or read about.
The time I spent with my family was... sitting quietly staring at the TV screen. That's what my mom did too. And she had a console in the 70s. Played computer games until she passed away in 2010.
I think this guy doesnt know much about history. Maybe he should spend some screen time on Wikipedia or Netflix, watch some old movie set in the 80s with bullying and teen pregnancy.

You could also start with:
  - two molecules that (moderately) accurately copied each other (though getting them both at the same time makes the time scale to the big event much longer.)
  - A molecule that makes NEARLY always inacurate (but occasionally acurate and complete) copies of itself. (This also drastically pulls in the time to a two-molecule solution.)
  - A molecule that makes inaccurate copies but with string of typical errors that occasionally loops back to an accurate and complete (mod a few errors in unimportant places) copy of a previous version.

These could eventually mutate into a version that can perform a one-step copy-itself loop.

=====

I've always been partial to an RNA-only origin. RNA can do it all (self-copy, enzymes, energy transport batteries in at least two sizes with self-pluggin-in connectors: ATP/ADP and UTP/UDP, expression regulation, directed genetic code editing, etc.). It's also still doing a lot of that in current lifeforms, especially in key parts (such as many of the components of the DNA duplication, DNA repair, DNA-to-MRNA copy, gene expression regulation, MRNA exon-eliminating editing, and MRNA directed protein synthesis machinery)

Cable AND internet? Are you out of your mind? You never heard of "triple play", that's like 20 years old. You cannot detach cable or telephone from "the internet" it's INTERNET DATA, all in the same fiber LOL. TV is served over IP! You can watch every TV channel on your freaking phone! What, you never heard of VOIP either? There is no analog phone network anymore. Telecoms pulled out and sold the copper out of the ground years ago, it was worth a lot of money. No analog radio. And certainly no cable company. .I'm pretty sure we've had gigabit fiber connections available for some ten years or so. I live in a distant suburb, not exactly Wall Street. What have your telecoms been doing for the past couple of decades? :D
Let me guess they still charge you for text messages limited to 140 characters?
We don't even have 3G anymore let alone the old GSM texts. We're about to phase out 4G, too.

Bitcoin is completely useless and the fact something is finite doesn't mean it's valuable. My great-grandfather put all his money on land and nobody lives in former agricultural towns anymore. The land is worth shit.
Gold is way overrated as well.
I can't fathom what sort of idiots just want to park their spare million on obscure risky assets instead of letting a certified professional handle it. Blind faith and money laundering.

That's what we did. We built one of the world's largest datacenters in 2013 with a capacity of 34 Petabytes and at a cost of 100 million on top of our highest mountain, which has always been one of the main attractions in Portugal. Now it's old and for sale. Sic transit gloria mundi. Soon you'll be able to store 34 petabytes on your desk.

I'm not a physicist but I seem to recall reading that over a long period of time it's likely that gravitational attraction can sync up orbits in a resonant pattern....if we're talking about largeish planets aligned on the same plane and relatively close to each other it sounds like the perfect environment for resonance to form.

As far back as 1889 there was a novel predicting the rebellion of sentient machines, "The Wreck of the World". Don't say they didn't warn you.

They should have simply added a lawnmower weapon to doom and turned lawnmowing into an AR game.

Imagine how AWESOME social media would be if everybody from Texas and Florida were no longer allowed to post?

No. Jesus. What a stupid idea.

What exactly do you want to pump into the entire atmosphere? Particulate matter is widely regarded as pollution. Soot. Black lung. Volcano ash causes lung disease in people who live at a relatively safe distance from the exploding volcano but still in the range that ash falls. Chalk also caused lung disease in a high school teacher of mine. .I can just see the media raging over the new "Glitter Lung" that came from Switzerland.
USE THE ENERGY. It's fuckling FREE ENERGY.
https://energy.mit.edu/news/tr...
This will protect plants and animals from excess UV and infrared (heat) while generating solar energy.
Build solar-powered desalination facilities in arid countries. Green the deserts. Let there be crops and forests.
Build solar-powered carbon capture, you get free carbon powder for paints, cosmetics, or medicine. Run a giant freezer in polar lands to pile the ice back onto them
You want geoengineering? Cover the world in solar panels and generate more energy than the mythical nuclear fusion plant we've been trying to build for over 50 years.

Here's that first sentence with them...

They've known for a while now, and been talking about it for well over a year.

They've known for a while now, and been talking about it for well over a year.

On Jan 1 2020 a new IMO (International Maratime Organization) regulation went into effect. The shipping industry drastically lowered the sulfur content of its fuels and the SOx content of ship exhaust plumes dropped by about 77%. (Other aspects of the fuel change also reduced some particulate pollution, too.)

The COVID sequestration also reduced shipping (and cloud-seeding exhaust from it), along with aircraft contrails and upper-atmosphere dust, and dust-generating industrial processes and transportation activity, which (like volcanic dust) also reflect sunlight over the ocean and lower temperatures.

I've seen claims that the reduction in ship exhaust plumes, alone, are enough to account for ALL the sea temperature rise since 2020, and that with the low-sulfur fuel in continued use the bulk of that excess heating will continue even as activity ramps up post-COVID.

Regarding the "hockey stick" graph. (Taking absolutely no position on whether Mann was honest or not, competent or not, etc.)

I was under the impression that the Hockey Stick graph had been shown to be defective as an indicator of warming, primarily because it took tree ring data as one of its proxies for temperature, but carbon dioxide concentration increases alone have been shown to substantially promote tree growth even in the absence of temperature increases. So how much of the sudden rise in the graph is from temperature increase (if any) and how much just from increased CO2 levels is unknown.

But I don't have any links to reliable scholarly articles examining this issue. Do any of you?