Comment Re:20% survival is pretty good (Score 1) 56
Light exposure, depth, degree of exposure, isolated from others or clustered... many factors can affect survivability.
Light exposure, depth, degree of exposure, isolated from others or clustered... many factors can affect survivability.
Movies have become more derivative every decade since the motion picture camera was invented. This is the "low hanging fruit" observation.
People only have a certain number of desires, and only desire a certain amount of change. As it gets more difficult to come up with something new that people like, something old will get repeated more. As there gets to be a longer history of "something old that people liked", something new will be created less often.
It's not just movies. You can see it everywhere. Consider, e.g., software. A new edition has to change something noticeable, but it gets harder to come up with something new that people will like as much.
The time when we could (sometimes) rely on legislators to mandate basic security was back when they understood how basic security worked. In these areas only (some) tech specialists do.
To be fair, there have been times where Earth's temperature changed relatively rapidly.
On the other hand... those times tended not to work out very well for life :
Our current experiment with mass greenhouse gas emissions affecting the climate, Earth itself has kinda done it before, at the Paleocene-Eocene boundary. The associated Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM) left the world such an altered place that we refer to it as a different era (the Eocene). The oceans took the brunt of the hit. Except the differences we have vs. the PETM are *not* to our favour:
* The arctic was ice-free going into the PETM; ours is not. The presence of ice creates an amplifying feedback process, where the more ice that melts, the more sunlight gets absorbed, creating more heat to melt more ice.
* We're releasing our carbon an order of magnitude faster (though our methane emissions are similar)
The PETM caused a 5-8C rise over 6000 years, but we're speed-running it, so it's really our best case. The worst case is the K-Pg extinction event
Only the worst excursions in history tend to result in large parts of the earth becoming relative sterile. But they all lead to mass disruptions in ecosystems and waves of global or at least local extinction (but new speciation of the survivors who take their place). Indeed, we probably owe our existence to the PETM - primates diversified and radiated after it. But that's little solace to species that didn't make it. Like, for example, dinoflagellates flourished during the PETM. But do you really want to replace reefs with red tide?
Also, it's actually 1-3 years. The Great Barrier reef underwent mass bleaching events in 2016, 2017, 2020, 2022, and now in 2024.
(To be clear on terminology: colony != reef. A coral colony is a cluster of polyps that bud or divide off from each other, all genetically identical and interconnected by the coenosarc to share resources, with each polyp living for a few years. For a plant analogy, the colony would be a a tree, and the polyps, individual leaves of that tree)
Going through mass bleaching events every 2-3 years is not the "whew, let's relax" event you seem to think it is when corals don't hit reproductive age for ~3-10 years, depending on species, with initial reproduction rates being slow and taking time to accelerate (the longest-lived animals on Earth are coral colonies, with certain individuals documented having lived for thousands of years; most live for decades, or in some species hundreds of years). Let alone the knock-on for all the species that depend on healthy coral for their their habitat, which lead to balance in the ecosystem, which is critical to e.g. preventing explosions of coral predators.
It's like taking an old growth forest in an ecosystem not adapted to regular fires, and burning it down every couple years. There will still be "something" living there, but it's just not going to be the same ecosystem it was.
Or they were just healthier to begin with, or more favourably situated. It doesn't mean that they have an inherent genetic advantage.
Corals are not fast growing. They grow about a centimeter per year, give or take half an order of magnitude. The fastest-reproducing corals still take several years to hit reproductive age, while others take as much as a decade. These aren't like bacteria that can quickly get new genes into the mix, test them, and quickly spread them through the population.
Corals need to get off Tiktok and stop with these unhealthy style trends. You're beautiful the way you are, corals!
That is, indeed, the most ethical. It's the way I chose. But I never deluded myself into believing that it would alter the behavior of the companies. Only two things (that I've thought of) stand a chance of doing that.
1) If you stop selling something that you are the monopolizer of sales in, you lose all associated copyrights. (And possibly all associated patents.) I.e. legal action to make things that you buy act is if they are yours.
2) Massive community on-line attacks whenever a company disables something that it's sold.
I don't think either of those have much chance of happening, and the second would be quite dangerous.
There's probably no "the" filter. It's probably a raft of multiple pieces. Some species won't be able to survive away from their home planet. Some will be aquatic (or other heavy medium). Some won't be able to tolerate the communications lag time. Some will kill each other off in suicidal war. Etc. Etc. Etc.
And another part of the filter is, since FTL appears to be impossible, (if only because of collision with grains of dust) once you've spent thousands of years in space, that's what you're adapted to, and then you don't want to (or can't) visit a planet.
I never agreed to allow my printer to connect to the internet. Even though I always used HP ink (I don't print that much), my printer still shut down, because I wouldn't allow it connection to the internet.
HP has become garbage.
There were contributions from multiple countries. You can point to particular problems that the Russians solved, but also some the the folks in the US solved. And the Germans. (And, IIRC, the French.) If you go back far enough, most of the progress happened in China.
For that matter, I suspect that in the 1700's much of the progress happened in Britain. (Consider "in the rocket's red glare", and there was a lot of work on rockets between ships...often for carrying a line to allow a rescue.)
China is NOT communist. They pretend to be, but they are actually a tyrannical oligarchy. (OTOH, no large government can ever be communist, as the theory doesn't scale beyond around Dunbar's number of people...and that requires a charismatic leader.)
That's a gross overstatement WRT "Russian theory of space travel".
As for the "German engineers", well, that's true. There were US engineers working on rockets, but they were ignored and never funded, so they never developed massive hardware.
I tell them to turn to the study of mathematics, for it is only there that they might escape the lusts of the flesh. -- Thomas Mann, "The Magic Mountain"