This is a myth possibly originating with The Martian, where the main character goes to great lengths to bury his RTG. That was silly, he should have used the thing as a foot warmer in the hab, and to charge his iPod.
They're potentially dangerous if you crack them open and munch on the plutonium inside, but they're generally also designed to survive reentry intact so good luck with that.
Don't worry, they've decided they need to get back to the moon right now because the Chinese are interested. There was a documentary on Netflix about it.
Mars' atmosphere is too thin for realistic passenger flight, it's just thick enough to be a PITA for both landing and taking off, any colony on Mars would have to be pretty self-sufficient right away since resupply is once every couple years, it's too far away and too big to supply anything useful to Earth, and is there actually a practical difference between 1/6 and 1/3 G?
Meanwhile the moon is close, made out of resources that would be useful for a space-based industry, and much easier to come and go from. Also, there's no thought it might have once had life, which means there's no real argument for mining the crap out of it. On the other hand, there's no thought it might have once had life.
fallen sharply beyond expectations
How far had Apple expected it to fall?
People will start to think like professional athletes: I have to earn a life's wage by the time I'm 35, because after that I won't have an income anymore.
To be fair, an athlete is more likely to experience a career-ruining injury than the average worker and then be unable to continue in that career. I'm not trying to justify the insane salaries many seem to get, but can understand why they'd want to earn while they can. Of course, being responsible with those earnings would go a long way toward future financial security. (Good advice for everyone.)
Bribes, usually.
1930s.
Of course it is. I'm not saying he's wrong. I'm saying "compelling" is a trap. Humans love stories, and scientists these days are highly encouraged to tell stories. When I was in grad school they paid people to come and teach us how to tell compelling stories.
Not reading the article is a Slashdot meme. You didn't even bother to read the first word of the article title before dashing off something silly.
The old "toss it down a staircase and the stair it falls on is the grade" trick doesn't care much about last name.
I have to agree with you though. The first few assignments I graded I tended to have high expectations. By the end those were gone.
Did you respond to the wrong comment? I am indeed unsure how "long wave transparency windows" are related to the definition of "order of magnitude."
Ah, you're one of those posters who likes to write comments for the mindless adoration of their fans. Indeed, my mistake. Carry on.
This is a common claim. People like to expand it into things like, well, more CO2 and warmer climates means a lusher Earth and more food!
That's probably true. Most of the land is in the northern hemisphere, fairly far from the equator. Deserts will expand with warmer temperatures, but likely even more land will become arable in the north. I'm Canadian, and my countrymen often quip that global warming sounds pretty good.
The problem is that cities need a *constant* supply of food. I grew up in a farming community. Farmers admittedly like to bitch about everything, but there's a reason for that. They'll be happy to tell you about how any change from the norm, in any direction, negatively affects their crops. Modern agriculture, especially in the developed world, isn't some old geezer waking up one day, squinting at the sun, letting some dirt trickle through his fingers, standing up and sighing "well, I guess it's plantin' time again." It's incredibly optimized. There was a documentary, unfortunately I can't find it, on all the things the USDA tracks and models in order to make recommendations for pretty much every aspect of agriculture in the US.
Canada is supposed to get (overall) warmer and wetter. Sounds great yeah? Well, a few years ago we had a really wet fall, meaning nobody could dry hay, meaning lots of livestock had to be culled the next year because there wasn't enough food for them. Warmer also means less or no persistent snow pack in the winter, so no spring runoff.
Moving New York, Miami and New Orleans because they're getting regularly flooded is expensive, but doable. Moving Capetown, LA, or a hundred other cities because they're out of water is expensive, doable. Switching Iowa from growing corn to growing wheat is expensive, but doable. All at the same time, and along with a zillion other things starts to get dicey, and definitely more expensive. And the global climate is likely to keep shifting for a long time until the heat budget equalizes and another zillion things all equilibrate.
One of the reasons Australia was sparsely populated historically, never developed large agrarian civilizations, and agriculture is still very difficult, is that its geography makes its climate highly variable. Civilization thrives in stability.
I'm not sure how you get "there is no problem" from the species will survive but civilization is fucked. Admittedly, that is the direction climate change deniers are heading: "oh, *some* humans will survive, so we don't have to do anything!"
Always draw your curves, then plot your reading.
