zipwitch

One of the challenges when it comes to assessing the full impact of anthropogenic climate change is that while it does drive extreme weather, it's far from the only input into such events. Combined with the limited number of such events, it makes it easy to dismiss them as ancedotes instead of data.

Scientific American has a good overview of this: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/yes-some-extreme-...

You can also do a google search for graphs on the frequency of extreme climate events.

Sci-fi is increasingly struggling to keep up with reality.

Here's a novel with a similar premise (but more SF setting) that isn't even out yet: https://www.tor.com/2017/09/18/excerpts-annalee-newitz-auton...

The part tabletop RPGs it models really well is where the players and GM spend three hours arguing about the rules applicable to a single sword swing.

Exactly. Comments about"costing jobs" always miss the point, partially or wholly. _Jobs are a cost._ They are what it takes to create _wealth_. At issue is how to best create and distribute wealth.

Equating invasions, bombings, and direct material support for local factions to "make some objective history available to people who want to read it" is extremely disingenuous.

I am not an anthropologist, but I believe that's a popular misconception. Many technologically primitive tribal cultures have low absolute numbers of violent deaths, but they also typically have very low populations compared to agricultural societies. Their per capita casualties from intra- and inter-tribal violence are quite high.

Nice of him to publicly testify to their gross incompetence , though. (And under oath too?)

Doubtless the various lawsuits will be coming back to this testimony for many years.

Except abandoned cities won't magically go back to some idyllic paradise. They're full of value (shelter, metals, art, etc) that someone is going to want to extract. And they're also full of lots of potentially dangerous stuff too.

Dealing with broken cities will not be cheap, swift or easy. I have no ready solutions. But thinking that we can just walk away from them is only setting ourselves up for different problems down the timeline.

Near Earth Orbit?

How feasible is launching a constellation of bitcoin-mining microsats that will run on solar power?

I am a fan of at least the idea of bitcoin, blockchain technology, and cryptocurrency, but I'm not sure it would be possible to describe bitcoin in a way that makes it sound more like a scam than you just did.

They leaked far more than SSNs.

This also raises a real question about scale and distributed harm. If killing someone is wrong, what is stealing one ten-thousandth of a lifespan (through stress and monetary loss) from a hundred million people?

I don't know what shape the team's careers will take, but this is anything but sudden for them. Planning for this started about a decade ago.

I remember years ago reading about all the options they were considering, including some really ambitious ones, like moving it to another gas giant over the course of decades. But costs would be high, failure a real possibility, and fuel very low. So we got the amazing last few months of images and science. And now comes the fiery end, with some final data and no chance to accidentally crash on Enceladus or Titan.

As someone who isn't exposed (I have like .02 bitcoin from a fountain in the early days), but has been an interested observer, the possibility of a crash down to rock bottom does make it seem like a good time to at least be in position to play with cryptocurrencies with some disposable funds. Maybe I'll take out some of my prediction market money that's been sitting since the election.

I thought breaking into systems they don't own for profit was something done by large nation-states and their proxies?

Politicians aren't the problem. They don't exist in a vaccuum. They're a symptom.

Democracy is only the problem insofar as we (here in the US) do not have one, we just pretend we do. Democracy and Republic both mean a government by the public. Voting once a year, donating money, and writing stuff on the net are utterly inadequate for that end.

Public government needs educated and involved citizenry. It means putting in quite a bit of time.

If we (the US) did not waste so much time, energy and other forms of wealth on what is essentially busywork, we would be forced to deal with the full ramifications of how we have transformed our world.

Customers also enjoy cigarettes. Which kill them.

The Information Age revolution has empowered and freed us countless ways. But it has also freed us to make bad choices. And it has empowered us to do far more damage to ourselves, our civilization, and our home than ever before.

And at the same time, we live in in world where the mechanisms of our existence - shaped by evolution and civilization are less suited to dealing with that ever before.

I'm confident that we can figure out new strategies for dealing with the world we've created, but I'm unsure how much damage we will do to ourselves first.

You may want to check out OpenStreetMap.

http://www.openstreetmap.org/

I'm no expert on xenobiology, but it seems like in our search for life we're always looking for life like Earth's. Are we even looking for life at much different scales of size or time?

Sooo... mass and composition are irrelevant? Because Pluto (and its fellows, like Eris) are smaller than a half-dozen moons. Pluto has less than _five percent_ of the mass of the smallest planet, Mercury. It is also mostly _ice_ unlike the inner (rocky) planets and the gas giants.

And variety of solar-system bodies are geologically active, from the inner planets, through numerous moons, down to comets and asteroids, and probably many other Trans-Neptunian Objects like Pluto (many of which also have moons). Your proposed criteria fail to be useful.

And there you've hit the nail on the head. Too many people running currently powerful/profitable businesses think they have a right to have their business model be profitable.

I've found BotR an invaluable inspiration for RPG characters of the less-serious sort. I wish all my wizards could have that ancient weapon known to the Elves as a Browning semi-automatic.

I wonder if we allow enough for this in our search for alien life? Are their other life-forms out there somewhere whose timescales are radically different from ours? How would we find or communicate with them if there were?

I recall seeing a navigation app a few years back that copied almost perfectly the navigation views from Standalone Complex. Never did get the name of it.

Senator Mark Warner publicly commented today that this is not the full extent of Russian attacks. She has succeeded in opening national high-profile public discussion on another aspect of Russian attacks on our election.

Should we terraform Mars is well on its way to being an irrelevant question. Launch costs keep getting cheaper, and there are low-energy (if long) paths between Earth and Mars. The only question is how long before some person or small group decides Mars terraforming is getting started, _now_.

Tolkien seems to have had a hard time actually finishing things. He would go back to tinker or re-write rather than producing a single final draft. (That's intended only as an observation, not a criticism. I sympathize with the tendency.) So for the stories he really liked (of which Beren and Luthien is certainly one) there's a lot of material.

I'd hope for a completed poetic version, but as a life-long Tolkien fan, I'll be buying it regardless.

3% in recent years. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Mount_Everest_death_st...

6.5% overall. https://www.thoughtco.com/death-on-mount-everest-755907

If they do, it's almost certainly never been put into orbit. The guys who track satellites as a hobby are good.

Sunken warships vanished from the ocean floor...

The Earth facing an environmental crisis...

Has anyone checked on the IJN Yamato lately?