117 karma · joined January 3, 2009
I think you can pull many people out of their patterns into consciousness for a short time through the right engagement, but they'll just slip back into semi-oblivion when they go back to their daily life, social network, confirmation bias affirming news sources, etc...
China is the largest paper consumer in the world (100mm metric tons), followed not far behind by the US(70mm metric tons). Japan is 3rd at 25mm.. That seems to suggest we have a lot of room for reduction.
Holocaust denial? Vaccine misinformation? Anti-mask propaganda? These things can and do cause real harm to society. To Facebook's credit, they have since banned these, but only after the ideas had spread significantly.
Whether or not you agree, some people like the idea of humanity surviving as a multi-solar system species.
I'm not sure Alpha Centauri has any inhabitable planets, at least for our biology as it stands today, but what we learn along the way might render that moot.
(https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/18/health/coronavirus-childr...)
Of course you're right that we don't know is if this is political, or just a distraction from whatever their real goal is / was. But the optics are clear here, and there is no reason to muddy the waters.
Let's say you get to 96% C. You would experience 28% of the journey. Taking into account the the time to speed up and slow down from C, you're looking at over 290k years from the perspective of the passengers.
At 99% C, you would experience over 14% of the journey (About 142k years).
This comment alleviated some of creeping anxiety from the above posts that I maybe hadn't done enough research (I hadn't, I just got lucky).
At the end of the day some parental digression is required here, and if you do take your child to see this film, it may open up a good opportunity for an earnest conversation about healthy and unhealthy relationships.
It would be great to see a follow on experiment where FoP is duplicated with direct stimulation of the associated brain regions.
Would it have been a better solution? Probably, but the investment required (laying down the rails, land buyouts, copious use of emanate domain, political greasing of the wheels, etc...) has always been prohibitive. The gains would be shared between many disparate groups that would need to fund this together, taking years to decades for any ROI - certainly a longer time-frame than most publicly traded, quarterly measured, corporations can afford. At the least this would have required some government subsidization.
With driver-less tech around the corner, returns on this investment for any one company become even more dubious, and thus make it less likely to happen. I think the parent comment here will always get some up-votes, but that is as far as I see this going anymore. Maybe it'd go farther if we threw in words like 'Hyperloop' ;)
On Mars we might be able to build large stables domes, or close off caverns for additional radiation shielding. We could mine the planet itself for resources, and even grow crops there.
Not nearly as easy to take advantage of as the Heartbleed vulnerability, but serious never the less the less.
6. What is the relationship between embryonic stem cell research and "therapeutic" cloning?
Another potential obstacle encountered by researchers engaging in embryonic stem cell research is the possibility that embryonic stem cells would not be immunologically compatible with patients and would therefore be “rejected,” much like a non-compatible kidney would be rejected. A proposed solution to this problem is to create an embryonic clone of a patient and subsequently destroy the clone in order to harvest his or her stem cells. Cloning for this purpose has been termed “therapeutic” cloning—despite the fact that the subject of the research—the clone—is not healed but killed.