- cross-posted to:
- nottheonion@zerobytes.monster
- cross-posted to:
- nottheonion@zerobytes.monster
We can’t even come together to wear a peice of cloth to slow the spread of a virus.
We can’t even come together to wear a peice of cloth to slow the spread of a virus.
- No one washes their hands — Increased infection rates.
- Research doctors don’t work — Reduced cure research speed.
- Sick people given hugs — Infectivity increased once spotted.
– Plague Inc. description of Easy Difficulty (Written before the 2020 COVID-19 Lockdown)
The cloth does nothing to stop the virus but also completely cuts off oxygen to your brain.
No I will not explain. It’s your job to educate yourself by watching more Jordan Peterson videos.
Poe’s law strikes again
Cameron Poe?
Just stopping by to say that I understood the obvious sarcasm/joke
Goddamnit, stop making me click the downvote button twice!
I know it’s stupid but /s really should be mandatory if you arennot serious. Because there are too many prople that are
Did you get the special chloroform-infused masks? I hear they’re the only ones that do the job properly.
I hope you’re a troll. That’s just next level stupidity to be real.
The second sentence tells me troll/sarcasm. But there are people who unironically believe that
Actually we DID. Tho’ only for a little while. And the results were enormous. The B/Yamgata Influenza lineage appears to have gone extinct. The cool part is we weren’t even trying to do anything with those specific efforts to affect influenza. All of which should encourage us to cooperate more. No less.
Why the change of heart at tha last sentence?
Call me an optimist, but I think that if an android was actually going to destroy life as we know it, nations would do everything in their power to advert the disaster.
you really think ONE android could wipe out life as we know it?
“According to The Atlantic, an asteroid that weighs more than 1.7 quadrillion metric tons could sterilize Earth by raising the temperature of its water above 100°C. This asteroid would be 10–1,000 times heavier than the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs and would be between 60–96 kilometers (37–60 miles) wide.”
The Atlantic article itself is paywalled, but yes, and it’s entirely dependent on the mass of said Asteroid.
i’m not worried because an android that heavy couldn’t even stand up
Id imagine it doesn’t have to really move fast, just has to sit in the right spot and wait for our orbit around the sun to smash us into it?
🤣 just visualizing the United Nations Assembly talking turns curb stomping some poor android.
Also there’s this survey that shows we actually would prefer stopping climate change instead of war.
https://kbin.run/m/climate@slrpnk.net/t/505138/Most-people-in-petrostates-want-quick-switch-to-clean-energyCongress is making laws about bathrooms and genitals like a bunch of 3rd graders running a minecraft server. Of course we can’t handle fucking asteroid defense.
Maybe the 10 commandments posted in every Louisiana classroom will stop the asteroids.
I’m not sure I learned anything new other than I want to play the tabletop game they created.
I’m roundaboutly reminded of one of my favorite novels - Greener Than You Think, by Ward Moore.
It’s a science fiction story about the end of the world that was written in the late 40s. The proximate cause of the end is all of the landmasses of Earth being smothered by a gigantic and very aggressive strain of Bermuda grass, but the real cause is the utter and complete failure, due to ignorance, greed, selfishness, short-sightedness, incompetence, arrogance and so on, of every attempt to combat it.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
In an exercise involving multiple US government agencies during April 2024, NASA conducted a so-called “tabletop” game in which participants plot their response to a 72 percent chance that an asteroid may hit Earth in 14 years.
Underpinning a bewildering number of moving parts is the likelihood that space agencies are not ready to implement the operations needed to find out more about the threat and mitigate it, even with more than a decade to prepare.
The game also found that the “role of the UN-endorsed Space Mission Planning and Advisory Group (SMPAG) in an asteroid impact threat scenario is not fully understood by all participants.”
“Sustaining the space mission, disaster preparedness, and communications efforts across a 14-year timeline would be challenging due to budget cycles, changes in political leadership, personnel, and ever-changing world events,” the report says.
It recommends “periodic briefings and exercises to continue to raise awareness of planetary defense and increase readiness for preparation and response to an asteroid impact threat.”
Speaking to US public radio service NPR, Terik Daly, planetary defense section supervisor at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory, said experts didn’t know of any asteroids of a substantial size that are going to hit Earth for the next hundred years.
The original article contains 610 words, the summary contains 206 words. Saved 66%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
Whenever I dare to hope about the lofty, admirable star trek future, I remember that space is completely unforgiving and we just aren’t up to the task for anything more than a token selfie by the best dozen humans we can possibly produce with great effort and training.
As a species, we aren’t going to spread out there. Still too primitive, and probably too self-destructive to make it out of this phase of evolution.
We aren’t even capable of caring for one another, let alone the EASIEST to maintain, most naturally human friendly habitat we would ever encounter in the cosmos as we evolved to fit it. No airlocks, the air/water/waste recycling was already fully automated, all we had to do was not recklessly grow/metastasize to the point we strain the absolutely massive system out of greed and glut, and stop carelessly shitting where we sleep. We all know how that’s been going since we figured out how to make dead animal poison rocket us accross town.
Master space? Master planetary defense? We’ll be lucky if we aren’t scattered tribes living near the old hardened structures of the before times for emergency shelter from the new normal weather events in a hundred years. We’re already starting to argue over the resources it’s taking to rebuild population centers from the current new normal.
I remember that space is completely unforgiving and we just aren’t up to the task for anything more than a token selfie
“Wow, rude!” – Carl Sagan, probably
I remember that space is completely unforgiving and we just aren’t up to the task for anything more than a token selfie by the best dozen humans we can possibly produce with great effort and training.
Astronauts aren’t superhumans and there is nothing “special” about their training. They are just pilots with stricter physical requirements. The reason why there aren’t many of them is because there is no need for more. Our technology is not there yet for cheap and “boring” space travel beyond low Earth orbit (and probably won’t be for a century at least). And there isn’t anything worthwhile for humanity out there anyway. At least at the current stage in our “evolution”. So for now manned spaceflight programmes are just vanity projects funded by politicians (for “national pride” or whatever) or some billionaire celebrities like Musk.
Also I don’t think that world peace would be necessary for space colonization. It could be born out of conflict or for economic reasons, like colonization of Americas. It’s simply that it will take centuries for us to reach a point when the prospect of leaving Earth will become attractive for regular people (if we survive that much of course).
While everything living grows old and dies, and has its limits, we separate “<T> revolution” from “<T> normal development” for a reason.
I mean, what currently exists (with consumerism, incredibly wasteful production of electronic devices doing mostly useless work, less efficient production and organization being preferable when it allows someone to preserve power, Ponzi schemes of various kinds, ignorance and tribalism) is sometimes just a culture, not basic instincts (which have their downsides, but those are solvable). It’s not all cultures.
That culture has brought us revolutions unseen before. Then it stagnated and may die, but the humanity may survive and have more revolutions in the future.
We’d rather bomb each other than save the planet.
If ace combat has taught me anything, it’s that there’s no reason we can’t do both
Achievement unlocked: discovering the Great Filter.
If an asteroid were to hit the Earth large enough to cause human extinction, it would save us the embarrassment of killing ourselves from poisoning the climate or microplastic pollution.
I’m pretty sure we navigated nuclear holocaust, but we haven’t fully ruled it out either.
Don’t look up
It was a great movie - sadly, because it was so accurate. Provided that you can call a sci-fi movie accurate. But after the pandemic and shit, “don’t look up” looks like a playbook for a meteor extinction level event
Actually they say that Comet Dibiasky is twice the size of the dinosaur killer, but they also say it’s 6-1 9 kilometres wide. 10 kilometres is the size of Chicxulub. Scientifically it was very inaccurate. But politically it’s flawless.
What’s funny is that movie released during the pandemic, so it seemed like that was the thing it was commenting on, but actually it was filmed before the pandemic and was originally meant as a commentary on climate change. What it shows is that humanity’s modern tribalism is remarkably predictable. No matter what the problem, we will turn it into an us versus them situation where getting anything meaningful done becomes an uphill battle.
That’s the last three words of the article. The author didn’t miss the connection either.
I always wonder when people repeat something from the article or ask a question that’s answered in the article: did you not read it or did you just want to start a discussion about this connection and are somehow constrained in the number of words you can write per day?
I didn’t read it. The Register has a drier tone than I felt like reading today. I mean seriously, putting the word tabletop in quotes? I am NOT the target audience for that writing style.
That’s okay, humanity had s good run. I imagine we’ll have extinctified ourselves way before a space rock could do it. A+ for trying though.
Sorry don’t you mean let’s fund AI?
/s