Grrl Power #417 – Gravitas check
Ok, this is a bit of a weird page, admittedly, but there’s a reason for it. Just planting deep seeds. :) As the undersecretary of ADHD folk myself, I wouldn’t blame anyone for skimming panel 1 a bit. Here’s a link to Sagan reading it out himself. If you’re the sort of person who is affected by powerful narration, prime your hanky. Personally I need to rehydrate after watching that clip. The TLDR version is “Earth is tiny and insignificant, people suck and we should do better.” Obviously Sagan’s version has slightly more gravitas. So much it can prevent light from escaping.
For those of you unfamiliar with what that picture is, it was taken from VGER Voyager 1 when it was 6.4 billion KM from Earth. Personally I think if all the halls of power in the world had a poster like this hanging somewhere prominent, people might be motivated to work together better, but perhaps that’s putting too much faith in humanity.
Deus genuinely did hang that poster at one point, as he says, to keep things in perspective, but sometimes the things meant to center us can have a divergent effect.
Sydney, as I’ve said before, is a bad liar. Not in the sense that she can’t keep a secret. She’s actually quite good at that. Usually. She has sometimes been known to get a case of blurtmouth, but not on anything critically important. Of course the best way to keep a secret is to never let on you know one. This is not Sydney’s area of expertise.
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Carl Sagan was one of the first, prominent scientist to warn that an asteroid/meteor impact is a serious threat to Earth and mankind. If he were still with us and I were allowed one question of him it would be: “What is the greater threat, AGWCC (human caused global warming) or a Killer asteroid?”
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Over the last forty years over one trillion dollars has been spent on AGWCC whereas only a few hundred millions has been spent to counter asteroid/meteor impacts and that has mostly been on sky watch efforts not actually doing anything to stop/divert such.
Fouling the fishbowl is our most likely Kurzweil limit.
It is the difference between a disaster that is unlikely to happen in the near future and a disaster that is literally going on right now.
Totally ignoring one in favour of the other strikes me as being a dang stupid move.
Cordyceps virus species jump is obviously the biggest disaster looming.
Gonna go train some more by playing The Last of Us again.
Actually, not only is there a concerted effort to find and catalog all asteroids in the Solar System (called NEOWISE: https://neowise.ipac.caltech.edu/) but NASA is also planning the so-called “Asteroid Redirect Mission” (https://www.nasa.gov/content/what-is-nasa-s-asteroid-redirect-mission), whose goal is to bring a small asteroid to lunar orbit by 2025 so it can be studied.
This mission will also explore several deflection strategies for larger asteroids, as well as serve as further training for the planned Manned Mars Mission.
So you can rest assured that yes, people are not ignoring the asteroid danger, it’s just that, as EveryZig put it, “It is the difference between a disaster that is unlikely to happen in the near future and a disaster that is literally going on right now”
Have they planned on what to do with that ‘small asteroid’ after it gets out of control and either heads directly for earth or hits the moon?
It’s small enough not to be a danger.
Even an asteroid the size of a small car could do a hael of a lot of damage if it struck land
No it wouldn’t. an asteroid the size of a small car would mostly burn up in the atmosphere, what remained of it after that would not be large enough to cause significant damage. (I mean, if it hits your house, that would suck, but not ‘global disaster’ levels).
Did not say ‘global disaster’ levels, simply ‘a hael of a lot of damge’
And ‘burning up in the atmosphere’ would depend on what sort of materials it is composed of
It’s actually surprising how rare a damaging asteroid is. Spend some time playing with the Asteroid Impact Calculator and you’ll see what I mean.
In order for an asteroid to cause any harm whatsoever, it first needs to hit the Earth. That’s hard, because space is (as Mr. Adams put it) really big. Once it hits, it has to not burn up in the atmosphere. If it doesn’t, it has to hit something that people care about. 70% of the Earth is ocean and an asteroid impact on the ocean doesn’t matter to us unless it is a dinosaur killer. The majority of the land is (as far as humans are concerned) empty.
Asteroid impacts come in two flavors: ones that wipe out the planet and are extremely rare, and ones that we don’t really care about or notice.
As an example, here’s the results for an impact of a 3m diameter (about the size of a small car) asteroid coming in at the most likely speed (17 km/s) at the most likely angle (45 degrees) and striking the most likely target (ocean, depth of 4000m which is average). I made the asteroid pure iron, just to maximize the damage. tl;dr is that it breaks up in the atmosphere and produces effectively no effect on the ground.
https://impact.ese.ic.ac.uk/cgi-bin/crater.cgi?dist=0.1&distanceUnits=1&diam=3&diameterUnits=1&pdens=&pdens_select=8000&vel=17&velocityUnits=1&theta=45&tdens=1000&wdepth=4000&wdepthUnits=1
Again, we were talking about scientists deliberately dragging an asteroid into Luna orbit to ‘study’, and simply asked the logical (well, apparently ‘logic’ flew out the window) question of: what have hey planned for if it gets out of control
As you said, space is rilly rilly big, which means the chance of miscalculating in so many factors of that plan is rilly rilly big
Out of control? An asteroid the size of a car in the worst possible scenario might break a window if it hits a building due to the vast majority of the rock turning into dust from re-entry.
We’ve been putting floating junk in orbit around our planet for half a century. I’m pretty sure we know how to do it correctly at this point
It’s one thing to put a few kilo’s of metal in orbit, but another thing to attract a large rock
The concern is not that we’re putting a rock into orbit, but we’re putting one into LUNAR orbit. Usually when you have “Object A” orbit something else(Object B) that is ALREADY orbiting a third object(Object C), then object A will, due to gravity, get slungshot from object B and directly fall to Object C OR fly off into the unknown. Failing the first 2 A will hit object B because the orbit was too low.
Thank you Commander, glad someone else saw a possible flaw
Yes, because moons (Object A) orbiting planets (Object B) orbiting stars (Object C) get slung uncontrollably into the star.
I agree that there is a risk of something going wrong, but those people are astrophysicists. They had better know their stuff and/or have contingencies. Probably multiple layers.
Don’t forget that the star (Object C) is also orbiting the supermassive black hole (Object D), so apparently planets (Object B) should be slung into the black hole.
I could go into detail, but suffice to say that mathematical equations don’t generally output truth values in physics. There is a reason that the numerous objects can orbit eachother stably for millenia without the possibility of collision. Jupiter has many moons in stable orbit, and Jupiter orbits the Sun.
If it is coming for Earth, then they would need to call in Morgan Freeman and Bruce Willis. They have had experience dealing with this type of problem.
I can see Morgan Freeman being called in. He is God after all…
If gods from each religion were renderred by the author of a sci-fi universe, I wonder how much power ‘God’ would have. What I mean is a universe where gods are reified by belief, so the flying spaghetti monster would have some territory and authority too (and would presumably have the power to null other gods’ power).
Would a human god’s powers be localized to our solar system, because we are the only known sapients within? And would Morgan Freeman as God be renderred a different entity to the Catholic God, the Protestant God, and the Mormon God?
If gods were included in this story, there are many questions about how they’d integrate and appear.
If you would like to see something a lot like this, read up on Warhammer 40k.
I said, “You are gods, sons of the Most High, all of you; nevertheless, like men you shall die, and fall like any prince.” Psalms 82:6-7 ESV
Don’t worry, I’m sure that NASA has Bruce Willis on speed dial.
Carl Sagan was also one of the first prominent scientists to warn about the dangers of climate change.
While the earth remains, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night, shall not cease.” Genesis 8:22
rip Carl Sagan
First thought that came to mind: ‘He’s hiding his intergalactic telepod behind this.’
You know, when people say how insignificant Earth is, somehow you never see anyone point how insignificant the cause of the day is. You’d never see anyone say “actually, racism/the economy/healthcare/farm subsidies/etc are insignificant, look how small the world is” if they’re people who want to promote action based on those. Furthermore, what’s so special about physical size in the first place that something is insignificant if it is of relatively small physical size, regardless of how many or few other things are actually similar to it?
Carl Sagan’s quote tries to sound profound, and some people may reflexively think “oh, it’s about being humble, so it must be profound”, but it really is nonsense.
I think it refers more to how insignificant Earth is if you take into account the vast amount of other things in this universe that are much greater than a planet with some primitive race that can’t even get along with itself, let alone other species, and is tearing it’s planet apart.
Perhaps, thinking of what another species of beings will make of terrestrials would make people take care of Earth a bit more and try to keep peace with others to make this rock a bit more comfortable.
It could also be a reminder that, by being all we know, we’ll take into consideration the marks we leave on generations to come matter, so it’d be in our best interests to play nice with each other.
Maybe it’s like that episode of the Twilight Zone. And we’re not supposed to get along with each other. We’re meant to be warriors and getting along is getting in the way of the alien experiment to breed the perfect warrior race :)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fbT1fCHOjfI
It is true that it’s far more dangerous to espouse peace and nonviolence than to shout for war and killing.
You might enjoy the truth behind humanity’s creation in this fic…
https://www.fanfiction.net/s/3631062/1/XSGCOM-Mirror-Image
I have it on good authority that humanity’s creation was just a plot to get rid of all the middle men of the planet Golgafrincham – the marketing executives, telephone sanitizers, sales assistants, telemarketers, people who spend way too much time in bathtubs, etc.
Sure, but the productive two thirds of the population died of a virulent disease contracted from an unsanitized telephone.
Yep. Gotta love that Douglas Adams.
Oh also, I think Sagan’s speech could be taken as how we are actually even MORE significant, IF life is a rarity in the universe – especially intelligent, sentient life. Because then you could say ‘the universe is HUGE, and by basic probability, in a universe so huge, it should be teeming with life even if life takes up only 1 percent of 1 percent of 1 percent of that space. But if it doesn’t, and the Earth is some sort of aberration from the norm in that it had life at all, let alone life that existed long enough to evolve into sentient beings, then we should be humbled, not by our insignificance, but by how we beat the odds so massively by simply existing.
Ken, it’s about stewardship and being good neighbors in the universe because for all of our posturing, we’re not so important in the grand scheme of things. He’s telling us that if we kill each other off, if we destroy our planet and our ecosystem in our mad grab for the fleeting concept of power, the universe will not record our passing and there will be nobody to care about us or mourn our loss. So he’s basically telling us that the only people who give a shit about humanity is humans and we should take better care of each other. Because literally no one else in the universe will. In the immortal words of the late, great George Carlin: “Save the planet? The planet doesn’t need saving. It’s going to shake us off like baaaaad case of fleas.”
“The planet will be fine, the people are @#$%ed”
You think YOU’RE qualified to call Carl Sagan’s words nonsense? You don’t even understand what the quote is saying. In fact, you DENY that it is saying exactly what it says. Don’t insult greater people than you with greater vision than you. It just comes off as a petulant child screaming at the guru on the mountaintop.
Too be fair, the Guru did steal his chicken.
Belittling others lowers the belittler.
He’s not wrong. But then neither is/was Sagan.
The truest form of freedom of speech is permitting others to have a different opinion.
“Astronomy” is humbling, is what he’s actually saying. You can look at the Earth from the perspective of just our local solar system and see that all the causes of all the hundred billion people who’ve ever lived are, from this point of view, actually, literally, impossible to see. It doesn’t mean that fighting racists is pointless, but it can be taken to mean that such efforts to overcome our internal differences is the only way we will ever have a chance to build anything more than pointless, on a cosmic scale. We’re not going to make anything lasting as long as we’re killing each other to own more of this little dot we’re stuck on, is how I’m reading it.
(I’m guessing Deus thinks he’s found the way around this by being so powerful no one can stop him from taking over the world and then enough of the universe to sate his ego.)
Sagan was not saying that Earth is not significant, he was saying that it is small and fragile. He was also saying that establishing power over other people, or making money, are insignificant when you look at the whole planet. Or the whole solar system. (Which this photo is only a small piece of, btw.)
Have to wonder how Deus would be affected if he had a picture of the scientific view of “Laniakea: Our home supercluster” on his wall.
Another aspect of the universe is time. We have fossils that “prove” advanced life has been on planet earth for millions of years. I personally own a fossil of a velociraptor claw that is dated 71 million years ago. You think a reference from a movie in 1979 is old?
In the grand scheme of things we are not only tiny specks of dust on a speck of rock floating through a thin band of gas pockets attached to a bigger lump of gas but “we” have only been thinking about it for less than half a blip of time. Go hold and look at a fossil, any fossil, ask yourself how important that animal thought itself to be while it was alive, whenever that was. If you are lucky someday, millions of years from now, someone will look upon a fragment of your corpse and say, ” wow, look at that.” it will probably some kid in a museum who just spilled juice on his shirt and your fossil will be in a bin selling the bits for $2. But for that moment, your entire existence amounts to a single thought of what we left behind.
Originally I had an idea that seemed profound, I’m not sure but it seems to have gone off the rails. Whatever, here’s hoping your personal speck of history is noteworthy.
“42”
A simplified version of this forms the heart of the Total Perspective Vortex.
I said that too! :) YAY! GMTA! High five! Cool and froody, man!
OK! OK! So I’m awesome! Now where is my cake? There’s supposed to be a cake here, right?
Zaphod ate it already.
I’ve decided to be immortal so I won’t be fossilized. But if I was fossilized I’d be worth so much more than $2.
Like at least a five-spot.
Dinosaurs didn’t have digital technology. It is possible that edit history of wikipedia will be declared worth of preserving and survives for longer than the fossils. Or maybe this comics will get so popular it will be archived including the comments. Remember: copying stuff is easy. Separating the important bits from less important is hard.
Fascinating expression Sydney’s got going on in the 4th panel thar.Only name for it I can think of is a “Hmm, yes, I see” face.
General Faulk: You’re not a member of Archon, so this can’t be an order, Deus. However, you are strongly urged to stop supervillaining at Sydney ‘Halo’ Scoville.
Deus: *grins evilly and steeples his fingers* “Oh, but it’s SUCH fun.
General Faulk: And frankly I’d like it if you didn’t supervillain at me so much either.
Deus: Aw.
Math, however, is fair game.
…Not certain if (reasonable) Lawful Evil, or (Trolling/greedy) chaotic neutral.
All and none of the above. Seems to me that Deus does NOT conform to any outside standards – except where / when it suits his own purposes.
Except the Trolling part :D
Well, he seems to be an idealistic villain with a little bit of humour about his status as villain. He knows how the world works and seems to want prosperity for other humans as much hisself, even to the point that he seems to have the motive of propelling humanity to the stars.
I really enjoy that he’s a multifaceted character who doesn’t need to kick a puppy for the sake of villainy. He’s a character who happens to be the antagonist, yet pursues goals almost befitting a hero despite his villainous values. A more detailed metric is required to measure him than the two dimensional law/alignment system. A lot of attempts to shoehorn every existing character into that system have been made, solely on account of how recognizable the system is.
This series is a bit of a fond deconstruction of superheroes, so it should be no surprise that the villains aren’t traditionally evil. In older stories, villainy had to be heinous to make the heroes heroic and admirable. Now the genre is developed enough to drop the pretense and have ordinary characters with superpowers.
I also enjoy the character foils that are Maxima and Deus; collectivism/direct action versus individualism/indirect action. Yet, they get along with only small misunderstandings.
Maxima assumed that they’d been dating because of gifts; she interprets and solves problems very directly. Deus on the other hand, being used to pursuing prosperous indirect outcomes, didn’t see them as dates; he saw them as mutual opportunities, business or otherwise. He doesn’t really try to label anything because his short term plans can and do change while pursuing his definite long-term outcome.
There’s a lot of good material here and I trust this writer to do it justice, punintended (is it pun intended, or a pun on pun unintended?)
I did skim. until the “as undersecretary of” “i wouldn’t blame anyone for skimming” part. Then my weird adhd part took up the challenge and read it all
there are some times when a description rings hollow, like “supreme leader” and “democratic republic”; if they really were all that they wouldn’t bother with emphatic redundancy
Don’t know if it has been mentioned, but this Animaniacs skit seems appropriate.
https://youtu.be/OmfAyK6CeIg
That is something that needs to go into the UN. Not that they seem to really do much anyway, but just to put things into perspective.
Humanocentric climate change is a multi-billion-dollar a year scam. We simply don’t have the capacity to impact the global climate on the scale people are decrying. Hell, oceanic sequestriation produces not one but SEVERAL orders of magnitude more CO2 than we can manage at our worst. We literally get lost in the rounding. And CO2 is only one of many, many different factors involved in the process colloquially known as ‘the greenhouse effect’.
The planet has gone through heating and cooling trends many times in its geologic history. There were no polar caps whatsoever when dinosaurs roamed the earth, in fact. They have discovered the remains of tropical plants on Antarctica. It has happened before. It will, inevitably, happen again. And we simply don’t have the capability of doing one damn thing about it.
Instead of crying about the sky falling, people should be taking steps to be ready when the sea levels DO, inevitably, rise. A good chunk of the world’s population live on coastlines because that was where it was easiest to get to in a pre-industrial culture by boat. These days, that’s not such a major concern. Move people inland. Or drown. I don’t really care at this point.
My take on anything being labeled as a vast conspiracy that has kept everyone in the dark for years
(Moon landing hoax, JFK assassination, Area 51, Illuminati) is that the probability of that many people keeping something that big absolutely secret for decades is just about zero. If any person involved talked to any reporter, or released any official document or photo out of the ‘secret files’ then it would blow the cover on the whole operation. Nothing is completely leak-proof, and people are notoriously talkative with the right motivation (sex, money, alcohol etc). As the old saying goes “Two people can keep a secret if one of them is dead”.
I’m not saying it is a conspiracy, I’m just saying it’s a scam. It’s right up there with the pyramid and ponzi schemes. There’s no secret, the science is right there. It’s just that people take an ‘expert’s’ word on damn near anything rather than actually do their own research.
How do you make an overpriced piece of crap sell like hotcakes? Claim it reduces your carbon footprint.
Soooo you find the idea that a bunch of people would argue “we’re destroying our environment enough it’ll fuck us over we should stop” is a “scam”, and an evil one at that, even though aside from relatively clean renewable energy and a lessening of air pollution, there’s really no point to such a conspiracy that would actually hinder mankind or public health
But the fact that even those scientists getting that info out has been an uphill battle taking decades and decades (seriously, we knew LONDON was warming during the INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION) because fossil fuel companies (i.e. those dealing in coal, oil and natural gas) have been verifiably and actively suppressing studies that paint coal, oil or natural gas retrieval, processing and use as anything less than good, for YEARS
that’s not at all a “multi-billion dollar scam” to you?
Even though we KNOW that fossil fuels, particularly coal and petroleum, are largely poisonous crap that if you’re actually exposed to it’s bad for your health?
Even though people who live near natural gas fracking areas can LITERALLY show you their tap water is flammable, and also undrinkable for humans. Even though their land is now dying from poisoned water tables because the “natural gas” has leaked into it from repeated shimmying to try and get it out.
Even though one of the major impacts of having regulations enforced that actually did reduce the parts per billion of unpleasant crap put in the air from various industrial practices that happen to also apparently impact heat levels per the Anthropenic Global Warming model, vs not having such regulation in place (See: Clean Air Act) was a difference in the THOUSANDS, of the number of people who were reported as having lung disease issues (i.e. lung cancer and asthma attacks — and keep in mind, speaking as an asthmatic, it’s only the most SEVERE asthma attacks that get “reported”; I have dozens of “incidents” each year that are never even mentioned to my doctor and counted in such statistics because my inhaler prevented it from reaching Emergency Room levels of crisis)
Even though we know, through common damn sense, that Smoke Inhalation is Bad For You, or that you shouldn’t be consuming/exposing yourself directly to gasoline, and large-scale burning of coal and large-scale release of gasoline fumes would by simple logic be an issue with HUNDREDS OF MILLIONS of cars on the road.
Even though a lot of countries, e.g. some of those on other continents, such as Africa, still use LEADED gasoline, and therefore increase levels of the known toxin lead into the environment.
But no, a desire to decrease pollution from all this crud, this crud that isn’t predicted to even last at this kind of level that we’re using it at for more than a few DECADES more anyway and probably shouldn’t even be relied on if only for that reason alone…that’s automatically an evil “scam” worth publicly decrying.
Not the fossil fuel industry and its political cohorts attempting (which we KNOW they have) to suppress the knowledge that the world IS overall warming (last ten years avg temps hottest on record, CONSISTENTLY), or that coasts are going to erode (recent scandal in the Carolinas on whether people were allowed to admit that the beaches would erode!), not them suppressing the degree to which their crap poisons us in other myriad ways (they fight tooth and nail against anti-fracking people etc)
No, they’re not the “scammers” in it for multiple billions of dollars; not the people with ACTUAL multiple billions of dollars riding on the continued use of crappy, pollution-making, toxin-releasing, non-renewable fossil fuels, nope, surely not, it’s the scientists working generally for peanuts who have nothing but cleaner air and the knowledge they helped provide a solution to the upcoming energy crisis to gain, no, it’s THEM that are “scamming” people.
Sure. That logic is sound. >_>
oh ps
“How do you make an overpriced piece of crap sell like hotcakes? Claim it reduces your carbon footprint.”
This is true in the sense that there ARE “carbon footprint reduction” scams i.e “carbon offset” nonsense…but it has nothing to do with the large number of climate scientists in the field who have strong evidence to suggest that human activity (NOT limited to ‘carbon’ output I might add; many have noted that beef production produces a lot of methane, which is also a greenhouse gas, too, via, well, bovine flatulence).
It’s mostly a-holes outside of the field capitalizing on the awareness of ill-informed consumers, similar to how people started exploiting the unregulated term “natural” to capitalize on fears of carcinogenic “chemicals”, or how they exploit loopholes in the legal meaning of “organic” foods/products to make people think that the cucumber or sunscreen they buy is better for the environment.
That is a capitalism problem, but not a scientific one; the actual science has been increasingly supporting the model. And if you think THAT MANY scientists in the same field wouldn’t be ready and raring to make a splash by “disproving” another scientist, or that THAT MANY scientists wouldn’t look at someone’s alarming results and try to verify it before they believed it…then you don’t know how competitive fields, let alone the sciences, actually work.
The fact that there is literally 99% consensus on this is actually ASTOUNDING.
Compare this to the people researching say, cancer, and how much disagreement there is in the data on what does or doesn’t cause or prevent it, or the vehement back and forth over whether the Big Bang model is correct or whether the universe will “big crunch” vs simply spread out til it dies a quiet death, etc, and you might somewhat begin to understand that scientists, the tens of THOUSANDS of scientists in any given major field, almost NEVER agree on a theory/model this firmly for this long. That’s not how science works as a field, usually to get to this point you need a LOT of years of a LOT of scientists bickering about data and results and running experiments and trying to disprove each other/verify shocking findings.
The fact that we’ve gotten to the point where ninety-nine out of a hundred climate scientists agrees that Climate Change is happening and it’s exacerbated by various human activities…that is incredible. That isn’t a “scam”, that’s a legitimate consensus, of the kind only very rarely reached in a field that normally LOVES to bicker and disprove each other.
No, the “scams” come from people OUTSIDE the field, trying to capitalize on buzz words like “carbon footprint”…or from fossil fuel companies desperately clinging to their multi-billion dollar industry because it’s still greatly profitable for them.
Look at the history of lead contamination in the 20th century, and how fiercely industries fought against people publicly recognizing that they were poisoning the population in unsustainably dangerous doses, and you’ll see the same pattern: the old industry is toxic (literally and figuratively), but it’s profitable and individually powerful humans don’t let go of profit very easily, even when the science says it’s somehow dangerous or ill-advised.
Even if we did actually cause the climate change, that’s not important. Important is if we are able to reverse it. And the answer is NO. … well, at least not by that multi-billion-dollar a year scam. We might be able to reverse it if we cause nuclear winter by nukes. Personally, I don’t think it will be worth it.
May I just point out that if we phased out fossil fuels at the very least we would:
*prevent people’s tap water from becoming undrinkable and occasionally flammable due to nearby fracking of natural gas releasing crap in the water table
*Reduce the amount of lead in the environment in areas where leaded gasoline is still used
*prevent (there is evidence, from before/after comparisons of strengthening and loosening regulation on air pollution in the US, to suggest this would be possible) THOUSANDS of cases of lung cancer and severe (as in, severe enough to report) asthma attacks per year
*Create less gross smoggy crap in the air, and similar pollution in the water, including therefore a reduction in contamination of all the crops and animals that we eat daily that rely on water (which tldr: is all of them)
*avoid the upcoming energy crisis because fossil fuels are non-renewable and not expected to last longer than say, my lifetime, and are being used up rapidly at the pace we’re currently consuming energy
So…there’s no real downside to trying to get into wind and solar energy and the like? Compared to the bs we’re getting from fossil fuels even BEFORE you count any impact on climate, it seems a healthier and even better economic decision. People aren’t freaking out about it as much as when gasoline was approaching $5/gallon in the US but still. Those fuels are noxious in plenty of other verifiable ways, as are their production/processing methods, AND they’re just going to run out in about a generation or less. There’s literally no real point to supporting the continued use of fossil fuels.
I mean really, why on earth would cleaner or more renewable energy production methods be bad? Unless of course you owned stock in Exxon-Mobil.
The downside is that alternative fuels are more expensive, so switching over will increase the cost of almost everything. This will be hard on everyone who isn’t wealthy as basic needs like food and clothing become priced out of reach.
However, that’s only a short term difference. In the long run, rising sea levels and reduced rainfall will similarly drive the cost of food and clothing upward. Also, when fossil fuels finally run out we’ll be right back to the facing the short term costs, but without a fallback during the suddenly urgent transition to alternative energy sources.
You are a fluke of the universe. You have no right to exist. And, whether you can hear it or not, the universe is laughing behind your back.
I have a contract that says otherwise, and I paid $29.95 on top of that! If the universe doesn’t like it I’m gonna punch it right in its big fat nose.
Rotate your tires.
For those of you interested in hearing Carl Sagan in a longer format, PBS has recently released an old interview from 1985. They added an animated chalkboard in the background to illustrate his take on the probability of alien life and what it would look like. Towards the end he gets into some musings on religion.
https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/a20185/1985-interview-carl-sagan/
If Sydney’s orbs ended up outside the elevator while it goes down, would it smash her against the ceiling, or would the orbs put holes in the floor to keep them within X distance away from her?
Have to wait and see when that happens in the comic.
Any chance you’d be willing to make that poster in the first panel available as a separate stand-alone piece of art, like a vote incentive or something, please? It’d make a great poster IRL IMHO!
I second this.
I’d totally ship Sydney and Deus
I think the inclusion of the word ‘obscurity’ just reveals how Sagan clings to his own ego. If you invert your egocentricity, ethnocentricity, anthrocentricity, terracentricity, all the way out the scope of self-centricity, you’ll see that we’re sharing a neighborhood with equally tiny specks. ‘Obscurity’ is relative, and if you see yourself as relative to each one rather than relative to all of them, then none are relatively obscure.
I’m with Deus on this one. If the universe really is as lifeless as Carl Sagan says it is, there’s absolutely no reason I can think of why humanity shouldn’t work to colonize and/or terraform the hell out of every planet we can get to, especially since Earth’s centuries are numbered. Manifest destiny justified by self-preservation!
We can’t even find out if there are any other people out there as long as we’re all working against each other, let alone get out there to take their stuff. I mean the only time we ever made it as far as the moon was because the richest country in the world had the highest tax rate in its history to pool its resources effectively. If going to space is humanity’s highest goal, we manifestly gave up on it after 1972.
And how is that going to change if Elon Musk manages to employ the population of Finland to let him and his friends grab some slaves and live on Mars? The further apart we get the harder it gets to ever deal with our petty factionalism. We’ll just have wars on bigger scales. What’s the point of expanding if all we can do is use up everything we can find to destroy each other? Why do we deserve to go to space?
Truth is a sword. Be the villian you were meant to be by speaking the truth all of the time. Swing that sword.
Truth is stranger than fiction because everyone lies.
The universe is vast and no one owns it. So gather your means to escape the planet and grab what you want from among the stars. And in time you may realize that what you really want was already yours: air, water, food, shelter, companionship.
Greed just means you are unwilling to make friends by sharing. And that is the problem, no one is anybody else’s friend… because the truth hurts and lies breed mistrust.
i like how deus is hinting at his extraterristrial knowledge while still supposedly giving his ego a check.