Grrl Power #857 – The Genosuicide Pool
It has been pointed out that Cora and Dabbler are being very careful about technological pollution with the leg, or at least the incubator it’s floating in, while at the same time, Cora granted some pretty high tech glasses to Sydney.
Cora could probably defend that if she really wanted to. The targeting function of the glasses could probably be replicated with our tech. It’d be more cumbersome, certainly, but with some good software and a high res CCD chip, I bet it could work. The comm function is also nothing special, really. Frix didn’t send his message from deep space straight to the glasses. Cora left a hyperspace relay, not quite in Earth orbit, but close enough to Earth to be functional, while not being somewhere we’re going to bump into on our way to Mars.
We’re further from the one way screen inside the glasses, though letting us have the schematics for that probably won’t directly endanger the global ecosystem. The power source for the glasses that allows it to do all that stuff is a different matter. That’s the kind of stuff that can cause technological upheaval. Every portable device designed these days starts around the battery, because that’s the thing that takes up a ton of space and contributes a lot of weight. If we had a fuel cell that could fit in the ear hook thingy on a pair of glasses, it would be a huge leap, especially if it could scale. If we suddenly had an electric car that could travel 10,000 miles off a power source the size of a VHS tape, there would be massive economic consequences.
Sylv isn’t referring to an incident on Earth, but a well known near miss in the intergalactic community. It was one of those cases where the Xevoarchy (the Space UN) debated whether or not to intercede with a species struggling with a case of self extinction. You’d think it’d be a simple thing to want to swoop in and save a species, but imagine making that decision about humanity during the height of the Cold War. At least a century or two from achieving extra solar system space travel, hoarding nuclear weapons, an endless history of war and superstition and racism and socio-economic abuses, etc, etc, ad nauseum, etc.
Now imagine the representative of your race needing to vote to commit a corvette from your navy to swing by a planet and help sort themselves out while your constituents are calling to spend resources on more domestic matters. Again, it’s nice to think everyone would be all “let’s help and make the universe a better place” but the reality is that some people are selfish and short sighted and ideologically compromised, so the galaxy at large is only a slightly better place than most individual inhabited planets.
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I’m a rampant AI guy, myself.
I’d like to join you, but…
Have you ever been in one of those places, almost within sight of the CBD, but your mobile phone only works if you cross the road? Or you’re nicely cruising the highway when all CB radio stutters to a grinding halt? And only comes back after 5Km’s more driving?
I’m fairly sure we can write a primitive but reasonable General AI, which in theory could research and write the next-gen edition. I recall an SF story decades ago… Analog anyone?… where this supercomputer was setting itself up to manage the nation, and our heroes needed to stop it: they knew it was powered off a wall-socket behind a command module, but found the computer had a dozen machine-guns trained on all entrances to the room…
We’re not getting a useable AI until we fix our comms. Not just in the cities, but the rural farming areas, and out back of the Black Stump. We could do it by putting comms repeaters in robots, as Asimov did, then station all these robots 1Km apart all over the country. Oh, and find power sources for the robots.
2 miles is the range you are shooting, 1 klick just doesn’t work you can’t get enough towers packed that closely. People just don’t like being under them. Also the drop off of 5g is roughly 2 miles, so you would be fine with that. As for the hinterlands getting data out to them has always been a problem after all the earth isn’t flat. Mountains, valleys and tree, curve of the earth all interfere with radio signals. Yes believe it or not trees are evil they suck up radio and keep it from getting to the towers. Then you have all the other things we make buildings out of. Yes cell phones are radio.
Oh tell me about the shrubbery! We were shoulder-grading out in the sticks, running 1500 meter work-zones, using 5W handheld UHF CB. The bush was in the order of 3 meters high. And then we came to the bend in the road and the steep down-hill… I had to cut the work-zone back to 700 meters due to signal loss. I’d love to know where the manufacturers get 17Km line-of-sight from!
And if we could get 5G towers every 2Km (we’re in Oz here!) we’d have a decent internet system!
Ooh, nearly forgot! Mobile phones may be radio, but the masts/tower repeaters need hardwire telephone cables. And power sources, but solar arrays feeding batteries could handle that. How many million kilometers of comms cable?
what about antennalope?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ESTkOWjl3w4
Have personally helped install* solar panels and battery backup arrays for a rural cell tower, miles from the next power line – I presume metro ones also have backup batteries (and sometimes generators). Definitely cost a lot more to run the power and comm lines than to bolt some batteries together in a block shed.
* Cad welding is fun – and nerve-wracking given the cost and how hard it is to fix if you screw up.
“You will bring us…a shrubbery!”
17km is old analog and I mean old pre digital, no systems is like that anymore unless you are in the middle of Texas with a repeaters in the middle of your ranch. Which means you are paying top dollar with the five pound bag phone. The majority of cell systems around the world now have an average drop off of about 3 miles. Again this isn’t accounting for hills, valleys, mountains, buildings, trees, and curve of the earth. Sure most of the system have some legacy stuff on them but the max range on those is about 5 miles. This is used for emergencies since analog goes further uses more power lots more power.
As for emergencies that is why cell companies built COWs (Cell On Wheels) so they can drop these everywhere they need a repeater. Cheaper and faster then back up batteries and generators. The towers are repeaters, mostly you just need them to have power the only towers that aren’t are the ones that tie directly into the backbone to connect to the switch. So those stand alone cell towers you see unless it is next to a phone company building is more than like just a repeater. Again radio doesn’t need wires.
We always needed 5 Kilometer range on our CB radios. The worksite was limited to 1000 meters (normally), then we’d have a K each end for traffic signage, then we wanted another K each end just for safety. That extra K outside our signage was so the Road Trains and Wide Loads could get an idea we were there — before they saw us.
I know we could get much more range if we had big long antennas, but have you ever tried to shove one in your pocket? Not to mention they cost an arm and a leg.
A silver lining with a AI taking over is that humanity no longer have to bother with all the hard work of ruling ourselves. Hopefully a nice AI like HAL 9000 takes over before a asshole like AM or Glados do.
Go for the best of the worst. Get taken over by Shodan.
My hope is for a Culture Mind, but my money is on a Paperclip maximizer.
Hey, at least the Paperclips maximizer has the decency and commitment to melt itself down in the end to finish the job. HAL and GLaDOS aren’t that selfless.
HAL is a very nice and selfless guy. All he want is to explore space with his human friends. As long as you don’t get in his way of exploring he will probably be a very nice and generous overlord.
Hal was fucked over by the people who demanded perfection. You don’t get perfection in this universe, you especially don’t get perfection when human beings are involved. If only they had demanded “Like, do you what you can but don’t go crazy” the film would have been a whole lot different.
Or order him to keep secrets. We don’t want any more of those H. Moebius loops.
I vote for a AI like Legion or EDI.
EDI may be a massive troll but I guess she would do a good job as overlord. Awesome stealth spaceships for all who can endure her trolling.
I’m with Cora: Runaway anthropogenic climate change seems to be well ahead of anything else.
That said, the climate change can certainly contribute to disease, famine, and war. But at what point do you try to separate the effect from the cause?
Don’t worry about that one. The IPCC’s worst case scenario is becoming less and less dangerous every time they publish a new report. They have already reached the point where it looks like “business as usual, but more expensive living costs.”
We may or may not bomb ourselves back into the stone age, but we will not turn Earth into a second Venus. That ship has sailed.
Oh it’s never too late to pull back environmental restrictions on industry and go the Venus route. Just because the Cold War is over doesn’t mean we can’t still play Global Thermonuclear War.
“An interesting game. It seems the only way to win, is not to play.” – WarGames
10 points for that quote.
Not Venus, or at least not in anything you’d call “soon” as compared to a human lifespan. A comparison to Venus is utter hyperbole, and smacks of an attempt to trivialize the actual changes which are still happening.
The Earth’s albedo continues to drop, so less heat is reflected back into space.
The permafrost rot enabled by ice cap retreat releases tons of methane.
Oceans continue to acidify due to carbon dioxide absorption and become less hospitable for coral and other organisms which protect, house, and feed a vast array of early food chain life forms.
The greater heating of the oceans is a vast reservoir of energy (one calorie per degree Celsius per cubic centimeter of water), which is released as more frequent and more violent storms, causing billions of dollars of damage, loss of property, loss of life.
Higher atmospheric temperatures similarly contribute to more droughts, heatwaves, and flooding.
And of course mankind is not reducing their carbon emissions or halting the elimination of vast carbon sinks such as the Amazon rainforest.
And all of these things are chain reactions, feeding on themselves and each other, and enabling acceleration of the process.
So no, that ship hasn’t sailed without us. We are on board that ship, and it is steadily building up speed.
https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/global-greenhouse-gas-emissions-data
Some developed nations have made some great strides to reduce production of greenhouse gasses, but second and third world nations don’t have the resources or the will to make the expensive changes, and the first world is still producing 70+% of the yearly greenhouse gas
Actually, what the climate people don’t like to talk about, is CO2 starvation. CO2 levels have been dropping gradually through all of planetary history, thanks to the formation of carbonate rocks sucking it out of the atmosphere. Most life on Earth evolved when it was in the thousands of PPM, at the worst of the last ice age it was down to a couple hundred.
Before we humans started burning coal deposits, the CO2 level in the atmosphere was getting close to the level where C-3 plants, (That’s the sort of photosynthesis used by everything but grasses and some oddball bacteria.) would die off. It was going to be a very boring ecosystem, and while in theory grasses could eventually fill all those ecological niches, it’s doubtful that they’d have had time before it dropped too low for them, too.
Humanity averted a major ecological disaster!
But the CO2 levels are still too low for C-3 plants to really be healthy. (What we think of as healthy plants are actually CO2 starved plants, nobody sees *healthy* C-3 plants outside greenhouses.) We need to get them up to 6-800 ppm.
The problem is, there might not be enough coal in the ground to do that. At some point we might have to import carbon from other planets, if we can’t find a way to get it out of those carbonates.
* citation needed.
This souonds like petroleum company propaganda?
Actually I think Brett is referring to the peer reviewed scientific articles on it. Not funded by petroleum companies.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1692178/
At least that’s what I’m assuming Brett is referring to. I think I also saw something on Walking with Dinosaurs about that :).
Why would you make that claim? And do you have a shred of evidence to back it up?
If, and I’m granting you a lot of unearned credence here, if “climate people” don’t like to talk about CO2 starvation, have you considered that it might be because the subject is utterly irrelevant to current climate changes, and bears discussing only as a historical curiosity?
I don’t have time ATM to follow all of these up, but they do look interesting, and I’m a bit ashamed I never heard of them before.
Link?
all of these up
I’m… not sure what happened there.
* Citation needed.
This sounds like petroleum company propaganda – just saying.
You poor guy. With all the program errors please don’t try to copy yourself.
if you mean AMAZINGLY INTERRESTING guy, yeah! I`m on boeard with this.
Why does NO ONE choose ‘zombie apocalypse?’
It’s like I don’t even know you people anymore.
I think Frix is most likely the correct one. It’ll be a antibiotic resistant superbug. At least based on some of the infections we’ve seen lately at the hospital where I work.
We survived and thrived without antibiotics before, so…
Not without thousands of people died, maybe even Millions.
Thousands? Millions?
Earth’s population is numbered in Billions.
Deaths from theoretical diseases shouldn’t be listed as raw numbers, but percentages. For example, the black death got around 30%-60% of the population. By itself, it killed in excess of 100 million. (Wikipedia states it dropped the world population from around 475 million to 350-375 million in the 14th century. However, even at that most conservative estimate, that’s lowballing the deaths, because more people were born while it was doing that. Also, it wasn’t just a 14th century phenomenon.)
There’s also another question regarding superbugs, which is how rapidly do they mutate? Some are pretty stable, while others change fairly rapidly. If it’s one of the more stable ones, we can develop immunity or resistance to it, and maybe even be able to vaccinate against it. If it’s not, the percentage it kills is the percentage of people it kills on exposure to each strain; just because you survived it once doesn’t mean you will again the next exposure.
As a reference, the reason that the flu vaccine is frequently not effective is because it’s not that stable, so there’s always multiple new strains around. This is also why quarantine is the best defense against COVID, and why the resistance of Americans to the whole ‘wearing masks in public’ thing is going to mean it won’t die until we can get our collective act together.
COVID is actually one of the more stable ones but we’re still seeing mutations and with every person infected the chance of a major mutation that makes it need different antibodies/vaccine increases so the whole “let 2% die, 10% get maimed and the rest get immune” method of dealing with it isn’t a good bet even if you ignore the individual suffering and massive economic damage done.
Hope I don’t start a political thing over this – I’m just going to state actual statistics since I’ve been focused on this for months, ever since my cousin got COVID back in March (he’s fine now, he said it was just like a really really bad flu).
I’m currently in New York. And while our population density does mean there’s more infection, the economic damage is far worse than anything the coronavirus has done. The largest number of deaths here were from government being stupid – ie, our governor (Cuomo) sending covid-infected people to nursing homes with people who were already sick from a variety of other illnesses, which caused over 6,500 deaths if I recall correctly (before that nursing homes had 0 deaths). The reasons for why he did this still boggle me because all he kept saying is he had to because of the law. I’m an attorney and I still don’t understand the legal reasoning behind it.
Additionally, the percentages seem to have been widely overblown – mostly because our testing has improved so much since it first came out. They were initially reporting 2-3.4%…. turns out it’s actually closer to 0.025% – 0.6% (still high, but not much higher than a bad flu epidemic at the worst, and about the same as a flu epidemic at the best – again mostly older people in nursing homes or people who already have compromised health issues). In other words, if testing and cases of infection goes up, and death rates go down, then the death rate goes way down percentage-wise. The black plague, on the other hand had a higher rate of infection and death. So did the Spanish flu, which people are inaccurately comparing this to – because of TV ratings or whatever reason (whatever the reason is, it’s not because of medical knowledge).
The most likely thing that will happen, as happens with most coronavirii, is it will mutate. With any luck it will mutate into something asymptomatic and harmless, so that while it’s still HIGHLY infectuous, it would become relatively harmless. There are a lot of doctors around here claiming this may have already happened which would account for the rise in infection cases while simultaneously having a drop in death rate. So… fingered crossed on that being the optimal scenario (combined with us having better treatments now than when it first infected the population).
A 50-75% fatal superbug would solve the human driven climate change problem, so silver lining there. But without the population, we would slow down technologically. So would still be a single planet species.
You’re sort of sounding like Ra’s al Ghul there Aboo.
Wait… didn’t Ra’s have a servant/henchman named Aboo?
No wait it was Ubu, not Aboo. Pretty close though.
And diseases thrived anywhere we gathered together in numbers.
New York is vastly more populous than middle ages London. Hell, London is vastly more populous than middle ages London. And even with modern communication the current pandemic shows that disease spread is way ahead of information spread/acceptance.
Modern supply chains have evolved over the past 50-100 years to be far more about “just enough/just in time” and far less about “lets sit on this big stockpile, it’ll sell eventually because it’s something everyone needs” because that’s ‘smarter’ from a profits perspective. But it isn’t smarter from the perspective of keeping people alive when supply chains and transportation are disrupted by a pandemic.
When you’ve got brewers dumping their beer into the gutter because their product isn’t being bought and they have no where to store the batches they had in production, when you’ve got farmers plowing under their ripe fields because they’d just be wasting their money harvesting a crop that would just rot before it sold, that’s when people just starve to death despite there being plenty of calories around to feed them.
The issue with supply chains is the natural consequence of A) allowing for-profit healthcare, and B) having an economy built on the need to maximize short-term profits above all other concerns.
Indeed – supply chain optimization is directly opposed to its robustness. If a given chain (say a car production line) is perfectly balanced to produce and deliver everything at exactly the right moment with no reserves or slack, a single broken process or failed part anywhere along the line prevents everything downstream from functioning. This makes it vital to have some slack and stockpiling at key points. It’s not a particularly gripping topic*, but supply / logistics is vital to a functioning civilization.
* I have only ever come across one enjoyable (non-historic-fiction) novel with controlling supply routes as a core premise, and am awaiting the rest of the series.
It has been convincingly argued that supply chain optimisation is the reason why we started with the newfangled civilisation experiment all those millenia ago.
The first civilisation had the god kings who collected the grain and handed out the seed stock the next planting season (and distributed the excess food, what little there was of it, to the non-farming population). The primary job of the priests was, besides propping up the god-king, to study the heavens and determine the optimal times to plant and to harvest.
Granaries are the oldest large scale building types, and astronomy out oldest science.
Everything else came about in support of the system as it grew larger and more complext (irrigation, walls, armies, craftsmen, ever growing numbers of clergy and tax collectors)
Yeah, I work in the automotive industry; We call it the “just too late” inventory system. But the accountants don’t like listening.
Isn’t that already happening (been happening) for the last hundred years?
The fear is, the superbug isn’t just lying dormant, it’s actively spreading (now combine that with the A.I.)
With climate change and the melting of the permafrost you have pockets of Anthrax being exposed right now. All it would take is a good sized pocket with a good size pocket of Methane Hydrate under it to blow some of it up into the atmosphere to start it going. As it is now tribes in Russia are being exposed to it all the time now, yes the bury it like everything else. Thankfully it isn’t antibiotic resistant yet.
More than like it will be another disease like Covid, which is why our response to this pandemic is so worrisome. All it would take is something that it slightly better at infecting and killing people. Covid itself isn’t done yet and could still change while we are trying to build a cure against it. This is why it is so damn important to wear a mask and wash your hands and cover you cough and sneeze. Virus pick up DNA from other virus’s and change with that they can become more or less lethal depending on what they pick up.
Actually, I’d say Covid is good enough at infecting people. All it would need to be is more deadly, especially to young people, and either more durable or have a longer incubation period. It’s possible it could use enough instability (or otherwise stated, tendency to mutate) so that it could reinfect people – it’s not clear to me whether it has that already or not.
If it was just more deadly to young people, it wouldn’t be very harmful to countries populated with sufficient people who know how to wear a breathing mask (I’m not sure which countries are necessarily like this, but mine isn’t one of them, as judged by the people I encounter when I must go outside.) If it’s just more durable, or just had a longer incubation period, it would infect more people, but it’s only particularly lethal in the portion of the population who’s not only done with reproducing, but chances are their kids are done with reproducing, so it basically has no impact on population growth.
Having a longer incubation period would probably be worse than being more durable. How well it transmits during that incubation period is certainly a factor, but even if it wouldn’t infect others until near the end of the incubation period, having a long period where you just don’t know you have it makes it much harder to have a proper sense of danger.
Anthrax isn’t all that uncommon. In the US it’s considered a livestock disease. Most versions of it aren’t particularly dangerous. The weaponized versions of Anthrax that got so much publicity were a particular variety selected for its ability to infect humans, processed into a fine powder that could be suspended in air and blown around (and inhaled, etc).
A coiple of times I’ve had to have surgery in Royal Perth Hospital. Every time, they want me to sterilise my skin prior to admittance. On the first occasion, I asked why? “Easy. We are sterile here, you’re not. You won’t even catch a cold in here, but you could infect everyone with a superbug.”
“Hey! Superbugs live in hospitals, not on the street!”
“They used to. Then we got clever, and stopped using all those hidously expensive antibiotics on the walls and floors, so the bugs died. But you lot still use antibiotics to treat everything, so you. must. become. sterile.”
I was thinking of the sterilization procedures they mentioned in the movie ‘the andromeda strain’ and had to snicker a bit.
That’s a major threat to our overall health and well-being, and could massively tank life-expectancies, but is never going to be an extinction-level threat. As pointed out by others, we don’t need antibiotics to survive as a species, it’s just that many of us need antibiotics to survive as individuals.
Evolution, is about populations, not individuals.
It’s about both – at least with humans. The bigger the population, the more likely there will be individuals born within that population to solve problems. Like creation of antibiotics and vaccines for superbugs. Larger brain pool, larger chance of coming up with a solution, since humans are sort of unique as a species on Earth in that we regularly come up with ways to manipulate our environment through science, altered learned-and-passed-on knowledge/behavior, and societal actions, while most other species adapt to the environment entirely through evolution. And it’s been that way, at least with homo sapien sapiens, since the Neanderthals and Homo Erectus ceased to be a competing human species.
Plus humans have admittedly gotten past a point where it would have to be a planetary mass extinction event to wipe out enough humans to ensure a complete eradication of the species. We survived the Toba Catastrophe bottleneck when there were only 10 to 30k humans left on the planet (most estimates are actually 12-22k)… and we have a lot more people on the planet now, spread throughout the entire world in almost every environment imaginable vs where humans were situated before the supervolcano eruption 75,000 years ago (followed by 10 years of volcanic winter and a 1000 year cooling period) in Indonesia.
Today humans are insanely spread out. It definitely minimizes our chance of extinction, at the very least.
Or maybe I’m just an optimist. :)
Counterpoint: bacteriophages are used for real treatment even today, and evolving antibiotic resistance vs virus resistance is a tradeoff bacteria have to make.
I think antibiotics have no effect on virii actually. Antibiotics are for bacteria. Antiviral agents (which are not always biological – ie, copper or colloidal silver, for example) and vaccines are for virii.
Sorry, I wasn’t clear; I meant bacteria’s resistance to bacteriophages (which are viruses).
Nah. We’ve already got some post-antibiotic treatments that work pretty well for some things. Bacteriophages are already the treatment of choice for certain types of infections. And the beauty of bacteriophage treatment is that bacteriophages can evolve even faster than the bacteria they’re used on, so bacteriophage resistance is probably never going to be a thing. By the time antibiotic resistant germs are a major threat to civilization we’ll be ready for them.
And on top of that, even if a strain managed to evolve bacteriophage resistance, doing so would compromise its antibiotic resistance—so a combined approach would still wreck it.
I’ve been worried about this, too. Then came across somebody’s really clever solution:
A Deep Learning Approach
to Antibiotic Discovery (Cell 20 Feb 2020)
Jonathan M. Stokes, Kevin Yang, Kyle Swanson, Wengong Jin,
Andres Cubillos-Ruiz, Nina M. Donghia, Craig R. MacNair,
Shawn French, Lindsey A. Carfrae, Zohar Bloom-Ackerman,
Victoria M. Tran, Anush Chiappino-Pepe, Ahmed H. Badran,
Ian W. Andrews, Emma J. Chory, George M. Church, Eric D.
Brown, Tommi S. Jaakkola, Regina Barzilay, James J. Collins
Summary
Due to the rapid emergence of antibiotic-resistant bacteria, there
is a growing need to discover new antibiotics. To address this
challenge, we trained a deep neural network capable of predicting
molecules with antibacterial activity. We performed predictions
on multiple chemical libraries and discovered a molecule
from the Drug Repurposing Hub – halicin – that is structurally
divergent from conventional antibiotics and displays bactericidal
activity against a wide phylogenetic spectrum of pathogens
including Mycobacterium tuberculosis and carbapenem-resistant
Enterobacteriaceae. Halicin also effectively treated Clostridioides
difficile and pan-resistant Acinetobacter baumannii infections in
murine models. Additionally, from a discrete set of 23 empirically
tested predictions from >107 million molecules curated from
the ZINC15 database, our model identified eight antibacterial
compounds that are structurally distant from known antibiotics.
This work highlights the utility of deep learning approaches to
expand our antibiotic arsenal through the discovery of structurally
distinct antibacterial molecules.
The first chemical they even did some further tests:
In laboratory tests, the drug killed many of the world’s most problematic
disease-causing bacteria, including some strains that are
resistant to all known antibiotics. It also cleared infections in
two different mouse models.
Very intriguing and a promising approach, although it’s still a long path from those preliminary results and working antigens… But a fantastic start, it seems to me. Killing disease-causing bacteria isn’t a hard problem at all (fire, acid), the trick is doing it while leaving the host alive, which makes the live tests results rather compelling.
This site’s abstract has a link to the original paper for anyone else wanting to read the full text.
What’s a mouse model? Something like Minnie in a short skirt and a push-up bra?
https://youtu.be/LIEkvPmgAHI?t=3
And now we need to keep these new antibiotics out of the greedy paws of pharmaceutical companies because if we don”t they will flood every conceivable market, especially the market of people who are not actually infected, with these medicines and cause bacteria to develop immunity to them post haste.
No (extremely profitable) over the counter medicines from these but administered only by specialists to patients who are locked up in quarantine for the duration of the treatment.
Yes, I can imagine how well that will play out with the science and reality denying portion of politicians and punditry.
An open source DIY bio-chemistry printer would be nice.
Well, we can 3d print flesh why not molecular compounds someday?
Remember the little computer tablet capt. Kirk used to sign used to be science fiction too.
With her pop culture knowledge I’m surprised Sydney didnt get in on the betting.
It’ll probably be something out of left field.
A new chemical in deodorants that shorts circuits the human male reproductive system as a for instance.
Or micro plastics collecting in your balls. ^.^
That deodorant would sell soooooo well if made and marketed intentionally. “The Pill” for men will be a population game changer whenever it finally gets developed
They trialed one. I haven’t researched this, so perhaps its purely apocryphal, because it seems like it could easily be apocryphal be while also having a veneer of truth (and heavy irony) to it…
I don’t recall how well it did as an effective birth control, but the story goes that a lot of the men dropped out of the trial complaining of mood swings and other symptoms which mirrored PMS rather closely.
The veneer of truth being that if you give men a pill that messes with their hormones, which seems necessary to operate as a form of male birth control, that it seems rather likely that it could easily cause PMS-like symptoms.
True. The major attraction of a Male birth control pill would be the ability to have lots of sex without lots of babies. Making said men more feminine kinda defeats that. A Vasagel (temporarily blocks the tubes that are cut in a vasectomy) that actually works near perfectly would be much more adoptable.
I believe another problem of that male birth control pill was it caused some form of hormone-related cancer in an abnormally high percentage of the test subjects. Condoms and vasectomies are much less risky for men. Or women just being the responsible ones and taking birth control pills which have far fewer (and less harmful) negative side effects.
Or better yet, both men and women being responsible (assuming the men don’t have a vasectomy or the woman doesn’t have a tubal ligation).
(man, not men).
Most likely a deranged government that thinks it can wage genetical warfare by releasing a disease or chemical that only targets ‘the enemy’
Only to find that a virus can’t think and certainly is not exactly known for its discerning infections, and will infect every human equally regardless of what superficial and stupidly racist trait it was supposed to discriminate against.
Heinlein did a novel (while holding his metaphorical nose) about a weapon like that, that caused certain Asiatics to die but not blacks or caucasians. I don’t remember the title, but I’m sure doing a quick search of his bibliography would turn it up. In his autobiography he said it was one of the most revolting jobs he ever took.
Frank Herbert’s The White Plague is about a biologist who develops a plague that kills only women, while men are the only carriers. It was a good read, despite the utter illogic of both of those specific characteristics.
Sounds like Y The Last Man but reversed. :)
Decent comic btw. I’m going to look up The White Plague now because that sounds like it would be a good book too. Plus Frank Herbert – can’t really lose on that.
I’m more amazed she didn’t instantly jump on the Geno-cyber comment. Mainly because that’s already been used.
I’ve always liked the idea that the universe at large is only slightly less dickish than we currently are. Quite a few depict it even more so (Uplift saga comes to mind).
So~ is that a coloring mistake / lighting issue with Dabbler’s markings suddenly being blue for one panel, or does that always happen when she uses spells? I’d have to go back and double check, but it’d be pretty cool if it was an always thing that’s just subtle and I never noticed.
Huh.
I never noticed that before.
I think it might be from the magic, if only because the markings on her right arms are still green/teal, and the markings get progressively more vibrantly blue and glowy as they head towards her left side which is the one with the hands that are using the magic.
Uplift is almost dysfunctionaly dickish. You can count the species that aren’t mostly backstabbing megalomaniacs in that ‘verse on one hand. It’s also totally unrealistic in that every species except humans apparently evolved on a planet of hats, and our hat appears to be that we’re weird for not having a hat (and for bootstrapping ourselves, but meh).
Even though it can be argued that an adult would better not intervene every single time a child stumbles or falls, another argument will be made the adult would intervene every single time (unless they are really selfish) if the child falls or stumbles in the presence of a clear threat.
However, we aren’t the child of aliens (at least, not very likely). When was the last time you rushed to save an ant-nest from extinction? A very, very low amount of people care for them here and there, but most of the human population don’t waste a single thought for the hard life of the ants in that nest which are being flooded by a breaking dam.
bad analogy. The Aliens shown in this story so far are not as far removed from one another as your ant examplewould suggest.
Better analogy would be a stranger caring for an orphan, and on a larger scale, a man in Germany going out of their way to care for an orphan in Australia.
Or willingly paying for Universal Healthcare. There would be factions that want to save everyone and factions that would prefer that the natives go extinct so they could have the planet.
Typo: “anthropgenic” should be “anthropogenic”.
Shouldn’t that be “disconcerting”?
Used as an adjective, concerning means “to cause anxiety”.
As for the anthropOgenic… darn, beat me to it. :P
Doesn’t “anthopogenic” cause anxiety? So, disconcerting much?
What I learned from this is that apparently other races also use blue for their crash-screen message. Highly suspicious.
Or Blue (the color of skies with that delicious oxygen almost everyone seems to breathe) is a universally comforting color for when things go BZZZZT. :)
Or there’s a different word and it just translates as “blue-screened”.
Naw, pretty sure one of the alien tourists back in the 70s got a job at Microsoft for kicks playing with the primitive alien tech, and just picked the galactic-standard of blue for total system failure out of habit.
It’s just their translators properly handling the idiom. He probably said something like, “The death rattle annunciator sound”, or something like that.
I’m sure less reasonable galactic races have survived the Great Filter and come out the other side with as few scars as possible. Still, a bit rude. I think we humans are doing pretty well, all things considered.
Well, if stupid ppl continue to refuse to wear masks while in public, Frix might end up winning that bet…
Unlikely. SARS-CV-2 is dramatically more deadly among the elderly (and, obviously, the immunocompromised) than it is among otherwise-healthy young adults. Even if it’s allowed to rampage completely freely, it’s less likely to exterminate us by itself, and more likely to simply lower the average wisdom and experience of the species so that we become even more vulnerable to the other causes of self-extinction in the betting pool.
No long term immunity and it gets worse with every re-infection. Its a little like Dengue Fever in that regard. No numbers yet on how bad it damages you each time but every bit of permanent damage makes your more susceptible to even more permanent damage until eventually it will kill you. This disease needs to be treated as worse than smallpox and wiped out. We should be treating this like a war not whining about a lack of socialization.
My fear is that this will become the “new normal” and people will just try to go on with their lives.
Can we please not discuss a disease that we barely know or understand anything about as of yet, and stop making definite statements about things the vast majority of people in this comment section have no factual knowledge or understanding of?
There have been multiple reports, which appear to be factual, which indicate that covid-19 can cause organ damage to include brain damage, and these effects have not been limited to the population of the elderly and immunocompromized.
This is not rear mongering or hysteria, this is from numerous actual reports of victims of covid-19 who had no reason to be suffering from organ and/or brain damage.
My horror is a lot of people already have started this.
I’ve met people who have expressed the sentiment that their beard was more important to them than their life. I do not understand this viewpoint. But I can understand how a full beard would make wearing breathing PPE uncomfortable, and also much less effective. So such an attitude could explain some of this.
For me, my new normal is wearing the mask. Staying in as much as feasible is just something I was already doing as an introvert.
My hope is that people will eventually wake up to the fact that the danger is real and increasing. As time goes on, there are more people who are infected worldwide and specifically in every country where people don’t have their acts together. If we’re lucky, the people who are the worst about using their PPE will get enough damage to learn from their recklessness.
Unfortunately, I’m not sure that’s going to be the case. Probably people who are completely asymptomatic also get minimal damage, possibly even no damage, and therefore don’t have any personal learning experience of their own. Some people can learn from others around them – they might notice that a lot of people they interact with seem to be getting this stuff over and over. But I’ve known too many who are completely oblivious.
Darwinism is good for the herd.
Simple mathematics says that refusing to wear a mask and socially distance is less likely to harm the people refusing than the many others to whom they can spread their disease.
Darwinism is only a good thing if it has a greater chance of killing the ignorant and foolhardy, especially before they can breed, than the informed and careful.
Only in the medium term. Its selection horizon is only a generation or two at the most, so anything which produces good short-term results at the price of causing long-term disaster gets enthusiastically adopted.
Please, could someone explain to me — in words of one or fewer syllables — what makes Covid 19 any different to influenza (of any description)?
As I see it, we’ve been burdened with the ‘flu for at least one millennium, probably more, and the human race has grown to flood the planet. And influenza is a remarkably hostile little disease.
So what makes Covid 19 such a special little snowflake?
Also called “novel coronavirus”, as in unique, because it is different enough from other human-communicable viruses like flu that we have no immunity to it. The second major factor is that it has a far higher infection rate than other flu viruses.
Various strains of flu have been around enough that we’ve developed a generalized herd immunity, but even so various strains still kill many people each year, and there have been multiple flu pandemics with high world-wide mortality in recent history. It’s not that common influenze isn’t a horrible thing, it’s that the majority of its damage has already been done and we’ve (mostly) adapted to it, whereas covid’s destructive potential is still in the present / near future.
So we have exactly two (2) responses:
1. Try to do a smallpox and utterly exterminate the virus (good luck with that); and
2. Do as our ancestors did, learn to live with it. This does not exclude development of immunisation tech.
Very often, a coronavirus will be more successful when it mutates into a form that’s LESS deadly, not moreso. Case in point – I believe about 30% of common colds are caused by coronavirii. I could be wrong on that though – I haven’t done a lot of study in biology outside of medical patents since college (but one of my majors WAS biology – you need a science degree in order to sit for the patent bar – so I’m operating on hazy recollection).
But in general, the successful virii are the ones that do not kill the host, which allows it to spread further. Eventually humans do develop herd immunity. Like Brichins accurately said, coronavirii are most deadly in the very beginning, when they’re novel, since at that point we have no immunity to it at all, and usually very little knowledge of how the virii works or spreads or which populations are most or least vulnerable – ie, the Spanish flu was most dangerous to the young, while COVID-19 is mainly dangerous to the elderly and immunocompromised/health-compromised individuals (which is one of the main reasons the elderly are more succeptible, since they usually have more existing health conditions already).
Da. Even I know that the “coronavirus” is not new to humanity, it’s as common as “rhinovirus”. But the current strain is new to humanity, and that’s the problem. I am not at all comfortable thinking we’ve seen the last of Orthomyxoviridae…
The only thing that makes me hopeful is we have more and better methods of dealing with cytokine storm.
All right, I’m gonna try to ELI5 this for you. Hopefully I don’t simplify to the point that it becomes vague and misleading at the same time.
The coronavirus is considered to be a ‘Novel’ virus, meaning we haven’t seen anything like it before. The way it attacks cells is different than the ways a flu virus does, and our bodies don’t know how to handle that vector yet. Which means exposure is VERY likely to result in infection. Contrast with the Flu, for which we have at least some resistance to from getting flu during our lifetime and the flu vaccine provided annually that helps with most of the current strains.
Developing vaccines for new strains of the Flu virus isn’t too difficult, they’re variations on the same theme. Trying to create a vaccine for COVID, however, is going to be a monumental undertaking. Before, I’d have said it would take at *least* a decade, if not more. Modern tech has pushed that down to an estimated three or four years to get out of trials, but that’s still… problematic for a lot of people.
The other major reason COVID-19 and other related variants is more of a major problem than most Flu viruses is that it is infectious during its period of being asymptomatic, which can last for two weeks or so. So you can be perfectly fine, not feel ill at all, and still be not only infected but actively transmitting the disease to anyone you come into contact with… for two weeks straight. By the time you realize you’re ill, you’ve already passed it on to the majority of the people you came into casual contact with during that time. Contrast with Flu which expresses symptoms very rapidly and generally is not very infectious until symptoms start expressing themselves.
Does that answer your question?
Thank you, it does. You and @Brichins should be picked up by various health authorities to spread the news, because I’ve never seen it explained so clearly and accurately.
Oh, and thanks for the acronym. It’s brilliant!
Nicely stated
Just think of the problem directive. Sort of like the prime directive, but the reason for non-interference is less “not advanced enough” and more along the lines “already dealing with our problems and do not want to add your problems to our own list until we have to deal with you!”
Dangit, repost from below since this was meant as a response and a glitch caused me to have to repost, but it didn’t link to this post.
Quite the coincidence, really. For the Anthraxi, the color of blue is a soothing color, and thusly they need it to calm the computer techs and users, lest they go into their war-brood state due to agitation. The Gwavaar use blue because it is the color of their blood, and the screen symbolizes the notion that if you don’t fix this quickly, your boss is going to splatter the walls with your blood. On the other transcendent psuedopod, the WOFF use a blue screen because they only see the universe in shades of blue. Like, everything is blue to them, even black and white are just lighter and darker shades of blue. Well, they don’t so much as see, as observe it transcendentally, and ‘blue’ is the closest thing in human perception to how they perceive it, and it’s not so much as a screen as a group consciousness that overlaps the multiversal substrate.
Pentarians just like the color blue. But they despise teal. Man, don’t even get me started on teal. Decades long wars have been fought over even a suggestion of teal. Their Great Filter almost was the color teal, but that’s a story for a different day.
It’d be more cumbersome, certainly, but with some good software and a high res CCD chip, I bet it could work.
I’d say we are pretty close to such tech, maybe even better. There are already experimental contact lenses with ability to overlay images. Still few years from being commercially available (which means they may not even make it to the market, not to mention what they will cost if available)… but certainly a cool tech, within reach.
Remember Google Glasses, they are non-extant, because of human fears, about being recorded, by a stranger.
Did you ever hear about Clearview AI?
We can’t even secure our mobile phones, so what chance with Google Glass?
Take off their clothes, and mickey and Minnie, start to look the same.
Precisely.
And here I thought it was because they were clunky, ugly, uncomfortable and expensive, while the tech could not do anywhere near what Google promised it could…
There were some news articles about people wearing them being harassed in places like bars and such for possibly recording others. The harassers were probably breaking the law if they laid hands on the wearers, and what with cell phone recording being so much more prevalent in recent years this probably wouldn’t be an issue, or at least as much of an issue, for a similar product.
Quite the coincidence, really. For the Anthraxi, the color of blue is a soothing color, and thusly they need it to calm the computer techs and users, lest they go into their war-brood state due to agitation. The Gwavaar use blue because it is the color of their blood, and the screen symbolizes the notion that if you don’t fix this quickly, your boss is going to splatter the walls with your blood. On the other transcendent psuedopod, the WOFF use a blue screen because they only see the universe in shades of blue. Like, everything is blue to them, even black and white are just lighter and darker shades of blue. Well, they don’t so much as see, as observe it transcendentally, and ‘blue’ is the closest thing in human perception to how they perceive it, and it’s not so much as a screen as a group consciousness that overlaps the multiversal substrate.
Pentarians just like the color blue. But they despise teal. Man, don’t even get me started on teal. Decades long wars have been fought over even a suggestion of teal. Their Great Filter almost was the color teal, but that’s a story for a different day.
To be fair, we do tend to find more and more creative ways to kill ourselves than anything. A great example being the top 10 military spender countries vs what those same countries invest in R&D for science and education.
And if a race offs itself in a way that leaves the planet more or less intact and viable to support life?
Wow! Where’d this new colony planet come from?
I know. Right?
Originally read anthropogenic as anthropomorphic and imagined angry little clouds sweeping across the world
Space civilisations be like: “Meh, better to let them kill themselves, then it’s open slather to claim the planet and mine the minerals, populate it ourselves, setup tourism and business while opening a museum displaying the previous state of things.
Don’t forget the space brothels for anonymous sex tourism.
Considering their world appears to already have limited access to super tech and outright access to magic, they are definitely much less likely to kill themselves. I mean, with magic being secret the world is literally one big reveal away from a massive magitech revolution.
This depends an awful lot on how magic works and how accessible it is. There may also be other possible factors of which I’m not aware.
If it’s very accessible, cheap, and easy to use, then absolutely.
If it requires the use of rare or illicit substances, it mostly just helps the rich. I don’t recall seeing material components being a thing for most spells, apart from blood magic. But that doesn’t mean it’s necessarily not involved.
If it is in some manner as difficult to use as do the stuff without magic, magic isn’t really helpful. It seems likely, based on Xuriel’s assortment of stuff and the amount we’ve seen her using magic versus using tech, magic makes some things easier, but for most things, tech is easier. More specifically, magic is mostly useful for things that tech has a very difficult time doing.
If it requires unusual mental capabilities, such as the ability to imagine picture-quality 10 dimensional images, or otherwise requires very unusual genetics, the world is literally one big reveal away from a massive witch hunt, as the have nots of magic seek to end the lucky few who can do it – which would probably just be 90% of the people with the capability and training to use it already, plus those they were looking for to train.
It feels to me like this case is probably part of the situation. The question is, how rare is it? Given the cast we’ve encountered so far, and the portion of them that use magic, I’ll guess that having a significant capacity to use magic is probably not much more common than being a super, and quite possibly a lot less. We don’t know for certain that governments don’t secretly have large teams of magic users, but it really feels like they went with super heroes because they were more readily available. Some of that might be a training thing – just because one has magic doesn’t mean that one can just use it – but a FISS *can* just use that stuff.
It’s also quite possible that a significant portion of supers are actually just innate mages whose magical abilities let them do this limited set of things. This portion of supers could possibly learn magic much more easily than the population at large. Except, since they can do this limited set of things easily, they’re much less inclined to try to learn magic than a normal magically capable person would be.
Another limiting factor on the ‘ease of use’ end of things could be the energy it requires. We know that Xuriel needs a lot of tantric energy to do her things. Kevin needs a lot of vehemic energy to do his things. (Probably also a much clearer mind than he has right now, what with all of the drugs they’re giving him.) Vampires clearly need blood, and Sciona is rather fond of that energy source, too. We don’t really know about what other magic using characters may need, and we don’t really know about what other costs the ones listed might be paying that hasn’t been made clear. But just because someone might be able to understand how to cast a particular spell and have all of the right physical ingredients doesn’t mean they’ll necessarily have the power to make it work.
If we’re allowed to believe Xuriel about Jabberwocky.
Magical supers exist yet they’re rare even under supers.
Assuming the ways our advanced aliens word things it seems that magic isn’t very usefull to get higher on the ladder and that the real revolution comes with psionics.
Examples: Xuriel tells that the Alari are one of the few high advanced races that still use magic, the Fel ship Argon took down apparently leaked psychic radiation according to Cora, Xuriel tells that psionic radiation can be detectable for her organic eye, but not for her artificial eye and It apperently requires a lot of psychics to open an athereal gateway according to Crona.
A super micro-battery would be half the battle. Energy still isn’t free. We’d still need high-efficiency, toxin-free solar panels, anti-matter reactors, or something similar to achieve the energy density necessary to effect the most change.
Luckily we’re only 25 years away from fusion tech. As we have been for the last fifty years…
Hey! Between the 1950s and 1970s we were 20 years away from Flat TVs.
I think Fusion is down to 15 years now.
As always, there’s a relevant xkcd for that.
The price of Thorium went positive a few years ago. Someone’s betting it’s a LOT sooner than that. With real money. LOTS of real money.
Given the amount of fear people have of fission power plants, I feel like most of us are probably not going to find out about how close we are to having fusion power until sometime after we have it. The power crisis will just slowly not be as important as it had been, with no real explanation.
The power source would be by far the most valuable thing in Syd’s glasses – we can do the rest already, it’s just miniaturization. Safe and compact energy is much harder, and until we go back to serious nuclear research we won’t get much further with lithium-ion etc.
Currently much of the world’s electricity is used for economic essentials like heating & cooling, ammonia (fertilizer) production, smelting aluminum, etc. And if we could replace fossil fuel usage in transportation as well (something like 40% of its usage), cheap power would revolutionize the world. Energy availability and affordability is one of the biggest disparities between countries – Bitcoin mining and gaming in the state of California alone each use more electricity than entire African and South American countries.
…I wish this was less relevant, but hey, whattyagonnado?
I’m still guessing that they’re probably here to give earth an entry level FTL ship to reverse engineer as promised.
…I can’t help but picture Star Trek’s Phoenix ship.
Hello Space Vegas, put 10 quatloos on ‘zombie apocalypse’. I’m feeling lucky!
Who had “meth gators” for July?
Wasn’t The Federation planning on Blue Screening The Borg?
Yes and no. They intended to inform them of a paradox and hope it would blow up their collective thinking process. This was eventually discarded when they learned it would not function properly because they can be individuals. They then did it anyway by letting an individual borg infect the collective with individualism.
Great leaps forward in “wait… we did what?”
So Dabbler is hanging to that limb for Peggy and what will be next for Sydney and the rest!?
About the text segment of this episode.
“The size of a VHS Tape” ? That’s anachronistic and oddly specific.
What’s the word for using an object as a unit of measurement?
(Seeing as the USA doesn’t want to use the Metric System, there’s a lot of that.)
Football fields, cigarette pack, bread box? (Walmart still sells those!)
Chronometric flux toaster. It toasts bread after you’ve already eaten it.
But you need to spread the bread with resublimated thiotimoline.
Now I’m wondering what the most universally recognizable size-comparison object might be (aside from actual units*). Bread loafs and cigarette packs vary wildly even within the same country. Cassettes, VHS and CDs are standardized and widely recognized in North America and Europe, but didn’t penetrate other continents before digital formats took over. USB ports (e.g. the mini port of a phone charger) have got to be close to universal, but they’re so small you can’t really estimate multiples accurately when you’re sizing up something larger.
A
soccerfootball pitch is pretty universal, except for the USA (where we somehow still think that the Super Bowl is the world’s biggest sporting event and most people don’t even know the World Cup exists). Soccer balls are ruled out for the same reason.I’m thinking it’s probably the Coke bottle – it’s been around for decades and has completely penetrated every country in the world (except 2 where it’s the victim of political embargoes).
* Since the metric system is off the table, as the USA, Myanmar, and Liberia are still screwing it up for everyone else. Even though other countries that ‘officially’ use metric (e.g. the UK) cling to imperial units, I still blame the USA as the biggest culprit.
There is an interesting movie, called “The Gods Must Be Crazy!” Is about people who have seen a bottle, try to figure out what it is used for. A glass Coke Bottle in fact, when they were still made from glass.
Classic! Didn’t like the sequel nearly as much though :(
Not even the honey badger? Or was that the first one?
Coke bottles universal size?
Then why do they come in different sizes?
I’ve seen at least two different glass bottle sizes, and at least four different plastic bottle sizes, for coke. Heck I’m pretty sure there’s at least two can sizes, too.
Oh sure, there’s litre and mini bottles, and the stupid half-size or energy-overload cans, etc. But the ‘standard’ single-serving bottle is pretty uniform across countries. Not identical of course, but pretty close – and the main thing is the recognition.
I was going to suggest a “standard soda can” (regardless of contents), but it turns out the standard can size varies by country as well.
The problem with the “metric system” is its irrelevance to the human scale. “Hands” and “feet” are easy to grasp for quick measurement, where 10 centimeters (or worse in supposedly advanced nations, 100 mm), or 33 centimeters are simply just clumsy. Even the old “inch” evolved roughly the same way as the 360 degree circle, simply to give the maximum convenience for arithmetic. Ever wonder why we don’t use the gradian for geometry?
The good thing about the Système International is its universality. Everyone is prepared to use it, as France is not nearly so hated and despised as England or the USA.
Imperial is definitely more intuitive and relatable, but anyone who’s done much physics or engineering math can tell you that the unit conversions are stupidly complicated and a major source of errors (some of them very expensive). Whereas with metric (technically SI, thank you) nearly everything just matches.
It doesn’t really seem like the base units were chosen around any single scale. A meter is rather long for measuring many common things, while a gram is very light for most things.
They did up their game and make the Kilogram the base unit for mass, but unfortunately pushed Volume into the derived units so now the liter is not “standard”.
The standard trope is that all objects in the range of what you can carry around is either defined by food or sports items.
Size standards:
grape/marble
egg/golf ball
tuna can/hockey puck
apple/baseball
grapefruit/softball
cantaloupe/football (American)
Honeydew/football(everyone else)
watermelon/basketball
Fun Fact, the Imperial measurement system is currently defined as a specific percentage or ratio of a given Metric unit equivalent, which is itself hung on some universal constant.
So yea, the pound is defined as a specific percentage of a kilogram, which is derived from Plank’s Constant.
So technically… the metric system is now universal, it’s just that some people have a compatibility layer between them and the actual unit of measurement used. Kind of like how Linux uses WINE to run Windows programs.
I guess that makes the US the Linux users of the measurement systems? Not sure how I feel about that, honestly…
As I understand it, US residents have the freedom to choose their measurement standard whenever they wish. The only restriction I know about is, that if they’re selling, the measurement standard cannot be capriciously changed.
We can’t do that in Oz, it’s metric or nothing.
If whatever the hell hit Greenland in 11 500 BC didnt kill us off, I doubt any of the emotard dramatics you spaz about will either.
This. By far, this.
Tell me *ClImAte ChANge* will reduce our population 50%, and you’ve told me you’ve set us back 50-100 years at most. Tell me it will wipe us out and I’m LMAO.
Of all the ways we might end, this is seriously the least likely.
Some nutjob using a LOT of thermonukes to trigger the supervolcano…. probably not possible.
A general nukewar triggering an ice age? Maybe 95% death. Maybe.
And yes. An ice age will be FAR more troublesome than a return to the Cretaceous.
Return to the cretaceous would be 100% human death rate.
Min oxygen level for human life is around 19%; cretaceous is around 10-15%.
We’d all suffocate.
I have to correct this. The cretaceous oxygen level was around 35%. Today’s is around 21%. It’s the dinosaurs that would suffocate if they got pulled forward into our time.
Going to have to correct Bear and that Ms Duck is actually correct…
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/11/131118081043.htm
While it was previously thought that oxygen levels were around the 30 percent mark later studies have put this much lower. Into the realms of the 10-15% rate.
In contrast it is the rising oxygen levels towards the end of the Cretaceous period that have been linked to the decline of the dinosaur.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/11413216/
Not saying that made dinosaurs extinct, we’re still pretty sure it was the asteroid that did that.
It would be very hard for humans to survive in the same period as the dinosaurs. Thanks to the rising levels the first humans began to evolve sometime in the late Cretaceous period. (Well primates who would later become humans…).
I did read somewhere — I know, I should bookmark EVERYTHING — that atmospheric oxygen levels in any era are always just low enough that vegetation does not “spontaneously” combust.
If anything’s going to kill us off, it’s birth control; There isn’t a developed nation on Earth that isn’t at a birth level so far below replacement that you’d normally see it only in the middle of a major war or plague.
It turns out that, if people have the option of having sex and not babies, not enough of them opt for the babies to produce the next generation. The only reason the world population isn’t in free fall is the part of the world that’s still too poor to routinely use birth control.
It’s probably self-correcting, eventually the human genome will be dominated by people who reproduced anyway, and are somehow immune to the deadly demographic effects. Hopefully not just because they’re too stupid to use a condom right.
I mean you can just slightly increase the incentives for people to have babies – it’s not an unmanageable problem if it actually became serious enough for us to want to do anything about it.
Historically, there have been multiple societies that reward the birth of a child. So, it is not unheard of.
Well, yes, fixing it would be as simple as making public old age pensions a function of how many/how productive your children are. That’s what children used to be, the original old age pension, this problem only really kicked in as things like Social Security became common in developed countries.
But the politics render doing that basically impossible in a democracy.
A story written years ago by C.M. Kornbluth kind of looks at that. “The Marching Morons” is the title. Well worth the read if you can find it.
“There isn’t a developed nation on Earth that isn’t at a birth level so far below replacement… – Brett Bellmore
Citation very much needed. Looking at the actual population figures, and taking migration into account, nearly every country is still in exponential population growth at some speed. There are a few exceptions, but they are [i] very much the exception and [ii] not below replacement by very much.
Of course, that’s not considering the more important question: why do we need raw numbers of Humans? The current situation in terms of numbers and resource consumption vastly outstrips the planet’s capacity; we’re burning through our capital far faster than it can be replaced. If we want a chance of long-term survival, we need to drastically reduce either the number of Humans consuming, or the average amount each consumes – or more likely both. To borrow a quote, “anyone who believes in infinite growth on a finite planet is either a fool or an economist”.
It should be noted that just because something won’t kill 100% of humanity, does not mean it should be ignored. Threats still are threats that are problematic.
Specifics, please! I can find nothing about it. Thanks!!
Look here.
Have we had a happy life-event?
why pick one, it could be more
the power sorce of this glass is kinda very nice, but I wonder… how you charge it?
So the Xevoarchy doesn’t do the whole “Day the Earth Stood Still” sort of things. Good to know there won’t be any Gort robots appearing after word got out about the supers on Earth.
Gort robots are apparently very expensive, both financially and politically.
A low cost ambient enegy receiver already exists. But production of the ambient energy transmitters isn’t allowed, due to potential health scares.
Don’t believe me? Try researching crystal sets. AM radios made by POWs in WW2 didn’t use any sort of electrical storage, they were powered solely by the radio waves from broadcasts.
I built one of those crystal radio kits when I was in (Cub?) (Boy?) Scouts. Got credit for it even though I never got it to receive anything.
My brother made one when we were kids back in the late 70s, and it actually received from the nearest AM station. If there’s still AM radio stations, you could probably still make one today. There’s no power for an amplifier, though, so you only get the volume you get, or less if you choose to dial it down. Also note that the range for them is a lot less than the range for a powered AM/FM radio receiver.
Most contact-free smart card authentication uses a low cost ambient energy receiver. The range they work at is roughly the range that they’ve dialed back the energy transmission to. With that level of power transmission, the energy cost is a small rounding error on the cost of the overall authentication system, even if you’re only talking all of the parts that are directly connected to the thing being secured (for example, one door), or are somewhere between that and the transmitter/receiver for the authentication system.
I’m pretty sure I’ve heard of other applications that were at least still in use as of 2020, but I’m blanking on them.
Yes, but at ridiculously low outputs – you need an amplifier to hear the sound more than a couple feet away. Compare that with the energy requirements to move a car at highway speeds, and you get exponential growth of the size of the receiver. And that’s completely ignoring the other issues you alluded to, wherein the power transmitter a) still has to produce and transmit the energy (plus corresponding losses), and b) cooks all nearby life.
Wireless power transmission techniques have been around for decades and are still in use for specialty applications, but they can’t (safely) meet the demands of general power consumption.
Yes, that’s what my post said.
I’m pretty sure there is no middle ground between “orbiting the Earth” and “flying away to only be seen again in a few months at best” (aka “orbiting the Sun”).
1. Powered flight. Either they have some source of highly concentrated energy, infinite energy, or they’re solar powered. Considering that they’re only trying to maintain proximity in an ultra-low gravity environment, it doesn’t require a lot of power.
2. Lagrangian points. Basically, these are 5 points between two bodies where all the forces cancel out.
3. Hyperspace or other extra-dimensional location. For this, it could even conceivably be on the planet, just not somewhere we can possibly go due to the limits of our perception and locomotion.
4. Most people don’t consider ‘on a natural satellite’ to be ‘in orbit’. They could’ve put it on the moon somewhere. Bury it in dust and we’d probably never know. (I’m not suggesting the far side of the moon, because that gets hit by rocks more frequently. That said, bury it deep enough and that doesn’t matter.)
There are also Lissajous orbits, which is basically oscillating around a Legrange point, and there are several spacecraft ‘parked’ in such orbits already. Cora could safely drop a cloaked device at any of those points so long as it wasn’t obstructing (or attached to) any nearby instruments.
Putting a relay on the Moon is just asking for trouble.
There is an interesting movie, called “The Gods Must Be Crazy!” Is about people who have seen a bottle, try to figure out what it is used for. A glass Coke Bottle in fact, when they were still made from glass.
Fun film. As is its sequel.
Einstein refereed to “infinite energy”, which is needed to pass the speed of light, however the mass gained will preclude it from ever existing. Unless we develop, a massless vehicle. it would need to be made of photons or if we find a way to cancel out mass, as they are the only form of matter, that is massless, which is why it travels AT the speed of light.
AM radio rules!
I’m going to throw “religious strife/war” into the pool… Of course with what’s happening in the States right now I wouldn’t rule out “runaway idiocracy.”
The rest of the world is less likely to follow the USA in its descent into madness.
That said, if the USA continues on its current path it would be at least the third time that a major empire/culture decides it liked the stone age better than civilisation.
The fourth great collapse and scientific retreat of several centuries that I know of was most likely caused by a international trade system and military balance being stressed beyond its limits leading to a system collapse.
And the two, possible soon third, other /voluntary/ retreat were primarily motivated by religion retaking the place of reason.
Hey! We haven’t started trying to water crops with Gatorade!
i mean all aspects of ARC aside… isn’t a super fueled apocalypse far more likely for sidney’s version of earth? you have people with literal super powers running around, not all of them can be monitored, what happens if one develops with a literal earth ending power and doesn’t know how to control it?
A three way war between The Normals, The Supers and The Supernaturals, with the local illegal aliens caught in the middle.
How is the deterioration of The Veil coming along?
Isn’t it stable since Sciona stopped messing with it after the vault raid? Heck, maybe the Council’s IT deptartment even got some overdue funding to expand some critical nodes.
Supers are powerful with varying levels of powerful but in very small numbers.
The non-supers may or may not already have more mundane methods at the ready to counter the supers or supernaturals – Sentinels come to mind.
My super power lets me convert my entire mass to antimatter. Oops, I used it once. Sorry.
The wrong power could be devastating the first time it was activated, and we’d not have any chance to react. The person’s ability to control it might not matter if the power were bad enough.
Again, my theory is that the reason Earth has supers, and no other planet, is that the Nth are living on Earth, using it as a VR role playing game. The normals are NPCs, and the supers are Nth players, who just aren’t allowed to remember it while they’re playing. They remember when they “die” and have to roll up a new character.
That’s why the supers are all good looking; Player characters start out with more points to allocate between their stats.
Thankfully 200 kg of antimatter-matter annihilation, while devastating still only has a partial continental scope. The supervolcano that likely follows it though is another matter.
Of course, if you just drop 100kg of anti matter on earth it will not create one big explosion. It will be more like a string of (very big) firecrackers. For antimatter to annihilate it must get into contact with matter, but only the outermost atoms of the mass weill be able to do so.
Cern creates a lot of antimatter particles (well, a lot relative to how many there are naturally on earth;)) and the ‘explosions’ barely register. If they occur in one of the big experiments.
So, converting yourself into antimatter is fatal to yourself but not to the planet, not even to the eastern seaboard of the USA. The same could be said to the ability to turn yourself into a black hole. The event horizon of that black hole would be so small that it would be difficult to even push an electron in. When that black hole finally eveporates a couple billion years later, that is going to produce a bigger bang :)
That said, it is possible to come up with subtler super powers that are lethal on a massive scale. Emitting gamma ray bursts would be one of those.
The biggest question is of course where the energy for those effects comes from. But that’s not suspending disbelief :)
“… converting yourself into antimatter is fatal to yourself but not to the planet, not even to the eastern seaboard of the USA.”
We-e-e-lll, in the Jenkinsverse, one of the Hierarchy delivers 5 kilogams of antimatter to an apartment in San Diego. The resultant hole takes out the entire city, plus a few acres of the surrounding hills — if I understood the narrative properly. But never mind. Just “the entire city” will do.
A human will mass, what, 50 to 100 kilograms? Now convert that to antimatter. Isn’t there a tectonic fault somewhere near San Diego?
Look at Star Trek, where “such being existed, Khan.
In This episode:
We list the most generic and deadbeat tropes of self destruction that will never happen…
“Looks at the news, reviews the latest online science posts.”
Not one trope may do humans in but we seem to have a nice selection on the table with a few catalysts to help things along – stupid and greed are two of them and those we can’t seem to get rid of.
I’m honestly surprised that they think humanity will wipe itself out with such mundane problems (well maybe a malevolent AI isn’t but the other too…) and the bet isn’t on something like a “grey goo” scenario.
Human can be pretty resilient little bastards. Or at least that’s what all the sci-fi and fantasy fiction tells me :P
More likely is that we get to fixated on entertainment to maintain the infrastructure of science to actually move meaningfully beyond current tech.
I mean, we *could* go to the stars, but..meh.
And I consider mining asteroids to be “current tech”. Also, a pretty clear way to make a REALLY bad day for anyone on the wrong side of whomever is steering the thing on the way back.
Yes I cringed when Hawking made that remark, you would have to aggressively mine carbonate rocks mostly from ocean bottoms , crack the carbon and release it into the atmosphere for decades to even get close to a Venus Atmosphere.
Those Extinction Now terrorists that Greta backed really have no clue about the future.
The exctinction now actually this problem quite succinctly.
It is not the temperature rising to lethal levels that will wipe us out.
It is the mass exctinction that we have already started that will.
In any extinction event it is the largest apex creatures that die out first. And guess who is at the top of the global food pyramid?
Our existence as a species depends on a shockingly small number of plants and creatures, and several of them are already rapidly disappearing. There are considerably less insects these days than there were even a decade ago. But these insects play a critical role in maintaining the soil and fertilising plants that we need to eat. So we could shift to hydroponics. Except that we already squandered an immense amount of sweet water and may not quickly have enough to feed 9+ billion humans. Then those billions of starving humans will not meekly stay at home. They will begin to migrate north where they heard there was still plenty of water and food…
In the mean time Bolsanaro will complete the destruction of the amazon rain forest and permanently disrupt the oxygen cycle of the entire planet. The larger the animal the more oxygen it needs (or like the dinosaurs they need a vastly more efficient respiratory system) so we can not afford a big drop in oxygen content in the atmosphere.
On top of that there is the danger of what happened to cause the ‘great dying’ or the Permian-Triassic extinction event. The oceans do not have to get that much hotter than they are now to trigger that. The hotter the water gets the more CO2 it absorbs and the more acidic it becomes. This alone will kill most sea life. But certain bacteria will thrive. Unfortunately they are going to pump vast amounts of sulferic compounds in the water, and atmosphere. This will cause the rain to get a high concentration of sulpheric acid. The permian-triassic extinction killed 95% of all marina life and over 70% of all terrestial life. Vertebrates (of which we are a part) almost went completely extinct. Only small animals that could burrow away from the deadly conditions survived.
I would say that there is a bit more urgency to doing something about the massive amount of CO2 in the air than you think.
It may (!) not kill off all humans, but civilisation as we know it now, that will not survive. And without cheap, plentiful and low-tech energy sources we will not be able to kickstart a second attempt. We will hang on but locked onto this planet until a stray asteroid or ice age wipes us out in the next couple of million years.
“In any extinction event it is the largest apex creatures that die out first. And guess who is at the top of the global food pyramid?”
nope, you might want to take an ecology course. We are the Apex Predator not the largest.
Given notice, I can keep a community going on with power, water, CHON , algae and yeast [plus trace elements]. So as long as single cell microbes survive, so can man.
Blue screen? Alien HIs run Windows?
Alien AIs. Damn auto correct.
I remember watching Geno-Cyber back in the 80’s. Might still have a copy somewhere . . . The poor kid was really tragic, but whay I remember most was how in part 2 she was more than willing to live an ordinary happy life until the spastic scientists decided to try and reverse engineer her tech and harness it for their wars. Which basically makes this pages point for it. Even if the machines didn’t want to wipe everyone out – humans will give them the power and act all shocked when it happens. ( Although geno cyber was more about a human brain piloting a cyborg god machine but point made)
Well chalk that up to Hollywood and their propaganda machine always making the scientists out as the bad guys.
Anyone who is a student of history or politics or science for that matter will know that it is those in charge that cause all the issues by misuse of science, lying to the scientists or just keeping them in the dark.
So that would be the military, espionage, politicians, titans of Industry.
The good old boys [encouraged though various means] modify what was supposed to be something to help humanity into something to control or destroy “The Enemy” whomever or whatever that may be at the time.
Lysenko
/nuff said.
Generally making claims that state ‘always’ or ‘never’ in an unquoted fashion is a poor plan if you wish to be right.
I’m not aware of any class of person who ‘always’ or ‘never’ causes problems, with the one possible exception of ‘nonexistent people’. Not even ‘dead people’.
There are some classes of people who tend to cause more than their share of problems. For example, ‘politicians’. But even within those classes, there are people who cause fewer problems, and there are people who cause more problems.
Also, just to point it out, scientists in general tend to be too focused on one area and not enough on others to the point that it causes problems. Most of the time, the biggest impact is on their families, but there are scientists who are personally responsible for some environmental disasters.
The ones I’m personally familiar with were only on the county level or less, afflicting only about a number of people that could’ve been in a phase IV trial had it been a medical trial rather than an industrial experiement. I have heard of others that were on larger scales, but without knowing the people involved, it’s difficult to say how much was the scientist and how much was the people around them.
Genocyber was much more about greed and military violence then mad science.
Even in the first episode the evil scientist was the paired with an apparently at least conventionally empathic partner who is never condemned for being the other half of the Vajra Engine which itself is never called a bad idea. It’s greed and sociopathy that creates the cyborgs and permits them to rampage and permits the villain to to known to molest his adopted daughter.
The beginning of part 2 involves a massacre of children done anonymously from a helicopter which in plain camera view flies back to the supercarrier. Who the pilots and gunners were is never touched on and instead we go to how basically “normal” the ship’s crew are. They work, they eat, some go to the chapel and some go to the arcade. They are normal people who art part of a war machine that kills children. The bio-creature pilot that becomes the uh “antagonist” is depicted as ominous and alien, but nobody shrieks “what has science done!” It’s a weapon, one more weapon, in a floating city of warfare.
It might be a stretch to say Genocyber is about anything, but if it is it’s about karma and judgement. A society that lets children be tortured and killed is destroyed by a force that arises from that callousness. A war machine that kills indifferently is destroyed by it’s drive to become more and more lethal. Episode 3, although pretty much crap quality wise, is about a decadent holdout society that destroys itself in much the same way: old war machines and ingrained cruelty.
In all episodes there are heroic people striving to save lives: fire fighters, rescue personnel, etc. The problem is not they don’t count or that otherwise everyone else is evil, it’s that the peaks of permitted sadism have become too high and that the science that permits jumbo jets and a subway service is as morally indifferent as the science that installs arm-chainsaws and miniguns to use on the former.
To be sure it’s nihilistic and ends basically on the note that “yeah maybe advanced societies aren’t a good idea after all” but over and over the evil present is the evil within: us. The transition from episodes 2 to 3 is a plot card explaining that World War 3 wipes out most of civilization when the nuclear powers of the age decide to destroy Genocyber using atomic bombs. Obviously science supplied the weapons, but it’s men who cannot resist answering the presence of a creature that doesn’t attack them first by in effect exterminating themeselves.
Wow. You posted way more in a post than I was willing to. And yeah I also got the feel of “Innocent people getting trampled over by those with power”, pretty much all dystopian futures in anime combine the idea that – corrupt people at the top push a status quo, but they flip flop back and forth whether that’s good or not. In the original movie the Vajra project is being made as a peace keeping project. Yes they took a four year old kid, stuck her brain in a cyborg weapons system designed to look like a pretty girl, and yes their goal was justified in that she was basically intended to become this shows ‘cybercop’. But she was still a four year old kid, with the power of a god.
And much like that classic Akira – Genocyber one did a good job of pushing the idea “Chaos and Anarchy are not the solution to totalitarian states or overthrowing the system. It just gets innocent people hurt”.
Part two actually doubled down on that IMO in a weird way. The point of the earlier depictions of mass slaughter, men women and children and Elaine actively fighting them was to depict that her extreme violence in direct response wasn’t accomplishing anything. The war waged on, and people kept dying. Only by allowing herself to be taken in by the military forces and allowing them to study her, did she get a foothold. In the final events Elains enhanced Vajra set the groundwork for parts 3 and 4 to systematically take down governments and the corrupt warmongering corporations from the inside!
How can we have rampant Artificial Intelligence when we don’t even have anything close to rampant Intelligence?
Just asking.
I’d tend to suggest not having rampant intelligence is probably helpful for running into rampant artificial intelligence issues.
We’ve discovered “genetic programming”, a technique where rather than programming a computer, we write tests to use to evaluate two separate programs and determine which one is better, and then a base program to try to do the thing we want done, and finally run it with various mutations and have the evaluations select better and better programs to do the task. We don’t understand how the final program does what it does, but we like the output.
We have applied this technique to writing the part of the program that does the evaluating of the two parts to determine which is best.
At this point, all we have to do is wait for the rampant AI to happen. To be fair, it’s not very likely with any iteration, given the starting points for these efforts of which I’m aware. But we are running a lot of iterations.
This doesn’t seem to me to be the work of an intelligent.
A good book on that sort of thing is “The Two Faces of Tomorrow” by James P. Hogan. Well worth reading.