domain:badcyber.com
07mk
2d ago
It's a few hundred millions, max. After that, the sun will slowly increase its irradiance by a relatively small percentage, resulting in a runaway greenhouse effect from atmospheric water vapor, which will end the carbon cycle on Earth.
Ah, I had thought we had at least a billion, but I hadn't done that much research. I'll take your correction at face value. You also answer here the question you asked earlier in this comment about what catastrophes I'm worried about. I'm worried about the big one.
So, those timelines are so extremely long, we can worry about them when we get really, really bored. The problems we have to solve before that need to be solved here, because solving them here is cheaper than living in space or on Mars.
I disagree. We won't ever get really, really bored, at least that's my prediction based on our evident ability to find extremely banal and inconsequential problems extremely interesting when there's a dearth of consequential problems that are nipping at our heels. And escaping boredom is a really bad motivator for accomplishing something as difficult as sustainable life off Earth. If we take the attitude that the timeline is just so long that we can worry about it in the future, that's a formula for just never doing it at all and letting humanity get snuffed out. One might hope that the human spirit would overcome and survive when push comes to shove, and I'd guess that it would, but I think things would be more pleasant if push didn't come to shove. Plenty of people survived the Titanic and made it to America, but I think it would have been more pleasant for everyone involved if that had been accomplished by the ship just reaching its destination safely instead of having to rely on lifeboats and another ship coming around to pick those up. If we can clearly see an iceberg in our path, it's best to plan for it now instead of relying on future us to solve it when there's less time to work out the kinks.
And there's no need to solve cheaper problems before expensive problems. Our problem-solving abilities aren't fungible like money, and we can devote resources both to expensive and cheap problems at the same time in a way that's more beneficial overall for humanity. Obviously no one can actually work out a credible measure of "benefit to humanity" or whatever, there are arguments to be made about the details, including the notion that, in 2025, all resources devoted to researching and accomplishing space travel would be better spent on something else on Earth, which I disagree with but which I think isn't unreasonable. But that's a different notion than the one that there's no point to humans living in space. Even before a planet/solar system-destroying catastrophe, there's a point, because living in space will force individuals living there to innovate and learn the things we don't even know that we don't know about how to live in space, so that we can actually get it right when shit hits the fan for all of Earth (some of them may will die along the way as they encounter these unknown unknowns, but that's a sacrifice I'm willing to make).
Bartender_Venator
2d ago
There's a good Nick Land essay about this where he argues that space exploration is really about planetary disassembly by posthuman intelligences rather than domestead frontier LARPing.
Iirc he starts from the premise that spheres are an extremely inefficient shape to extract mineral resources from, compared to disassembling a planet into asteroids and having space drones mine them.
magic9mushroom
If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me
2d ago
Well, the actual sentence was:
There’s nothing worth saving in there that just won’t slow you down and get your people killed.
It's a bit broken, but I interpreted that as roughly
"There might be friendlies in there, but the time and (expected-value) expense in lives of going in there outweighs the value of saving them."
There's a saying that "the exception proves the rule", i.e. if you note that no X are not Y (contrapositive: all X are Y), then this implies the existence of X that are Y. This is not how formal logic defines things, but most people consider it implicit in common parlance (indeed, one of the most common exact-words tricks is to violate this convention). And certainly, even in formal logic, saying that all X are Y does not imply that there aren't X that are Y. Hence, it's not saying there's nothing... saveable? Good? ...in there, just nothing worth the cost of saving.
Nobody wants to waste hand grenades in this economy.
Well, I mean, not quite nobody.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
2d ago
The work to intentionally contaminate some shrimp is going to bring plenty of scrutiny. That’s like preparing to hijack a plane by carjacking an 18-wheeler.
Now, Mars is close enough to Earth that it's not an effective hedge against these catastrophes
What are you worried about? Volcanism or impactor would certainly spare Mars. We'd need to be extremely unlucky for a gamma ray burst to take out either Earth or Mars, but for both getting hit, we'd need to be absurdly unlucky. What else? Close-by supernova? I think we ruled out most candidates, there are no geriatric stars in our direct neighborhood.
The first two candidates certainly could end human civilization on Earth, but they usually only happen every few tens of millions of years. On such extreme timelines, it's unlikely humans would still be around, just from an evolutionary view. Also, humans being the cockroaches of the mammalian class, we'd probably have a pretty good chance to survive a minor event, at least as a species (if not as a civilization). After all, we eat everything and live everywhere.
Fortunately, we likely have millions, if not billions, of years, to get human civilization sustainable on another planet that's safe from these guaranteed catastrophes on Earth, which is a lot of time to research and develop innovations to enable us getting off Earth.
It's a few hundred millions, max. After that, the sun will slowly increase its irradiance by a relatively small percentage, resulting in a runaway greenhouse effect from atmospheric water vapor, which will end the carbon cycle on Earth.
So, those timelines are so extremely long (and as such, the probabilities of an extinction event in the next couple of hundred years), we can worry about them when we get really, really bored. The problems we have to solve before that need to be solved here, because solving them here is cheaper than living in space or on Mars.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
2d ago
Or German besides living in the Midwest? Neither do I.
The presence of German culture in the US was pretty much forced out of the popular consciousness in two waves in the 1910s and 1940s for obvious reasons. It used to be a common language, even with German-language newspapers. Somehow the folks that get very upset about "destroying subcultures" never notice that example. You can still find bits and pieces around: Oktoberfest and such, and amusingly in elements of polka in Norteño music.
roystgnr
2d ago
There's a famous legend about Henry Ford trying to engineer cars this way - if the car you buy has ten parts that might wear out, but in practice only nine of them ever fail, doesn't that mean you probably paid too much for an over-engineered design on the tenth?
If the lifetime of your car (or your body) was actually strictly determined by a L=min_i(L_i) formula, in fact, evolution would have a really tough time improving that - once you get L_i = L_j for some i,j, you can't improve L by improving either component, but only with a change that improves both at once. I think evolution is helped here by the addition of uncertainty - even when something like "heart failure kills people before cancer can" was true at some point in some average sense, there'd still be individuals getting lucky with their heart or unlucky with cancer and so cancer-fighting mutations would still give non-zero fitness improvements.
Perhaps a more subtle problem is that evolution doesn't care about the longevity of your body, only the fitness of your genes. By the time your biological mortality is really catching up to you, you're supposed to have a few kids and a bunch of grandkids running around, and from the point of view of an allele's frequency your life is only worth approximately as much as two of the former or four of the latter. So if age has made your body a significantly less efficient carrier of the genes you share, then evolution would be happy to put you out on an ice floe (as in a somewhat less mythical metaphor) rather than let you drag them down with you. Not only do alleles that reduce mortality become less useful in the face of different causes of death, but also in the face of other causes of weakness!
WandererintheWilderness
2d ago
No, that doesn't follow. You can still exercise good faith, ie trust that people's stated moral principles as real unless proven otherwise, no martyrdom necessary.
To put it another way, it's fine to hold moral principles that do bring you material benefits as a bonus. It's just that if the benefits dry up, and you give up on the principles, then we can state pretty confidently that you never held them for moral reasons in the first place.
Yea certainly! I've been very excited about nattokinase recently. This is a compound found in the Japanese fermented soybean dish Natto, that has been shown to reduce plaque by up to 36% in a single year. Been trying to get the parents on it with little success. I myself take it daily.
faceh
2d ago
Kids can get T2D and athero, so merely having robust new cells wouldn't fix things completely.
This does sound like a problem that can be solved via pharmacueticals, some chemical that breaks up the plaques (without hurting other cells), and removing the plaque from the blood would probably involve filtering (possibly via an external device?) and reintroducing it.
It sounds more like an oil change type problem, rather than an engine swap type problem.
johnfabian
2d ago
KSR is very much a utopian socialist, and thinks that humans could - if we all sat down together in open conversation - Figure It All Out. I don't mind it, it's nice to have not everything you read be endlessly cynical. But this streak of his obviously runs through all his work.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
2d ago
I think Trump and Desantis and Abbot have demonstrated that the accelerationists were already in charge on immigration. There really was basically no control of the border and no attempt to remove obvious criminals once they got here. That's why Trump was able to get at all that low-hanging fruit, and why there haven't been really compelling immigration atrocity stories. The best they could do was Abrego Garcia... and he certainly seems like a bad hombre, even if his case was screwed up procedurally.
thejdizzler
2d ago
We do see people without much plaque who have eaten diets relatively low in fat, especially saturated fat. But this usually means that one's diet is high in protein (which greatly increases cancer risk and kidney failure, although at least the former can be greatly mitigated through DNA-repair), or carbohydrates (which greatly increases the risk of insulin resistance). Now many traditional populations experience none of these three metabolic failure modes. Yet that is (as far as I understand it) usually a result of them being on the edge of starvation most of time, which increases risks for other things like malnutrition which would negatively impact cellular replication.
And likewise, if there was a mechanism for preventing the buildup of plaque in the body, wouldn't that also be impacted by failed cellular replication?
I certainly think it would help, but I'm not sure it would solve things completely. Kids can get T2D and athero, so merely having robust new cells wouldn't fix things completely.
Since there are certainly other animals that have cardiovascular systems that nonetheless live an extremely long time.
Certainly, and I'm by no means arguing that enhanced DNA repair wouldn't help improve lifespans significantly. I just don't believe that this would be the magic bullet, as there are many other things going wrong as one ages. In addition to metabolism there's also the problem of the brain no longer producing new cells at all, which you point out in a comment thread below.
Corvos
2d ago
High-risk high-reward strategy is to build up a clear list of cases where his behaviour lost the company money, either directly or in missed opportunities, and then take that list to the level above him once it gets big enough and explain how you or a different person could increase profits. I've seen a friend do that to great success, but you need to have a good reputation yourself plus a willing superior and a very delicate touch to make it work.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
2d ago
The leftists who thought it was a war were routing their opposition right up until the right decided it was one as well. Perhaps they were correct that it was a war -- or perhaps if one side treats it as a war, it is one.
Is there anyone here on The Motte whom you do consider a principled liberal? And beyond The Motte, is there an example of a public figure whom you consider to be a principled liberal?
pbmonster
2d ago
I don't know about acceptable ways that can be used right there, in the moment, in a social situation, that go beyond giving the target a death glare and maybe clenching a fist in your pocket
With enough verbal intelligence, you can also get away with quite some veiled ridicule or malicious compliance, while maintaining enough plausible deniability that shouldn't get your parents called. We had a class clown that got very entertaining when angry... I'm sure it made him feel better (especially in public with people laughing), although raising your kids to be obnoxious little shits might not be exactly advisable.
roystgnr
2d ago
I only glanced at this story briefly last night, but: isn't 68 Bq/kg less than the radioactivity of bananas?
I also concluded that they must be worried about contamination that they missed - if some cesium capsule leaked a tiny bit into these shrimp, does that mean there was a tiny leak, or does that mean there was a big leak but this particular sample only included a tiny bit of it? Imagine if the most contaminated packages ended up near the center of a different shipping container, hidden from detection by a meter of cargo in every direction.
Switching from normal brain to crazy internet-addled brain: is there any chance this could have been a penetration test rather than unintentional contamination? Customs doesn't check every import for radioactivity because they're worried about shrimp with the power of bananas, they do it because after 9/11 we spent like a billion dollars on radiation portal monitors designed to detect "dirty bombs". If I was a psychopath looking to slip something by those monitors, I wouldn't want to blow my shot without a test run first, and I would want that run to have some kind of relatively-innocuous plausible alternative explanation in case the pen test didn't pen. If a dirty bomb hidden inside a bunch of radiation shielding still leaks as much gamma as a pallet of barely-contaminated frozen shrimp, well, then, barely contaminate some shrimp and send them through first and see if anybody freaks out.
faceh
2d ago
Is this considered an actual symptom of 'aging' wherein its inevitable as one gets older? I mean, do we see old people without much plaque as often as we see them with it (Yes yes, accounting for the survival of such persons to old age).
And likewise, if there was a mechanism for preventing the buildup of plaque in the body, wouldn't that also be impacted by failed cellular replication?
Since there are certainly other animals that have cardiovascular systems that nonetheless live an extremely long time.
professorgerm
You shall love your crooked neighbor, with your crooked heart
2d ago
Because there are such things as moral imperatives which you should follow even if they do not bring you material benefits; indeed, even if following them costs you dear.
By this standard no one except dead martyrs have moral principles.
thejdizzler
2d ago
This fits what I have read and seen of the research as well. There was a poster at a meeting I went to this year in San Diego where they selected flies for long lifespans by only taking offspring after a certain date (usually around 40 days I think). The genes that they found to be modified were all over the genome and didn't point to a single nice answer about aging other than it's something that affects the whole organism through many different pathways.
Nick Lane (one of my favorite biologists these days) has a theory that aging is caused by accumulations of mitochondrial mutations that prevent optimal ATP production. Eventually you get to the point where tissues can't produce enough energy to sustain themselves and then you get multiple organ failure and die. I'm attracted to this model because it means that in order to combat aging you should do a lot of aerobic (easy) exercise and have kids with people who are physically fit. Over time the average human lifespan should increase.
07mk
2d ago
besides escaping the "single planet trap" which hedges against catastrophes that are extremely unlikely, many of which would still leave the surviving humans on earth better of than the humans surviving in our potential colonies
This isn't true, though. These catastrophes that would literally leave no humans (or any life as we know it) alive on Earth aren't extremely unlikely, they are basically guaranteed according to our best understanding of physics and astronomy. Now, Mars is close enough to Earth that it's not an effective hedge against these catastrophes, but one must step into one's entrance way before one steps out one's front door.
Fortunately, we likely have millions, if not billions, of years, to get human civilization sustainable on another planet that's safe from these guaranteed catastrophes on Earth, which is a lot of time to research and develop innovations to enable us getting off Earth. But it's still a very finite amount of time, and these innovations aren't going to just happen over time without humans trying to come up with solutions to problems that get in the way of a goal. Dunno if terraforming is the right idea, but certainly some form of self-sustaining human colony on Mars seems like a reasonable intermediate goal for motivating the necessary innovations.
faceh
2d ago
There are a whole lot of factors in aging that by definition can't be cured by DNA repair because things in body that intentionally have no major maintenance mechanism after reaching adulthood keep deteriorating from plain physical stress and wear.
"intentionally" is a weird word to use there, what do you mean with that?
Likewise "after reaching adulthood." This implies that these maintenance mechanisms existed prior to adulthood. Which implies they could be re-activated.
Funny in hindsight, given that OP was revealed to be a Hlynka sockpuppet recently. Not sure if you saw.
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