| Author | Message | ||
     Torquehd |
I'm also on board with mosquito annihilation. Can we nix chiggers while we're at it? I lived in WA for the last 6 years and didn't have a single chigger bite, then I went to Missouri for one day and got probably 40 chigger bites from a 10 minute walk in the woods. My wife, who's from Wa, had never heard of chiggers before. | ||
| Aesquire |
The real problem with mosquito genocide is just killing the one species. We are just on the cusp of being able to reliably build viruses that can do that. However, that also means we will be able to engineer viruses that target specific groups with specific genes. This means that a bad guy could, maybe, someday, design a virus that killed only a specific group. Say, people with the gene for sickle cell anemia, or everyone descended from a particular tribe in Ireland. Or Norway. ( scary because the Vikings may have spread that gene across Europe & Eurasia ) Or Brunettes. | ||
| Torquehd |
this is tragic (every time it happens). http://www.foxnews.com/health/2016/09/12/student-d ies-after-contracting-brain-eating-amoeba-on-vacat ion.html I fear this will become more common. Brain eating amoeba, zika, islam, marxist politicians.... the world's doomed, for sure. | ||
| Aesquire |
the world's doomed, for sure. What, you didn't know that? ( what do they teach in school today? ) In no particular order... Sun will swell and the Seas will boil and the Earth bake. Asteroid/Comet impact will sterilize the surface. Supervolcano will end civilization and most humans. Ice age will destroy civilization and reset Mankind back to hunter gatherer. Plague, probably man made, will expand past it's target audience of Male Blondes ( or Arabs, or Koreans or..... ) and leave only Will Smith & a dog. Nuclear war won't kill all life... Just most of us. Physics experiment will succeed in making an artificial black hole. Earth falls in. Oh, there's more. But only the first four listed are 100% sure bets. The rest are just probable. I skipped Alien Invasion, since the same folk that tell us that exhaling makes us responsible for Earthquakes, will insist we all give up our jobs for the tentacle monsters... after all, It's not our way.... Also, don't call them aliens. Call them Visitors. | ||
| Aesquire |
Didn't mean to depress anyone. Only 2, 3 & 5 are likely in our lifetimes. All out Cold War massive nuclear war is fairly unlikely, ( although the current U.S. regime is far more likely to kick that off than a good one would ) So the worst I see is a limited one. And probably not for a couple of years... or this December depending on U.S. elections. ( and I live nowhere near a prime limited war target. back in the Cold war, before the Hawkeye plant & Bausch & Lomb quit local operations, this area was at a prime industrial target ) Asteroid? Just have to watch and encourage space flight. It's even possible to build and launch a "save the earth" mission if we started now, and had 6 years to prepare. Much better if that capacity is in place. And Supervolcano? Nothing we can do about that. There's probably a bad Sify movie in one mad scientist wanting to nuke Yellowstone to save us all... but of course he'd be wrong and the heroes would have to stop him. So nothing you can do expect write your Congressman to fund space defense and hope no one drops a plague flask in an airport. Easy enough. Have a nice day  | ||
| Reepicheep |
You forgot intersteller gamma ray burst from collapsing star wipes out all living things. And you must not be Neal Stephenson fan, because you forgot "mysterious projectile splits moon into seven large pieces".  | ||
| Aesquire |
https://pjmedia.com/blog/global-cooling-a-far-more-dangerous-fate/?singlepage=true I also skipped the "Doc" E.E. Smith "rotate the planet into another dimension" and "crash another planet into the Earth" ( WHICH HAPPENED... that's where the Moon comes from ) and the "burn the face of the planet with heat beams" scenarios. Mostly because it's pure hard science fiction. Highly unlikely. ( You think we'd notice someone building the heat beam projectors in orbit, eh? ) But not impossible... More likely is relativistic kinetic impact, now that the Chinese are said to be building reactionless drives for commercial purposes.  | ||
| Aesquire |
For those interested in large... booms, there is actually a well thought out "Boom Table". Enjoy. http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/usefu ltables.php#id--The_Boom_Table Fun items to note. The Barringer Meteor Crater is only 3.5 Megatons. Mt. St. Helens was 25 megatons. Krakatoa was 6 Mt. St. Helens. 150 Megatons. Thera eruption was 6 Krakatoas 600 megatons. Shoemaker-Levy was 10,000 Theras 6 Teratons. Chicxulub ( Dinosaur killer ) was 20 Shoemaker-Levys........ Krakatoa messed up the weather for 5 years. It was only a VE-6. Tambora was a VE-7 and caused the "Year without a summer" in 1816... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volcanic_explosivity _index https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minoan_eruption Notice there's a lot of argument about how big & exactly when all the prehistory bangs were. That's Science. We just keep learning, or we become grant whores and support the popular notions of the day. Galactic Gamma ray events, or even local ones, are even harder to date. There's some evidence/speculation of a gamma beam that sterilizes life as the Solar System circles the galaxy, & passes though it's flux, but it's very hard to be sure about repeating events over such a long time period. ( Long time by human scale ) Back to the Stone age is a periodic phenomena, just the Ice ages alone have left precious little evidence of civilization before the last one. The "70k year supervolcano" is just an average. ( over due ) Not really locked in periodicity, just one of those "about every X years..." things. Asteroid? Overdue. Seriously. do the math. Not Periodic, but statistical. All of this is beyond normal human comprehension as far as the times go. Gonna happen, don't know when. Probably not Thursday. OTOH... Human actions, while the current "why does it take the microwave so long?" generation, who are deliberately not taught human history, don't have a clue, is well within my old fart human time scale of understanding. My Grandfather witnessed the rise of Socialism and got shot at a lot, and the local villages were decimated as the Nazis shot locals in reprisal for the Resistance. My Father walked back from a Reservoir near the Chinese Border just a few years before I was born. I spent my youth being told I would be buried by the Proletariat, and have spent years living at primary target sites for nuclear annihilation. Today I am told I should be shot, sent to re-education camp, or simply imprisoned for questioning the Religious Revelation OF The Day. Global Warming. Funny part is it's all the same ideology as far as I can see, just different labels to fool the ignorant. Oh, and I'm apparently Phobic about a group of people that keep telling me they will enslave or kill me... while they are enslaving and killing hundreds of thousands of others. But that's not science, that's Religion. ( and so is the ideology that sent troops into Norway to shoot at Grand Dad. Or into Korea to shoot at Dad. Or sent to Vietnam to shoot.... ) | ||
| Chauly |
Why not Thursday? I never could get the hang of Thursday, the EARTH will probably be destroyed by the Vogons on a Thursday | ||
| Hootowl |
As long as they don't recite poetry at me before I die, Thursday will be just fine. | ||
| Aesquire |
Serious geek cred here.  http://grrlpowercomic.com/archives/728 | ||
| Slaughter |
Hoot - you know better. Wish to Die by ANY means other than Vogon poetry! | ||
| Reepicheep |
At least you will have tea that matches the poetry. | ||
| Hootowl |
Being throttled by your own intestines can't be pleasant. | ||
| Aesquire |
http://www.space.com/34070-earth-vulnerable-to-maj or-asteroid-strike.html Naturally I wonder what a White House official is covering up by telling the truth about a different subject. | ||
| Aesquire |
http://www.thelocal.fr/20160915/sarkozy-turns-clim ate-sceptic-in-battle-for-the-elyse | ||
| Aesquire |
http://gizmodo.com/how-palantir-is-taking-over-new -york-city-1786738085 | ||
| Aesquire |
http://www.lifedaily.com/shocking-discovery-farmer -finds-two-ton-fossil-in-his-backyard/source/taboo la/#utm_medium=referral&utm_source=taboola&utm_cam paign=TB-FossilBackyard3 You thought Armadillos were traffic hazards. | ||
| Aesquire |
http://www.express.co.uk/news/weird/714924/Black-M oon-END-OF-THE-WORLD-JESUS-apocalypse "Black moon" my shiny metal butt. Sure, prehistoric & dark ages folk predicted doom with common eclipses. Applying leeches was the cure for common ailments too. This is idiot journalism. You're the idiot. I'm sure there's a technical term for this kind of b s and it makes me miss the Weekly World News. "What x looks like now is crazy"...... yeah, been dead for years. "Crazy" isn't the term for x, it's click bait. | ||
| Aesquire |
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/2016/09/29/scie nce-shows-thomas-hobbes-was-right--which-is-why-th e-right-wi/ | ||
| Aesquire |
http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-an d-tech/news/facebook-what-does-it-know-chrome-data -ads-marketing-information-spying-a7338101.html Well..... I suppose I need to sign up for Facebook to find out what it found out about me already. | ||
| Ducbsa |
Thanks, Greenies, for the new Dark Age: http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2016/09/comi ng-soon-a-new-dark-age.php | ||
| Aesquire |
http://jalopnik.com/heres-how-to-fix-the-big-probl ems-with-elon-musks-mars-1787163420 I support a space program, and thank Mr. Musk for doing such a good job so far, but as this article points out he either has no clue or let the same artists who keep putting flying cars and ekranoplans on the cover of Popular Mechanics for the last 50 years do his presentation. | ||
| Aesquire |
https://www.cnet.com/news/successful-blue-origin-r ocket-test-possible-explosion-live-stream/ | ||
| Hootowl |
He'll figure it out. Lots of bright people involved. At least he's trying. It takes someone with vision to make that stuff happen. Science fiction becomes science fact. | ||
| Aesquire |
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-382 1223/Satellites-suffer-mystery-blackouts-Thunderst orms-edge-space-causing-loss-GPS-signals.html | ||
| Zac4mac |
Patrick - you didn't know? Leeches are Sucking their Way Back into Modern Medicine http://www.rasmussen.edu/degrees/health-sciences/b log/leeches-in-modern-medicine/ | ||
| Aesquire |
That's not new. | ||
| Torquehd |
Science fiction becomes science fact. I hope so, I'd love to have my own holodeck. | ||
| Blake |
A shift from false quantum vacuum to the true vacuum state of the universe is one of my favorite doomsday scenarios. https://cosmosmagazine.com/physics/vacuum-decay-ul timate-catastrophe The eventual peak entropy heat death of the universe is the most depressing. Yeah, why no asteroid deflection program yet? |
