Population Bomb

[Gawdzilla Sama]

There is no current proof a technologically progressive species can survive more than a couple of centuries before nuking its nest.

There no current proof that they cannot, either.

A responsible agent of the law will attempt to disarm the person seen wandering around with a lethal weapon, at some risk. Waiting until the day and hoping it will never arrive is bad mental hygeine. I'd call it denial.

And we've done a good job of attempting that. Nukes have only been used in battle twice.

[Atheist-Lite]

There is no current proof a technologically progressive species can survive more than a couple of centuries before nuking its nest.

There no current proof that they cannot, either.

A responsible agent of the law will attempt to disarm the person seen wandering around with a lethal weapon, at some risk. Waiting until the day and hoping it will never arrive is bad mental hygeine. I'd call it denial.

And we've done a good job of attempting that. Nukes have only been used in battle twice.

That's luck not skill.

[Gawdzilla Sama]

And we've done a good job of attempting that. Nukes have only been used in battle twice.

That's luck not skill.

We had a few near-run things, the Cuban Missile Crisis, for example. (Lovely we knew that the USSR wasn't ready for a showdown then, weren't it?)

[Atheist-Lite]

And we've done a good job of attempting that. Nukes have only been used in battle twice.

That's luck not skill.

We had a few near-run things, the Cuban Missile Crisis, for example. (Lovely we knew that the USSR wasn't ready for a showdown then, weren't it?)

Especially the way they've got their box of fireworks wired to go off all together.

[Poto]

Well, the nuclear war might be a good thing, speed up the mutations so we can evolve to be a more Hobbit like-peaceful species.

[Schneibster]

So what's the progressive liberal solution for this problem?

Population limit laws and nuclear weapons as a deterrent. Other countries will need to make their own decisions; but we should be emphasizing non-combative conflict resolution for our safety (and therefore in our national interest) as well as everyone else's. When attacked, we should respond as necessary to end the conflict decisively; but this should be a last resort not a first choice, as it was in Iraq.

The population may self-limit in the US and Europe in any case; the high tech economies' birth rates have been dropping for quite some time. China has already imposed relatively draconian population laws, with some interesting if rather disturbing results. We can hope that such will not be necessary, but we need to be prepared to do it if the fundies won't stop having kids.

The ethics of abortion laws interfering with individual rights to a limited number of children, and the risks that religions that preach free population growth without regard to the safety of others pose, now become obvious. This behavior is pernicious in the extreme in a world with limited resources. There is going to be one of the biggest and potentially one of the ugliest fights in the history of the world, stopping that shit.

That's not liberal. It's what I expect to really happen. It's as progressive as I can imagine reality letting us be. I expect it to be quite messy, actually. We can only hope that religionism fades, or anyway these overpopulation-encouraging religions fade or change their stripes, but the knock-down drag-out fight over abortion makes me fear that nuclear weapons will be used in this dispute before it is over. It's going to hit a lot of people right where they live and they are going to have absolute shit-fit temper tantrums over it.

[Berthold]

On the cheery side, one of the answers to the Fermi Paradox is, "We're first in the galaxy." IOW, it's just time for the universe to start intelligent lifeing now and we're it.

Not even too absurd. If you combine the (intelligent) conjecture that civilization-building life is very rare with the fact that the whole shebang is just about three Earth ages old (and it took some time in the beginning to build up sufficient amounts of the stuff that astronomers call metals)...

[Atheist-Lite]

There's so many explanations for the radio silence. A certainty is that space is really big and if they have enough time they'll have developed the technology to avoid getting noticed by the dangerously dumb species in the galaxy - if they exist at all?

[Magicziggy]

If the Earth were a thirty meter sphere, the thickness of everything from the bottom of the Marianas trench's Challenger Depth to the top of Everest is less than the thickness of a coat of paint on the outside of that sphere; an order of magnitude less, actually. That's one hell of a lot of space, man, and the Earth is like ten or more orders of magnitude more, if you count the interior. Fifty or a hundred billion might easily survive here, if that were the only limit. The limit isn't the Earth, it's the incoming energy from the Sun.

Actually I didn't understand this paragraph about mass. I got the bit about energy from the sun. I just did a back of the envelope calculation and came up with a very thick coat of paint. Between 4 and 5 cm. Am I missing something?

[Schneibster]

I'm looking at that picture of the quasar's accretion disk they just measured, and thinking that "life" probably isn't happening within a pretty wide swath around all that hard radiation. I would say the "age of quasars" would have to be pretty much over and all of the galaxies in the neighborhood of live would have to be pretty quiescent. That takes at least one of those Earth-ages. Then as you say, metals had to be built up in interstellar media, which has to happen inside the cores of massive Population III (conjectured) and Population II stars. We don't know enough yet about galactic evolution to say exactly how that works yet. But there's plenty of time for it, another entire Earth-age, more or less.

But boy, we sure are discovering a lot of planets nearby just recently. It doesn't look like they're rare at all, and the equation I'm talking about over on the "evolution" thread, along with Stuart Kauffman's conjectures in At Home in the Universe, sure do make it look like life can't be very uncommon either.

[Schneibster]

If the Earth were a thirty meter sphere, the thickness of everything from the bottom of the Marianas trench's Challenger Depth to the top of Everest is less than the thickness of a coat of paint on the outside of that sphere; an order of magnitude less, actually. That's one hell of a lot of space, man, and the Earth is like ten or more orders of magnitude more, if you count the interior. Fifty or a hundred billion might easily survive here, if that were the only limit. The limit isn't the Earth, it's the incoming energy from the Sun.

Actually I didn't understand this paragraph about mass. I got the bit about energy from the sun. I just did a back of the envelope calculation and came up with a very thick coat of paint. Between 4 and 5 cm. Am I missing something?

The context.

[Magicziggy]

If the Earth were a thirty meter sphere, the thickness of everything from the bottom of the Marianas trench's Challenger Depth to the top of Everest is less than the thickness of a coat of paint on the outside of that sphere; an order of magnitude less, actually. That's one hell of a lot of space, man, and the Earth is like ten or more orders of magnitude more, if you count the interior. Fifty or a hundred billion might easily survive here, if that were the only limit. The limit isn't the Earth, it's the incoming energy from the Sun.

Actually I didn't understand this paragraph about mass. I got the bit about energy from the sun. I just did a back of the envelope calculation and came up with a very thick coat of paint. Between 4 and 5 cm. Am I missing something?

The context.

I think maybe I'll have to move my brain out of second to read this thread. Can't happen late on a Sunday night after a glass of red.

[Gawdzilla Sama]

Well, the nuclear war might be a good thing, speed up the mutations so we can evolve to be a more Hobbit like-peaceful species.

Watch the intro part.

[Tyrannical]

So what's the progressive liberal solution for this problem?

Population limit laws and nuclear weapons as a deterrent. Other countries will need to make their own decisions; but we should be emphasizing non-combative conflict resolution for our safety (and therefore in our national interest) as well as everyone else's. When attacked, we should respond as necessary to end the conflict decisively; but this should be a last resort not a first choice, as it was in Iraq.

The population may self-limit in the US and Europe in any case; the high tech economies' birth rates have been dropping for quite some time. China has already imposed relatively draconian population laws, with some interesting if rather disturbing results. We can hope that such will not be necessary, but we need to be prepared to do it if the fundies won't stop having kids.

The ethics of abortion laws interfering with individual rights to a limited number of children, and the risks that religions that preach free population growth without regard to the safety of others pose, now become obvious. This behavior is pernicious in the extreme in a world with limited resources. There is going to be one of the biggest and potentially one of the ugliest fights in the history of the world, stopping that shit.

That's not liberal. It's what I expect to really happen. It's as progressive as I can imagine reality letting us be. I expect it to be quite messy, actually. We can only hope that religionism fades, or anyway these overpopulation-encouraging religions fade or change their stripes, but the knock-down drag-out fight over abortion makes me fear that nuclear weapons will be used in this dispute before it is over. It's going to hit a lot of people right where they live and they are going to have absolute shit-fit temper tantrums over it.

Nuclear weapons as deterrents? Use condoms or we will nuke you
I'd like to avoid mass genocide thank you

Even without abortion as an option, we have a variety of quite mature birth control methods. A 100% effectiveness isn't even needed when you just have to reduce numbers. The problem is getting the real problem areas to use it. I wouldn't even worry about the more modern countries as long as the cut immigration, and some of them could even use higher population levels.

Maybe require long term implanted birth control in exchange for food in the over populated famine areas?

[Schneibster]

Nuclear weapons as deterrents? Use condoms or we will nuke you

If you're just gonna lie about what I said there's no point in talking to you.