exchemist

Ah so it was the hubristic boast that he could clean it up and turn it blue that has caused the trouble. It really could be a metaphor for his entire presidency, as Tim Walz says.

This implies the algal problem has always been there, so nothing has changed. Is that right? Because what I am trying to understand is whether Trump’s tinkering has made it worse or not. If not, why the ballyhoo now?

How would you decelerate the spacecraft at its intended destination?

Has it always been full of algae then? Or if not, what has changed? My impression is that painting the bottom dark blue has somehow made it worse. Or is it that, before, people were solely concerned with the reflection from the surface and didn’t care about the algae, so it is Trump’s insistence on it being blue that has proved to be impossible?

Yes these are all very fair points. Particularly interesting to think about pathogen resistance and metabolic disorders.

Why do you say humans do not seem to be evolving more slowly than wild animals? I should have thought it likely that we are, though I have not seen any data on it.

Haha good catch, I was creating a confused synthesis of the two. Maybe a covfefe moment on my part. 😀

From my reading of the thread other contributors would also agree. What has been called into question seems to be your focus on natural selection as opposed to other mechanisms. But certainly it seems to me we should think about what factors in humanity cause greater or lesser rates of reproduction. In many countries, reproduction rates are now below the mean rate of 2.1 children per woman needed to avoid population decline. But this is a recent development. Given the very slow rate of turnover of human populations (only 3-4 generations per century) one would expect change due to heredity to be an extremely long term effect. So it is probably unwise to extrapolate much from recent social change.

No, for Trump it would have to be gold, in order to create the tacky, dictator bling effect he is addicted to. I actually sometimes wonder if he models himself on Arno Goldfinger. He resembles him physically, like Goldfinger he cheats at golf and he has even hired an Oddjob lookalike, in Steven Cheung.

Yes we all agree it is different for humans. One point I have not seen made yet is that we even consciously control whether or not we reproduce. The birth rate drops in human populations as women’s opportunities for work improve and contraception becomes available to them. Since the engine of evolution is reproductive “success”, once reproduction is no longer necessarily seen as a “success” and you can decide not to, that can be expected to have an impact on the direction evolution takes. I’ve seen it suggested that brighter women have fewer children, which may make the human race more stupid over time. 😄

First, as @KJW points out, the opening post is purely concerned with the physics of propulsion (and deceleration), which apply regardless of what is transported. Second, My comment about “”vanishingly unlikely” was a response to you suggesting the point of the exchanges on this thread could be to account for some aspect of current UAPs. In that context “colonisation” can be dismissed, since we have not been colonised. That leaves only reconnaissance. Which does require communicating findings back to the sender.

Firstly, I refer you to the opening post. Secondly, any journey would take so long that it would be pointless. No information could ever be sent back unless the senders were willing to wait for hundreds of thousands of years. And then what would they do with it? In space travel the numbers are awful. That’s why scenarios for alien visitation necessarily involve some magic macguffin that violates the principles of current physics.

They have even arrested a guy for stopping to pick up a bit of the peeling paint. Reality must be made to conform to Trump’s fantastic lies. But he’s a former Olympic canoeist, 67 years old, and not even black, so they will struggle to sustain the narrative that he’s vandalising the pool. I’m a bit surprised the parks police would stoop to this but maybe they are all Trumpy.

To make matters worse, at least according to something I have read, painting the pool dark blue has made it reflect the sunlight less well so the water gets warmer, further encouraging algal bloom. A real 6-cylinder cock-up.

No it does not. Vanishingly unlikely in this case means our physics has to be wrong for it to occur. Our physics is not going to just become suddenly wrong if we wait long enough.

I can’t believe that that is the point of these exchanges. For all the reasons given earlier in the thread it is vanishingly unlikely there is an extraterrestrial explanation for any UAP. Current physics + interstellar distances => no alien visitation. The later exchanges are sci-fi speculative ideas. We’d all love it if it were possible. But it isn’t, unless our physics is wrong.

I had one a couple of weeks go. I hope your wife has the patience for a long, boring and noisy procedure. The only point of interest for me was the contrast agent, a gadolinium complex.

Is that happens when you enter an MRI suite wearing a 10kg metal chain round your neck? https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cx2n39dvp0po

This seems, from the evidence, to be incorrect. There is evidence for say the age of the universe, or the age of the Earth, that long predates any evidence of consciousness. In science it is evidence that counts.

So nothing to do with high-achieving female business executives, evidently.

The trouble with these is they do not show these claims were actually underpinned by the science of the day. Dionysus Lardner was just one rather opinionated populariser of science. There is nothing in Newtonian mechanics, which was the science of the day, to support his notion - and in fact he seems to have made an idiot of himself several times over in disputes with Brunel, who was a professional engineer. Kelvin estimated the age of the Earth at a few million years. That is not at all the same as claiming it could not be older than that. Pickering did not say sending a man to the moon was impossible. He said he thought it absurd and would not happen in the foreseeable future. That means he thought it impractical. He did not claim it was ruled out by science. Jefferson was not any kind of astronomer, so his opinions on meteorites can't be taken to reflect a scientific consensus. Pasteur's dismissal of spontaneous generation was to scotch the notion that, for example, "the sun breeds maggots in a dead dog" (Hamlet), i.e. the ancient idea that living things could arise spontaneously all the time. He was not expressing an opinion on the origin of life on the Earth. So it seems to me that none of these examples is comparable to the conclusion that, according to current physics, aliens will not have visited the Earth and will not do so in the future. That is based on the scientific considerations outlined in some detail in this thread.

I doubt any of them were.

Which of those proclamations were predictions from the science of the day?

Not to mention the small problem of how to slow down at the end of your journey……

Why is clearing the cache important? It's a pain, as I have re-enter various passwords etc when I do that and lose history, so I prefer not to do that very often.