Gian

Exactly. Estimates vary, but one figure says that when the human population gets to 10 billion the Earth can no longer sustain the human family. Governments will be forced to look elsewhere. So the quicker we get to 10 billion people the better, so we can start living on Mars and become a spacefaring species Cheerz GIAN🙂xxx

So what's your solution to the Why Aren't We In Space problem?

I didn't say make giving birth compulsory lol. I just wish the human family was doing something a bit more interesting than PlayStation games Spelling: effect, not "affect." So do you think space exploration is something which should happen (I can't imagine anyone interested in science saying otherwise) and if so why isn't it happening and how do we make it happen? Cheerz GIAN🙂

Hope so

The worst thing about abortion and birth control -which are both consequences of secularism (NOT atheism) and commercialism is that they're sooo boring. Until about 150y ago, I guess birth control wasn't needed much (it was there, but not much) because in order to have 3 or 4 surviving children women had to conceive all their childbearing years. (In the 17thC, King James VII & II fathered 27 children. Only 8 grew up, and only 4 reached old age) If women did that now the Earth's population would be 150 billion in 20y, so a major population problem. In the 1970s it was said that by now 2024 people would be living on other planets. We're not, and for all our science & tech modern life is all sex and shopping (yawn.) No abortion or contraception, and we'd be having this conversation in a pub on Mars. Birth control stunts progress Cheerz GIAN🙂XXX

Other robots of course They bought it with their last few pennies. No more cash afterwards It would be. I guess they'd have to go through the industrial revolution again, with the same result, repeating cyclically. Cheerz GIAN🙂XXX

Exactly so. There'd be one small group of aristocrats who'd own all the factories, which would gradually dwindle to almost nothing as the only people the aristocracy could by from and sell to would be each other. The rest of the proletariat would try be self-sufficient farmers, operating in a cashless barter economy.

What would it look like in a totally free-market capitalist economy? (Not that there is such a thing of course) They could I guess if they used their last cash to buy it, and livestock and seed. Then being penniless they'd have to start subsistence farming. There's no other option

Thanks, well reskilling could involve going back to the land for some. But I was just wondering what would happen theoretically (in the style of how many angels fit on a pinhead) if there really were absolutely no paid jobs left whatsoever Cheerz GIAN🙂

Adoption of course. Maybe the legal adoption of unwanted children before they're born could be introduced. In a large hospital near where I live, girls go into the maternity unit for abortions. However, I don't know if it's on the same floor but certainly in the same building there's the Southwest Regional Fertility Clinic, which is for young couples who are having difficulty conceiving a child. Same building: Abortions... and Fertility treatments. A rather Orwellian irony? Wow! thanks for your story, that's encouraging🙂 That's not the issue I raised here. I just wanted to know if it was theoretically possible to transfer a child from one womb to another. Or maybe a child can be born as soon as a mother knows she's carrying him? I guess even if he's just a cluster of cells it's just a question of maintaining temperature, with blood oxygen and nutritional supply, so maybe that's a future possibility. Perhaps one day women may be able to have children without the aggro of a 9 month pregnancy. cheerz GIAN🙂

Hi kids I don't find it will happen literally. Eg some politicians may look a bit robotic but they're not made of metal and wires. But there is ever increasing automation of traditional jobs, especially manual jobs, eg someone's invented a machine which can lay bricks 3x faster than a man. On a theoretical basis, what would society look like if ALL paid employment became automated so there's no more jobs for human beings? I guess all money in the economy would eventually flow to the owners of the means of production, people who own all the robots and robot factories. Everyone else, the jobless, cash-less proletariat, would I guess have to go back to the land, to the state they were in before the industrial revolution, and then they'd eventually have to start the whole process of industrialisation again. Does this sound valid? Any other ideas? Cheerz GIAN🙂

Thanks. Well hopefully that will change GIAN🙂XXX

Most of the time that's true. An apartment in a skyscraper is usually one large concrete box, so it's best to lock yourself inside in the event of a fire. But it can't be guaranteed that will always be the case🔥

I gather that with surrogacy, an egg can be fertilised inside a woman then transferred to another who can give birth. Re abortion If a woman were to have an abortion at say 11 weeks gestation, would it in theory be possible to "transfer" the child to another womb rather than killing him? Cheerz GIAN🙂XXX

It means the definition of religion in his God Delusion book really is a delusion, because that's not what religious people believe. The definition of God he puts there is just so many groundless assertions. It's a bit like if I wrote a book called The Science Delusion all about how stupid Dawky and other scientists are for believing the Earth is flat. But they don't believe the Earth is flat, so such a book would be a pointless imposture. That's why when I asked him about it, a clergyman friend of my mum and dad's said "We aren't particularly worried about Professor Dawkins." Cheerz GIAN🙂XXX

Dawkins is one of those atheists who needs God in order to have something not to believe in

Absolutely agree. Tbh to make these mega-skyscrapers safe would not I think be very expensive. You're right, the best way is to have as many different rapid evacuation mechanisms as possible. When building it, imagine an outer frame over the whole building - it would look like builders scaffolding - with a honeycomb of metal fire escape steps from top to bottom. Handholds on the outer skin for those brave souls who want to try climbing down (one poor sod was filmed trying to do so in the WTC on 9/11 but of course with nothing to hold onto he fell) 100 x 1300 ft ropes automatically let down from the roof, parachutes, anything. None of these is foolproof of course (if one were able to climb down the outside of the building it would probably take 2 hours to reach the ground) and were the WTC to happen again the loss life would still be v high but a few additional mechanisms would at least have helped to save some lives

The difference is that ethnicity is an unchangeable characteristic, whereas being a communist is a personal decision. I shouldn't think even Senator McCarthy would have had an issue with "communist" children.

The dislike of Jews was a dislike of their adherence to their religion, and their non-acceptance of Christianity. It's like some people dislike communists because of, well, their communism. I believe that in the 1950s in the US, people could lose their jobs and have all sorts of other penalties if there was the slightest hint of communist sympathy. Or it's like people who dislike Trump supporters, because of Trump supporters' support for Mr Trump and general mindset. Neither of those dislikes is racism, is it? Cheerz GIAN🙂XXX

Sounds like you need to make some friends mate🙂 Disliking, say, communism is not racism is it? The dislike of Jews and Judaism was not racism, there was no such thing before the 19thC. As I've stated elsewhere, if, in the middle ages, Jews converted to Christanity -which they frequently did- the Christian Churches had no further problem with them. Why would they? That approach would not of course have counted for anything in National Socialist Germany, where it really was about race, nor it would seem with some others in this discussion thread. Given that they all purport to believe in evidence-based rational analysis, I'm left in a state of shock. Cheerz GIAN🙂XXX

Mr TheVat I can't find the Chomsky quote but he's said it in interview several times. Surveys are unnecessary; just go and get to know unskilled construction workers (I was one of them once) or any unskilled workers with as little "education" as possible. I'm not saying they're geniuses, but by comparison, University students are pathetically easily led. The following film The Great Awakening (2023) is mostly fear-mongering and "conspiracy theories about conspiracy theories," but I do agree with what is said at 00:26:18 "'You would think it would be people with lower IQ's that would be susceptible to this [illogical mass ideology] but it seems to be the other way around. Are you seeing this?' "'I have seen this. And it does seem to be predicted by educational status and IQ.'" https://youtu.be/1fDWZjvNUC8?si=aDiHxnYRH7rNxyu- Cheerz GIAN🙂XXX Mr StringJunky Why would "Zionists" need to "invent" antisemitism? Why would they need to uproot themselves, trek across the world from North America, Europe and Russia to Palestine if they weren't already experiencing serious threats and racism? I shouldn't think you'd uproot yourself and relocate to New Zealand unless you had a very very good reason. I sure wouldn't. Cheerz GIANxxx

There should be many different ways of vacating a tower block, especially insanely large ones. If Grenfell tower victims had been able to jump into a safety net or equivalent many more might have survived. As for being expensive, you can't put a value on human life, and the landlords of the World Trade Center aren't exactly short of a bob or 2 GIAN🙂XXX That's 684000 human beings, not numbers. If we can reduce that number by just 1 human being it's worth it. And if you were that 1 human being I'm sure you'd agree Cheerz GIAN🙂XXX

The slave trade was not about treating an ethnic group as subhuman, ethnicity had not been invented at that time. It was simply based on the idea that some people are less important than others, and some people more so. The idea of "all men are created equal" is a very recent one. It was more about social and economic class. When the Titanic was sinking, it just went without saying that First Class passengers got into the lifeboats first, Second clas second, and as for the Third class well they themselves did not expect to get into the lifeboats at all, simply becasue they were Third Class. I gather that black African kings, kingdoms and black slave traders sold black slaves to European slavers, and made a helluva lot of money doing so, so it's nowhere near the later definition of racism. "I asked you earlier on this thread for examples of religious speakers being "cancelled" and got no response. I've never come across this and doubt it is really a thing." Religious speakers can be cancelled, but usually (not always) by other religious people and institutions. The Rev Calvin Robinson in the UK was dismissed from GB.News, a vulgar right-wing news channel, effectively for being too right-wing even for GB.News. His ordination to the priesthood was blocked by the Church of England for the same reason. However, clergy are generally not cancelled by academic institutions in the UK (I don't know about the US) I guess because they tend to adopt more balanced stances. If "the cancelled" have one thing in common it's that they are usually secularists. Sure there's always been controversial speakers and ideas, but pre-c2000 I don't recall people actually losing their jobs because of it. My point is that "new wave" cancellation culture seems to have originated in the early 2000s. On the issue of mindless prejudice, I recall an especially nasty attack on Roman Catholicism by the loathsome Stephen Fry and Christopher Hitchens at an Intelligence Squared debate in 2009, in which they deployed the same methods against Catholicism as the National Socialists did against judaism; unsubstantiated groundless bigotry. They easily won the debate and were salivatingly pleased with themselves, but I thought at the time they were going to rue the day they did so. They foolishly believed, or more likely never considered, that if you encourage bigotry in one area, is never stops there. Predictably, Stephen Fry was on TV a few months ago bleating about the rise in antisemitism. The Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason & Science A few months ago I cancelled my membership of the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason & Science, because in the online general discussion forum I was shocked to receive alot of unreasoning antisemitic and anti-zionist bigotry and sheer freaking racism. Even more shocking was the fact that the moderators were completely unconcerned by it. So much for "Reason & Science" Cheerz GIAN🙂XXX

It's been aided by social media and other communications technology, but the act of doing so is man-made, social media and tech not being a person. So Dawky and several of his unpleasant "new atheist" friends definitely did encourage it with their vile bile about religion in the early 2000s. (Incidentally, there was no "new atheism" during the Cold War, which is in itself quite telling, but that's another story.) What has happened I think is one of Richard Dawkins' "memes." Someone somewhere thought of cancelling someone because they can't actually mount a counter-argument, and now everyone's doing it. "'Antisemitism is 1800y old. Racism was invented in the 19th century.' Citation needed." Here's a citation for you. Hannah Arendt, who was jewish and living in pre-war National Socialist Germany, states in The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) that racist ideology developed in the 19th century as a way of justifying imperial conquest. It was aided by scientific racism, or Social Darwinism. Racist ideas disseminated in the 19th century on scientific hypotheses were combined with unilineal theories of social progress, which asserted the superiority of the European civilization over the rest of the world. The term "survival of the fittest" is a term coined by Herbert Spencer in 1864, and is associated with ideas of competition, which were named Social Darwinism in the 1940s. This was of course later applied to Jews by the National Socialists. The antismeitism prior to the 19th century as proposed by the Christian Churches began I would say with St John Chrysostom in the 4th Century AD. However it must be emphasised that The Catholic Church's resentment was down to judaism as a religion and jews as its followers, there being no concept of "race" at that time. Jews frequently converted to Christianity in the middle ages, after which the Church had no further problem with them. This is of course radically different to what happened to the jews in the 20th century. Prof Noam Chomsky on "new atheists" Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens: “Well I think that they [Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens] are religious fanatics. They happen to believe in the state religion which is much more dangerous than other religions for the most part. “So they both of them happen to be defenders of the state religion namely the religion that says we have to support the violence and atrocities of our own state because it's being done for all sorts of wonderful reasons…. That’s just another religion like the religion that markets know best. “I mean it doesn't happen to be a religion that you pray to every once a week, but it's just another religion and it's very destructive.” NOAM CHOMSKY Speaking at the University of Toronto Scarborough April 2011 https://youtu.be/ql7wgqmtSv4?si=A_3dNCRXfvn28GcI

It happened where I live in the UK; in 2017 a residential tower block called Grenfell Tower which was a mere 24 storeys went up in flames, and people couldn't escape from the upper floors above the fire, so 72 lives were lost. What about a frame at the foot of the building with several layers of flexible material like a multilayered trampoline. Could a fall from the top of the WTC 1300ft be broken at the ground by a succession of layers? I know it sounds a bit far-fetched, but as things are there seems no way of rapidly evacuating those insanely high skyscrapers you have in America. I've not been able to establish what if any evacuation mechanisms there are inside the new World Trade Center building "You know, one of these days, you're gonna kill 10,000 in one of these firetraps, and I'm gonna keep eating smoke and bringing out bodies until somebody asks us how to build them." STEVE MCQUEEN as Chief Fire Officer O'Halloran. The Towering Inferno. 1974