leicsmac

Come on over to the sci thread and sometime soon I'll make a post on spectroscopy and how it can identify emitted gases by electromagnetic spectra alone.

Part ego at having lost to him, part easy scapegoating for the results of his own self interested and sociopathic decisions.

Always found it fascinating. Necessary, too. Out there lies the keys to the future of our biosphere and everything on it, including ourselves.

Speaking personally, I don't disagree with you because you're dumb or immoral, Mr Vance. I disagree with you because your entire apparent ethos and worldview when applied to policy is going to get a huge amount of people, if not civilisation itself, fvcking killed.

... or, judging by the quality of discourse that then often turns into conflict, as seen on here and out in the wider world, they'll simply watch us squander our gift of intelligence, destroy ourselves and then shrug at yet another species not making it through the Great Filter.

... is eugenics (by demographics other than the poor, that's been going on for a while) going to be standard US administration policy now, then?

A similar response to the one given to the President in Mars Attacks is forthcoming then (hopefully).

And yet there are other countries where Trump-style nationalism is going full speed ahead. And given the way Reform continues to poll in the UK, I'm not sure they're anywhere near away from that particular outcome either. Here's hoping that our species can, if slowly, move away from that precipice.

Perhaps so. Hopefully (or not so hopefully) one day we'll find out.

I would hope so too, which is why I would hope that their view would be either dispassionate or at least the "roll eyes, 'look at those backward primates but we were there once too' " kind of amused derision.

And to weave together the last few topics here once again: I reckon that if there indeed is an intelligent civilisation capable of FTL travel or observation watching us right now, their viewpoint on our actions regarding nationalism and sexual dimorphism would be patronisingly amused at best and utterly contemptuous and saying it's unbecoming of a supposedly intelligent species at worst. But who knows?

Think this one belongs here rather than the scientific thread because it's rather "human interest": https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cp8jwj90ejno There are some scientific discoveries that do much more than advance our knowledge: they create a shift in our psyche as they show us the scale of the Universe and our place in it. One such moment was when space craft sent back images of the Earth for the first time. Another is the discovery of life on another world, a moment that has inched a little closer today with the news that signs of a gas, which on Earth is produced by simple marine organisms, has been found on a planet called K2-18b. Now, the prospect of really finding alien life - meaning we are not alone in the Universe - is not far away, according to the scientist leading the team that made the detection. "This is basically as big as it gets in terms of fundamental questions, and we may be on the verge of answering that question," says Prof Nikku Madhusudhan of the Institute of Astronomy at Cambridge University. But all of this prompts even more questions, including, if they do find life on another world, how will this change us as a species? Fascinating topic of discussion.

It is a distinct possibility, yes. Unfortunately we'll not be able to prove it beyond telescopic observation until we (somehow) master FTL travel.

...I guess we'll see where we are in ten years. That goes for other supposedly "developed" nations, as well as the UK.

To link the two most recent topics, an observation: I'm not sure that anyone can in good faith claim to be an advocate for women's rights and at the same time have expressed any support of the administration of Donald Trump, either in 2016 or now, given the attitude of that administration towards women's rights was as clear then as it is now.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c39jj9vkr34o Scientists have found new but tentative evidence that a faraway world orbiting another star may be home to life. A Cambridge team studying the atmosphere of a planet called K2-18b has detected signs of molecules which on Earth are only produced by simple organisms. This is the second, and more promising, time chemicals associated with life have been detected in the planet's atmosphere by Nasa's James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). But the team and independent astronomers stress that more data is needed to confirm these results. For me, there was always life - if only of the simple microbial type - out there. It's just a matter of finding it and confirming it.

Pretty much, yes. Sometimes it's shit to see pretty clearly how the future plays out.

...it's almost like the neofascists have been organising for the best part of a decade or more and waiting for their chance. Funny, that. (Similarly, it's almost as if some folks have been warning about it for about the same amount of time but the comfortable commentators could never envisage the idea of such neofascism rising once again and so it was all "that'll never happen" or "don't overreact".)

And ICE "operatives" not even bothering with the due process part, smashing into people's homes and cars and dragging people away while masked and wearing nothing to identify themselves as legal officers.

One wonders, for instance, how much of the outrage over the tragic case of Brianna Ghey was purely performative.

Yeah, this. The slippery slope isn't always a fallacy.

As per above, let's see if it ends only there.

That's a rather optimistic outlook given general present circumstances, but of course I hope it turns out that way too.

Yep. There's a reason that the Chinese use "interesting times" as a curse rather than a blessing.

And so we arrive at the terrible conundrum that such action might be both exactly what the MAGAs want and play to all of their strengths...and also the only way to stop them because if it isn't done they use a pretext to do the same thing anyway, because it's been the objective all along. We live in interesting times.