[SeaGypsy]

I guess KJ's pot is stirring itself. It appears his brain is the one utterly calcified around his stupid space excuse bizarre humanism.

[KaiserJeep]

One person thinks outside the box, and it terrifies the rest of you:

So I have a message for all of you comfortably planning to hide from TEOTWAWKI in a remote location:

You have overlooked the other 7.3 Billion human beings who are all just as determined not to die as you. The fact that you were ahead of them in your thinking makes you one of the few around with things worth stealing. I personally believe that any kind of "prepper" will have a shorter survival than a thoughtless city dweller who joins a roving pack of cannibals.

Not that cannibalism will offer anything but a brief respite. We have made progress on nuclear disarmament in the past two decades - from enough warheads to sear the entire earth's surface down to bare rock 21X, we are now down to something like 15X - a useful reduction of about 1/3rd. Even better, we exchanged American dollars for former Soviet-bloc warheads, and are re-processing the uranium and plutonium as fuel pellets for our commercial nuclear reactors. But unfortunately the nuclear club keeps growing, with new members such as North Korea and Iran - so the overall chances of this happening are on the increase:

Not that that is the only way to die. Let me remind everyone that we are about 10,000 years overdue for one of the periodic eruptions of the giant mega-volcano underneath Yellowstone, and a few million years overdue for an asteroid impact:

....and if anything at all survives, "Mother Earth" will still be trying to kill everything everywhere, as it always has been:


Living on the Earth has always meant having all the eggs, all the chicks, and all the chickens in one basket. It is only prudent to create and populate as many space habitats as we can build. If any of you have the slightest doubt about this analysis, then I invite you to remain behind on the surface, and teach your kids and grandkids the same skepticism, and thus remove your genes from the big game of Life.

I though I would show you one of the competing space habitat designs from the O'Neill cylinder I typically show. This image shows the interior of a Stanford Torus. The transparent roof can be easily seen. In the original design the population density was intended to be similar to a suburban area of Earth, with mixed residential, recreational and agricultural areas. There also exist variations with additional mirrors for specialized agriculture.

[ennui2]

Magical thinking. There's really only so many responses to doom, and once you've seen the full spectrum, it gets kind of repetitive.

I have no doubt the world isn't done producing elaborate technological feats and there will probably be a fair amount of geoengineering attempts before it's all said and done, but I just don't see us "escaping" through some sort of technological get out of jail free card.

[Dybbuk]

Let me remind everyone that we are about 10,000 years overdue for one of the periodic eruptions of the giant mega-volcano underneath Yellowstone

That caldera isn't like Old Faithful, erupting on schedule over and over again. It's erupted a grand total of three times. This idea of it being "due" is based on the fact that the time between Eruption #1 and Eruption #2 (roughly 800,000 years) is not too far off the time between Eruption #2 and Eruption #3 (roughly 650,000 years), and now we're about 640,000 past Eruption #3. The possibility of a new eruption can leave one a bit uneasy, but I'd say it's way down the list of most ominous existential threats in the near term, since we don't have much reason to believe it will happen, beyond numerology.