Fantastic work by the team in taking the wonderful things mining has done for the planet and expanding it to the oceans! I'm sure once we've had our way with the ocean and left almost nothing to live that we can find a way to live harmoniously with what remains.
A matter of time until someone (whether negligently or maliciously) screws up the orbital insertion of a packet of minerals or a whole-ass asteroid. "Oops"
Ideally, not that much material would be returned to Earth from asteroids, and certainly not "whole-ass" asteroids themselves. They would be kept far from an Earth-crossing orbit and mined in some safe orbit for their valuable minerals, and then a lot of those would probably be used in space, such as on the Moon, for constructing manufacturing facilities there.
Ultimately, we should be trying to move a lot of our "dirty" industries offworld, to places where no one cares much about keeping pristine and where nothing lives.
But yeah, The Expanse showed what happens when 1 jerk plays around with asteroid orbits...
And it will undoubtedly happen because an american company, after lobbying for fewer regulations, will fail to do the right or necessary thing like "testing their systems" or "being fail safe"
Cognitive Liberty and Religious Liberty FTW. Medicalization implicitly promotes the idea that you should need a "medical issue" in order to have the government's permission to ingest plants and fungi that spring out of the ground spontaneously.
The idea that cognitive liberty should be a global constant for all humans — seems self-evident to my mind. The freedom of the individual should be placed above everything else, as long as it's not hurting anybody.
Astonishingly enough, quite a huge part of the population don't seem to think this as important. This honestly shocks me.
I'm open to proposals for an ethical basis for technological work that's better than "well it's not nearly as societally destructive as what I was building before!"
No, but imagine a world in which brain power was distributed by consensus via a decentralized ledger, rather than a bio-authoritarian central party! The crowdsourced, democratic nature of DeBi(o) would sense this problem early and avoid it in the first place. There are other solutions as well, but they all have one thing in common...you guessed it, blockchain technology!
It is not about brain power but the computing power. The biggest fallacy with crypto is that combined computing power owned by general public is more than few powerful entities. This has never hold true in the history of humanity. The 1% of people owns 80% of the computing resources. So there is no "decetralized" or "distributed" authority. For instance, US or Chises government can put togather more GPUs than the rest of the public combined any day perform 51% attack on any crypto. The reason for this lies in tax arrangement in physical world. No matter what people earn, government is taking away a big chunk from them and thus always can have majority resources than rest of the public combined.
I can legit imagine this being used to describe a gig-knowledge-worker DAO, where via "decentralized consensus" the "best minds" were directed at "humanity's most important problems".
But in reality it would be a bunch of people paid in gamified company bucks to write spammy blogs and comments to promote shitcoins that a small number of the DAO members would trade on while the rest debated if they should buy some half-assed NFT because it would support a community of creators.
Well, if we let our "leaders" run amok with the powers of warfare I'd expect some serious repercussions to the citizenry. "I didn't vote for him" won't get us much sympathy with our brothers and sisters elsewhere if our government is out killing people en masse.
Source? I have no reason to doubt you but would love to see where those data. Most of what I heard is that "lead exposure above zero is significant" and "if you're living near an airport, especially one serving smaller plans, you are being exposed".
This is specific to the reid-hillview county airport, north of san jose. It was in the news last fall. I can't/won't look for the exact broadcast, but the spokesperson for the airport was quick to point out that there's no detectable lead in the air. The FAA is not convinced either and has no intention of shutting down the airport.
I don't work for anything related to aviation or petrol, quite the opposite, and I don't have any interest in it, just was suprised to hear the FAA say that there's no detectable lead in the environment, and then a lead blood level study trying to argue otherwise. In the study they do admit that 25% of the homes in the study were built before 1960 (which I thought was an odd year to pick, as lead paint wasn't banned until almost 20 years later (1978), and I'd wager 65%+ of the homes there were built 1960-1978).
That's about as much time as I have to look down that rabbit-hole. I may be convinced, but there's enough cherry-picked data to make a very gray issue questionable. Looks like nationwide BLL is about 1.50 ug/Dl and in the homes less than a thousand feet directly downwind of the airport it was 1.70, and a child in a typical lead paint home was 1.90
It would have been much more convincing (and conclusive), to me, if there was a measurable amount of lead, particularly downwind, in the areas with the higher blood lead levels. But those readings either were not done, or were absent in the report.
