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All true -- but the discovery of the New World charged the imagination of many people in Europe and served as a powerful spur to creativity, innovation, adventure and expansion. Perhaps the majority of people ended up returning to their "pre-discovery" lives without much change in their way of...

It's hard to answer this without knowing what the evidence of ETI would be, especially how much information about the nature of the ETI is available. I think it would energize scientifically-minded people, regardless of what the evidence was. And, based on what I know of the religious people...

The important point is that with this paper, Hanson refined the thinking on the subject in a systematic way that hadn't been done before. He concluded that what we might call "the naive Fermi Paradox" -- that we should see gross evidence of "interstellar colonization" everywhere -- was wrong...

If you want to read a rigorous analysis of this problem, buckle your seat belts for a little math (after the firs few pages) and read this: http://64.233.169.104/search?q=cache:UvpxNVJoTvAJ:hanson.gmu.edu/filluniv.pdf+burning+the+cosmic+commons&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=1&gl=us&client=firefox-a Ever...

Actually, the problem is that ten million years is a very, very, very short period of time relative to the age of the galaxy. There's been plenty of time for intelligent life to develop in lots of places and for reasons I bored everyone to tears in another thread a few months ago about, once...

I honestly don't understand the negative reaction. Religions advertise. In doing so, they are asserting 1) the existence of a (their) god or gods and 2) that their group has at least one true set of beliefs and practices relating to that god or gods. These are truth assertions in the form of...

Amen, brother.

YouTube - "Weird Al" Yankovic - Don't Download This Song

B I N G O

Believe it or not, Estes rockets came onto the market when I was a kid -- that's how long they've been around. It was a post-Sputnik craze in those days. My older brother and I built and flew dozens and dozens of them. Some of my fondest memories of childhood involve flying those rockets ...

As much fun as it is to imagine moving lots of "stuff" from one part of the solar system to the other (and I'm certainly engaged in making addons that could suggest that this might happen), in reality, I think very little matter will ever get moved from one part of the solar system to the other...

FWIW -- which isn't very much -- I'll say again that I'm sure that planetary warming is occurring. The only reason I got interested in the critique of the original Mann work was 1) to the extent that it was being taken as the state of the art in predicting further warming, then it becomes...

I freely confess that I am suspicious and mistrustful of advocates of AGW. I have to fight against it within myself all the time. Here's an example: About a year or so ago, I engaged in an extended project of reading on the subject, and had gotten much more comfortable with the idea of AGW...

I do not claim to be able to follow the math, but anyone who can might want to look at this site: http://www.climateaudit.org/ The new study you mention is referred to there as "Mann et al. 2008." From what I can grasp, it appears the author of climateaudit.org maintains that the new study is...

OK, obviously, once again, I’ve gone way too far. There’s only so much swimming against a strong current that someone can do before they get tired. I’m tired. So here are some points before I try to get out of the water for a while. 1. Obama’s biography as related in his books and the...

How about this: I'll do the same to you and pick out one small item to respond to: You have ZERO credibility here. How do I know this? because he has NOT been completely honest in his biographies and it is laughably easy to demonstrate it. But cherry picking your opponents' writing because...

You know, I've always appreciated your blogging and, especially, your enthusiasm for my addons, but that last comment is so insulting that, well, once again, in order to continue as a member of this community, I have to swallow a gallon of gall. OPPOSING BARAK OBAMA'S CANDIDACY IS NOT PER SE...

... somewhat, but an argument can be made for the usefulness of a logarithmic scale in that instance, since the marginal utility of money tends to not be linear in the context of basic human needs.

If you have a few minutes, this video from TED is really an eye-opener regarding economic and social development in the first and third worlds: http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/hans_rosling_shows_the_best_stats_you_ve_ever_seen.html Some of the best demonstration of data I've ever seen.

The regulatory roadblocks to expansion of nuclear power are so strong that you really don't have to worry about the problem. At the rate we are going, there will be no increase in nuclear power generation -- in the U.S. at least -- for at least a decade. I'm not just guessing about this, it's...