mistermack

I was told that joke by a jewish friend. (about 50 years ago) He thought it was funny.

The US are being pushed by the Chinese interest in the Moon. It's space race number 2. But space race number 1 was not really a race of equals. The Russians were way below the US economically, but the Chinese are now coming from a position of economic strength. (comparatively)

The unkindest cut of all !!

The location of that point is a matter of opinion though. Balanced and rational people will plact that point differently to obsessive or even mentally ill people. And they will all think that they have got it right. Take Michael Jackson for example. Where did he fit in on the rationality scale?

Which is another way of saying it's about mental health. And unfortunately, it's all grey areas. Obsessiveness merges seamlessly into mental illness, with no clear dividing line to point to. You just have people who are a bit over the top at one end, and people who are clearly deluded at the other. A bit like dieting. For some people, it's a good thing and brings them what they want. At the other end of the scale are people who starve themselves to death while not even realising or admitting that they have a problem.

Djokovitch did lie about having covid. And the Serbian government appears to have helped. The BBC did an investigation into the serial numbers on the test certs that he provided, and it's clear that the record was fiddled. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/59999541

I'm sure that they will be aiming at the same system as ITER will be testing, a Lithium based blanket, that catches the heat and neutrons, and produces Tritium for the manufacture of new fuel. I can't picture how they would supply a stream of fuel pellets, perfectly positioned for the next laser shot, just split seconds after the last one went off. But I'm sure they have it covered. I'm similarly surprised that they will be able to run lasers at that type of output, for continuous output. But again, they obviously don't see that as a major hurdle. The combination of temperature and pressure probably explains why bigger stars burn out so much faster. It looks ready made for a positive feedback loop. More pressure, more heat, more fusion, more heat, more heat, more fusion. So stars that are a bit bigger than the Sun burn much brighter.

I have to admit that I know very little about inertial confinement fusion, but the temperature thing is a bit misleading. Fusion takes place when you get a combination of two factors, temperature and pressure. In the laser inertial confinement approach, they generate phenomenal pressures, so they don't need the same sort of temperatures that the Tokamaks use. In the centre of the Sun, you get high temeratures and enormous pressures, that's how you get constant fusion. A Tokamak can't get anywhere near the pressures of the Sun, so it needs much higher temperatures for fusion to happen. Inside the fuel pellet of an inertial confinement reaction, the hydrogen is squeezed so hard, it's density can touch 300 times that of lead. So you don't need for it to get as hot as a Tokamak. One thing I haven't seen, is what mechanism they are planning to use, to achieve a constant burn. Will they keep firing the laser constantly, in a running power plant? Or do they hope to achieve a constant burn without external power input, once fusion is running? If they need the lasers to achieve the required pressure, then it looks like they need a continuous laser for a generating plant.

Luckily, we do what we do, in spite of all of it being pointless. You can find short term reasons to do things, that are pointless in the long-term wider picture. If people like the idea, than that is the point. Even if they are wrong. What's the point of looking at images of the universe just after the big bang? It doesn't get you any tangible reward. Even though it's academic, we would still like to KNOW. It might be pointless to seed another planet, it will never benefit us, but people would just like to know that life has a second chance. It's pointless in absolute terms, but it's nowhere near as pointless as other stuff we spend money on. In some cases, the silly amounts of money spent IS the point. Very few people would give the Mona Lisa a second look, if it wasn't for the fact that it's probably worth a billion in today's money.

I'm probably in the same boat, but it feels a bit different to me. I think that the main wanting to smoke is the addiction part of nicotine. I haven't smoked for years so I'm not craving a smoke. But I still know that if I did smoke (a cigar in my case) I would enjoy it. I can't class that as wanting a cigar. But I also can't class it as NOT wanting one. I would enjoy a cigar, but I 'want' to avoid the health downside even more. So I haven't changed the appeal in my mind, I've decided to favour one "want" over another, and helping willpower along is the fact that the immediate craving caused by regular smoking has gone, due to time elapsed.

Why would you wonder what I would want? If that was the case, I would say so. The only thing I want is for people to be happy, it's up to them how they go for it. In fact, logically speaking, if it ever did become possible to change sexual orientation, I would imagine that a lot of people would opt to become bisexual. After all, that gives you double the choice. (assuming you could attract both sexes) I must admit, I find the concept of changing what you want rather weird. It's probably worth it's own thread.

If we found a planet that was similar to Earth, with liquid water and shielding from harmful radiation, then why not seed it? You are just talking about a huge sterile rock. What can you possibly harm? I would go the whole hog, if it had near 1g of gravity, and introduce bigger forms of life, as much as I possibly could. After all, the Sun is not the only danger to life on Earth. Life could be wiped out by a much smaller body, so long as it scored a direct hit. If you had seeded another planet, it wouldn't be a total loss.

Don't be silly. Erik2014 would have got patents on the idea, and would be churning out thousands of evaporation/condensation generators by now. I'm surprised I haven't seen them in the shops. The prior disclosure will make it impossible for bestchance to make any money out of the invention though. Once you've made your idea public, it becomes public property, without a patent.

You could argue that everything's natural. I was just using the common distinction that people make between natural, and man-made. As in diamonds, or lakes, or pearls or forests. Most extinctions are happening because of human land-use, but many others are down to invasive species, again brought in by man. There's just too many humans on the planet, and we have no real interest in species going extinct, unless they look cute.

It's funny to see the religious right marching for an individual's right to make their own health choices, when around the world they try to ban women from deciding for themselves whether to terminate a pregnancy or not. Giving birth is a bit more life changing than having a little prick in the arm. I do think that the Aussies made a mess of this though. I can't believe that the original visa application didn't "go upstairs", with the name Novak Djokovitch on it and a claimed exemption to vaccination. At what level was the visa application allowed? If the visa had been denied in the first place, nobody would have been that surprised. But to grant it, and let someone travel halfway round the world, before pissing about at the border doesn't really put the country in a good light. No sympathy for Djokovitch though. Anti-vaxxers are morons, who lack the will or ability to weigh evidence properly. And I didn't know about the lying on the application till later. I still don't know exactly what that was about. But I do have my doubts whether he ever actually ever had covid, as he claimed. It looks very suspiciously like that was a story to get round the vaccine requirement.

I feel that way now. Every time another species goes extinct. I know extinction is a natural process, but what we are living through and causing is not natural, it's catastrophic.

Very much so. First of all, he's given solid reasons, not just intuition for why we can't know. But secondly, the second one is about the chances if INTELLIGENT life being out there. And the results are not just "we don't know", they tell you more than that. I could have linked just the second one, but I think you need to watch the first one to appreciate the second.

The problem of only having the Earth to go by, a single datapoint, is adressed by this guy on youtube, and although I'm a non-mathematician, I think he presents it clearly and well from a mathematical angle, and he claims that you can use maths to get to a real probability result about the existence of life, and the existence of intelligent life. Well, I liked it enough to watch both, so here are the links, in case you might too : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PqEmYU8Y_rI and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iLbbpRYRW5Y And apologies if someone has already mentioned them.

How do you circumcise a whale? . . . Send down four skindivers. A little boy was sitting on the front steps of synagogue in floods of tears. A kindly old lady asked him "whatever is the matter?" "The Rabbi nicked my pullover !! "

Yes, but we've been through all that. Harry Potter didn't exist as J.K. Rowling. They are two different entities. J.K.Rowling exists. Harry Potter does not. Harry Potter came out of her head. That doesn't mean he existed as a person. The OP asks, was there a real Jesus of Nazereth. Not, were there real people that helped inspire the story. Every story is based on people that the author knew or heard of. If you use that as your yardstick, there was a real Odin, a real Hercules, a real Superman, a real Spiderman etc. etc.

A stunning blonde turns up at the gates of heaven. St. Peter : Name please ! Blonde : White. . . Miss White. St. Peter takes a good look at her. "so you're not married then? I have to ask you, are you a virgin? You can't come in unless you're a virgin" She replies "yes, I'm a virgin" but Peter doesn't believe her so he gets the doctor to examine her. The doctor reports "yes, she is a virgin all right. Her hymen is intact, although it does have seven small dents in it" So Peter lets her in, and as she passes he calls after her "oh by the way, Miss White, what's your first name? And she calls back "Snow" !

That's fair enough. But while what you believe is perfectly possible, it's worth remembering that a lot of religions did NOT start with a charismatic leader. Most scholars agree that Moses didn't exist. Or Dionysus, or Odin, or all of the various Hindu gods. The muslims’ Allah didn't start with Mohammed, he was a legend long before. Christians have a trinity of gods, only one is claimed to have existed as a material being. They also have a long list of angels, none of whom began as a human. They all started out inside someone's head, not flesh and blood. The Egyptians started off with a whole host of heavenly gods, and morphed into having human/god hybrids as Pharoes. If I were to list all of the gods who started out as myths, it would run to many pages, and that’s just the known ones. Compare that to established gods that started out as real humans, it’s probably a thousand to one. Here’s Richard Carrier, talking about earlier myths, similar to the Jesus myth : https://youtu.be/CC6TzlZtdCo?t=579 I think that people today give the Jesus story more credibility, just because it’s such a successful religion. If there were just a few thousand Christians around today, I don’t think many people would have problems with believing that Jesus was a mythical figure. But with 2.4 billion supposed believers, it’s harder to contemplate that he never existed at all. Even though the huge numbers are purely the result of centuries of compulsion, and nothing to do with evidence, they still influence our thinking.

I agree with the genertal thrust of your post. There's nothing implausible about the notion of a real life character starting it all off. That sort of thing happens all the time. And not just political, but religious figures, like David Koresh, and the Branch Davidians. I'm arguing that the other scenario, the Jesus figure starting out as a myth of a son of god in heaven, morphing into an earthly figure, is equally plausible. It wouldn't be plausible today, I would certainly agree to that. Attitudes are so different now, that something like that sounds alien. But 2,000 years ago, there were gods all over the place, with new ones popping up all over the place. Rivers, mountains, the Moon, the Sun, thunder, etc etc etc all identified as having their own gods. And gods became people, and people became gods. These stories were being invented all the time, and getting followings. Like I said earlier, the reason that I personally favour the myth version, is the lack of any biographical details in Paul's letters, and the lack of any independent reference to Jesus from the time. There are loads of references to Christians, but none to Jesus except pretty obvious forgeries. If there had been a real Jesus, I think we would have very different letters from Paul, and genuine contempory references to him, and no need at all to forge references to him. And the gospels wouldn't need to be so contradictory and full of pure invention, they would have real facts to draw on. So I'm just saying that we can never know, both scenarios are plausible, but right now I think the myth version is more likely, given the little we DO know.

I don't think there's anything wrong with that. We have nothing written by Jesus. The gospels are not historical, they are later Jesus Stories, and can't be relied on for History. What we do have is the letters of Paul, and with all their faults, that's pretty much it, historically. Paul definitely existed. At least, someone wrote his letters, so that person definitely existed. So if you want to talk about the historicity or mythical nature of Jesus, you end up discussing Paul and his letters. Historically, there's Paul, there's a couple of very suspect passages in books written by the Jewish historian Josephus, and nothing else.

I did cover that. . .