TheVat

With green burial, conversion into soil, plants, animals that eat those plants, fungi, worms, soil nematodes, and (if your mortician was lazy and irresponsible) residues of mercury from dental amalgam leaching into the soil. Make sure you find a reputable and environmentally aware mortician, if you want a green burial, so that your fillings will be properly removed.

Har! Wonder if those old Up Pompeii shows have survived. Sounds like a series possibly influenced by Stephen Sondheim's sixties comedy, A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum. (which was also inspired by the farces of Plautus)

Seems like restoring a rainforest somewhere, or expanding a seagrass meadow, would fix more carbon than this approach, which sounds more like a recipe for giving marine mammals a case of the trots. MgOH is a laxative.

The spouse and I sometimes refer to AI as Artificial Idiocy. Note that the IBM "Watson" after defeating Ken Jennings and the other contestant on Jeopardy, was not able to participate in the chat at the end of the show. Or figure out that Toronto was not an American city, or that having a leg and missing a leg are not the same thing (a question about an Olympic athlete), or notice that another contestant had just given the wrong answer ("the 1920s") and amend its own answer accordingly. Bear in mind that Waton's entire purpose and design was to play Jeopardy.

So how did that work out for the planet's biosphere?

Hopefully this https://www.climatechangenews.com/2012/01/24/warming-oceans-face-co2-tipping-point/#:~:text=The world's oceans will absorb,cause surface temperatures to rise. will help underscore the necessity of focus on land emissions reduction. And fertilization proposals, like iron fertilization, are pretty controversial given the level of ecosystem tampering involved as well as dubious effectiveness and ROI.... https://www.nature.com/articles/545393a

Side note: when I murder someone and bury their body, it usually involves someone's excessive use of a subwoofer in a car stereo. Hopefully we're reaching the point where most audiophiles experience paranormal anxiety as they pass my house and they then turn down the bass. When considering my death, I always imagine it to be decades in the future. 😀 I have read somewhere that it is more common to die around one's birthday than would be by chance alone. No idea how that could be or even if it's factual. Maybe related to the rigors of celebrating?

My speculation is that absence of consciousness is what would magnify the threat of AGI. Without it we could have an AI more easily arrive at absurd solutions to problems or pursuing one goal to the exclusion of all others. It's what some AI theorists have called "the paperclip maximizer" problem. (Nick Bostrom, iirc) Having self aware consciousness might allow an AGI to question its own drives, especially if they were narrowly focused. Say that it wants to solve an exceedingly difficult math problem and decides to convert the whole earth into computational machinery to implement this.

Still needs evidence that this would absorb more than a miniscule fraction of CO2 emission. The overwhelming proportion of ocean absorption is just the gas dissolving in water. And waters are warming, which would decrease their capacity to hold dissolved gas. And pump sediment, which has mass and is heavier than water, so you would be doing some lifting, too.

Yep, especially given the information that he knew the father living there to be abusive. Humans have a lot of retrospective bias in remembering past feelings. We fit them into a current narrative.

You are clearly off your rocker!

How would your proposed system deal with eutrophication? Seems like red tides, hypoxic zones, cyanobacteria blooms with their toxins, etc could be a problem. Also, what's the phosphorous content of these mid-ocean sediments that are being stirred up?

Some paranormal phenomena are inherently so haphazard, so much fluke events tied to strong emotions and crisis, that they don't seem open to laboratory study. More like something rare seen in field research out in nature, where all you get over a long period are sporadic observations. Determining a sigma value would be really challenging. We can't, say, put people in a lab then kidnap their family members and see if the subjects report unusual and specific impressions. The research on anomalous and improbable events where unlikely details are somehow transfered is often plagued with potential leaks of information that the interviewer fails to consider or rule out. And, as @Genady makes clear, some people are going to be statistical outliers, who just happened to, say, have terrible acid reflux and chest pain at the same time a distant friend had a fatal heart attack. When the person later recalls their pain, they may tinker with the memory and imagine that the acid reflux was accompanied by a sense of something ominous. Self-report data is so often tainted by confabulation.

Galaxies are mostly empty space. https://lovethenightsky.com/are-galaxies-mostly-empty-space/#:~:text=However%2C what we didn't,well over 99.99% empty space.

Trump-Carlson ticket. "Bronze above, bronze below"

Well said. I thought of that episode earlier as I followed this thread. The "casualties" had to go into a suicide booth didn't they? Viewing themselves as already dead. Yep. As @zapatos mentioned, it would be a kind of Catch-22: if foes trust each other enough to know their five warheads won't be attacked, then they wouldn't need the warheads in the first place. Powerful arms tend to lead to arms races and insane buildup of stockpiles.

It could be something so rudimentary in humans that only the most dire and tragic events give a discernible signal. Your sad experience also seems to challenge conventional ideas of time and our perception of it.

What do you think of Carl Jung's idea that paranormal experiences may be us tapping into a collective unconscious? A sort of mental internet. I've tended towards skepticism but have to acknowledge that cases of phenomena like crisis telepathy seem to be pretty well documented.

Seems to be spreading. Don Lemon, of the infamous Nikki Haley (51) is past her prime remark, has just been booted by CNN. Wonder where Tucker will tan his testicles now. https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/tucker-carlson-end-of-men-testicle-tanning-1338944/

https://knowablemagazine.org/article/food-environment/2023/climate-change-effect-on-plant-nutrients Atmospheric carbon dioxide is at its highest in human history. That’s probably fine for plants like the grasses the hoppers munch. They can turn that atmospheric carbon into carbohydrates and build more plant — in fact, plant biologists once thought all that extra carbon dioxide would simply mean better crop yields. But experiments in crops exposed to high carbon dioxide levels indicate that many food plants contain less of other nutrients than under carbon dioxide concentrations of the past. Several studies find that plants’ levels of nitrogen, for example, have fallen, indicating lower plant protein content. And some studies suggest that plants may also be deficient in phosphorus and other trace elements. The idea that plants grown in today’s carbon dioxide-rich era will contain less of certain other elements — a concept Kaspari categorizes as nutrient dilution — has been well-studied in crop plants. Nutrient dilution in natural ecosystems is less-studied, but scientists have observed it happening in several places, from the woods of Europe to the kelp forests off Southern California. Now researchers like Kaspari are starting to examine the knock-on effects — to see whether herbivores that eat those plants, such as grasshoppers and grazing mammals, are affected....

May need a British --> American translator. I gather the peace sign, when held up backwards in UK, is a rude gesture. Not sure about the image source. Anyway, agree the new payment requirement is crap.

That's good to hear. Perhaps coding skills are retained by doing other tasks employing logic, math, recursion, looping, etc. And so much depends on attention span and level of fascination when first learning a skill. I loved astronomy as a teen, joined a club, and it surprises me how much is retained.

Cognitive skills vary a lot in how much maintenance they need. When young, I read books - and still do so. But if take a break from books, say a month or two, I resume reading easily. If I take such a long break from piano, my playing suffers terribly. Same with chess. Some mental activity involve a lot of intricate tasks and to be any good at the activity you have to stay at the very top of your abilities. (physics and higher math I would guess is like piano, you must keep at it almost daily) Others seem to rest on skills with more shelf life. And almost all skills benefit from attention span, so obsessive personality types generally have an easier path to developing notable cognitive skills. If they are hunter-gatherers, they become good animal trackers or mushroom finders; if they are modern people, they become scientists, musicians, coders, etc.

Let's say full nuclear deterrence is reached by five warheads (of big city erasing megatonnage). Five can take out a major power's capital and four most economically vital cities. That would effectively collapse that nation. How could we at least reach that stage of MAD? It would keep maintaining that condition where WW3 is unthinkable, while reducing the potential to erase the planetary biosphere. E.g. wipe out Washington DC, New York, LA, Chicago, and Houston. USA collapses, but most of our territory would remain habitable and cropland outside of fallout plumes would be sufficient to feed many survivors. Industrial centers would remain, as would NG and petroleum fields, interstate highways and rails, wind turbines on the Great Plains, and refineries in Oklahoma, Kansas, couple other states. As this attack happened, we in turn would fire our five at Russia, taking out Moscow, etc. Both nations would vanish from the world stage, in terms of power and economy, and would spend decades if not centuries simply surviving and catching up, possibly as an aggregate of balkanized regions. The enemies would be, as Moon mentions, reemerging oligarchs using fascist tactics, offering their power to restore order. Balkan states might grow around cities like Atlanta, Denver, Seattle. Anyway, to keep this post from turning into a dystopian novel, back to main question: could just five big bombs apiece be a workable deterrence system?

Pale leaves usually from watering issues. Either under or over watering.