WoodScientist [she/her]

It’s ultimately going to take multiple lines of evidence. Yes, there are compounds that we think are strong indicators of life; we don’t know how to explain them except for life. However, we can never rule out some other abiotic origin for that compound exists that we simply haven’t discovered yet. We don’t know what we don’t know. Abundant life however is likely to cause all sorts of these biosignature compounds to be present in an atmosphere. If we find a planet with many of these compounds, we’ll have many independent lines of evidence pointing at life being present there. That is how we are likely to finally accept that life has indeed been detected.

Another pathway that may result in the acceptance of a detection of life is us learning more about the origins of life. It’s possible as we learn more about how life started on Earth, we will discover that mechanisms to get it going make it a near inevitability where the necessary conditions exist. That would make its detection much easier to accept.

Pina colada, not to be confused with a pollo colada, which substitutes the pineapple for raw chicken.

Do they still give out membership cards? The only reason I might want to join the ACP is so I can literally be a card-carrying Communist.

Yup. “Autism” is simply the new “Untermensch.”

Please. At least use his full and proper name, Secretary of Transportation Booty Judge.

It sounds like he’s confusing autism with cerebral palsy or severe Down syndrome.

I also went to Buenos Aires. I had my face rebuilt there!

because then anyone could put garbage in the receptacle.

This is when you’re so capitalism brained that you’re willing to shoot yourself in the foot. So much unnecessary complexity, so many ways for things to break, all just to keep a random pedestrian from throwing a sandwich wrapper in a random bin. So concerned about someone getting a service they ‘don’t deserve’ for free that they would rather live in filth than just eat the minor cost and live in a sanitary city.

This just screams good old-fashioned political machine corruption. The garbage collectors are unionized and have a good bit of political influence. It seems like NYC has been running its trash collection as a make-work program for years. The only advantage of doing trash this way is that it means you need to hire way more garbage collectors than you would with other systems. I’m all for having well paid jobs and providing people opportunities, but there are ways to do that without creating a huge public health nuisance.

Thanks. I took a bath tonight because of this post.

That’s the problem with founding a state based on genocide and ethnic cleansing. When you’ve convinced yourself that you’re literally doing the will of God, when are you actually “done” with God’s work? Just how big is the “Jewish homeland” supposed to be? The Torah said that Yahweh gave the ancient Israelites all the land from the Nile to the Euphrates. A fundamentalist Zionist can justify, based on a direct religious reference, that Israel can rightfully expand that far based on the direct word of God. And God never said the Israelis couldn’t conquer more land beyond those bounds. It’s a recipe for self-destructive never-ending conflict.

Israel’s MO is pretty obvious at this point:

1. Antagonize your neighbors just over the border until they start attacking you back.
2. When your neighbors retaliate against your harassment and violence, send in the military to secure a “buffer zone,” billed as a demilitarized zone like the Korean DMZ. Say you can’t have Jews and Arabs living right next door to each other, so a buffer is needed.
3. Once the buffer zone is established, let Jewish settlers in to build towns and cities in what was supposed to be an empty safety buffer.
4. After a few years, Jews and Arabs are once again on each other’s doorstep.
5. Start again antagonizing the neighbors (who are usually the same people you displaced a generation ago.)

This has been Israel’s strategy for decades. They’ve seized “buffer zone” after “buffer zone.” They let their people move into the buffer zone, and then suddenly they don’t have a buffer zone anymore. They use their own civilian population as human shields, putting them in a position where they are guaranteed to be attacked by angry people the Israeli government and settler forces are continually antagonizing. Then when they’re inevitably attacked, that can be used to justify expanding the borders even further. Oh, and none of their neighbors can resist this process through direct military action, as Israel has a nuclear arsenal. No one can afford to get in a total war with Israel.

I really don’t know where this ends. At this point I think the best thing for Mideast peace would be the Iranians, Egyptians, or Turks getting a nuclear weapon themselves. The only thing that’s going to stop the never-ending drive for Israeli lebensraum is if they expand until they’re up against someone too tough for them to boss around. And that’s probably going to need to be a country that is themselves a nuclear power.

The other problem with this expansion is that it gets baked into the Israeli society and economy. It’s a bit like what happened with ancient Rome. Their whole economy became dependent on this process of expanding, conquering peoples, subjugating and enslaving them, etc. They had to keep expanding just to keep their economy running. They paid their retired veterans with stolen land. The only way you can keep that model going is by expanding forever. And eventually they expanded beyond what they could manage. The same thing is happening in Israel. They have whole sectors of their economy dependent on this process of expansion and settlement. At this point, even if they wanted to, they can’t just say, “ok, we’ve expanded enough. These are our fixed borders now and forever.” They can’t do that without collapsing the part of their economy that is dependent on selling and developing all the land they take. They can’t have peace without causing a massive recession. They’ve become addicted to stealing land.