Wednesday, November 16, 2016

It's Wednesday So Stephen Hawking Tells Us Again We're Screwed

For the latest doomnostication from Stephen Hawking, and he doesn't specifically say what will happen but, well, we're fucked.  (Science Daily:  Humans won’t survive 1,000 more years without escaping ‘fragile’ Earth – Hawking)

Ed:  doomnostication?

Today's sniglet rolls together doom and prognostication.  Nice, huh?  With all the fortune teller news readers sleazing about, they should find it handy.  We are fucked.  We are so completely fucked!!!


It's not clear what he tries to do since he's right there's an important step between now and establishing a working colony on another planet but he adds we have to be especially careful until he then.

WTF??  We don't have to be especially careful after that??

Parting on an inspiring note, Hawking encouraged those in the audience to “remember to look up at the stars and not down at your feet.

- RT

Hot tip on that, Steve-o:  if you are sinking into the sand because of the rising water, you maybe have a different problem requiring your attention.


Hawking's enthusiasm for space exploration is laudable and I share it but not at the expense of everything else.  There has to be determined research in all aspects of science to pursue the space exploration and also the proper shepherding of this fragile planet.  There's one salient point to space travel and that's the fact you're not going; it's not a ticket to other planets except for colonists and most of us won't go.  If Earth won't last more than a thousand more years then we really are fucked.

Most of us won't want to go because you're not putting me inside a fucking flying and sometimes exploding coffin for six fucking months to land on some godforsaken hellhole which doesn't even have fucking cable television but it's great if you don't mind your food being created on a 3D fucking printer.

Nope, most of us won't go but we still need to do it because this is what Man does.  Even when we don't go, we see some of what they see and what a spectacle even when it's only a couple of guys bouncing around on the Moon to collect rocks or just a robot blundering around Mars.  We need that in the same way as sunshine since the lack of it is a strong indicator for depression.


Besides, every rocket launch is mechanical orgasm for the Industrial Revolution.  They need that because otherwise all they've got is Nintendo.


Hawking is a study because he's great for these pontifical pronouncements although his previous 'there is no God' wasn't precisely something a pontiff might say.  Climate change is one of the most hysterical about doomnostication but this is what the Earth looks like after the poles melt in the next hundred years.



The Southeast gets soaked the most and Florida is sleeping with the alligators.  Fort Worth is not crying because it becomes beachfront property.  They predict more storms with the warming and I doubt I would dig a hurricane too much so maybe Fort Worth wouldn't be so good.

Assuming the continued lack of preparation, there's catastrophic business expense as a consequence of the warming but not so much for property overall ... unless you're in Florida and in which case you're fucked.  The Dixiecrat states are screwed too but no-one likes them anyway.  Louisiana even busted Willie Nelson once.  They don't want anyone to like them when they do shit like that.

Ed:  all the launch sites go underwater.

Yep, California, Virginia, and Florida definitely go defunct for space vehicles.  Whoa, this could be the time for the pitch for the Fort Worth launch site.  Let's do that.


The fragile planet will be destroyed in a thousand years, huh?  Given no change to nonstop rapacious consumerism, no mitigation of economies to normalize societies and population growth, and no effort to find ways to accommodate change, Earth will probably be destroyed even faster than that.  That assumes people never do more than acquiesce to denialists but you don't believe that or you wouldn't be reading this scurvy swill from a pusillanimous pigeon-hearted poltroon such as myself.

People have never accepted disaster.  When there's an Ice Age, we go South.  For the really big ones, we go far South.  Now we have the flip side and people say we will roll over for it?

Like bloody hell we will.

In the resounding words of Lotho:  you figure it out.


In the not-so-resounding words of Silas:  look at your feet and the stars to see it all.

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