We eradicated smallpox.

The problem is, the AI has to connect to something - even if that something is only a human being, and the AI can supposedly only communicate via a simple text terminal.

UK Viewers: Meet the Sloths is on Animal Planet, Sunday, 8 PM.

One could parse the title as,

It's not a bug. It's a feature.

Me too. It's simply not worth talking to them anymore. It's all the more irritating because I did a lot of environmental physics as part of my degree, simply because it's such a fascinating subject, and the stuff they parrot is not even wrong - half the time they don't even seem to comprehend how science itself works.

This illustrates a truly tragic - and unfortunately all too common - misunderstanding of the way the entire scientific process works.

"Do you realize the universe is constantly shrinking, Superman?"

"If you could erase your most painful memories with a pill, would you take it?"

Marmots are excellent.

I'd accept a handwave involving magnetic shielding.

"For instance, if some matter was ejected from the epicenter of the Big Bang at near the speed of light, and we know the Big Bang was about fifteen billion years ago, the universe must be something like thirty billion light- years across, if matter is somewhat evenly dispersed."

You only get effects like EMP when the nuclear detonation is very close to Earth - the tests which created large EMP, and flooded the radiation belts with charged particles, were detonated at altitudes of a few hundred kilometers. EMP is caused by a lot of gamma rays hitting the atmosphere, not by the nuclear…

Exactly.

The rate at which helium reserves are being depleted is a real concern, isn't it?

Yes, well said.

Interesting. Butterflies (and lepidoptera in general) are fascinating creatures, in all sorts of ways.

Hi,

"For example, nobody has yet driven upto 99.999% the speed of light then turned on their car lights."

Yes, all you can ever really do is provide bounds on the probability of different models, while making some reasonable assumptions about the validity of the Cosmological Principle. It's trivially true that we can only directly gather data on the local geometry, but we since the observable universe is homogeneous and…