“This flash-forward opening also labors hard to melodramatically inflate the importance of both the game and this individual rivalry”

When somebody talks like that, you want to hold up the Joe Biden/Paul Ryan “this fucking guy” animated gif for him to look at.

Except that unless you publish five papers a year in your laid-back-almost-a-hobby-career, you’ll be out of a job in no time. I was almost a papyrologist, too.

Yep. We WILL all be back to candles and horse-drawn buggies, very soon, and it would take a century to recover from it. And it’s not if it will happen, just when.

I’ve read that a Carringon-level eruption could blank the power grid, and that such a thing could take on the order of decades to repair — especially when there’s no power...anywhere. Could put humanity back into the 19th century for a generation.

I’d like to hear creationists’ sophistry about this one...

I think it’s more that they assume life will be water soluble and carbon based. So you need those conditions. And they assume that about life because that’s the easiest chemistry, actually. Any other conditions, any other atomic basis, is much harder to work with.

Mars before: atmosphere, water, some radiation shielding.

You can’t construct enough molecules with silicon, oxygen, or plutonium. Carbon has the optimal number of valence electrons to form the most possible bonds with other atoms and (importantly) itself. Also, it’s (a lot) more common than silicon or plutonium.

So make organisms, you need a recipe, and to evolve organisms, you need a method of introducing random variation. To bootstrap that fundamental thing, you need a self-assembling molecule.

Double-down, baby. Do you have anything substantive, beyond, “anything’s possible, bro!” Go ahead, propose a non-water-soluble, non-carbon-based life form.

No, but if you’re limited to say, only a few hundred billion a year to look, where would you look, given that shit in space is far away and far apart?

That was precisely the unscientific conclusion one would expect the unscientific to arrive at, given the aforegoing.

Proposed: that non-carbon-based life forms could exist. You’ve got three minutes.

The laws of chemistry are hard to get around. Life almost certainly will be carbon based, because you can’t construct enough complicated shit without it. Life won’t be Star Trek slow, because chemical reactions are, from our perspective, fast, and you can’t get them at some arbitrarily slow speed.

Can somebody do the cartoon of the dog in the house on fire (“All is Well”) with McConnell’s face Photoshopped onto it? Thanks.

Yeah, it’s as impossible to believe as Nazis having marches and a president supporting them and nobody is upset about it. Hillary lost because America has gone around the fucking bend, you idiot.

Second, yo.

Insomuch. That should be a word. I like it.

Huh, almost as if Equifax’s IT people were incompetent or something.