Though there is likely life throughout the galaxy, it's probably difficult for one sentient spacefaring race to find another habitable planet they'd be comfortable on, i.e., one with a similar atmosphere and mass. If it's a long way from your planet to another you'd care to set foot on, you're left with lots of space stations. But who wants to live in that precarity?
Subduction only occurs at plate boundaries and is not nearly this fast. Continental plates float on top like foam and do not get subducted. It's the oceanic plate that is created at mid-ocean ridges and gets subducted at the margins.
How churned is "churned"? Does this mean particular pebbles have have been found to have lain in their current arrangement for 1.8 million years, or just that not much has happened? I expect any arid region far from the poles or mountains and lacking dune fields will have similar patches of inert land. Much of Australia would fit this bill.
Right. You can vote for a government that will tax you and then fix misfortunes and injustices. It's probably a lot more effective and efficient than writing a check to a megachurch.
Qualia is an interesting topic, but "they don't have qualia so they aren't really slaves" doesn't have a great track record. This mental game is what tech overlords are engaging in when they characterize losers in their world as NPCs and deride empathy as pathological. It's what Descartes was doing when he vivisected animals.
It is my understanding that this claim about Americans' charitable giving does not disaggregate giving to food banks, Girl Scout cookie drives, political causes, the environment, cultural events, religious institutions, etc. Much of this charitable giving does not feed the hungry or house the homeless.
We used to live in a world where individual virtue was what everyone fell back on. That is the default state. It has many problems -- free riding by the selfish, for one, but also a lack of capacity to prepare for large-scale disasters like the Great Depression. We have a government precisely to solve this sort of problem. It works (when it is competent and not corrupt) for defense, international trade, and the enforcement of law. Solving resource distribution and aid coordination is right in its wheelhouse.
Russia is great at stuff that can be automated cheaply like influence campaigns. They're not so great at physical hardware and logistics and so forth. Not everyone is good at everything.
Messing with elections by fooling the most volatile and eager to be fooled is not a genius move.
In the town where I live there are buildings from a 19th century pipe organ factory. My wife used to work in one of the buildings. The employees had scribbled various names and dates and witticisms on the walls in pencil. Their handwriting was beautiful. I was gratified that no one had thought to beautify the walls after the factory closed. In the loft above there were ancient mechanical drawings of organ parts rolled up and stored on racks, and at the end of the loft was a designer's desk still waiting for him to come back and make more drawings.
Everyone wants someone else to deal with it. It's like we have a live grenade and rather than defusing it or disposing of it we keep passing it around hoping it explodes on someone else.
> A rich person and a poor person can train LLMs on copyrighted material in 2026.
Updating an old adage for the modern age:
“The law, in its majestic equality, forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal their bread.”
― Anatole France