stelelor

I like him too.

The answer was in us all along.

Today is my birthday and this is very much how I feel about growing older. It's not at all what I thought it would be.

It says a lot about the culture of the 60s and/or Pohl himself, that the first conceivable use for "instant ordering" would be for drugs.

... Pocket bar? Googling it gets me nowhere. Surely he didn't mean a bar of alcoholic drinks? Maybe a pocket pry bar?

Will this blue obsidian crystal amplify my positive energy?

Feynman, mainly because he was an amazing professor and knows how to talk to people.

Einstein and Newton disliked people, so they would be terrible conversationslists outside their areas of expertise. I think that was true of Leonardo as well. Edison is also out because he was a dick.

I mean, isn't that what we basically all do for at least 8h a day anyway? Except that our machinery has screens and Internet.

The main issue with permafrost is instability. If you build on permafrost, when it melts you'll lose everything that's not anchored to bedrock. Imagine the ground 3ft below the surface of your street suddenly collapsing, like a sinkhole. At the very least that would ruin the road, the water and sewer pipes, the electricitu and telecom lines, etc. Melting permafrost also releases A LOT of methane, a much more potent greenhouse gas than CO2. (Runaway global warning, anyone?) Lastly, after the permafrost melts, the soil that is left isn't necessarily suitable for agriculture: it washes away easily and is prone to waterlogging.

Of course, these challenges can be overcome with time and money. It might become worth doing once the current arable land turn into deserts. But the scope of it is huge. We'll have to invent a whole new type of agriculture.

"Only those who do not seek power are qualified to hold it." Plato knew what was up.

Unlike trees, plastic is not self-renewing. So when humanity goes extinct, there will no longer be a steady supply of plastic for these microbes. They will crash just as quickly (geologically speaking) as they arose.