This will drive the planetary-protection people nuts:
Whether the tardigrades survived is unknown—but Spivack said if they did, there is no risk of the creatures taking over the Moon as they would need to be revived by future humans that may find them.
Yeah, it’s all fun and games until they mutate and become our giant lunar tardigrade overlords.
[Wednesday-afternoon update]
More at Pop Sci.
Lileks has a very strange mind.
An insightful essay for the 21st century, on the 200th anniversary of the first modern science-fiction novel.
The latest from Bob Zimmerman.
There may be a lot more of it than we thought. And we were already thinking there’s quite a bit.
Has not been silenced:
I hear this line of criticism fairly often from people who are not very bright or well-informed; in truth, I have never complained of “being silenced.” As I have written and said probably 200 times, the mob-mentality culture of conformism and homogeneity is a relatively minor problem for people like me — people who are in the controversy business, for whom this sort of thing is only a vexing professional hazard — but it is a very large problem for people who are not employed in writing and speaking about public affairs but nonetheless threatened with educational or employment sanctions for holding unpopular views. You hear about people like me because we are media figures, but the people who really have to worry about this sort of thing are Starbucks managers in Philadelphia and Silicon Valley nerds who are dumb enough to believe that the bosses at Google mean it when they ask them for their opinions.
Which brings us to the problem of trying to have a productive conversation with people who are caught up in the vast sprawling electronic apparatus of self-moronization. It does not matter what anybody actually has said or written. The rage-monkeys have an idea about what it is they want you to have said, or what people like you are supposed to think about x or y. I cannot count how many times I have had some person respond to something critical I’ve written about some lefty fruitcake with “What about Trump, huh?” When I point out that, among other things, I wrote a little book called The Case against Trump, the response is: “Well, Republicans . . .” And then when I point out that I am not one of those, either, the retreat into ever-vaguer generality continues incrementally.
Yes, I get this sort of idiocy a lot, too. I’m always amused when morons assume that (a functional atheist) am a Young-Earth creationist, or a Christian, or Republican, because I’m skeptical about hyperbolic climate claims.
I should say, though, that at least when it comes to Professor Mann, I have in fact been somewhat silenced (which is ironic, given that prior to the time he sued me, I’d hardly ever discussed him).
An interesting essay, but it has a few problems. First…
And they repeatedly use the phrase “lunar soil.” In fact we just update Evoloterra this weekend to fix this ourselves.
Finally, we have this comment, which seems gratuitous and almost a non sequitur in the context of this article:
This isn’t news to me. I’ve always been concerned (to the degree that I am concerned) about both, and in fact, I worry more about diastolic than systolic. I’m trying to get it down with 20 mg of Lisinopril, but it’s still 150/100 on waking. Fortunately, I’ve never had a cardiovascular event, despite having lost both parents relatively young to heart attacks. I think I have a much healthier lifestyle, though. They were both life-long smokers, and overweight (partly as a result of horrible nutrition advice from the government).
Are they in a race?
Bryan doesn’t mention the (white) elephant in the room: SLS.
…is probably bad for the planet.
I still recall the day that I saw a truck come by and threw the contents of both the recycle bin and the trash bin in the same place. But we still separate, for no obvious good reason except, I guess, if not to virtue signal, to at least avoid opprobrium from the neighbors.