h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Indeed indeed, all this quantifying of earthquakes and wars in an attempt to fit events to prophecies is (note spelling, Kid) ludicrous.

A small knowledge of history ( try googling on war, plague, earthquakes, volcanoes, calderas etc.) will show that the only significant difference in death between our times and former times is the technological advances.

Medieval Europe thought the world was ending when the Black Death struck in the 13th century. It killed roughly half the entire population of Europe in one generation, and recurred on a smaller scale at intervals until the 17th century.

People also thought the world was ending as the Mongol hordes swept all the way across the world from China to Vienna, slaughtering everything in their path. It's all a matter of scale. For a medieval peasant, the world was the village. One earthquake, landslide, or the plague, or a passing war could end that world at one go.

The worst volcanic eruption since "modern" man, homo sapiens has been around occured in the Philippines 75,000 years ago, when the entire world population of humans was reduced to about 5,000 people ( calculated from the so-called DNA "bottleneck") by the resulting volcanic winter.

But the world, or at least life for higher mammals, has ended at regular 600,000 year intervals thanks to the Yellowstone Caldera, now overdue by 40,000 years.

Better get some prophesying in while there's still time, folks.

Cheers,

C \|/

<>

Cool!

There was a civil war in 19th century China that might well take credit for relative numbers with its 20ish million dead, bearing in mind that population pretty much everywhere has gone up massively since then.

<>

depleted uranium shells are no more "nuclear weapons" than rubber mallets. Uranium is heavier, is all.

Indeed, the Taiping Rising of 1850 remains the bloodiest civil war ever fought ( it slipped my memory just now ). Interestingly, it was led by a south Chinese "hakka", Hong Xiuquan who thought he was the reincarnated brother of Jesus.

Hong Xiuquan brought in some very enlightened reforms during his brief period of power in South China, but called upon China to rise and throw out the heathen Manchu foreigners. However, the Manchu Emperor enlisted the help of foreign troops to suppress the rising, which the Taipings strenuously resisted, believing, as they did, that the world was coming to an end, and that Nanjing was the new Jerusalem, which God would save.

I've written about this in more detail at A2257670

On the subject of uranium enriched shell cases, they are not nuclear weapons in the sense of using nuclear reactions in their explosive charge, but they are nuclear in the sense of generating radioactive fall-out, with serious long-term health effects, sepecially in southern Iraq where trhey wewre used in the first Gulf War.

*Depleated* well I can imagine sat in a tank next to a stock of these, you'd hope *depleated* means just that, in practice they are still radio active, health affecting radioactive.

Besides it's use for how hard it is, not how heaviy it is.

Tell you what, take one of these shell's and put it in you're back yard, or keep it around the house, you could *pet it, and stroke it, and maybe call it Harvey.*

Sitting next to a pile of DU munitions (or having an unused shell in the house) probably isn't a significant health risk.

Breathing in the dust created when a round impacts a hard target is a different matter. Contamination of soil and water supplies is another potential problem.

The military usefulness is due to a combination of various factors - high density helps get lots of momentum/kinetic energy into a small impact area. The hardness, the self-sharpening nature of penetrators and the tendency to burn on impact also add to the effectiveness against armour. Any one factor on its own might not make much of a useful material.

"It does look as though popular pressure in England is leading Blair and Brown to make attempts internationally to reduce Third World debt."
Or maybe it's because there's an election due. Labour make a good job of talking and making promises that sometimes look as if they might happen and then whoops they don't.

Meanwhile I grit my teeth to hear that whoever it is that decides these things is debating whether what is happening in Darfur is 'technically' a genocide because without the genecide label they won't (and aren't) able to act. Apparently. Anyone here able to help them with a definition?

A nuclear weapon relies on radiocative fission for its effectiveness so I cant see a way that DU tipped shells or anything similar would count as atomic weapons.

Yeah if all these sinister cults are really into the end is nigh why arent fundies like Bush and alleged opus Dei types giving up all their wealth or indeed writtting off third world debt?

Maybe the people pulling the strings know something the acolytes dont

one love

As I read Chai's post, I could almost hear Hoo's gears grinding up for the protection of his almost fundmentalist belief in science.
For every wonderful thing science has actually given the world, they've also given us a curse.
To coin a phrase, 'They've unravelled DNA while at the same time cultivated bacteria strong enough to kill every living thing.'
If science wants the position of God, it has to take the responsibility.
We've been able to globally warm our planet - because of science.
Science is not infallible, they work with probability and sometimes they're wrong.

I think we'd rather work with probability than possibility.

B

"Every living thing"



Sounds a little over the top. Life is more resourceful and resilient than that and any bacteria is only as strong as its target is weak.

Still a germ and squirmy thing expert like 2legs would tell you not all squirmy things are necessarily dangerous.

Yes, I've heard that line before too.

B

anyone?


az

Recomends a re-read Potholer's post (287) for at least two people. It's a better definition, but then I was trying to keep it simple.

Re: "in your back yard" means you would not want 'DU weapons' any place near you. The "health affecting", being what happens when the 'war' is over, the affect on the land.

DU, it's a weapon, it has a radio active affect on the enviroment. The point is why is this acceptable? More over, why is an international 'pissing contest' by setting off 'real nukes' acceptable?

<>

To answer the second question first, it isn't accepatable. And this is one reason why, despite some sabre rattling from a few ultra-hawks, they have never been used since Nagasaki/Hiroshima.

The use of DU weapons is bit more contextual. *If* you believe war is acceptable then the added risks of DU weapons are likely to seem comparatively trivial given its effectiveness as a tank buster. If you *dont* believe war is acceptable then the question doesn't really arise in this form.

Noggin

everybody needs to sit down eventually, i've not seen anything in the writings, about Jesus skidding over the water on his rear end.

And so do the gears grind...

"For every wonderful thing science has actually given the world, they've also given us a curse."

You're right of course. Presumably you believe ignorance is bliss?

If there's one thing that really gets my goat, it's criticism of science by people who, without the benefits of it, would be dead or would never have been born because their ancestors would have died of cholera or similar. Most of us fall into this category.

Science is a tool.

Screwdrivers and hammers can be and frequently have been used as murder weapons. Does anyone seriously believe that, because of this, these tools are anything other than an overwhelming benefit to almost everyone who ever touches one?

"To coin a phrase, 'They've unravelled DNA while at the same time cultivated bacteria strong enough to kill every living thing.'"

To coin another phrase "Bacteria are living things."

Or, to expand on the probably too-subtle point that phrase is intended to make: anyone who says such a thing is clearly so uneducated in the most basic principles of biology that they really ought to keep their irrelevant opinions to themselves.

H.