Pretty sure the Uyghur Muslims don't see it that way

Some of them end up dismembered in embassies.

is that huge pivots like this can happen very fast. No hugely wealthy industries making dodgy payments to buy political votes. No legal systems to bog down the flow of change. On the flip side you must do as your told broadly speaking, and you might get re-educated if your beliefs aren't the right ones, but shit does get done.

Technically this does seem to be the best solution; use the most efficient generation means for the local climate combined with an electricity superhighway. The problem with this is that we can't seem to stop falling out with each other. What do you do when you go to war with your neighbour and the switch of your electric supply? I think geopolitics and energy security is always going to trump the right technical solution, at least until we grow up enough to get rid of flags and borders and realise that we've only got one world to live on. Like that's going to happen.

There is a very common misconception amongst folks, even some physicists, around what "being observed" means wrt quantum mechanics. It doesn't mean somebody sees it. It really just means being forced to interact with some other form of energy in some way. This is what collapses the wave function.

It's also worth noting that the wave function description is simply a mathematical tool that enables you to make accurate predictions about what will happen. It's not intended to be taken as an actual picture of reality at the quantum scale, something we can probably never know.

Ever heard of a rhetorical question?

In the past, yes, there have always been other new types of jobs to replace the old ones. But look where we're heading with automation, robotics and machine intelligence. At some point it'll be possible to make stuff for zero financial cost. How so? If everything is automated from the extraction of mineral resources, through processing, to creation of end goods, you don't need money. There's nobody to pay. You just need to own the raw resources, e.g. the land. The owning class can then focus purely on what's always motivated them; living a life of total ease. Start focusing on luxury products created in their automated factories, plus robotic security. They will finally have removed their dependency on the poor to work for them.

And what then? The bulk of the worlds population then simply become a problem to them, competing for the same finite resources. They could suddenly become all concerned about the climate change and overpopulation. Bring on the one child policies and enforced sterilisation. Time to deal with the poor majority. Rise up and revolt you say? Against the robotic security forces and weaponry that are surely coming too? Good luck with that.

It sounds like a plot from a Sci-Fi novel, but it's one possible future, and unless we're very careful, it's possible something like this could happen. So no, sadly I don't think it's safe to just assume there will always be jobs.

This is how we're so fckd. One of the sunniest places in the world: probs best place for a solar based solution and they're going to stay on coal.

Agree entirely. These carbon removal solutions are always a smokescreen for the real problem. Just look at the scale of what would be required for this enhanced weathering project. Directly fom the link given in the summary on weathering it gives details on an analysis of the technology applied to Ireland. Covering ALL of the arable land available in Ireland would give a net removal of 1 to 2 M tonnes of carbon per year. Required figure is 10000 times this so even if all the worlds farmland was covered it still wouldn't be enough. And if you did that what are the consequences? Hmm. An awful lot of acid leach off into Oceans which are already acidifying rapidly. So you don't actually fully solve the problem but exacerbate another aspect of it.

The coming job market changes are going to be fundamentally different from any previous rounds of automation. It's fairly obvious that advances in both machine intelligence and robotics in the next few decades are going to lead to the situation where humans are just not needed for the vast majority of jobs in today's marketplace. Historically displaced workers retrained in new roles that had been impossible previously, either because the workforce had been too busy doing other more fundamental stuff, or the job had only become newly available due to the technology shift. With the coming change it's hard to see how there will be enough non-robot jobs for all. The fundamentals of how economies work are going to have to change.

Tbh their conclusions are a bit of a stretch. They're trying to match mass spectra from Cassini with laboratory EI spectra of known compounds. From their analysis they are then claiming unequivocal identification of specific compound types ( esters, alkenes, ethers, etc). The Cassini data is pretty noisy and low resolution, and in general it's very difficult to determine exact composition based on real world data like this. To report this as unambiguous detection, instead of as a possible, is misleading.

Oops, I'm only half right with the cats. It seems female ligers and tigons are fertile, whilst males are not. Seems the infertility aspect of separate species is a bit blurry when they get a little too close to each other. You just can't put nature in a box. Check out the ants which lay eggs that turn out an entirely different species

Err, you're saying that.

If the Blue Jay and Green Jay can interbreed and produce fertile offspring then they are not different species. That appears to be the case here unless theres some detail I'm missing.

Nobody knows yet whether the cross offspring is fertile or not. We'll have to wait and see if the cyan jay is able to breed to know. Tigers and lions can breed, but the offspring, ligers and tigons, can't.

Who said the cyan jay is fertile?

I didn't mean the analysis from a scientific perspective was out of date; it's still very relevant. I've got a physics background and agree with Scotty that you canny change the laws of physics. Being a decade old doesn't change the math. Rather it was that a lot of the text uses costings which are now well out of date for a range of reasons. It would be useful to see it updated for today's numbers but agree that the conclusions would be the same.