more important to protect and promote critical thinking skills
My father had a 50 year career in education, he spent it trying to promote critical thinking - he recently retired and feels that the system has made negative progress through all 50 years of his career in terms of improving critical thinking skills through the educational system.
as I said, the human mind is very bad at intuitively grasping the implications of very large or very small numbers.
I don't worry about it, because it is a very small number and my life is likely very short by comparison, but... the very large number of potential sites for life to evolve in the visible universe still yields zero evidence of a technological "WE ARE HERE" sign that we can understand. That implies that either: A) we really are the center of the universe, first to develop technology or B) such developments of energy manipulating technology are an exceedingly small number rare for... reasons that we do not yet understand. And of course C) those of us who have seen irrefutable proof of alien technology are hiding it from the rest of us for... reasons.
Of the possibilities, I find A) much less likely than B), and C) to be impossibly absurd - people just aren't that good at keeping secrets for long periods of time.
Go ahead and actually calculate what risk there might be from something like this.
You're analyzing a risk we could imagine, what you can't do is analyze a risk we haven't imagined yet. Looking at the vastness of the Universe and the rate at which our theories about how it all works evolve, I find it far more likely that we haven't imagined more of actual reality than we have.
sometimes miraculously pop like balloons to spray us with liquid death.
Not miraculously, we know some of the causes that make this happen. What we don't know is all of the causes or all of the existing conditions that will precede such events.
When such event does "miraculously" happen we may be able to learn from observation what likely triggered it and then it won't be "miraculous" anymore, it will have an analyzable probability - with a rather large window of uncertainty.
Until such an event kills us all, or at least tanks civilization. We won't likely learn much from that one.
The odds of a civilization-ending asteroid or comet hitting Earth in the next century is minuscule.
Absolutely, based on the information we have today.
That dark swarm of asteroids that was launched out of the Magellanic Cloud 8 billion years ago that's coming on a direct collision course against the Milky Way rotation - yeah, we don't know about that one.
The thing about our probabilities of events that haven't happened yet to leave a scar that we can notice on the surface of the Earth, we haven't been very good at observing the sky except for the last 100 years or so, really 50. So, we're learning more and more about things and newly discovered hazards don't lower the probability of occurrence...
A star that’s capable of producing a gamma ray burst is not “innocent-looking”, it’s actually very obvious. There are none that are that close to us.
That we know of the mechanism that produced the burst. What we don't know about that star is the super Jupiters orbiting it in a quasi stable multi-body arrangement that could collapse a bunch of mass into the star and turn it from Jekyll to Hyde under your bed ASAP.
Yeah, you have to take it for what it's worth, and it's worth a lot. Most of what it says is pretty close, and when close is good enough, go for it. When AI is telling you how to secure your brake hydraulic connectors and it doesn't seem quite right - time for a 2nd opinion.
My Google account that I had for 15+ years got banned from YouTube when I let my 9 year old play around making edited videos. He'd mash up clips from PBS Kids and other places. Apparently PBS didn't like this and after a couple of vague warnings, my account is banned from YouTube for life, no actual chance of appeal. Of course I could just ditch it and open a new account under another name, but I'm stubborn, over seven years have passed and they're still silent on the issue. I can watch YouTube, but not comment or post videos. Oh well.
So, I believe a tolerable generator load for most people to pedal is around 10W... battery charge / discharge is maybe 80% efficient, so you're netting 8W into your storage. Pedal relatively hard for an hour and you might get 20 minutes use of your IPS LCD screen.
Solar panels are indeed the way to go.
Also society isn’t going to collapse overnight.
Not if it goes down like you expect it to.
In my experience, the real problems are the ones you weren't planning for.
Even if we don't end up nuking each other like we thought we would in the 60s-90s, we could still get a massive asteroid / comet strike with less than a week's notice. That innocent looking star 23 light years away could have collapsed 22.99 years ago and zap us with a gamma ray burst next week.
More likely: something we don't even know about comes along and makes life far more challenging than it has been for 100,000 years.
The lone rambo raider types aren’t going to last long, humans are social animals that do best in tribes and for the most part want to form tribes.
That's why Mad Max has a crew.
the under valuing on steps we could just take to not have this future in the first place.
They feel helpless to change the current course of events, and they're not far wrong as individuals.
What they also underestimate is how quickly they're gonna die when somebody decides they should after TSHTF. All the prepping in the world isn't gonna make living after a 20MT strike 20 miles away any fun at all. Living out in the boonies growing your own food? Whatever arsenal you have to protect it, all it takes is a band of yahoos with twice your numbers and firepower and your toast becomes their toast.
live in a fricking farming commune in the first place
Surprisingly difficult to do... we had a farming commune as neighbors for a couple of years, they never did reach food self sufficiency with 80 acres of fertile land and 16 people to work it. The Amish come close to making it work, but any Amish I have ever gotten to know tend to cheat, a lot.
Or, you know, voting for politicians who listen to scientists.
Yeah, they trust the "scientists" even less than you trust their politicians - and they're not 100% wrong, just mostly wrong.
Don't get me wrong: true science is the way to make progress, and we have built a lot on science in the past 200 years or so, but we have also got a lot of bought and paid for business tools running around in lab coats fooling the science community that they are just like them.
Anything beyond being self sufficient for a month is overkill in my opinion.
Disasters of my lifetime have been hurricanes. If you can hunker down for the storm and retain your ability to drive out of the devastation zone after the roads are cleared (usually in a couple of days), you're good. Keep enough gas to run the generators until you can get more gas, keep enough food to last until you can get to a source of more. I've never had to abandon home, even with some pretty hard direct hits, but when it's bad enough that's what you do. Go somewhere that hasn't been whacked.
If we politically screw up the whole planet, that's harder to prep for than a mild nuclear winter.
If the monitor draws even 20W, you're gonna be tired of that eBike generator solution really quick.
A single rooftop solar panel can do that, and charge a battery for a little after dark use while you're at it.
A true prepper will get an eInk monitor and resist the urge to scroll until they read all the way to the bottom of the page, but even a normal monitor uses a small fraction of a solar panel. Keyboard? Near zero. Mouse? Near zero x10 but still near zero when compared with 200W. RasPi? less than a normal monitor.
Andromeda is going to hit the Milky way, and it likely won't do anything to most earth-like planets because the densities of both (all) galaxies are so low.
Individual low odds things don't happen frequently, but collectively they happen a lot more often because there are so many low odds things with potential to happen.
The Holocene may only run 12,000 years - it looks like the Anthropocene is the most likely end for it, but life has been evolving on Earth for 3.5(ish) billion years, making the Holocene just 0.00034% of that period, 1/300,000th in round numbers.