Tlaloc_Temporal

Eh, that’s a few dozen steps removed. By that standard, every herbivore “uses” photosynthesis.

These guys (coral & lichen too) use photosynthesis much more directly, completely encapsulating the algea and supporting it internally. It’s much closer to mitochondria.

Also, the cooling effect sulphate aerosols can cause only really happens at high altitudes. At low altitudes the reflected light is less likely to escape to space, and the aerosols fall out of the air faster.

Even if they reached high altitudes, one of the effects of being in the atmosphere is moving with the wind, across entire hemispheres. And at tropospheric heights, sulphates, their products, and other byproducts of combustion may destroy ozone at significant levels.

There may come a day where aerosol-based geo-engineering becomes a part of climate management, but it’s definitely not with bunker fumes.

It would be really nice on less powerful hardware too. One picture gallery can eat all my RAM real fast.

It’s almost analogous. A more massive object experiences a larger force caused by gravity, so assuming the gravity field stays the same, a larger mass is heavier.

You’re right that it’s technically incorrect, especially when talking about something like moving the Earth with gravity.

Both accelerate at the same speed, but the bowling ball completes it’s fall first because the Earth was pulled up to meet it. The bowling ball falls faster not because it’s moving faster, but because it’s fall is shorter.

Whales are surprisingly new.

an intelligent species isn’t going to be limited by chance encounters.

That’s actually a fantastic point, we change our environment to be more suitable to ourselves, including cultivating unique yet safe species. I’ve never heard of a poison dart frog farm, nor a field of death caps.

Aliens tree people is an interesting picture indeed.

That’s based on species though, so it would overrepresent unlikely encounters. I can go eat pine bark or grass on any continent and probably be A-OK.

I do wonder how that data compares with other mammals though. Is it just average, or is it significantly higher?

Scavenging carcasses and chasing predators away from a kill is definitely a behavior we had in the past. Particularly during droughts and famines, scavenging would be an important food source on the Saharan scrubland. IIRC, this would’ve been before persistence hunting was a thing, back in the H.erectus days, maybe even as far back as some Australopiths.

It is kinda weird that humans are so resilient to so many things though. It’s part of being scavenging omnivores, but alients with a more specialized diet might be weirded out.

I would argue that habitat destruction, the introduction of hypercarivores, and chemical spraying would have a much larger effect on bird and insect populations around urban areas than a reduction in mosquitoes, but I’ll admit that I haven’t done any research (primary or secondary) on the topic.

My point was that a genetic attack vector would have far less side-effects than DDT, and pointing out the flaws of DDT does nothing to criticize attacking mosquitoes genetically.

The whole point is that DDT caused a mosquito crash and nothing bad happened. If we can crash mosquitoes without DDT, it would be better for everyone.

There are probably a few handfuls of other parasites that would count too.

I think KPH is the preferred acronym. km/h is the proper unit of course.

Lucky, I mean it is exactly the opposite way! Teach me some local languages, like Cree or Dene, maybe something Inuk.

I guess I am telling people to speak English though, aren’t I? Well it’s good to keep updated on the colonizer tongue I suppose.

Now get off my native grass lawn!

Oh probably, but I don’t speak latin. Most people don’t speak latin; there’s like 1000 people in the world maximum who could hold a conversation in latin.

We really should rename botanical berries to something else.

I thought Egyptians had bad teeth because their flour was ground with sandstone, leaving sand in their bread. They ground their teeth into nothing by eating sand.

Drogue chutes are good too, especially for stabilizing a craft that really wants to make like a lawn dart. Using them I can make Duna landings with only a few seconds of thrust from a soft touchdown.

Repacking can be tedious though…