How Long Can Life Wait?

(mceglowski.substack.com)

35 points | by Ariarule 1 hour ago

6 comments

  • gb2d_hn 2 minutes ago
    I thought this was going to be about my poor work-life balance from the title!?
  • schiffern 29 minutes ago
    One thing about panspermia math: why assume current travel conditions between the stars?

    Today the Sun is very far from other stars, but early in star formation (within nebula) the stars are

    1. much closer together

    2. have a higher rate of material ejection (mass exchange)

    3. likely have more more benign radiation environments unless near a star, due to GCR shielding by nebula gas

    4. likely have higher equilibrium temperature in 'interstellar space'

    Combined, these factors yield orders of magnitude improvement in panspermia efficiency vs the Sun.

  • themanmaran 27 minutes ago
    > But if 2-9-3 really had been isolated from its relative for a quarter billion years, enough random mutations in the rDNA should have accumulated for there to be a difference of at least 50 base pairs

    Occams razor definitely points to this just being a sterilization problem. But it would be funny if the bacteria was just way more stable than people expect.

  • thisisauserid 1 hour ago
    Based on the article, there is solid proof that microbes can remain viable for up to 100,000 years.
  • karbak 49 minutes ago
    For a brief moment there, seeing just the headline, I thought this was going to be about Pinboard.
  • shevy-java 41 minutes ago
    I hate the website. Why? Because when I scroll down, I get blocked, that is, I can not easily copy/paste via a selection anymore; the selection simply does not work, and is connected to the slow-fade out and pop-in of an irrelevant widget I can not want to be bothered to even look at.

    Any author who uses such a website strategy gets insta-perma-banned by me.

    It is not worth my time "reading" anything that is made useless by really horrible UI choices, be it infinite scrolling or fafe-out-scrolling-click-to-continue. No, I do not want to click on anything to continue. I don't even want to see accept-cookies. Whenever such a question comes up I'd auto-say no, no pester-widget. Thankfully for the latter there are extensions available, but I have not found a strategy against the slow-fade-in-pester-strategy.

    Why can I not easily select the text I wish to copy/paste here, from that horrible website? I have no clue, but I can not invest time to investigate this. Hopefully more and more people realise that any strategy to pester people means you devalue YOUR OWN CONTENT as-is. The same applies to medium.com too - it is one reason I do not read anything from there anymore. People need to stop putting up barriers if they want people to read anything.