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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 5th, 2023

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  • “one fifth the mass” is not the same thing as “five times lighter”

    Consider something that weighs half as much. It’s 50% lighter … 0.5 times lighter. Something that weighs 0.2 times as much has 20% of the weight, and is 80% lighter. If it weighed 1% as much, it would be 99% lighter (0.99 times lighter). If it was 100% lighter … it would weigh nothing. Five times lighter would be -4 times the original mass.

    We already have accurate and precise ways to describe less mass (albeit leaving aside for the moment the distinction between mass and weight). It’s no harder to say “one fifth” than “five times”, but only one is correctly describing what is going on.







  • global warming is definitely something it makes sense to worry about and which there’s still some chance to mitigate the worst effects of.

    The sun expanding - or even the much earlier effects before that happens, as the sun gets hotter - will happen on such long time scales that there simply won’t be any humans at all; most species only last about a million years or so, vastly less time than we’re talking about.

    We might well make the planet nigh uninhabitable in considerably less than one-millionth of the sun-being-a-major-problem time. It’s like worrying about the bridge maybe rusting dangerously a few decades from now, while not paying attention to the truck that has just veered onto your side of the road and will surely hit you in the next few seconds. You need to take evasive maneuvers, not worry about the bridge.