Too true. I don’t know how many articles like this I’ve read over the last few years. The title suggests with weasel-words that an Earth-like paradise planet capable to supporting carbon/water based life has been found.

But then when you dig into the details there’s always one or more catches that complicate things. Things like:

• It’s a super Earth several times the mass of our Earth (as is the case here).
• It doesn’t have tectonic activity and/or a magnetosphere.
• There are actually zero signs of water.
• It’s barely inside the habitable zone, so it’ll either be very hot or very cold.
• The atmosphere turns out to be very toxic to life as we know it.
• The star it orbits is highly volatile.
• The star it orbits is a red dwarf (which while isn’t necessarily a deal-breaker it does present other challenges).
• Its parent star system is very volatile and print to heavy colliding of other hazards.

I’ve wondered why the habitable world spin is picked up so much. That makes a lot of sense that it’s being promoted to help get funding for post-graduate studies.

Hate to say it, but AI-driven voice impersonation is not coming - it’s already here. It’s not perfect, but it’s pretty damn impressive, and is at a useable state already.

Good article. Just shared it with some less tech-savvy friends.

Good article.

We need a version of the UK government’s National Risk Register, covering everything from the collapse of financial markets to “an attack on government” (but, unsurprisingly, that risk is described in terms of external threats). The register mostly predicts long-term consequences, with recovery taking months. That may end up being the case here.

I assume they mean on a state government level? I doubt this will happen, unless it’s already started. Plus, as they point out, such plans typically focus on external threats to the government. A huge internal threat like this is a long-standing blind spot. Hopefully in the future that prospect becomes a more prominent concern.

We need to dust off those “in the event of an emergency” disaster response procedures dealing with the failure of federal government—at individual organizations that may soon hit cash-flow problems and huge budget deficits without federal funding, at statehouses that will need to keep social programs running, and in groups doing the hard work of archiving and preserving data and knowledge.

This is a great point. DRPs (Disaster Recovery Plans) have been a pretty big focus on organizations I’ve worked at. However, the focus here is almost always on natural disasters that can cripple an organization’s IT and daily operations. So I don’t know how much those will help in this situation either.

We’re talking about short term credit lines potentially being crippled and regulatory organizations essentially shutting down. Hopefully it doesn’t come to that.