Das Brötchen

New one in the saga of Tony Hawk trying to live life as Tony Hawk

I remember as a kid the nearby small town had a "computer expert" who had a full storefront and office. If someone bricked their computer or it loaded with viruses he'd factory reset it for them and try to get it working again. He'd also buy, refurbish, rest, and resell old computers. But the main thing he advertised was if people brought him a computer and a list of programs they wanted installed on it he'd get them all set up. Flat rate of like 20 bucks.

(recent) tumblr exclusive linguistic phenomena:

me: oh thomas cromwell, we're really in it now. every day i get emails.

me: cromwell. cromwell this post has got too big and famous and people are starting to misunderstand me on it.

“Musk talks about Mars as a lifeboat for humanity, which is among the very stupidest things that someone could say,” says Adam Becker, an astrophysicist and author of the book More Everything Forever, which outlines the messianic, sci-fi fantasies of the tech oligarchs. “There are so many reasons why it’s such a bad idea, and this is not about, ‘Oh, we’ll never have the technology to live on Mars.’ That’s not what I’m saying. What I’m saying is that Earth is always going to be a better option no matter what happens to Earth. Like, we could get hit with an asteroid the size of the one that killed off the dinosaurs, and Earth would still be more habitable. We could explode every single nuclear weapon, and Earth would still be more habitable. We could have the worst-case scenario for climate change, and Earth would still be more habitable. Any cursory examination of any of the facts about Mars makes it very clear.”

I really like sci-fi stories where people have to go off and terraform a planet, or figure out how to rebuild civilization after some disaster, or ideally both. "The last ark-ship leaving Earth right before it becomes uninhabitable" sort of deal. But lately I've been coming around to this same idea, that it will always be more practical to try to save Earth than to try to start over elsewhere.