[ExI] Dodged the bullet maybe

[spike at rainier66.com]

> On Behalf Of John Clark via extropy-chat
>
Subject: Re: [ExI] Dodged the bullet maybe

 

On Thu, Feb 6, 2020 at 11:40 AM spike jones via extropy-chat <extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org <mailto:extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> > wrote:

 

>>… We just got a text from our friends who are nearly two days out to sea heading east back from a Hawaii vacation.  The captain announced they are turning back and heading for Hawaii because one of the passengers has (an unspecified) medical emergency. 

 

>…A passenger on the 116,000 ton cruise  ship Diamond Princess tested positive for the Wuhan virus and now the ship is tied up in Yokohama Japan and 3700 people are under quarantine and not allowed to leave the ship.

 

 John K Clark

 

 

 

 

Events coming to the attention of the public today cause us to snap out of our tunnel-vision outlook on life and focus on the big picture.

 

Today we learn of an existential risk we never even knew existed:

 

http://www.keckobservatory.org/monster-galaxy

 

A galaxy can run short of material for new star formation as XMM-2599 did, which after a few tens of billions of years results in insufficient heavy element formation to sustain all known life-forms.  This is a clear existential risk: it could halt humanity’s expansion throughout the universe within the next 100 billion years.  Oh mercy, bad news indeed.

 

When we are suddenly confronted with such devastating news, it causes us to get a fresh perspective on the petty stuff that we can’t do anything about and really just doesn’t matter much, such as newly-evolved diseases and the usual mainstream media barrage of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

 

spike

 

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.extropy.org/pipermail/extropy-chat/attachments/20200206/7f50360f/attachment.htm>