Comments by "Kevin Street" (@Kevin_Street) on "Kurzgesagt – In a Nutshell" channel.

I'm 51, and most of the people I knew are now gone. Three died in car accidents, one died in a different kind of accident, one died from complications caused by Alzheimer's, and the vast majority died of cancer. Cancer is the big scary monster at the end of the road that most of us will have to deal with, sooner or later. If there's anything you can do to reduce your odds of getting cancer, do it! Wear sunscreen, get regular checkups, take vaccines, anything that makes it less likely. Putting off your fight with the cancer monster as long as possible is the greatest thing you can do to extend your life.
1700
And most important (imo), this is the only 100% human-habitable planet we have. It's the only world in the entire universe that's completely ideal for us to live on, right out of the box. Other planets won't have our biosphere, even if they're perfect in every other respect, so we need to learn how Earth works before we can build those features into other worlds.
31
Reddit is a decent alternative, but it suffers from the environment it exists within. Most people only use Reddit casually because that's how they use the Internet as a whole. The result is that Reddit has a small number of very large subreddits with thousands of people reading and contributing, and a large number of very small subreddits with dedicated user bases. The small subreddits are communities where the best interactions happen, but most of them are too small to survive.
25
I think I've seen more David Suzuki science documentaries than Kurzgesagt ones, thanks to "The Nature of Things" being on TV for so many years. Though that ratio will flip someday.
20
The Internet has massive potential to make the world a better place. I'm glad you found spaces and friends here where you can have those productive and awesome interactions. That's what it's all about. But there is a problem where it's become harder for most people to interact with the Internet in the same way. Some people have succeeded, but a great many just sort of "graze" around, looking for constant shallow social interaction because they don't have any meaningful deeper connections. It wasn't always this way. I agree with the video that we'd be better off if there were thousands of little communities online like it used to be.
15
You're right! I'm Gen X, the Internet was just becoming a thing when I was in my late twenties and I remember the progression: email listservs, forums, blogs, then social media like today. Forums were so much more fun than modern social media! We really did have little communities with our own constitutions. I was on forums with people I never met in real life, but we were all members of the same forum who agreed to abide by the same rules. That is, a community. Sometimes we'd just make up silly jokes and memes and have fun with each other. Sometimes we'd have debates about current events and stuff that went on for days. Try doing that on today's Facebook or Instagram.
7
I love everything about this. Let's get started!
5
@FrahdChikun Or to put it another way, we all need to realize that our "team" isn't completely right about everything and the rest of the world isn't totally wrong.
5
@NateDoesYT I'm glad you and @newtybot are here. 😀You're both helping to make the Internet a better place just by hanging out and having fun with others.
3
@ArawnOfAnnwn That's a good point. There's two kinds of anonymity: the anonymity of using a false identity, and the anonymity of just being another face in the crowd. Even if we use our real names, we're just a face in the crowd to most people we meet online. There's no pressure to be on our best behavior if the person we're rude to is somebody we'll never meet again.
3
@Ezequiel Ciamparella You're absolutely right that the mirrors will have to be maintained over time, but thin sheets of metal foil won't shatter when hit by a meteoroid, the object will just shoot through it like a bullet and leave a hole behind. Now the size of the hole, and the amount of crinkling the metal foil will go through when it absorbs some of the kinetic energy of the impact, are things we can minimize with proper engineering. But over time sections of the mirrors will grow increasingly tattered and need to be replaced. There's a greater danger to the mirrors, though: the radiation from the Sun. Over many years and centuries the radiation constantly reflecting from the mirrors will turn the metal foil brittle and opaque, until it no longer reflects anything. This means that all of the mirrors will need to be replaced periodically, since the metal can only last so long. That would be a continuing expense that would have to paid as the price for living on Venus.
3
Wow! ...Wait, if everybody is me, does that explain why other writers always seem to use my ideas before I can?
2
A very important and sobering message.
1
@InvdrDana I agree with you. Around 2000 I was in a forum made by fans of the niche sci-fi show "Andromeda." We had endless arguments over our community guidelines. I wondered why, until I realized the guidelines were our community constitution. It was the document where we defined the values that brought us together and made us a group, values that often had nothing to do with the show that was ostensibly why we were all there. I miss that place.
1
For me the scariest future is one where general AI does give humanity everything we want, and humanity stops doing anything. From that point on we become clients of the machines. They're not evil and don't wish us harm, but as a species we stop trying to improve ourselves, and become something like an intelligent domestic animal. Why strive and sacrifice, why train, why work at all, when an AI can do it for you?
1
Yeah, I loved some of the people on the old forums, and some of them were real dicks. But they were all my people. We need that again.
1
Colonizing Mars (and the Moon) is our training phase. If we can learn to live there, we can live anywhere in the Solar System.
1
@Ezequiel Ciamparella Totally, but there's no economic system where terraforming Venus turns a profit. Presumably this would be a project for a civilization that has tremendous wealth and a robust existing infrastructure in space. Like Kurzgesagt said, it would be the Great Pyramids of their time.
1
I like it! And the whole exercise will help humanity develop the skills for terraforming extrasolar planets when we finally get out to other star systems, where things are usually not arranged perfectly to our liking. But the idea of a whole planet depending so utterly upon systems of huge space based mirrors is a little chilling. We'd have to make sure nothing ever happened to those gigantic structures!
1
This is an old, old argument. I remember debating these exact same positions back in university nearly thirty years ago, and even before. Count me as firmly in the free will exists camp. As far as I can see the no free will camp commits more than one logical error. In addition to the category error of looking for the physical location of something that may not be physical in nature, they also make the error of assuming that something doesn't exist simply because they can't find it.
1