Comments by "Snack Plissken" (@snackplissken8192) on "Kurzgesagt – In a Nutshell" channel.

  1. That last bit, about reprocessing it is probably largely thanks to advances in nuclear reactor technology which allow plants to run on vastly less enriched uranium than older models. If we focus on building cheaper and more efficient reactors we might be able to use new reactors to recycle spent fuel rods from older reactors until they are no longer a long term problem. Additionally, it would mean that no country would have a civilian use for uranium enrichment and countries could have nuclear power without the threat of them making nuclear weapons with civilian tech. Cleaner cheaper nuclear might finally break the dominance of coal power and bring a green future that much closer.
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  2. This is the price you pay for trying to develop weapons powerful enough to allow you to draw down troop levels and save money on war matériel. The US gambled on nukes as a way to avoid committing unpopular levels of funding and manpower to fighting the Soviets after WWII. The fact that Russia just kidnapped more German scientists than we did and paid traitors for weapons technology ensured that the benefits were short-lived. The Cold War only ended when America used a combination of military spending and outright bluffs about space based weapons to tip the Soviet Union into bankruptcy. Evolutionarily, weapons are a hard-to-spoof show of the relative health and strength of an organism. In nature, an organism with a smaller weapon will yield to a similar organism with a larger weapon rather than risk death fighting. Modern weaponry has proven to be a poor proxy of strength, since the countries that display weapons now are mostly free riders from countries that paid for the research and development and many modern armies are like bucks with hollow horns that will shatter on impact. This is bad because it is an honest measurement of relative strength that keeps fights between unequal opponents from happening. WWII happened because the Axis Powers underestimated the industrial power of the Allies, and a similar argument could be made of the Cold War. They thought they legitimately had much bigger horns and picked what they thought would be an easy fight that ended up costing everybody dearly.
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  3. Dr. Drew Pinsky has been warning for years that he and his fellow board-certified addiction medicine specialists have experienced growing concerns about weed-induced psychosis in certain populations of patients, stemming from the radical increases in THC consumed by weed users. The problem is that nobody is studying it, so you can neither definitively prove nor disprove a causal link or properly weigh your risk factors.
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  4. Bacteriophages evolve faster than bacteria, so it makes sense to sample and study them as treatments for deadly mutations of bacteria. If natural predators from the human biome can be quickly spread across the world to cull threats to humanity, you could end pandemics in the early stages and create extreme evolutionary pressure for benign strains.
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  5. The initial argument is basically Laplace's Demon (short version, if an entity knows the position and velocity of every particle in the universe at a given time it can perfectly predict the future). People tend to confuse the actions of the silent right hemisphere, which gets heavy input from the body, with a lack of free will because the left hemisphere, which possesses language, lacks the right's ability to know what the other hemisphere is thinking. When the left is forced to recognize that it so often retroactively justifies the actions of the right hemisphere, it thinks that its free will has been violated because it thinks it is the entire mind since it is the only internal voice it hears. Ian McGilchrist's "The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World" explains this in great detail.
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