From me, as well. Making a public apology is hard.
I believe that the modern Western diet, with staples such as high fructose corn syrup, highly refined carbs, and a low amount of fresh vegetables, is the major cause of a lot of the diseases we still face. The underlying pathology appears to be a disruption in glucose metabolism which leads to obesity, type 2 diabetes, and hypertension (but not high cholesterol, which I believe to be almost entirely just one aspect of T2DM, not a separate disease except for rare cases caused by genetic mutations). Those diseases, in turn, lead to the various complications that cause the actual problems (heart disease, stroke, dementia, and so on). I also believe that the “leaky gut” hypothesis that disruptions in our gut microbiome play a large part in this process.
I believe that there’s no such thing as grand X files style conspiracies. They’re just too large and unwieldy to coordinate at a large scale. If anything, the state of the current Republican Party shows that one doesn’t need a conspiracy to achieve the sort of things that used to be attributed to them. It can all be done out in the open.
I believe there’s a good chance you’re correct about the first one, but I’m not 100% certain. As for the second, I agree but with a limitation. I think the only way that any alien will ever meet another alien is if there’s a solar system out there where life develops separately on two (or more) planets or moons in the same solar system.
I believe that the solution to the Fermi paradox is that there’s a limit to how advanced technology can get, not just for humans, but for any life forms. Interstellar space travel with living organisms, no matter how long the time scale, is beyond that limit.
I mean, you can kinda prove that. All the evidence points that way.
What I would add though is that the real problem is the foods that are getting displaced by ultra processed foods, especially plants. Plants seem to be able to counteract the damage caused by eating meat, and without that protective effect we have a lot of disease. Which is why I think, for health reasons, the goal should be more adding in plant-based foods rather than excluding anything in particular.
I agree about adding in plant based foods, especially if we’re talking about vegetables as opposed to foods based on flour and refined simple sugars.
As far as being able to prove it, the problems are multiple. There just isn’t any good way of conducting long term studies on how specific details of our diets affect our health. We’re too long lived as a species to be able to study such things using the “gold standard” of the randomized control study. It would also, of course, be unethical to control the diet of the study participants to the extent needed to get results that can lead to concussions about specific aspects of a diet.
Instead, we have to rely on observational studies or controlled studies of shorter lengths of time. Those are still useful, but IMHO fall short of the standard of being able to prove a hypothesis about the long term effects on our health of any specific aspect of our diets.
I want to add my thanks as well.
My knee-jerk “shut-up” was uncalled for. I apologize for that.
One thing that I feel certain of, but cannot prove, is that, deep down, most people who follow a religion - or some political ideologies, or a certain politician - know that it’s full of holes, or isn’t true. They just won’t admit it out loud.
I also believe that the big social media companies like Facebook / Instagram, TikTok, and X could do a lot better a job of moderation, they just don’t want to. I base this on what I’ve seen when a local tragedy occurs. Whenever there’s a car wreck, shooting, public suicide or suicide attempt, etc., any comments about who was involved or any posts with detailed information or graphic photos / videos about what happened get taken down very quickly, usually within a few minutes. On the other hand, the usual scam posts about “video of the local tragedy found here, click on this link to find out more!” style scams are never removed. The other typical junk posts like “I like you’re comment, please send me a friend request” or “I got rich trading crypto with so and so, like their page to get rich too!” are also never moderated. Posts from someone with actual knowledge of a given tragedy, crime, accident, etc., however, are always quickly removed.
I actually chuckled and you were right- I went off on a thing I should not have.
Some of the kern County things hit too close to home, it is a sore spot for me.
I go in another direction with this.
ISTM that being taught from a young age to “believe” in things that have no definable evidence actually has the effect of structuring the individual’s brain in some way (programming them, as it were) that makes them more susceptible throughout life to believe other things without evidence.
So, yes, I agree that these individuals do know that it’s full of holes. However, they have been programmed to dismiss this factor as having value.
What limit do you believe there is on technology, beyond what we now know of physics? Because with what we now know of physics, interstellar travel is easy. It takes only a few million years, practically no time at all.
My currently-favored answer to the Fermi paradox (which, apropos of this thread, I cannot prove) is that there’s not one Great Filter, but two, and that both of them were the Great Oxygenation Event. In order to get a technological civilization like us, we needed something like the Great Oxygenation Event to make it possible for living things to store and use large amounts of energy, and on most life-bearing worlds, that didn’t happen… and further, even on most life-bearing worlds where it did happen, the biome couldn’t survive it, and all life went extinct. We were lucky, because we both had oxygenation, and we survived it.
I am certain that people who post pictures with “Why don’t posts like this ever trend?” also kick puppies.
I am certain that the heavy usage of plastics, especially in food packaging, is a major factor in the ever-increasing number of cancer cases each year.
There’s several areas that I think are bottlenecks. For all of the following, by “we” I mean not just humans, but any type of sapient life form that’s similar to ours, which I suspect is the vast majority (although I can’t prove that either 
).
I don’t think we’ll ever develop tech to sufficiently shield an interstellar spacecraft traveling at speeds that are significant fractions of the speed of light. Radiation will have damaged any such craft beyond functionality by the time it arrives at some other solar system.
I don’t think we’ll ever develop tech to keep life going for millions of years on a spacecraft. There just isn’t a way to practically store enough energy to maintain for that long a period of time. There’s also the damage that will be done to the genetic material over time, which will occur at a much faster rate outside the protective magnetic field of our home planet, and even faster at the 10 or 20 percent of the speed of light.
I don’t think that it’s practical to store and drag along double the energy already allotted for the mission (the energy that will be needed to slow down the spaceship) with fuel that will just be sitting there doing nothing until it’s time decelerate.
I think that should we arrive at another system, there’s a good chance that there won’t be any resources in usable form to repair and refuel the spaceship / build a brand new one / conduct more research to determine where to go next / etc. My guess is that most stars will turn out to have a collection of planets that are a combination of gas giants, ice giants, and hot rocky planets like Mercury and Venus, but no Earth or even Mars like planets. That would mean the end of that particular mission as a failure. We’re already talking about a massive allocation of resources for just one such mission, and that’s in the IMHO highly unlikely event we even get to the tech level to launch. Asking that we send out thousands to millions of such missions to find a suitable solar system by playing the odds makes it even less likely to ever happen. Assuming we’re dealing with nuclear fission as the source of power, I doubt that there’s enough uranium and plutonium* in the entire solar system to send out that many interstellar missions, and that’s assuming we develop tech to extract from the Earth’s core, the other rocky planets, and (even less likely) the gas giants, and (much much less likely) from inside the sun. And forget about nuclear fusion. I don’t think it’s ever going to happen, much less in a manner that can be made safely portable for an interstellar journey.
*. There’s also the matter that life forms that developed in a solar system from an earlier generation of stars are not going to have uranium or plutonium available to them, because it wouldn’t have been created yet, and so will lack a fuel source to even make the attempt.
There are some things I remember clear as a bell. These would mostly be tramatic experiences.
Almost died in 1972 from a motorcycle accident. I remember it clear as a bell. And oddly, I was coming and going from a conconsion. Didn’t hurt at all, but then I suspect I was in shock from blood loss.
Coming out of a hip replacement 7 years ago. Unfortunatly, I remember very, very well. Most people do fine. I had some issues.
Others that may just have imprinted on me because it’s a bit important to me, I might embelish as a story to tell friends.
I believe that the solution to the so called Fermi Paradox is quite simple. There ARE no other intelligent, technological, species, capable of even limited space flight, anywhere within our own Milky Way galaxy. Anywhere.
Probabilities are not science, there must be, is not science. There is no evidence of anyone else, anywhere.
The answer to the question; Are we alone? is Yes. People do not like this answer, but it is correct with all the information we have. This is not a Star Trek universe.
I don’t believe homo sapiens are smart enough to prevent their own ultimate self-destruction.
Possibly, but even today anaerobic microbes survive in limited niches. I don’t think the dieoff could be total, and if it isn’t organisms will eventually evolve that can first tolerate and then actual utilize oxygen.
I have wondered if wood necessarily would always evolve. If the local equivalent of plants instead used alternate stiffeners like keratin, chitin or calcium carbonate, there might not be much handy to burn. But since cellulose is basically polymerized sugar it’s independently reevolved a couple of times, so it seems more likely.
The question then becomes, “why not?”. What specifically is the bottleneck? Other than a technological species like ours being so fantastically unlikely that it was a long shot that even we happened.
When I hear about fixing races I always think about this:
One thing I have heard and it sounds plausible is that if a horse owner is having a run of bad luck and is in danger of not being able to pay their stable fees all those involved will collude and let them win an unimportant race. The purse isn’t big but it’s enough to keep them afloat for a little while.
I believe there are Big foots.
Can’t prove it.
But, they’re out there.