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Jan Barendrecht's avatar

The video suggests that the presence of water, atmosphere and magnetic field is enough to start a sequence of evolving lifeforms. Would be easy to verify in the case of Mars which provided those conditions long ago.

Re collapse, some are expressing this in poetic form, preferable to those with the experience that none of the academic forms of expression had (have) any effect on the (disastrous) BAU scenario.

https://collapseofindustrialcivilization.com/2026/05/13/graphs-shaped-like-screams/

And while posting, got this:

Substack is experiencing technical problems. We are working to restore service. Thank you for your patience.

Verifying, I got this:

Substack.com Server Status Check

nothumb

SubstackWebsite Name:

substack.comURL Checked:

no responseResponse Time:

~3 minsDown For:

DOWN

Substack.com is DOWN for everyone.

It is not just you. The server is not responding...

Report an Issue

Substack Website Status History

Substack.com server report and response time

We have tried pinging Substack website using our server and the website returned the above results. If substack.com is down for us too there is nothing you can do except waiting. Probably the server is overloaded, down or unreachable because of a network problem, outage or a website maintenance is in progress...

[...]

Down Right Now

cloudflare.com - CloudFlare

Server is down. Last checked 58 secs ago.

elpais.com - Elpais

Server is down. Last checked 2 mins ago.

aa.com - American Airlines

Server is down. Last checked 10 mins ago.

marriott.com - Marriott

Server is down. Last checked 10 mins ago.

oregonlive.com - Oregon Live

Server is down. Last checked 15 mins ago.

John Day MD's avatar

Testing, Testing, Testing...

It strikes me as good(ish) that major information infrastructure like CloudFlare is crashing fairly often these days. I also like it that the electricity goes out at our rural homestead about every 6 weeks. We arrived last Saturday morning to no-electricity for the whole town... There is hope, because we humans can survive that.

Jan Barendrecht's avatar

The US grid was in bad shape even before the introduction of AI. Improving that at the expense of a population already having a problem with inflation and stagnating wages won't be possible, and being a bubble, the AI tycoons won't invest in it either. What would help is to use the war budget to improve infrastructure but "the owners" still think they can somehow maintain feudal power and hegemony.

John Day MD's avatar

Indeed. Out-surviving a faction of elites is hard work, takes a long time, good preparation and considerable luck. ;-/

Jan Barendrecht's avatar

Restoring a "large enough" sense of community would be a great help. In the US, armed gangs surely will be a problem when law & order breaks down and the gangs still having fuel will ransack rural areas.

John Day MD's avatar

I think the fuel will be problematic, and gangs with guns may not last too long in a country where so many people have guns.

We'll see. I think there is an optimum size of community, and I like that Yoakum has been so stable for its whole history, and never a slave economy, just farmers, ranchers tradesmen, and lately some oilfield workers.

Jan Barendrecht's avatar

The saying goes "one bullet can be one too much" so caution never is a luxury. Situation here is comparable, be it there's no fossil fuel in Panama, only bio-diesel and possibly, ethanol. Trying to convince lawyers that fermentation of (among others) sugar cane to butanol is the much better option (injection system, engine) is a hard job though ;-)