I have probably mentioned this, but IMHO portal was invented by Terry Pratchett.

Discworld, Book 22, The Last Continent (1998)

The wizards looked at the gently rippling surface. There should have been several feet of solid wood sticking out of it.
“Well, well, well,” said the Archchancellor, going back in out of the cold air. “Do you know, I’ve never actually seen one of these?”
“Anyone remember Archchancellor Bewdley’s boots?” said the Senior Wrangler, helping himself to some cold mutton from the trolley. “He made a mistake and got one of the things opened up in the left boot. Very tricky. You can’t go walking around with one foot in another dimension.”
“Well, no…” said Ridcully, staring at the tropical scene and tapping his chin thoughtfully with the seashell.
“Can’t see what you’re treading in, for one thing,” said the Senior Wrangler.
“One opened up in one of the cellars once, all by itself,” said the Dean. “Just a round black hole. Anything you put in it just disappeared. So old Archchancellor Weatherwax had a privy built over it.”
“Very sensible idea,” said Ridcully, still looking thoughtful.
“We thought so too, until we found the other one that had opened in the attic. Turned out to be the other side of the same hole. I’m sure I don’t need to draw you a picture.”
“I’ve never heard of these!” said Ponder Stibbons. “The possibilities are amazing!”
“Everyone says that when they first hear about them,” said the Senior Wrangler. “But when you’ve been a wizard as long as I have, my boy, you’ll learn that as soon as you find anything that offers amazing possibilities for the improvement of the human condition it’s best to put the lid back on and pretend it never happened.”
“But if you could get one to open above another you could drop something through the bottom hole and it’d come out of the top hole and fall through the bottom hole again…It’d reach meteoritic speed and the amount of power you could generate would be—”
“That’s pretty much what happened between the attic and the cellar,” said the Dean, taking a cold chicken leg. “Thank goodness for air friction, that’s all I’ll say.”
Ponder waved his hand gingerly through the window and felt the sun’s heat.
“And no one’s ever studied them?” he said.

I agree.
What I think it was was an acid bath, rinse, and maybe a coat of clear enamel or something to make it smoother? That's just a guess based on a minimal knowledge of metallurgy. Acid is often used to bring out patterns in cut meteorites and patterned steel.

Probably Tesla meteorites.

That guy is ONLY saved if a HUGE volcano goes off or a good-sized meteorite hits us...

Or, you know, nuclear war.

I fI was Bill Nye I would amend these bets with atmospheric readings of ash @ so many parts per million (at the point it really is WAY too high!). Or also amending it for debris consistent with a large meteorite hit (a few different choices in the ring to measure to see if it's a meteorite too); so if "x" per milllion is too high in the atmosphere, again the year is bunck (the decade may become bunck all depending the levels of both events).

But, the worst, nuclear fallout from what "may be" WWIII or a smaller "civil conflict", like Pakistan and India could top the meters pretty high with worldwide fallout if they drop a good ten or so (again this is based off the material used to create the bomb and once more it's parts per million in the atmosphere combined with, how much?)...

No matter what Bill Nye is right, and even if these type of "small-term" events slow it down momentarily, after the planet helps to clean to out of the atmosphere we have a big issue on hand because some of that stuff WILL stay and then Bill Nye can show you how in two years (and as we know, it could be much longer), or the time it truly takes to clean it out leaves us with an atmosphere that is now even worse...

AIM FOR THE PARTIAL WIN BOYS AND GIRLS!!! I know you all want zombies (radioactive, Japanese spiritual based demons and shinigami here to try to kill us all until every boy and girl 15 years old or so become shounen trope mystical power holders made to save our world from the oncoming onslaught of Donald Trump and Putin phantasms and demons, truly horrific--college students may apply; grownups may gain insight into how to pull off the most powerful abilities that they must teach to the "chosen ones" to use it to defeat either Putin or The Trump (spiritual fighter, capable of killing people even with his TERRIBLE "slams", fighting power: 0, defense: every fanboy on Earth!)--or how to use "super tactics with the "main-group" who'll have stories written about them in their local High Scool Paper every week: in the American, Japanese, Russian, and European branches (needed for Putin, since he writes great stories explaining how each of us suck ass and even though we try it is ALWAYS Putin, riding in on a Velociraptor with a railgun that's able to drive those evil bastards out, especially when he gets off the horse and makes the wrestling techniques and signature move, crossing his arms in an "X" and slamming down over the side of his genitals (causing all watching to be confused and easily dismembered in twenty minutes... The glory of dawn continues in the next 4-6 hours before dawn...

SO... What exactly do you guys believe you should vote for? I say Vote Bill Nye and Vote often. Did you know that in both those "metaverses" Bill Nye becomes akin to Dr. Strange. Great because he protects ALL of us from this world with an extremely powerful spell--as he IS the only person here that knows just what in the hell is happening.

All hail the kid's scientist, through Sarah Palin on the "happiness tour bus" to Putin. He LOVES her. Especially listening to her talk. Ceaseless entertainment...!


I decided to list this as "sarcasm", BUT there is SO MUCH that isn't. Sometimes you have to hide the truth in reality...err...not reality...

The scary thing is that while in Australia it seems like the wildlife tries to kill you, in Russia it seems like the earth itself wants you dead.

Well, that and meteorites.

and winter...

Don't worry Dad, you can probably sell that meteorite for more than your car was worth.

@RedSky

Crossing your fingers and waiting for the tooth fairy to fix everything is not a valid response to global crises. That is what passivity amounts to whether your eventual, hoped for remedy is shiny's simple-minded faith or failed economic models that got us into this mess in the first place, or unforeseeable scientific advances that may never come.

You've been using the most preposterously optimistic projections available, okay, let's assume they're correct and we level off at somewhere around nine to eleven billion. You want all of these people to live worthwhile, prosperous lives; well that's at least five times as many high energy consuming, 21st century humans as we've ever actually been able to support.

This coming at the end of an economic and technological bubble of readily available, dense energy supply for which we have no replacement; relative efficiency gains in spending that energy that can never be replicated (because efficiency doesn't go above 100%); casual environmental damage that cannot continue; and diminishing returns in every scientific field, where advancement is always becoming more difficult and more expensive.

This isn't a pessimistic view. Humanity has a bright future, all we have to do to secure it is stop creating more and more people out of nothing for no reason. Barring extra-terrestrial threats like meteorites, solar flares and relativistic missiles launched by hostile alien species; we have the knowledge we need to build a civilisation capable of enduring for millions of years, or burn out in a couple of hundred.

I have a really hard time believing this.

In the entire history of air flight, millions and millions of miles have been logged and not once has an airliner, helicopter, blimp or glider ever hit or been hit by a meteorite. I would think the odds would be astronomically higher that an aircraft would be hit than a single skydiver who just happened to have his GoPro on.

Not saying it's impossible, it just feels highly, highly, highly unlikely.

I think a more interesting title would be "Skydiver killed by meteorite while in free fall." But that might just be a tad morbid, and wrong. So let's go with "hit by" instead . . .

Otherwise, it's quite plausible for something like this to happen. We're constantly being bombarded so eventually it's bound to happen. But yeah, was hoping for more smoke and flames.

I'm not sure why you say that it didn't go much faster than the jumper. It only stayed in the frame about 1/3 of a second even though it's not really that close. It may be slower than you might expect a meteorite to be going, but if it's a fragment from after the disintegration/explosion of a larger one it easily might have slowed to just terminal velocity, which seems about right to me from the video.
What made me wonder was the lack of any visible smoke/trail. It could just be a rock dropped from the plane above, even a real meteor dropped from the plane (in case someone found it before the jig was up that it was faked). True, it would be a lot of effort for little pay off, but people do dumber things.
Still unsure...1/2 expecting this to turn out to be a commercial...but for what?

"it just sounds like a return to feudalism."

How so specifically? An agrarian culture based on farmland ownership?

It sounds to me that your imagination is getting the best of you. Creative, but not at all what I am describing. Somalia is a failed state, and a socialist failed state at that. However, as you know, things from medical services to life expectancy to infrastructure to child mortality to crime all dropped in the 20 years in which Somalia had no functioning government. Things got better not worse. Why do you think that is?

Saying a free market would be like Somalia is like saying that a government-regulated market would be like North Korea. There are other issues to consider.

Libertarianism does not posit that a free market automatically means a perfect or even a great society. But it does posit that a free market system will ease poverty, increase wealth, and ensure peace at a faster pace than a statist one. At whatever level a culture/society starts at, they will improve and be better off in a free market rather than under state rule. Somalia started off in a mess, caused by its failed state circumstances. You cannot seriously expect to go from one day to the next, eliminate the state, and expect that overnight all that damage will sort itself out just because now -- a day later -- there's no state. You have to rebuild and accumulate wealth over time. And Somalia did remarkably well considering the mess it started from.

A society like the US, which is much better off (for the time-being!), would improve even more, rather than deteriorate, with less or even no government. But of course, if a meteorite wipes out DC overnight, that does not mean overnight improvement. After all, the government has wiped out many private institutions that would need to be in place to take over from the government in providing the services they put out of business.

On the other hand, the road towards more state control (which you, strangely continue to support and defend) leads to more deterioration of the society/culture. The US is doing better because of all the capital it accumulated during the century in which it functioned under little government intervention with regards to its economic matters. That wealth has been badly squandered, and now Americans are living off what remains, slowly but surely bankrupting the country though more government interventions, currency inflations, needless war, bailouts, surveillance, ad infinitum.

But make no mistake: whatever wealth the US as a nation has came about though free exchange in commerce, and was not the result of government regulation. The more government interferes, the slower the growth, until now it has reached the point where there is no growth, only debt. (The Treasury should be renamed the Department of Debt, because it has no money, only debt -- just like a majority of Americans.)

In sum: Somalis are improving. Americans are not. Whoever you are, I assure you, you started off in a much better place than the average Somali did. But look at their rate of change!


EDIT: Somalia also did not have a "free market" when it came to warlord gangs. Unless people had a choice as to which warlord to hire for protection or not, then that is not a free market when it comes to protection services. If allegiance to a particular warlord was voluntary, then you could more honestly make the claim that they had a "free market." Still, the situation is improving. And I think it would have improved faster had there not been the (UN-fueled) expectation of a future centralized government, had the UN not been financing groups towards this end, and had they not been incentivizing gangs to fight each other for position in a future "government."

There is nothing "free market" about forced conscription. I don't know why you would even say that.

Your video, Aaron Paul Pranks His Friend - Meteorites, has made it into the Top 15 New Videos listing. Congratulations on your achievement. For your contribution you have been awarded 1 Power Point.

At least they're not getting whaled by a giant meteorite!

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