OMG- Yet Another Existential Threat!

Choice 1. It is in God's hands so don't worry about it

Choice 2. There is no God and in some finite period of time the whole universe will be dead anyhow...so don't worry about it.

Good advice. IOW, if it's something beyond your control, don't worry about it!

Someone ought to read that hard SF novel "The Black Cloud" by Fred Hoyle.

On one page it even contains a footnote giving the calculus used by the hero to make an estimate of the cloud's movement. He didn't patronise his audience with this "every equation will halve the sales" nonsense :)

Lots of other solid SF memes there, which other people only picked up decades later.

I last read it while chilling out on a beach in Kerala. It was in one of the beachfront libraries. My kind of country :)

Huh, OK.. downloaded kindle version. I didn't look at Fred B.'s thing. Disaster sells.

George H.

Is lightning beyond your control? The answer in 2019 doesn't match the answer in 1719.

Long timescales apply to extinction-level hazards, and the criteria for nonworry keep changing, sometimes very rapidly. Worrying a problem really means working on a problem: that's how progress happens.

So we need to tackle space dust? How many billions should we divert from global warming?

I hope you enjoy it.

The other book of Hoyle's that is worth reading is "A For Andromeda", which contains a remarkable early (1961) of computers, interstellar comms, and genetic engineering.

It was made into a TV series (since wiped), and marked the screen debut of Julie Christie.

"The Andromeda Breakthrough" wasn't as good; sequels rarely are.

Hoyle's other fiction is for "completeists" only.

The existence (or otherwise) of God is beyond our control. So don't worry about it.

Fred Hoyle was no slouch with a long track record of doing good science: Unfortunately, he picked the wrong side of the big band vs steady state creation controversy.

Warning, spoiler ahead:

Personally, I suspect that the planet will need some way to control and eventually reduce its growing population. Since we haven't managed to do this ourselves, we might as well let a galactic catastrophe do it for us.

All of it. According to the US General Accounting Office, that would be about $13.2 billion across 19 agencies in 2017: There may also be some foreign countries which may wish to contribute to the war on dust.

White nationalism has been infiltrated by furries! is nothing sacred

Not much of a spoiler! The devil^H^H^H^H^H angel is in the details, and the journey is as important as the destination :)

It's called secondary education for girls.

Most countries have. The US population is still growing, but the quality of the secondary education is poor, and the immigrant population often hasn't even had that, and is consequently even more fertile. Australia has much t he same kind of problem - we let the Roman Catholic church run a lot of our secondary schools, and they seem to think that "natural increase" is good route to political power.

We wouldn't get to choose. Catastrophes happen because you can't do anythin g to stop them - even if you can predict them. Donald Trump comes to mind.

I think that was the first SF book I read, not that I've read that many. I'm not really into the genre but I think I read all of Hoyle's book shortly after that.