easwaran

So far, yes. If you look at the geologic record tens of millions of years from now, it might be impossible to find anything beyond the blip of sudden temperature spikes and weird outcroppings of plastic and metals.

I've been wondering whether the mRNA vaccine method might enable us to get a vaccine for various cold-causing viruses that is cheap and easy enough to be worth pursuing.

The United States actually has a rail network that Europe envies, but it's our freight rail network. Some time in the middle of the 20th century, the US decided that roads are for people and rails are for good, but Europe decided that roads are for goods and rails are for people. Because we are people, we tend to think that Europe has much better rail than the US does, but that's because we ignore how heavily reliant they are on trucks for moving goods.

Neither continent is great overall in its rail system - we need a separate rail system for goods and for people. The one for people needs higher speeds and needs to come into city center; the one for goods needs lower speeds and higher efficiency, and needs big truckyards around it.

https://ops.fhwa.dot.gov/freight/freight_analysis/euro_scan/index.htm

Also remember the tens of millions of cows and pigs that die every day in the jurisdiction you live in, and the torture that they go through for their entire lives. It's important to protest bad things going on anywhere in the world, but it's more important to do what you can to stop the ones that are closer to your control.

The geological record is just layers of rock. If something is not in one layer and then is in the next layer, that’s as close to an instant as you can measure in geology. In many cases, layers of rock only get placed over hundreds of thousands of years, or millions of years, so anything faster than that might as well be an instant, from what we can tell. (There will be some special places in very temporary river valleys where floods deposit significant sediment every single year, so the instant becomes closer to a year than a hundred thousand years. But such a river valley will completely fill up in just a few centuries, so it’s unlikely to exist at just the right moment to catch a more precise snapshot of whatever event you want.)