I think I used to eat mud when I was bored.

A sad day when following international law is considered exceptional.

No, there's barely any physical evidence that anyone a few hundred years ago existed.

But if writing is enough, there are some. Tacitus basically said: "Nero blamed the Christians, followers of that Guy called Jesus who Pilatus executed a few decades ago."

Wikipedia at least says both his Baptism and crucifixion are not disputed by historians.

We have had Millions of years of (presumably) intelligent Dinosaurs on this planet, but only 200.000 years of mankind were enough to create Civilization IV, the best Strategy game and peak of life as we know it.

So clearly, Civilization™ is what sets us apart.

Jokes aside, the thing evolution on earth spend the most time on is getting from single celled life-forms to multicellular life (~2 billion years). If what earth life found difficult is difficult for all, multicellular collaboration is way harder than photosynthesis, which evolved roughly half a billion years after life formed.

Our Minister of transportation has been a disaster for our most climate minded government yet.

He continuously refuses to present any plans on how to reduce emissions in his sector. His emission reduction targets for the past few years were missed, but instead our climate bill was changed so it doesn't have immediate consequences as long as other sectors meet their targets. Investments in communal and private rail were cut by 20 million €, while 150 Million were given to Volocopter, a start up for personal-use passenger drones. "State-owned" rail did see minor increases in investments, but most of that money is locked for now until the government and "Die Bahn" company agree on financing it.

The only good new thing in transportation right now is the 49€ a month ticket for all public transport in Germany, and even that fails to make commuters switch to public transport as public transport remains unreliable and inconvenient outside of cities.

You are correct, but that doesn't mean I can't speculate about it.

The ability to do photosynthesis is widely distributed throughout the bacterial domain in six different phyla, with no apparent pattern of evolution., according to this random paper I found on the internet (I'm not a biologist either).

What I can glance is that photosynthesis has (probably) evolved independently 6 time in Bacteria and 3 times in Eukaryotes.

Plants evolved to photosynthesise after photosynthesising bacteria already existed for billions of years.

(But then we have to also acknowledge that multicellular life evolved like 25 times in Eukaryotes, and the Eukaryote - aka Mitochondria-"Powerhouse of the cell"-haver- is the real big step as it only happened once to our knowledge).

A filter for sure, but not a great one. Call me optimistic, but I don't think that will set us back more than 10.000 years. If humanity can survive, society will re-emerge, and we are back here 2-3000 years into the future.

Is +5°C Earth a good place to be? No. Will the majority of humans die? Absolutely. Will the descendants get to try this society thing again? I believe so.

On a cosmic scale 10.000 years is just a setback, and cannot be considered a great filter.

No true scottsman

He's a Christian like any other and Christians will have to recognize that their beliefs are responsible for a lot of homophobia, instead of saying that anyone who makes them look bad is not a "true" Christian.

I think that is thinking a bit too narrow. A lot of the stuff we use today might just be our bronze to our successors iron - you can build an unstable society on either. And what we do use up today could still work if used more efficiently - we might not have enough rare metals to give everyone a smartphone in the post-post-apocalypse, but I could see us still launching satellites if only big governments had computers - because they did.

New dentally enforced diet.

Actually, it was the train that has come the long way.

It might look like you're moving when you focus completely on the train, but you are in fact standing still while train spotting.

My left pinkie finger knuckle can hold some tension when I from my pinkie into a claw shape, but then snaps forward. Either that's unusual or my right hand can't do that as snappy.

I thought it's missing 1 Comma and 1 exclamation mark...

The news say Eastern Ukraine, though take that with a grain of salt as I haven't been there personally.