@mikiesherrill.bsky.social was elected on a platform aggressively critical of PJM

Well, the president’s budget request does get rid of the environmental half of Biological & Environmental Research. So I’m not quite as optimistic …

yes and partially there already www.congress.gov/crs-product/....

It certainly has the authority to set environmental performance standards for Genesis Mission procurement.

As an aside, not that anybody cares right now, I think there’s a fairly colorable argument that DOE has the statutory authority to set energy efficiency standards for data center.

3. It pains me to see DOE launch a major scientific initiative without a whisper of Earth & environmental research

4. If you wanted to hide public bail outs of AI firms, this could be a place to do so

AI will be trained on federal datasets that are the accumulation of decades of world-class research. The admin has also decimated that research infrastructure.

Not sure I would assign a prior probability of zero to the existence of Noachian life, so don’t see how you can rule that out based on the absence of evidence.

But I was a Joe Kirschvink PhD student

We probably can’t rule out Noachian Martian bacteria hitching a ride to Hadean Earth, either.

But I think we can assume from the rest of the survey’s context that respondents are interpreting aliens as technological beings, not prokaryotes…

Also, they do ask both about visits “in recent years” and “ever”, and there are only 4% who shift more positive if allowed the entirety of geologic time. (I would have expected some movement from “definitely not” to “probably not”, but both decline)

Agreed. But I was struck by the how small the proportion of people thinking aliens probably exist somewhere in the universe but have never visited Earth are, since that seems to me by far the most likely answer.

Probably correct (and yes, I spent many years teaching undergrads the Drake equation in my course on “how to build and maintain a habitable planet”) — but if you ask unconditionally “do aliens exist?”, the universe is awfully big.

Personally, I think it is unlikely we are the only technological species ever to have existed in any part of the universe over the last 13 billion years

Does the difference between Democrats and Republicans reflect a difference between Carl Sagan fans and religious Christians committed to the idea of a single creation?

Do the 47% think aliens have visited Earth in the history of human civilization, or just at some point in the last 4.6 billion years?

Yeah, I just wonder whether they drop the whole “alternative rationale” built upon the debunked and unfinalized DOE report