notabot

You don't want to be calling the Patrician a 'royal vizer', he might get creative with what he does with you.

Clearly fake, it says there's a tty number in the top left corner and there isn't.

We can try your idea after the whole area is a glowing crater. I'm sure it'll work out juuuust fine that way. The first rule of scifi nuke vs. parasite club is: you don't listen to the advisor counselling caution.

I'm sorry, but this really is a 'nuke the entire site from orbit' situation. The loss of the southern US and Central America will, of course, be mourned as a terrible loss, but it'll be worth it to make sure those things are dealt with. Permanently.

LoL: License of Lunatic.

It does, but it will also bind a lot of the micro plastic pieces into the concrete matrix, which, I think (and, again, as I said, I haven't actually gone looking for any research on this), would keep them from entering the environment. If the concrete is then recycled, typically by crushing and using as aggregate, it would further trap the particles. It's not a perfect solution, but I don't think there is a perfect solution to plastics in general, we just have to find less harmful alternatives.

The fixed eye contact makes me think the cat is sending a message, "I require snacks, or else".

That's a fair concern, but, as you say, concrete is recyclable, and I would expect (though I admit I haven't looked for studies) that it still would be when it has some amount of plastic aggregate. If the plastic breaks down in the concrete, the microplastics should be trapped, and will be reincorporated when the concrete is reused.

Nothing is going to be a perfect solution to plastic, we need to find alternatives to its use, but in the interim it seems sensible to find effective ways to reuse it rather than just dumping it and hoping for the best.

The biggest issue seems to be around a lake of thinking. Recycling used plastics into more plastic is certainly energetically infeasible, and letting plastics escape to contaminate the environment is also unacceptable. However plastic can be recycled, or perhaps reused, into other things, notably as a partial replacement for aggregate in concrete. This process is low energy, doesn't require sorting the plastic, and actually enhances the thermal and noise insulation properties of the concrete, whilst also reducing it's overall weight. There are undoubtedly other things a stable, non-biodegradable, waterproof and hardwearing substance could be used for given some though.

Eww, no you can't have women being superheros! They're just supposed to stand around shouting "hayelp! hayelp!" and being rescued by the burly chap in the improbable costume. Surely everybody knows that?

For the avoidance of doubt, this is very much /s

We fix it with rockets. Circularize the orbit and set it to an integer number of days that's divisible by 28.

That only gives you 364 daya per year and we need just fractionally less than 365.25. You end up needing an extra day every year, and if we want to keep midnight in the middle of the night, and extra full day every four years (except when we don't). Adding those sorts of bodges onto an otherwise elegant system would be awful to work with.

Instead, I propose we build giant rocket engines pointing straight up on the equator, and adjust the Earth's orbit until one orbit around the sun takes exactly 364 days.