Since the global protests of September 2019, I’ve been looking for words to describe what is happening in climate campaigning and policy formation, and for historical precedents which may help us understand where we’re going.

Calls for action are getting stronger, and they’re coming from many directions: scientists, politicians, the UN, and the emerging generation.

The World Health Organisation is warning that climate change already causes about 150,000 deaths annually, and is likely to cause about 250,000 deaths per year between 2030 and 2050.

Two of the world’s most revered religious leaders, Pope Francis and the Dalai Lama, have spoken…

You've used the phrases "deregulated capitalism" and "unfettered capitalism" several times. Do you think a regulated capitalism might bring better outcomes or not?

Quantum physics has been very successful at developing mathematical formulae that not only fit with past experimental results, but also predict the results of new experiments. Yet serious questions remain unresolved.

A major enigma is the way two particles with shared history, but now remote from one another, manage to instantaneously coordinate their responses to measurements — the phenomenon which Einstein called “spooky action at a distance”.

So there are theorists who see the need for a next step, possibly involving the concept that events in the past can be influenced by events in the present or the future. …

"Many Christians love to say 'Jesus is for everyone.' But I’ve discovered what they usually mean is Jesus is for everyone as long as you believe like us." I understand your point... But unless he was misquoted in the NT, Jesus himself denounced people who believed differently. "Beware of the false prophets, who come to you in sheep's clothing, but inwardly are ravenous wolves." Matthew 7:15 What is your take on that one, Kyle?

"Part of the horror of the crucifixion was the denial of the proper rites of burial. " Suetonius mentions an incident where Julius Caesar granted a group of pirates the clemency of a swift death, but afterwards crucified their dead bodies. He respected them enough that he didn't want to torture them, but he did want to make them into a spectacle of utter defeat.

"I think I missed the opportunity of my life." If you feel that way, why don't you go back?

Yes, scientific revolutions happen. Half a century ago, mainstream science said the entire family of dinosaurs died out without leaving any descendants. Today it is mainstream science that birds belong to the dinosaur family... But we don't have to choose between thinking that "science is real" and "science is fiction". A third option is to think of science as a map, and nature as the territory the map is about. The map is not the territory, but the territory itself is a reality, to which the map corresponds imperfectly. Scientific revolutions are about revising the map when more information about the territory has been found..

But for most of those 2.5 billion years there was almost no free oxygen (O2) in Earth's atmosphere. (See the page "Geological history of oxygen" in Wikipedia.) This oxygen-less Earth was an environment where many forms of microbial life could emerge and flourish, but not mitochondria which are adapted to process O2.