Please have the courtesy to read what I said.

Oxygen is not a candidate. The question is mitochondria?

No the analogy is poor since oxygen is common to all things, and quite different from the co-dependancy of mitochondria and animals.
Oxygen is not dependent on life, nor is it a candidate for life in any sense.

What are you talking about?
Is this some sort of twisted attempt at an analogy?
If that is the case it is very poor indeed.

You’re nothing but your neurons, and your neurons are nothing but little bits of matter. Here, life and the mind are gone, and only lifeless matter exists.

This is the moment he departs from reason to hyperbole.

This is not an impediment to science, just a place where other ways of knowing are more useful.
"Life and Mind" are not "GONE", science does not say that. There is no "lifeless matter". Simply enough the lived experience is the place where other means of understanding and knowing come into play. In the same way you cannot hear colour, and you cannot see music, we cannot expect science to unpack and describe everything.

There are oddities, though
Mitochondria are semi-automomous "beings" that live inside everyone of our cells. They migrate from the mother's cells to the unborn foetus in the early stages of "life", but are themselves no living because they can have no existence outside of the cell.
They have their own DNA , and that never mixes with the human genome, yet no human can live without them, and no mitochondrion can exist without a living cell host.
These are organelles. But are they living?

"They do lots of work, good they will be rewarded, they put on a robe, turban, and cite religion, surely a stupidity that will be punished."

The good and the evil suffer just the same. Had you not noticed yet??

Not part of the Plan??
What plan?
Whose Plan?

The God of snakes and cancer and disease.
Cancer has right too. God loves cancer.

There is no prospect of a economically viable colony in Antartica, and that is a piece of cake far more than ANY where outside earth's orbit.

Canada does not exist. It is just a word used to describe a parcel of land and the people who live in it.
It is always worth keeping this in mind when trying to understand what things actually are.
God is also a word, but it is used to describe a thing which was used to patch up a whole in our understanding of how the world came to be. There seems to be no material evidence that such a thing exists in any sense.

EP is a fantasy discipline. It assumes a perfection in evolution by attributing all traits a naturally selected positive.
As complex bodies we have evolved with hit and miss, carrying along selectively neutral and even selectively negative traits. As long as a trait or behaviour does not result in the failure of reproduction it shall be preserved in any successful progeny.
In this way EP fails to understand that complexity, and attributes and invented positive to "explain" the trait.
EP fails since it confuses the difference between

(1) The claim that evolution is a process in which creatures with adaptive traits are selected and

(2) the claim that evolution is a process in which creatures are selected for their adaptive traits.”

1 Is correct, but 2, assumed and fetishized by EP renders EP ridiculous.

I've not forgotten gravity at all. Zero gravity is totally hostile to the human body. And building in a space suit is not easy at all.

All the elements that we use are present on earth in quantities easy enough to extract. Antarctica has as yet completely untapped mineral resources. But there is a very good reason we've not done that yet - it's too bloody cold. But it would be a picnic compared to ANYWHERE outside earth's orbit.
3D printing might help, but only of you want plastic shite. The body of a tooth brush would be easy enough but the bristles would be difficult. Printing is limited to plastic items which require a massive backup series of industries from oil extraction, processing, chemical industries, and energy generation.
Can you tell me where you are going to get the plastics to keep your printer fed? And what are you going to do about metal objects?

I've read 100s of sci-fi books since my teens; eagerly watched men landing on the moon; reveled over 2001 A Space Odyssey; couldn't get enough of Star Trek; and always hoped that space was going to be routinely explored and eventually colonized.
Reason and evidence has demonstrated to me what I suspected when the Moon Landings ceased; that humans shall never create a self sustaining colony outside earth's orbit, except in the most extreme and desperate attempt to save the last dregs of humanity in the far future.
Space is hostile, and the simple act of leaving earth's gravity takes a huge and environmentally damaging amount of fuel.
Would you be able to cope with low/zero gravity; space radiation, and stay healthy? Can you deal with boredom, aging and maybe dying on the shit before you even got near your destination?
To get a colony established would take more effort than it ever could be worth taking. Image the most simple everyday item necessary to your life or health. and consider the massive range of support industries necessary to make the object economically. All these support industries would have to follow you in a massive fleet of ships. Take a toothbrush, a cup, a pair of shoes.
A trip to another planet is going to be a one way trip to a potentially hostile environment
. You'll not be able to send for a new toothbrush, bandages, antibiotics, food, water, shelter. You'd have to make it all when you get there. You would have to be plunged into the ancient world.
Could you eat anything that is there? Is there any life there at all? Would the bacteria and viruses for which we had no immunity kill the entire colony strait away? WOuld the gravity cripple you, or would it be too low to maintain your health?

The fact is that space is hostile. We evolved here on earth, and it has everything we need right here.

Depends on your criteria.
An F1 car is absolutely useless compared to an Octavia if you want to get to work.

There are NO answers to why unless they are asked about the actions of intentional agents.
For example, you might ask WHY you asked that question, as you would have s reason for it. You can ask why did you shoot that person.
But there really is no answer as to why we have evolved consciousness. You can ask HOW do we have it. And the answer can be given in evolutionary terms, with the emergence of specialized neural matter.
So the only answer is that we have consciousness because we have brains.
Brains have been mapped out, areas of different functionality have been determined. You can change a mind, make it feel different, with various inputs, sensory, hormonal, and pharmaceutical.
There is no doubt that the sole source of all consciousness and mindfulness is inherent in neural matter. And although we know more each year, we may never know the whole picture and are forced to accept that there are gaps in understanding.

Really? You think Ron Paul is a fascist? How bizarre. — ssu

What is NOT fascist about Paul?

The main thing to understand about N is that he was quite an old windbag who for most of his later life was losing his mind to syphilis.
His doctoral thesis on the Philology of Dionysus and Apollo is still regarded as a masterpiece. This work has always given him plenty of kudos.
His life in writing is a spectrum of less reason and more polemic as time passes. He also had the tendency to increasingly weird metaphors, which some have taken too literally. The worst was possibly the eternal return, or recurrance, where some think of it as an endorsement of re-incarnation; it is not. It is a moral lesson that we ought to live our lives as if this was the last of a fully mindful and considered whole.
His attacks on Christian morality bear the marks of personal experience, and seem too strident at times. But there is no way he can be held responsible for Hitler.
It's worth pointing out that his sister had a role in upgrading his works to appeal to fascism,

Owning a firecracker and having a picture of an H-Bomb is not the same thing as a real threat the the USA. N Korea is no threat at all, and the solution to any problem with them would not come from the USA who can't hold a picnic in a park when it comes to a foreign war.
With Korea's vast and sieve like border, China has the manpower to take Korea in a weekend, like Russia took Manchuria.
Nukes are a waste of money, what you need is boots on the ground.

Murder is illegal killing by definition.
So obviously not; this is not murder.

Ask yourself whose life is it? And when you have that answer you should be able to figure out who should be in ultimate control of what happens to that life.
Although tragic, this case is a very welcome step.

whether we should allow even such reasonable instances for fear the empowered will continue to euthanize children. — Hanover

17 is not a child in Holland.

The last time we were truly on the verge of a nuclear war was during the Cuban Missile Crisis, when unknown to the US, the Soviets had deployed also tactical nukes into Cuba. Those would have been used, especially Fidel Castro's insisted they would be used, to counter the Marines landing in Cuba. — ssu

This crisis was caused by the USA installing nukes in Turkey. We were never "on the brink". As soon as the US agreed to move them Khrushchev, pulled his nukes out of Cuba.
Kennedy used this to try to look tough but basically it was all just childish posturing.

What these moments shows is that decision to escalate to nuclear weapons isn't taken lightly. The Falklands war is especially a good example, because the Argentinian junta could totally count on the British NOT nuking Buenos Aires or even using nuclear weapons on their ships. That (nuking Buenos Aires) would have been simply insane and a deathknell to Thatcher and the conservative party. — ssu

You are bing absurd,
Argentina was completely free to invade since the British government had expensive and useless weapons.
Had the British government spent the same money on a better navy, Argentina would not have invaded.
In the same way that Russia was free to roll in to Crimea and Georgia at will.

When you have seen thousands of movies and TV programmes it becomes crystal clear that many are all basically the same; same structure, same mood, same plot.

I am always predicting: whodunnit; what happens next; sit there waiting for the hero to have his "crisis of confidence" with mind numbing regularity; and it all tends to end up with fisty-cuffs - even it the most futuristic scenarios. Boy meets girl - split up - get back together. ad nauseum

So it can be very refreshing when something different comes along. Breaking Bad, for example.
But even when remarkable TV comes along the pressures of the money-men tend to mean that they milk the thing until it runs dry and dies. Though I have not seen the latest Game of Thrones I am given to understand that it is complete rubbish.

As for so-called "high brow"...
The more Shakespeare I see the more I love it. Beethoven is peerless. Yes until the the early 1980; Led Zeppelin; Pink Floyd; are unsurpassed in their genres.

If you don't like that stuff it might not mean you are less for it, but there is no doubt that some criteria can be use to determine that some music and drama is better than others.

When Argentina invaded the Falkland Islands; when the US failed in Vietnam; when Russia rolled into the Crimea; the concept of MADestruction was show to fail.
When you have weapons you cannot use, they can be no deterrent.

A State Visit is not a Vacation.
Can you take him away please?

It's high time we de-gendered toilets.
Urinals might have to go, but cubicles solve all problems.

Rand is not a philosopher. She was a political bigot and polemicist. He ideas are anti-human, anti-social, and have shown to encourage selfishness and greed.
You might as well ask, why is Mein Kampf not part of every syllabus.

H2O is a model of water which is not immediately a posteriori.
But just about anyone can put an anode and a cathode into water and collect gas. You will find that the two gases bubbling from the water is in the proportion of 2:1. Put one gas in a balloon and it will rise, put the other in a balloon and it will sink.
A posteriori you can say that water is constituted by two gases which conform to expected proportions and qualities. Both gases are inflammable, as predicted, and their weights can be also determined as expected.
So you have moved from an a priori assertion to an a posteriori conformation.
In itself, "H2O" could refer to anything. Demonstrations offer models.

In a fantasy story you are allowed to have a fabrication. 90% of the story is fabrication and more to do with the politics of the late Archaic period than anything to do with a real battle.
Have you ever studied this seriously?

The Troy of Homer does not exist.
There are many candidates for Troy on this site, but you cannot discover what is basically a fiction, based on events that may or may not have happened.
Read Odyssey bk 2 and tell me where all those ships came from.
Explain why Homer uses Bronze age and Iron age references. Why does his work point to the early Iron Age but there are references to boar's tusk helmets, and tower shields which were from a much earlier age. Why is the social relationships between the Basileis incompatible with Mycenean political structures.
Have you ever met a talking horse, seen arrows of disease; met any witches; seen Poseidon or any Cyclopses?

https://www.ancientworldmagazine.com/articles/trojan-horse-from-mykonos/

https://theshieldofachilles.net/prologue/corinthian-aryballos-depicting-the-trojan-war-from-1887-jahrbuchdeskaiserich-1200x500/

It's also in Euripedes'Trojan Women.

It does not matter at all if there were only a few lines in the Odyssey. The story of the horse was a big part of the myth from the very start, well before Virgil stole the story and invented the myth of Aeneas for political reasons
You might want to look at the archaeology too. Depictions of the horse appear on aryballoi and other vases from the archaic to the early ancient period right up to and beyond Virgil.
Virgil simply did not invent the story

It was almost entirely an invention by Virgil. — ernestm

Since the story of the TH was mentioned in Homer, it was part of the myth for maybe a 1000 years before Virgil was born. I do not call that "entirely an invention".
You are confusing your personal reception of the myth with how it was better know by the people of the time.

Some time ago there was even a version that made the whole Trojan War an act of vengeance by abused women. That's what sells now so thats what it makes. Homer's point was that Agamemnon was a power-hungry, war-crazed megalamaniac who didnt care about women at all. It's true he abused women, but it wasnt anything against women in particular, he abused anyone he could in his desire for power. Sacrificing his daughter for success in war, and supporting a competition for Helen's marriage against her own wishes were just symptomatic. — ernestm

I think you might be ignoring the rest of Greek literature.
Hollywood is shite at inventing stuff.

That's Hollywood's misconception, not historical fact. After all Hollywood was founded to glorify war, and has done so ever since, with ever better special effects. — ernestm

I studied this for more years than I'd care to remember.
So no I reject your insulting comment.

Camus is life affirming, brutally honest and empowering.
I fail to see what is depressing about that.

All city states were up for war. Athens had an empire, and Alexander learned how to build one in Athens.
The thing about the Spartans was they were a small tribe keeping order over the majority of Helots.

... Aristotle, in his 'Physicæ Auscultationes' (lib. 2, cap. 8, s. 2), after remarking that rain does not fall in order to make the corn grow, any more than it falls to spoil the farmer's corn when threshed out of doors, applies the same argument to organisation; and adds (as translated by Mr. Clair Grece, who first pointed out the passage to me), "So what hinders the different parts [of the body] from having this merely accidental relation in nature? as the teeth, for example, grow by necessity, the front ones sharp, adapted for dividing, and the grinders flat, and serviceable for masticating the food; since they were not made for the sake of this, but it was the result of accident. And in like manner as to the other parts in which there appears to exist an adaptation to an end. Wheresoever, therefore, all things together (that is all the parts of one whole) happened like as if they were made for the sake of something, these were preserved, having been appropriately constituted by an internal spontaneity; and whatsoever things were not thus constituted, perished, and still perish." We here see the principle of natural selection shadowed forth, but how little Aristotle fully comprehended the principle is shown by his remarks on the formation of the teet

This is a foreshadowing of evolution. In the 2nd edition of OofS, Darwin mentions an passage from Aristotle who built upon the idea, showing that in the pre Christian era it was commonly held that struggle results in refinement, and lack of fitness leads to extinction.

Nah. Camus embraces the end of the tunnel. In fact he knows there is no tunnel. Knowing you are going to die and the everyone will be dead in 100 year, means that you are free to do as you please.
Camus is never depressed