I'm not talking about going to other star systems, I'm talking about settling within the solar system we already inhabit..
You realise of course that settling planets within Sol System isn't going to do anything to prevent the Sun going red giant and ruining everything. Migrating away from Sol to another star will take extremely long-term manned habitat technology.
In the very short term, we're facing a resource crunch here on Earth whether we like it or not. Having a manned orbital presence won't do anything one way or another to affect that. Fossil fuels are simply irrelevant to the vast energy densities needed to navigate space.
Space: It really isn't your happy future friend, it won't make you magically super-smart, it isn't filled with gold and ivory and peacocks and Klingons. It's not the New World, it's not India, it's not Africa. It's a big empty hole filled with more nothing than you can imagine and a few stray hydrogen molecules. It's a desert so hostile that it doesn't even have to notice you to kill you. It can do it just by waiting for you to die of natural causes while crossing it. Our past analogies of exploration are so amusingly silly that space yawns just thinking about them. Space blinks, a million years later and we're gone.
We got to the moon. Yay us. That was pretty awesome. But home is still where the biosphere is, and we're still killing trees and fish by the millions here on Earth. When we've figured out how not to do that, then we'll understand how to build space-worthy habitats. Putting rockets on them is the easy part by comparison.
If the space program hadn't happened, that would be an outcome of events contrary to what was. The act of discussing it isn't ironic or contrary to anything, it's just a discussion.
It's not that we're debating. It's the tone of the debate. It's that 40+ years after Apollo, we're staring up at the moon wistfully asking "can you really believe we went there? is it even remotely possible that America or anyone else could ever go there again? or is that era long gone in the past? are we even sure it wasn't all a hoax/dream? we're never going to see another space shuttle, are we? also, are we even going to be able to run our cars and make enough food to eat in twenty years? we're getting low on water, and we have to choose between poisoning our aquifers with fracking, or importing more oil from radical Islamic states who we've just polarised with ten years of war."
When in the 1960s, that we'd have massive moonbases and regular commercial shuttles and atomic power on tap was seen as a given, and the Big Future Poblems were going to be "how do we stop the super-smart science geniuses and sentient computers who run everything from taking over the world".
The jarring juxtaposition between past dreams and a looming present reality of infrastructure collapse. That's what's ironic.
It's sad how the enterprise users posting here act as if Mozilla owes them something. They give you a free browser you're using to make money on.
So does Microsoft, if you hadn't noticed. Our bosses are perfectly happy for us to continue using Internet Explorer, because it comes for free with Windows, it's got great Group Policy configuration support, it gets security updates every month like clockwork while keeping major version updates to every couple of years and non-mandatory, and generally Just Works.
Some of us in the Enterprise world would like to run Firefox instead out of the misguided sense that by doing so we're giving back to the community, promoting the use of a more "standard" browser than IE. We think our using it actually helps the open source project. It gives Mozilla and Google eyeballs and clicks and therefore, indirectly, funds, and it keeps OSS in the public eye.
But if you think that by using your browser we're just being a burden and being a bunch of greedy slobs, and you'd rather we stopped using your precious free product and contaminating it with our strange requests like "please make it secure and stop breaking our tools", well okay. Our bosses would be very happy for us to just forget this whole OSS thing and kick Firefox to the kerb, and run straight back into the welcoming arms of for-pay commercial software. Microsoft loves us and is ready to forgive us for this strange "freedom" obsession of ours, and since you guys don't seem to want us after all - maybe we should just come home to our corporate masters, shut the door and never stray again.
Supporting older FF versions is just putting make-up on the pig.
Why did they ship a pig to start with? Do they have no pig-detection algorithms in their compile and test suite? Or are the new tweaks to HTML just that, tweaks, and not some fundamental revolution?
There's a point where you have to say "this is no longer an experimental toy, it's a real information-handling tool which real people are using to store information for decades to centuries, and it needs to remain stable so we can continue to access important documents more than six week old." Human language changes on a far slower scale than HTML, and yet we somehow seem to get by with using an alphabet designed by the Romans and numerals built in ancient India.
Innovation is also destruction, and sometimes what we need is continuity, not manufactured slash-and-churn.
Browsers implement a several dozen specifications and in-progress specifications. If you figure there are major improvements to support for each one once every two years or so, that comes out to 2-3 such improvements per month.
Or, a dozen changes per year, all rolled up into a single version increment, which is much more sane and manageable.
I wish they would not change the architecture ever 5 weeks...
This. Isn't "architecture" supposed to be something you do once, do right, and then leave the heck alone? If it was supposed to change rapidly, it'd be "fashion". And your architecture should have been designed to accommodate extensions (not fundamental rewrites) from the beginning. If you have to rebuild your foundations every six weeks in a way that breaks existing stuff, that's an admission that you got the design totally wrong.
No, don't say "but we have no way of testing whether our fundamental underlying design is correct! we have to just extremely iterate it until we crowdsource the eyeballs!" That just means that we shouldn't believe you when you tell us that you've got it right this time either. Go back to school until you can learn how to do it once, do it right, and then leave it the heck alone. You've built a platform, now build on that platform, don't keep yanking it away. There's a word for what happens to real architecture when it undergoes rapid forced change: disaster. Try not to take earthquakes and tsunamis as your development model for software, hmm?
(That's probably something the entire software industry needs to do, sadly, not just Mozilla. Go back to school until we actually have a formal science of software engineering that can detect Titanic-sized disasters before they're shipped to the entire Internet. I'm not hopeful it will happen before botnets turn us into a smoking crater though.)
It seems odd to civilians, but much of the military hold our corrupt civilian government in contempt.
That's not much consolation. Do the troops hold the government in contempt because it's corrupt, or do they hold it in contempt (and consider it corrupt) because it's civilian?
If the former, then why the heck are they serving in the military and executing corrupt orders for a government in which they don't believe? I can't see how that can be morally justifiable.
If the latter, then would they be more comfortable serving under a military dictatorship than a democracy? Because that would be the moral response to the situation, and it's not a direction I'd like to see America going.
According to your "logic," or in this case lack thereof, if you leave the doors to your home or car unlocked, you've 'waived your right to privacy,' i.e. government agents are free to ransack your belongings, place surveillance devices in and around your home/car, take what they like, et. al.
Replace "house" with "car" and yes, that's pretty much exactly what happen at the moment. If you leave your car doors unlocked and someone steals it and uses it to commit crime, do you really have an expectation of a hard-cre "right to privacy" that would prevent the police from stopping searching that car - even using deadly force against it?
A non-networked computer is like a house, yes. A networked computer is much more like a car, because it "travels" and interacts with other computers and can break into and destroy them. You really need to know what you're doing when you own one.
and make it sound like we're going somewhere new and exciting, like Pandora.
Yes, do let's commission Icarus Project Flight 13 (crew callsigns "Black Cat", "Broken Mirror" and "Walks-Under-Ladders") to launch to D'Eath Colony at Desolation Point in the Sea of Crises on planet Pandora, a moon of gas giant Loki orbiting star SNAFU-666.
Another concept might be to simply upload the astronaut's neural net into a very high capacity computer.
Indeed, since researchers have already started doing this with cat neurons, there's already a software base to work from, so to speed the work we could combine astronaut brains with the existing IBM cat brain simulation.
Also, for long duration space flights, China has already claimed that females are better than males. So we should make sure to use female astronauts for the baseline neural scans.
We should probably then provide robot humanoid bodies for the simulations in case they need to perform maintenance tasks on any space hardware components assembled by baseline humans on Earth.
Our human representatives to the stars will therefore most likely be robot space catgirls. It's scientific!
The threat we're guarding against is that of having a vast number of people stuck in a single biosphere, all complex unpredictable people, occasionally inventing new and dangerous things. A few decades ago, nuclear war seemed like the manifestation of that. We got past that hurdle with civilisation intact. How many more inventions like that will there be? How many times can we pass the test?
I don't know what new doomsday weapons might come down the physics pipe (at the moment, realistically speaking, it's looking very much like physics has reached a centuries-long dead end and won't even be able to got fusion working, and the huge surge of discoveries in the 20th century was a weird spike anomaly which won't be repeated) - but also realistically speaking, there's no plausible scenario where any kind of war or world-killer device could make Earth less habitable than Mars, without also stuffing the rest of the solar system.
Consider: to get a colony onto Luna or Mars, we're going to have to create a fairly reliable space shipping network. It won't be a case of "one launch, one ship, one colony, no followups". Apollo took more than 10 ships just to put boots on the ground. Soyuz/Progress/Shuttle/Mir/ISS have done multiple service flights per year just to replace consumables. Any longer-term space habitation program will grow out of these existing initiatives, and will require creating a space transport infrastructure which will most likely remain once the colony is self-sufficient. (Bear in mind that achieving true self-sufficiency may be a matter of centuries, not decades; even if Mars Base Alpha can grow its own water and oxygen like ISS currently can't, there'll still be skills and resources like doctors, engineers, replacement seeds, trace minerals, etc which require special flights. Even Earth city-states never became completely isolated from trade.)
Also consider: the energy requirements for regular, reliable space shipping are similar to that required for city-busting weapons. If you can launch a chemical rocket into orbit, you can launch an ICBM to bomb Moscow or Washington (and in fact, in our history, the ICBMs were easier and came first). If you can put lots of cheap fusion drives on commercial rockets, you can probably smuggle lots of cheap fusion devices into office buildings. If you can divert asteroids for mining, you can also divert asteroids to smash Earth cities. So realistically, space shipping will require space policing and the extension across the solar system of (possibly fairly draconian) state monitoring and control of reactor fuel and drive flares - just like our current space traffic control has grown out of NORAD's missile monitoring. And space is lots of empty vacuum, very hard to hide things in, very easy to detect signals from a distance. Habitats will also (at least initially) be very fragile, very exposed to terrorism, and very aware of the delicate social balance needed for survival. So don't expect space to be a big wild west of freedom - expect the opposite, a tiny well-lit, pressurised, glasshouse filled with lots of big rocks and many very nervous people with guns watching everything.
Also consider: the energy requirements for making Earth less habitable than, say, Mars already is, are absolutely stupendous. A simple nuclear war with every bomb we have wouldn't do it. Mars is bathed in radiation as it is; Jupiter's moons have far more; Venus is a hell of boiling sulphuric acid CO2 gas; Luna will just straight-up kill you with vacuum if you get a tear in your suit, and we don't even know how toxic or carconigenic moon dust might be to breathe (tiny nano-chunks of harsh dust, think asbestos). Global warming? Not a chance it could compare. If all the ocean levels on Earth rose ten metres, we'd still be far better off than Mars with its no oceans; at a pinch we could build undersea habitats using a tenth of the technology we'd need to even start looking at Mars. Boil Earth dry, irradiate it to hell, it's still better than Mercury. So u
Let's say I find a web page that I like, and maybe it has a form on it somewhere with a dropdown containing a list of countries. I'd like to scrape that list and do some kind of throwaway mashup for myself. I
Are you saying you'd like to somehow... combine... other people's data... with other data... generating new data? That's outrageous! And I'm sure it's illegal. Hard-working programmers spent hours of their lives keying in that data, and now you want to just use it as if knowledge were some kind of... shared public resource or something? That must violate about a billionty copyright-patent laws, and if it doesn't, we'll darn sure pass new ones to make sure it does!
Consumers remixing data on their own. What has the Web come to. Well, at least we've made it painful, but we shouldn't rest until we make it impossible!
I fail to see why the food needs of impoverished nations is more significant an issue for wealthy nations than the establishment of a permanent colony on another celestial body. The long-term viability of our species is far better served by expanding than trying to feed every child in the Sudan.
But what if one of those Sudanese kids is the one who will crack the equations for hyperspatial wave motion wormjump planoforming, huh? Huh? And you let her starve in order to build Trans-Plutonian Probe 534 and now you'll never get off this rock.
This delicious, watery, breathable, edible, sun-drenched rock full of biodiversity. Mmmm, rock.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not talking about going to other star systems, I'm talking about settling within the solar system we already inhabit..
You realise of course that settling planets within Sol System isn't going to do anything to prevent the Sun going red giant and ruining everything. Migrating away from Sol to another star will take extremely long-term manned habitat technology.
In the very short term, we're facing a resource crunch here on Earth whether we like it or not. Having a manned orbital presence won't do anything one way or another to affect that. Fossil fuels are simply irrelevant to the vast energy densities needed to navigate space.
Space: It really isn't your happy future friend, it won't make you magically super-smart, it isn't filled with gold and ivory and peacocks and Klingons. It's not the New World, it's not India, it's not Africa. It's a big empty hole filled with more nothing than you can imagine and a few stray hydrogen molecules. It's a desert so hostile that it doesn't even have to notice you to kill you. It can do it just by waiting for you to die of natural causes while crossing it. Our past analogies of exploration are so amusingly silly that space yawns just thinking about them. Space blinks, a million years later and we're gone.
We got to the moon. Yay us. That was pretty awesome. But home is still where the biosphere is, and we're still killing trees and fish by the millions here on Earth. When we've figured out how not to do that, then we'll understand how to build space-worthy habitats. Putting rockets on them is the easy part by comparison.
At any rate, there are at least 4 reasons no one might be listening:
4) They hate our freedom and refuse to listen to our propaganda.
Your ideas intrigue me and I would like to fund your colonial space armada. Huzzah! Rigel or bust! Tally ho, what!
Without space exploration there isn't much point to our civilization.
Without breaking the lightspeed barrier, there isn't much point to space exploration, unless you've got some really good immortality drugs.
If the space program hadn't happened, that would be an outcome of events contrary to what was. The act of discussing it isn't ironic or contrary to anything, it's just a discussion.
It's not that we're debating. It's the tone of the debate. It's that 40+ years after Apollo, we're staring up at the moon wistfully asking "can you really believe we went there? is it even remotely possible that America or anyone else could ever go there again? or is that era long gone in the past? are we even sure it wasn't all a hoax/dream? we're never going to see another space shuttle, are we? also, are we even going to be able to run our cars and make enough food to eat in twenty years? we're getting low on water, and we have to choose between poisoning our aquifers with fracking, or importing more oil from radical Islamic states who we've just polarised with ten years of war."
When in the 1960s, that we'd have massive moonbases and regular commercial shuttles and atomic power on tap was seen as a given, and the Big Future Poblems were going to be "how do we stop the super-smart science geniuses and sentient computers who run everything from taking over the world".
The jarring juxtaposition between past dreams and a looming present reality of infrastructure collapse. That's what's ironic.
you can jailbreak it. Just be careful you don't brick it.
I remember that game! Back before Space Invaders. Played like Pong.
Now if someone could Spacewar the Internet, that'd be something...
Kubism as a movement in art to portray things in a certain way.
You mean with lots of apes tossing bones which become space stations, Peter Sellers in a wheelchair, and the ol' Ludwig Van?
"us to hoist a lot data currently stored"
I really wish I knew what this phrase meant. It sounds fascinating.
I believe it involves repeated self-application of the Petard pattern.
And PLEASE do NOT trout out some benchmark
Sole true. Benchmarks are all red herrings. Whiting-wash, even. The manufacturers do it on porpoise.
So, the Cairo team responded, and gave the world XP. X is the greek letter chi, and P is the greek letter rho -- Chi-Rho, or Cairo.
And here I thought it was just because they were D&D players.
Did you actually just suggest we would have greater rights if we had remained colonies of Britain?
Seems to have worked well for Canada.
Just sayin'.
It's sad how the enterprise users posting here act as if Mozilla owes them something. They give you a free browser you're using to make money on.
So does Microsoft, if you hadn't noticed. Our bosses are perfectly happy for us to continue using Internet Explorer, because it comes for free with Windows, it's got great Group Policy configuration support, it gets security updates every month like clockwork while keeping major version updates to every couple of years and non-mandatory, and generally Just Works.
Some of us in the Enterprise world would like to run Firefox instead out of the misguided sense that by doing so we're giving back to the community, promoting the use of a more "standard" browser than IE. We think our using it actually helps the open source project. It gives Mozilla and Google eyeballs and clicks and therefore, indirectly, funds, and it keeps OSS in the public eye.
But if you think that by using your browser we're just being a burden and being a bunch of greedy slobs, and you'd rather we stopped using your precious free product and contaminating it with our strange requests like "please make it secure and stop breaking our tools", well okay. Our bosses would be very happy for us to just forget this whole OSS thing and kick Firefox to the kerb, and run straight back into the welcoming arms of for-pay commercial software. Microsoft loves us and is ready to forgive us for this strange "freedom" obsession of ours, and since you guys don't seem to want us after all - maybe we should just come home to our corporate masters, shut the door and never stray again.
It's up to you, I guess.
Supporting older FF versions is just putting make-up on the pig.
Why did they ship a pig to start with? Do they have no pig-detection algorithms in their compile and test suite? Or are the new tweaks to HTML just that, tweaks, and not some fundamental revolution?
There's a point where you have to say "this is no longer an experimental toy, it's a real information-handling tool which real people are using to store information for decades to centuries, and it needs to remain stable so we can continue to access important documents more than six week old." Human language changes on a far slower scale than HTML, and yet we somehow seem to get by with using an alphabet designed by the Romans and numerals built in ancient India.
Innovation is also destruction, and sometimes what we need is continuity, not manufactured slash-and-churn.
Browsers implement a several dozen specifications and in-progress specifications. If you figure there are major improvements to support for each one once every two years or so, that comes out to 2-3 such improvements per month.
Or, a dozen changes per year, all rolled up into a single version increment, which is much more sane and manageable.
> but will _not_ get architecture changes
I wish they would not change the architecture ever 5 weeks...
This. Isn't "architecture" supposed to be something you do once, do right, and then leave the heck alone? If it was supposed to change rapidly, it'd be "fashion". And your architecture should have been designed to accommodate extensions (not fundamental rewrites) from the beginning. If you have to rebuild your foundations every six weeks in a way that breaks existing stuff, that's an admission that you got the design totally wrong.
No, don't say "but we have no way of testing whether our fundamental underlying design is correct! we have to just extremely iterate it until we crowdsource the eyeballs!" That just means that we shouldn't believe you when you tell us that you've got it right this time either. Go back to school until you can learn how to do it once, do it right, and then leave it the heck alone. You've built a platform, now build on that platform, don't keep yanking it away. There's a word for what happens to real architecture when it undergoes rapid forced change: disaster. Try not to take earthquakes and tsunamis as your development model for software, hmm?
(That's probably something the entire software industry needs to do, sadly, not just Mozilla. Go back to school until we actually have a formal science of software engineering that can detect Titanic-sized disasters before they're shipped to the entire Internet. I'm not hopeful it will happen before botnets turn us into a smoking crater though.)
And what kind of "Enterprise Support" are you expecting by using Mozilla's free Firefox browser in the first place?
Perhaps at least as good enterprise support as we get from using Microsoft's free Internet Explorer browser?
It seems odd to civilians, but much of the military hold our corrupt civilian government in contempt.
That's not much consolation. Do the troops hold the government in contempt because it's corrupt, or do they hold it in contempt (and consider it corrupt) because it's civilian?
If the former, then why the heck are they serving in the military and executing corrupt orders for a government in which they don't believe? I can't see how that can be morally justifiable.
If the latter, then would they be more comfortable serving under a military dictatorship than a democracy? Because that would be the moral response to the situation, and it's not a direction I'd like to see America going.
>supremicists
Stopped reading there.
Do you have something against our supreme mice overlords?
According to your "logic," or in this case lack thereof, if you leave the doors to your home or car unlocked, you've 'waived your right to privacy,' i.e. government agents are free to ransack your belongings, place surveillance devices in and around your home/car, take what they like, et. al.
Replace "house" with "car" and yes, that's pretty much exactly what happen at the moment. If you leave your car doors unlocked and someone steals it and uses it to commit crime, do you really have an expectation of a hard-cre "right to privacy" that would prevent the police from stopping searching that car - even using deadly force against it?
A non-networked computer is like a house, yes. A networked computer is much more like a car, because it "travels" and interacts with other computers and can break into and destroy them. You really need to know what you're doing when you own one.
and make it sound like we're going somewhere new and exciting, like Pandora.
Yes, do let's commission Icarus Project Flight 13 (crew callsigns "Black Cat", "Broken Mirror" and "Walks-Under-Ladders") to launch to D'Eath Colony at Desolation Point in the Sea of Crises on planet Pandora, a moon of gas giant Loki orbiting star SNAFU-666.
I'm sure nothing whatever will go wrong.
Another concept might be to simply upload the astronaut's neural net into a very high capacity computer.
Indeed, since researchers have already started doing this with cat neurons, there's already a software base to work from, so to speed the work we could combine astronaut brains with the existing IBM cat brain simulation.
Also, for long duration space flights, China has already claimed that females are better than males. So we should make sure to use female astronauts for the baseline neural scans.
We should probably then provide robot humanoid bodies for the simulations in case they need to perform maintenance tasks on any space hardware components assembled by baseline humans on Earth.
Our human representatives to the stars will therefore most likely be robot space catgirls. It's scientific!
The threat we're guarding against is that of having a vast number of people stuck in a single biosphere, all complex unpredictable people, occasionally inventing new and dangerous things. A few decades ago, nuclear war seemed like the manifestation of that. We got past that hurdle with civilisation intact. How many more inventions like that will there be? How many times can we pass the test?
I don't know what new doomsday weapons might come down the physics pipe (at the moment, realistically speaking, it's looking very much like physics has reached a centuries-long dead end and won't even be able to got fusion working, and the huge surge of discoveries in the 20th century was a weird spike anomaly which won't be repeated) - but also realistically speaking, there's no plausible scenario where any kind of war or world-killer device could make Earth less habitable than Mars, without also stuffing the rest of the solar system.
Consider: to get a colony onto Luna or Mars, we're going to have to create a fairly reliable space shipping network. It won't be a case of "one launch, one ship, one colony, no followups". Apollo took more than 10 ships just to put boots on the ground. Soyuz/Progress/Shuttle/Mir/ISS have done multiple service flights per year just to replace consumables. Any longer-term space habitation program will grow out of these existing initiatives, and will require creating a space transport infrastructure which will most likely remain once the colony is self-sufficient. (Bear in mind that achieving true self-sufficiency may be a matter of centuries, not decades; even if Mars Base Alpha can grow its own water and oxygen like ISS currently can't, there'll still be skills and resources like doctors, engineers, replacement seeds, trace minerals, etc which require special flights. Even Earth city-states never became completely isolated from trade.)
Also consider: the energy requirements for regular, reliable space shipping are similar to that required for city-busting weapons. If you can launch a chemical rocket into orbit, you can launch an ICBM to bomb Moscow or Washington (and in fact, in our history, the ICBMs were easier and came first). If you can put lots of cheap fusion drives on commercial rockets, you can probably smuggle lots of cheap fusion devices into office buildings. If you can divert asteroids for mining, you can also divert asteroids to smash Earth cities. So realistically, space shipping will require space policing and the extension across the solar system of (possibly fairly draconian) state monitoring and control of reactor fuel and drive flares - just like our current space traffic control has grown out of NORAD's missile monitoring. And space is lots of empty vacuum, very hard to hide things in, very easy to detect signals from a distance. Habitats will also (at least initially) be very fragile, very exposed to terrorism, and very aware of the delicate social balance needed for survival. So don't expect space to be a big wild west of freedom - expect the opposite, a tiny well-lit, pressurised, glasshouse filled with lots of big rocks and many very nervous people with guns watching everything.
Also consider: the energy requirements for making Earth less habitable than, say, Mars already is, are absolutely stupendous. A simple nuclear war with every bomb we have wouldn't do it. Mars is bathed in radiation as it is; Jupiter's moons have far more; Venus is a hell of boiling sulphuric acid CO2 gas; Luna will just straight-up kill you with vacuum if you get a tear in your suit, and we don't even know how toxic or carconigenic moon dust might be to breathe (tiny nano-chunks of harsh dust, think asbestos). Global warming? Not a chance it could compare. If all the ocean levels on Earth rose ten metres, we'd still be far better off than Mars with its no oceans; at a pinch we could build undersea habitats using a tenth of the technology we'd need to even start looking at Mars. Boil Earth dry, irradiate it to hell, it's still better than Mercury. So u
nasa would need more "steely eyed missile men" to make those square chinese pegs fit into round iss holes
And a lot more duct tape and underpants. (rips front cover off flight plan, tosses it away)
Let's say I find a web page that I like, and maybe it has a form on it somewhere with a dropdown containing a list of countries. I'd like to scrape that list and do some kind of throwaway mashup for myself. I
Are you saying you'd like to somehow... combine... other people's data... with other data... generating new data? That's outrageous! And I'm sure it's illegal. Hard-working programmers spent hours of their lives keying in that data, and now you want to just use it as if knowledge were some kind of... shared public resource or something? That must violate about a billionty copyright-patent laws, and if it doesn't, we'll darn sure pass new ones to make sure it does!
Consumers remixing data on their own. What has the Web come to. Well, at least we've made it painful, but we shouldn't rest until we make it impossible!
I fail to see why the food needs of impoverished nations is more significant an issue for wealthy nations than the establishment of a permanent colony on another celestial body. The long-term viability of our species is far better served by expanding than trying to feed every child in the Sudan.
But what if one of those Sudanese kids is the one who will crack the equations for hyperspatial wave motion wormjump planoforming, huh? Huh? And you let her starve in order to build Trans-Plutonian Probe 534 and now you'll never get off this rock.
This delicious, watery, breathable, edible, sun-drenched rock full of biodiversity. Mmmm, rock.
Christmas and contemplating the scale of the universe always gets me down.
You might think it's a long way down the spiral arm to the Lesser Magellenic Cloud, but that's just peanuts to Christmas.