I remember characters "sounding" a lot better in my head before voice acting started.
I don't. Everything I read happens to sound kind of like myself, my imagination isn't quite up to matching the cast of dozens and dozens of talented voice actors. On top of that text just can't replace voice, sometimes you want to have your teammates shouting out meaningful dialog within a fight, you can't really do that with subtitles, as you are way to busy to keep track of them in the mid of a firefight.
If I remember correctly KotOR, along with some of their other earlier games, suffered from having a mute main hero. You select lines, but they never say them out loud, thus you end up with a very unnatural dialog flow in the game. That kind of high level game design stuff bothers me much more then any lack of voice talent when it comse to individual lines.
Which luckily people have already thought of years ago and solved since then.
Miles-per-charge is lower than miles-per-fuel-tank, so you'll need to change batteries more often,
You charge at home and maybe even at work. The only time where you would need the battery replacement is if you drive beyond what a battery can hold on a single charge, which is a very small percentage of all the driving you do day to day.
Battery swaps are going to take at least 10 minutes, as opposed to a 5-minute fillup like we have today.
The car frame can hold it in place. With a removable, you need to move it to the edge somewhere, and you need the battery in a frame designed for easy slide-out.
Battery replacement works just fine when mounted under the car, see above video.
And who decommissions the old batteries? Who pays for all that?
The company from which you lease the batteries. You don't buy batteries in this scheme, you lease them and only pay for the amount of miles you drive. Nicely solves all problems with disposal and reduced capacity.
Most likely cost I assume, as its not just a ball, the full motion detection also consists of gyros and a magnetic sensor. However, I consider that decision to be extremely stupid, as its drastically limits what you can do with the controller.
Another way to look at the issue is, why didn't they put an analogstick on the Move controller? One would assume that Sony has learned by now that a second analogstick is a really useful thing to have (see PSP camera problems in half the games) and it would have also allowed to have the controller act as a full Dualshock replacement, instead of just being an additional controller.
What jensen404 said is basically correct. For motion/waggle the Wiimote has an accelerometer and for pointing it does have a IR camera which tracks the two groups of LEDs in the sensor bar. The processing of the picture happens inside the Wiimote and all that gets transmitted over the Bluetooth protocol is the position of the points.
The major difference between both devices in the end is simply that the Move controller, thanks to the camera and gyro sensor, knows where it is in 3D space, while the Wiimote doesn't, it only knows how fast it was accelerated. Thus the Wiimote can only react rather crudely to movements and the aiming is limited to being relative to the sensorbar, instead of to the monitor, thus you need a cursor instead of having the ability to directly aim at targets on the screen as with a lightgun.
The browser and not the website owner controls how the video displays, the interface shown to the user
I doubt that, a lot of Flash players out there have quite advanced features compared to a standard video player. Youtube will for example allow captions, links and comments being added on-top of the video stream, it also allows changing the soundtrack of a video, other players have allowed adding comments directly to a time stamp or split the video into sections instead of a single linear bar and there is of course all that showing of related videos going on. Not quite sure how flexible HTML5 is, but I'd guess all that can be replicated with a heap load of Javascript, SVG and all that stuff. So I don't really expect to see standard video player on the web anytime.
The main trouble you might run into and which many other projects have run into are naming conflicts. Publishers like to protect their trademarks, so any name that is a little to close to the original will give you a cease&desist, but those are mostly harmless, as you just need to change your project name then.
Taking over gameplay ideas and concepts is however a non-issue, lots of games do that, even commercial ones.
If you want to create a pixel-perfect replica using original artwork and stuff you shouldn't have much trouble either, as long as you do not include the graphics directly. Many hobby projects like to "steal" graphics from commercial projects and while most of them don't get into trouble it will put you in legal limbo, as what you are doing is illegal. This will also have practical implications such as not getting included in Linux Distributions and such.
Long story short, a recreation based on ideas of the original game won't get you normally into trouble. A recreation based on original graphics, title, names and other copyrightable details however might.
And in the end you have of course to get an idea why you want to recreate it. If its for preservation purposes, adopting to new hardware, etc., it might be best to try to contact the original author and ask for source. There have been quite a few cases where older games have released source code, figuring out however who the current copyright holder is can be troublesome.
The Nunchuck has the stick and buttons all comfortably accessible,
So does the Move Subcontroller, it however has additional buttons instead of just the two on the Nintendo Nunchuk. I consider that a serious improvement, as the Wiimote/Nunchuk combination had a serious lack of buttons, forcing the use of +, -, 1 and 2 for core gameplay functions.
What however boggles my mind is that the Subcontroller does not have motion detection and that they are demoning dual-wild games with two Move controllers at the same time. So it seems they want you to get two Moves, a Subcontroller and a classic Dualshock, just for single player gaming.
This seems to be an issue with the game The Shoot, not with the controller itself. As others have reported that it feels noticably more accurate then the Wiimote in SOCOM.
They're just afraid of change and it colors all their thoughts and arguments.
There are plenty of reasons why you should be afraid of this. This service basically means perfect DRM, the code never leaves the servers, so there is no way to make a backup. If the server goes down or they decide to remove a game, then its gone for good with no way to recover it for a user. This also means no more used sales or normal shop sales, so they have plenty of freedom to dictate the price that they want. One might also worry about privacy issues, as they will be able to tell exactly what you played and when you played it.
Now of course, technology behind this is brilliant, but it also means you give up almost all control to a third party.
You can't homebrew this easily, at least not when you want quality gaming. One problem is that all normal video compression is mostly useless for this task, as the latency is to high, they have developed special algorithms for the task to keep the latency extremely low. The second problem is that they have their special compression stuff in hardware, not software, as normal general purpose hardware is just to slow for the tasks. So to replicate this you wouldn't just need a gaming box, but also a second powerful box just for the compression. So it would be easier to just buy a gaming laptop.
I don't think you understand that publishers have a much greater incentive to discount their titles just like they do on Valve's steam
Lets see, Dirt 2 from Steam costs 50EUR, from Amazon.de it costs 30EUR, Assassins Creed 2 is 50EUR vs 45EUR, Orange Box is 30EUR vs 20EUR and so on. Steam is almost always more expensive then ordering something boxed from Amazon.de and of course Amazon.de throws in free shipping for everything above 20EUR. As I understand it the situation is a little less worse in the USA then it is in Germany, but still, Steam isn't exactly cheap. And that was is saved on shipping goes straight to the developers, not to a price discount.
You are only looking on the dark side of it. The thing is the service has also a ton of positive stuff. Games get platform independent, can run on your PC, your Mac, your TV or even your iPhone. Savegames will always carry over. Even weak hardware can run the games. No more compatibility issues, driver updates, etc. You can watch, record and publish the recorded gameplay. Console hardware will be very cheap. Games will start instantly, without first downloading gigabytes of data. Multiplayer could be done server side, giving you a much higher upper limit on number of players in the same game. And lots more.
For the gaming companies there is also a ton of advantages, like they will get a bigger chunk of money and piracy is basically impossible.
The thing that scares me about this service most is that it actually could work. That might not be right away and it will certainly take time to get the server infrastructure everywhere to cover millions of gamers out there, but issues like bandwidth will simply disappear in the near future and not be a long term show stopper. And once the service becomes mainstream we might run into a dark age of video game history, as it will be completly in the publishers hands what games will be preserved and how.
All that said, when the thing becomes successful Linux gaming might end up being a solved problem, as porting a simple videogame player over to Linux is much easier then porting hundreds of games.
The problem isn't buying something that is slower, but buying something that is noticeably faster. I am not going to invest $100 when all I get is a little bit more detail in the graphics, but I might care about investing $100 if I could play all the games I am interested in at high details with full resolution.
On top of that my current graphic card is passively cooled and I have a PCIe TV card sitting right next to it, which I would have to throw away when I want to insert an active cooled card that takes two slots. And as mentioned my power supply might also need replacement. I am also not a heavy PC gamer and own a PS3, so an additional question would be how the PS3 graphics compare to the PC ones, in case of multiplatform games.
Just too many variables for a piece of hardware that I may need for two games a year.
The problem is that this doesn't work when you want to find out if it is worth to upgrade or not, as benchmarks always only compare the newest stuff against the other newest stuff, not against your years old hardware at home. Even worse is the special OEM hardware that you sometimes get (Geforce 7600LE for example), as that doesn't show up in benchmarks at all. And on top of that there are of course also compatibility issues, like will this graphics card work with my old power supply and such.
Long story short: I have basically given, its to much trouble to search for updates, so instead I just run what I have till it breaks.
As I've understood, mind reading comes down to recognizing certain patterns in the brain.
The hard part isn't so much recognizing the patterns, but getting a good picture of the brain in the first place. Even with the most advanced scanning technologies you don't go much beyond "this region of the brain is active", which isn't anywhere near enough to figure out what exactly is happening in your brain. Its kind of like trying to figure out what you computer is doing by looking at its heat signature with an IR camera, sure you can figure out if somebody is playing a game or not as the GPU is heating up, but you won't get a screenshot that way, there just isn't enough detailed data available.
Biosphere 2 seems to have used 6 * 10^6 liters in its water cycle to sustain 8 peoples, since Biosphere 2 was a closed system it is much closer to a moon base then average water consumption in New York, as it includes agriculture, animals and all that stuff. Assuming no optimizations that would be enough for 8 million people in a moon colony, not that bad.
If video games could make people violent then there would be millions of homicidal maniacs running the streets and nobody would dare venture outside!
How many young soldiers are currently fighting in Iraq? Quite a lot I would say. Now of course thats not video games fault alone, but you can bet that the media in general had more then a tiny bit of influence in their decision making and video games is a tiny part of that.
* large parts of our way of life depends on oil * oil is a limited resource * we will be running out of it quite soon
This is a simple fact how having limited resources and far to many people using them up. It is not a political view, an opinion or anything which you can opt-out of, it is reality. Our current way of life isn't sustainable and even less so when you consider that China, India and all the other nations that want to "rise" to our way of living, speeding up the resource use even more.
This whole "save the planet" business really isn't about tree-hugging, but simply about thinking a bit ahead so that we find alternative solutions before we run out of resources.
It isn't a perfect lifestyle, but I imagine their carbon footprint is near-zero, and certainly better than living in slums.
It might be carbon free, but it is not efficient enough to feed 7 billion people with it. Land and water isn't a limitless resource, so you want to make the most efficient use of it and Amish lifestyle likely isn't.
There is not one robot that exists today that can do what a human can do better on an extraterrestrial surface.
For the cost of shipping a human to another planed you should have not much of a problem to build one. The reason robots are so inferior is mainly because they are cheap.
Can we recreate the gravity, which would make a lunar base an ideal staging ground for launching ships?
And how exactly do you propose we build a factory that can build rockets on the moon? For the cost to launch all the required stuff to the moon you could likely do an in depth exploration of all the rest of the solar system, you know, that kind of exploration where you actually learn something new. Also to actually build something on the moon, so that you don't need hundreds or thousands of workers, it would help to have some good autonomous robots, the kind of robot you might learn to build when you actually build robots for space exploration.
Can we recreate the effects of zero gravity on the human body and learn about how that will effect us in long term space travel?
Thats what the orbit is good for. You don't really want to learn about long term effects when you are already on the trip to Mars, as that would be a little late to actually do something about it.
Can a man sitting in a geodesic dome in Antarctica inspire schoolchildren the same way that Neil Armstrong and co. did when they went to the moon?
I find our robotic space probes quite inspirational and for the cost of human space colonies you could probably shoot enough to the moon that school kids could drive a few on them on their Xboxs for promotional purposes. That would be cool.
Cost isn't and shouldn't be the only concern when it comes to exploration.
If cost isn't a concern you are just wasting time and money and you won't ever create something that is actually sustainable. Just look at the moon program, sure we managed to shoot man to the moon, but we failed at actually building cheap rockets. Thus no more moon rockets for now, as it isn't worth the cost.
If you want to protect against rocks, just do more observation, given a few years warning its not that hard to let a rock miss earth and certainly much easier and cheaper then creating a self sustaining colony. On top of that conditions after an asteroid impact are not that bad, they might wipe out large quantities of life, but even then you are still much better of then on the moon, where you have absolutely no life to begin with nor the conditions to sustain it.
We, as a race, have to start by getting off this planet and then proceed to get out of our solar system.
Yes, someday sure, but there is no need to waste time and money now on efforts that are completly wasted. Building moon colonies is like building colonies on the north pole, sure you can do it, but its not exactly a great place for a self sustaining colony.
For the time being robotic exploration gives you a much bigger bang for the buck.
The bot thing is a distraction. If we don't get our genome off this mudball we're as doomed as the dinosaurs. Sooner or later some unpleasantness will occur.
If we can't get our act together and manage to survive on earth, our chances to survive anywhere else are pretty much zero.
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I remember characters "sounding" a lot better in my head before voice acting started.
I don't. Everything I read happens to sound kind of like myself, my imagination isn't quite up to matching the cast of dozens and dozens of talented voice actors. On top of that text just can't replace voice, sometimes you want to have your teammates shouting out meaningful dialog within a fight, you can't really do that with subtitles, as you are way to busy to keep track of them in the mid of a firefight.
If I remember correctly KotOR, along with some of their other earlier games, suffered from having a mute main hero. You select lines, but they never say them out loud, thus you end up with a very unnatural dialog flow in the game. That kind of high level game design stuff bothers me much more then any lack of voice talent when it comse to individual lines.
Yes, and there are a number of problems with it.
Which luckily people have already thought of years ago and solved since then.
Miles-per-charge is lower than miles-per-fuel-tank, so you'll need to change batteries more often,
You charge at home and maybe even at work. The only time where you would need the battery replacement is if you drive beyond what a battery can hold on a single charge, which is a very small percentage of all the driving you do day to day.
Battery swaps are going to take at least 10 minutes, as opposed to a 5-minute fillup like we have today.
2 minutes to be exact.
The car frame can hold it in place. With a removable, you need to move it to the edge somewhere, and you need the battery in a frame designed for easy slide-out.
Battery replacement works just fine when mounted under the car, see above video.
And who decommissions the old batteries? Who pays for all that?
The company from which you lease the batteries. You don't buy batteries in this scheme, you lease them and only pay for the amount of miles you drive. Nicely solves all problems with disposal and reduced capacity.
Most likely cost I assume, as its not just a ball, the full motion detection also consists of gyros and a magnetic sensor. However, I consider that decision to be extremely stupid, as its drastically limits what you can do with the controller.
Another way to look at the issue is, why didn't they put an analogstick on the Move controller? One would assume that Sony has learned by now that a second analogstick is a really useful thing to have (see PSP camera problems in half the games) and it would have also allowed to have the controller act as a full Dualshock replacement, instead of just being an additional controller.
What jensen404 said is basically correct. For motion/waggle the Wiimote has an accelerometer and for pointing it does have a IR camera which tracks the two groups of LEDs in the sensor bar. The processing of the picture happens inside the Wiimote and all that gets transmitted over the Bluetooth protocol is the position of the points.
The major difference between both devices in the end is simply that the Move controller, thanks to the camera and gyro sensor, knows where it is in 3D space, while the Wiimote doesn't, it only knows how fast it was accelerated. Thus the Wiimote can only react rather crudely to movements and the aiming is limited to being relative to the sensorbar, instead of to the monitor, thus you need a cursor instead of having the ability to directly aim at targets on the screen as with a lightgun.
The browser and not the website owner controls how the video displays, the interface shown to the user
I doubt that, a lot of Flash players out there have quite advanced features compared to a standard video player. Youtube will for example allow captions, links and comments being added on-top of the video stream, it also allows changing the soundtrack of a video, other players have allowed adding comments directly to a time stamp or split the video into sections instead of a single linear bar and there is of course all that showing of related videos going on. Not quite sure how flexible HTML5 is, but I'd guess all that can be replicated with a heap load of Javascript, SVG and all that stuff. So I don't really expect to see standard video player on the web anytime.
The main trouble you might run into and which many other projects have run into are naming conflicts. Publishers like to protect their trademarks, so any name that is a little to close to the original will give you a cease&desist, but those are mostly harmless, as you just need to change your project name then.
Taking over gameplay ideas and concepts is however a non-issue, lots of games do that, even commercial ones.
If you want to create a pixel-perfect replica using original artwork and stuff you shouldn't have much trouble either, as long as you do not include the graphics directly. Many hobby projects like to "steal" graphics from commercial projects and while most of them don't get into trouble it will put you in legal limbo, as what you are doing is illegal. This will also have practical implications such as not getting included in Linux Distributions and such.
Long story short, a recreation based on ideas of the original game won't get you normally into trouble. A recreation based on original graphics, title, names and other copyrightable details however might.
And in the end you have of course to get an idea why you want to recreate it. If its for preservation purposes, adopting to new hardware, etc., it might be best to try to contact the original author and ask for source. There have been quite a few cases where older games have released source code, figuring out however who the current copyright holder is can be troublesome.
The Nunchuck has the stick and buttons all comfortably accessible,
So does the Move Subcontroller, it however has additional buttons instead of just the two on the Nintendo Nunchuk. I consider that a serious improvement, as the Wiimote/Nunchuk combination had a serious lack of buttons, forcing the use of +, -, 1 and 2 for core gameplay functions.
What however boggles my mind is that the Subcontroller does not have motion detection and that they are demoning dual-wild games with two Move controllers at the same time. So it seems they want you to get two Moves, a Subcontroller and a classic Dualshock, just for single player gaming.
This seems to be an issue with the game The Shoot, not with the controller itself. As others have reported that it feels noticably more accurate then the Wiimote in SOCOM.
They're just afraid of change and it colors all their thoughts and arguments.
There are plenty of reasons why you should be afraid of this. This service basically means perfect DRM, the code never leaves the servers, so there is no way to make a backup. If the server goes down or they decide to remove a game, then its gone for good with no way to recover it for a user. This also means no more used sales or normal shop sales, so they have plenty of freedom to dictate the price that they want. One might also worry about privacy issues, as they will be able to tell exactly what you played and when you played it.
Now of course, technology behind this is brilliant, but it also means you give up almost all control to a third party.
You can't homebrew this easily, at least not when you want quality gaming. One problem is that all normal video compression is mostly useless for this task, as the latency is to high, they have developed special algorithms for the task to keep the latency extremely low. The second problem is that they have their special compression stuff in hardware, not software, as normal general purpose hardware is just to slow for the tasks. So to replicate this you wouldn't just need a gaming box, but also a second powerful box just for the compression. So it would be easier to just buy a gaming laptop.
I don't think you understand that publishers have a much greater incentive to discount their titles just like they do on Valve's steam
Lets see, Dirt 2 from Steam costs 50EUR, from Amazon.de it costs 30EUR, Assassins Creed 2 is 50EUR vs 45EUR, Orange Box is 30EUR vs 20EUR and so on. Steam is almost always more expensive then ordering something boxed from Amazon.de and of course Amazon.de throws in free shipping for everything above 20EUR. As I understand it the situation is a little less worse in the USA then it is in Germany, but still, Steam isn't exactly cheap. And that was is saved on shipping goes straight to the developers, not to a price discount.
You are only looking on the dark side of it. The thing is the service has also a ton of positive stuff. Games get platform independent, can run on your PC, your Mac, your TV or even your iPhone. Savegames will always carry over. Even weak hardware can run the games. No more compatibility issues, driver updates, etc. You can watch, record and publish the recorded gameplay. Console hardware will be very cheap. Games will start instantly, without first downloading gigabytes of data. Multiplayer could be done server side, giving you a much higher upper limit on number of players in the same game. And lots more.
For the gaming companies there is also a ton of advantages, like they will get a bigger chunk of money and piracy is basically impossible.
The thing that scares me about this service most is that it actually could work. That might not be right away and it will certainly take time to get the server infrastructure everywhere to cover millions of gamers out there, but issues like bandwidth will simply disappear in the near future and not be a long term show stopper. And once the service becomes mainstream we might run into a dark age of video game history, as it will be completly in the publishers hands what games will be preserved and how.
All that said, when the thing becomes successful Linux gaming might end up being a solved problem, as porting a simple videogame player over to Linux is much easier then porting hundreds of games.
The problem isn't buying something that is slower, but buying something that is noticeably faster. I am not going to invest $100 when all I get is a little bit more detail in the graphics, but I might care about investing $100 if I could play all the games I am interested in at high details with full resolution.
On top of that my current graphic card is passively cooled and I have a PCIe TV card sitting right next to it, which I would have to throw away when I want to insert an active cooled card that takes two slots. And as mentioned my power supply might also need replacement. I am also not a heavy PC gamer and own a PS3, so an additional question would be how the PS3 graphics compare to the PC ones, in case of multiplatform games.
Just too many variables for a piece of hardware that I may need for two games a year.
The problem is that this doesn't work when you want to find out if it is worth to upgrade or not, as benchmarks always only compare the newest stuff against the other newest stuff, not against your years old hardware at home. Even worse is the special OEM hardware that you sometimes get (Geforce 7600LE for example), as that doesn't show up in benchmarks at all. And on top of that there are of course also compatibility issues, like will this graphics card work with my old power supply and such.
Long story short: I have basically given, its to much trouble to search for updates, so instead I just run what I have till it breaks.
As I've understood, mind reading comes down to recognizing certain patterns in the brain.
The hard part isn't so much recognizing the patterns, but getting a good picture of the brain in the first place. Even with the most advanced scanning technologies you don't go much beyond "this region of the brain is active", which isn't anywhere near enough to figure out what exactly is happening in your brain. Its kind of like trying to figure out what you computer is doing by looking at its heat signature with an IR camera, sure you can figure out if somebody is playing a game or not as the GPU is heating up, but you won't get a screenshot that way, there just isn't enough detailed data available.
Biosphere 2 seems to have used 6 * 10^6 liters in its water cycle to sustain 8 peoples, since Biosphere 2 was a closed system it is much closer to a moon base then average water consumption in New York, as it includes agriculture, animals and all that stuff. Assuming no optimizations that would be enough for 8 million people in a moon colony, not that bad.
The 1.3 million pounds seem to be wrong and fixed in the press release, as it right now lists 1.3 trillion pounds.
Measuring water as weight seems so totally illogical.
In the metric system: 1 liter of water == 1 kg.
If video games could make people violent then there would be millions of homicidal maniacs running the streets and nobody would dare venture outside!
How many young soldiers are currently fighting in Iraq? Quite a lot I would say. Now of course thats not video games fault alone, but you can bet that the media in general had more then a tiny bit of influence in their decision making and video games is a tiny part of that.
We are saving the planet? From what?
From us and for us. Short summary:
* large parts of our way of life depends on oil
* oil is a limited resource
* we will be running out of it quite soon
This is a simple fact how having limited resources and far to many people using them up. It is not a political view, an opinion or anything which you can opt-out of, it is reality. Our current way of life isn't sustainable and even less so when you consider that China, India and all the other nations that want to "rise" to our way of living, speeding up the resource use even more.
This whole "save the planet" business really isn't about tree-hugging, but simply about thinking a bit ahead so that we find alternative solutions before we run out of resources.
It isn't a perfect lifestyle, but I imagine their carbon footprint is near-zero, and certainly better than living in slums.
It might be carbon free, but it is not efficient enough to feed 7 billion people with it. Land and water isn't a limitless resource, so you want to make the most efficient use of it and Amish lifestyle likely isn't.
There is not one robot that exists today that can do what a human can do better on an extraterrestrial surface.
For the cost of shipping a human to another planed you should have not much of a problem to build one. The reason robots are so inferior is mainly because they are cheap.
Can we recreate the gravity, which would make a lunar base an ideal staging ground for launching ships?
And how exactly do you propose we build a factory that can build rockets on the moon? For the cost to launch all the required stuff to the moon you could likely do an in depth exploration of all the rest of the solar system, you know, that kind of exploration where you actually learn something new. Also to actually build something on the moon, so that you don't need hundreds or thousands of workers, it would help to have some good autonomous robots, the kind of robot you might learn to build when you actually build robots for space exploration.
Can we recreate the effects of zero gravity on the human body and learn about how that will effect us in long term space travel?
Thats what the orbit is good for. You don't really want to learn about long term effects when you are already on the trip to Mars, as that would be a little late to actually do something about it.
Can a man sitting in a geodesic dome in Antarctica inspire schoolchildren the same way that Neil Armstrong and co. did when they went to the moon?
I find our robotic space probes quite inspirational and for the cost of human space colonies you could probably shoot enough to the moon that school kids could drive a few on them on their Xboxs for promotional purposes. That would be cool.
Cost isn't and shouldn't be the only concern when it comes to exploration.
If cost isn't a concern you are just wasting time and money and you won't ever create something that is actually sustainable. Just look at the moon program, sure we managed to shoot man to the moon, but we failed at actually building cheap rockets. Thus no more moon rockets for now, as it isn't worth the cost.
If you want to protect against rocks, just do more observation, given a few years warning its not that hard to let a rock miss earth and certainly much easier and cheaper then creating a self sustaining colony. On top of that conditions after an asteroid impact are not that bad, they might wipe out large quantities of life, but even then you are still much better of then on the moon, where you have absolutely no life to begin with nor the conditions to sustain it.
We, as a race, have to start by getting off this planet and then proceed to get out of our solar system.
Yes, someday sure, but there is no need to waste time and money now on efforts that are completly wasted. Building moon colonies is like building colonies on the north pole, sure you can do it, but its not exactly a great place for a self sustaining colony.
For the time being robotic exploration gives you a much bigger bang for the buck.
The bot thing is a distraction. If we don't get our genome off this mudball we're as doomed as the dinosaurs. Sooner or later some unpleasantness will occur.
If we can't get our act together and manage to survive on earth, our chances to survive anywhere else are pretty much zero.