There are even housing developments built expressly for amateur astronomers, like Arizona Sky Village southeast of Tucson. It's shielded by mountains and has 4 acre lots to give you plenty of space for your dome. There are apparently ones in Georgia and Florida too. Vermont would be a good site for retiring New…

Sure, the creatures had to be CGI, but it looked like a lot of the landscape was too. That's really too bad. There were some places there, like the river trip, that I would actually like to visit if they were real. They looked somewhat like Glen Canyon, but who knows?

Come on fellow slans, humanity is extinguishing itself all the time. Present day homo sapiens would look pretty alien to a Victorian, never mind a Paleolith-ian. That's a key theme of our genre! Of course we're going to be gone pretty soon! As Bruce Sterling's Shaper protagonist in "Swarm" says - "In a thousand…

Here's another theory - let's ignore the box office and look at the movie itself. Ask your own inner fan - do you want to see yet another CGI fantasy full of explosions and monsters? Would you like to see an Avatar-ish spectacle, but without SF or politics and with even more cardboard characters? There have been a…

Also look for Paul McAuley's novels "Garden of the Sun" and "The Quiet War", where Brazil and China are the major powers after North America and Europe suffer ecological collapse. Unfortunately, Brazil is by that time a militaristic corpocracy, which conquers the peaceful settlements on the moons of Jupiter and…

Are we sure that only Neanderthals used Mousterian-style tools? Wiki says that homo sap sap also did. It also sounds like the date range could overlap with that of modern humans in Europe.

If anti-trust law still meant anything in the US, Amazon would be a prime target for break-up. The mere fact that a book distributor is allowed to also be a publisher is shocking to those who care about free markets. Have a look at The Master Switch (not an Amazon link!) by Tim Wu to see the damage caused by…

A good explanation! Especially since "Prometheus" is also claiming that there will be common interstellar travel by human beings in 2082. That's only 70 years from now, and we don't know how to do it even theoretically. 70 years ago, in 1942, we knew how to theoretically do the common technologies of 2012, like…

"21st century - biotech, nanotech, fusion, fission, and M-theory, and that was just the first decade!" Hope the movie's writing is better than this. Biotech and fission got big in the 20th century. No one at present is close to making nanotech work (at least as in self-replicating machines) or fusion for that…

This is one of the cool things about the power plants at Niagara Falls - they divert the water at night into the generators so they can pump water up into storage reservoirs. Then they keep the Falls flowing during the day for tourists, while they drain the reservoirs to generate power when electricity rates are at…

They have! Thomas the Tank Engine is straight up corporate propaganda. All the engines strive to be Really Useful, as defined by what Sir Topham Hatt decrees. If not, it's straight to the scrapyard. Doing your job, keeping neat and clean, being on time - you couldn't ask for better employee training. It's not…

Why would you expect scientists to be good politicians? They've chosen a career of studying nature, not of improving human well-being. They may care as much about people as anyone else, but that's not their training.

From a Darwinian point of view, these mods don't really do anything for the species of homo sapiens, since they don't enhance survival or reproduction in any but the most unusual circumstances. I'm hard put to think of a case where I really, really needed to see UV, or even to be much stronger than I currently am. …

The system of seismometers that was put in place for detecting nuclear tests was also critical to gathering the proof of the theory of continental drift. The Cold War was good for that, at least. Before that, no geologists had the resources to set up such a worldwide monitoring system, or make sure the data was…

These kind of bullets are called flechettes, and people have been trying to make them work since the 60s. One of the alternatives to the M-16 was something called the Special Purpose Individual Weapon, which used flechettes to decrease weight and increase range. It was cancelled in the 90s. The problem with them is…

Yet we just dropped about $100B on building the ISS, and no one seems to care. It's the most expensive single object ever built. There have been more people in LEO in the last couple of years than ever before in history. The average population of space is now about 6.

In Ken MacLeod's "Engines of Light" series, there's a reference to the Ninth. The overall premise is that people from a wide range of times get kidnapped and taken to a planet on the other side of the galaxy, so all sorts of disappearances can be accounted for. In the main city of the new world is an enormous castle…

Actually, I care more about what has actually happened in terms of space weapons than vague imaginings. The use of the Shuttle to deliver nukes was a new one to me, as was the cannon on the Salyut.

There are four probes on or around Mars, ones at Mercury, Venus, Vesta and Saturn, and ones on the way to Jupiter, Venus, Mars, and Pluto. And space exploration is dead? There's more exploration being done right now than at any time in history, and that includes the Cold War stunt of Apollo. This attitude of…

You're absolutely right to ask for citation, so here you go: US R&D Expenditures (NSF.gov). For the latest year of 2008, the US spent $324B on R&D. In 2000 it spent $267B. Both are in constant 2000 dollars. This table: Gross Expenditures for R&D By Selected Country shows the absolute levels: