If that's not the worst way to become sustainable as a species, I'm not sure I want to find out what the worst way would be. Nuclear war? Probably does not lead to sustainable anything. Deadly plagues? Lots of conventional war conflicts? Awful, but actually I'm not sure they'd be as bad as — or would, in the long run,…

I don't know — the Canadarm does pack a mean punch...

"In logic, an argumentum ad populum (Latin for "appeal to the people") is a fallacious argument that concludes a proposition to be true because many or most people believe it. In other words, the basic idea of the argument is: "If many believe so, it is so.""

To be fair, dreaming of space colonization as the solution to the world's problems is, at present, no less wishful than dreams of noble savage societies. It's an exciting prospect in the remote future, but unless some sort of singularity really is around the corner, we'll probably be dealing with very serious…

Complaining about modern art is what people do when... actually, I have no idea why people do it. It's not your cup of tea, fine — but maybe others like it? Maybe the artist just decided that doing this is what made them happy? Why does this make them a bad person, or one unworthy of respect?

I felt a little like I already knew exactly where this story was going once I got a few paragraphs in, and then the rest of it was kind of... unnecessary elaboration on an already clearly-made point. It felt less like a story, and more like a... fictionalized version of a post someone would make on some politics…

Gonna refer you to Strakus' awesome comment below: http://io9.com/5966332/golden-spike-company-announces-trips-to-the-moon-will-launch-in-2020-guess-how-much-tickets-cost?post=54960382

It's a phrase that is linked to stereotypical French-ness in parts of the English-speaking world. A caricature, basically. An American cartoon character who is meant to be portrayed as French is likely to shout "sacre bleu!" at some point, for example (he is also likely to be wearing a beret, and carrying a baguette).…

Wikipedia offers this list of animals by number of neurons: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_animals_by_number_of_neurons

According to Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuron#Neurons_in_the_brain), a human being has a hundred billion neurons, a nematode worm has only a few hundred, and a fruit fly gets by with a hundred thousand. I would guess that a bird, being a pretty complex creature, would be somewhat closer to the "human"…

That makes sense — squids are pretty smart, all things considered. I'm not sure the word "primitive" really makes sense in this context, though.

That doesn't make sense to me — how do you derive the ethical worth of a (hypothetical — not talking about the Spaun model here) thinking, conscious mind merely from whether it naturally evolved and whether it's biologically alive, or based on artificial computing technology? Why are these the important things to look…

I actually liked the theme song. :P But the characters were so unlikeable! Trip and Reed were alright, but pretty much everyone else was either bland or just unbearable. I think Captain Archer was closer to Futurama's Zapp Brannigan than any Kirk/Shatner hybrid ever could be: he was stupid, self-righteous, and did…

"New Trek" didn't "retcon" anything per se — it created an "alternate timeline" instead; the upshot being that the franchise can still return to the original timeline in some other medium, perhaps.

"Just like the moonraker goes in search of his dream of gold..."

I like the asteroid mining company (Planetary Resources) because their plan is actually fairly tame. It starts off with sending up a few comparatively cheap space telescopes to study the asteroids more closely, then, years later, would eventually move up to robot probe missions to some promising and comparatively…

Then the obvious solution is to take a more direct approach, and just put solar sails on Mercury.

But there seemed to be a difference between TOS AI and TNG AI. TOS AI was just something for Kirk to talk to death, as another comment put it, precisely because it was inflexible and kind of stupid. TOS robots often behaved in illogical, erratic ways, and then exploded as soon as this was pointed out to them. They…

Finally.

I think it's the process by which the kid comes to conclusions that is the issue, more than any specific wrong conclusions they may arrive at in themselves. Children may be curious and may want to experiment, but to be good scientists, and just to think about the world rationally, they also need to be taught to try…