Sorry but government bashing is facile.

Sure, but with solar energy, Earth is an open system. Sure growth can't be infinite. Even the universe isn't big enough for endless growth, but as long as stars exist, change can exist.

I think I agree. Ideally recessions should force us to think things over, to reform and abandon old solutions that don't work anymore. Change always hurts but change is always necessary. The current collapse of the global financial system was good in some ways. It exposed 30 years of corruption and pointed out many…

Well, economists seem to have a different definition of growth from biologists and one I find confusing. I mean what exactly is growing here? Number of consumers? Number of jobs created? Amount of resources transformed? Profits? Number of products made? Number of participants in an economy?

Boo! Hiss! Open source the human genome!

I doubt I'm young enough now to see it but I do think aging will be cured one day. It's in our nature to defy nature all the time. We build machines to fly and to travel through space. This is not normal for us but we do it anyway. Since I know it won't do any good, I'm not going to repeat all the reasons why I think…

"Mars has significant gravity."

I'm aware that the Casimir Effect does this and I don't think anyone disputes that it does distort space-time in a negative sense. I just don't think the Casimir Effect is powerful enough to actually make a working Alcubierre drive. I think you'd need charged plates of enormously impractical size.

There is no let about it. It's not that we really have much choice anyway. If the technology exists to reliably, flexibly and cheaply replace a human worker in some task, it will happen. This has been true for about 500 years.

Good writing can make either work and, when it's done right, it's fun to read.

Needs more Ever Lovin' Blue Eyed Thing.

As a kid I remember UFO, Space 1999 and the Thunderbirds in syndication in the States. He was a master at miniatures and miniature special effects. And I think he had as powerful an effect on the use of miniatures in movies as Dykstra or Trumbull. Before Star Wars made the "weathered look" cool for futuristic tech,…

Understood and points taken.

The thing is we don't know that for certain, is mechanical loading enough? We won't know until we have people spend a year or so on Mars, right?

Where's the centrifuges to counter the reduced gravity? I mean I realize they don't actually have to use them, but they should take X amount of hours out of the day to allow for centrifuge time. Wouldn't real astronauts have to do this?

I first saw Doctor Who on PBS back in San Francisco in the early 70s, during the Pertwee years. I was 5 or 6. It was the episode where, due to some malfunction of his TARDIS guidance computer, the Doctor slipped into an evil beard universe where Lethbridge-Stewart wears an eye patch and Earth is a bit more…

Absurdism should be a stylized rubber chicken.

Ow! Another good one! Yep, with all his own alternate history Kangs working at cross purposes to him, it's a wonder he can even shave in the morning or brush his teeth at night!

Plus a billion for this. Wile E. Coyote should be number one on this list—NUMBER ONE. He so smart he goes back around to stupid again!