“why we should be sending humans to Mars instead of developing systems to protect the Earth from deadly asteroids.”

And developing the capability to send humans to Mars means that you will also have the capability to go after asteroids.

Trying to explain space exploration or any upper-level science to Congress is a bit like trying to explain how to balance a check book to my dog. Sure, she’ll sit there patiently and listen politely, but when it comes time to actually do anything, she’d much rather lick her own crotch.

I always hear that artificial gravity is a huge engineering problem, but I’ve never heard exactly why it is.

Can’t comment on Mars, don’t want to spoil anything

When the point is to educate science dummies, a best-selling author of a book that NASA went out of its way to support seems like a good starting point before getting into headier scientific inquiry.

But the whole point is that extinction by asteroid impact is one of many possible scenarios, of the ones we know about. Without considering the fact that there might be scenarios/events we don’t even know about.

Agreed. Mark Bowden isn’t military, but all his research for Black Hawk Down made him qualified to give talks on military topics. Weir did a lot of research, is a known figure, and is obviously able to get his point across. He is a great person to have talk to Congress.

That tether idea comes up in Neal Stephenson’s Seveneves too

Andy did a lot of research and talked to many experts, many unsolicited. I think he has a good outsider’s perspective as a cumulative high level overview of where Space technology is today. He would be good to give a good, informed, layman’s perspective that the Congress people can understand allowing them to then…

You can’t because of wibly wobbly time reasons. Don’t you know time travel?!

Honestly I think the takaway people usually get is “Wow, we sure we’re racist... back then.”

And we all know that, if there’s one thing network television handles well, it’s time travel.

Be sort of like a serialized Deja Vu, which I generally liked.

He’s stolen our time machine! We must now chase him through the past!

Reruns would be better than some of these shows. I’d love to see repeats of Journeyman since it’s not on DVD/Bluray.

I’ll never forget the episode where he had sex with a computer.

It’s the first thing I thought of too! I remember on one of the open channels a while back, I nominated this show as a good one to reboot. IDoing something with this premise in the a post 9/11 world could have interesting possibilities.

Despite the bloodbath of television cancellations last week, NBC is on a roll picking up new shows to fill the fall schedule.

I KNEW this looked familiar: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seven_Day…