Can this destroying-the-system business wait 'til after my Cape Town vacation this winter?

"probably less life than Titan, Europa, or Mars"

Nah, I'd cut a deal with them and negotiate root privileges.

"We'll fail if we try terraforming Venus first, and that failure may result in us not being able to terraform it."

"All it would take a venusian biosphere to thrive would be a chemical reaction possible on Venus and allowing it to process Co2. Doesn't sound far-fetched."

I don't understand why you would object to changing an entire lifeless planet.

I don't assume anything, just idle musings. And it saddens me too, that we will probably not be around to hear the answers to all these vexing questions. But hey, we might just make it to the singularity and achieve some form of immorality, so let's cross fingers.

I'd assume that the monitoring of some 7 billion peeps would be automated. Anyhow, we come into existence, we cease to exist, doesn't really matter.

You're on this site for the comics section, correct?

"In his paper, Bostrom offered very little science to support his theory".

Well, I guess you don't eat your chicken raw, including it's intestines and their content, do you? I know that I don't.

I didn't suggest that guy died of some infection. It's cockroaches, man. They eat everything, including their own feces and of course there'll be a significant chance that they carry something nasty. But hey, be my guest, try some, I just don't think it's a good idea, statistically speaking.

"Unless the roaches were contaminated with some bacteria or other pathogens"

Can't wait!

Once they do this with lobsters it's time to pack and move to Saturn.

If "getting all the love and attention this is getting" is your desire, then maybe you should submit those drawings of yours here at io9.

Would be interesting to know whether the human players knew the purpose of the experiment. If so, I think that might influence their gaming, many would probably try to play more bot-like.

Didn't even notice it was a McCoy quote, yet fully agree. If progress could be measured objectively across all fields, I bet medicine would lag significantly behind many other fields. It's bizarre that we can cram billions of transistors into a CPU, detect planets one hundred light years away or manipulate single…

I had the same thought, but I decided to let you express it and, consequently, deal with the outrage police.

Such is the human condition.