The way I've always thought of a technological singularity was that society would reach a point of technological advancement where if you were to take a person from before the event occurred, and take another person (or the same person) after the event, the person as they were before the singularity would be unable to…

Before we can bio engineer another planet, we need to think a tad smaller. We really don't understand biospheres. We can't make a self-contained, self-sustaining long term environment on Earth. Just about every experiment has ended in failure.

Unless we do all the antimatter generation on the Moon, odds are that we'll never get enough fuel to make it there because of the dangers of storage and the cost of lifting it to orbit from Earth.

Not the worst design I've seen for a patrol boat. Although, for open-seas I'd want enclosed cockpit.

@n3onkn1ght: Like it or not, that thing's armed for bear... moose and can probably kill a few squirrels as well. :)

Red Dwarfs are an excellent choice for a second home for a space-faring civilization. However, for the next few billion years, intelligent life is more likely to develop around yellow and orange dwarfs.

If you think about a moment, there are humans that treat other humans worse than any AI movie has ever portrayed. To be honest, AI is everywhere nowadays. Artificial Intelligence is a simulation designed to mimic reactions in ways humans or other life would. When you are playing a level in a FPS, the characters…

@8x10: *racks brain* I was almost certain it was him. I remember watching Cosmos as a kid. Although the line might have been: "There are Billions of stars in our galaxy alone and Billions of galaxies in our universe... A billion, billion stars..."

As Carl Sagan was fond of saying, "There are billions and billions of stars..." The idea that we are completely, totally and utterly alone in this universe is frankly more unbelievable than the idea we might be visited by Aliens. In fact, I'd wager that the odds of there being a world out there that is an almost…

@Vexxarr: Verizon is one of the primary backbone carriers in the US. Verizon owns a sizable chunk of the fiber backbone as its legacy from Bell Atlantic. Their various acquisitions over the years only grew that. They are the land-based infrastructure for the eastern US. They are also one of the largest…

All this seems to say to me is there are elements of interaction in the quantum/electromagnetic realm that are not observable with current techniques and not predictable because of missing components somewhere between the known electromagnetic spectrum and what we know about matter. And it is not going to be a leap…

Something to remember: in order to successfully cover up anything, the only thing you have to do is make it impossible to separate the facts from the fiction and ensure that the fiction is more believable than the facts. In the case of extraterrestrial visitation... lets just say its very, very easy to create…

Its an interesting idea. And I, too, long for the day the transporter is no longer a nice day-dream. I also understand that the Q-bit computer necessary to store the information for all my body would, with anything available in the next 20 years, be the size of a large building and probably need to keep me in some…

@Howard Blair: Eliminate one source of death, another will take its place. The key here is not stopping the advancement of medical science, but instead asking ourselves if this is what we want. For some it will be a resounding "yes", for others a blatant "no". Odds are cyborgs and cloning will eventually fall…

@Cory Gross: I think what you fear is not so much the fantasy itself, but the idea that someone can take advantage of the people who believe strongly in that fantasy.

@Howard J. Barnett: The oldest space-faring civilizations are likely to be around red-dwarf stars. The reason is that such stars can burn for 50-100 billion years. Makes for an attractive piece of real estate once you work out the kinks.