Not a fan of Occam's razor, are we?
Are you saying we shouldn't investigate because the simplest answer is good enough?

If you want to know more about the origin of life, try investing in biology, not NASA
Yes, astrobiology ;-)

Neil is arguing for a bigger space program not to answer questions, but to inspire 'dreams'
Wouldn't you consider the possibility of answers to some of life’s most fundamental questions inspirational?

I'm reminded of that Shakespeare quote "I could be bounded in a nutshell, and count myself a king of infinite space...". We're so primitive as a culture and know so little about the universe that all we can really do is choose a belief that fits comfortably within our realm of knowledge, or accept the fact that we don't know and that any logical theory is as valid as another in the absence of evidence.

We don't know what amount of time is required for life to spontaneously form in a given set of conditions. If we found it to be one day, in ideal conditions then yes, it's very likely it spontaneously formed here, daily. If it required several billion years for it to spontaneously form and take hold then I would say it's more likely it evolved elsewhere and that the primary form of creation is transmition.

We don't know how much other life is out there. If our Milky Way galaxy was found to be primary sterile?

There are many questions, and that's why Neil deGrasse Tyson is arguing for a bigger space program. We'd like answers.

Prometheus was a bit of a dissapointment - it had so much potential!

Argh, to the extent of face saving permitted in Slashdot commentry I'd like to retract my use of the terms "creation" and "intelligent design" in that context. Those terms are clearly identified with religion but my argument wasn't intended to be.

My point is that the two theories are compatible. Natural selection will be effective in any system where multiple species compete for resources regardless of where the species originated. My argument is constrained to the origin of life on earth, not in the universe. I'm trying to say that by distancing themselves from creation people inadvertently distance themselves from the possibility that life originated elsewhere in the universe prior to earth and may have found its way here. As we can't travel back in time to the origin of life on earth perhaps we can seek out life elsewhere in the galaxy to see how it evolved there, or if we find intelligent life, perhaps a culture more mature than our own, we can simply ask them how we got here as their culture may be old enough to have recorded this. Yes it's impossible to prove that life doesn't exist elsewhere in the universe, that's my point, even though I had constrained that argument to life in the galaxy as it's reasonable to consider each galaxy as an island since the big bang, excepting those which have merged since.

Great video. I'm not sure what it has to do with Intelligent Design though. It strikes me that Intelligent Design is compatible with Natural Selection. The two theories diverge when it comes to the ultimate source of life which Natural Selection says evolved spontaneously as a single cell life form from which all other life evolved, and ID suggesting that our DNA may have come from elsewhere. It seems to me that expanding the exploration of space is key to discoving where we come from and the answer may be something which would be considered very unscientific at this point in time. Until we encounter other intelligent life in the galaxy or prove there is none and that under the right conditions life can evolve spontaneously in a previously sterile environment it would be short sighted to deny that life may have originated elsewhere.

I agree with Sergey. Facebook and other such sites represent the opposite of what the Internet was meant to be. Instead of creating an open facebook or twitter protocol for anyone to implement, they've closed it off and put a wall around their own little internet. Imagine the same was done in the early days; instead of SMTP we'd just have Hotmail. Instead of HTTP we'd have AOL. Eeeewww

You were referring to the audio frequency. Sorry, my bad. Should have read the article above properly.

I too can hear very high pitched sounds. Back in the CRT days I could tell a cheap or faulty monitor from a few metres away while others were oblivious. In this case however, the kHz refers to the rate at which the audio signal is sampled, not the frequency of the audible signal.

As mentioned above truckers, delivery van drivers etc can use jammers to hide thier location inadvertantly disrupting critical systems.
"An event last year at Newark Liberty International Airport in New Jersey showed that it only takes one jammer to cause disruption. Airport controllers had installed a new GPS-based landing system, so that aircraft could approach in bad visibility. But it was shutting itself down once or twice a day. It took several months to find the culprit: a driver on the nearby New Jersey Turnpike using a portable GPS jammer to avoid paying the highway toll."

Yes you're right. To be more precise: Vendor neutral, DRM free method of legally downloading media. Streaming also, is not good enough. The crux of my argument is that pirates offer this already, yet content providers seem to be opposed to the idea of giving consumers high quality DRM free downloads, which is exactly what people want. When I buy a DVD I'm confident it will work on any player for many years. Why not give consumers the same level of assurance with Internet delivered content?

Until content producers provide a quick, easy and legal means to download content as soon as soon as it becomes available consumers will keep getting their media from "alternative" sources.

There's nothing new or unusual about paying for market analysis. People who sign up are doing the Internet equivilant taste testing foods for a market research company.

For the last couple of decades SETI has been searching the sky methodically looking for any interesting signals around the 1.420 gigahertz range which is the "precession frequency of neutral hydrogen". SETI will now be able to point their radio telescopes at places we already know are interesting and check them on a much wider range of frequencies. I may be hopeful but I can't help feeling it's an exciting time to be alive.

Nokia shot themselves in the foot by having a hundred different phone models available at any one time and not many of them very good. My friend had a high end Nokia,which was buggy and glitchy. I told him it was no problem, I would go to the Nokia website and download a firmware update for him. Well, after a year still no firmware update. He then went and bought an iPhone which he loves. If Nokia focused on making a few really good phones instead of a hundred average ones they might have retained some customer loyalty.