Ummm. The fact that she lived longer than other patients just means that she lived longer than other patients. I am sure that some patients lived a lot less than other patients. It had nothing to do with god. It had to do with the fact that people react to diseases and treatments differently. Some people live longer than some people who live longer than some people.

To pretend that the entire mission would be dedicated to getting a 3D printer into orbit is to be obtuse to the point of ridiculous. Send it up as a cargo module on a regular flight just like many other experimental packages.

I can't understand why you insist on the solution being one or the other. I see this all the time, but I can never figure out why. Humans tend to be so one-dimensional in their planning and thinking.
Do you honestly think that the great masses of homo sapiens are even interested in the kind of evolution you are talking about? I see absolutely no evidence of the kinds of changes you are talking about on a large enough scale to be relevant.

This reflects a serious misunderstanding of the mechanics of recovery from E.L.E.'s. The ecosystem doesn't recover in decades even with the possibility of terraforming. It would be a centuries to millennium process. Way too many people think of the geosphere, atmosphere and biosphere as devices we can just adjust if we just turn the nobs. Its the same kind of reasoning which says geoengineering will solve the global warming problem. Throw some dust in the air and drop the temp a few degrees. Too cold, stop putting dust in the air and raise the temp a few degrees. The environment doesn't work that way.

No, it isn't. There are somethings the universe can do that which make being off planet essential for survival. A large scale CME that wipes the van Allen belt away and strips the atmosphere from the planet. A gamma ray burst which completely sterilizes the entire planet. An asteroid collision that destroys a large section of the globe. The details are extremely well explained in Phil Plait's Death from the Skies and would clearly be beyond the capability of the humans in domes survival strategy.

Actually companies make money by passing such issues to the general public. Externalities is what they call it.

Your imagination is faulty in this area.

It does so by noting minute changes in gravitational pull caused by local changes in Earth's mass. Masses of ice, air, water and solid Earth can be moved by weather patterns, seasonal change, climate change and even tectonic events such as large earthquakes. To track these changes, GRACE uses GPS and a microwave ranging system to measure micron-scale variations in the 220-kilometer (137-mile) separation between the two spacecraft, developed by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. These measurements are used to produce monthly gravity maps that are more than 100 times more precise than previous models, providing the resolution necessary to characterize how Earth’s gravity field varies over time and space, and over land and sea. The data have substantially improved the accuracy of techniques used by oceanographers, hydrologists, glaciologists, geologists and climate scientists.

Given the complete lack of doing anything about it, as exemplified by this reading, this should be the default position for everyone involved. There is no hint that anything will be done about it before it gets a lot worse. Not on a large enough scale to actually alleviate the problem so I take the adaptation approach in the hopes that humanity will get motivated enough to mitigate the damage. So far the bets are on human apathy.

Every time I read a statement about this I question the research capacity of people. The fact that I see this on a computer technology forum makes my brain sad.
No, he didn't invent the Internet. He just created the bill which underlay a lot of Internet development.

Among the many technological achievements that resulted from the funding of the Gore Bill, was the development of Mosaic in 1993,the World Wide Web browser software which is credited by most scholars as beginning the Internet boom of the 1990s: Gore's legislation also helped fund the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois, where a team of programmers, including Netscape founder Marc Andreessen, created the Mosaic Web browser, the commercial Internet's technological springboard. 'If it had been left to private industry, it wouldn't have happened,' Andreessen says of Gore's bill, 'at least, not until years later.'

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_Performance_Computing_Act_of_1991#Results

I tell you what. Place yourself in a closed room with a 5% CO2 solution and then come back to me and tell me its not poisonous.

Also, social programs don't do anybody any long term favors. The give a man a fish and teach him to fish analogy comes to mind.

Except that rich people are hoarding all the fish which leaves very little for non-rich people to catch. Concentration of wealth in the hands of few is equal to over-fishing.

There is absolutely no way for you to prove this. Just because things happened that way doesn't mean that they couldn't have happened another way. Post Hoc, Ergo Proctor Hoc and all that.

Of course, this affects me, the grocery buyer. The increased monopolization and mono-culture of agriculture created by companies like Monsanto does affect me. A great many of the foods I buy are from a limited number of lines which gives companies like Monsanto power over my food choices as they actively work to suppress the growth of other lines. All in the name of profit.
Monsanto doesn't have to have a specific clause saying they can sue their customers' customers. The fact that they have a patent on one particular gene means they can sue anyone who uses that gene without their permission. Which means they can sue their customers' customers for patent enfringement and they have. Over and over again. Suing smaller farmers who can't afford to defend themselves allows Monsanto to put competitors out of business and allows the to get a larger market share of the famland by confiscation of farmland which belongs to people who "infringed their patent."
This affects me by limiting my choices of food products and by creating a powerful monopoly over food which allows them to influence future production and restrict the actions of others. It also creates a very real danger because creating a single monoculture of a certain crop opens up the danger to future diseases for which we don't have a resistance. Monsanto is directly impacting agricultural biodiversity in the name of profit.
I do not have a problem with GMO foods. I have a problem with companies getting a monopoly and then using that monopoly to beat down other producers.

You are kidding right. The Fiscal Libertarian methodology cannot create a sustainable society. It doesn't matter what the Objectivist pipe dreamers say. Any system based solely on the premise of "as long as I get mine" isn't sustainable in the long term because everything becomes an externality. It especially isn't suitable for a space faring civilization.
Think about a long space journey. A couple of years long or longer. Each person is only concerned with his own profit and his own survival. What happens when the water system does down and the people needed to fix it decide to extort major profit from the situation. I know how to fix it and if you don't put me in charge then I won't help you fix it. They can take care of the their own repairs, but they don't have to do a thing to help you with yours. After all they have what they need. My favorite example is from the media. The scene in the original Total Recall movie where Cohaagan turns off the air machines because they belong to him.
Sorry, but space exploration requires a high level of cooperation and interdependence which is something Libertarians can't handle. The Libertarian pipe dream is an illusion based on ease of resources and the opportunity to pass the buck to someone else. Won't work when you are in a closed space colony.

Well, first off the oil companies would love them and pay them handsomely. We know this because this is what the oil companies have done to people in their pocket. You might want to look into how much money the oil companies have invested in keeping the debate down. The amount they spend dwarfs anything a scientist gets and just because your side is willing to prostitute themselves for money doesn't mean that real scientist are. This is definitely a case of pot calling the kettle black.

It is so sad. It is no wonder we can't get anywhere and this thread has been a great example why. For every we can do it comment there are 10-20 we can't comments. On what is supposed to be a tech mecca, too.