Though I don't think, this particular one is a bad idea, I am worried about the yet another illustration of how the Federal government's control reaches into the crooks and nannies it was never supposed to reach:

If you want federal funding in your community, you've got to fill in the blank

By ratcheting up the Federal taxes, the Federal government has come into position to dictate the terms to local governments, who can neither print money nor raise their taxes to finance themselves without bankrupting local economies. But don't you worry — it is not dictatorship, you can always refuse the federal monies, can you not?

Or will we one day hear, that, unfortunately, the cameras worn by the officers involved had "malfunctioned" at the most inopportune moment?

(Pay no attention to the remains of chewing gum around the lenses.)

IPCC not good enough for you?

Certainly not. The panel would be disbanded, if Climate Change turned out to be a hoax so all members are interested in maintaining the fear. The fear may still be justified, but the glaring conflict of interest disqualifies their reports as evidence.

I would not trust them any more, than I would trust an "anti-poverty" politician to eliminate poverty — what is he going to run on come next elections?

Then how about Koch funded 0.01% papers?

You had the opportunity to offer a link, but chose not to... Is it because you don't have one.

Ah, this is a lot more persuasive than your earlier attempt, but still not quite good enough... Citation needed much? (No, IPCC-produced documents don't count — members of the panel are government-appointed politicians, not scientists.)

Please, don't hate.

Read the IPCC reports

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change are exactly the sort of people I was talking about — the ones, whose salaries and authority depend on Climate Change being a big deal. The conflict of interest is so glaringly obvious, it is comparable to the proverbial elephant in the room. They've been caught red-handed before.

The "reports" they produce are written by people appointed by governments. Few of them are scientists, and what few scientists there are seek not knowledge, but ways to confirm their pre-existing convictions — and when the data fails to do that, they "homogenize" it until it does... And though governments differ world-wide, they all have one thing in common: they are all convinced (often sincerely), that they "know better" and could "do good" if only they had more control over their subjects and their pretty little heads.

This is why you have never heard of any "green" measure, that would have reduced rather than increased the government's power over Individuals, have you?..

In fact, I don't see how these two are mutually exclusive.

They are not mutually exclusive, but undertakings as substantial as building a network of telescopes would certainly be, will always be at the expense of something else. And there are plenty of those "somethings", that should have a higher priority, in my not so humble opinion.

Doing both, or the cheaper first is good, sound science.

No. Because the two fields — hunting for exo-planets and developing the theory of very fast space-travel — are not much related, there is no synergy in doing both at once. Various scientists may choose to pursue either (or both) as they please, but no coordinated effort needs to be extended to further increase the list of destinations before we even know, we'll ever be able to reach any of them.

And until we figure out, how to travel with even the .1c speed, we don't even need to know, which one can be terraformed — easily or otherwise. Sure, the pursuit of abstract knowledge is valuable in itself, but more than that is needed to justify extending the effort and the resources needed for "telescopes, on and around earth".

Heck, we haven't even colonized Antarctica yet — which can already be reached in a few hours and is known to have breathable air and plenty of water...

Then what? What's the point without a destination?

The point of my posting was that we already have — using the old imperfect methods — compiled a list of destinations. We can continue looking for them, but studding the entire globe with uber-telescopes, as NotingHere insisted, seems pointless until we can (or, at least, come close to being able to) reach any of them in reasonable time.

We need telescopes, on and around earth. lots of them.

What for? We've already determined, a vast variety of planets exist — including those, which can be human-habitable. What good is known, that there is a billion rather than a mere million of them "nearby", if we can't get to even the nearest star anyway?

Except what will happen is Uber will come out and say that after an internal investigation, they found a few rogue employees had the program up on their own time, and Uber has now put a stop to it, etc..

This only works for government agencies, who are "investigated" by legislatures with all of the concomitant political theater — not private companies, who have to work with courts.

One more good illustration, why government should be responsible for as little as at all possible, BTW.

But morons like you [...] bitches of science denial [...] Stupid, ignorant, FUD spread prick.

I suppose, this was another example of the sophisticated argument exquisitely worded in order to convince an opponent, rather than shout him down...

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and we're still mostly acting like it's no big deal.

It certainly is a big deal to those, whose salaries and authority depends on it being a big deal. To the rest of us — not so much...