Small drones with significant non-metal construction will be more or less indistinguishable from birds. And it's not a stretch to imagine "stealth" drones specifically constructed or modified to mitigate radar.

Using a radar offensively, aka an EMP weapon, is a possibility, but shielding electronics is also a possibility. You'd need a very powerful signal to defeat that, and operating such a thing in a civilian area could lead to all kinds of unintended damage.

Radar, backed up by lidar and acoustic sensors, is the best route. Threat mitigation is best handled by a point defense laser. End of story.

Use this: www.youtube.com/watch?v=D0DbgNju2wE

Infinite ammo so long as you have power, instant hit, no ballistic fallout if you miss. And it's not like they can't afford it.

Not to go all Dr. Evil on the subject, but the Navy *does* have some recently-deployed point defense laser technology designed to shoot down incoming cruise missiles. These tiny drones aren't manned and they're violating what might be the most restricted airspace in the country outside of Groom Lake; there's nothing legally preventing them from being shot down by said laser. That's a far better course than trying to do it ballistically or with something like a Stinger missile, both of which would have a hard time hitting something small and have issues with what happens to the round if it misses (i.e. falls on a civilian).

Mars is also a nine-month journey with no practical prospect of a "turn around and go home if something goes wrong" option. The moon is three days away and a free-return abort is built into the flight plan (along with a direct abort if the situation is dire). The scale of the two missions is completely different, with Mars being vastly more difficult mainly due to time.

I'm a big fan of the lunar base idea. Start there and develop -- or re-develop, as the case may be -- the technologies needed to get us reliably to and from the moon. Lunar habitats can be inflatable, or built underground using locally available materials. Hell, we could put robots on the moon to BUILD the habitats before we ever go there in person, making the whole trip a lot safer. And remotely controlling robots on the moon is a helluva lot easier than doing the same on Mars. Water is present on the moon for rocket fuel. Solar power is reasonable, but a small fission reactor would be much better. The escape velocity for the moon is lower than Mars and vastly lower than Earth. And asteroid capture missions could redirect to the moon instead of Earth, where the risk of "losing" and asteroid and having it impact would be negligible compared to aiming one at Earth and hoping you don't hit a populated area.

In short, a sustainable lunar base could be used as a springboard for future manned missions to Mars and the outer planets. The moon is IDEAL for this for every reason except one: it currently has no infrastructure for building or launching anything. Let's remedy that as soon as possible instead of trying to figure out how to haul everything out of Earth's gravity well and dense atmosphere. Grab an asteroid, send it to lunar orbit, smelt it down in orbit and construct your spacecraft THERE instead of on the surface. Complex items that cannot be easily made in orbit can be made on the lunar surface and launched via magnetic catapults into lunar orbit for final assembly. Or, for that matter, a lunar space elevator. The lower gravity and lack of atmosphere means we can construct a lunar space elevator with existing materials RIGHT NOW. Forget the magical unobtanium needed to make one on Earth; we just turn the moon into our launch platform for the solar system. Long term, instead of just redirecting asteroids to the moon, we can get to Saturn and grab a few cubic miles of water ice from its rings. Sent to the moon, it could provide water, breathable oxygen, and fuel for thousands of missions.

The DC-X and NASP were cancelled because they were unworkable concepts. The prototypes you saw up until cancellation were about as space-ready as my toaster is. There were too many problems with materials and performance that we do not have the technology to overcome just yet. Boeing recognized this and that's why the ideas were shelved, not some Vast Corporate Conspiracy.

Except for the fact that it does nothing to spread out the human species. Right now, if a calamity befalls Earth such as an asteroid/comet impact, or the explosion of the Yosemite supervolcano, or global thermonuclear war, we get wiped out as a species. In the long run, we MUST leave Earth if for no other reason that to get all our eggs out of one basket.

And, if you want to be REALLY forward thinking, we have to eventually leave this entire solar system, as our Sun will eventually burn out, turn into a red giant, swallow Mercury and Venus, and probably Earth as well if it isn't burned to a cinder already.

Why land a rather large rocket? Seriously. This same discussion took place pre-Apollo when engineers thought we'd have to land a large rocket on the moon. Their solution then would work equally well now. Send a lander with a small, lightweight return-to-orbit ascent stage. Leave the Earth-return rocket in orbit awaiting the ascent stage with sample. Your landing/takeoff mass problem is thus solved.

Granted, you now need an automated docking procedure in Mars orbit, but I can't imagine that would be more difficult to engineer than trying to orchestrate a much heavier land-and-return rocket setup.

Remind me again who's been in charge of charge of the House, the Senate, and the White House for most of Obama's tenure? Sure, a Republican was pushing for this pork. But it passed a Senate and a White House both controlled by Democrats, either of which could have easily stopped it. Neither did. In fact, depending upon the timeline (which I'm too busy to fully look up at the moment), it's possible the Democrats were in control of the House as well at the time this was going on. I can't recall exactly when the Republicans took over the House.

The truth here is the entire system is contemptible. Both Republicans and Democrats bear equal responsibility for this debacle. And to suggest there aren't billions and billions of dollars of pork barrel projects championed by Democrats is disingenuous at best.

Yeah, just like Prometheus was the "best ever" sequel to Alien!

Like any tool, regulations can be abused. That's why We The People should be especially vigilant in allowing them to be established in the first place. As hard as I might try, I can't find anything in the federal and state Constitution that empowers the government to look out for me making shitty decisions. Therefore, the government has no business saying who can or cannot drive a taxi. If Uber gives shitty service, they will fail because the market will MAKE them fail. It's not the government's job to choose winners and losers when it comes to providing voluntary services.

These regulations are protection rackets, no more, no less.

Actually, anybody who knows anything about how labor unions -- and, in the case of Las Vegas, the spectre of organized crime syndicates -- use their political muscle to destroy free market competition knows pretty much whatever they need to know about this situation. Uber/Lyft represented a threat to the government-enforced near monopoly of the taxi market, using laws created by labor unions and pitched to politicians in concert with generous campaign contributions. Business as usual.

Next up, Halo light bridges!

Ironically, the MPAA you cite possesses no power that the public doesn't give it voluntarily. The MPAA puts ratings on its movies. Movie theaters show these movies to the public. These theaters are under no obligation to ban unrated movies. That they have collectively decided to do so is a social phenomenon, not a regulatory one.

In this sense, the MPAA has no more power than, say, Consumer Reports Magazine. If I decide to open a theater chain showing any movie, regardless of rating, nobody can stop me. But my success will depend upon the public's willingness to ignore that lack of rating. Honestly, it might make a fun social experiment to see what would happen, but I lack the funds and time to do it. I suspect the results would surprise the MPAA, as social and moral attitudes have changed markedly in the last several decades. I don't think many people really care all that much about ratings anymore. It should be enough to note if a movie contains "adult content" or is "suitable for children" and that's about it.

Consider that any successful experience in cloning anything adds to our knowledge base about cloning. By perfecting cloning, we can do a lot more than just bring back extinct species. We could, for example, grow entirely new organs cloned from your body to replace damaged or failing ones, organs that could be transplanted into you without fear of tissue rejection. Further, the practice of being able to reliably modify cells at the genetic level can lead to all sorts of other benefits in medicine, biology, and even far-flung fields as nanotechnology when you consider the scale you have to work in.

The whole "can't you spend your time/money better" argument is pretty short-sighted when you consider the enormous ancillary benefits. It's like saying why bother going to the moon when you can spend money on Earth. But without that impetus, we might not have the very computers and Internet you're currently using to read this post, or lasers to correct your vision, or lightweight, strong materials used to make the planes you fly on, or the fuel cells used to power zero-emission vehicles, or...you get the idea.

Stop thinking in checkers. Think chess. It's not the current move that matters; it's the move you make three moves from now that wins the game.

Exactly how are they going to ban them? Short of banning them completely from stores -- a heavy-handed move that would likely meet significant legal obstacles -- they're going to be out there. You can't control where people fly these things, either. You could try jamming commonly-used RC frequencies to stop people from manually flying them here or there, but you can't stop someone who might pre-program a GPS-guided drone to deliberately go into controlled airspace without also jamming GPS -- and that would piss off too many people. And if that fails, really determined bad guy/idiot could put together an inertial guidance setup and *still* get into your airspace.

The only way to be sure is to shoot them down, but that's also impractical. These things are here to stay. I'm not saying I like it anymore than you because, I agree, some fool is going to fly their shiny quadcopter into the intake of a plane during takeoff and kill a bunch of people. I just don't see a way to stop them that's both legal (i.e. respects the safe, legal use of drones for legitimate purposes) and practical (you can't just shoot them all down).