How many actual scientific doomsday predictions can you think of?

By the looks of it, you have a hard time sustaining a thought process for more than about two seconds.

Not to worry. It will drag through the courts, get defeated, wasting huge amounts of taxpayers' money, all so a bunch of moronic religious ingrates can try to make some sort of point.

The San Francisco valley is now a bay. The great barrier kangaroo hunting grounds have been flooded. The Siberian land bridge has been submerged. Irreversible, horrible, and irreparably damaged. Damaged I say! Worse yet, there will be no Frost Faire on the Thames this year.

You do realize this scenario happens beyond the Arctic and Antarctic circles on Earth every winter, right? Both of which have life.

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.

Putting telescopes in orbit is a good way of pumping money to the emerging spaceflight industry.

Don't send a person, send a blueprint and some way to raise and teach a first generation. We don't have to get there ourselves as long as our "children" can.

And that "some way" would be?...

In all likelihood it would take a fully sapient AI with a humanlike body puppet to raise a human being. At that point, what would be the point? Just accept these sapient spaceships are as good as our "children" as meatbags would be. And of course, since we're talking about sci-fi tropes here, there's always brain uploading.

Also, you're not considering the moral implications of sending a bunch of babies to live or die in an alien planet, in what are likely to be extremely limiting and harsh conditions. Whether you personally care for such things or not, a society that can simply ignore them is unlikely to send anyone anywhere, for the simple reason that this entire project requires a lot of people putting other objectives before their personal interests for a long period of time.

This might be part of an answer to your question: "Ohio lawmakers want to limit the teaching of the scientific process".

In other words, you live in a country where being an ''egghead'' (your term - not mine) is not respected. As a matter of fact, you live in a country where a large percentage of the population still thinks some invisble man in the sky has created the entire Uinverse in 6 days, and the Earth itself might well be 6000+ years old (instead of 4+ billion years old).

Need I say more? Case closed.

You mean, first post courtesy of my unlimited comc

They say that beauty is in the eye of the beerholder.

They say that if you drop enough acid you see eyes in your beerholder.

Is there some particular quality of an "automated driving system" that will make it signficantly more reliable than a home computer? I'm sure the auto manufacturers will try their best to avoid bugs, but then again Apple and Microsoft also try their best.

No worries -- to handle those scenarios, we'll download the app and steer the car using our phone. Bluetooth FTW!

Help me understand what I missed

The fact that they actually gave us a transcript instead of trying to make us watch two videos. I skimmed it in a couple minutes and reached the same conclusion. It's just a lot of dime-a-dozen cliches; but I didn't waste too much time finding that out. Thanks. Now make it a rule that you can't do video stories without a transcript, unless it's something where a transcript doesn't make sense such as a rocket launch, electronic music, or a badass sharkbot shooting lasers.

Larger and stronger at a younger age would seem to be a good survival trait, not a bad one.

Too inexperienced to make good decisions + too strong to be easily controlled = excellent chances of dying young.

I mean, can you IMAGINE the dam structure you'd need to create a pool of water deep enough to float a block of stone to the top of the pyramid? Hint, it'd dwarf the pyramid!

Not really. Remember, the pyramid gets less wide towards the top. So your dam walls only need to be higher than one layer of stones: after a layer of is finished, move the walls on top of its outer edge and refill. Sure, you need a system of levees to get the ships to the lake at the top of the growing pyramid, but that's okay: it can just rest against the pyramid wall. 45 degree rise is no problem if you can move weight one bucket at a time.

And if you use windmills to pump the water, you don't even need all that much human labour.