He's not necessarily talking about going off the grid. There's a certain minimum investment to getting *any* panels on your house. It may not be $40k, but it's still not cheap.

Actually, California is doing pretty well at the moment.

Dibs on Twilight Sparkle! :)

Most likely they bought back when housing prices were cheaper and/or they had more income.

Prop 13 at work, eh?

Calculus was never claimed to be anything else.

Climatology has proven much more predictive than string theory.

Actually, quantum mechanics made a few actual predictions that proved to be dead on.

I don't disagree that the problems are hard, but I think reality will show people where they need to be. No one is going to spend tens of billion dollars on a trip to Mars unless they really think it can be done and have something to back that up.

I think it is possible to set up a colony now, it is just extremely likely to fail with the shoestring funds and priority we're allocating to it. I think that any one of a million things can go wrong that would kill every last person who tried to do it. So yeah, Mars One = space suicide pact. That is, if it even gets more than a foot off the ground.

What I don't think is that we lack the suitable technological level or resources to do it. We don't need to have another technological revolution to make the trip possible, we just have to devote the time and resources to devising the solutions. The problem in that case is less of possibility and more of priority. If we made this our top priority, I am 99% certain we could have a successful colony on Mars in short order, but no one is going to make that our #1 priority. So, now we figure out what we can do with the limited resources we've allocated the project.

I'm okay with the sci-fi people being optimistic. Optimistic people make difficult things happen in the face of adversity. Realism takes care of itself.

There's a shitload of iron on Mars. It's just that it's all attached to those pesky oxygen atoms.

That said, while I agree that some people severely underestimate the amount of effort to set up full-on industrial activities on Mars, we do have enough understanding of how things work to make it happen. We wouldn't be building things straight up from the Stone Age.

The trick is that the initial settlement would be very tenuous. You would have to ship the exact amount of what you need to start off a process, and proceed down that path with little possibility of variance from your plan. You would only have x amount of tools and n amount of materials to work with. If you can get the next stage set up, then there is probably another milestone you have to reach, which also is very constrained in what you need to do.

Chances are decent you would fail and with Mars, that failure costs billions of dollars and more importantly, dead astronauts/colonists. However, strictly speaking, we're at the earliest point where we could give it a "go". It's just that the probabilities are not really on our side yet.

Devising the reduced gravity methods of certain processes has to be done, but as long as such things are actually possible, they can and will be done. It's just a matter of priority and time.

The environment is barren and the atmosphere is much too thin and lacking in oxygen to support unsuited humans. I don't know if it is actively poisonous if you were in a cavern with an artificial atmosphere, although there are going to certainly be places that are more toxic than others, just like on Earth.

However, with the right equipment, water is water and oxygen is oxygen. You should be able to produce those from what is on Mars, but you're right, there is a certain amount of equipment that would need to get there. Presumably, at least some of the initial work of preparing the habitat would be done by programming or remote control via pre-staged equipment.

It is certainly possible to colonize Mars, the question is, is it worth the large expense? That's harder to say.

It may be easier, but actually understanding the geology of Mars under the surface is something that you need to be able to do. What is the composition of the layers you are digging into? How far down do you dig to find a layer that is easy enough to work, but able to support itself?

And of course, is there anything like ground water? Mars is a desert on the surface, but might well have ground water underneath at some level.

There are things we can use like ground penetrating radar from satellites to try and get answers to those questions, but it is far easier to do that sort of survey work on Earth than it would be on Mars. And you'd have far better results with a dedicated human or robotic survey mission to the surface.

Were you using SMS or iMessage? This is probably fixable in iMessage -- they get routed through Apple's servers and could probably be sanitized so that the offending characters can be byte-aligned to avoid the crash -- but SMSes go directly through the carriers and would require an OS update.

It's HORSE MANURE. And yes, all those caps are necessary - HORSE MANURE is a backronym, though I don't remember what it means

Imagine a "theory" with a bunch of adjustments. So many adjustmentrs that no matter what happens, there is some adjustment that canm be made such that it "retroactively) predicts it. That is string theory.

The big problem with string "theory" is that it predicts everything and so, nothing.

String toolkit might be a better name. It is just that, a bag of parts and tools that might one day be used to construct a theory that predicts something in particular.

Can you imagine if it had been on Small Pox?

Hmmm...we actually cured that in the mean time, so... how would they handle that? Brushing up on the new research could be fairly quick.