It's all a matter of priorities, and most of these fools feel as though theirs are the only priorities that matter. India's mission to Mars cost less than the wedding of the daughter of one of its industrialists a couple of years ago. The wealth of the Walton heirs alone could come close to funding a sustainable Lunar colony,

Don't forget to mention six inch long cockroaches that fly.

There were books by "futurists" to that effect and some science fiction stories, but reputable scientists? Hardly. If you think back, which "scientist" was it that claimed we were about to enter a new Ice Age? None, it was a reporter at Time Magazine who had (probably accidentally) learned about Milancovitch Cycles, actual climatologists (there were a few then) already knew we were getting warmer and together with astronomers put together the first climate models to explain the gross temperature ranges of Venus, Earth and Mars. Economists were the only people surprised by economic growth in India and China, and there aren't many of those who could be called "scientists" much less reputable. And even politicians as ignorant as Ronnie Raygun were under no illusion that the Cold War was a permanent state.

Are you sure that you actually remember **anything** from the 1970s?

But I wanted a car analogy . . .

Thank you, that's a very nice explanation.

More like they were trained by the CIA. How many failed attempts did they make to kill Castro?

Oh, horsepuckey. Every time the Taliban blows up an ancient statue of Buddha or a Hindu family burns a widow or an Indian tribe kills a whale it's the Left that complains. The only time the Right in the US complains is if the victim is a Christian or if it aids the sales of weapons.

Fixing it? How the frack do you "fix" a highway that had the last five miles buried by multiple meters of molten rock? Walk for half an hour from the current end of the road and you'll see a "No Parking" sign sticking up a couple inches above the solid rock. When we were there a couple of years ago there was an active lava tube a few feet below the surface just a couple hundred meters further along.

No, he's thinking of the US military's insistence on bulldozing an airfield well into the protected archeological zone of Babylon, destroying (IIRC) an unexcavated mound and a minor temple in the process. (Then to add insult to injury, they abandoned the project because it wasn't needed, something they were told well before starting work.).

There are access control systems in a couple of local hospitals here that are over 20 years old, one hasn't been rebooted in at least 8 years. There are controllers for a local power dam that have been in place and working since the 1970s. There is a lot to be said about the reliability of old-school hardware that more modern equipment can't hope to match.

Uh, no. On one trip by one administrator to the Middle East in one interview he mentioned that was one of several goals of that one trip. I realize that's not quite the spin that Fox News put on it for you, but that's the truth. Sorry.

Most of the matter and energy that makes up the universe is still undetectable to us except on the gross galactic scale, somewhere between 60-95 percent depending on who's estimating. I think that leaves a little wiggle room. BTW, cold fusion wouldn't exist at "human scale", it's an atomic scale phenomenon.

they are physically impossible.

The US Navy Research Laboratory disagrees, and claims to have made it work reliably with a couple different types of metals.

I followed the Pons and Fleishman story fairly closely when it first came out. There were a lot of attempts to duplicate the experiment, some got heat but no neutrons, some got neutrons but no heat, some got tritium but no heat.or neutrons. A few years ago there was word from the US Navy Research Lab that they had managed to reproduce the effect fairly reliably with a couple different combinations of metals in the electrodes. I believe that they found that the purity of the electrodes was extremely important, which could be why most of the other attempts had problems.

The US and Soviet military had howitzer-launched nukes, which if you peel the shell casing off you get the legendary "backpack nuke". The Pentagon lost track of how many they had produced by the end of the 1950s, since the number was in the thousands.

Sure you could weaponize it, you just need to add a step. Like a 100 MW laser on the back of that truck.