Shaped charge. You don't need any skill or knowledge, just get a hold of an old Soviet RPG round designed for armor penetration. Those things will penetrate tank armor and kill everyone inside... bulletproof glass would be like nothing. No sniper needed.

Robot science missions are great, but they're not the end goal in space exploration (and they shouldn't be). If all we did was launch Voyager and Mars Rover type missions every few years, there would be no need to develop anything beyond the ULA Atlas rocket. There would be no Saturn V, no Falcon HR etc.

Humans *want* to step on the moon and Mars and other places, so that gives us an incentive to develop the means to get there.

Correct. For the past ~2000 years, rise of trade, urban culture and sophisticated economies meant smart people tended to become more successful (wealthy) and breed more children. For example in the Far East nations, surest way for an ordinary person to raise your social status and income was to be really smart and score high on the social service exam which would lead to a government bureaucrat position. With the newfound wealth you could afford to not only start a family, but also a second family. Having second and third wives/concubines and huge families was socially acceptable and actually expected of someone in high position.

Incorrect. The forces that led to intelligent people breeding more children have stopped completely and reversed course in the 20th century.

How about setting up an earth-made prefab hab inside a Martian cave/lava tube? Then you get the radiation shielding benefits without having to launch or move any regolith.

I would agree that a moon base is more plausible than a Mars base. However, both endeavors are gonna cost a shit ton of money anyways, so why not go for the cool option that offers more future returns?

Also an escape craft to bring you back to Earth is not an issue since people are signing up for a one-way trip. Not necessarily talking about the Mars One thing here, which seems to me like a scam to collect "registration fees" from gullible people. But generally speaking I think a NASA or ESA mission to Mars should be a one-way trip as well. And as we found out recently, there is no shortage of volunteers.

So you scout ahead of time instead of going there blind. And if you find one from a rover rolling on the surface, it obviously does not need considerable earth moving equipment to gain access. And the low gravity on Mars means structural strength is most likely a non-issue, since lava tubes are already plenty strong on earth.

Light bulbs, and vitamin D

How does anyone know that saving pink iguanas from a volcano is better than letting nature take its course?

Render city streets unnavigable? Where would the massive number of additional customers come from to support enough taxis to do that?

they're talking about high schools, not 6th grade.

The guy teaching programming at my old high school didn't know jack shit. Well okay he knew enough to explain the elementary concepts in the book but he was far, far far from an expert in CS. Usually the job falls on math teachers or science teachers because generally speaking the number of CS grads from a reputable school (not ITT tech) available to teach high school is zero.

Having math teachers teach programming might be OK for getting the kids' feet wet and letting them know that such as thing exists, it might be okay for the average student, but even a slightly above average student such as myself back in the day (yes i was only slightly above average) will be bored to tears. But I suppose in today's world where everyone gets an equal education and no student is allowed to be left behind or get ahead, this may be desirable.

I think the somewhat bright kids are done the most disservice. The super bright Zuckerbergs of the world will just figure stuff out by themselves and do any kind of coding they want. The average and below will be happy to just follow along and get a passing grade. It's the somewhat bright kids who could benefit most from an expert teacher explaining advanced concepts and answering questions and pushing them to higher standards that they wouldn't have had otherwise.

If you play multiplayer online games, latency is a big issue.

If you talk to people over the internet, latency is an issue. Like, you say something in Skype. The person at the other end hears it and replies. By the time you hear the reply, a regime change has taken place and there's a new president in power. Currently internet video chatting over long distances is an unpleasant experience due to the lag.

I hear this a lot from anti-gold people. Yes if the entire world civilization collapses and 98% of humans on earth die, then gold will be worthless. However I would point out that such a scenario has never happened in all of recorded history.

I'm not saying a worldwide apocalypse is impossible... of course it's possible. It's just very unlikely. A far more likely scenario is a local collapse of civilization, like a famine and civil war in Middle East or a governmental collapse/economic ruin in South America or Germany getting frisky again and getting bombed into oblivion by Russians/Americans.

Such local collapses (local SHTF in survivor speak) have occurred many times in history, some quite recently. And in all such cases, gold has never become worthless. In fact gold has been the gold standard of stored wealth.

As long as there is civilization somewhere that people can hope to escape to, gold will be what people will expect to hold value.

Rhode Island is supposed to be an island. The rising sea levels are only helping it to achieve its natural state!

Although we haven't tested the long term effects of living in gravity between 0G and 1G, it's one of those things where we pretty much know what the outcome will be, even if the exact value is unknown.

Like, we know the effect of not getting hit by a punch. We also know the effect of getting hit by a Mike Tyson uppercut. And although no one has been hit by a Justin Bieber punch yet, we can predict that the result will be somewhere between not getting hit by a punch and a Mike Tyson uppercut.

and their website looks like it's from 1995 as well!