Yes, but in Dune, Herbert really made it clear how much humanity was different via training, yes, but also very, very long term breeding programs. That's almost the opposite of Trek, where there is this almost quaint ban on genetically engineering humans. Understandable, given Trek history, but humans would not have "evolved" much in that time. Not in a way that would have removed our basic drives which have encouraged much of our bad behavior in the past and certainly our aggression.

I don't fault Trek too much for saying they're a utopia, but not really showing the results. That sort of reality doesn't make for good TV. So it ended up being a gloss of having a Shakespearean actor deliver fine sentiments on camera. Good to have those out there, but dangerous to assume it would be anything near that easy in only a few centuries.

True. And let's be honest, they forgot about the warp speed limit very soon after it was introduced even in TNG.

That Voyager even tried to sort of deal with it was one of the few pluses for that series.

You make a good point about following the shiniest crew in the fleet. On the other hand, from a storytelling perspective, that's kind of boring.

And the whole "rape gangs" comment was almost like someone was again telling, but not showing, how there were flawed characters onboard. The characterization was like "I'm a survivor, so I am going to act a little gruff and stiff sometimes, because that's what happens when you've survived after avoiding rape gangs." I mean I literally recall that as a trivia footnote in my mind about Tasha Yar, not as something that really mattered at all.

Also, "rape gangs"? Did they specifically run around only raping people, but were otherwise nice folks? Just that term is another bit of "I grew up in a place so bad that we had whole gangs dedicated to rape. Not murder, or extortion, or unruliness, but rape." Because rape. Seriously.

I think the original series did a better job of showing what actual explorers might have as a personality. You don't go looking for danger in a utopia unless you have a particular sort of personality, and TNG felt like it wasn't bringing along those sorts of people until later in the series, and even then they needed some damage to their shiny resumes.

I enjoyed the first season as a kid, it certainly kept me tuning in, but looking back on it, it was a mess.

That said, I've always found the Roddenberry utopia to be a forced one. It was like "we're a peaceful utopia", but I saw none of the actual implications or consequences of that from a societal or cultural perspective. It was all right as the backdrop for what the Enterprise was doing, but the Federation, especially in TNG, felt like they were running around being superior all the time, and given their inability to easily overcome cruder or dystopian civilizations like the Romulans or Klingons, I am not sure that the Federation had actually made a case for being the superior civilization even inside of Trek.

Nevertheless, this is silly.

Humans are the most deadly predators that the planet has ever had. Killing stuff is what we're really really good at. Making weapons is something we're really really good at.

Zombies... their weapons are teeth and fingernails. Their tactics are go straight in and attack regardless of tactical situation.

They wouldn't have a chance.

Given human response to things like the Black Death, I'm hoping that we are extremely disappointed by any actual pandemic.

No one has done that and even if you took the raw unadjusted data and used that the results wouldn't be much different than using adjusted data.

If you think they're trying to take your money now just wait til you have to pay the cost of adapting to global warming.

Actually the next ice age is indefinitely postponed until CO2 levels drop below about 250 ppm again.

Because news organizations think the error bars are too confusing for regular people. They're probably right. But the probabilities of 2014 being the hottest year were mentioned prominently in the joint NOAA/NASA press conference on the subject. Here are the graphics from that press conference. See page 5.

And how do we know that the real benefit doesn't come from hitting yourself with birch branches?

...telling us to stay the hell away from their base on Ceres.

We should retaliate by beaming Youtube comments at them.

Apparently it uses 1.5mW at 1V.

You can get batteryless radios. Crystal radios (which don't necessarily contain a crystal) get all their power from the radio signal, and they're scarily simple. During the second world war foxhole radios were built out of a razor blade, a pencil, some wire and a set of headphones (instructions: http://www.bizarrelabs.com/fox...) Prisoner of war radios used coal

AFAIK, however, the much lower energy VHF signals for FM isn't capable of running an FM decoder, and probably not an earpiece either.

I wonder if a modern crystal earpiece could usefully pick up low-power AM transmissions from a cellphone in your pocket without spamming everyone around you with radio waves?

What does that have to do with anything I wrote.

Maybe there is a correlation with temperature and lightening but where is the causation and what way does it flow? My guess would be since warming causes more atmospheric water vapor that could lead to more lightening.

zblockquote>See: Cabin_Pressurization [wikipedia.org]

A person needs at least 20kPa *from the mask to breathe*. Not 20kPa *ambient pressure*. Please learn to read.

The "problematic loading on the capsules" is from the high speed aerodynamics, not the ambient pressure

Aerodynamic loading = pressure. If you have high loadings, you have high pressures. Period.