I've lived in the Sacramento area for 25 years, and I think this would be a GREAT idea!

Another big plus; Sacramento itself has no nearby major fault lines. When large-ish earthquakes hit the Bay area, we get a mild shaking, without (so far!) any damage. In the 1989 Loma Prieta quake, it sloshed a little bit of water out of the jacuzzi, but no damage.

Weather: our winters are chilly and rainy - usually. This year it got fairly cold, and got very little rain. (California is mostly desert....). Summers are hot and bone-dry. About half of the evenings. we do get a "delta breeze", oceanic winds through the Golden Gate and right up the Sacramento River. Daytime highs in the high 90's/low 100s with nighttime temps in the high 60's/low 70's are not unusual.

Our "rush hour" lasts about an hour, where SF or LA have "rush hours" of 4-5 hours in the morning and 3-4 hours in the evening.

We already have a fairly large high-tech workforce; Intel in Folsom, HP in Roseville.

Plus, when Silicon Valley moves to Sacramento, I'll be able to sell my house at a huge profit and retire!

Come on down!

We know precious little about how evolution proceeded here, and we know nothing at all about how it might have proceeded elsewhere.

We can guess that it would be carbon based, because carbon has four covalent bonds and would have been formed sooner than silicon (with 4 bonds, but lower energies) would have. Beyond that, we'd need a few dozen D20 dice to calculate the odds.

But any real scientist knows that at some point, we have to admit WE DON'T KNOW how it might turn out. Wild-assed guesses aren't science, even if some people who claim to be scientists are sometimes wild-assed guessers.

It would probably be much less expensive to remedy a few degrees warmer - thus INCREASING the growing season in North America - than a few degrees COLDER, which might make a whole lot of people very hungry. AND cold. But neither is especially likely.

The warmist view is based almost entirely on computer models which cannot predict the present based on the past. I would be strongly opposed to betting a few trillion dollars worth of economic growth on a computer model's forecast for 20 years hence.

50 years ago, there were no "reputable" scientists who accepted either continental drift OR the out-of-this-world concept (literally!) that an astronomical impact might have caused the mass extinctions of 65 billion years ago. Both are now generally accepted. Earth scientists today are trying to explain the Younger Dryas as anything OTHER than an impact event.

I think it's just overwhelmed; I was able to get on the first time I tried, bu haven't been able to get the video since.

That would be me. Yup.

I love Starcraft; both the original, and StarCraft II. I'm not all that GOOD at it, and now we know why; I'm on the high side of 60. I can still beat the computer, most of the time; I just can't beat the other players! :-)

You write: "We trust science because it is self correcting. If it stops being self correcting, or that self correction is delayed by say, 50 years, there is no reason to trust it."

I would go one step further; when it stops being self-correcting, it stops being "science".

You write: "...because it is next to impossible to remove all human bias from an experiment." My concern is not that the advocates for anthropogenic global warming (AGW) have tried insufficiently to remove bias, it is the near certainly that the so-called "scientists" have been busy INTRODUCING bias. Not satisfied with merely being wrong, I think they are actively lying.

One of the fundamental principles of experimental science is accurately publishing your methods and your data, to allow other researchers to perform the same or similar experiments and attain the same results. To the extent that methods and data are not shared, it isn't "science".

One other thing; "science" is NEVER EVER "settled". There is always new things to learn, now experiments to be performed, new interpretations to be examined. Once the "science is settled" and no further debate is allowed, it has devolved into a religion. And it is scary how closely the current strident denial of debate in the AGW realm has come to a hunt for heretics to be burned at the stake. Just last week, a "journalist" opined that climate change "deniers" should be imprisoned.

'

Anthony Watts of WattsUpWithThat compiled an interesting list of "Global Cooling" references all through the 1970's.

http://wattsupwiththat.com/201...

I may be old, but my memory is still MOSTLY here.....

Hmmm. Are you SURE that "global cooling" and "The Coming Ice Age" weren't all the rage in the late '70's and early '80's? I sure remember a lot of headlines and magazine articles about that. I'm guessing that you weren't around to read those papers and magazines back then and that you get all your news from your iPhone now, but Siri can probably help you look up relevant articles.

WikiPedia may be the wrong thing to point to if you want "scientific journals".

Nor are the real "scientific" journals doing such a wonderful job, either. "Peer review" is a joke, and the track record of scientific journals retracting controversial articles is too long to put much faith in it. The mathematical models cannot predict the present by using inputs from the past. Contra Michael "Chicken Little" Mann, the "Medieval Warm Period _DID_ exist, and his own emails (leaked as part of the HadCRUT archive) prove that he was trying without success to explain it away. Kilimanjaro's snows have not receded. The glaciers in the Himalayas have not disappeared. Billions of people have not starved, nor has Australia been overrun with panicked Malaysians and Indonesians.

I got really suspicious when I saw that the same Socialist/World Government nostrums that Carl Sagan tried to prescribe for Global Cooling in the 1970s were being prescribed now for Global Warming.

My degree is in Physics; I always believe the actual facts. I haven't seen many, and most of them are on the "It's not a problem now, and may never be" side. And if we can only avoid collapsing the world economy with phony scare tactics, the world of 2060 will be rich enough to mitigate what minor effects there may be.

And if Siberia and northern Canada warm up a bit, there will be millions of acres of additional cropland that we can't use now. Maybe that would be a good thing.

Humans, fickle? Indeed we are! A few years back, I read about some interviews done with people who had survived jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge.

The majority of the sentiments were something like "I had had enough of life, and I had so many problems. But an instant after jumping, I realized that all those problems were solvable, except one - that I had just jumped off the Golden Gate Bridge!"

Yes, at least a few of the people who arrive on Mars, ready to settle and stay, will change their minds. (A fair number of the Mayflower pilgrims voiced similar sentiments.) But the basic idea of going to Mars isn't to set up some tech-free commune - it will be to build the next link in a space-faring civilization, and to create a lifeboat for humanity in case the next rock has our name on it.

Bringing materials back to Earth, from Mars? Not likely; if we wanted to bring raw materials back to Earth, we'd grab them from the asteroid belt so that we wouldn't have to lift them against even Mars' feeble gravity. Mining the Moon may be useful, or at least Harrison Schmidt thinks so, to extract He3 from the lunar dust to be used in fusion powerplants.

Yes, yes, just as Neil Armstrong and Harrison Schmidt returned to Earth. But with any luck, there are people who are alive today who will help to settle the Moon - and die there of old age. Humanity must either continue out to the other planets, and to the planets of other stars, or our race will die here in the cradle of Earth the next time a BIG rock hits the Earth, we will become extinct. I'm a big believer in humanity not becoming extinct.

The ultimate "space exploration is immoral" argument boils down to one of two things. Either you're a coward, and think all humans should be cowards, or you hate humanity and APPROVE of the idea of human extinction. Because if we sit here long enough, it WILL happen. It's a statistical certainty.

The less-sane of the commenters here seem to think that we're about to blast off for Mars tomorrow. It's not going to happen; we don't have any rockets. We can't even send more Americans to the International Space Station, now that NASA has decided to cut off cooperation with the Russians. But by the time we _can_ go to Mars, we'll be ready to live there - for a long time. Will it be ten years? Thirty? Fifty? Hell, I'm astonished that we haven't even been back to the Moon in the last 40 years. We could be on Mars NOW, if we had wanted to, in 1980.

So, let's start NOW. It won't be easy, it won't be cheap, and it won't be entirely safe - but nothing worthwhile ever is. People died learning about electricity. Marie Curie died learning about radium. People died learning how to fly, and people died learning how to dive, and people die every day in learning how to drive. People will die learning how to build lunar habitats, and learning how to land on Mars, and how to build homes there. And a lot more people WON'T die, and we'll learn what we need to know to settle Mars, and to build starships.

And just as it has always done, the knowledge that we gain in doing these things and going those places will make life easier and safer for you cowards who stay behind.

Sorry; my crystal ball is in the shop, so I truly do NOT know what the outcome will be. If yours is in good working order, then visit your stockbroker, and your certainties will carry somewhat more weight. Or at least, your bling will.

Oh, yeah, we're all going to die eventually; that much is certain. But nobody is proposing to send humans as sacrifices to the God of War, or that we're just going there to fertilize the Martian dust. There's a CHANCE of survival beyond the first 72 hours, and probably much longer.

You object? Don't go. It's just that simple. Had an opportunity like this come up 40 years ago, I'd have jumped on it. But they won't be ready to go for several years yet, and I'll be 70 by then; they wouldn't take me.

Does it really matter WHERE you die? If we're in the business of trying to maximize human lifespan, then perhaps we should consider banning skydiving - or at least, base jumping, because THAT crap is DANGEROUS. But we're not going to do that, and we shouldn't be quite so squeamish as writing off any visits to Mars.

Yes, going to the Moon is going to be dangerous, especially when we start setting up lunar colonies. And going to Mars, or the Jovian moons isn't going to be any safer. But then, scuba diving - and even bicycling - causes its own inevitable death toll.

The Roanoke colony vanished without a trace. Something like that is certain to happen to at least one Moon mission, and at least one Mars mission. But when we stop trying to grow, we may as well finish dying. Go ahead - but don't expect me to support that decision.