Sometimes I wonder - I, or perhaps humanity as a whole, we have so much anxiety about the destruction and depletion of our natural resources, the extinction of species, the CO2 in the atmosphere, the conservation of our environment. Some of us try so hard to be environmentally conscious by recycling waste, reusing appliances, conserving water and energy.
Then maybe 100 years from now the killer asteroid will struck Earth and obliterate everything, or the supervolcano under Yosemite will blow up. And the universe will point the finger at us and say "ha ha!"

That would be a real bummer.

But I suppose this is like saying, why take care of myself? Why take a shower in the morning, have a balanced died, quit smoking, if maybe tomorrow I'll be dead?
As long as we have a chance at survival, we have to protect our heritage, which means the natural environment that spawned and hosts us.
Who knows, maybe in 100 years, instead of being obliterated, we will take this heritage with us to the stars.

Are you sure? In latin, "decima" means 1/10, so I figured to decimate means to reduce TO 1/10, so BY 9/10.

James Cameron doesn't do what James Cameron does for James Cameron. James Cameron does what James Cameron does, because James Cameron IS James Cameron.

Yeah, but this perception of programming is the real problem.

Programming is not a "pain" if you do it right. Most of the times programming is a "pain" because you are working with code or frameworks written by mediocre programmers who probably shouldn't be programmers. The more accessible you try to make programming, the more mediocre programmers will be encouraged to write code and software that will be a pain to work with.

Actually, qualified scientists who are expert on this topic are telling us right now what their predictions are of what will happen.

But yes, continue putting your hands to your ears and shouting yaddayaddayadda.... all future is uncertain so just fuck it all. You can go eat at McDonalds every day and stuff yourself full of cheeseburgers. Predictions are you will get fat and possibly die from the causes at some point. But you don't care about that, right? Because we have no idea what might happen.

Yeah, let's ban killer robots. Better let humans do the killing. I'm sure they have a much better track record at discriminating hostiles from innocent civilians.
After the war, when we bring our killer heroes back home to rejoin their families, everything will be just dandy. Because after daddy has shot three Extremistanis in the face and seen his buddy's leg torn off by an IED, the first thing he wants to is hug his little girl and tell her he loves her.
Killer robots would just be so immoral.

There is no way Earth is the only planet with life in the universe. Even if you reduce the probability of life on a given solar system to almost nothing, like winning the lottery, the sheer size of the universe with its almost endless amount of stars and galaxies makes the odds for life somewhere in space and time extremely favorable.

Now the odds of that space and time being close enough to our little bubble of existence for us to take notice, that is a different matter.

Not many. You need to produce the gadgets and code the software. Then you just need some energy to power the devices. Little price to pay considering that everything else following that will be "free", like your own private yacht, villa, holiday resort, spaceship, hookers, whatever.

You don't need a lot of resources when you can spend your free time living in your own virtual paradise universe. We will get to this point well within our lifetime.
Welcome to the Matrix, Neo.

Then there is also "The Forever War", where, among other things, fleets of spaceships travel to a war zone only to find out the war has long ended once they arrive there.

If you are 25, earn a decent wage (+60k $ a year) and are able to save 20% of your income, which you invest in stocks that pay dividends of 3% on average, which you reinvest, and assuming that you get a moderate wage increases of 3% a year, being a millionaire at 65 is doable.
At least that's what my financial planning Excel sheet says.

If you are 25, earn a decent wage (+60k $ a year) and are able to save 20% of your income, which you invest in stocks that pay dividends of 3% on average, which you reinvest, and assuming that you get a moderate wage increases of 3% a year, being a millionaire at 65 is doable.

At least that's what my financial planning Excel sheet says.

I've never enjoyed competitive gaming much, except some rounds at a multiplayer FPS every now and then.

When I play a RTS like StarCraft I like to calmly build up my bases and defenses, create an army, secure chokepoints... take my time and enjoy the game. The twitchy online experience is not for me. I'm playing to have fun and relax, not to experience stress.

I suppose this is why I mostly enjoy single player RPG's in which I can enjoy the game at my own pace.

There is no heavy burden. If the consequences of contact are so disastrous, they must not be contacted, full stop. We have 95% of the world at our disposal. It wouldn't really kill us to leave some patches of unscathed rain forest standing. On the contrary, the non-stop, all consuming "progress" seems to be that which will kill us.

So if a crazy lunatic billionaire wants to buy your share for a billion dollars (share value at this moment 1 billion dollars) and then dies before the transaction could be made (share value back to 10 dollars), by your logic this means that 999.999.990 million dollars of value have "vanished"?

One thing is clear, the existing -money value- has not vanished. It will simply be distributed among heirs instead of being on your bank account. You are talking about the value of a commodity. I was replying to the parent claim that "money can vanish" in a stock exchange crash, which is false. There is a difference between money, which can not simply "vanish" and the value of commodities, which have whatever value people attribute it. In the case of BitCoins, it is even possible for the value they represent to actually, truly vanish, if the BitCoins are lost or deleted.