Once we start building small black holes stars won't matter. You can get 100 times as much energy (hawking Radiation) out of a micro-black hole for the same amount of matter consumed as from complete fusion of hydrogen into iron. That hawking radiation can be collected and used to make new matter of any type that might be wanted - you can even recycle iron into hydrogen.

This will allow life to survive for many trillions of years even as the universe gradually goes dark.

Just need to build a monster converging gamma-ray laser black-hole maker and start spitting out those micro-black holes.

It is sad though to think of all that will be lost - eg all this effort to preserve tigers or whales is ultimately pointless.

Shuttle cost $209 billion over it's life, 134 missions. $1.6 billion per flight.
http://www.space.com/12166-space-shuttle-program-cost-promises-209-billion.html
So more like $200 million per Astronaut on Shuttle.

Russia sells flights to ISS for ~$50 million (Sarah Brightman), though used to be cheaper ($20 million for Mark Shuttleworth).
SpaceX is targeting $20 million per person for its Dragon Capsule

The best explanations for the Flynn effect appear to be improved nutrition and lessened childhood disease. Something like 80% of a babies metabolic output goes into brain function (20% for an adult). So any severe sickness or deficiencies in diet at a young age will always produce a negative impact on brain development (creating a bulge on stupid side of bell curve). The West has mostly wiped out serious childhood disease and famine creating a significant boost compared to places where things like Malaria and poor food and nutritional deficiencies still kill or negatively impact the development of huge numbers of babies.

Also intelligence is correlated weakly with brain size, and bigger people have bigger brains (anecdotally I found it very noticeable in STEM subjects at University how many tall and therefore bigger-brained men and women there were). The average size of humans has increased markedly during the last 100 years with better food availability (eg 5-10cm taller in China in last 30 years).

The genetically determined (Nature over Nurture) aspect of intelligence is contrary to the ideal of the improvable man - but unfortunately it does turn out that genetics dominates Intelligence, with something like .75 correlation between twins even if raised separately. IQ statistics and correlations are very strong and very clear and can be used to predict (with accuracy) a wide range of things about the behaviours and attainments of genetically differentiated groups groups in our society.

This does not go down well in politics or the humanities and has been decried by apologists such as Stephen J Gould. It is OK to recognise genetic differences if they are positive, such as hugely superior athletic ability of West Africans that dominate most sports they participate in, but do not mention average academic outcomes - or find factors other than genetics to blame.

Some of the interesting results of this strong tendency towards genetic determination of IQ are that you get regression to mean (smart parents tend to have slightly dumber children, but stupid parents tend to have slightly smarter children) leading to identifiable trends such as smart first generation immigrants who managed to get to the West then having children who are less talented. And also that your chances of being a genius are massively higher if you come from certain cold climate populations where survival appears to have hinged on non-violent economic competition (han chinese, ashkenazic jew), and massively lower if you come from other hot-climate gene-pools that appear to have placed greater emphasis on disease resistance and athletic/verbal/physical ability in benign climates with frequent warefare. This results in a very large difference of something like 2-3 standard deviations between the Ashkanazic Jews and some of the hot climate gene pools. Which is why given the nature of the tails of the bell-curve the Ashkanazic's are so massively over-represented in elite attainments (nobels etc) and hot climate gene-pools almost invisible. Again this is not popular or politically correct but is nonetheless real and is demonstrates the reality of IQ or 'G' even without needing to devise a test for it - relative differences in group IQ and the bell curve can be elegantly inferred simply from the proportions of individuals in various professions.

So sadly it appears that genes do determine IQ to a large extent, but selective breeding can change average IQ by up to 15 points within a few generations (ashkenazic jews had nearly identical genes to the local population wherever they lived, and yet were on average almost a standard deviation smarter). If we wanted to we could probably eliminate IQ differences between groups within a generation or two using Gatacca style technology.

4 times higher resolution than James Webb, 12 times the light collecting area, 10% of the cost.

Space telescopes are only sensible for the sections of the spectrum the earth-bound just can't do.

It would require a trivial amount of water on a global scale. Total world fuel consumption is about 90 million barrels a day = 12million tonnes. Hydrogen equivalent would be 4 million tonnes, requiring 36 million tonnes of water. which is about half an hour of of flow from the mississippi.

The big issue is where does the energy come from. Nuclear is the only sensible answer,

... Out of a large one.

Alan Gibbs is a kiwi rich-lister who is monomaniacal about amphibious vehicles - typical for otherwise uncreative people who think they have had a good idea. Most engineers I know probably have a more viable commercial idea every month or two.

He has squandered probably in the region of $100 million on developing amphibious vehicles, but to date the world has yawned, because there is almost no one who could or would actually have a use for such an expensive and high maintenance folly with compromised performance on both land and water.

In this universe we obey the laws of thermodynamics, including the 2nd Law. There is no, and can be no 100% efficiency.

Small black holes are basically 100% efficient at turning mass into energy via Hawking Radiation, which is nearly two orders of magnitude more efficient than Stars powered by fusion.

There are some serious suggestions as to how to go about making them (ultra powerful converging gamma ray lasers, as photons aren't subject to Pauli Exclusion Principle). While it probably requires a moon-sized machine to do it, it is probably feasible for a civilisation capable of building a Dyson sphere, and once you have that technology you don't need stars or the gravitational hassles that they create anymore.

Really the only downside to splashdown is potential corrosion of parts of the capsule, but given amount of refurb work that will go on anyway this is probably a pretty minor consideration.

Capsule trajectory prediction is good enough that you don't need to land on water when you have a Nevada dry lake bed available. The recent SpaceX Dragon Capsule flight had a touchdown within (I believe) about 1 mile of target.

Transporting a big heavy capsule overland to the launch site again is a bit tricky, anything more than 3-4m diameter starts to be a problem on roads (Orion is 5m diameter). But you could also use heavy lift helicopters - at 8 tonnes it could be carried by a Chinook to an airport without too much trouble.

For a parachute landing you can hit water pretty fast without damaging the capsule - whereas for a hitting dirt you need landing gear to prevent point loading and a clever terminal speed arresting system to kill your parachute sink rate of a few m/s just as you touch the ground.

The sea is far more accessible for Cape Canaveral. Ultimately a relatively small boat and crane with a small crew could recover the capsule and return it to Canaveral for reprocessing. (Though that would not be the SpaceX rather than the Nasa way of doing things).

Helium is also available from the atmosphere for several $1000/kg. So we won't run out.

Most Cryogenic applications like MRI magnets can use Hydrogen 14K or Neon 24K instead.

But I agree save the helium for more important uses.

Instead use Neon - its a renewable resource from the atmosphere, and would only cost about $300/kg of lift or a couple of $ per balloon - not much worse than helium, and well within typical retail margins, also won't leak away as quickly.

For bigger lift applications use methane. Dirt cheap, commonly available, not poisonous, less leaky than hydrogen or helium and would work fine for most lift applications. Downside is flammability, though far less dangerous than hydrogen, and rises quickly in air to disperse in an accident. A party balloon with 4 litres would only release 100kJ when burnt - though that is more than the 20kJ from an equivalent hydrogen balloon. It is much harder to ignite methane - only ignites in a relatively narrow range of air-methane mixes, spanning about 4-15%, vs hydrogen 4-75%

The real waste in the Budget is in things like Medicare. US spends 15% of GDP on health, while most OECD countries spend about 7-8% on evil "socialised medicine" yet have everyone is covered and in many cases they have higher life expectancies. 7% of us GDP is about $1 Trillion per year, I realise that isn't the federal budget but it is money that people could use for other things if they weren't wasting it.

Higher education 3% of GDP vs OECD average 1.5%. College attendees are getting screwed to the tune of $200 billion per year.

Around $1000 per person spent on tax filing per year due to ridiculously complex tax system - another 2-300 $billion per year.

And I am not even going to bother talking about the Pentagon.

Point is that there are ways of saving all that needs to be saved without impacting negatively on peoples standard of living, but the US needs to be willing to adopt the best practices of the rest of the west, regardless of philosophical objections about free-markets etc.

To be honest I wasn't even looking at the trend I was just trying to illustrate the 60 year cycle driven by the PDO/AMO ocean cycles as it impacts the Arctic. We see PDO in all climate data, from sea level rise, to Global Temperatures to Droughts etc. And because it is so dominant you cannot say much that is sensible about climate trends at shorter timescales. That is where IPCC climatology of recent decades has gone so wrong - extrapolating rises from a decade or two of upward slope in teh 80's and 90's taken from a 60 year sinusoidal variation (even though 1910-1940 temp rise was just as fast as 1970-2000 rise it was before significant rises in CO2, and IPCC models just can't explain that or other historic variation without some colossal fudging of input data on 'forcings').

Taking the change over 60 years gives you something like the real trend underlying PDO driven variation - and works out at something like 0.7 deg C per century for global temperatures. The temperature trend is higher in Europe and mostly lower or even in some cases negative in the rest of the world.

As far as I am aware WW2 had no noticeable effect on climate, it was a minuscule blip in terms of its effects on the world, and actually led to a post war industrialisation and population explosion that drove the first sharp rise in CO2, which by IPCC assertions should not have caused a 30 year cooling trend such as what was seen globally 1940-1970 - again pointing to the dominant effects of PDO.

So we have had 30 years of slowly dropping average Arctic Ice coverage during the warming phase of the PDO, however in the southern hemisphere Ice has generally been increasing. The Key point is that 30 years is too short a data timescale in the context of the PDO/AMO cycle and that in last 5 years it has been looking like the falling Arctic Ice trend might have actually bottomed out as the PDO tips over into its cooling phase just as it did 60 years ago.

http://www.webcitation.org/6AKKakUIo
There was almost a million km more ice over last winter than there was in the previous low year of 2007.

There was also an exceptionally strong summer storm this year in early August (the time when ice is thinnest) that led to a lot of ice breaking up - hence the relative ice low.
http://earthsky.org/earth/powerful-summer-storm-in-arctic-reduces-sea-ice-even-more

Result is an at least 30 year low, but it is pretty consistent with the 60 year AMO/PDO ocean cycle:
http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Features/ArcticIce/Images/arctic_temp_trends_rt.gif

So it doesn't actually look like this is a "death spiral" at least in the short term, more like a bit of seasonal variability in an otherwise 5 year upwards trend.

Definitely a lot of organised crime in relatively strong Australian unions.

In the days of strong militant unions in New Zealand OC in unions was a big factor (surprising considering that New Zealand is nearly the least corrupt place on the planet), but unions were thankfully mostly broken in 80's, (with partial exception of waterfront), at the point where they had come close to destroying the economy with uncompetitive labour practices and the Labour govt of the time was left with no choice but massive reform.

Solidworks, an engineering CAD and analysis package, was nearly twice as much in Australia as in US a few years ago (not peanuts, close to AUD $20k vs around US $10k for full analysis package) . Very hard to understand reason. US engineering salaries were about he same as Oz, so this imposes significantly higher cost of business for any Australian corporation trying to compete internationally. I would have expected similar prices in countries with similar wage costs.

Actually worth hopping on a plane, buying it and installing from a reseller in the US and then getting a US proxy for updates and servicing.

Governments of the abused customers should specifically legislate to make the laws that support such predatory pricing illegal regardless of copyright lobby, because our businesses have to compete with the countries that get the advantage of cheaper prices.