Can I stop by with my autogyro?

Not exactly. Even Columbus had a fair idea of the diameter of the planet - where he got it wrong was estimating the width of Eurasia at almost double the actual value, which put the east coast roughly where he encountered the Americas. Considering that he made the estimates based on the log books of explorers who crossed extremely rough terrain and couldn't measure longitude*, being off by a factor of two is hardly a symptom of idiocy. Unless you have reason to believe that a substantially more accurate and trustworthy estimate of the width of Eurasia was well-known in Europe at the time?

* measuring longitude requires a clock that can be transported while keeping accurate time - the sort of thing that was *extremely* difficult at the time, especially on long rough journeys. The moon's position against the stars could also be used, but the accuracy is poor**, and the technique was apparently still just gaining recognition in the early to mid 1500s, well after Columbus's voyage. And even centuries later it was considered insufficiently accurate for seafaring purposes.

** the moon moves only 0.5 degrees per hour meaning an error of 1 degree in measuring lunar position translates to 2 hours of time inaccuracy, or 30 degrees of longitude - about 2,000 miles at the equator.

Not nearly as good an observation post as it would have in orbit. And as long as we're doing orbital observations there's not much reason to involve a planet at all, unless it's our own.

Not to mention that if you're studying something hundreds of millions of miles away from your sensors, there's not much point in having people standing next to the sensors unless they need to be repaired or modified. You could just as easily be sitting on Earth and have the information forwarded to you, it's not like you could send a warning any faster than you could send the raw data.

Well now my oldest will be interested in a different ship other than the Maersk Triple Es. In his mind the bigger the better, so things like the Bagger 288, Big Muskie, The Captian, and the Cat 797 are the best things ever created.

What would it take to create a probe that could survive these conditions and send back data indefinitely? Is it even currently possible to engineer electronics that can either operate at those temperatures or be insulated and cooled sustainably? If you had infinite funding and the best engineers in the world, how would you even begin to address this?

Depending on where this guy was the nearest neighbor may have likely been several miles away. For example one of my friends has a cabin in norther Minnesota the nearest neighbor is about 10 miles away. We frequently toss empty cans out the door at night and the next day walk out and shoot them from the porch, no sense in letting perfectly intact cans go unshot. Yes we do clean up the cans when we leave but why not shoot them for target practice first. This type of thing is very common in rural areas and would only really be a concern if it were in a developed are. Also in the fall it is very common to see people walking around in blaze orange with a shotgun or rifle over their shoulder out hunting

I have wondered if it is even possible to know all of the laws and government regulations that one has to abide by. There is the United States Code, all of the various federal regulations, laws and regulations for the state you are a resident in, and various local laws and regulations. Is it even reasonable to assume that someone could read them all in a year? When you have congress passing massive bill like the ~2400 page Affordable Care Act, or how ever many are in the US patriot act, or even the annual federal budget which gets all sorts of other random crap stuffed in it, that all makes changes to existing law or create new laws it seems like it is an impossible task. Given that even the federal government can't state how many federal crimes there are it seems that it should entirely be a reasonable defense to be ignorant of the law given that even the government is.

Well, at least you understand the motivation behind your anti-space delusions. But do you really need to share the details with the rest of us?

Sure there is - 1.1 trillion people carrying ten gallons of water each to California. Or, each of the ~400 million Americans carrying 27,000 gallons. Plenty of places in the world suffering from too much water - the challenge is only in moving it around cheaply enough that someone is willing to pay for it. Hell, they want to build a pipeline across the country to move oil that only costs about $2/gallon, and water is far safer and less viscous - you could probably move it at half the price, if that.

Actually, no. The brain is unclocked, making "speed" (frequency) analysis difficult, but as I recall neurons are only able to fire somewhere on the order of a few hundred Hz to a few kHz. The incredible data processing capacities likely originate from the the massively interconnected parallel design, rather than raw speed. In terms of total "switch" transitions per second I believe we hit human-brain-comparable supercomputers almost a decade ago. To the limits of our feeble understanding of the brain, of course.

As for "banging on the brain with a hammer" - I'm inclined to agree with your description, but that's hardly slowed humans from doing just that with alcohol and other drugs for millenia - to say nothing of the booming market for prescription psycho-pharmaceuticals, many of which are recognized to have potentially serious but poorly understood side effects..

Presumably because our brains appear to be resistant to the effects of simplistic stimulation on it's own. For example we can wire rat's brains so that the "pleasure center" can be stimulated when they press a switch - and they'll then proceed to keep pressing that switch to the exclusion of eating, sleeping, fucking, etc. Similarly wired humans reported only a sensation of mild pleasure, and no such obsessive behavior was observed (or so I recall).

On the other hand it's not unheard of for opiate consumption to cause similar results in humans, so perhaps it's simply a matter of humans having a more distributed "pleasure center" than could be stimulated by a few electrodes.

Amen.

Maybe, *maybe* I might trust such "enhancement" from an open-source game engine or similar, but from an amoral (at best) profiteering organization that specializes in bald-faced psycho-emotional manipulation? Not a chance.

Even controlled by a scrupulously moral actor I would be leery though - I *am* my brain responses, anything that "hacks" them, hacks *me*. And frankly I'm pretty happy with the "me" I've built the old-fashioned way.

I have heard that for a long time the standard "retirement package" for at least mildly well-to-do Chinese who were facing the final inevitable decline was a pipe and all the opium they could smoke. Actually sounds a lot more civilized than the normal American routine - who wants to spend their last days/weeks/months draining their children's inheritance to fight a battle that can't be won? Let me die from starvation with a smile on my face and a sandwich beside me, ignored in favor of the pipe in my hand.

If you understand how federal politics and the well-connected military-industrial complex actually works, you would know that costing lots of money would make it MORE likely, not less.

Yes, a global presence, especially (though not exclusively) because we just insist on constantly fucking with the Middle East. If we didn't have such a global presence feeding the military-industrial complex, we would have plenty of personnel to deal with the real national security issue of a wide-open border. We'd have far fewer enemies that way as well, but then the anti-terrorism propaganda would have to find another issue to excuse draconian laws.

The USA is a military and economic empire that doesn't like to call itself an empire because that might sound bad.