"Frederick Douglass taught that literacy is the path from slavery to freedom.

There are many kinds of slavery and many kinds of freedom, but reading is still the path."

-Carl Sagan

Gold! Willard was hesitating. Money, when it was a matter of electronic exchange, meant nothing.
There was no feeling of either wealth or poverty above a certain level.
The world was a matter of plastic cards and of slots and all the world transferred, transferred, transferred.
Gold was different. It had a feel. Each piece had a weight. Piled together, it had a gleaming beauty.
It was wealth one could appreciate and experience.

He didn't need the money. He was not so sure he didn't need the gold.

- Isaac Asimov (Gold)

"The suppression of uncomfortable ideas may be common in religion or in politics, but it is not the path to knowledge, and there's no place for it in the endeavor of science." - Carl Sagan

I seem to recall reading that If there were a mass of gold ingots in low Earth orbit, it would not be economically feasible to send the Space Shuttle up to bring them back to Earth. You'd spend more on training, parts, maintenance and fuel than a cargo hold full of pure bullion could offset. If you had a factory in orbit to use the gold to some purpose, that might be different, but that's putting the cart before the horse.

If it is indeed a 'garden spot' for life, we should be extra careful to not send any wayward seeds with our robotic emissaries.

"Oh, hello deep-dwelling sentient beings. Yeah, sorry about those microbes that got stuck to our probe and seem to be causing your extinction."

O The Embarrassment.

Islam has never killed anyone. Islam has never detonated a suicide bomb. Islam has never called for the downfall of Western Culture. Also, Christianity has never declared a Crusade, rallied against equal rights for homosexuals or called for the killings of doctors who perform abortions.

All these things have been done by *humans* who have decided to hijack an entire religion and twist it in order to accomplish their secular goals.

Instead of having a specially-made or retrofitted baton, how about having the area in front of the podium encased in a magnetic field like that of a theremin, such that the baton would provide data on horizontal position by pitch and vertical position by volume. That would give you all the data you need to feed to whatever peripheral signals the musician (come to think of it, an earbud with the output would help for the beginning of the piece, but it might be too distracting for things like tempo changes.

Does wonders for produce by killing the living heck out of bacteria... Not sure if there would be 'harmful' side effects though.

They did, after all, pardon Galileo in 1992 after having sentenced him to life in prison for his heretical beliefs in a non-heliocentric cosmology.

Would have been the Alan Dean Foster novelization of John Carpenter's film.

We see lots of stories with headlines like "Nation's Millionaire College Dropouts."

Odd that we never see "Nation's Minimum-Wage College Dropouts."

I suppose they only have so much newsprint...

You still use Balonium? If you want to maximize your nucleonic blasts, you need to refine it into Phoni-Balonium

Umm... Yes. Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation.

Well, if we're shooting at it, it means we can see it. If we see it we can track it.

Accuracy? A laser is a straight line of photons that travel at the speed of light. If we can track it, we can hit it. It's just a matter of calculating trajectories and factoring in gravitiational effects. At the distance it would be at, i'm not sure how lasers could possibly cancel each other out.

A spinning asteroid wouldn't matter much... just calculate its center of mass then fire appropriately to effect the greatest change in desired direction. You might be shooting at empty space part of the time, but the rest will do the work you want.