Most of Pluto is going to be ice. Is the cap solid Nitrogen?

He must be new here.

Two words: key escrow. Google "secret sharing" for interesting details and concepts.

'Low-head nondestructive hydroelectric power' isn't enough energy to provide a significant amount of power unless you're looking at powering a tiny village.

True, at the current scale. I think what all this points to is that we need better energy storage technology. Chemical storage is currently the most efficient (i.e. petroleum fuel), but in the long run, what's needed is better battery technology - something equivalent in energy density and price to petroleum. It's a tall order, but at least there's some progress.

The downside, of course, is that this isn't likely to happen soon enough to provide enough cheap power to run a global "just-in-time" supply chain. Transportation energy is the major problem, or at least it is if you don't want a lot of people to starve.

Not to mention special ops, infantry combat, mining and ditch digging. These professions are all mostly male. I guess we'd better go figure out how to get more women there too.

Equality doesn't mean you just get to do the nice, clean, fun stuff. It means you do *all* the stuff.

Doesn't need to be, but you have to stand in line behind the pedophiles, polygamists, and instinctual relationships, they were there first. Of course, now that homosexuals can marry, I suspect the redefinition will start happening quite regularly. Bestiality will get its turn.

I'd mod this up if I could. And I'd suggest it also applies in not only mental realms, but also the physical, and could well be an explanation for why NO women were able to pass the special forces exams for the military.

It only looks like satire or stupidity to the ignorant. It is, sadly, 100% correct, even if politically incorrect and decidedly chauvinist, it is what occurred in pre history when the division of labor was handed out.

No, you've moved from "displacing farmland" to "destroying an ecology you don't care about because you don't live there." As someone who's been to Death Valley and lived in New Mexico, I can tell you that the "deserts" are rather delicate, unique ecosystems.

Look, there are just better ways to get industrial scale energy than by harvesting biomass. There's quite a bit of sunlight. There's thorium. There's conservation and efficiency. There's low-head, nondestructive hydroelectric power (no dams required). There's geoengineering to bring heat to the surface - lousy for generating power, but great for temperature control.

And all of these work with minimal ecological impact.

Once again, life imitates art.

https://xkcd.com/723/

He's from Uranus you insensitive clod!

These are always the questions when talking about new energy sources.

Gasoline currently has 114,000 BTUs per gallon, at about $2.33 a gallon at my local station. It's being produced from source materials that don't require farmland, or blocking sunlight to local ecologies. It's stable at room temperature and portable.

While biodiesel typically comes in at 118,300 BTUs per gallon, and may be cheap to make *today,* if we were to try and scale up to current industrial scale use, the price would climb remarkably (and quickly) and the resources needed to make it (i.e. farmland, water and sunlight) would soon push up food prices as more and more land was diverted to energy production.

Biofuels have a place in the energy picture. It's just never going to be a very big one. What we need are batteries that are worth a shit (i.e. cheap and with about 20x current energy densities) and a mix of solar/nuclear/low head hydro/wind and so on.

There's always going to be an optimal balance between information and cognition. Our problem now is that we are gathering too much information for any automated or natural cognition equipment to handle in a useful way. If the NSA were made up of smarter people, they would be focusing far more heavily on AI and crowd-cognitive analysis techniques using humans, not big data.

Bad news

The preserved ship was found underneath the tombs, hidden safely in a pool of mercury from those who sought its destruction millennia ago. But now the pool has been emptied, and the ship's beacon detected, awakening the ancient enemy, who even now races to their final destination, readying massive engines of destruction, pointing them at a small, insignificant planet, called... Earth (zoom out to stock photo of Earth in space - Cue "threatening alien" theme).