Bullshit. Sorry, there is no nice way to put it, but the scare mongering was pure, weapons-grade bullshit.

The REAL problems with any actual critical systems had been readily apparent to any company who would do any kind of forecasting or planning or had any contracts (including any loans given or taken) extending into the future. Even something as non-critical as import-export companies for packaging, or travel agencies or whatever, I know people actually working for them and they were aware at the very least in January 1999 (though most even earlier,) when forecast data or contracts extending in the next year started having problems. I actually know people working for such companies and NONE were waiting for the hype to convince them. As soon as the first report showed up as "uh, it says we'll achieve our goals if we get, uh, minus two thousand dollars a month in sales until 1900", some boss said, "fix the fucking thing NOW."

Meanwhile things were hyped as needing an urgent fix, that had no problem whatsoever. Network CABLES and speakers were hyped as Y2K Compliant, when, seriously, they didn't even have a calendar in them or anything. Scammers made off with billions from the rest of the economy, in upgrades for things that didn't need upgrading, and replacements for things that didn't need replacing.

THAT was what the shameless hype did: help some scammers milk the rest of the economy of money that would have been better spent elsewhere. Anyone who took part in spreading that scare, THAT is what they helped achieve: help some parasites loot the rest of society.

And it didn't even stop there. Things were hyped as going to bring civilization down, like street lights or car electronics which (especially in 1999) didn't even hold the date anywhere and had no use for it, AND which nobody could afford to just yank out and replace wholesale. Yet hordes of shameless snake oil vendors and their PR toadies were hammering non-stop on the idea that OMG, unless your city is blowing its whole budget on their snake oil, come next year all car traffic will halt, airplanes will come crashing down from the sky, and apparently grocery stores will stay closed because everyone is too stupid to figure they still need to go to work if their electronic watch locks up in 2000. It was stuff that wasn't going to get "fixed", not just because it wasn't broken in the first place, but also because nobody was rich AND retarded enough to yank out and replace every single streetlight control module like that. The hype just kept people's fears high, and even tried to amplify them some more, just in case it results in some sale anyway, although chances were 99% that it wouldn't.

The shameless snake oil vendors and the idiots who helped them spread the panic, were NOT actually doing anyone any problem. In fact if it were a just world, we'd put that kind of parasites out of our collective misery and be better off for it.

I think you're rigorously applying the laws of physics to a supernatural being. Mind you I don't accept at all the idea that the universe is 6k years old, but if we start at the assumption that it was created 6k years ago by an entity capable of such a feat, it's hardly a stretch to think the same entity created all the stars with light already having radiated outwards so that distant stars could be visible right away. Seems sort of silly to bother creating stars otherwise.

Well, if I needed to rationalize something like that, yeah, I'd go with creating light in transit too. But, believe it or not, there ARE people who argue for a 6000 light year universe, and find the darndest rationalizations for it. E.g., some really weird gravity lensing that just makes it look like some galaxy is 10 billion light-years away, when it's less than 6000 light-years away.

Not all Christians, mind you, and (I like to think) not even a majority, but such people DO exist and my point merely was: "and we let even THOSE vote." :p

That's actually a new one for me. There are two reasons I've generally heard for why Xmas is Dec 25:

1. That's actually his birthday. Not my favorite theory, but it's not out of the question.

The problem is that nobody has a frikken clue when it happened. The only gospel author that gives us any indirect clues was Luke, and that one points actually at a date waaay off from Xmas. For the rest of the gang, including Paul, Matthew, Mark and John, basically they don't seem to give a fuck about when Jesus was born. (In fact, Mark, the earliest gospel writer, doesn't even mention anything at all about Jesus before he met John The Baptist.) What mattered for them was when he died and got resurrected. That was the big event for Christians, not the birth.

And even later, some people like Origen argued that it was a barbarian custom to celebrate the birthday, and Christians shouldn't do that.

At any rate, by 200 AD there were like a dozen dates proposed, and none in December.

2. Usurpation of pagan winter solstice festivals such as Saturnalia, Sol Invictus, etc.

While it might or might not have played a role later in the adoption and acceptance of that particular date -- as opposed to the dozen or so calculations which were discarded -- it wasn't even mentioned in the rationalizations actually written for it.

Really, those guys were taking over a pagan sun-related celebration all right, but it was the spring equinox actually. They already had from Philo that the world must have been created on the spring equinox, i.e., on 25 March (by the Julian calendar at the time.) So now a bunch of them, when they started actually doing chronologies for Jesus, wanted to basically have neatly exact thousands of years, as fits a Son Of God. So Jesus actually had to die on the 25'th of March too, even if it meant calculating Easter wrong for the whole decade around the possible year for it, and at that be CONCEIVED on the 25'th of March too. Incidentally, he also had to be exactly 40 years from conception at his death, because 40 is such a holy number to God (starting from Moses' life being neatly 3 periods of 40 years each, and going through LOTS of stuff where 40 was impoirtant from the OT. At any rate, his life had to be an exact number of years, and nail the equinox day twice at that, because that's how a perfect God would do it. (Some originally wanted him born on that date, but later they switched to conception.)

So then if you add exactly 9 months to the 25th March, you get the 25th December. Again, the notion that Jesus could be born even a day late or early, never occured to anyone. I mean, come on, someone as awesome and perfect as God wouldn't have an imperfectly timed birth, right? :p

Again, actually I believe that for the larger mass of believers, taking over the Saturnalia and birthday of Sol Invictus, may have made it more palatable and more popular than competing chronologies. So I wouldn't call that flat-out wrong. But the obsessive Jesus-fanboys writing those perfect chronologies for Jesus didn't seem to actually give a damn about that date. They were obsessed with the spring equinox as a perfect day and anniversary of the world creation.

Well, there are even there a few competing calculations, like in De Pascha Computus, which actually goes for 28 instead of 25. The rationale being that if the world has been created on the 25'th, then the 4th day when the Sun is created would be the 28'th of March, and Jesus being the new Sun of creation would have to be conceived on that anniversary of the creation of the sun, rather than the creation of the Earth.

But, same general idea. What they were fascinated with was really the spring equinox.

Well, yes, the idea certainly didn't originate with Russel, and is in fact as old as we have a written record. Before Yeats, we had for example Michel de Montaigne in the 15'th century which argued and justified that, "it turns out that nothing is so firmly believed as whatever we know least about, and that no persons are more sure of themselves than those who tell us tall stories" That's someone pretty much explicitly statind Dunning-Kruger effect, centuries before Dunning and Kruger. And he in turn was quoting from Plato's Critias, who says, "the inexperience and utter ignorance of his hearers about any subject is a great assistance to him who has to speak of it", which isn't exactly Dunning-Kruger, but is actually even more on topic for explaining why politicians get away with economically-impossible promises and other complete BS. And that's, you know, Plato, 5'th century BC.

Well, while you may be right about the cases which are actually about investing money, you probably also realize that it was just an analogy. It's supposed to illustrate something from domain X, via something that the other party knows from domain Y. The two won't be and fundamentally can't be identical in all aspects, or it's not even an analogy any more, it becomes just an identity.

Basically the only thing that's really equivalent with letting people vote for politicians is... letting people vote for politicians. But that doesn't help much with illustrating it, unless you already understand it in the first place. Illustrating a political choice by comparison with a technology investment, is kinda like comparing computers to cars. Of course they won't be identical.

And here an important difference is that while you might leave fundamental physics research to private initiative to sort out, in politics you HAVE to decide and organize some things, because leaving them to whoever has the money tends to end up very badly every single time. E.g., history shows that time and time again, if you let someone else do the policing and army as they see fit, you end up at best with a dictatorship and at worst with a civil war. Outside of the deranged delusions of Anarcho-Capitalists, privatizing the state's monopoly on violence, doesn't work and never did. From Sulla and Caesar to contemporary Somalia, whenever someone had an army that was reasonably "theirs", they started a bid for totalitarian power with it, and that often went through a civil war too. So you can't really wait for private initiative to sort out the army and police. You have to decide something at state level, and that involves making people vote... for stuff they don't really understand, and don't know they don't understand.

Big bang has nothing to do with it. According to Genesis 1:14-19:

14. And God said, âoeLet there be lights in the expanse of the sky to separate the day from the night, and let them serve as signs to mark seasons and days and years,

15. and let them be lights in the expanse of the sky to give light on the earth.â And it was so.

16. God made two great lightsâ"the greater light to govern the day and the lesser light to govern the night. He also made the stars.

17. God set them in the expanse of the sky to give light on the earth,

18. to govern the day and the night, and to separate light from darkness. And God saw that it was good.

19. And there was evening, and there was morningâ"the fourth day.

The stars were created on the 4'th day of creation, about 3 days after the Earth itself. Hence if Earth is no older than 6000 years, the stars themselves cannot be older than 6000 years. Any light we receive today CANNOT have started more than 6000 years ago. Hence, If the speed of light didn't change, everything we see must be within a 6000 light year radius.

Mind you, technically the Bible also doesn't say that the creation was 6000 years ago. There's a different reason why everyone calculated about 6000 years old in the 3'rd century, and in the 11'th century, and in the 18'th century, now it's still about 6000 years.

The reason is basically that the idiots want to have a rapture any day now, instead of dealing with the rest of their lives. And they wanted a rapture any day now at just about any point in the history of Christianity.

So the reasoning which appears IIRC around the 2'nd-3'rd century is basically this: God worked for 6 days, and the 7'th day was God's day. And for God it is said that 1000 years are like a day. Hence it makes sense (bear in mind that these are not scientists, but theologians, so get used to pulling stuff out of the ass and handwaving it as making sense to them therefore being true) that the world from that point on would be based on the same 6+1 pattern, with 6000 years of toil and hardship, and the 7'th "day" of 1000 years being God's reign on Earth.

So they're not actually doing some real maths to get that 6000 years, but fudge the numbers to get the 6000 they want.

There's a lot of false accuracy involved. Think: there are 28 generations between David and Jesus in Matthew, a generation is 40 years, therefore there are EXACTLY 1120 years between Jesus and David. Down to the day. No, seriously, the reason we got Xmas on 25 December was because a 3rd century lemming added generations with such amazing accuracy as to get precision down to the day between Jesus's birth and the creation of Earth, which had already been postulated by Philo to have happened on a spring equinox. The thought of error bars and human reproduction not being that predictable, tends to not occur to these people.

And there's a lot of generously applying Flannagan's Finagling Factor, i.e., "That quantity which, when multiplied by, divided by, added to, or subtracted from the answer you got, gives you the answer you should have gotten."

Because that's basically what it's about. it's not about actually calculating an unknown result, but about fudging the maths to give them the result they already decided they want. One which says that their precious judgment day will come any day now.

The first problem is that most people just aren't knowledgeable of advanced theory and precedents in any domain. That's not to say they're "dumb" or "stupid", just that they don't know everything, because nobody can know everything.

Basically, unless you're a physicist, imagine that you had to pick which form of energy supply should you back for interstellar travel. Should we pursue producing anti-matter (which can store incredibly much energy, but is so ridiculously ineffective to produce that we'll need several breakthroughs before it's even feasible to use like in Star Trek) or should we go with micro-black-holes and Hawking radiation, basically harnessing the incredible energy released as a small enough black hole evaporates? Both actually pack the same joules per kilogram, because at the end of it, both will have converted mess into energy as per e=mc^2. Maybe the black hole promises a bit less losses.

But anyway, imagine you had to vote on which of the two should get a trillion dollars in research grants to get us off this piece of rock before some mass extinction event gets us.

Now that's not to say that you're dumb or anything. You're a smart and educated person, and perfectly capable of rational thought and logical decisions. But unless you're a physicist, you won't know enough to understand what the choices are, much less to pick the best. They get a physicist proponent of each of the two to explain until they're blue in the face, but chances are even after a year you still won't know enough to make an informed choice.

Now worse yet, imagine that it's not just YOU who gets a vote, but also that hippie chick who only heard of "quantum" in some bogus quantum chi crystal pendants she wears. And that dude who actually believes that the universe is less than 6000 years old and less than 6000 light years across, because the bible says so. Yeah, I wouldn't rely on him to estimate the amount of energy for star travel correctly, when he literally believes that everything is three million times closer than the scientists think. And millions of other woefully unqualified people.

You probably see how the result of that vote will be no closer to picking the right one, than flipping a coin.

And those are probably the worst, because, quoth Bertrand Russell, "[i]The fundamental cause of the trouble is that in the modern world the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt.[/i]" YOU, if you're not a physicist, and are all that smart and educated, will probably realize, "wait, why are they asking me? I don't know enough to judge that." Whereas the guy who thinks "quantum" is the mystical force in his new crystal pendants he bought from some dodgy site, will actually be more likely to think he knows enough about it.

In effect, it's just Dunning-Kruger in action. The less you actually know, the more you'll grossly overestimate what you know.

And it's really getting worse for topics where everyone thinks they know something about, like economics. You'll find very few people who actually understand what, say, Keynesian vs Austrian School economics say. Or to what extent they even make testable predictions. Or to what extent they were ever actually tested.

But you'll find a LOT of people who think they know EXACTLY which theory will fix the economy, and furthermore, which candidate has the best grip on it, and exactly what they should do differently about it too.

And that, in a nutshell, is the problem with letting people vote on it.

Actually, that's just for the choice of leaders.

IMHO the real advantage functioning democracies have are in the balances and checks on those leaders' powers. Because basically you're not better off with a genius leader, if he only uses that genius just to get more power for himself and suppress any possible threats to his rule. And those balances and checks tend to be the first to go in a dictatorship.

The problem with economic theory is that it is based on a _perfect_ world. It's just handwaved that, uh, well, it works close enough in the real world.

Among the assumptions that are necessary to have most of that shiny-happy outcome for everything -- and I mean, really, necessary, as once you have a margin of error, real world starts to happen -- are such gems as:

- many manufacturers of perfectly homogenous and fungible products. Which works well if you're buying orange juice, but less well when your brand of pneumonia is only sensitive to the latest patented antibiotic.

- zero (or negligible) entry and exit barriers. This is in fact needed both for the previous one, as well as to prevent collusion. In a market where it costs nothing to enter or to exit if it didn't work, you can't form a cartel to regulate the price of bread, because someone else will then start making bread anyway and undercut you. This assumption is increasingly false in the real world, with entry barriers in some domains being in the many billions range. No, really, try starting a CPU manufacturing company.

- perfectly informed buyers. To have any chance that the market punishes behaviours X, Y and Z, or even rewards fine differences in quality, basically all (or the vast majority) of buyers must know that stuff. Again, this is not only getting to be very false, but most corporations actively work through marketing and PR to make sure that you care more about their beer making you cool than whether beer X actually tastes better than beer Y.

- perfectly rational everyone, including buyers and sellers. Which already is false in the case discussed here. Perfectly rational buyers would buy her music because the genuinely like them more than some other music, not just because they heard she died.

- no externalities. An assumption which may be mostly correct for music, but is also something that produced barely breathable smog and other problem at the times it was basically true.

- perfectly elastic supply and demand mechanics. Which sadly was only really true up to the start of the 20'th century. The Great Depression arguably happened when we ran into a domain where things started to be inelastic.

Etc.

What I'm getting at is that while this kind of thing makes for a great BS libertarian rhetoric, it is very much divorced from reality. In the perfect world used in such economic theory, monopolies are impossible, in the real world they are a fact of life. In the perfect world used in such economic theory, collusion isn't viable, in the real world there are real cases where for example a bunch of big pharma companies agreed to not undercut each other. In that ideal world you couldn't make money by recommending that other people invest in the same imploding dot-com that you're selling your shares in, because buyers would already be informed, but in the real world it actually happened. Etc.

If you were a really merciless investor, you'd also know that, and factor it in. E.g., you'd know that if you make ten millions and then have to pay a million to PR to whitewash your image, then, meh, being an asshole actually paid.

And in the end, that's the real difference between those who actually know how to abuse an imperfect market, and idealist nerds who think the world works like in perfect-world BS propaganda.

Well, now that's a letdown. If a geek can't dream of getting laid with an alien babe, then what's the point of it all? ;)

Well, now seriously, I have some idea of my own on the topic. Whatever we meet, true, won't even vaguely resemble HOMO SAPIENS. On the other hand, if you think about how evolutionary pressures worked on Earth, it's not unreasonable to expect some Earth-style body plan.

For a start I'm going to assume that life is going to evolve from individual mollecules that self-replicate and get increasingly more complex. This kinda means a primal pond for those chemical reactions to thrive. This kinda rules out the most exotic scenarios like gas bags floating in gas giants. Ephemereal water droplets just won't last enough for that kind of evolution.

Second, I'm only interested in sentients. While life can also just mean some weird rock-eating bacteria, it's not going to be the kind you make contact with. That kind of thing just gets written under local flora at best, not alien contact.

Then you have constraints like that probably the simplest complex and mobile shape that can pump that pond through and extract nutrients is some kind of tube. It evolved so many times on Earth that there must be some merit to it. So you'll pretty much have critters based on a body plan that takes in food at one end, and dumps waste out the other end.

Or that if that kind of life form has SOME equivalent to DNA -- doesn't mean actual DNA, just SOME way to encode how to make more copies of itself --- you'll probably get SOME symmetry, because it saves on complexity there.

Then if you think of it, it makes sense to have the sensor organs to the front of that tube. It makes more sense to see or smell what you're about to swallow than what just passed you by. Critters with the sensor organs up front will have a strong evolutionary advantage in just about any imaginable setup.

At that point, you have to worry about reaction times, Whatever means of processing information it will have, whether it will be like our neurons or not, it will have finite speed and bandwidth. The main sensor organs, like eyes (or equivalent) need massive bandwidth and quick processing (our eyes even have basic image processing built right into the retina), so you'll want that trunk kept short. So that gives you a "brain" or equivalent quite close to the front of that tube, i.e., it gives you a head.

It will be a generic purpose "brain". Hard-wired reflexes that have to be pre-wired for your exact limb lengths and whatnot, are actually a major handicap, so no complex animal does that. Most brains just learn to use whatever body they got, to the point where animals can in actual studies learn to use eyes that detect a fourth colour, or a CCD camera sensor instead of a retina, or a culture of rat neurons can learn to use a truck with wheels instead of a rat body. In the end it's a problem of survivable complexity. You are much more adaptable evolving if mutations to body shape don't have to happen at the same time as mutations to a brain that is already fine-tuned to that body, to be survivable. Mutations to the body have to be able to just happen by themselves, and the brain must be able to learn to use that body.

Plus, if it were hard-wired, the reflexes that helped avoid predators as a dumb animal, won't help it be able to do maths or operate a spaceship. Any alien that can really operate new tools and think abstractly, will have a general-purpose enough brain to do that.

A complex enough head, gives you a long childhood. Whether you believe that that species give birth to live offspring, or lays eggs, or whatever, there's only so big a head you can get out of the mother or that you can grow out of the limited nutrients in an egg, or whatever. You'll continue building processing units for a long time afterwards, and a complex enough brain needs some time to figure out a complex world model. (See the Piaget childhood development theories, for how long it takes for a human brain to finally "grow up" and have an adult world model and processing capabilities.)

Then there's a matter of limbs. The simplest body plans use the most of them, up to schemes where each cell has its own flagellum that contributes to the whole, and a decentralized control scheme. E.g., insects have one bundle of nerves independently controlling each leg or wing, with the CNS just giving it loose signals like "start the walk forward sequence for that leg."

But as you get more complex, it starts being an obvious advantage to go centralized, again, partly because of an advantage to have short paths. The most efficient brain layout seems to be basically a lot of processing columns, around a high-speed, massive-bandwidth central hub. Your brain is like that, for example. You can probably see the evolution pressure in that. From a data processing point of view, you can surely see the advantage in that. If you don't have infinite speed or bandwidth, and reacting a millisecond faster than the prey or predator counts, then that layout gives you the best bang per buck.

And at that point, once you have short reaction times and complex processing for each limb, it seems you need less limbs. In fact, 4 seems to be the all around sweet spot, once you have enough coordination for each.

Once you have 4, symmetry, a head, and some limbs used for manipulation (a main factor in developping intelligence), that already gives you a humanoid bipedal body plan. In fact, bipedalism to leave the fore limbs free for grasping things, evolved several times independently on Earth, so obviously it works. There is no reason to assume that some exotic, less efficient configuration would be preferred by natural selection on another planet.

It will probably give birth to live babies. Again, this is a thing that not only evolved on Earth, but is evolving independently again right as we speak. E.g., some lizards are evolving it right now. Again, it has an obvious advantage, and doubly so for an animal which will need a long time to become self-sufficient.

It will have evolved in conditions that make it actually extremely vulnerable. You don't develop complex behaviours and use of tools, when your natural defenses don't need that. A big and complex "brain" of whatever imaginable kind will push the envelope for energy use and nutrient use and whatnot, so by itself complexity is a disadvantage. It has to give a big enough advantage just to compensate for that. The animal has to actually have a concrete advantage from being smarter, not just be an eternal rock with a big brain vs an eternal rock with less brain.

Once a big enough brain is in place, all sorts of natural weapons and defenses become obsolete and a waste of energy. It becomes more advantageous to throw a spear well or figure out some cunning way to build a trap, than to have a big jaw and claws. So such traits like big jaws, claws, or even extreme sexual dimorphism will be selected out. (Sexual dimorphism for steadily decreased in the evolution of Homo Sapiens, unsurprisingly.)

Etc, etc, etc.

Once you take all such factors into consideration, I do believe that it's not unreasonable to expect a humanoid-type body plan. Will it be something one would actually find sexy and want to fuck? Probably not, for most people. It will probably look even more different than a chimp. A LOT more different even. But it will still be some kind of humanoid.

Oh, don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that that energy is why it can't EVENTUALLY be done. I'm just saying it's why it won't be done during the lifetime of generation Y either. Since, really, that's what I was answering to: whether it will inspire the next generation to not fail to move on with space travel.

I'm just saying that, yeah, focusing on the here and now, I wouldn't bet on the next generation getting a guy out of the solar system.

Further in the future... who knows? We've only had even cities for like 10,000 years, and existed as a species for 200,000 years. It would be presumptuous of me to state what can't be done in the next 4-5 billion years we can exist on this planet. (Past which point if it's not done yet, it effectively means "never.") I'm perfectly willing to say I have no bloody clue what will happen that far in the future.

Well, that price is actually a function of supply and demand. Namely the supply is infinitessimal. If you start bringing back tons of it, I would expect the price to drop a heck of a lot.

After all, the same happened already to several materials. E.g., at one point aluminium was more expensive than gold, and that's why it was chosen for the cap of the Washington monument. It was a statement to put a cap of a ridiculously expensive precious metal on it. But then in a couple of years a new process started churning out aluminiums by the tens of tons, and the price dropped to the point where we make inexpensive foil for packing or baking things in, or make disposable beer cans out of it. In ye olde days it would have been like putting beer in solid platinum cans, but that changed a lot.

But yeah, if you somehow had a market that doesn't drop prices when supply is abundant, that would be one heck of a business model :P

I have to ask one thing Why, in the name of all that is good and holy, would you want HK-47 as a bank teller?

Heh, well, as an adult, I wouldn't. I already said in there that ATMs are the more logical solutions. Just imagine telling your pin by voice to a robot, with 20 people in line behind you, and you'll see the problem.

But as a kid? HK-47 is the kewlest droid EVAR, meatbag :p

1. I'm not sure you're right about the efficiency of the system.

Well, I probably am not. You'll notice that in the equivalence to nukes I assumed you can get 29/30=0.9667, i.e., 96,67% efficiency in getting 30 kilotons of energy in the fuel into 29 kilotons of energy in moving that gram of matter. Real engines will be worse than that. I'm trying to be as geberous as I can with the assumptions, really.

2. Which planet are you thinking? I'm thinking to simply get to the next system - forget planets for a second, Orion may be the way to go.

Well, the one I had in the back of the head was the 22 light-years one mentioned in IIRC yesterday's front page.

But given that the problem was the energy in reaching a certain speed, I'd say the problem is the target speed, not the distance. After all, if you can reach 0.9c between here and Proxima Centauri, you can also coast on the same 0.9c to however far you wish. So the question isn't as much what distance, but at what speed do you want to get there.

All I'm saying is that things get ridiculously expensive close to c. And 0.75c is only half as much kinetic energy, so that's probably too high too.

But if you want to reach Proxima Centauri in a millennium, yeah, things get cheaper :p

Exactly where did you see anything about refusing to grow up, or using fiction as proof, or not being able to tell the difference between reality and fantasy, in the actual message you answer to?

By actually reading the message while sober and in full possession of my faculties.

Provide an exact quote, my dear troll, or piss off. Just more postulating that your delusional strawmen are there, just won't cut it.

We're on a board where the message is still readable on the same page. Just postulating I said something I didn't is stupid, when it's trivial to see I actually said and what was being discussed.

That whole tirade of insults of yours contained stuff like, and this is a direct quote: "Are you seriously so immature as to be disappointed that something as amazing as real time machine translation (which was nothing put a pipe dream when I was in high school a mere thirty years ago) is available 24/7 in something you can put in your pocket rather than being a 'kewl' 'droid?"

Provide an exact quote where I said anything even remotely resembling that I'm disappointed in that, or piss off.

But, yes, that's what is sadder, that that's the full extent of your capacities: reading a text twice and coming out with something wildly unrelated to what was actually in it.

I also notice that you carefully picked just pieces out of context that are easy to sound smart about, while leaving out what was actually the point there. Whop-de-do, such a surprise ;)

No, I don't. But neither do those little girls (now grown into adults or even seniors) go on and on about how much reality sucks compared to the fiction they read as youth. On the other hand, such things are part and parcel of the discussion pretty much everywhere nerds and geeks gather.

Again, provide an exact quote where I said that reality sucks, or piss off. I'm getting tired of your arguing with your own strawmen. If you just want to argue with your own delusions, you can spare my time and do that in Notepad.

Take your own advice: if someone is that unable to distinguish between reality and fantasy, they need professional help. If you genuinely can't distinguish between the kind of claim you had a canned answer for, and what I actually wrote, see a psychiatrist.

Again: the whole topic was whether the state of space travel will inspire kids or not. It's not even about reality as a whole, but about getting kids dreaming about a narrow domain.

What I AM saying is that if I were 6 nowadays, I'd probably find other pieces of reality to get excited about. Maybe I'd want to be a formula 1 driver, or maybe I'd want to make computer games, or God knows what else, but aiming to be the guy who'll study mold growth in zero g probably wouldn't be it. Precisely because there are enough other pieces of reality where the future prospects aren't nearly as underwhelming.

Yeah, there's just no way universal access to things beyond even the wildest dreams of SF (like near universal access to knowledge, in a handy pocket size package) is as cool as something so common in SF it's practically a cliche.

The part you conveniently left out was: to a kid. Address what is actually being said, not sentences taken out of context allow you to give your canned answers.

Do you genuinely think that someone will grow up dreaming to have something mundane, and at this point something which they already have? What kind of aiming short for an aspiration is that?

You don't grow up dreaming of having a cell phone with a browser. (Or if anyone does, well, they probably need help.)

I need help because I think that something like a Star Trek communicator or the MINISEC depicted in Imperial Earth is cool?

At this point, I'd say you need help because you fail elementary comprehension of written English.

The point that's even in the part you quoted, but apparently just can't understand, is about growing up now vs growing up 40-50 years ago. BACK THEN, growing up thinking it would be cool to own a Star Trek communicator was understandable and common, because it was a futuristic piece of technology. NOWADAYS, if anyone is growing up having the dream to grow up to have something bigger, clunkier and with less functionality than the cell phones he/she/it and everyone else has, is having the most underwhelming dream and goal in life. The whole POINT was that contrast.

You really are a sad little unit. (As well as ignorant of your SF history.) As in your original message, when faced with a reality you don't accept... you deny the reality.

Again, provide an exact quote where I deny or don't accept reality, or piss off. Provide a quote or piss off.

Isn't it the same thing, though? Of course, basic physics doesn't technically get into the way of getting to Alpha Centauri either. It's economics and technology that put the kibosh on it.

Going anywhere in the solar system is, of course, going to be an easier proposition, and you can get some of that energy by slingshot fly-bys of planets. It's still going to involve a lot of time, a lot of shielding, and ultimately a lot of energy. I don't think technology and economics will make that a realistic goal for most people in any foreseeable future.

Helium 3 mining on the moon for example sounds the most feasible, but the economics just aren't there yet. If you need to get a 50 ton truck to moon and back (chosen as close enough to the total weight of the orbiter and lander for Apollo 11), exactly how much Helium 3 can you get back to even pay for the costs?

Or let's think big. Let's say we have a space truck roughly about the size of the late Space Shuttle. Let's also say that technology evolves so, adjusted for inflation, it costs as much to get it to moon and back as it costs currently to get it to LEO. Let's also say that on that cost, it can haul as much payload to moon and back as it currently can haul to LEO.

Not exceedingly SF scenarios, I think you'll agree. I mean, we're not talking warp engines and antimatter there, but the kind of better engines you'd expect to happen somewhere in the near-ish future.

Well, the Space Shuttle cost per mission according to NASA, as of 2011, was about 450 million dollars. So in my scenario, we'll pay that for a trip to the moon and back, so it's not that huge. It can haul 24,400 kg to LEO, let's say our space truck can do 25 tons to the moon and back. (Probably 25 tons of supplies in one direction, and 25 tons of He3 on the return route, not counting the weight of the tanks and such, which would probably be a part of the cosmic tanker truck as the cheapest solution.) It's a fair amount actually, since Helium is lightweight.

Well, now we have 450 million dollars / 25t = 18 million dollars per ton. That's how much you'd have to sell that He3 for, to just break even.

In fact, even if the cost of that round trip dropped by an order of magnitude (hey, technology progresses), it still has to be worth nearly 2 million dollars a ton to be worth just the trip alone, never mind the costs of the moon base.

So I still think that even that won't happen any time soon. Sorry. Adam Smith's invisible hand is flipping us SF nerds the bird :p