Damn it. Now I have that song stuck in my head.

I'm not sure I would consider that a boundary. For a substantial part of their lifetime, our planets were not considered planets.

We know now that planet formation is common place and occurs around nearly every single point of light in the sky. I just don't think the word should still be specific to the Solar System as it currently stands. We need a definition that includes the current planets, and the "other planets".

I consider Ceres a planet. It's round, may have a very small and more or less stable atmosphere.

What if it were 3 or 4 billion years ago when the solar system was still young. There would still be a lot of clutter in the orbit of Jupiter and the other planets. We wouldn't be able to call them planets anymore by the IAU's definition.

But Grandpa, you can turn the ice maker on and off with your iPad. Can't you see how much awesomer this is?

Oh, come on. It's at least Lite-Brite.

Yeah, but iPAD isn't BetaMax....it's LaserDisc.

At least the contaminants are packaged up neatly in big glass blobs rather than released into the atmosphere for all of us to breath.

No. It took millions of cavemen thousands of years to reach the point where they could do that. A tribe putting together an expedition to follow a herd north would be just as costly on the tribe, and the consequences far more dire than it was for the US. I could probably argue it was a larger undertaking for them than Apollo was the US.

It won't.

But you claim that our nutty space religion ideas will bankrupt the world, yet all we want and more could be paid for many times over by the military budget of the United States.

We can still die at a moments notice.

I never proposed it as a solution for overpopulation. I never proposed a mass migration. Why do people keep assuming that?

Primitive humans would probably disagree.

They had to invent the technology to kill animals for food and to acquire pelts for warm themselves in cold climates. They had to learn to control fire. They had to learn language. It simply could not be done without the knowledge you and I take for granted. You're belittling what a huge undertaking all that was. Yes, we can look back from where we are now and say it was easy. But for them, it meant death, therefore it was impossible.

It's the same thing today. We're lacking the knowledge to go in live in a new habitat. But our ancestors 5, 10, or 100 thousand years from now will look back and say it was easy.

And I bet a hundred thousand years ago, there was anti-space-nutter type guy trolling the tribal council saying it was crazy to chase the herds north. It would be certain death. Let's stay here where we can eat leaves and bugs year round.

Yes. Stealing *tons* of resources from Earth to expand human habitat to space is fine by me. It's a drop of water compared to the *billions of tons* of resources and energy we put into killing each other. You guys keep trying to play this up like we're throwing away our future in order to finance space research...that is not so. It is nothing compared to our other (less worthy) expenses.

Wrong. Clearly the space chair-lift comes before the Escalator.

Bullshit. Nature has already solved this problem for us. We instinctively kill each other. This will NEVER change. Even if we have one world government, there will always be violent factions.

I'm not talking about evacuating the existing population, that's impossible until something like a space elevator comes along. I never billed this as a cure for overpopulation. Stop putting words in my mouth.

The same argument could have been used for staying in Africa.