"Go ahead, throw your vote away! hahahaha!" -Kang.

But if all the candidates are evil, that means the only non-idiotic (smart) thing to do is: don't vote.

It'll happen about 10 years before we have a useful fusion reactor. So...Mars will always be about 40 years off.

Well, the sun and moon rise and set. This is because of the earth's rotation. If the earth is spinning, how could the core not be spinning?

But all that's behind us now and the US gov only does benevolent things now. Right?

They were. If you took a stray to a PETA shelter, they euthanize it. Problem solved, no more stray.

I had a Audi TT convertible for a while back in the early 2000s. For some reason the pickup truck guys used to fuck with me too. Can't figure out why. It's not exactly an expensive exotic. Maybe they just do it whenever they see a guy in a convertible. Or maybe they all thought it was an expensive car. I got called rich boy. I got coal rolled. I had people key my car. I had people tag my car. And I had some local red neck kids setting my alarm off every night for a week before I remembered you could turn off the impact sensor. In the same parking lot I had kept a Golf, a Porsche 914, and a Bronco II, Audi Quattro Coupe, various other Japanese economy cars.... without any issues.

Surely the widespread switch to CFLs or LED bulbs is a hit to their business too. Are they trying to stifle growth there too?

Not if we're talking about a comet. New comets are constantly being discovered because we can't see them and establish their orbits like we can with asteroids. If we're talking about a comet, we might not even have a year.

Excitable children colonized the planet and brought us from caves to space travel. The majority of our culture, and technological innovations was made by brilliant excitable children. The old guard doesn't innovate. The old guard would have us stay in the outlying trees of the serengeti instead of moving into the grassland. The old guard would have us stick to scavenging food rather than utilizing untried technology like the club or spear to actively pursue food. The old guard would have us stay on earth and make new infrastructure and babies to support the war machine to take land and oil from others with the same goals. I am not interested in fighting the wars of the old guard. I want to wander into the serengeti and find a new way to live and a new place to call home and build a new society. Fuck the petty wars of my ancestors. I'm not gaining a damn thing by strengthening their society. At the end of the day I'm still a lower-middle class computer jockey who will be tossed aside and left to die when I've lost my usefulness.

Because the desire to explore is an instinct most of us possess. It's not necessarily about science, although it's certainly something we will do. Exploration is in our genes. So why not send robots instead of humans? It does not satisfy. For the same reason we don't live in purely utilitarian houses, or have purely utilitarian cars, or eat tasteless nutritional gruel. That kind of thing is for oppressive socialist governments who try to fit square pegs into round holes. Forcing us all to exist in the same dull repetitive manner is contrary to human nature.

No. I don't expect governments to do it. They're far more interested in maintaining their own strategic interests in orbit. But it would be nice if they got out of the way to let the rest of us do it instead of trying to get their pound of flesh out of the investors. They can impose their crippling bureaucracy on their own go nowhere space program.

So is the ocean. But hey, we got over it and now we have a global society. Every new area we haven't established ourselves yet is empty and extremely hostile. And I already gave you a very rational reason for going there.

Perhaps. But this urge has driven the human race out of Africa and brought us to the edge of space. We're only going to stagnate here as we fill up the planet with people and fight each for the remaining resources. We're even better at killing each other than we are at exploring. Why not direct that energy to kill each other toward expanding our territory into space.

An interesting twist on that is that post-human machine intelligences are actually the best suited for space exploration. The need power and raw materials to renew their bodies. They don't need an ecosystem and a gravity well to maintain their health. As long as there's a sending and receiving station, they can travel at the speed of light. Long voyages to other stars would not be an issue for them. In fact, I'd image they'd be far more prosperous off of the planet.

We are all aware of that. Exploring the ocean floor (or space) with robots, simply does not satiate the desire to explore.