You're off by several years: you should have looked it up before posting. When I started driving a car was expected to last less than 100,000 miles, but the lifespan has been stretching out ever since... it's 11.4 years now, even though many cars are chugging along for decades more. Light trucks are slightly less: 11.3 years average. Electric vehicles are likely to change that: even without a breakthrough in today's battery chemistry, EVs are so much simpler they are much easier to keep running.

We try to think outside the box-- biological systems surviving at enormous depths, extreme temperatures, feeding on arsenic and old lace-- but what if life is even more extreme than our wildest imaginings: life forms whose atoms are stripped of electrons, nothing more than ionic creatures, surviving within suns, or deep within gaseous bodies such as Saturn, Jupiter... or even within black holes? We could never know what is in such places, it would seem.

As already stated, we spend trifles on space. We spend even less on these undersea adventures that all but Tea Party psychos feel enriched by, if for no other reason than because we find new and unique life forms that give us keys to untangling cancers, aging, and diseases of every kind. What we DON'T need is a back-breaking military budget when there are alternatives, such as flooding the Internet with countermeasures against the very successful lures al Qaeda, the Taliban, ISIL and other malevolent jackasses use to suck in vulnerable nitwits that become suicide bombers, rapists and child killers. No one has yet begun to tell them: "what if they're wrong, and Allah does not gift you with dozens of virgins and pleasures for eternity? What if what they say does not agree with the Koran by any means? Are you willing to burn in eternal hell for the terrible, evil things they want you to do?" There are countless such things we can be telling them, assaulting their faulty logic, hammering home the illegitimacy of their doings. "Who are the real good guys, and bad guys? Who went to Malaysia after the tsunamis, and brought food and medicine to the millions of Muslims that were starving and bleeding? How much effort has the Taliban made to build hospitals and schools, rather than destroy them?" If we start driving electric vehicles rather than spending $450B a year on oil we buy from despotic OPEC countries, that's hundreds of billions of dollars we have to spend on hospitals, schools, roads, bridges... and SPACE. We can also encourage the super-wealthy among us to play higher, more challenging games as Musk, Gates, and others have done, such as using their resources to produce inexpensive medications and verify herbal remedies, if Eli Lilly, Pfizer and others are only interested in profit? -- Electric Bill

You sound like a priest advising on matters of sex and marriage-- obviously lackng in personal experience or any truly reliable data. The first thing you'll notice when exposed to even a mild vacuum is that your ears hurt, and with extreme vacuum administered quickly, your ears would rupture unbearably. The nitrogen in your blood would boil painfully, and within a minute or so, you would die, but it definitely would NOT be painless.

I strongly disagree. You seem to think that all these thorny AI probs will have to be handled in some kind of serial fashion, by some tiny batch of techies slaving away in drudgery. In fact, there may be a couple of dozen serious thorny problems that are presently hampering AI, but for each of those thorny probs, you can be sure there are thousands of individual talented, clever, innovative groups working to solve the single conundrum they are focused on. By dividing up the problem and the available supergeeks to deal with them, and the incredibly rapid pace of development in computing and hardware, I am very confident the AI necessary to give us the robots we want will be here soon indeed. Consider the pace of computing overall it has not been steady, but logarithmic just a few short years ago, computers were generally thought of as science fiction, and anyone that even USED a computer was referred to as a "computer genius". Do you remember those days?! Anyone using a computer was doing so on a "time share" basis? There was no such thing as a "personal computer"! That term did not even exist! Today, the average person has been through several generations of PCs; the same is surely to happen now with robots, especially now with the widespread use of dirt cheap 3D printers, laser cutters, etc. The pace cannot be suppressed. Open your eyes!

Timothy is correct-- you are the one whose math is off. An elephant has a gestation of 22 months, so after a year, an elephant cow is still pregnant; after another 12 months, she will have had a single calf that is 2 months old. I cannot see how you could think he made any mistakes.

I find ANYONE shooting elephants a vert troubling thing, unless they are sick, in pain, and are being euthanzed. Several years ago I was in Flint Michigan when a carnival/circus was there... the circus has a trained elephant. Overnight, some coward shot the elephant... it was laying on its side next to its tent. If I had known who the vermin was that shot that poor creature, I'm not sure if I could have kept myself from killing him. Someone like that is surely a threat to everyone he is around-- it's my guess he has committed many other crimes before and since... rape, murder, mayhem. A worthless individual.

Haruchai-- Don't make the mistake of assuming that, while batteries increase energy density and EVs dramatically increase in numbers, that all else will remain the same-- it won't. Many things will change... For instance, today's EV buyers are more likely to own homes, and far more likely to install solar panels on their home roofs, which will take up much of the slack to supply EV charge. Photovoltaic panels have dropped in price dramatically due to economies of scale, and will continue to drop for years to come; with dramatic increases of solar and wind power farms and other renewable energy, we'll be helping to supply clean energy to the EVs owned by people that do not have roofs for their own solar panels.

Everything about EVs will continue to mature, including AC motors for EV use will make them more efficient, increasing range per charge and decreasing power requirements. Google "V2G"... it stands for "Vehicle to Grid"... it is a system that power companies are beginning to implement to make EVs part of the solution, not just part of the problem. The grid and the EVs plugged into it will be "intelligent"... If the grid senses it is beginning to become overloaded, it puts out a "request" to EVs to give back some of their charge to prevent blackouts. Vehicle owners that provide such power will be paid for that energy at an attractive rate, allowing the load on the grid to be less erratic. Homeowners, public charging stations, retail businesses, and apartment buildings will be installing their own battery storage systems, which will help to decentralize our grid and make it more robust against terrorists and any other anomalies that might otherwise give us the kinds of problems inherent with very centralized grids.

The power grids of the future will be as different from the grid of the recent past as today's cars differ from the best cars of the 1970's-- they will be cybernetic.

Check out Altair Nanotech of Reno, Nevada, re: their NanoSafe battery, which is far more rugged than any batteries today-- they survive undercharging, overcharging, rapid discharge, rapid charging, and will last for decades without maintenance. The Navy has been using them to replace one of two large generators on their submarines to make them stealthier and reduce their operating expenses; what they save on energy in less than two years will pay back the investment. The Army will be using such batteries to avoid the hazardous transport of tanker trucks through hostile territory, operating quiet, stealthy vehicles that can be charged from local solar power panels; they will also power radios in soldier's backpacks. Also take a look at Clipper Creek, Coloumb Technologies and others ramping up to provide thousands of charging stations nationwide. They are doing it intelligently, so grids will not be crashing.

Incredible! The subject is BATTERIES, not e-cigs, eggplants or smoker's (uggggh!) "rights"-- does nicotine addiction screw up your heads to the point you can't even stay on topic!?!

This battery tech, if it pans out, should be the the most profound change to our society since the PC-- electric vehicles (EVs)-- mass-produced and affordable ones, that is-- that today can only manage a couple of hundred miles at best will be capable of driving thousands of miles per charge. But as a practical matter, we will opt instead for cars with a range of, say, 300 miles, but with much smaller, lighter batteries. They will only require motors a third as big... the suspension systems will be lighter and nimbler... they'll be more powerful, quicker, less expensive and better in every respect than the internal combustion engine (ICE) cars that we have toay and which I hate. I look forward to quieter freeways, less smog, cheaper transportation costs, and the other benefits such cars will bring. The one problem will be that since EVs will be so much cheaper, and cheaper to operate, our freeways will eventually become more congested unless we develop new tech that allows greater density but still allows reasonable speeds.

"After a few seconds of freefall, the drouge chutes appeared..." It's DROGUE, not DROUGE, for anyone trying to look up the definition. Good info, otherwise.

I spent the last two days or so trying to figure out how to understand this discussion board, and how to navigate it; I posted a reply to a message a day or so ago, and have not even been able to find my own post, and cannot understand how to use this. Sorry, guys, I give up. It's too obtuse for me, and there are way too many pointless posts to weed through to try to use it.