As someone posted below, here is the forum post with some data, and here is the raw data with more plots. This is really awesome, but you have to temper your enthusiasm when you realize he knew exactly when to look and how much the brightness should drop, and he chose a relatively bright star (apparent magnitude +7.676, which is just barely too faint to see with the naked eye) with a relatively large exoplanet to image. There is some wiggle room there, but the data is pretty noisy, so it will be pretty tough to spot new exoplanets like this.

In comparison, Kepler-67b is a confirmed exoplanet 3610 light years away, orbiting a star with an apparent magnitude of +16. That is, take the light received from the star this guy imaged, divide it by 2000 (less than 0.05% the brightness), and Kepler can still detect exoplanets passing in front of it. The Hubble and Keck Telescopes have imaged stars with magnitudes of +30 or higher. So to answer the headline (in case it wasn't already obvious), we still kinda need NASA.

Not sure of full details, but I got this much:

18 counts of cyberstalking: filling out a public contact form on the "victim's" website with junk text.
15 counts violating Computer Fraud and Abuse Act: scanning sites for vulnerabilities using commercial available scanning tools.
Not sure what the other 11 counts were.
The only charge he pled guilty to was a violation of the CFAA, downgraded to a misdemeanor, for trying to log in to the Hidalgo County website server 14,000 times, causing a slowdown that prompted them to hire specialists.

That's just the hard limit. There will be many catastrophic events between now and then. Sure, the odds that the next one occurs in the next couple of decades is astronomically small, and we have a really, really long way to go to settling on another planet or in space. But your statement "if there's still a civilization" is telling: if we left it to people like you, humanity would keep kicking the can down the road, over and over, until it's too late.

Both of my original DS's have a cracked hinge (rough handling from the kids), but both of them still work. Our family still uses them occasionally to play multiplayer games like Mario Kart and New Super Mario Bros DS with our two 3DS XLs.

That's a pretty awesome feature. Several months ago I picked up three used copies of Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: Echoes of Time for cheap, and the 3DS XLs my wife and I got last Christmas can play multiplayer with the systems we had even before we had kids.

I understand why they haven't tried it yet, but if it's about to run out of juice anyway, there's no reason not to give it a shot.

Yikes. There are still 20,000 pages of unpublished manuscript around, written before the early 1990s. Hopefully most of it was written before these encounters.

And Philae bounced twice, finally settling in two hours after first touching the comet, which is enough time for the comet to rotate almost 60 degrees. The two systems meant to prevent bouncing - the thruster and the harpoons - failed, so it ended up some kilometer away from the carefully chosen site. That we are getting any science at all after that potentially mission-killing news is just fantastic.

I'm hoping they make some last-ditch effort to have Philae try to jump over to another part of the comet to get more sunlight, though I'm not sure what kind of resources they have to try it. Can they command the drill and/or the legs to jab downward relatively quickly? Command the harpoons to fire? I don't know, but you can bet this will be part of the design on future missions. I actually did some work on this, which made hopping around a key part of the mission.

You know what's anti-American? Calling other Americans anti-American because they disagree with you.

Here's a funny little factoid for you: the Pledge of Allegiance was written by a socialist.

This is not quite correct, because robots don't have brains, and that is unlikely to change in the near future.

Some parts of our bodies are easier to replace than others. We have been replacing skin, blood, and bone (albeit imperfectly) for a long time. We are becoming better and better at replacing or removing parts of organs like kidneys, lungs, and even the heart. We are not even close to doing the same with our brains. We are starting to learn to do some awesome stuff with it, like control other people's limbs, and we may have even found the on-off switch for consciousness, but we can't replicate or replace the brain. We tried removing parts of it before, but even ignoring the horrid ethical violations, lobotomies had disastrous results and are no longer practiced.

Anyway, the point is, yes, robots could (and will) be a very significant part of colonization effort, but they can't replace humans entirely. I'll give you the idea that much of the human body is low tech, but our brains, though far from perfect, are more advanced than anything we've got.

A solid outline of the challenges, but a simplistic understanding of the proposed solutions. You don't put 100,000 colonists in orbit as fast as possible and put them to work building a metropolis on Mars. You put a few fertile and healthy couples on Mars at a time, over and over, and you grow the colony over hundreds of years. In fact, you grow several independent ones simultaneously, so one can evacuate to others in the event of an emergency. An additional 300 launches spread out over, say, six Earth-Mars launch windows (about 10 years) could mean 1200-1800 colonists, not counting any children they may have, and the infrastructure, agriculture, and industry involved in supporting those people would grow with the population. It would be heavily reliant on Earth for a long time, but that reliance could slowly disappear over time as Martian humans make do with what they can produce themselves, which could end up being a lot more than we can imagine with today's technology.

Of course, also on those timescales (centuries), the ability to recolonize Earth is questionable. Even the first human that grows up on Mars would have a great deal of trouble adapting to Earth, which would have three times his or her native gravity! They could probably do it with some fancy exoskeleton technology that might not exist yet, but their bones wouldn't be used to the stress at all, and they could easily have some crippling agoraphobia. But who knows what other adaptations the human body will undergo, given enough time. If anything, colonizing Mars is a stepping stone to a mostly space-faring civilization, but that's far, far into the future.

Apple can't build an iPhone with a 5.05 inch screen. Haha! You Apple Nutters think they can do anything. If you think they can do it, where's the part number for the screen? Where's the schedule? Sorry, nobody in the world makes 5.05 inch screens, the technology just isn't there.

Am I doing it right?

Ah ha! I know you! You're the software patent examiner that rubber stamps everything that's In The Cloud(TM) or On A Smartphone(TM). We have inflatable habitats in space, but inflatable habitats On The Moon(TM) is entirely new and unproven technology!

Good job ignoring all the parts that countered your main point and focusing on the bit about future technology. Go back and read the tl;dr section and tell me, what technology is missing there? No, part numbers and schedules are not technology, and note the "earth-dependent" prefix on colony. I'll grant you one thing: a heavy lift vehicle that would make the whole thing much easier. But we had one in the past and with Falcon Heavy and/or SLS, we'll have one in a few years. It'll take longer than that to build and test the habitat and train the "colonists" anyway. The technology to maintain a permanent and self-sustaining presence can come later.

That's the caption on an approximate side-by-side comparison image. Neptune is 30.1 AU, so, 80 AU or so? In the image, the disk looks closer to two times the size, but I'm going with the words.

Really it doesn't matter much since proposed numbers for the various factors vary so wildly, but it could change the Drake equation if you wanted (there are other factors listed on the Wikipedia page that could change it as well). In this case, the first three multipliers, R* x fp x ne, estimate the rate at which habitable planets form, but since those terms focus entirely on planets around stars, it ignores habitable homeless planets. So you might replace that with (R* x fp x ne + Rh x fhh), where Rh = rate at which homeless planets form, and fhh = fraction of homeless planets that are habitable. Granted, fhh is probably extremely small (civilization would have to develop deep underground near a molten core), but if we can imagine it, we can't rule it out. There's a bit of a weird crossover when it comes to planets that are flung from other systems (e.g. if it was too close to its star to be habitable, but now its in near-absolute zero interstellar space...), but I'm ignoring that for now. It's all just interesting conjecture anyway.

I know this is a personal anecdote, but since I work for large aerospace corporations, this is a personal anecdote for a significant number of people. Before the provisions of Obamacare went into effect, my healthcare premiums rose 20% to 33% per year since 2008. From 2013 to 2014, when all the major provisions went into effect, my deductible went up 20%, but my premium stayed the same (and I never hit the old deductible limit anyway). I changed jobs this year, and in 2015, my premiums and coverage are both staying the same.

I have no idea if Obamacare is responsible for this state of affairs or if it's just coincidence, but it's a damn sight better than what was happening before it came along.