``IF THE JOB DOES NOT CONSIST MOSTLY OF DOING MATH AND REQUIRE THE WORKER TO BE LICENSED BY THE STATE, IT IS WRONG TO TITLE IT "ENGINEER!"''

You forgot the people who actually drive trains. An old friend of mine is that kind of engineer.

The argument over who should be called an "engineer" has been going on since the '70s. At least. It's only gotten worse over those 40+ years. Lately, it seems to be the job-title-enhancer of choice by employers who aren't willing to offer a higher salary. "Maybe they'll like a fancier title... We'll call them an engineer."

``I hadn't asked, we hadn't discussed the particulars of the job/my skills etc.''

The classic is when the recruiter calls about a [generic job title] position and the first thing out of the recruiter's mouth is "How much are making?" before even telling you what the job's requirements are.

I wouldn't go as far as setting up some sort of auto-responder. But I do have a canned letter that I started using to cut-n-paste into a reply to emails that were for positions outside my desired geographic location. Essentially, it read "Thank you for contacting me about the [fill-in-the-position-name] position. While my background appears to be a good fit for this position, I am not currently considering positions outside the [current city] vicinity." Some of the replies generate a nice "Thank you. I'll keep your information on file..." response. Others are ignored and they continue to send me emails about "long term" 3 month contracts (not even C2H) for jobs that I'm barely qualified for that are halfway across the country.

...but it seems the author isn't really talking about receiving 30 job offers. I can easily imagine receiving 30 calls about job openings a month. I've gotten as many as ten calls -- not emails, calls -- in one day. Granted, several of those wind up being for the same job but those calls are not offers. They're not even a guarantee that you'll be selected for a phone screen let alone a face-to-face interview.

I started receiving office management job ads partly, I assume, because my resume contained "administrator" and "manager". The laugh-out-loud ad was for an administrative assistant. For some reason I'd also started receiving near-daily ads for legal jobs, utility jobs (I used to know the lyrics to "Wichita Lineman" but I doubt that experience counts), and transit jobs (bus driver and cabbie jobs). Idjits.

It wouldn't surprise me to, one day, receive an email for an urgent job for which my experience with "the" makes me the ideal candidate. Oh, and it'll be halfway across the state to boot. Five hour commute each way? I've actually had a few recruiters wonder why I thought that might be a bit of a problem.

It's a radio transmitter in a can. It would take an even larger departure from known physics to make it go boom. We have a good deal of experience with radio transmitters in space.

OK, I will try to restate in my baby talk since I don't remember this correctly.

Given that you are accelerating, the appearance to you is that you are doing so linearly, and time dilation is happening to you. It could appear to you that you reach your destination in a very short time, much shorter than light would allow. To the outside observer, however, time passes at a different rate and you never achieve light speed.

I am having an equally hard time thinking of how Earth is more habitable than Mars while atomic bombs are going off or impactors are impacting. If you wait a while, sure it's more habitable than Mars. But for that moment, no.

To an outside observer. I don't think it's the same in the inertial frame.

Before we call this real, we need to put one on some object in orbit, leave it in continuous operation, and use it to raise the orbit by a measurable amount large enough that there would not be argument regarding where it came from. The Space Station would be just fine. It has power for experiments that is probably sufficient and it has a continuing problem of needing to raise its orbit.

And believe me, if this raises the orbit of the Space Station they aren't going to want to disconnect it after the experiment. We spend a tremendous amount of money to get additional Delta-V to that thing, and it comes down if we don't.

Thanks!

Brian Webb isn't listing this on his Vandenberg AFB Launch Schedule yet. I think he's going to wait until someone official tells him a date.

With some optimism that might only be thousands of years rather than hundreds of Millions.

But it's only necessary for Earth to be uninhabitable for a short time to end the Human race. And that can happen due to man or nature, today. If people aren't somewhere else during that process, that's the end.

Actually I was thinking nuclear power rather than magic.

I agree with the other commenter, there will be lots of people living in space if they can only get there. Mars is a good start.

Obviously I am missing something, then. Please fill me in on your better information sources. Email to bruce at perens dot com if you don't want to put them on Slashdot.

It's time to start planning another trip to Lompoc. The Motel 6 was sort of yukky last time. Maybe I'll try something else. There was an official visitor observation site that I found and got into last time, but that was for the Delta, and it was on Pad 4 if I remember correctly. This one is all the way on the other side of the base on Pad 7 or 8, isn't it? There are some farm roads that might be good observation sites if they are open.

I am not confident that the world will remain a hospitable place for life until we are ready by your standard.

Getting the resources and people there is very close to being within our technical capability. The task ourselves, if we perform it, will take care of the remaining gaps.

Creating a self-sustaining colony outside of the Earth's environment is going to need a lot of work, but it is not work that can ever be achieved on this earth. We have to actually put people in space to achieve this. Our best experience so far is with submarines. Academic research has so far yielded only farcial frauds like Biosphere II.