But you would also need a lot of cargo to support those people. In fact, your cargo to person ratio is going to be quite high. It would probably be 10 cargo trips for every human trip, so more like 100,000 trips. And we're talking 100,000 trips of a giant spaceship.

And what is the cost, both in terms of resources and pollution, of launching 100,000 times? Even if you kept it in orbit and brought people up to it it's a huge cost.

And I'm betting 100,000 launches is more than have been done in all of history. By a rather large amount, I'd think.

As usual, when I hear futurists telling us about the awesome the future will be ... I find myself thinking "this is impractical, way more than anybody will ever be able to afford, and probably never going to happen".

It sounds like we'd need to pretty much strip the Earth of resources to pull this off, and unless Musk is paying this out of his own damned pocket, I think the entire idea is doomed to fail. And that doesn't change the fact that you're diverting a huge amount of resources for a relatively small percentage of humanity.

This is flying cars, Mr Fusion, and a vast amount of engineering, plus ponies, unicorns, and cats living with dogs ... all in one big overly-optimistic ball of fantasy.

The sheer amount of energy required to do this is so mind boggling as to make the whole idea laughable.

I think the romantic idea of space colonization is pretty cool. But I don't really think it's quite as viable as people like to think it is. At least not with current energy requirements and sources.

Pong: The future is in your hands.
A cross genre action-scifi-romcom with human drama and real meaning.

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We managed it pretty effortlessly in Ireland, and from direct and extended experience of the roads in every corner of the British isles I can confidently say that we Irish have the least capable, least educated and least competent drivers of the set.

We manas it pretty effortlessly in Ireland, and from direct and extended experience of the roads in every corner of the British isles I can confidently say that we Irish have the least capable, least educated and least competent drivers of the set.

Don't know about you, but my car's speedometer has ... gasp ... both kph and mph on it.

I can magically change from Canada to the US and back again, and still know what speed I'm going in the correct units.

It's really quite a marvelous invention to apply two scales to a dial. I've even seen some of them new-fangled digital ones where you could change all of the units pretty easily. Imagine, the same car can display either at the touch of a button.

Sorry, but requiring car makers to make it possible to have both has been a solved problem for a couple of decades now.

Besides, if it's anything like over here, nobody is going to pay attention to the speed limit anyway. :-P

What I find most annoying is that Spinger publishes this in a "Popular Astronomy" series. At least they could have classified it under religious studies, speculative philosophy, or put it in a "Popular Astrology" series.

This seems to be based on a common misunderstanding, based on confusing education with wisdom and/or intelligence. Just because we all have color TVs in the industrialized world now doesn't mean that we have gained one grain of wisdom.

For all it's worth, a space-faring civilization could be a a couple of dozens or hundreds of years ahead of us in terms of engineering and science, and still they might be a complete bunch of morons. They could be more intelligent than us, but they could also be much less intelligent than us. They could be more religious than us or less religious than us. It might have taken them 100 times longer than us to have come up with Newtonian mechanics, they might all be mindless religious zealots, could have the strangest religious views about the universe, might love to kill or torture aliens (=us) for fun or in order to bring us their 'wisdom', and so forth. We simply don't know, and almost nothing can be inferred from the level of technical development about these matters.

My worldview wouldn't change a whit.

We're already aware of life on a planet. That's what we are. Us, and cats, and dogs, and everything else living here. As humans, we're already aware of the great diversity of life even sourced from just the one planet. Likewise, the range of intelligence. Life, intelligence, on some planet? Spacecraft? Interest in exploring? Nothing groundbreaking there. Not a thing. Already known facts. It happens; we've watched it happen.

So, another case? Ok. Interesting? Sure. Absolutely. But already a 100% fit with what we know. The whole shebang is going to be about things to learn in the areas of culture and technology. Just specifics. The rest, we already knew.

How about tin? (can we hear some L. Frank Baum, here, the only example of tin based life in literature I can think of)
Lead?

Both Tin and Lead are represented in Gold Key's "Metal Men"

Ask the aliens what their views on hacking their own bodies reproductive reward system, in order to avoid the reproduction part but still get the reward.

Hacking? Honey, I'm not hacking, I'm practicing. No, no, don't take them off. I like the way the line of the stocking goes up the back of your leg.

What makes you think this hasn't already happened?"

The uniform lack of any good advice indicating a technology in any way advanced from those the insights were supposedly given to. Nothing so advanced as "wash your hands before touching any wound", or a reasonable tip about cooking to eliminate parasites (instead of, for instance, forbidding shellfish and so on... just dumb, straight up primitive stuff.)

All religions fail this simple test: Their all-knowing patron (of whatever type) manifests as utterly clueless. So whatever else might have been going on -- and that certainly leaves a very wide field -- visiting aliens can be very cleanly ruled out.

No, because when the ice melts from the land, it flows away into the ocean leaving less total mass in that location.

Probably because the deniers want to use minuscule blips in the temperature to 'support' a claim that decades of measurements mean nothing. All they're trying to do in TFA is quantify a well supported occurrence using recent data.

They must be clicking OK when Sony offers to update Titan's firmware. That is the leading cause of disappearing features. Of course it could be LG...