Indeed. With all of the stuff that we have no clue about there in our solar system, why spend so much time on the second-best studied body on the solar system? I'd take a single Titan-exploring tiltrotor VTOL craft over a hundred new lunar rovers.

"Love" is the nice way to put it. "Largess at the expense of all other solar system exploration" would be more accurate. Here's a graph. And it's always the same stupid justifications - how many times can we pretend to be excited about "revelations" that Mars was once in its past a wet place? Or that we're going to stumble into life any time soon in its perchlorate-rich, destroys-organics-on-contact regolith?

And it's not just huge amounts of money that they're wasting - they're also throwing away most of the remainder of our plutonium supply. At least there's money to start making it again, but it'll take time. Plutonium is precious, and it's needed for outer planet missions.

I hate to be the one to tell you but academia generally pays poorly outside of the US. More so in a country like Russia that is still clawing its way back up from the economic collapse that occurred during the transition from communism to capitalism.

Perhaps if most of the country's wealth wasn't concentrated in the hands of a handful of corrupt oligarchs who live like a modern version of Roman emperors they'd be able to pay researchers a living wage.

You don't need "antigravity" (which in all likelihood is impossible). Diamagnetic hoverboards would be possible... if we could make ridiculously powerful, compact halbach arrays in the board. Also you'd need a clever mechanism to detect and deal with flying over ferromagnetic material, or otherwise it's going to smack into your board really hard.

"Religious Right" in the USA is a euphemism for "sex obsessed control freaks".

If I wanted ritual in my life, I would have become a priest and pursued my career with extreme political ambition so I could vote for the freaking pope.

I guess you've never read an article in your life about mobilizing the voters who are too lazy (or metabolically downtrodden from their Cheetos and Coke diets) to physically show up at a polling station?

Paper is a physical token. Reliably obtaining exactly one unambiguous, untamperable physical token with confidentiality from each adult member of society—the vast majority of which are collected on the same day—hasn't exactly proven to be an easy problem, especially when broadened to include public trust—that every voter understands and believes the process to have all of these properties (to at least a substantial degree).

Electronic voting vastly reduces the complexity on the collection side, but then the tamperability problem looms supreme, but this could almost be solved with enough crypto cleverness, except that the public trust story then requires a tiny bit of numeracy beyond grade six math.

Ritual, however, is accessible to a four-year old.

The same four-year olds who are unfortunately not yet equipped with fully functioning batshit detectors.

I don't want to abolish ritual. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub.

catatonic

Or they'll just say they stopped but keep on doing it.

I'll be astonished if they aren't already doing more than we know about.

The problem is, sewage treatment systems have a lot of trouble (at present, let's just simply say "can't") filtering them out. They go into the sewage, they will go into the sea.

Setting up filters for particles as small as 1 micron for all sewage going out into the ocean is obviously going to be a massive expensive. Who wants to pay for that so that people can keep sticking bits of plastic in cosmetics?

Seriously, whose bright idea was it to make bits of plastic, bite-size for plankton, looking like fish eggs, whose very design intent is to wash out into the ocean? And no, while they're not harmful to us, they absolutely will be to plankton - if not immediately (how healthy do you think you'd be if you wolfed down an entire meal-sized chunk of plastic?), then with time. Plastics act as chelators for heavy metals and a number of organic poisons, to such a degree that they might even be economical to mine. There's simply no way that this isn't going to have an impact.

And it's so stupid when one can just use soluble crystals (salts, sugars, etc) instead of plastic.

I can't have a serious discussion with you if you believe racist things. No one intellectually honest and capable can have a serious discussion with a racist, because it is only possible to believe in racist things if you are of low intellect. Objectively true. To correlate skin color and intellect is gross prejudice composed of logical fallacies. It is ironic too (you need to be low iq to commit to the fallacies and believe this arbitrary link between skin color and intellect).

I can't have a serious discussion with a creationist or an antivaxxer or a ufo cultist either. Because to firmly believe these things is only possible if you are a person with a serious defect in intellect. I'm being 100% serious and sincere. You are a stupid person. Objectively true based on you having a racist belief. You are not worth the time of anyone serious, and you will never find the "fair" airing of your thoughts that you seek because everyone intelligent has discarded your entire domain. No one intellectually honest is interested in indulging and entertaining an idiot's idea. And that is exactly what racism is: the "thoughts" of the dumb people.

And if you want to improve the gene pool: don't have children. Again, I am completely sincere. You are a dumb person. To have a racist belief is only possible if you are.

You disrespect people based on the color of their skin. Therefore you deserve no respect. You withhold respect for ignorant reasons. You see a skin color, and make a baseless judgment on intellect and character from that. Which, ironically, is proof you are unintelligent and of low character. Because to believe racist thoughts is only possible if you lack cognitive capacity in certain areas of reasoning and social intelligence, and if you have bad intent on society and individuals in general.

You're a disrespectful asshole, so you get nothing but insults and disrespect in return. You get what you give you ignorant douchebag.

Want to improve the gene pool? Don't have children. I mean that sincerely. The quality of your words here belies low intellect and low character on your part, objectively speaking.

Because sitting around playing video games all day is *exactly* like a career as a programmer. If you like one, you'll *love* the other.

The article is also based on some terrible reasoning, like:

That means there will be no asteroids left in the Solar System, because they all will have struck Earth, in another few hundred million years. Think someone’s overestimated something there? Yeah, me too. Let’s take a look with the flaws in our fear-based reasoning.

Yeah, in a universe where our solar system is some sort of perfect steady state. Which, of course, it is not. Asteroids collide or - more commonly, come close to other bodies and gravitationally interact - and throw each other into different orbits. When that happens, non-Earth-crossing asteroids can become Earth-crossing ones. For example, one of the candidates for the K-Pg extinction event is a Batisma-family asteroid. This family came from an asteroid breakup 80 million years ago.

A person well versed in the field would be aware of the fact that asteroids are not in some sort of unchanging steady state. Which is why they're the ones paid to do the research on the subject.

And more to the point, we really don't have a good handle on what's out there. We have trouble making out dwarf planets in the outer solar system. We really have no bloody clue what could be on its way into the inner solar system, apart from studying how often major events happen.

And on that note, another flaw in his logic, given that until recently, the vast majority of Tunguska-style events would never even have been detected, having occurred over the oceans, remote deserts, the poles, etc. So by all means it's perfectly fair to say that the fact that an asteroid hitting earth is more likely to hit a remote uninhabited area is perfectly fair. But saying that while mentioning the rarity of inhabited areas having been hit in the past is double-counting. The historical record is evidence of how often they hit populated areas, not how often they hit Earth.

Lastly, his claim that only one person has ever been "hit by an asteroid" is ridiculous. 1500 people were injured by the Chelyabinsk one in 2013 badly enough to seek medical attention. Yes, they weren't "hit by rocks", but that's not what large asteroid impacts do; they mostly or completely vaporize by exploding in the atmosphere and/or on impact. And there's lots of reports throughout history of people getting struck by asteroids; just because they weren't documented by modern medical science doesn't mean it never happened. Seriously, what's the bloody odds that the only person to ever in historical times be hit by an asteroid would be in the 1950s in the middle of a first-world nation? Now what's the odds that someone being hit in the 1950s in the middle of a first-world nation would be well documented, publicized, and believed?

Just a lot of really bad arguments.

let us say, just for the sake of argument (i don't really believe your ignorance), that skin color and race are correlated somehow

it's a bell curve. you understand that, right?

so, for example, we have on one end one of the most cerebral presidents we've maybe ever had, at least since wilson: barack obama. obviously more intelligent than the vast majority of white people, as well as black people. more intelligent than people of all races, period

what is the value, exactly, of saying that because his skin is brown, that we have to ascribe some sort of negative modifier on how we perceive his intelligence, just because a bunch of other people who are brown are supposedly less intelligent on average?

intelligence is an INDIVIDUAL value. it does no good to class all people according to an arbitrary signifier. if you were interviewing a bunch of people for computer programmer, and disregarded the ones with brown skin because they were "less intelligent," you might have hired a dumb white person and disregarded the black genius. it does no good to you, nevermind black people, to use this shallow useless prejudice, because it doesn't actually help you. an INDIVIDUAL assessment is what matters

for example: most african americans have scottish, irish, english, etc. blood in them, because a lot of their forebearers were raped. therefore, a lot of white people were doing a lot of raping. therefore, according to racist "thinking," we should assume all white people are rapists, because we can prove they rape a lot ( i don't believe this, i'm just demonstrating your ignorance to you)

i'm not really sure this argument is worth having with you though, because i doubt you have enough intellectual capacity to appreciate the argument, since it requires a low iq to believe in racism. by believing in racism, and all of the logical fallacies that come with it, you have objectively proven to me that you are a stupid person. i don't respect you