You are conflating vastly different meanings of "as a species". The species didn't invent the lightbulb, and the species didn't adopt the light bulb. Most of humanity didn't even have a thing to do with the creation of the societies that made invention of the light bulb possible.

And your "inevitable" replacement of previous technologies by the light bulb took generations. It was in high volume use long before the majority of humanity ever used one.

Finally, we go to the painfully obvious point that only a few people had anything at all to do with the invention of the light bulb. It didn't take humanity to make a light bulb, it took a few people working in labs over the course of 50 or so years to do so.

Currently, even putting things into Earth orbit take considerable economic effort. That will change just as it has for the past few centuries. Eventually, it'll drop to the point where a group with sufficient economic resources to make it happen will do so.

All of which is completely irrelevant to both the capabilities of manned space flight and the capabilities of future groups of people to engage in manned space flight. The "incidental science", for example, happened and we can use that as an example of human endeavors in that sort of environment no matter the motives of the time.

As the questions at the end of your post, they are remarkable only for their lack of ambition. For example, you could have asked instead "Want to establish a colony on the Moon?" which is a bit more involved than just picking up a few more rocks from the Moon. Well, you'll need people for that.

Going from 3,000 K to 3K is also cooling. This is what I'm speaking of. Do you have a point to your argument? Perhaps you ought to look at actual video of rocket plumes in space. They really do cool very rapidly to below ionization temperatures.

How visible? You're chasing a straw man here. I'm not interested in perfect invisibility, I'm interested in "stealth", making a vehicle hard enough to detect that it can sneak up on a target and get within range of making a useful attack.

That is incorrect. What happens is that as the exhaust plume expands, the motion becomes correlated. Everything has random motion, but only particles moving in the same direction will stay near one another. Thus, the random motion of heat translates naturally into translation motion. That's how the temperature will drop from expansion.

Depends what the free stuff costs and what you're getting back in revenue. I don't see that Ireland came out poorly on the deal.

Only if the transaction is interstate/out of state.

I doubt there's 1 in 1,000 people in the US who pay for their insurance with cash. It's close enough to cashless. Maybe we ought to look at problems instead.

The assumption here is that the exhaust is in the form of a gas. Once it passes through the constriction of the rocket nozzle, it expands (the effect is to turn thermal random motion of the particles of the exhaust into directed velocity). Expansion of a gas causes cooling. After leaving the bell, there are no more restrictions to expansion of the gas aside from the small amount of matter in space.

In addition, the much increased surface area of the exhaust plume allows for greater radiation of heat to space.

And again, so what? I already explained why I posted that. No one is going to use the behavior of Voyager spacecraft, particularly beaming a highly directed signal at the target you're trying to sneak up on, as a strategy for stealth. It was an inappropriate example for the article to use. That's the only reason I mentioned it.

Then use physics to make that argument not assertions that I brought up Voyager. And please characterize my arguments correctly. I'm not saying that invisibility is possible, but rather that stealth is.

I think you're starting to see my point. Stealth isn't perfect. It would be relatively hard against large, sensitive detectors. But you can't haul those on a high acceleration warship (unless you're doing some sort of swarm-based sensing). Disable the detectors and you're left with far weaker systems. The methods we've been discussing would be much more effective in that case.

It's also worth noting that even rudimentary stealth efforts might be effective against self-guiding weapons or enemies who don't happen to have access to good sensory equipment. It can provide an edge or improve survivability.

Lots of things can cause fluctuations even the entry of new players or someone deciding to change the size of their investment in a corporation. Government interference is far from unique in this regard.

This analogy doesn't make sense at all to me. I don't see that it is any better to pretend a government policy or regulation change didn't happen.

Which is part of the lesson IMHO. Training like this can help you turn off empathy when it is inappropriate and/or unhealthy for you.

While I agree, I don't see the connection to the discussion of day trading. It's obviously not particularly moral, but it's not taking candy from babies either. And if this guy is as good at it as he claims, then that's a better thing to be doing from his bedroom than a lot of stuff I can think of. As to his mental outlook, I think that's actually two useful lessons for us all.

First, knowledge learned in one area can be applied elsewhere sometimes in surprising places or ways. Who knew that playing a game could help you become a vigorous trader on a stock market? Well, now we know.

Then there's the mental attitude he speaks of. It takes a considerable mental adjustment to be able to accept such a high rate of failure as routine and develop a feeling for when something has failed or succeeded to the point of abandonment. Sure, it's not so great an outlook for child-rearing, but there's plenty such as trade or commerce of just about anything, where this is a useful approach.

Or we could have something useful. Or just not collect the taxes in the first place, if that's the best you can do with it.

Definitely from the US. Well, I guess you'll be pleased to find out that everyone including the US Supreme Court already agrees with you. Corporations aren't people and there just isn't any disagreement on that. OTOH, corporate personhood is a legal fiction used to insure that the people involved with a corporation receive proper protection under a variety of developed world legal systems, including the US.

Let me note that pro-business is far less harmful and crazy to human society than anti-business.

You just quoted my explanation "rapid expansion of the propellant in a vacuum in addition to the above mentioned thermal radiation". My point was not that rocket exhaust is instantly invisible, but rather it cools off very quickly and is not as visible as claimed by you or the link that's been passed around. "Glow" in particular implies ionization. That goes away particularly fast in space.

I didn't bring up Voyager, that was brought up by the article on the impossibility of stealth in space. Here's what that article stated:

Note that there's no mention of the facts that the signal in question is highly directional and narrow bandwidth, while the Green Bank antenna is massive. The observation is irrelevant to any attempt at stealth.

You first have to show that.

Doesn't work that way unless everyone does all or nothing bets. My view is that it's more likely to stabilize with each one tending to hold a portion with the more competent tending to be the wealthier and portions stabilizing where investment opportunities tend to taper off.