I don't know why I'm bothering to reply when you're pretty obviously trolling/baiting me here, but whatever...

Yeah right, so every high school graduate and welder in the country is easily set for retirement? And consequently the majority of Americans (struggling to make ends meet day to day much less save for retirement) are only in that boat because they're unskilled high school dropouts? Even the ones with four-year degrees doing technical jobs and making twice the median income and nevertheless struggling because the median income is a pittance compared to the cost of basic necessities like housing -- they're all unskilled high school dropouts too, somehow? Most Americans are high school dropouts, and all their struggles are all their own lazy faults for not just... welding? Really? Obvious troll is obvious.

Yeah, you can work hard and possibly beat the odds. You can increase you chances of success. But the odds are against you. That's why I said "just try ... and probably lose anyway". Try, of course, to not try is to guarantee failure. But it's not like it's a matter of just choosing not to be poor, and most attempts to change that fate fail, or else almost nobody would be poor.

You apparently don't understand even naive set theory. There are a lot of other things much less severe than overthrowing the government that could be achieved if enough people demanded it. Like just changing a few laws here or there. Change doesn't have to mean a complete replacement.

Something like that (or a negative income tax, etc) would be a useful band-aid, but in the long run I agree that those are boring solutions. Forced redistribution of wealth is palliative at best, treating the symptoms of a problem, making it hurt less, but not addressing the cause of those symptoms at all, leaving the actual problem untreated.

The problem is that wealth concentrates; that having more wealth makes it easier to acquire more wealth, and having less wealth makes it difficult to even stem the further loss of wealth, to the point that a class of idle rich can live off the labors of a class of working poor, creating the class divide and class immobility which are the symptoms that forced redistribution is aimed at alleviating, but which aren't the root problem. As far as I can see almost nobody is even asking the question of what the root problem is. How does having wealth enable some people to simultaneously work less and gain more? How does lacking wealth force other people to work their asses off and yet gain nothing? Why doesn't wealth naturally flow from the idle rich to the working poor, as the rich pay the poor to work to support them, gradually drawing the rich and poor together into a single moderately-working moderately-wealthy middle class? What breaks that natural process?

The short version of my answer (because I gather you don't really care enough to read a full explanation) is that the problem is any transaction where someone with more wealth than they need for their personal use lends that wealth (be it money, land, whatever) out for temporary use by someone who needs more than they have, in exchange for a permanent transfer of wealth (i.e. money) in the other direction -- rather than a simple sale where both sides give up something permanently in exchange for some permanent gain. Such transactions (the ones we call rent and interest, or in older technical terms, "usury") are the root cause of the problems of capitalism, and if we got rid of them we wouldn't need palliative treatments like forced redistribution at all. A usury-free free market would be one without any of the troubles that free-market opponents deride. It would be one where any high school graduate or welder who showed up and did their job every day could expect to own their own home and eventually retire, unlike the world today.

I have much more I could say about how such a usury-free market could function without disrupting all the things which currently rely on rent and interest, but you probably don't care to hear it.

They don't build up over generations because they are part of a single cell. When you make a new person you make new cells for them and so this stuff does not spread between generations. I just ends up as a kind of finite cap on how long a single cell can survive because of these problems.

This would work but it would take millions of years. Natural selection is very slow and it is likely the consequences would be a LOT of genetic problems in the mean time. Things like down syndrome are caused by a nondisjunction during chromosome separation. There become more common as eggs age. By making everyone have babies later it would very slowly select against it but the consequences would be severe.

Lets just go the genetic engineering route. It is much faster and far less brutal.

So then you're agreeing if I leave my door unlocked at night and someone comes in and steals something, it's my fault because the asshat thought it was okay to steal?

Shall we take that twisted logic to the next phase and say if you get shot it's partly your fault because you weren't wearing a bullet-resistant vest? After all, you knowingly wore something which wasn't secure (your shirt/jacket) so obviously it's partly your fault for getting shot.

If you live long enough most of your cells end up dieing or critically damaged by the formation of inclusion bodies caused from misfolded proteins. As far as we can tell the cells are otherwise fine they are just slowly accumulating that damage over time. This is also what alzheimer's is. The problem is that misfolded proteins are kind of contagious to other proteins in the cell and that is what leads to the inclusion bodies.

We are making progress though on being able to clean out the inclusion bodies. Your cells do have the ability to take them apart but somehow they end up not doing it. Give us some time though and we will fix this problem also and clean out these inclusion bodies in all of your cells and then your cells will work much better.

The other issue we need to fix is activating telomerase to extend our telomeres. The basic issue is that natural selection does not really select for anything after reproductive age so humans are filled with a bunch of small defects and we are getting better at repairing the damage. I really look forward to what can be done with CRISPR-CAS9 to repair DNA damage and replaced damaged genes.

Oh, you meant solutions the suffering individuals could implement all by themselves? Nah, they're probably fucked. Just try to fight it as best as you can and probably lose anyway.

I was offering ideas for solutions we collectively might implement if enough of us had the political will to do it, but it doesn't sound like you're actually interested in hearing those so never mind.

"but even that has a fairly short practical limit."
nope. Any signal that has ever broadcast anywhere and has had time to get here can be picked up, you just need a big enough antenna.

I did some research, and in order to pick up a TV level signal 100 light years away, we could built an antenna the size of Rhode Island in space.

That sound big, but if you could it out of small piece you can send and it can attach itself, we could do it for not much money every year. The great thing is we could just keep adding and get more and more 'fainter' signals.

egomaniac much?

We deserves life, and the stars.
we crawled out of the ocean, we got out of the trees, we defeated every predator, we built towers of glass and steel, we have spanned great water ways, we have been to the moon, and we have a machine out side out solar system

We surely DO DESERVE the stars.
The stars are no place for pansies, quitters. The stars are for whom ever can grab them.

People content to live in a squalor with no motivation or goals, no curiosity, those subhumans done't deserve the stars.

"And if you think this is too harsh, you haven't studied our history like I have."
teach you grandmother to suck eggs, quitter.

With the stars comes peace, and technology to solve the issues here.

Because they aren't possible? becasue they have populated the other half of the galaxy? becasue they don't need to grow that fast? becasue they have all been wiped out be a variety of event. Specifically wiped out faster then they can be built?

It's like getting a thimble of water from the ocean and asking "where are all the fish?"

why would it last forever? Why would it be within our solar system?

answer: Space is really big.

A race could have populate half the galaxy's out there and we still wouldn't know.

And it also mean every step in the chain need 50 available as well.

On plus plus side, you have invented a way to post to the future.:)

sorry, 1.5/.75 just reminded of 1997. I we were glad to have it!

so how would "loaning" a digital copy multiple times be treated?
at the same time? illegal distribution.
If it can't be stolen, it can't be lent.