I wish I had mod points today... I'd mod this up.

This is one of the worst cases of armchair rocket science I've ever seen. You obviously failed economics. Space launches are not in infinite supply. So cost would rise with demand. Also, as others have already pointed out, you discuss only the cost of fuel, and as our good friend Elon Musk has pointed out on multiple occasions, fuel is the cheapest part of space travel. Your cost analysis is lacking.... both in the cost, and in the analysis. Try summing up the cost of non-reusable vehicles, supplies, destination habitat, launch support and logistics, and see where that takes us.

Furthermore, lets talk about your 400 million people for a second... how many launches is that? Assuming you could somehow pack 100 people and all required supplies into one launch (a ridiculous assumption at the outset) it would still take 4 million launches to move all those people. You'd have to launch 100 people 100 times a day for 110 years straight to move those people... in which time you'd have 3 or 4 new generations of people wanting to go. Of course, that's just my back-of-the-napkin estimate.

Respectfully, I call complete and total bullshit on this.

Even if mankind had the capability to warp off to some other star system capable of supporting life, how many humans would make the journey? Hundreds? Thousands? Consider the energy requirements to lift a significant portion of humanity out of earths gravity well. How many rockets are required to lift just the people into low earth orbit? The reduced headcount of those people who would leave earth would do NOTHING to curb the current population growth! So the remainder of humanity on this planet would still suffer the same fate you predicted if we didn't find another planet. And while we're going through this mental exercise, here's another one for you: What type of person is going to be capable of chartering a flight off this rock? The wealthy, that's who. So in a way, earth will be renamed to "Detroit" where the rich can afford to move away and leave a rotting infrastructure for those unable to escape. Meanwhile New Earth will be populated only by the families and friends of the ultra wealthy, with no reason to look back. Ironically, for all the religious hate that goes on around /. religion has a better chance of saving all of humanity than science does... at least if we're talking about leaving this planet for a better place.

WE are the invading insectoid aliens who have depleted all of the resources of our planet and are invading other planets... there's a reason science fiction has written those kinds of invaders as the villain... because they're assholes.

This is the future that your scenario brings.

Sounds like the fight about currents has been rectified then?

This is a moronic statement. Lots of guns are manufactured without a safety. But with guns and cars both, it is unwise to load it, point it at another person and "hit go" assuming the safety will prevent an accident. This may or may not have been a failure of the vehicle, but it most certainly was a failure of the driver.

Spelling "foul"... spelling is for the birds.

NASA has been doing this for a while... I remember when they announced it as "yesterday's coffee is now today's coffee"... everybody thought it was witty and cool. I guess Californians don't make good astronauts.

An icy core with a napalm mantle... disguised under an unassuming flaky pastry crust.

Nearly all labs have an online LTD (Laboratory Test Directory), so it should be trivial to look it up, however without knowing which facility the testing was done at (often not the same as the facility where the samples were taken) it's impossible to say exactly what those test codes are.

The CPT codes are much more revealing, but it should be noted that many different tests could fall under the same CPT billing code, and it is also possible to bill multiple CPTs for a single test (depending on the utility of that test). It appears as if that's the case because looking those CPT codes up in the 2015 list yields: 87481 = CANDIDA DNA AMP PROBE, 87491 = CHYLMD TRACH DNA AMP PROBE, 87798 = DETECT AGENT NOS DNA AMP. All three of those tests could be performed from a single swab. To me it sounds like the NY Times writer is just being lazy and not doing any research... it also sounds like she likes to party.

There really is no wrong answer here...

Yessss... muhah ha haha... and once we've dealt with the Christians, we can move on to the Zen Buddhists!

Examine your heart when you say things like this.

What I'm hearing when I read this, is that cell phone technology has some kind of weakness so severe, that just a whiff of the exploit will set experts on the obvious path to uncovering it... thus to leak any information at all will provide security researchers with everything they need to figure it out and fix it. Once that is done, the value of stingray devices will be moot. Or in other words... c'mon security researchers, you're so damn close the government can taste it!

I like this one better...

http://xkcd.com/641/

...considering that self-driving cars are just a few weeks away?

I'm not so sure about that... I opted out of the millimeter scan once, only to have the agent performing the pat-down tell me "next time you should ask for a female agent to pat you down"... I replied that I wanted him to be as uncomfortable as I was... reflecting on that moment, I'm no longer sure that was a witty thing to say.