Except for one thing. If you want to build an infrastructure in space, getting materials off the moon is far cheaper than getting the same materials off Earth. If you're planning on a large enough infrastructure, spending a couple of trillion on moon mines may become the smart thing to do.

This is interesting: planet inside habitable zone, perhaps with liquid water

Interesting: engaging or exciting and holding the attention or curiosity.

Sure. Some of these may be "interesting" to a limited set of people, but for the most part they are about the same as the other couple of hundred planets already discovered.

There's a lot of planets out there. They were expecting to find a bunch of them. This is not news.

I'm pretty sure if there were interesting planets in the 32 they are announcing, they would have pointed them out.

Slow News Day.

Seriously, are any of these 32 new planets at all interesting? It was great that we've figured out how to detect the existence of these planets, but even the chilean team doesn't bother to single out any of them as being out of the ordinary.

Now that VASIMR technology seems to be coming of age, isn't it time to do a survey of everything within say, 20 light years to find stuff that may be potentially habitable?

The only thing that this being a "right" gets you is that if there is an ISP that services your area, they cannot refuse to connect you, the service must be reasonably priced and the connection must be at least this good 75% of the time.

This is really just establishing a legal minimum level of service than an ISP can provide in Finland.

No, you don't need the right to Internet Access to survive. You also don't need the right to vote to survive either, yet you have it. You have the right to an awful lot of things you probably know nothing about, think are entirely useless and never exercise.

Yes, you probably do. You also have the right to an electricity supply to power the computer and the right to have a house to put it in.

You also have the legal obligation to pay for the house, the computer, the electricity and the internet connection.

You do not have to avail yourself any of these rights if you don't want to.

I'm pretty sure they wouldn't just glue a whole bunch of solar car tops onto the Ares. The 40 pounds includes not only the solar panels but also the "carbon-fiber-and-Kevlar bodywork" and perhaps even a small section of "chrome-moly steel frame".

The point is that a 540 pound car can hit 90 miles an hour with less than 40 pounds of solar cells. The cells are not a substantial portion of the weight of the car.

Heavy? Tell that to the MIT team who built a solar powered car that does 90 miles an hour.

What exactly do you mean by "bee-sting allergy". These nanobees are filled with melittin, which may or may not be the same thing.

Interestingly, if you inject melittin you'll cause "widespread destruction of red blood cells" but these things don't. That might be because they target "growing blood vessels". Presumably, if the only areas of growing blood cells are tumors, you might be able to get away with injecting someone who is allergic.

Or, assuming your friend is allergic to melittin and not one of the other fun things in a bee string, they might end up a writhing blob of agony.

Given that feathers are much less dense than water, everything else being equal it would cost more to get the feathers there since they enclosure required to contain them would be larger than the enclosure required to contain water.

Things not being equal, feathers are far more compressible than water so you could perhaps increase their density substantially.

You don't specify what condition you want the feathers in. It might be possible to just glue them to the outside of the craft, in which case there are no associated container requirements whereas the water must still be contained. In this case it's going to cost more to get the water there.

On the other hand, if the water was already in orbit it would be as ice, in which case you might be able to just glue a chunk of that to the outside of the craft.

If we're gluing random chunks of stuff to the outside of spaceships, it's probably going to come down to how much friction each material causes and what loss of material each substance would undergo due to space friction.

HTH

There are limits to the minimum you can be paid and still be considered exempt.

If you do so many hours that it drives your effective hourly rate below the threshold, you are no longer exempt.