Of course you meant it as an adjective. I'm sure you are extremely "capable of subtle" when you want to be.

subtlety is a noun. subtle is an adjective. You meant to say, "more subtlety than you are apparently capable of." See also: "Your advice on grammar lacks subtlety." versus "Your advice on grammar is not very subtle."

This. The jetpack/flying car whining just needs to stop. Some problems are really hard, and the imagined solutions to some problems make no sense at all. Turns out moving along the surface of the earth is really easy, and (gasp!) we can get to pretty much everywhere we need to by doing so.

If you thought our influence on the environment was bad before... just imagine what it will be like when we are actually trying.

Agreed. I got lost right around here in the summary:

Maybe the paper has a really great argument to support this assertion, but it doesn't seem obvious to me.

Several of the sciences depend on extremely accurate timing. It's not a question of seconds lost over millions of years, but rather "how accurately can I time an event that is only a few nanoseconds long", or even better, "Exactly how far apart were these two events, even if the events are separated by hours, or days". It's misleading for the media to talk about timing in the way that they do, but apparently normal people's brains explode when someone says "nanosecond" or "parts per billion".

The object of a carpool lane is the object of a carpool lane. There can be no other.