In the original story, there was no limit for time travel. You could go back to the origin of time and make all past grandfathers die. In this movie they limited it, and made it an incoherent mess.

Read the original story, not the government sponsored modified version. It makes far more sense.

What they did was pro-government-terroristm, not antiterrorism. The main message of the movie is that it is ok to kill thousands because we know the future and someone on them may be in some years responsible of some murder.

No zombies in the original story, and the reference to them is pretty clever. The movie modified the story in several hideous ways, including in particular that that phrase there have no sense... and even with that they say it.

Scientists that had their lives dedicated to the study of climate and consequences still getting surprised by some of the newly discovered consequences of global warming. Tinkering with a very complex system that you don't understand could have even worse or more urgent consequences than the original problem you were trying to solve. And if you make big mistakes there you not only lose the future of mankind, but also all the past.

Whats wrong with solving it in the plain, simple, ordered and pretty studied solution of diminishing our influence in the change?

The one that was banned for most of the world by the US government?

Don't tell your left hand what your right hand does.

Not sure whats new will come, what new technologies will be enabled, what new discoveries will be made, whatever that comes from this that will be integral part of our future lives. But we know the past, the ROI of what already invested is still coming. That is the math that should be used, including the big part of it that impacted defense. How would be the world without any of it?

Maybe they should be aware of how much they got back from the investment. Just going to orbit, not landing elsewhere, the impact on everyone's life is all around, from weather/climate prediction to GPSs on phones. And maybe some activities that would have even more impact on our everyday life (zero-g manufacturing/alloys made from captured asteroids?) need more funds to be able to be done. And if well things in the space could give obvious returns, reaching other planets could get us unexpected yet (or only suspected) benefits.

Landing elsewhere and planting a flag is nice as a symbol, but things that have economic return may sustain a complex space program a bit better.

Of course, there are things that may end having infinite ROI, if by standing there we could avoid the end of mankind (detecting threats and avoiding them, or at least having a backup copy elsewhere). Delaying it till is too late will be much more expensive than doing it now.

I will wait till the Eschaton teleports me to my destination with a couple of cornucopia machines.

SF also extrapolated an AI singularity and it may not be so technologically feasible.

What we will build is not the ship, is an habitat over it. We could say that Earth (or our solar system) is our spaceship now, and no matter how much buildings we have on it, it is natural. What turns it into a ship is that we build it piece by piece or that it bring us to a destination?

If we can make habitats on big enough asteroids and deviate them from their orbits toward those star systems, they could be considered natural spaceships.

That the sound changes leaves the main phase will take millons to billons of years. In the other hand, our civilization has been around for 10k years, and in the last 100 we developed (and actually used against ourselves) a lot of technologies that could end mankind or even all life on earth, and with time the opportunities to do it with more severe consequences will be more, not less. I would give more chances that we manage to actually travel 14 light years (with all the complexities involved) than mankind and/or our civilization would last for another 10k years.

It should be a warning sign that climate scientists are still being surprised by unexpected consequences caused directly or indirectly by global warming, specially of the kind that could do a possitive feedback to the loop. We predict based on what we know, what we observe, and what we model after it. That we are missing on the consequences is not a reason to calm down, but to hurry up, as more things could be impacted and the 200-500 years could turn end being 200-500 months or even days, or hit in an unexpected direction (i.e. temperature or water level didn't rise a lot, but ocean acidification break the food chain, and that affect atmosphere composition)

US government owes each person of the world several trillons because copyright infringment in that case. And if the US government don't comply with copyright laws, why the rest of the world should?

Maybe they should start giving more responsibilities and capabilities to the expert systems running in the computers aboard to do all those tasks. Lets start the HAL series.