Whatcha wanna do here is send small self replicating molecules.... accelerate them at the speed of light toward habitable planets in some kind of accelerator gun... let them land on the distant planet and start evolving... wait a billion years or so and voila... they start sending radio signals announcing their arrival.

It will be "us", but perfectly adapted to wherever "we" land.

In fact, that may be how we got here. We may be the aliens finally reporting back to the mother planet right now.

Forgot sense of humor?

We value sticking together... we value it in our mutual decision (hers, mine, my spouse's) to be next door neighbors with our mother/mother in law... we value it in our hopes to remain near our children when they are adults... and we raise our children under the guidance of the always apt maxim "be nice to your children, they may be picking your nursing home... or deciding whether you can live next door or in their house."

"ignorant", "stupid", "lie" -- seriously, is there an eye rolling icon big enough for this kind of nonsense?

I was kidding about the firm warning... it's a joke we make, but a joke with a serious point. If our kids move out of state, we plan to follow (some day) and of course we do everything we can to make sure they'll want us, or choose to remain local.

It seems like Google Earth qualifies as a much larger "picture".... continuously linked pixels creating a visual representation of reality resembling that which you would see if you looked with your eyes.

Define "picture" or "photograph" as you will... many map databases integrate images to create images that are vastly larger and more interactive.

My preteen children year old are on firm warning... they can move out of state, but we parents are coming after them and moving into their attics/basements/spare rooms. There is no escape. And we live what we talk, taking care of our mother/mother-in-law next door.

Are we better off if people do not breed for the purposes of old age insurance? I doubt it. We are better off if people do not breed excessively out of fear that disease will utterly deprive them of offspring for old age, but it is probably more sustainable to "entrain" children in the care of parents out of a sense of duty, than it is to free them to maximize their income and then tax that income to pay "someone else" to provide elder care.

We might ask "would it not be more efficient for a lawyer or engineer to earn $200 K and pay someone else $50 K to watch an elder?" but that is probably a rare case. The cost of quality care is the cost of middle class income anyway, roughly, so why should this family service be exogenized into the market as opposed to remaining endogenous to the family?

Well there is ONE very good reason and that is that women are the vastly predominant providers of elder care services. Marketizing those services enables women to have public careers as opposed to be locked into the family care giver role... mother to children, nurse to elders... for their entire life. Families are only "free" if you ignore the lost opportunities they tend to cause for women.

Single safe = single point of failure. Distribute the information as noncoding dna in the genomes of cockroaches. That'll last.

Sorry, but sometimes the stupid just burns: "They are merely two different brands of corporatism that use different approaches to achieve the same goal of statism."

No, corporatism is its own goal, and the very opposite of statism. In a corporatist reality, our reality, the corporations control the state. It expresses their interests. Any reasonable definition of statism must put corporations in service of a powerful central state, and no sane observer could imagine that we have that or are moving in that direction.

There is only one political party... the left third of the Democratic party... and the rest is just one big corporate funded subsidiary of powerful interests.... 100% of the Republicans and 2/3 of the Democrats, doing corporate bidding.

As for Obama... well he believes in the art of the possible... does what the corporate party requires of him... and lacks the will to attack the paymasters of Congress. When people worry about "statism" I just laugh. They have no idea. We should be so lucky as to have a strong central government, able to see a need and levy a tax to fund an efficient government office to solve the problem. It can be done, but we way too far gone for it to happen.