If I'd just smelled the latest rumor that there are birds in my neighborhood which are NOT animals, I'd be on the lookout for them, too!

Why do you keep saying "if there isn't a god, then evolution is the best model to explain what we have"? You're saying that God *is* a better explanation? That the hypothesis of a god or gods gives _explanatory_ power? That one can make falsifiable _predictions_ based on the concept of God?

No, you don't know evolution.

"Which we answer to"? Bizarre.

Replace "religion" with "mythology". Grandparent post's point proven.

One certainly shouldn't write "hellish" or "heavenly" with capital letters, though that was perhaps done a few hundred years ago. That'd be hellacious.

Ah, the wonderful irony of arguing about grammar on the internet. Fixed a few things for you (and left a few in my response to fix yourself. You're welcome).

Do you have bolts clamping the tyre to your bicycle's rims? I didn't think so.

If you think that tire rim length and deformation energy scale the same way with volume that mass does, then you're not thinking.

Your definition of a "hard physical limit" is suspect. Do you have any idea how energy-intensive it is to desalinate water, not only for drinking but for agriculture? You might not call that a "hard" physical limit, but it sure is a damned important one.

You know that space travel is possible. Fine. Where are the travelers going to go? What do they do once they get there? How many need to leave to give the remaining inhabitants a better life? Not only do you have the problem of water wherever you're going, you have the problem of getting there in any reasonable time, with any reasonable chance of survival. That's a pretty damned important physical limit.

"Remote possibility" does not equal "possible on any necessary volume-scale within the next several hundreds of years".

Maybe he was attacked for that, but that doesn't mean you should fall into the trap of thinking he WAS an atheist. He wasn't a Trinitarian, but was clearly a Christian.

Given that some of the current best cosmological estimates put the total energy content of the universe at zero, a single red photon would have the same capacity. I see, though, where you're going with this (though underestimating by about 5 orders of magnitude from a back-of-the-envelope critical density * volume of observable universe calculation).

I suspect you're thinking of the brachistochrone problem, posed by Johann Bernoulli in 1696, and solved the next day by Newton (also by several other mathematical giants of the time, very quickly).

If your yearly income is 1 million dollars, that 20 seconds is worth about $600

Interesting math. That's equivalent to being paid for 9.26 hours. Now, you might argue that millionaires don't work more than 9.26 hours in a year, but... *really*?

TL;DR

*fires up bittorrent to find IT Crowd*

The problem space might not be finite, but there's a huge gradient in the ease with which experiments can be done, computational complexity space, and theoretical tractability. You have to be able to reach this "vast area of research with all kinds of low-hanging fruit", and recognize it for what it is from the outside, or make little investigative forays into it to even tell it's there.

      The most recent example (in the non-biological sciences) was probably chaos theory, where people could just wade in and tackle important computational and theoretical problems right away. That fruit rapidly got picked. There are still nice orchards lying in there, but it is no longer "easy".
      When string theory was proposed there was lots of low-hanging fruit for students to work on, but the initial foray took some very advanced thinking by a few explorers, and much of the fruit turns out to be worm-eaten.

And who *does* "search for funding all the time"? There's not a big pool of money that everyone can dip into, and only the researchers themselves can tailor proposals with the detail and insight that are needed by people plunking down the money.
        When I was in a University (in the U.S.), the P.I. still has to find and secure funding for the future. There's not unlimited money guaranteed two years down the line, let alone 7 - 10 years down the line, and certainly little from the University. At the National Lab where I am now, the situation is even worse, and overhead is two to three times what anyone can use for actual research or wages. At least at the University it was "only" 50%.