It was primarily designed to funnel money into Apple and Pearson's coffers or facilitate tax writeoffs from said companies that would be at least as lucrative.

You first!

Sure. If we want to wait tens, hundreds, thousands or millions of centuries before something comes close enough. And then we have to hope that it's something useful and habitable.

And, in the mean time, we could conveniently die out.

How about "no".

That's essentially what it is.

All you jackasses saying "Well, birth is a death sentence." can fuck off.

All pithy sayings aside, a one way Mars mission at this point is little more than a multi-victim snuff film.

These people aren't going to die of old age or related causes.

They're going to die of asphyxia, starvation, decompression, etc, as they're going to be shot out there with little to no actual means of support.

It's not like they can just get out there and live off the land.

So, great, we get video of people dying horribly in an alien environment with no hope of rescue, as the nearest people are at least 35 million miles and a MINIMUM of 40 days (with a maximum of 289 days and a median of 162 days) away.

Anybody who actually volunteered for this was an idiot.

Anyone who actually goes through with this is a suicidal idiot.

Anyone who actually facilitates these suicidal idiots is a sonofabitch and a murderer.

Also, Japan is roughly the size of Montana. And fairly densely populated. Are 70-80 mile commutes to work really that common?

Sure there is.

MONEY.

Just looking at US box office, of the top 50 highest grossing movies, there are 11 comic book films. 8 of which are Marvel property films. All but three are actually PRODUCED by Marvel.
Representing over THREE BILLION DOLLARS in revenue. And that's just the US box office. Worldwide receipts are even BIGGER.

Marvel was not ALWAYS a subsidiary of Walt Disney Company. And the push towards Marvel Studios and the MCU began before the 2009 purchase.
It just accelerated once mouse money was involved. And, considering the returns, I don't blame Disney for shoveling cash at them at all.

I agree about the renegotiations being about creating bigger returns on investment however.

Yeah. NO.

Marvel is NOT going to stick a fork into this cash cow. Sorry.

And even if they WERE petty enough to do something DUMB like that, it wouldn't affect those licenses.

What you're seeing is a result of Marvel trying to break into the motion picture entertainment business, and the differing strategies of several successive management teams.

Years ago, "they were just a comics shop" trying to shop their properties around, since they didn't have the means to produce films themselves. So they went to the pros.

And yeah, in light of where they ended up? They made some not-so-great deals.

But those deals brought in money. LOTS of money.

And, not happy with the results of the licenses they let out, a decision was finally made to go with in-house development of properties, using the money, industry contacts, and knowledge they'd slowly built up over the years when they were just licensing stuff out.

Also, the special effects production industry had reached a mass production point that they could, realistically, bring this stuff to the screen without essentially having to rely on an established studio.

Wow. You should probably talk to a professional about these feelings you're having.

Bullshit.

Large-scale hydro is essentially DONE in the US. Why? Environmental impact.

And worse, in some regions, multi-state water rights issues and environmental change are all set to cause massive problems for hydro.
(Google up Colorado River Water Rights Issues)

Basically, unless storage technologies take a MASSIVE leap forward, nuclear will still make sense in 20 years. Or 100 years. Or 1000 years.

The reason is, without those storage technologies in place and functioning properly, the scale and complexity required of renewables-based energy go up a several orders of magnitude, past the point where actual implementation is feasible or economical.

No. Actually it's not.

If you purport to be concerned about carbon in the environment, and you don't support modern fission for electrical generation?

You, quite simply, have NOT thought through the equation well enough.

While some of the renewables COULD be built to a point that you could use them, in conjunction, for base load, the main problem is that the power STORAGE technology for such an undertaking just doesn't exist.

Without that, the build-out for a complete system is several orders of magnitude LARGER and several more orders of magnitude more intricate. This makes them totally unfeasible from pretty much EVERY logistical standpoint.

Yes, granted, we COULD build enough nuclear capacity to cover energy consumption for the entire planet for years/decades/centuries to come (both base and peak).

That's uneconomical. We're better off building nuclear to cover base load in the truly foreseeable future (basically over the 50 year lifespan of a typical generator), and then augmenting with renewables for peaks.

Once that's done, LOTS of research (and MONEY) needs to be poured into two things.

1: Fusion
2: Improvement of storage technologies/methods.

Unfortunately, you still can't fix stupid. Even with education.

And stupid people will continue to breed like rabbits.

Of course not!

Noo-kyoo-luhr = BOMBZ!

BOMZ! = EVIL!

Good people don't like EVIL!

Therefore, the unthinking masses have turned power generation from a science and a business into a popularity contest.

Now think about how much is going up smokestacks throughout Asia, without all the "stringent" environmental controls that the US plants have to comply with.