If we're going to have to send a machine to do it anyway, why not start with a simpler organism? We can design a single-celled extremophile that would be viable on the target planet, then send a probe there to make them. Then all we have to do is wait a billion years or so for evolution to produce an organism that we could communicate with. Wouldn't the result be essentially the same?

Didn't know that. Thanks!

Grush's plan is sound as far as back-of-the-envelope estimates go. But there is more to this than money. Roughly half of NASA's HSF budget goes to projects that exist only to spend money. As in, you could cancel the projects, reduce NASA's budget by that amount, and you would still get the same amount of space exploration done. Unfortunately, when the budget crunch comes, those projects are never the first ones cancelled. So I think the key to effective long-term space exploration is to establish incremental and self-sustaining capabilities while resisting cost growth in the pork projects.

So, yeah, someday we can send astronauts to the moon. But first we need to figure out how to send people to orbit for "free". And we need to expose the pork projects for what they are while preventing infrastructure from being built around them. You can help! Don't buy the BS that NASA is going to send humans to Mars for 0.5% of the federal budget. When your Science Committee congress-person comes up for re-election, reward responsible oversight and not "vision".

Whatever you do, don't blow the school's money on a project that is going to be obsolete in five years. Obsolescence should be matched to your annual budget. For example, if you have $1000 a year to spend on something that will last three years, make sure you can replace it for ~$3000. No annual budget? Just buy books.

So the authors looked at the number of asteroids that it would be ***commercially profitable to mine with today's technology***, and they estimate ten? That's fantastic news! Let the asteroid mining begin! I am sure once those ten are mined out, the infrastructure will be in place to bring a thousand more within reach.

The singularity is here. It started a few decades ago, but we are only now noticing it because it is accelerating. Kurzweil forgot to consider variance in the capacity of human minds to adapt to change.

And yes, robot cars are one of the horsemen of the technologocalypse.

Yes, you're right. I forgot about that incident.

You really need to familiarize yourself with how crypto-currencies work. To a certain extent, it is the burden of the issuer to prove that their system is secure, so you can rail on how insecure digital, decentralized, and anonymous currency is all you want. However, consider this. Bitcoins are being used in everyday trade right now. The market cap is > $1B last I checked. The FIRST TIME the core algorithm is hacked to give someone free money, the total value of the system drops to $0. That $1B represents the discounted future value of the currency plus a certain level of speculation (and minus a large chunk of investors who don't understand what they are looking at). It includes our collective best guess as to how secure the system is. That is a lot of confidence in the system. MintChip sounds pretty lame, but it shouldn't taint the efforts of better cryptocurrencies.

While they have restricted access to the paper that describes how they are going to do this, what Tito is going to do has already been revealed. Most of the sentences in the summary are wrong. Yes the mission will include humans. No it will not be bringing anything beyond what is required to keep the astronaut(s) alive. Astronaut training? You could fly this mission yourself tomorrow if you had the dedication and the planets were aligned. Which they aren't, and won't be until 2018. Word is that this will be a single launch of a Falcon Heavy with a Dragon capsule. Hardware cost could be less than $200 million.

The mission will fly by Mars but not orbit or land on it. Round trip will be roughly 500 days. Crew activities will involve posting photos of themselves with Mars in the background to Facebook, eating space food, and playing lots and lots of Angry Birds. It is possible that a flyby of Venus could be in the mission plan as well. If and when they return to Earth they will not be able to walk again without significant physical therapy and they will be known as the biggest bad-asses in the Solar System.

"Should the U.S. go back to its 'Let's put a man on the moon' ideology, or is the federal government fighting an uphill battle against newly emerging private space expeditions?"

Why is that the only choice? Why can't we do something useful in space, like build power plants or prospect for valuable minerals or, most pressingly, deflect asteroids? Those are worthy goals of a new space race. They are achievable with the resources we have.

Oh, right, because none of those involve sending humans to plant American flags on the rocks and planets of space. None of those provide a pretense for NASA to spend billions building a monster rocket that they can't finish and couldn't afford to fly if they did.

What if we just ended it altogether, like so many other civilized countries already have?

Get the ball rolling, sign this petition: http://wh.gov/IFE

What makes you think this would be the case? All the test-based evaluation systems I have heard of measure performance above expectations. If you have two fifth grade teachers at the same school, and one's students perform significantly better at the end of the year, year after year, than the other's, that should be reflected in teacher evaluations. Those promoting the status quo seem to have a very difficult time understanding this aspect.

I really hope for the best, but that should read "In the unlikely event that Curiosity lands successfully ...". Have you seen the concept videos? http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/msl/multimedia/videos/movies/msl20110722/MSLanimation20110721-640.mov

I'm pretty sure logos can be both copyrighted and trademarked. For example, the Coca-Cola logo is a registered trademark which has fallen into the public domain as the copyright term has expired. The current Pepsi logo, on the other hand, is copyrighted.

Very sad story. The plant had some odor problems in the beginning, but then it turned into a classic case of mass hysteria. People were calling in complaints on days when the plant wasn't even operating.