Actually I've wanted a 3d printer for a while, I've also wanted a Milling machine for longer. Having nearly gone off and bought the bits for a 3D printer I stopped and thought about it.

A milling machine with bigger overall capacity than most home-built 3D printers (i.e. about a cubic foot) can be had new for under £1000 which (all-in) is not much more than a large, rigid 3D printer kit would be. Add in a CNC set up (about another £300) and make an extruder (we now have a milling machine so making an accurate extruder should not be to difficult) and you have a milling machine and a 3D printer, for significantly less than the cost of both, and a much more capable set up.

So my current plan is to save up a bit more money and buy a milling mahine and then mod it to be a 3D printer.

In morse code there are a number of 3 letter "Q" codes for common phrases that operators use (e.g. QSL - acknowledge receipt). Q is presumably used because if it is not followed by a U in English then it must be a code and not a word. Equally X and Z are fairly uncommon letters and so may be used more commonly in abbreviations (TX/RX transmit/receive).

By focring everything to 5 letter groups means that there is some error checking in the message if the sriting is small, closely grouos, gets wet, etc. you know if letters or spaces are missing. So it is possible that this abbreviation idea is valid.

Looks like Vanity Fair is going to drip feed us this stuff for a while... does it add anything we didn't already know?

Suppose the aliens evolved on the dark side of a tidally locked planet and are busy braodcasting light signals at us?

More seriously though it's about timing. The longest a human civilisation has survived is a few thousand years. Assume the aliens broadcast "hello universe" for a few thousand years, what are the chances of SETI listening at the same time their broadcast reaches us? If the earth hadn't been hit by a random event 65 million years ago, SETI would be not be here now. SETI may have happened thousands or millions of years ago or may be millions of years on the future.

I suppose this is what one would expect from anyone with "open source space travel" in their sig. We are nowhere near approaching a "post scarcity society", go to Africa or India and tell the significant proportion of the earth's populaton that live in poverty that we are approaching a "post scarcity society"!

On the 3D printing front, gimme one that prints steel, aluminium alloys, etc. with the structural integrity of their conventially produced equivalents (i.e. not sintered) and I'll start to take this discussion seriously.

20km says most of what you need. How much fuel do you need to carry with reserves to go 20km into even a light (5-10 knot) head wind - answer, a lot. A lot of fuel means a big drone, I guess in most countries flying things over a certain size may be regulated...

Damn, just used up my mod points otherwise I would have modded you up.

Probably because of timing. We just assume that our civilisation will go on for ever, but our own history shows that all civilisations die out in only a few thousand years. Given that if an asteroid hadn't randomly hit earth 65 million years ago a species that developed radio could have evolved any time between 65 million year ago and anytime in the future. There is no reason to suppose that there is any species in the galaxy whose evolution and scientific development is coincident with ours.

You're hired

Nice try at the sig, although I think you have prepended an extra "To be" to the quote.

I think it was George Bernard Shaw who said something like:

The wise man adapts himself to the world but the fool adapts the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the fool.